The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (26 page)

Symptoms of depression can affect almost any system in the body, which frequently makes for confusion in diagnosis. The mood is one of gloom and pessimism, and anxiety is never far off. ‘Such anguishes and despairs', Virginia experienced, ‘never was anyone so tossed up and down by the body as I am'.
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She was sure she was a failure, and she could see ‘no pleasure in life whatsoever'.
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Her mind felt ‘a blank' and she would never again have the power of writing.
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In a bad depression she would seize on some subject to worry about but no sooner was it dealt with by Leonard than a new one would take its place.

The loss of energy in cases of depression, both physical and mental, is striking. Virginia found it an effort to think logically; thoughts came slowly and concentration was difficult, reading and writing came to a halt. She felt clumsy and her movements uncoordinated. Her hand was stiff and she ‘had the same stiffness in manipulating sentences'.
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It was then that Virginia felt a perverse pleasure in bed, in being alone, her mind effortlessly filling with words and sentences and ideas for books. It was thus, while lying in bed recovering from the depression of 1929, that she conceived
A Room of One's Own.

Insomnia is a characteristic of most depressions, although one small group of depressives (although not cyclothymes) sleep longer than usual. Normally when Virginia was stable she ‘slept splendidly', but when depressed she would waken abruptly after three hours. Many depressives experience the horror of waking every morning between 2 and 3 a.m., sweating with fear. Scott Fitzgerald maintained that ‘In a real dark night of the soul, it is always 3 o'clock in the morning.'
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Cowper ‘slept [his] usual 3 hours well

and then awakened with ten times a stronger sense of my alienation from God than ever. Satan plied me close with horrible visions and more horrible voices. A numbness seized upon the extremities of my body and life seemed to retreat before it. My hands and feet became cold and stiff; a cold sweat stood upon my forehead.
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Virginia knew the same terror. ‘All my spectres come out on a sleepless night.' She recorded an instance:

Woke up perhaps at 3. Oh it's beginning it's coming – the horror – physically like a painful wave swelling about the heart – tossing me up. I'm unhappy unhappy! Down – God I wish I were dead. Pause. But why am I feeling this? Let me watch the wave rise. I watch. Vanessa. Children. Failure. Yes, I detect that. Failure. Failure. (The wave rises.) Oh they laughed at my taste in green paint! Wave crashes. I wish I were dead! I've only a few more years to live I hope. I can't face this horror any more – (this is the wave spreading out over me).

Sometimes she would doze off only to reawaken ‘with a start. The wave again! The irrational pain; the sense of failure, generally some specific incident, as for example my taste in green paint or buying a new dress'.
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When the new day arrived she was exhausted.

Depression brings about a progressive change of character. The philanthropist becomes a misanthrope, generosity turns into parsimony, calmness gives way to furious reaction, humour goes out the window. The previously confident gregarious individual has nothing to say, no ideas, no small talk, his mind emptied. When depressed, Virginia wanted to hide. ‘I see nobody partly because I have nothing to say except Oh! shall I ever have anything to say except Oh!'
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She felt anxious and ‘very lonely'

as though exposed on a high ledge in full light … very apprehensive. As if something cold and horrible – a roar of laughter at my expense – were about to happen. And I am powerless to ward it off: I have no protection and this anxiety and nothingness surround me with a vacuum … I want to burst into tears, but have nothing to cry for. Then a great restlessness seizes me.
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As the sense of alienation develops with depression, suspicion and paranoia begin to appear. The depressive becomes afraid of leaving home. A business trip, a holiday, away from home, even a visit to the shops can be a terrifying ordeal, a fearful strain. Virginia was seriously depressed in 1913 when Leonard, against his better inclination, took her to stay in the Holford Inn. Her anxiety was overwhelming and she lost control of her mind. She became more and more deluded, convinced she was an object of derision and that people were planning and plotting against her. The hotel staff recognised she was ill and behaved ‘with the greatest kindness, sensitiveness and consideration but to no effect'.
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Paranoia grew until even Leonard could no longer be wholly trusted. She was reluctant to eat and mealtimes turned into a nightmare for Leonard, for by this time she was probably hearing hallucinatory voices.

