Vanessa bell, p.46
Vanessa Bell, page 46
For a few minutes before the meal Bunny was alone with Vanessa and she asked him bluntly if Angelica was pregnant. Relieved to hear that she was not, she then added that if this eventuality ever occurred he must tell her at once because an abortion was easier to perform in the early stages. This appalled Bunny as her suggestion took no account of what Angelica’s feelings might be, but he could not reply for at that moment Clive appeared and a jovial dinner began. Bunny was still smarting from Vanessa’s words when at some point during the meal she commented how strange it was that Angelica had not let her know she had been in pain. He now blurted out that Angelica had not wanted her to know she was ill. His implication - that Angelica no longer placed her trust in her mother - wounded Vanessa and infuriated Duncan, both feeling also that Bunny had no right to make arrangements regarding Angelica without consulting them. Bunny at once left the meal, but met Vanessa the following morning at Angelica’s bedside. He apologized for his behaviour the night before, but the matter did not end there. Later, after Dr Richards had confirmed that Angelica was suffering from cystitis, Vanessa suggested to her that Angelica could recuperate in her studio. Bunny immediately flared up at this suggestion and said Angelica ought not to be moved, that Vanessa could not nurse her adequately and that she would only try to get up too soon. Vanessa was furious and the next day Bunny received a terse note saying that she preferred not to have differences of opinion with him in front of Dr Richards.
The next time they met either side of Angelica’s bed, all three at first sat in silence. Bunny resorted to telling a story about a cat which had jumped out of a nursing-home window after a pigeon and fallen to its death. Vanessa remarked that her cat was too sensible to do a thing like that. Bunny argued that she couldn’t expect her cat to be as reasonable as herself. With deep irony Vanessa replied that he could not think she was flattering the cat too much to suppose it. The conversation had become so bitterly absurd that when Bunny and Angelica laughed, Vanessa also relaxed and engaged willingly in another subject.
But it had now become evident that Bunny and Angelica were severely critical of Vanessa, chiefly of her silences which hid much. Angelica did not know that Vanessa called Duncan ‘Bear’ in her letters and she rarely saw any physical expression of their love. Vanessa had never talked with her about Duncan’s fondness for young men and had constantly protected her from subjects that might cause pain. Only in 1937, after Julian’s death, had she admitted to Angelica her true parentage. She had suppressed much, acting out of kindness but causing unfortunate results. Constantly indulged, her talents praised, Angelica sometimes felt as if she had been brought up in a glass case, isolated from normality and quite deserted after Julian had departed for China and then Spain. Bunny, meanwhile, had now fallen deeply in love with her. From the spring of this year he knew that his wife’s cancer had returned, but he still came often to London, having secretly taken a room in Fitzroy Street to facilitate his meetings with Angelica.
Duncan now sent Bunny a piece of his diary. In it he had recorded his fury at the other man’s suggestion that Vanessa mismanaged her relationship with her daughter. In reply to this, Bunny urged both Duncan and Vanessa to talk of their feelings openly in front of Angelica; to talk of their love for each other and what they had felt when they were her age. It depended on them, he said, to break down the reserve between Angelica and her mother.
Vanessa, but not Duncan, took Bunny’s advice; but once she had exposed her feelings she could not control them and became hysterical. Angelica, formerly maddened by Vanessa’s silences, found this contrary display an unnerving experience and one she did not wish to repeat; it left behind, she felt, a ‘fermenting wound which neither of us dared to touch’.34
That summer both Vanessa and Duncan sublet their studios to Basil Rocke and Victor Pasmore respectively. A good many of the canvases and belongings that over the years had collected in the studios were removed to Charleston, along with Angelica’s piano and Clive’s books from 50 Gordon Square. At Charleston Vanessa had difficulty in restraining her terror as an endless procession of canvases, many of them nudes, emerged from the two removal vans. It took five days to sort out and put away all the books, china, cigarette cards and odds and ends. At the same time Quentin and Grace helped Vanessa prepare her new downstairs bedroom, furnished with, among other things, her Provençal desk, a rug designed by Duncan, a screen decorated by him and his painting of a Spanish dancer.
