Vanessa bell, p.53
Vanessa Bell, page 53
Not long after Angelica left, Vanessa began to think about returning home. ‘This is an odd place,’ she wrote. ‘I like it in a way very much and yet I don’t think I want to stay here very long or come often. Everything in the house is simply falling to pieces and after a bit it rather gets on, one’s nerves. The lights go out, the chairs seem to be going to fall to pieces in a day or two, the cats increase. I am becoming aware of ghosts.’62 Towards the end of March a spell of fine weather set in. They sat out on the terrace, overlooking the sea and the curve of the shore which was obliterated from sight when a mountain mist descended. They picked the oranges and sent a boxful to Janie. Edward le Bas arrived and stayed a few days, and Clive and Barbara paid regular visits. ‘Clive and B. came to their usual Sunday lunch,’ Vanessa wrote, ‘and I was greeted in the garden by a spectacular rush from B. jumping down the garden path flinging herself into my arms and shrieking out some hectic remark about her feelings on the occasion - oh God - that woman will drive me mad if I have to see much of her.’ 63 Barbara’s imminence strengthened Vanessa’s resolve to leave and in early April, after pausing two nights in Paris en route, she returned home.
As soon as was possible they arranged to see Janie in order to give her news of La Souco. The day before they were due to meet, Marjorie Strachey rang up: Janie had been found dead in the bathroom at 51 Gordon Square. An inquest was held; the verdict was accidental death caused by an old-fashioned gas water-heater which had not been regularly cleaned. The whole event was devastating to everyone concerned. Janie’s two aunts, Pippa and Marjorie Strachey, never forgot the kindness shown them by Vanessa and Duncan, who turned up unexpectedly at 51 Gordon Square with a hot meal. Dorothy Bussy, too senile to realize what had happened, was moved into a nursing-home where she died a couple of weeks later. ‘If only it could have happened before’,64 Vanessa remarked, bitterly reflecting on the restricting circumstances that had thwarted the last part of Janie’s life. Though very different in character and intelligence, Janie had recently turned for solace and friendship to Barbara Bagenal, and she was hard hit by this tragedy. She and Clive had received the news at Lydd airport, as Clive recounts: Tor a few moments Barbara collapsed in the custom’s house. ... The shock was hardly surprising, seeing that Janie had become her closest friend. They were in constant correspondence and B. was bringing back all sorts of little presents for her.’65 Though two more deaths occurred in May, those of Douglas Davidson and Dora Morris, neither caused such a sense of loss, for Janie’s distinctive personality, her astute mind, caustic humour and love of painting had caused both Clive and Vanessa to regard her with ever-increasing affection.
One tale of the past with which Vanessa regaled her grandchildren was that concerning her great-grandmother, Adeline de l’Etang, eldest daughter of the Chevalier de I’Etang, whose likeness had been recorded in a miniature which Julia Stephen had often worn as a locket. According to Vanessa, Adeline could speak no English at all except for one sentence - ‘If you don’t like it you must lump it.’
It was a philosophy that Vanessa had trained herself to observe but one she did not always impart to others. As with Angelica, she would attend to most of the whims of her grandchildren, making dolls’ clothes, entering their childhood world of fantasy, sharing the pretence that the dolls pined of love or suffered terrible fevers; occasionally she would jab them in the arm with her darning needle to inoculate them against further misfortunes. ‘As we grew older,’ Henrietta has recalled,
Amaryllis and I were sometimes allowed to stay up for dinner instead of being given an early supper. On these occasions we both paraded in extravagant and fantastic evening dress concocted from curtains, lengths of Omega cloth, Vanessa’s nightdresses, feathers, flowers and finery borrowed from her jewel boxes. Then we pretended that we were grand ladies. Duchesses, courtesans and curate’s daughters. We flirted outrageously with Duncan and with Clive. On one occasion we went so far as to have a double wedding. Amaryllis married Clive, I married Duncan. This curious wedding party took place one sunny afternoon and it was held in the piazza by the small fish pond beneath the apple tree. Nessa officiated as high priestess. Then we all had tea.
