Authors: Norah Vincent
“Among Carrington’s papers,” she continues with taunting surety, “was found a note with those very same lines from Webster—can you imagine? The very same lines, written out in Carrington’s hand, and the word ‘wolf’ underlined.”
Vivien jerkily rights her head, crosses her legs and settles back in her chair. “That cannot be a coincidence, do you think?” she says.
Yet another astonished silence engulfs the other three, who are once again utterly at a loss, like characters from a different genre, thrown in with this harpy. Virginia had been almost halfway to the house by the time the words “‘wolf’ underlined,” had registered. She stops cold at the sound of them. She is standing with her back to the others, shaking, as before, with rage, but also tottering with the jolt of this new insult.
Leonard stands and goes to her. He puts his arms around her and she collapses against him. But then, flushed with a fresh resolve not to be beaten by this bromided nobody, she rights herself again, takes her husband by the shoulders and swings him aside. She turns and makes her way toward Tom. She stumbles slightly when she reaches him, and leans over to grip the arms of his chair for support. “Is this true, Tom?” she gasps, glaring into his eyes. She is close enough to kiss him. “You must tell me if it is.”
Very slowly and reluctantly, he nods, but he cannot bring himself to say anything.
“Of course it’s true,” shouts Vivien triumphantly. “We heard it directly from our mutual friend Ottoline, and, well, you know how close
they
were.”
Vivien is like a crocodile clamped on its prey. She will not let go. She will roll right to the bottom of the bog with her victim and thrash it until it is dead. There is no graceful way out, and Virginia is too sideswiped to try. Leonard will have to euthanize this fiasco.
Without looking at Tom again, Virginia pushes herself back from his chair and, without another word, makes her way across the lawn toward the house. Leonard is still standing where she left him, and she meets him on her way in.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispers as she passes. She will not look at him either, though he sees that this is because her eyes are no longer functioning as they should. They will guide her to her room, where she is likely to spend the next several days incommunicado, but that is all. She is locking down into her most isolated self. Once there, she will be gone for as long as it takes, all the doors and windows shut tight. He can only wait for her to come back.
Leonard’s eyes are on her all the way to the house. When he sees her reach it, open, then shut the door behind her with a brisk and terrible click, he shifts his gaze to Tom, who is already up and handling Vivien. Grasping her by the shoulders, he hauls her to her feet, which she is clearly unable to keep beneath her on her own, roughly grapples her to him by the waist and marches her toward the front gate. Vivien is one of those petite women who look immediately ridiculous when they attempt a show of force. And so it is now. Her feet are no longer touching the ground, and she is repeatedly attempting to kick Tom in the shins. Meanwhile, she is pummeling his chest quite uselessly with weak and uncoordinated fists, and spitting unintelligible insults into his face. He, however, looks only faintly annoyed and oddly focused on his task, as if she is not a human being, but an unwieldy object that he has been hired to transport. It will be no great tragedy if he drops her; just more time on the job.
Over the top of Vivien’s head, Tom is slurring his apologies to Leonard, and Leonard is waving him off, saying some insincere variation on “It’s all right” or “It’s all over now,” but Vivien is screaming too loudly for him to hear. The gist of a formulaic sendoff is all he can get, which is undoubtedly for the best. He can’t apologize enough, and Leonard can’t pretend enough to make this parting anything but a farcical dumb show. Tom will have to make this up to Leonard over time, if he can. Virginia will require more finesse. And Vivien? Well, before today, she was on her way out. Now she has stamped her ticket.
ACT IV
1934–1938
WHY DOES THIS
not get easier? Honestly, why? It makes no sense. Other labors improve with repetition; streamline, accrue, accelerate. Not this one. The novel, it seems, is definitively always just that, new. Damned thing. And she is damned along with it, again and again and again. Bloody hell.
Except that hell is not the outer darkness. Hell is writing novels.
What else can she think? She has done this seven times already, and the last was her best. But it is coming on five years since she touched
The Waves
, five long, terrible years since she wrote those final resounding words:
Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
Had it been a malediction? A valediction? In retrospect it sounds as if it was both. Seal your lips with a curse. She is working harder than a dung beetle, yet she has nothing to show for it but dung.
