The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (21 page)

*   *   *

In December 1931 the Woolfs learnt that Lytton Strachey was seriously ill with ulcerative colitis; in fact he was dying of cancer of the stomach. In recent years they had seen less of Lytton but he had remained an important friend. Virginia still loved him deeply ‘after my Jew. He's in all my past – my youth.'
12
On Christmas Eve they heard he was dying, and they sat talking of ‘death and its stupidity'.
13
Virginia asked how Leonard would feel if she died. She felt sure she would die first, yet she wanted to live another twenty years and ‘write another four novels'. She wondered about immortality, and questioned Leonard's insistence that death was the end, with nothing beyond. She asked Maynard Keynes's opinion. He was vague: ‘I suppose I think something may be continued', but ‘death [should] be arranged for couples simultaneously.'
14

Lytton died on 19 January. Leonard wept briefly and comforted Virginia. They were joined by Vanessa, and the two sisters ‘sat sobbing together … a sense of something spent, gone.' Lytton had been ‘the first of the people one has known since one has grown up to die'. Virginia had adored, feared and admired him. They had talked of everything; ‘love and beauty, and prose and poetry'. She knew his complicated love life. He was not a ‘protector' in the maternal sense, but he was part of Old Bloomsbury, the ‘family' whose love she took for granted.
15

Dora Carrington had fallen in love with Lytton as a young woman and devoted herself to him, looking after him, an inseparable daughter. Before Lytton died friends predicted she would commit suicide, and on 13 March she shot herself. The Woolfs had visited Carrington the day before her death. Virginia had held her while she wept and confessed she had nothing to live for, causing Virginia to think of her own dependence on Leonard. For a moment she too saw life as ‘hopeless, useless, when I woke in the night and thought of Lytton's death.'
16

Leonard took her to task. Carrington's suicide was ‘histrionic' and trivial compared to Lytton's death. They talked again of suicide, ‘and the ghosts … change so oddly in my mind; like people who live and are changed by what one hears of them'. A week later Virginia was ‘glad to be alive and sorry for the dead; can't think why Carrington killed herself.'
18

*   *   *

Early in 1931 John Lehmann was appointed manager of the Press, and over the following year Leonard was increasingly critical of him. A major row developed and Virginia was bruised by the bickering. It was a relief when Lehmann left, but she was left disturbed by Leonard's ‘desire to dominate',
19
to ride roughshod over people, and depressed by ‘the inane pointlessness of all this existence; the old treadmill feeling of going on and on, for no reason … terror at night of things generally wrong in the universe.' She made herself think of Leonard's ‘goodness, and firmness; and the immense responsibility that rests on him', but she

saw all the violence and unreason crossing in the air: ourselves small; a tumult outside: something terrifying: unreason. Shall I make a book out of this? It would be a way of bringing order and speed again into my world.
20

Male aggression and unreason angered and frightened her.

I've been nearer one of those climaxes of despair that I used to have than any time these six years – Lord knows why. Oh, how I suffer! and, what's worse, for nothing, no reason that's respectable … the incessant rubbing and rasping … the whole Press upset, and in process of death or birth, heaven knows which.
21

That summer of 1932 she saw too many people and wore herself out during the cyclothymic high months. In August another close friend, Goldie Dickinson, died: ‘it is thus we die, when they die', she thought.
22
A few days later she fainted in the garden and felt that she too was dying.

One night in November she awoke with her heart pounding, fearing death. She did not want to die, and went to Leonard's bed for reassurance. The turmoil ceased as she lay in his arms; tranquillity returned. Later, she thought:

I don't think we've ever been so happy … And so intimate and so completely entire … If it could only last like this for another fifty years – life like this is wholly satisfactory, to me anyhow.
23

Chapter Fourteen

The Years
and
Three Guineas

Leonard's prolonged frustrations at work brought on psychosomatic symptoms. In January 1933 he began to itch, and was convinced that insects were crawling under his skin. He spent hours picking what he thought were black insects on his neck. Virginia was concerned: ‘I can imagine nothing more terrible than to have insects under one's skin – I should see them parading in squads.'
1
She assumed the insects were lice, although in truth she was unable to see any. Their doctor failed to help and eventually sent Leonard to a Harley Street dermatologist, who diagnosed a simple dermatitis and dismissed the idea of bugs out of hand. Within a few days the itch and the imagined insects disappeared.

These symptoms are quite common in old age but in Leonard's case, a mere fifty-year-old, it was a sign of tension. Symbolically, no doubt, they could have been seen as evil forces invading his civilised world.

Hitler became Chancellor of the German Reich at the end of January 1933 and established a one-party system. Leonard was quick to warn of the danger: ‘it is one of the most savage and senseless dictatorships that has been tolerated by a civilised European population for at least two centuries', he wrote in the
Political Quarterly.
2
He watched with rising alarm as Hitler had himself proclaimed ‘Führer of the German Reich', withdrew Germany from the League of Nations, and introduced conscription.

As early as November Winston Churchill was warning of the dangers of Nazi aggression and German rearmament, and the next year the National Government, now under Baldwin, proposed a small increase in the military estimates. They were immediately accused of warmongering by the Labour Party, who bitterly attacked the measure and called for total disarmament.

Although Leonard agreed with the Labour Party policy at that time, he was already beginning to have doubts. He was also concerned by the divisions in the Party, the woolly thinking of some of its members. The extreme left rejected the League as a tool of capitalist countries; the right wing supported the League but objected to sanctions on the grounds they increased the risk of war; die-hard pacifists opposed anything other than passive resistance.

