Vanessa bell, p.40
Vanessa Bell, page 40
News of Roger’s sudden death reverberated widely. Arthur Waley and Beryl de Zoete read of it in the Tyrol; the designers McKnight Kauffer and Marion Dorn casually picked up the same edition of The Times in a Salzburg cafe. They and many others wrote letters of condolence to Helen Anrep, who had been living with Roger since 1929. ‘He helped one use one’s faculties,’ Virginia told Helen, ‘... the most magnificent, the most loveable of all our friends. He will never die for he is the best part of our lives.’49 The critic Alan Clutton-Brock spoke for many when he wrote: ‘In many ways his mind was at once so scrupulous and so fine, so exact and so adventurous. He opened the mind of anyone who read his books, and still more of anyone who talked to him, to a multitude of new things, and to follow him was to combine the delight of discovery with that of listening to an exquisitely precise demonstration.’50
When Vanessa recovered from her immediate shock her thoughts turned to Helen. But their first meeting after Roger’s death was evidently more than Vanessa could bear for afterwards she apologized: ‘I feel nearer Roger when I’m with you. I behaved so stupidly today but I don’t think I’d recovered ... for what seemed a long time I couldn’t get near anyone and was so faint. But I’m all right now and it’s only to explain being so feeble today. Helen dear, you know I love you very much.’51
That autumn Charles and Marie Mauron visited London, as had earlier been arranged, and stayed with Helen. When the time came for them to leave, Quentin and Vanessa decided to drive over to Newhaven to see them off and to bring Helen back to Charleston for a rest. Vanessa told Helen of this plan by letter, confessing also that she had spent most of the afternoon asleep in the studio with the cat in her arms. She had been dazed but not broken by Roger’s death and at his funeral had become reconciled to it. No words had been spoken and those present sat in silence while music was played in a room with open doors that led on to a garden. ‘I thought yesterday’, Vanessa afterwards wrote to Helen, ‘it was so much what Roger would have chosen. One was more conscious of the beauty of life than of anything else and it seemed enough explanation of everything. Why should one want more than that people like him and music like Bach’s and such incredible loveliness as one sees all round one should exist and that one should know them. They do not really ever stop.’52 Even so, an absence remained. ‘Will one ever lose the habit of thinking one can tell him things, I wonder?’ she asked.53
* * *
* The Tate did not buy it and as Agnew’s sales records contain no mention of this picture, it would appear that it went unsold. Its present whereabouts is unknown. It may have been exhibited again in 1942 with the London Group at the Leger Gallery, for ‘The Nursery’ by Vanessa is listed in the catalogue at a price of £65. More likely this was another painting on the same theme as two years earlier an incendiary bomb had destroyed her studio and most of the paintings in it.
TWELVE
Between Bloomsbury and China
1935-1937
There were several projects afoot immediately after Roger’s death: a memorial exhibition of his paintings was arranged at Bristol; Virginia, on the invitation of his sister Margery, began the necessary research for his biography; and his Slade lectures were prepared for publication by Helen Anrep and Kenneth Clark. Meanwhile a memento of Roger that now hung on Vanessa’s wall was a small Matisse of ships in harbour which he had left her in his will.
Another project afoot, one which Roger would very much have enjoyed, was the play Freshwater, written by Virginia twelve years earlier and now revised for a performance in Vanessa’s London studio. Taking the story of Watts, Ellen Terry and Mrs Cameron, it presented a burlesque on the Victorians’ pursuit of truth and beauty. An audience of around sixty people (Vanessa estimated) crowded into her studio. Not all had a good view and several of the jokes were drowned by the laughter of Clive and his brother Cory. The climax of the play came in the third act when Ellen (played by Angelica), after having been presumed drowned, ran on stage in a white, flounced dress with blue ribbons and received roars of applause. The dress had been made by Vanessa and afterwards Duncan executed for her a pastel portrait of Angelica wearing this frock and a prettily tilted hat.1
This was Angelica’s last year at school. It was also the year that Vanessa planned a lengthy visit to Rome. Anxious to arrive in Italy before the heat became severe, she took the sixteen-year-old Angelica away from school at Easter so that she left without having sat the School Certificate. Vanessa also made Grace, who the year previously had married Walter Higgens, housekeeper at Charleston and let it to Herbert Read and his wife. And immediately before departing for Rome she attended a dinner given in honour of the artist Ethel Walker, to whom she had sat for her portrait (Tate Gallery). Then in a chauffeur-driven car which the Harold Nicolsons had need of in Rome, she and Angelica were driven in (for them) unusual style through France, stopping for a night at Moulins and at Montélimar. From the latter Vanessa wrote to Helen:
No wonder the French are painters. It all seems so immense and indestructible when one drives through the great spaces and everyone’s life going on quite regardless of the rest of the world ... Angelica is a perfect travelling companion with very high spirits and then lapses into another existence in which I leave her alone. I suspect it looks more romantic than it is, but it’s agreeable to look at. She reads Shakespeare at intervals and plays the piano in hotel drawing rooms.2
The next day they called on the Maurons at St-Rémy. Apprehensive of meeting them without Roger, Vanessa was surprised how easily she could talk and even joke about him with Charles and Marie. Their visit lasted longer than she intended and they subsequently arrived very late that night at Roquebrune, Vanessa, in the dark, almost falling down La Souco’s steep steps. There they found Quentin who had been staying with the Bussys while he researched into the history of Monaco. He was hoping that his friend Yvonne Kapp (later to write a biography of Eleanor Marx) would help with the writing, but the project never materialized.
With Quentin, Vanessa and Angelica completed their journey. In Rome they put up temporarily at the Hotel Hassler while Vanessa looked round for a studio where they could work and live. 'I saw Vita this morning’, Vanessa reported to Helen, ‘looking red as beetroot - with a thick moustache - rather fine in a manly way, with a small rather mousy [sic] looking creature in tow, her sister-in-law with whom she is desperately in love.’ They dined twice in the Nicolsons’ company, giving Vanessa further opportunity for acute observation. ‘Harold isn’t a bad creature.... My impression is he could be led or pushed in any direction. Vita seems as masterful as Mussolini and has him in complete control.’3 This is the only reference to Mussolini in Vanessa’s letters from Rome, for as yet she did not take Fascism seriously. She could speak little Italian and was therefore somewhat cut off from the life around her. Wherever she went she seemed to carry her own world with her and before long her manner of existence had become much like that she led in London; detached, contemplative and remote from the bustle and tension of the everyday world.
Angelica, overjoyed at finding herself in Rome, walked through the streets arm in arm with Quentin, shrieking with laughter or alternatively filled with ecstasy by the sight of a church or an ancient building. She attracted much attention to herself, and the son of a well-known tenor began to sit in the hotel salon listening to her play the piano. Vanessa, meanwhile, found for herself and Angelica an enormous room at No.33 Via Margutta; it was divided in two by a curtain and had a small kitchen, water-closet and bathroom attached; it had marble floors, the minimum of furniture and cost £2 2s. a week. Duncan, when he arrived, took a studio on the top floor, and Quentin found a room near by. Before long everyone had settled down to work while Angelica took Italian lessons with a Signorina Boschetti. When the Woolfs arrived in Rome for a week, during the course of a motoring holiday through Europe, Virginia found a familiar life-style already established. ‘We went rag marketing. And suddenly out sprang, to my eyes, the old triumphant Vanessa of early married days. Why? How she would bear off in full sail with Roger, Clive and me attendant. We bought pots; and a tea set, which gave her great intense potters delight more than any clothing or jewel.’4
As usual when abroad, Vanessa found she had more time to read. ‘Her leisure, with books, is prodigious,’ Virginia once complained, explaining to Ethel Smyth that Vanessa had not yet finished Beecham and Pharaoh: ‘it reminds me of the gestation and copulation of elephants. “No, I can’t say I’ve read more than one sentence but when I read, I read.” And that’s true. It’ll take her six months.’5 In Rome she buried herself in the memoirs of Mrs Humphry Ward and emerged declaring this author ‘the inventor of the cinematic caption ... all dashes and notes of exclamation. I believe a fortune could be made by turning some of her works into films.’6 During the rest of her stay in Rome Vanessa re-read all Roger’s letters to herself, before giving them to Virginia for use in her biography.
At the same time she was at work on her decorations for RMS Queen Mary. This commission had followed shortly after the success of the music room, for which she and Duncan had designed fabrics, rugs, painted furniture and wall decorations, for an installation at the Lefevre Gallery in December 1932. The occasion had attracted notice in the press, partly because of the highly successful cocktail party given at the opening by Virginia and Vanessa. According to Cyril Connolly, ‘the room vibrated to a Debussy solo on the harp, and the music, with its seasonal elegiac, seemed to blend with the surrounding patterns of the flowers and falling leaves in a rare union of intellect and imagination, colour and sound, which produced in the listener a momentary apprehension of the life of the spirit, that lonely and un-English credo’.7 But designing freely for a private domestic interior was a very different matter from creating murals for a public setting and both Duncan and Vanessa might have been warned of the difficulties the Queen Mary commission would present. Duncan had been given the task of providing three large panels to decorate the ship’s main lounge; Vanessa was to produce only one painted panel for a private sitting-room. Both also had the task of designing colour schemes and patterns for carpets and stuffs. With this major commission on hand Duncan declared he needed to stay in one place and would remain in Rome until September. Vanessa intended leaving earlier in order to spend some time at Cassis on the way home, but news from Julian brought her back to England before the end of July.
For some time now Julian’s public and private life had been unsettled. In 1933, anxious for change and feeling a need to assert his independence, he began to consider the possibility of employment abroad. He applied for jobs in Siam, China and Japan, at first without success. Meanwhile one girl-friend followed another. None of these relationships seem to have been very satisfactory and in one instance he was obliged to pay out £30 for an abortion. Nor did it trouble him if his women were married. With Helen Hasland, the photographer who worked under the name Helena Thornhill from Haverstock Hill, this presented little problem as she was rarely with her husband, but his affair with a biochemist proved difficult as it threatened to upset her domestic life. 'I daresay she’ll find a way of managing it all,’ Vanessa remarked. ‘Females generally do.’8
The ease with which he got what he wanted did not appease his sense of failure. Then in July 1935 he was offered the post of Professor of English at the National University of Wuhan at Hankow. He wrote immediately to Vanessa, admitting that he was appalled at the thought of leaving her for three years, but that his need for change was now urgent. ‘When I come back I should have got straight internally ... somehow I’m convinced that it will produce a kind of peace of mind [which] I now want above all things.’9
As Julian had only a month in which to prepare for his departure Vanessa hurried home in order to spend some days with him and the rest of her family at Charleston. Julian was photographed in his new clothes and when the time came for him to leave Vanessa drove him to the port. ‘Nessa and I both have about the same notion of how to behave, but it isn’t easy. As it happened it was her giving me some money as a present that broke me down. Then a bright, cheerful grim little drive into Lewes and Newhaven. You know, I’m almost the only person I know who has an adult relationship with their mother. It’s about the most satisfactory human relationship I have, perhaps it’s the only one where I’ve deep emotions uncomplicated by power-sadist feelings.’10 He crossed the channel and from Paris caught a train to Marseilles where he boarded the Japanese ship, the Fushimi Maru.
After leaving Julian at Newhaven Vanessa drove back to Charleston partly in a dream, feeling and noticing little except the beauty of the Downs and the summer countryside. On her return Duncan was protectively kind and Vanessa showed her feelings to him but not to others, not wanting to afflict Quentin and Angelica with her sense of loss. Nevertheless, Angelica was made aware that her mother ‘looked on his [Julian’s] departure rather in the light of a personal tragedy, an act which left her, if only temporarily, bereft and desolate’.11 To distract her thoughts Vanessa began to transform Julian’s room, tidying his books, papers and clothes in order to make space for Angelica who was to use the bedroom in his absence.