Depressives, are frequently reluctant to eat, and not simply because of loss of appetite. The depressed Cowper believed everyone hated him and that his food was poisoned. Robert Schumann had similar delusions and, like Virginia's cousin, starved himself to death. Virginia's reasons for not eating were not wholly dissimilar. She was convinced ‘the voices I used to hear telling me to do all kinds of wild things … came from over-eating';
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they had to be starved. Leonard was almost driven to breaking-point himself in 1913 trying to get Virginia to eat. ‘If left to herself she … would have gradually starved to death.'
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Similar behaviour was developing in 1941, and by the time of her suicide she was extremely thin.

Although she enjoyed food and drink when well (her description of meals can be mouth-watering), she had, according to Leonard, ‘a taboo against eating'. It was, he wrote, ‘extraordinarily difficult ever to get her to eat enough to keep her strong and well'.
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Leonard perhaps over-emphasised the problem, partly because he believed her mental stability depended on maintaining a ‘good' weight, but also because Virginia became noticeably more anorexic when Leonard was worried and irritable and fussed over her food.

Sexual appetite is lost from the start. Virginia's physical libido, never very strong, rapidly disappeared. During the most passionate time of her affair with Vita Sackville-West, although she was disappointed not to receive a visit she was ‘yet relieved at the same time'. Even during hypomania, when sexual appetites sometimes overflow, Virginia's sexual interest was as much intellectual as physical.

Depression is uniquely painful. Cowper saw it as ‘the most terrible dismay of the soul',
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and many a believer has compared his sufferings to the torments of Hell. Unlike a physical pain which, however unbearable, can be related to part of the body and, in a sense, isolated, the pain of depression involves the whole being. The depression is the pain. William Styron thought it like ‘drowning or suffocating'.
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Suicide may seem the only escape. Virginia ‘did most emphatically attempt to end it all' in 1913.
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Before her suicide in 1941 Virginia left a last note for Leonard saying, ‘I can't go through another of those terrible times … I can't fight any longer. I know I am spoiling your life.'
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An alternative to suicide is to accept the pain, as Hector Berlioz did: ‘One power was left to me – to suffer, to embrace madness.'
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Cowper, in despair after having failed to kill himself, ‘now began to look upon madness as though the only chance remaining. I had a strong foreboding that it would fare so with me, and I wished for it earnestly.'
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That was never Virginia's wish. She was terrified of madness and when normal took precautions against a recurrence by drinking milk and maintaining her weight – ‘unless I weigh nine and a half stones I hear voices and see visions and can neither write nor sleep' – and retiring to bed and ‘lying still directly my head aches'. Yet she recognised that insanity had its attractions: ‘as an experience madness is terrific', she informed a friend. Like Charles Lamb after his recovery, she looked back on ‘many hours of pure happiness … of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of Fancy'.
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She remembered ‘lying in bed, mad, and seeing the sunlight quivering like gold water on the wall. I've heard the voice of the dead here. And felt, through it all, exquisitely happy.'
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Virginia's depressions were often ushered in by ‘a dribbling little temperature', invariably diagnosed as influenza.
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Influenza, or what passed for influenza, was seen as a potent cause of depression by psychiatrists, and Virginia's general practitioner repeatedly warned of its ‘dangerous effects on the nervous system'.
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Genuine influenza can leave its victims depressed, but Virginia's descriptions do not match up with true ‘flu'. The raised temperature during cyclothymic depression, not at all uncommon, was caused by the depression and was not the cause of it.

At the beginning of the 1920s Virginia's depressions increased and a repeatedly raised temperature of 99 was investigated by specialists, who came up in turn with heart disease, trouble in the right lung, infection around the teeth (three of which were unnecessarily extracted) and ‘pneumonia germs or ‘flu'.

She was bothered by ‘dropped beats' – of no real concern but alarming to someone depressed – and when she was exhausted her heart might begin to race ‘like galloping horses got wild in my head'. Her back ached, limbs felt ‘fidgety', and pain sometimes stabbed her chest.
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There were moments when she felt on the point of death.

The cyclothymic depressions lasted usually between two and six weeks but they could be prolonged by stressful situations into many weeks. In 1936 Virginia was ill for most of the year as a result of a long period of strain, and she was depressed for nearly four months before her suicide. Minor short-lived depressions lifted abruptly, but more severe episodes often fluctuated up and down before finally resolving. Then followed a period of calm until the hypomanic phase occurred.

Hypomania is a lesser form of mania. Kay Jamison described her own experience as ‘a light, lovely tincture of true mania … tiresome to my friends, perhaps; exhausting and exhilarating to me, definitely; but not disturbingly on the top'.
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Life becomes more vivid, colourful, brighter, entrancing. Appetites increase. The mind bubbles and takes magical leaps over hitherto unclimbable mountains. When hypomanic Virginia would waken early, bursting with energy and zest, her mind full of ideas and plans for current and future work. She saw herself in a confident positive light. Gone was the fear of failure, envy of her sister, desire for children. Books were her children and she saw them stretching like a magic carpet into the future. Naturally sociable when well, she now invited ‘shoals of friends' for weekends and accepted every invitation to luncheon and dinner with her intimates, as well as to grander parties and social occasions where she was one of the chief centres of attraction. She lost her usual reserve and could be wickedly witty, weaving a cloud of fantasy around some embarrassed guest, sparkling ‘with gaiety, delicate malice and gossip'. Fellow guests fell under her spell and, ‘listening to her, forgot love affairs, stayed on and on into the small hours'.
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Leonard always had cause to feel anxiety at such times, for with over-excitement and late hours exhaustion and depression were liable to follow. More than once she collapsed physically, usually after returning home.

These hypomanic spells were rarely severe and Leonard was usually able to exert a degree of control, urging her home from a late party, or to bed if at home. They were tremendously enjoyable, comparable but much superior to the effects of a pep pill such as Ecstasy. An understandable reluctance to give up the experience is why a number of cyclothymes refuse to accept treatment with lithium – which removes or diminishes mood swings.

When hypomania intensifies, the mind begins to turn too quickly for comfort. Grandiose, frankly absurd ideas pour forth which, if acted upon, can bring chaos and ruin. Insight and judgement are lost, and excitable monologues become less and less intelligible. Hilarity or irritability may be the predominant mood, so-called ‘hilarious' and ‘furious' forms of mania. Any opposition arouses violent anger and abuse, as Vanessa found in 1904 and Leonard discovered in 1915. Money is spent without thought and huge debts incurred, and sexual adventures begun. Virginia, when manic, was never driven in that direction, but her cyclothymic great-great-grandfather, the first James Stephen, spent time in a debtors' jail and died in poverty as a result of his ‘furious' hypomania; and Virginia's cousin Jim Stephen when severely hypomanic, was moved to expose himself naked in windows and write pornographic verse and pursue women, including Virginia's half-sister.

At the height of the 1915 episode of mania Virginia's talk became ‘wildly insane', and then ‘completely incoherent, a mere jumble of dissociated words' and finally she fell into a coma, but conscious of her surroundings and of hallucinatory experiences.
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Mania is destructive but mild hypomania can be very productive; the hypomanic's business thrives, the scientist designs new research, paintings, music, books pour forth, fresh and original. But more than hypomania alone is needed for great originality or what may be called genius. That something is provided, paradoxically, by depression. It is the contradictory-sounding mixture of mania and depression, the so-called mixed state of manic depression, which can be a source of original ideas to a genius capable of making them ‘real'.

Mixed manic depression – a mood of depression and self-blame mingles with rapid, vivid hallucinatory scenes; suicidal ideas exist alongside elation, and so on – is not uncommon, and perhaps particularly among cyclothymic artists. Robert Schumann, in the midst of exquisite suffering, heard glorious music which he later wrote down. John Ruskin saw ‘horribly hideous forms' followed by wonderfully ‘beautiful objects'.
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A mad Virginia suffered ‘every form and variety of nightmare and extravagant intensity of perception', from which ‘in the light of reason' she constructed her stories.
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