The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (20 page)

She wrote to a rhythm, not to a plot – she worried lest readers should find it incomprehensible. The rhythm of the waves on the seashore reflected, perhaps, the rhythm of the deep subcortical areas of her brain.

I like to flash and dash from side to side, goaded on by what I call reality [by which Virginia meant the subconscious]. If I never felt these extraordinary pervasive strains – of unrest, or rest, or happiness, or discomfort – I should float down into acquiescence. Here is something to fight: and when I wake early I say to myself, fight, fight. If I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world [the subconscious] as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world.
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In creating
The Waves
Virginia dredged her mental depths: ‘one goes down into the well and nothing protects one from the assault of truth'.
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The first draft needed so much concentration; so many ideas kept welling up to be hammered into shape. Depression interrupted the work from time to time, but the breaks were valuable in solving the insoluble. When faced with a mental block she thought, ‘6 weeks in bed now would make a masterpiece'.
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Leonard regarded
The Waves
as a masterpiece, Virginia's greatest book. Vanessa was ‘overcome by the beauty … it's quite as real as having a baby or anything else, being moved as you have succeeded in moving me'.
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Her friend Ethel Smyth found it ‘profoundly disquieting, sadder than any book I ever read'.
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Only Vita thought it ‘boring in the extreme'.
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Virginia hid her disappointment in jocularity, and told Vita's son that his mother believed ‘only a small dog that had been fed on gin could have written it'.
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Six weeks after the publication of
The Waves,
in October 1934, headaches and exhaustion forced Virginia to lead ‘a hermit's life, without pleasure or excitement', until the end of the year.
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Ethel Smyth was a well-known if minor composer when she swept into Virginia's life in 1930 and became an important friend, providing love and adoration. Her warmth and interest in Virginia, feminism, honesty, intelligence and eccentricity, perhaps even her age, encouraged Virginia to bare her soul to Ethel. Ethel also had that essential ‘maternal quality, which of all others I need and adore … for that reason I chatter faster and freer to you than to other people'.
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Ethel was besotted by Virginia. Almost at once she made Virginia ‘a declaration of violent but platonic love', she had ‘never loved anyone so much'.
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She was nearly 72 when they met, and deaf enough to need an ear trumpet. She had lesbian leanings but sex was never an issue in her relationship with Virginia. Convinced that her musical reputation had suffered through being a woman, she was an extraordinary being: massively built, with a huge head and a ‘humane, battered face', egotistic, warmhearted and quarrelsome.

She helped to keep up Virginia's morale as Vita retreated. For Ethel, Virginia came before everyone and anything else. When ill and confined to bed, Ethel rushed to her bedside. Virginia loved her for it: ‘I can't tell you, Ethel, how I adored you for that dash here – for two hours only – how it kindled and enraptured me to have you by me.'
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She craved such affection, and formed a ‘limpet childish attachment' to Ethel.

There were occasional setbacks. Once, Ethel sent Virginia a picture of a sick monkey, with a note telling her all her ills ‘spring from liver', calomel would cure her. ‘After swallowing this terrific insult to the celebrated sensibility of my nervous system; Virginia forgave her.
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Chapter Thirteen

Threat of War

Leonard, through his committee work and writings, sought to widen the Labour party's international and imperial horizons, and gain support for the League of Nations. He worked prodigiously hard; much of his aggression, and perhaps his sexual energy, were displaced into work. He rarely lost his temper, and his celibacy probably added to his ‘grimness'.

Until the 1930s the Parliamentary Labour party voted consistently for disarmament and measures to strengthen the League. The Party held power briefly in 1923 under Ramsay MacDonald, and again in 1929 when they came back as a minority government. Leonard's hopes of radical change ended with the world financial crisis and the depletion of Britain's gold reserves in 1931. The Cabinet split over proposed cuts in public expenditure, especially unemployment benefits, and Ramsay MacDonald resigned. A National Coalition government, made up largely of Conservatives, was formed next day with MacDonald at its head. Leonard was incensed by MacDonald's ‘betrayal' of the Party; there was never ‘a more treacherous man'. His despair was complete when the Labour Party was routed at the General Election that followed. They would remain weak and divided for years to come.

Leonard barely had time to adjust to these catastrophic changes when Japanese troops occupied Manchuria and went on to invade China. It was the first important challenge to the League of Nations and called for effective action, but the League's response was pathetically inadequate, a disappointment to those who had put their faith in collective security, and a taste of what lay ahead. Neither Russia nor America, the two powers best placed to intervene, were members of the League and Britain had no intention of taking military action. The League simply criticised the use of force and avoided branding Japan an aggressor.

Uncharacteristically, Leonard brought up the subject of the Sino-Japanese conflict at a dinner party given by Clive, and was shouted down by everyone there, including Virginia, who thought ‘war is the dullest of all things'.
1
Thus began for Leonard the years of horror as he watched the League disintegrate and war approach.

*   *   *

The Hogarth Press was expanding, almost too rapidly for the Woolfs' liking. It was no longer just a therapy for Virginia, an interesting diversion for Leonard, but a successful and prestigious publishing firm; the 1925 list contained thirty-four books. Over the years the Press published works by many distinguished writers and best sellers, and from 1924 the Press was responsible for the International Psycho-Analytical Library, which included Freud and prominent analysts.

As early as 1920 Leonard was complaining of the amount of work, that the Press ‘was beginning to outgrow its parents'.
2
Leonard was entirely responsible for all the management and business side. Virginia set type, bound books, and parcelled them up, but her strength lay in judging the manuscripts which came in. She had no business sense, although plenty of ideas that she expressed when in high spirits, and which Leonard patiently listened to and ignored.

