Again the door opened.
“Lady Mary Cholmondeley on the telephone, milady”, said Fielding.
“Tell her I’m engaged”, said Sibyl angrily. Fielding went.
“Who can she mean?” Sibyl asked. “I don’t know any Lady Mary Cholmondeley. Can it be . . .Oh dear,” she sighed getting up, “I must go and see for myself. Fielding’s the bane of my life”, she sighed. “First she cries, then she laughs; and she won’t wear spectacles though she’s as blind as a bat. I must go and see for myself.”
Again she left me. Another illusion had gone, I thought. I had always thought Fielding a treasure – an old servant to whom Sibyl was devoted. But no; first she cried; then she laughed; and she was as blind as a bat. This was another peep into the pantry at Argyll House.
As I sat there waiting I thought of the times I had sat on that sofa – with Sir Arthur; with Arnold Bennett; with George Moore; with old Mr Birrell; with Max Beerbohm. It was in this room that Olga Lynn threw down her music in a rage because people talked; and here that I saw Sibyl glide across the room and lead Lord Balfour, beaming benevolence and distinction, to soothe the angry singer . . . But Sibyl came back again, and again took up her bread and butter.
“What were we talking about”, she said, “before Fielding interrupted? And what am I to do about Fielding?” she added. “I can’t send her away. She’s been with us all these years. But she’s such an awful. . . but don’t let’s go into that,” she broke off again.
Again I made an effort to talk more intimately. “I’ve been thinking of all the people I’ve met here”, I said. “Arnold Bennett. George Moore. Max Beerbohm . . .”
She smiled. I saw that I had given her pleasure. “That’s what I like you to say”, she said. “That’s what I’ve wanted – that the people I like should meet the people I like. That’s what I tried to do—” “And that’s what you’ve done”, I said, warming up. I felt very grateful to her, although in fact I had never much enjoyed meeting other writers, still she had kept open house; she had worked very hard; it had been a great achievement in its way. I tried to tell her so.
“I have enjoyed myself in this room so much”, I said. “D’you remember the party when Olga Lynn threw down her music? And then, that time I met Arnold Bennett. And then – Henry James . . .” I stopped. I had never met Henry James at Argyll House. That was before my time.
“Did you know him?” I said, quite innocently.
“Know Henry James!” Sibyl exclaimed. Her face lit up. It was as if I had touched on a nerve, the wrong nerve, I rather felt. She became the old Sibyl again – the hostess.
“Dear H.J.! I should think I did! I shall never forget”, she began, “how when Wolcott Balestier died in Vienna – he was Rudyard Kipling’s brother-in-law, you know—”fn16 Here the door opened again; and again Fielding – Fielding who was as blind as a bat and the curse of Sibyl’s life – peered in.
“The car’s at the door, milady”, she said.
Sibyl turned to me. “I’ve a tiresome engagement in Mount Street”, she said. “I must go. But I’ll give you a lift.”
She got up and we went into the hall. The door was open. The Rolls Royce was waiting at the door behind the gate. This is my farewell, I said to myself, pausing for a moment, and looked, as one looks for the last time, at the Italian pots, at the looking-glasses, all with their tickets on them, that stood in the hall. I wanted to say something to show that I minded leaving Argyll House for the last time. But Sibyl seemed to have forgotten all about it. She looked animated. The colour had come back into the cherries; the straw hat was hard again. “I was just telling you”, she resumed. “When Wolcott Balestier died in Vienna, Henry James came to see me, and he said, ‘Dear Sibyl, there are those two poor women alone with the corpse of that dear young man in Vienna, and I feel that it is my duty—’” By this time we were walking down the flagged pathway to the car.
“Mount Street”, she said to the chauffeur and got in. “H.J. said to me,” she resumed, “‘I feel it is my duty to go to Vienna in case I can be of any assistance to those two bereaved ladies . . .’” And the car drove off, and she sat by my side, trying to impress me with the fact that she had known Henry James.
fn1 MacCarthy. See here.
fn2 Margot Asquith, Lady Oxford, second wife of Herbert Asquith, Earl of Oxford (Prime Minister 1908—16).
fn3 Geoffrey Dawson, twice editor of The Times, 1912–19,1923–41.
fn4 ‘the’ is the last word of the line of type that trails off the page. The Countess of Warwick was a celebrated beauty and member of the Prince of Wales’ circle. It is only a possibility that the Prince of Wales was intended here, however.
fn5 The ts has ‘La Balfour’ but ‘Lord’ must surely have been intended. Arthur James Balfour, philosopher and statesman, Prime Minister 1902–5, was the central figure of the exclusive, aristocratic and intellectual coterie known as ‘the Souls’.
fn6 The Woolfs lived in Richmond from 1914—24.
fn7 Lady Colefax of Argyll House was a well-known London hostess. Leonard Woolf described her as ‘an unabashed hunter of lions’.
fn8 ‘you must undress’ was typed after ‘shop’ then deleted; it was then written in and partially deleted. The present phrase was the last addition made in the margin.
fn9 Sir Arthur Colefax, husband of Sibyl.
fn10 Strachey.
fn11 Typographical errors plus incomplete deletions make this paragraph a ‘doubtful reading’. However, the meaning is clear.
fn12 He died on 19 February 1936.
fn13 This letter is included in the ‘Monks House Papers’ at the University of Sussex Library.
fn14 The following passage is deleted in the ts: “Yet when she asked me to dine with her alone, I could not face it. Again the feeling seemed to break into three separate bits, and when I thought of spending a whole evening alone with her talking about Arthur I shirked it. I thought no. I shall be found out. I made some excuse, and waited till time had passed, and the need for genuine feeling should be less pressing.”
fn15 Wife of Ralph Follet Wigram, CMG, counsellor in the Foreign Office.
fn16 Balestier died in 1891; Kipling married his sister Caroline in 1892.
Sketch of the Past
TWO DAYS AGO – Sunday 16th April 1939 to be precise – Nessa said that if I did not start writing my memoirs I should soon be too old. I should be eighty-five, and should have forgotten – witness the unhappy case of Lady Strachey.fn1 As it happens that I am sick of writing Roger’s life, perhaps I will spend two or three mornings making a sketch.fn2 There are several difficulties. In the first place, the enormous number of things I can remember; in the second, the number of different ways in which memoirs can be written. As a great memoir reader, I know many different ways. But if I begin to go through them and to analyse them and their merits and faults, the mornings – I cannot take more than two or three at most – will be gone. So without stopping to choose my way, in the sure and certain knowledge that it will find itself – or if not it will not matter – I begin: the first memory.
This was of red and purple flowers on a black ground – my mother’s dress; and she was sitting either in a train or in an omnibus, and I was on her lap. I therefore saw the flowers she was wearing very close; and can still see purple and red and blue, I think, against the black; they must have been anemones, I suppose. Perhaps we were going to St Ives; more probably, for from the light it must have been evening, we were coming back to London. But it is more convenient artistically to suppose that we were going to St Ives, for that will lead to my other memory, which also seems to be my first memory, and in fact it is the most important of all my memories. If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills – then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, on
e, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.
I could spend hours trying to write that as it should be written, in order to give the feeling which is even at this moment very strong in me. But I should fail (unless I had some wonderful luck); I dare say I should only succeed in having the luck if I had begun by describing Virginia herself.
Here I come to one of the memoir writer’s difficulties – one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: “This is what happened”; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened. Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daughter of Leslie and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January 1882, descended from a great many people, some famous, others obscure; born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world; so that I could if I liked to take the trouble, write a great deal here not only about my mother and father but about uncles and aunts, cousins and friends. But I do not know how much of this, or what part of this, made me feel what I felt in the nursery at St Ives. I do not know how far I differ from other people. That is another memoir writer’s difficulty. Yet to describe oneself truly one must have some standard of comparison; was I clever, stupid, good looking, ugly, passionate, cold—? Owing partly to the fact that I was never at school, never competed in any way with children of my own age, I have never been able to compare my gifts and defects with other people’s. But of course there was one external reason for the intensity of this first impression: the impression of the waves and the acorn on the blind; the feeling, as I describe it sometimes to myself, of lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow – it was due partly to the many months we spent in London. The change of nursery was a great change. And there was the long train journey; and the excitement. I remember the dark; the lights; the stir of the going up to bed.
But to fix my mind upon the nursery – it had a balcony; there was a partition, but it joined the balcony of my father’s and mother’s bedroom. My mother would come out on to her balcony in a white dressing gown. There were passion flowers growing on the wall; they were great starry blossoms, with purple streaks, and large green buds, part empty, part full.
If I were a painter I should paint these first impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green. There was the pale yellow blind; the green sea; and the silver of the passion flowers. I should make a picture that was globular; semitransparent. I should make a picture of curved petals; of shells; of things that were semi-transparent; I should make curved shapes, showing the light through, but not giving a clear outline. Everything would be large and dim; and what was seen would at the same time be heard; sounds would come through this petal or leaf – sounds indistinguishable from sights. Sound and sight seem to make equal parts of these first impressions. When I think of the early morning in bed I also hear the caw of rooks falling from a great height. The sound seems to fall through an elastic, gummy air; which holds it up; which prevents it from being sharp and distinct.fn3 The quality of the air above Talland House seemed to suspend sound, to let it sink down slowly, as if it were caught in a blue gummy veil. The rooks cawing is part of the waves breaking – one, two, one, two – and the splash as the wave drew back and then it gathered again, and I lay there half awake, half asleep, drawing in such ecstasy as I cannot describe.
The next memory – all these colour-and-sound memories hang together at St Ives – was much more robust; it was highly sensual. It was later. It still makes me feel warm; as if everything were ripe; humming; sunny; smelling so many smells at once; and all making a whole that even now makes me stop – as I stopped then going down to the beach; I stopped at the top to look down at the gardens. They were sunk beneath the road. The apples were on a level with one’s head. The gardens gave off a murmur of bees; the apples were red and gold; there were also pink flowers; and grey and silver leaves. The buzz, the croon, the smell, all seemed to press voluptuously against some membrane; not to burst it; but to hum round one such a complete rapture of pleasure that I stopped, smelt; looked. But again I cannot describe that rapture. It was rapture rather than ecstasy.
The strength of these pictures – but sight was always then so much mixed with sound that picture is not the right word – the strength anyhow of these impressions makes me again digress. Those moments – in the nursery, on the road to the beach – can still be more real than the present moment. This I have just tested. For I got up and crossed the garden. Percy was digging the asparagus bed; Louie was shaking a mat in front of the bedroom door.fn4 But I was seeing them through the sight I saw here – the nursery and the road to the beach. At times I can go back to St Ives more completely than I can this morning. I can reach a state where I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there. That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so that it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen. In certain favourable moods, memories – what one has forgotten – come to the top. Now if this is so, is it not possible – I often wonder – that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them? I see it – the past – as an avenue lying behind; a long ribbon of scenes, emotions. There at the end of the avenue still, are the garden and the nursery. Instead of remembering here a scene and there a sound, I shall fit a plug into the wall; and listen in to the past. I shall turn up August 1890.1 feel that strong emotion must leave its trace; and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start.
But the peculiarity of these two strong memories is that each was very simple. I am hardly aware of myself, but only of the sensation. I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture. Perhaps this is characteristic of all childhood memories; perhaps it accounts for their strength. Later we add to feelings much that makes them more complex; and therefore less strong; or if not less strong, less isolated, less complete. But instead of analysing this, here is an instance of what I mean – my feeling about the looking-glass in the hall.
There was a small looking-glass in the hall at Talland House. It had, I remember, a ledge with a brush on it. By standing on tiptoe I could see my face in the glass. When I was six or seven perhaps, I got into the habit of looking at my face in the glass. But I only did this if I was sure that I was alone. I was ashamed of it. A strong feeling of guilt seemed naturally attached to it. But why was this so? One obvious reason occurs to me – Vanessa and I were both what was called tomboys; that is, we played cricket, scrambled over rocks, climbed trees, were said not to care for clothes and so on. Perhaps therefore to have been found looking in the glass would have been against our tomboy code. But I think that my feeling of shame went a great deal deeper. I am almost inclined to drag in my grandfather – Sir James, who once smoked a cigar, liked it, and so threw away his cigar and never smoked another. I am almost inclined to think that I inherited a streak of the puritan, of the Clapham Sect.fn5 At any rate, the looking-glass shame has lasted all my life, long after the tomboy phase was over. I cannot now powder my nose in public. Everything to do with dress – to be fitted, to come into a room wearing a new dress – still frightens me; at least makes me shy, selfconscious, uncomfortable. “Oh to be able to run, like Julian Morrell, all over the garden in a new dress”, I thought not many years ago at Garsington
; when Julian undid a parcel and put on a new dress and scampered round and round like a hare.fn6 Yet femininity was very strong in our family. We were famous for our beauty – my mother’s beauty, Stella’s beauty, gave me as early as I can remember, pride and pleasure. What then gave me this feeling of shame, unless it were that I inherited some opposite instinct? My father was spartan, ascetic, puritanical. He had I think no feeling for pictures; no ear for music; no sense of the sound of words. This leads me to think that my – I would say ‘our’ if I knew enough about Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian – but how little we know even about brothers and sisters – this leads me to think that my natural love for beauty was checked by some ancestral dread. Yet this did not prevent me from feeling ecstasies and raptures spontaneously and intensely and without any shame or the least sense of guilt, so long as they were disconnected with my own body. I thus detect another element in the shame which I had in being caught looking at myself in the glass in the hall. I must have been ashamed or afraid of my own body. Another memory, also of the hall, may help to explain this. There was a slab outside the dining room door for standing dishes upon. Once when I was very small Gerald Duckworth lifted me on to this, and as I sat there he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it did not stop. His hand explored my private parts too. I remember resenting, disliking it – what is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling? It must have been strong, since I still recall it. This seems to show that a feeling about certain parts of the body; how they must not be touched; how it is wrong to allow them to be touched; must be instinctive. It proves that Virginia Stephen was not born on the 25th January 1882, but was born many thousands of years ago; and had from the very first to encounter instincts already acquired by thousands of ancestresses in the past.