They were delightful evenings. Our childish follies were entered into and bettered by the company we kept. For Clive was a witty and erudite conversationalist of great charm and intelligence. Duncan was an enchanting and eccentric individual. Nessa loved them both. She gazed from one to another with her beautiful blue-grey eyes and let the smoke drift slowly from the gauloise which she took with her after dinner coffee. At certain intervals she would murmur ‘How absurd’.66
Detached, amused, surrounded by those she loved and still able to take pleasure in a career that had directed and enriched her life; an elderly woman who had survived the tragic death of her son and distress over her daughter’s marriage, emerging from this fearful period securely and affectionately married, in all but name, to the person with whom she had chosen to share her life. These are reasons enough to explain the serenity reflected in her paintings and letters. But they do not account for the sense of isolation and poignant sadness found in the photographs and portraits of Vanessa in old age.
Over the years she had sat to Duncan on many occasions. His most formal portrait of her is that painted in 1942 and now in the Tate Gallery. Dressed in a long cloak, seated on an upright chair and framed by swags of drapery, she looks straight out at the spectator with stern, regal aloofness. Given her longstanding intimacy with Duncan, it is a curiously external likeness, contrived, stiff, repelling. By comparison, the portrait he painted of her in 1959 is more harmoniously arranged; folds of material lap round her in curves that echo those in the sofa behind. The frontality is also modified by the decision to show her gaze averted. She sits brooding within herself, her personality withdrawn; even the artist is shut out by the melancholy that surrounds her§. It presents the person with whom Angelica had for some time found it difficult to communicate freely, to whom Duncan was obliged to write on the rare occasions that he strove to break through the barriers of privacy surrounding their intimate yet separate lives. It portrays a woman who when young, as Virginia had observed, had contained ‘volcanoes underneath her sedate manner’;67 who had found in painting the philosopher’s stone to transmute suffering into serenity, but in so doing had become walled up in her own feelings, isolated by her reserve and left profoundly alone.
In the autumn of 1960 she visited London because the Picasso exhibition at the Tate Gallery was an event that others knew she would enjoy. For the most part Charleston had now become her entire world. ‘Yesterday Leonard and Morgan [E.M. Forster] came to lunch and seemed to enjoy themselves,’ she wrote to Angelica in September. ‘Duncan is painting, I am sitting in my room with the door open between us. The garden is full of Red Admirals and birds and apples.’68 That winter she never left the house. She heard of Ralph Partridge’s death and immediately wrote an affectionate note to Frances. Clive also wrote, urging Frances to join him and Barbara at Menton in the new year. After his departure, Vanessa and Duncan were alone at Charleston. Edward le Bas, possibly sensing a loss of motivation, persuaded the Adams brothers to give Vanessa another show. They began negotiations and Vanessa responded with hesitant vagueness. ‘I feel very incompetent nowadays,’ she admitted to Angelica. ‘As I can’t drive I can do nothing if left to myself. I have seen no one for ages.’69 Even her grandchildren were either too distant or too occupied with their own lives to visit. When Henrietta telephoned Charleston and announced that she was taking part in one of Bertrand Russell’s peace marches, Vanessa was thrown into confused alarm and wrote anxiously to Angelica for further explanation. Real concern was caused by news of Clive. While looking at a church in Menton in the company of his friend Raymond Mortimer, he had fallen down some steps and broken his leg. As Frances Partridge was confined to her hotel room with flu, Barbara Bagenal was left to cope with Clive’s misfortune unaided. Fortunately Kenneth Clark was staying near by and he arranged for Clive to be flown home. He went straight into the London Clinic. Duncan visited him there, but Vanessa was not strong enough to make the journey to town. Instead she comforted herself with the thought that he would soon be recuperating in Charleston garden.
In March Duncan and Vanessa finished Mansfield Park which they had been reading aloud to each other. The fine weather brought out the daffodils and crocuses. ‘I haven’t been to London for ages and really don’t much want to go - it seems so silly when it’s so lovely here,’ Vanessa wrote to Angelica, enclosing with her letter a cheque for £50 which she had mistakenly dated 1956.70 The mild spring perhaps seemed warmer than it really was because on 4 April Vanessa fell suddenly ill with bronchitis. Her north-facing bedroom, with its French windows opposite the bed, was cold in temperature if warm with the colours of her and Duncan’s paintings, his screen and rug. Grace tried repeatedly to put hot water bottles into her bed but frequently found them on the floor. She was struck by Vanessa’s remoteness, by the fact that after more than forty years in her employment she seemed unknowable. On the day that she had fallen ill Quentin had arrived at Charleston on a pre-arranged visit with his small son. As Vanessa’s condition was evidently serious, he took Julian up to London early on the morning of 7 April and left him with his Popham grandfather. He returned to Charleston just before 11.30 a.m., when Vanessa’s heart gave out and she died without pain.71 Shortly afterwards Angelica arrived, having been telephoned, too late, earlier that morning. In the London Clinic, Clive received the news from Barbara, and wept for the wife he had never ceased to love.
Five days later, on 12 April, Duncan, Quentin, Angelica and Grace accompanied Vanessa’s coffin to Firle churchyard where, without any form of service, she was buried. Later a plain, black tombstone was erected, giving only her name and dates. Its starkness is a reminder of her innate solitariness. For even amid company at Charleston, when surrounded by a sensuous concord of line, form and colour, she emitted a remarkable contained and containing power; it translated an essentially tragic love into a lasting, creative union; it caused Virginia to liken Vanessa to ‘a bowl of golden water which brims but never overflows’.72
* * *
* Almost certainly this was the Château Miromesnil at Tourville-sur-Arques. Miss Sands and Miss Hudson were friendly with the Le Breton family who lived there, and they left Château d’Auppegard to the son Louis, a pupil of Jacques-Emile Blanche, a cousin of Henri Cartier-Bresson and an employee of the Louvre.
Notes
The whereabouts of manuscript material is indicated at the end of each note. Certain holders of manuscripts are referred to by the following abbreviations:
QB - Quentin Bell
AVG - Angelica Garnett
HC - Henrietta Couper
FP - Frances Partridge
AP - Anrep Papers (in a private collection)
BL - British Library, Manuscript Department
KCC - King’s College, Cambridge
Berg - Berg Collection, New York Public Library
Sussex - University of Sussex Library
Texas - Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin
The reference to papers at King’s College, Cambridge, does not in every instance point to the original document but to copies of the originals made while the Charleston Papers were in their care. On 21 July 1980 the Charleston Papers were sold at Sotheby’s in London and are now dispersed. A large number were bought by the Tate Gallery and are now in its Archive Department, but at the time of writing (1982) had not been fully catalogued.
In every instance the references to Virginia Woolf’s edited letters and diaries are abbreviated; e.g., Woolf, Letters, vol. I, p. 174, and the full title of each volume given in the bibliography.
Chapter 1: Always the Eldest 1879-1895
1Vanessa Stephen to M. Snowden, no date [March 1903]: KCC. According to William Rothenstein, Watts said his painting, entitled The Parasite, represented ‘the undisciplined art of the day slowly sapping the life of a centuries-old artistic inheritance’. Men and Memories, vol. I (Rose and Crown Library Edition, 1934), p. 207. The painting belongs to the Watts Gallery, Compton, Guildford.
2Vanessa Stephen to M. Snowden, 11 January 1905: KCC.
3Woolf, Letters, vol. I, p. 174.
4Vanessa to Clive Bell [?June 1915]: KCC.
5Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, vol. I, 1904, p. 159.
6du Maurier, Daphne (ed.), The Young George du Maurier, 1951, p. 112.
7John Ruskin, The Winnington Letters, ed. Van Akin Burd, 1969, p. 150.
8Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, vol. I, p. 188.
9Quoted in Brian Hill, Julia Margaret Cameron. A Victorian Family Photograph, 1973, p. 83.
10Quoted in Frederic Maitland, The Life of Sir Leslie Stephen, 1906, p. 335.
11Sir Leslie Stephen's Mausoleum Book, introd. Alan Bell, 1977, p. 35.
12Leslie to Julia Stephen, 22 March 1887: Berg.
13Vanessa Bell, Notes on Virginia's Childhood, ed. R.J. Schaubeck Jr, 1974, unpaginated.
14Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, 1976 p. 29.
15Ibid., p. 30.
16Leslie to Julia Stephen, 13 April 1884: Berg.
17Same to same, 12 July 1890: Berg.
18Same to same, 27 July 1893: Berg.
19Notes on Virginia's Childhood.
20Moments of Being, pp. 28, 29.
21Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen, His Thought & Character in Relation to his Time, 1951, pp. 100-101.
22Sir Henry Newbolt, My World as in My Time, 1932, p. 177.
23Vanessa Bell to Virginia Woolf, 11 May 1927: Berg.
24Selected Letters of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, 1955, p. 149.
Chapter 2: Mrs Young’s Evening Dress 1895-1904
1William Rothenstein, Men and Memories, abr. and ed. Mary Lago, 1978, p. 141.
2Ibid., p. 60.
3For information on Ebenezer Cooke I am indebted to an unpublished thesis by A.E. Richardson (University of Newcastle, 1971).
4L. Stephen to J. Duckworth, 18 July 1877: Berg.
5See Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf, 1972 vol. I, pp. 42-4.
6Vanessa to Virginia Stephen, 8 September 1904: Berg.
7 Moments of Being, p. 96.
8 Ibid., p. 96.
9Ibid., p. 46.
10Vanessa to Thoby Stephen, 16 March [1897]: KCC.
11Vanessa Bell, Memoir II: AVG.
12Virginia Stephen, Hyde Park Gate Diary, 1897 (June 13): Berg.
13L. Stephen to C.E. Norton, 25 July 1897: Harvard University Library.
14Woolf, Diaries, vol. I, p. 69.
15Violet Dickinson, ‘Notes on the Stephen Family’: The Library, Longleat House.
16Moments of Being, p. 54.
17Vanessa Bell, Memoir III: AVG.
18Cynthia Asquith, Remember and Be Glad, 1952, p. 64.
19Vanessa Bell, Memoir II.
20Vanessa Bell, Memoir III.
21Moments of Being, p. 149
22Interview with Mrs Gilbert Russell, 27 September 1980.
23Hyde Park Gate Diary, 1903 (July 15): Berg.
24Maitland, The Life of Sir Leslie Stephen, p. 439·
25L. Stephen to C.E. Norton, 31 December 1900: Harvard University Library.
26Moments of Being, p. 59.
27Ibid., p. 122.
28Ibid., p. 119.
29‘Notes on the Stephen Family’.
30Woolf, Diaries, vol. Ill, p. 255.
31The portrait of Leslie Stephen was sold at Sotheby’s on 21 July 1980, and that of Elizabeth Hills, daughter of Eustace Hills, belongs to Walter Aylen. As the child was born in November 1900 and appears to be around eighteen months old, the picture can be dated to the early summer of 1902.
32Vanessa Bell to Virginia Woolf, 11 May [1927]: Berg.
33Vanessa Stephen to M. Snowden, 4 January [1902?]: KCC.
34Quoted in Evan Charteris, John Sargent, 1927, p. 188.
35Vanessa Bell, Memoir VI: AVG.
36Ibid.
37Ibid.
38Moments of Being, p. 126.
39Vanessa Stephen to C. Bell, 10 September 1902: KCC.
40Moments of Being, p. 124.
41Vanessa Bell, Memoir III.
42Quoted in Winifred Gerin, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, 1981, p. 287.
Chapter 3: Changing Places 1904-1906
1Vanessa Stephen to M. Snowden, [9 April 1904]: KCC.
2Ibid.
3Same to same, 3 May 1904: KCC.
4Vanessa Stephen to C. Bell, 11 May 1904: KCC.
5Vanessa Bell, Memoir III: AVG.
6Vanessa to Virginia Stephen, 8 September 1904: Berg.
7Same to same, [? 30 October 1904]: Berg.
8Same to same, 31 October [1904]: Berg.
9Moments of Being, pp. 162, 163.
10Vanessa Bell, Memoir III.
11L. Strachey to L. Woolf, 21 December 1904: Texas.
12Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury, 1968 (Omega edn 1974), p. 13.
13Vanessa Bell, Memoir IV: AVG.
14David Garnett, The Flowers of the Forest, 1955 p. 23.
15‘Letter to a Lady’, Ad Familiares, The Pelican Press, October 1917 (privately printed).
16‘Mrs Raven-Hill’ (essay written for the Memoir Club): Trinity College Library, Cambridge.
17Quoted in Michael Holroyd’s Lytton Strachey: a biography (London. Penguin rev. edn 1979), p. 139.
18C. Bell to L. Strachey, 9 August 1908: BL.
19Vanessa Bell, Memoir IV.
20C. Bell to L. Strachey, [20 July 1905]: BL.
21Vanessa Stephen to M. Vaughan, 25 March [1905]: KCC.
22Vanessa Stephen to M. Snowden [14 August 1905]: KCC.
23Vanessa to Virginia Stephen, 7 December 1904: Berg.
24Richard Shone, ‘The Friday Club’, Burlington Magazine, May 1975, vol. CXVII, no. 866, p. 279.
25Woolf, Letters, vol. I, p. 201.