Virginia benefited from the Press. It prevented her ‘brooding and gives me something solid to fall back on'.
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It relieved her of the anxiety of submitting her novels to another publisher, although by 1926 she felt confident enough to ‘doubt if Heinemann or Cape would much intimidate me'. But eventually she began to tire of reading manuscripts, and the Woolfs considered selling the Press, or using it solely for her and Leonard's publications. In 1920 they appointed a part-time manager, Ralph Partridge, a bright young man who had just left Oxford. He admired the Woolfs, was ambitious to become a partner in a publishing firm of growing repute, and was intent on doing ‘hurricane' business.

Leonard admitted he was never an easy person to work with.
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He was incapable of giving up the day-to-day running of the Press – he regarded it as his child – and delegating responsibility.

After a honeymoon period of a few weeks when he would instruct them – the managers – in their manifold obligations with fatherly patience and humour, [he] would become increasingly impatient, intolerant of little mistakes, and testy – indeed often hysterically angry – when things were not going quite to his liking; and when he was testy he could be extremely rude. The result was that each attempt to lift the burden on to a young man's shoulders ended in more time wasted, mainly in altercation, and nerves frayed all round.
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Tensions were heightened by the working conditions – untidy, pokey rooms – and by Leonard's parsimony. He ran the Press on a shoestring, and paid his authors little and his managers an almost insultingly low wage. Virginia, who possessed her father's meanness and went along with Leonard's penny-pinching ways, felt impelled on at least one occasion to apologise to Vita for what the Press offered.

Although she always sided with Leonard in disputes, she was often upset by them. On one occasion she walked into the end of ‘a terrific quarrel' between Leonard and the manager Angus Davidson over whether or not he had arrived a few minutes late for work, which ended in his simultaneous dismissal and resignation, and everyone being upset. Virginia did not like bullying, which she looked on as a male characteristic, responsible for most of the world's troubles. She could criticise Leonard to his face as ‘a tub-thumper, intolerant, arrogant',
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when she was well, but when depressed she sank under it. She was troubled by the contrasting faces he presented in public and private. He was intolerant and bullied his subordinates, yet he wrote impassioned articles against aggression, and urged men and nations to resolve their differences through rational discussion and compromise.

*   *   *

Leonard's decision to take over the publishing of the International Psycho-Analytical Library was partly prompted by his interest in Freud's work. Leonard regarded Freud as a genius, although not infallible. He was sceptical of some of Freud's hypotheses, but he was prepared to look at colleagues, and sometimes himself, through Freudian eyes:

I am sure that if one could look deep into the minds of those who are on the Left in politics (including myself), Liberals, revolutionaries, socialists, communists, pacifists, and humanitarians, one would find that their political beliefs and desires were connected with some very strange goings-on down among their Ids in their unconscious.
7

However, Leonard did not consider analysis for himself (he would have been an impossible analysand, unable to give up intellectual control), although a number of friends took it up. James Strachey, Lytton's younger brother, and his wife Alix, had been analysed by Freud:

Each day I spend an hour on the Prof's sofa – it's sometimes extremely exciting and sometimes extremely unpleasant. The Prof himself is most affable and, as an artistic performer, dazzling.
8

Adrian Stephen gave up Law in 1920 and with his wife embarked on analytical training. However, not all Bloomsbury smiled on Freudian theory and methods. Roger Fry, backed by Clive Bell, was incensed by the idea of the artist as neurotic, and art being no more than his unconscious conflicts.

Leonard never considered psychoanalytic treatment for Virginia. Analysts were practising in London well before her breakdown, but treatment was still experimental and the results unpredictable and, it was said, liable to impair creative work. None of the specialists Leonard consulted for Virginia was
au fait
with psychoanalysis and both Savage and Craig were frankly hostile. Maurice Craig believed she lacked the mental stability to withstand the strain of having distressing ideas dredged up. Alix Strachey, a practising analyst and someone who knew Virginia well, agreed with that view and thought analysis would do more harm than good. Few psychiatrists today would contest that.

If Leonard had suggested psychoanalysis, he would probably have met strong opposition. The possibility of losing the urge to write would have horrified Virginia (it is, of course, an erroneous belief; an artist may be highly neurotic but the quality of one's work does not depend on the neurosis, although that may colour the work). She would have objected to an analyst attempting to break into her privacy. ‘There is a virgin forest, tangled, pathless, in each [of us]' she wrote in
On Being Ill.
‘Here we go alone and like it better so. Always to be accompanied, always to be understood, would be intolerable.'
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Leonard was impressed by Freud's discoveries regarding the unconscious and he more than half believed that if you punctured a pacifist, out would pour aggression. But he disagreed with Freud over how civilised man learnt to control his aggression and sexual instincts. Freud believed the destructive instincts were repressed into the unconscious in the early years through fear of punishment, and that in the process a sense of sin developed – ‘the unhappiness of mankind'. Leonard maintained that such repression was undesirable, for sooner or later it would give way and bring civilisation crashing to the ground with war and anarchy. Only when ‘love (in the widest sense) and reason are substituted for the sanctions of fear and sin' will men learn truly to control their instincts and use them for creative and not destructive purposes.
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‘To be a slave to [a sense of sin] is barbarism; to control it is civilisation.'
11

Leonard learnt this, he claimed, through training his pets. Training based on fear rather than love resulted in less obedient and affectionate dogs. The same principle must apply to children. When all children can be brought up by enlightened parents and teachers whom they love, there will be no more war. Leonard maintained that he had never known a sense of sin. He had been brought up in a loving atmosphere, and developed into a rational civilised being whose impulses were always under his control. Not everyone would agree with this self-assessment. Leonard may have controlled his sexual instinct, but his aggression was liable to appear in all kinds of ‘uncivilised' ways.