These appear in the painting Vanessa executed shortly after moving into this room§. The subject allows for a richly orchestrated arrangement of warm colours - purples, dull reds, ochres and browns, cooled by touches of green and the blue and silver highlights. The figure holding the broom is anonymous and merely acts as a compositional link between the background wall, where a glimpse of Duncan’s Spanish Dancer can be seen, and the foreground chair. As in Van Gogh’s painting of Gauguin’s chair, the empty chair placed next to the desk evokes awareness of its owner and of its use. The open desk, displaying paper and pens, is prepared for the letter-writer and its presence in her room must have reminded Vanessa of the many letters she had sent Julian, whose absence now permeated Charleston. Her painting, though it is directed by formal considerations, is also replete with associative values. Three years earlier Vanessa had reflected:
But yet it seems to me always the visual relationship that is important in painting. There is a language simply of form and colour that can be as moving as any other and that seems to affect one quite as much as the greatest poetry of words. At least so it seems to me but I admit that it is very difficult to be sure for of course the form and colour nearly always do represent life and I suppose any allusions may creep in.35
Now that Vanessa, Duncan, Quentin and Angelica lived permanently at Charleston and all painted, the life of the house was dominated by this activity. Still lifes, guarded by placards saying ‘Please do not touch’, inhabited corners of the rooms; on fine days the artists might take to the garden in straw hats and, with some of the brushes and oils that abounded at Charleston, would paint views of the flower-beds, paths, statues and flint walls in an impressionistic idiom. Inside the house the decorated surfaces continued to accumulate, the sensuality of these patterns and colours stunning many visitors.
One occasional guest was the young artist Nigel Henderson who was later to marry Judith Stephen, the daughter of Adrian and Karin, by whom he had been informally adopted in his adolescence. He had known Julian at Cambridge and had first been invited to Charleston for a weekend some years before. He had been met at Lewes station by Vanessa and Angelica:
I had only briefly met Vanessa hitherto at one or two parties in her or Duncan Grant’s studio and was a little taken aback by the figure that met my train at Lewes, and overtopping Angelica who was beside her. ...
As I remember she wore a ... very old and rather fatigued hat. Was she not in a polo-necked jersey, rather long, a long skirt and ... old gym shoes? I don’t remember the specifics but none of this would have raised an eyebrow on any ‘60s campus but was a Declaration of Independence which I found formidable, backed up by an engaging shyness and apparent unconsciousness of the bizarre figure she cut in those semi-formal times. We all crammed quite easily into the Baby Austin with Vanessa at the wheel. I was intensely nervous and shy too and I think the conversation was as stilted as the driving, in spite of the fact that I was already beginning to feel that the wonderful thing about visual artists was that they gave themselves entirely to that which was before them, were absolutely present in the here and now; and here was this impressive lady, impossible for me to read, and her beautiful daughter in the alarmingly exhilarating intimacy of a mobile hen coop.36
However informal the daily life and style of dress at Charleston, the underlying attitude to emotions and behaviour was anything but sloppy. ‘They were very, very self-controlled,’ Angelica has recalled, . we were all very good-mannered with each other; we didn’t step beyond certain limits, and our feelings, I think, seethed underneath and didn’t come out.’37 Vanessa, still unable to talk openly about her feelings to Angelica, welcomed Bunny’s visits to Charleston but found the situation between him, herself and her daughter difficult. On one occasion Duncan was absent and to him she wrote:
I feel somewhat detached and really don’t much mind what happens - the whole thing is rather like what it used to be when one saw a nurse being foolish with one’s child and had to wait till it stopped. But this evening we began to talk about pre-war days - parties in Regent Sqre with the Oliviers, etc. Angelica seemed amused at first but said nothing. Then got more and more aloof and finally retired to bed seemingly in a huff while Bunny had become excited and even affectionate to me. What a strange creature she is. I can’t do anything but try to take no notice.38
Even the imaginative effort necessary to sympathize with Angelica was momentarily impossible. ‘The world is too full of pain,’ Vanessa wrote to Edward Sackville-West. ‘You must come to Charleston some day and see all the changes we have been making here - new studios, etc. which we now hope may just be done before the war begins, with luck.’39
On 3 September Britain and France declared war on Germany. Bunny was in Ireland at the time, having joined his wife and two sons for a holiday, and was called back by the Air Ministry. When he next visited Charleston, in early October, he was dressed in Flight-Lieutenant’s uniform. Quentin had the year previously been rejected by the Territorials, since he had had tuberculosis, and now began work as a farm labourer for Maynard. Duncan’s mother and Aunt Violet had arrived from Twickenham for safety, as Clive, with his mauvaise langue, describes: ‘And so we have Duncan’s Aunt Violet - blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, half-witted and harmless; and Duncan’s mother whom I find trying. She has good qualities; but she is a Mem Sahib at heart, self-complacent, petty and esurient. She chatters incessantly and trivially about infinitely uninteresting relations and friends, and her heart bleeds for poor old Miss Horner and her six cantankerous dogs whom nobody loves. She even threw out a hint that the old vixen might be found a room here, but there Vanessa stood firm.’40 She also stood firm on the length of their visit: when the papers declared that the Twickenham area was unlikely to be bombed, Vanessa made sure this was generally known and before long the two ladies returned home. Clive, meanwhile, was determined to keep civilization alive, and in an official capacity he sat on a British Council committee which arranged for British art to be sent abroad. He felt the world was changing radically, but in November comforted himself with six volumes of Madame de Sévigné for they enabled him to believe that certain things he cared about might survive.