The turning point for Leonard came at the beginning of 1935 when Mussolini's aggressive intentions against Abyssinia became apparent. He saw Mussolini as less of a danger than Hitler, but a bully who would take what he wanted unless faced down. If he violated the Covenant of the League, Italy must face full economic sanctions and if sanctions brought war, so be it. Force had to be met with force, for the sake of peace. The alternative was worldwide barbarism. Leonard's decision did not come easily or quickly for, once accepted, he had to abandon his long-held convictions.

It was perhaps in order to make up his mind that he and Virginia travelled through Germany in 1935. That spring the Woolfs had planned to go to Rome, and their route would normally have taken them through France. Instead, Leonard arranged to travel on the car ferry to Holland and motor across Germany, going through the Brenner Pass. Their friends were alarmed at the risk. Virginia joked that Leonard's nose was ‘so long and hooked, we rather suspect we shall be flayed alive'.
3
Quentin Bell thought Leonard ‘took an unjustifiable risk with Virginia's nerves',
4
but physical danger never bothered her. As they crossed the German frontier Leonard felt, ‘with some disquiet', that he had ‘passed in a few yards from civilisation into savagery'. ‘Jews [were] not wanted … there was something sinister and menacing … a crude and savage silliness beneath the surface'.
5

The journey seems to have resolved Leonard's doubts. He now believed that Britain and France must re-arm and prepare to defend themselves and others against Nazi aggression. He applauded the trade unionist Ernest Bevin for telling the Labour Party Conference – in the course of which he ‘battered' the aged pacifist leader George Lansbury to political death – ‘if you are going to fight against Hitler, or any other aggressor, you must have arms with which to fight'.
6

The failure of the League to stop Mussolini in Abyssinia reinforced his new belief; for clearly the League could not deter aggression and prevent war. When Hitler's troops marched into the demilitarised Rhineland that March, Leonard thought not of the League but of alliances and rearmament. He urged the Parliamentary Labour Party to change its line. The increasingly dangerous situation required a new policy: ‘mere negative opposition to a policy of rearmament would be sterile and ineffective'.
7
He provoked strong antagonism from many of the members.

Virginia was distressed by Leonard's turn-about, his call to rearm, preparations for war. She was an out-and-out pacifist. Wars were destructive games invented by men. She simply could not understand ‘the fever in the blood' of most males.
8
Women should adopt an ‘attitude of complete indifference' to male war-cries.
9
‘Has war ever won any cause?', she challenged Leonard.
10

Virginia loathed the Nazis as much as Leonard; they stood for brutality, violence, the domestication of women.

Brutal bullies go about in hoods and masks, like little boys dressed up, acting this idiotic, meaningless, brutal, bloody pandemonium … And for the first time I read articles with rage, to find him [Hitler] called a real leader. Worse far than Napoleon.'
11

She signed anti-fascist petitions and joined committees, while remaining firmly a pacifist, convinced that force should not be used against force. The pen was mightier than the sword, and with that weapon she would fight ‘to the death for votes, wages, peace and so on'.
12

Many of Virginia's friends were pacifists. Aldous Huxley opposed sanctions against Italy because he feared they would result in war. Clive Bell wrote a letter to the
New Statesman
declaring, ‘War's so awful it can't be right anyhow', which impressed Virginia; a sign, she said, of Clive's ‘genuine humanity'.
13

Another reason for Leonard's decision to travel across Germany may have been to make Virginia recognise Nazi anti-Semitism. It was not something Virginia really felt or understood. She had the conventional disdain of her class for Jews in general but she could not be accused of being truly anti-Semitic. Only gradually did she come to appreciate the basis for Leonard's hatred of Nazi anti-Semitism. She met refugee German Jews like Bruno Walter:

‘You must not think of the Jews,' he kept on saying, ‘You must think of the whole state of the world. It is terrible – terrible. That this meanness, that this pettiness, should be possible!'
14

Virginia looked forward to seeing Germany. She told a friend there was little danger, ‘and it will be the greatest fun',
15
but after three days, angered by the banners stretched across the streets of every town, ‘The Jew Is Our enemy', she was thankful to leave behind ‘the hysterical crowd' and cross the border into Austria. Both their nerves were rather frayed, and she was upset by Leonard's tension and gloom.
16
When they got to Rome he was still keyed up and irritable, and Virginia reacted by being ‘so difficult to feed that meals became rather an uneasy problem'.
17

It was always so when Virginia was angry with Leonard. She was upset over his reaction to their experiences, his near-certainty that war with Germany had to be faced. She too hated what they had seen, and she now understood Leonard's fear of the Nazis and his fate under German domination, but she wanted a peaceful outcome, not war. Usually a healthy row would settle their differences, but on this occasion the problem was too complex.

Leonard grew worried by Virginia's anorexic behaviour and gave her all his attention. His introspectiveness and irritability were replaced by concern and persuasion, and Virginia gradually relaxed. Her anger faded, although the problem remained. Once home, she recorded that ‘holidays are very upsetting',
18
the constant motoring was ‘intolerable' and she was left with ‘a grim wooden feeling'.
19

She continued to be bothered by talk of war. ‘When even I can't sleep at night for thinking of politics, things must be in a fine mess. All our friends talk politics, politics, politics', she told Ottoline Morell. ‘All politics be damned.'
20
She got ‘into a stew' thinking of war and patriotism, and, seeing the signs chalked up on London walls – ‘Don't Fight For Foreigners'; ‘Britain Should Mind Her Own Business' – Leonard told her sharply they were ‘Fascist propaganda. Mosley again active'.
21

During 1935 Virginia was revising
The Years.
She had begun the novel in 1932, as an ‘Essay-Novel':

to take in everything; sex, education, life, etc; and come, with the most powerful and agile leaps, like a chamois across precipices, from 1880 to here and now.
22

Her plan had been to alternate fiction with essay, but she found the method too unwieldy and left out the essays – which were later expanded into
Three Guineas.