The startling skirl of the telephone ringing fills her with a sense of childish liberation; class dismissed. And indeed there is a reprieve on the other end, for it is Ottoline calling to absolutely beg her to come over to Gower Street at once and salvage one of her teas, which she swears is falling so mortifyingly flat that she will be shining bald the next time they meet if Virginia does not fly to her rescue immediately.
Virginia laughs. “But what can possibly have gone so wrong?”
“I’ve deliberately kept it scarce,” Ottoline huffs in a scratching whisper—she has clearly got her hand cupped round the mouthpiece—“because blessed Yeats has graced us again. But Stephen Spender is in there with him now, and I would swear to you it is
not
a happy meeting of two poets. It’s like some forced détente between diplomats, neither of whom speaks a word of the other’s language. It’s simply ghastly. You must come. You are the only person I know who can possibly resuscitate this conversation.”
She drawls the word “conversation” as if it is stretched to the breaking point between quotation marks. Virginia is loving the picture: the poets, old and new, stuck and writhing, and, of course, the sound of the grand Lady Ottoline on her knees, flustered and beseeching her to—only she can possibly—save the “conversation.”
And why not? It is certainly better than being a dung beetle. What’s more, how can she pass up another chance at dear, mystifying Yeats, of all the prophets, who foretold that they would meet again? And so, here they are. Again.
She must go.
She throws on her shawl, careers down the stairs and out the door to fetch a taxi. It is only several blocks to Gower Street from Tavistock Square, but she must do as asked and fly.
Coming into Ottoline’s flat is like coming into a funeral home for atheists who grew up going to church. It is not dour, but it is not dapper either. It bears the morbid legacy of the prior age: the damask, the chintz, the paneling and the long, dark, polished dining table, which looks as if it might have been a bier for Gulliver. And then there is the portrait of Lady Ottoline herself, by Augustus John, hanging above it like a vaguely macabre portrait of the deceased, who is every strand of pearl and Ascot chapeau the great lady, except that she appears to be feasting on a leech or biting off the end of her tongue. It is hard to know with Ottoline whether she has hung the portrait in spite of or because of this unflattering detail, or simply because it is by John, but one does feel inclined to give her credit for brashness in this, as in all things.
There are other paintings throughout the flat, by Walter Sickert and Henry Lamb, which are part of the modern flair and liveliness of hue that mitigates the funereal fust of these rooms. Still, the faint odor of airless parlors and sickrooms out of the last century lingers in the pomander bowls that are spread about the room. Again, one never knows with Ottoline whether this is a provocation or a compulsory nod to tradition.
When Virginia makes her way through the sensory assault and busybody battery of the anterooms and arrives at last in the sanctum, she sees that for once Ottoline has not been exaggerating. Yeats and Spender are indeed as forked and twisted as mandrakes in their chairs, and seemingly afflicted with encephalitis lethargica.
Spender is lean and fine-boned, with a Cupid’s-bow mouth that seems to slip a contradictory come-hither into his otherwise tense and serious face. Those lips, with the lapidary jaw and the winning cleft in his chin, make him almost handsome, but not quite. His thin mousy hair is a roguish swirl that he will lose in middle age, and which, Virginia observes, only gives him a more rending boyish appeal. Like many English princes, his flowering will be short-lived, and his momentary brush with beauty will give way to the unfortunate balding and beaking of his Norman-Saxon genes. At present, though, Lytton would have called him defilable.
Through Julian’s introductions, Stephen (as they have been urged to call him) has become something of a friend and regular at the Woolfs’, so when he sees Virginia, he leaps to his feet as if cured, and kisses her firmly and wetly on both cheeks.
“Good God,” she cries, “but you are eager today, Stephen.”
“Yes,” he drawls, turning immediately to Yeats. “Forgive me. But this venerable gentleman here is the eager one. He has been waiting with misted eyes for your arrival ever since Ottoline importuned you to save him from me.”
Yeats shakes his head as if to demur, but he has clearly been pained by the intimidated lad and is every bit as relieved to see her as Stephen is. Though Yeats would not say so, he does have the grateful look of someone saved—and this much he might say when they are alone, for he has said as much elsewhere, she knows—how sharper than a serpent’s tooth they are, Spender and his lot, this thankless gaggle of lettered offspring. Dreamless, angry, dialectical materialists, he calls them, beating their poems into ploughshares. And she agrees. She has said the same herself. Yeats must be nearly seventy now, and Stephen is just about Julian’s age, give or take, a mere toddler of twenty-six. They are indeed so young, so brash, so chipped against the shoulders they have stood on. Yeats, meanwhile, does resemble the woeful parent Lear. Today he is open-collared and windblown, yet rosy with the vigor of something suspect. Or supernatural, perhaps?
He is not shy in telling her his secret, though the moment he does, Stephen seems to petrify with shame or disgust and fall into his former vegetative state, for succor, if nothing else.
“I’ve had the Steinach operation, my dear,” Yeats announces. “It’s marvelous. I feel sixteen again.”
She does not want to know what the Steinach operation is—something gonadal, she gathers—but she is grateful for the bloom it seems to have given him. Though she has not read it yet, she knows that he has just published another collection,
The Winding Stair.
He seems as prolific as ever. A prick of envy catches her, but it is soon dispelled by his enthusiasm, which is as brimming with her as it was dry when he was with Stephen. She feels for him, Stephen, being alone with an icon. How can one help but dry up and turn into a tuber? Unless one is an icon oneself? The puckish thought wanders through her brain, but she dismisses it in favor of a better formulation, mystic. She is a fellow mystic, and this time she is prepared.
But she needn’t be. Yeats is doing all the spinning.
“Oh, Mrs. Woolf,” he cries, “do you know I wrote a little poem after we met the last time? It is in this new collection. You are an inspiration to this withered vine. I grow the vaunted grape once more.”
Again, this is not a metaphor she wishes to pursue, but she is cheered by his zeal.
“Ah, youth,” she sighs, a little caustically, casting a slightly suspicious eye on Stephen, who is still catatonic and stiff in his chair, as if he has changed ages with Yeats or had all his natural verve siphoned from him by the old wizard. “It has so many secrets,” she adds, glancing now at Yeats, who is—she must agree—sitting oddly pretty to the youngster’s left and looking almost sinisterly sated by
some
juice.
Yeats smiles meekly at this, but does not reply, and so she goes on with her thought.
“I had a similar conversation with Tom Eliot several years ago about De Quincey’s purported secret of youth, but as I remember, Tom was quite drunk at the time.”
Yeats is roused. “Ah, yes. Tom Eliot. He, too, has heard the mermaids singing. What did he say De Quincey’s secret was?”
“Drink,” Virginia says. “Well, that and other substances, both ingested, I believe he said, and excreted. He came to De Quincey via Baudelaire, it sounded, and was very keen on
Les Paradis Artificiels.
Mysticism achieved through derangement of the senses and all that.”
“And you disagree? Or is it disapprove?”
“No. No. Neither,” she says. She is going to be surprisingly honest with the old man, she realizes. “I think that in his drink, Tom has an excuse for mysticism, not a method, and his newfound spirituality, such as it is, while it scans beautifully in print, is cover.”
Yeats’s eyes light up with what Virginia takes at first for a fellow gossiper’s glee at the bitchiness of her remark, but he is no Lytton or Ottoline, and he will not contribute to slander.
“I think you do him a disservice. You know, of course, that in his poem ‘Ash Wednesday,’ Tom and I have shared the metaphor of the winding stair. We have done so unwittingly, I would say, except that there is nothing unwitting in the Spiritus Mundi. We are drinking from the same spring. As are you, dear lady, as are you.”
She cocks her head, saying nothing, then looks down, both because she has been caught talking idly and because Yeats, as always, has seen through it.
“
We shine with brightness
,” Yeats pronounces, but she does not understand that he is quoting. Seeing this, he adds, “That is from ‘Ash Wednesday.’ Tom’s conversion poem, I believe it is called?”
She nods meekly. “So it is.”
“And then there is you,” Yeats says. “
I feel myself shining in the dark.
”