They suffered no physical hardship. Vanessa had bought chickens which they kept for eggs, and with Walter Higgens as full-time gardener they grew more vegetables than usual. Grace still acted as housekeeper and was now joined by Lottie who had been Clive’s cook in London. Vanessa also employed local help with the cleaning of the house, so that throughout this period there were three employees at Charleston and ample food. There was also entertainment, for at the start of the war Michal Lewis, the daughter of the concert pianist Mark Hambourg, came from Firle every Sunday and played the piano while Angelica sang. Michal was also present at the twenty-first birthday party given for Angelica that winter which Duncan thought ‘a miracle of organization’ on the part of Vanessa and the cook Lottie.
The war did, however, adversely affect the sales of Julian Bell. Essays, Poems and Letters which the Hogarth Press had published in the autumn of 1938. At first it had sold reasonably well but, despite several short favourable reviews, it had not received the attention Vanessa had hoped. It had been critically reviewed in the London Mercury by Janet Adam Smith who declared that Bloomsbury was incapable of dealing with human tragedy. Meanwhile Virginia’s praise of Julian Bell left Vanessa bitterly reflecting that her sister had done little to praise Julian’s writing while he lived. However, when her biography of Roger Fry appeared in July 1940, its narrative ease, restrained wit and appreciation, its tact and straight-forwardness, won Vanessa’s approval and helped wipe out her resentment. After finishing the typescript, she picked up a pen at midnight and sent Virginia a five-line note: ‘Since Julian died I haven’t been able to think of Roger. Now you have brought him back to me. Although I cannot help crying I can’t thank you enough. VB.’41
In May 1940 Bunny took Angelica to his cottage Butts Intake at Low Row, near Richmond in Yorkshire. Two months earlier his wife had died, disseminated cancer having set in the previous November. While Ray Garnett had lived, Bunny’s affair with Angelica had been kept a secret, even from Virginia. ‘I ought to have telephoned you before leaving Charleston,’ Angelica wrote to Virginia, ‘ - please forgive me for not doing so or not coming to tea but the emotional situation at Charleston got me down.’42 It had been left to Vanessa to break the news to her sister, who was not pleased, but less shocked than expected. The fact of Angelica’s living with Bunny was still to be kept within the family for Duncan worried that if news of it spread it would upset his mother. When Desmond MacCarthy and G.E. Moore visited the Woolfs in May and Vanessa went over for tea (meeting the philosopher for the first time), she told Desmond that Angelica had gone to Yorkshire but did not say with whom.