She now adopted the habit of sending Julian weekly letters written over a period of two to three days. They provided an opportunity for things to be said which in other circumstances would have been left unsaid; separation, instead of creating a rift in their relationship, licensed the expression of love and therefore may have increased Vanessa’s hold on her son. ‘This has been a great blessing,’ she wrote to him, ‘for it has made us try to tell each other what we mean to each other ... I feel so perfectly sure now that you want me to know and share things with you and what can one have more from one’s children? ... How glad I am too that it didn’t happen sooner, for you made such a tremendous difference to me last year when Roger died.’12 Roger and Julian had become somehow joined in her mind and her son’s departure seemed to her ‘like some dim reflection of his [Roger’s] death’.13 Julian, perhaps realizing his need to compensate his mother for her loss, began composing an essay on Roger during his journey to China. He did not stick closely to his subject but often used Roger’s ideas as a mere starting-point for the discussion of contemporary political theory. He completed it in January 1936 and sent it to Vanessa, knowing that his understanding of Roger would please her. ‘His was a rationalism so subtle’, he wrote, ‘and so profound that he could cope with, and enjoy, chaos itself: that there was nothing in the universe, apparently, nor in himself, that he could not contemplate with an impartial detachment, ready to accept or reject anything on its merits. I have never known anyone so nearly the “free mind” of Spinoza’s imagination.’14
Vanessa’s distress over Julian’s absence did not prevent her from enjoying an active social life. Against her better judgement she even attended a dinner given by the Palace employee Timmy Chichester to welcome the return of the dealer Duncan Macdonald from Tangier and George Bergen from America. As two days after this party Duncan arrived at Charleston alone, to join Vanessa, it would appear that Bergen no longer dominated his emotional life. More troublesome at this time was ‘Tut’ who had escaped from an asylum in Brighton and kept turning up either at Charleston or 8 Fitzroy Street, asking for Duncan but refusing to accept gifts of money unless he felt able to pay it back.
The most glamorous social event that autumn was the party given at Gordon Square by Charles and Elsa Laughton and at which Blooms-bury and Hollywood mixed. Vanessa, a little fearful of her shabbiness, went to please Angelica and was glad to find Bunny also present. While he carried on with a tall, beautiful and, as Vanessa thought, rather witless young lady, she made friends with the zoologist [Lord] Solly Zuckerman. That same month she herself gave a small but memorable party at Charleston at which the Woolfs, Janie Bussy, Bunny, T. S. Eliot, Duncan, Clive, Angelica, her friend Eve Younger and another were present. She had ordered eleven grouse, thinking that two sides of grouse went to one person, instead of two persons to a grouse, but this mistake proved the making of the occasion. Eliot’s eyes shone at the sight of so many birds; he ate his entire (while the rest carved off half for the next day), then visibly relaxed and began to talk about himself. ‘He and Bunny’, Vanessa recounted to Julian, ‘made a very good couple, one slow in the American and the other in the English style - and both keeping us in roars of laughter. After dinner Angelica and Eve gave us a musical entertainment in the studio which consisted of their dressing up and singing such songs as “Where are you going to my pretty maid?” with Quentin as the cow. They looked ravishing - but generally forgot their words. However everyone enjoyed it I think and Tom told us the immortal story of his party ... how, to make things go, he bought chocolates which should have been filled with sawdust but were filled with soap, and sugar lumps with india rubber fish inside which would have been all right in tea but were invisible in black coffee - and what a failure it all was.’15
At intervals that autumn Vanessa and Duncan painted at the nearby Michelham Priory. Their chief concern, however, was with the Queen Mary decorations. During the summer they had completed their decorative panels, Vanessa’s having been commissioned for a private sitting-room next to the Roman Catholic chapel. By the autumn they were in frequent contact with a Mr Leach. He visited their London studio and made arrangements for them to visit Liverpool in order to advise the Cunard Shipping Company on the choice of colours for interior decoration. Then, on the day before they were expected in Liverpool, two letters arrived, one cancelling Vanessa’s contract because the Roman Catholic authorities had found her designs offensive, the other informing Duncan that certain restrictions would have to be imposed on his panels and that he would have to reduce the size of his figures. Vanessa went straight to Maynard for advice. Fortunately he knew Sir Percy Bates, Chairman of the Cunard Shipping Company, and wrote immediately to him.