Unlike some artists, Vanessa and Duncan were relatively unaffected by war. On one of her infrequent day visits to London Vanessa arranged with the Leicester Galleries to have an exhibition in June-July 1941, having now despaired of Lefevre’s. Concurrently the Tate Gallery was negotiating the acquisition of Duncan’s large painting of Angelica playing the piano in the garden room. They still enjoyed the support of Kenneth Clark, then Director of the National Gallery, and on one of their visits to London in May called at his rooms in Gray’s Inn. They found there Victor Pasmore as well as the Graham Sutherlands whom Vanessa invited to Charleston for a weekend. Always quick to discern when decoration had been chosen for social rather than aesthetic reasons, she remarked to Angelica: ‘I was interested to see how these lovely shabby college rooms can be converted into the height of chic and luxe, rather horrifying to my mind. All the same I spent the next morning entirely at the studio cleaning, destroying rubbish.’43
Later in May Duncan travelled on a war artist’s commission, to Plymouth where he found John Nash and Eric Kennington already at work. On Kennington’s advice, Duncan avoided the docks, where security was very tight, and confined himself instead to the naval barracks where he made many friends. While he was away the fear of invasion increased; the Germans had now taken Arras and Amiens and aeroplanes seemed to fly regularly over Charleston. It had become impossible to escape the depression of war, even though it also had its humorous side. Clive and Quentin enrolled with the Home Guard and, in a state not entirely sober, kept watch at night in the nearby gamekeeper’s tower. Walter Higgens was also willing to join, if he could belong not to the Firle but to the Selmeston corps which met conveniently in his regular haunt, the Barley Mow. ‘There is a great deal of feeling among the wives about the part the Barley Mow plays in the whole affair,’ Vanessa told Duncan.44
It now seemed unpatriotic to keep Walter Higgens on as a full-time gardener; he found a job in the sandpits at Berwick and for the rest of the war Clive, Vanessa and Duncan looked after the garden themselves. The labour this afforded was in fact welcome, for the most dispiriting thing that year was the amount of time spent waiting for news. In June the dealers Reid and Lefevre announced they were closing at the end of July; Dunbar Hay, where Duncan and Vanessa sold needlework designs, also shut down. When bombing raids began on London, Phyllis Keyes’ pottery was destroyed, as was the Woolfs’ house in Tavistock Square, in which the sitting-room had been decorated by Vanessa and Duncan. Peter Quennell walked past and saw the fireplace ‘now unsupported by hearth or floor, but still surrounded by a ghostly suggestion of garlands and fruit and horns of plenty’.45 The designs were already flaking and next time he passed they had altogether vanished. In September 1940 an incendiary bomb fell on the workshop next to 8 Fitzroy Street; the fire caught Duncan’s studio and spread to Vanessa’s. Until the debris had been cleared no one was allowed in to assess the extent of the damage. ‘Vanessa takes it very philosophically,’ Duncan told his mother, ‘and says she can always paint more pictures.’46 Fortunately several of Vanessa’s paintings were on exhibition, at Agnew’s and elsewhere, and many of their belongings had been moved down to Charleston before the war began. When she and Duncan went in to salvage what they could (a fridge, stove, bath and some of Duncan’s and Angelica’s clothes) they found that very few of the paintings had survived. They received financial compensation (Duncan £1,700 and Vanessa £1,200) but this was not paid until the war ended. Clive was put out because he had occasionally used Vanessa’s studio to sleep in on his visits to London and had now to resort to Claridge’s.
In March 1941 Virginia fell ill. Vanessa wrote her a letter in which harsh advice on the need to rest was tempered by an admission of need: ‘What shall we do when we’re invaded if you are a helpless invalid - what should I have done all those last 3 years if you hadn’t been able to keep me alive and cheerful. You don’t know how much I depend on you.’47 Virginia’s reply was one of three suicide notes.
You can’t think how I loved your letter. But I feel that I have gone too far this time to come back again. I am certain now that I am going mad again. It is just as it was the first time, I am always hearing voices, and I know I shan’t get over it now. ...
I can hardly think clearly any more. If I could I would tell you what you and the children have meant to me. I think you know.
I have fought against it, but I can’t any longer.48
On 28 March she disappeared. Her gardener Mr Bartholomew telephoned Vanessa who went to Rodmell and saw Leonard. Meanwhile Angelica, who was now living near by at Claverham with Bunny, bicycled over to Charleston and was there with Quentin when Vanessa, very calm and controlled, returned. Later that day Duncan returned from London and Vanessa and Angelica broke the news to him in the kitchen: for a brief space all three clung together in a rare moment of physical and emotional intimacy. Three weeks later Virginia’s body was found in the river not far from where she had left her stick. Clive, Duncan and Quentin expected Virginia’s suicide to cause Vanessa another physical collapse, but she seemed less affected than they feared; she was still able to work and garden and was more concerned for Leonard than herself. She received many letters of condolence including one from Vita Sackville-West:
