Virginia Woolf: The Ambiguity of Feeling

By Giuseppe Cafiero

Almost a romantic escape. 1928. Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West set off for France to attest to their feelings. To find each other, even with the ever-present phantom of Orlando, which celebrates Vita beyond any love. Virginia has lost her heart to Vita - the elusive, ephemeral Sapphic nymph - and her statuesque body. Vita and her other loves. Swashbuckling Vita. Vita, romancing and being romanced. Vita, bowed in adoration of other womens bodies.

For Virginia, feelings are a sort of surrogate ambiguity, because reality -meant to be the setting for a love song - is to her the fertile mother of thousands of worries, clashing affections, and artificial sensibilities. Nothing is as real as her imagined feelings.

Virginia feels alone with her own never-ending perplexities. Ambiguity becomes central in her unconsciousness, surmising a possible, likely reality. The love proposition that fails to determine reality as such. A love that even when it is close seems to be far, with thousands of memories emerging and turning into visions that confuse past and present.

They live parallel lives in the ambiguity of feeling, lives that appear as imagined realities and real images.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jan 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546285946

Giuseppe Cafiero

Giuseppe Cafiero is a prolific writer of plays and fiction who has has produced numerous programs for the Italian-Swiss Radio, Radio Della Svizzera Italiana, and Slovenia's Radio Capodistria. The author of ten published works focusing on cultural giants from Vincent Van Gogh to Edgar Allan Poe, Cafiero lives in Italy, in the Tuscan countryside.

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2018 Giuseppe Cafiero. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 01/03/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-8595-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-8596-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-8594-6 (e)

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Contents

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VII

VIII

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X

XI

XII

XIII

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XV

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XVIII

XIX

to Paola, Melissa and Emiliano

I

"Suppose we start … on Saturday 22nd. … Get to Saulieu … go on to Auxerre, Semur, Vézelay; all within a stone’s throw… Sleep in Paris … Brantôme seems too far…. Do you want to go 2nd or 1st… First class travellers are always old fat testy and smell of eau de cologne, which makes me sick. … I confess I am in a state of violent excitement already. …what clothes do you expect me to take? None, I hope. A fur coat? … we might go to moonlight ruins, cafés, dances…and by day traipse the vineyards¹!"

She remembered when any journey was mostly "the crown of a long life spent in teaching²", to see the things that until then had only been imagined with ardent, imaginative enthusiasm.

Exploring oneself and finding oneself again through another woman. Offering one’s hand to a "dearest creature³". Holding that hand. Tender, loving whispers. Melancholy and joy seemed to be going hand in hand.

Burgundy. 1928.

She moved in the shadow of the alleged Knights, the Templars, among sacred architecture; ever since March 1098, on the day of St Benedict and the Spring Equinox, when St Robert of Molesmes went to Burgundy with a handful of monks to establish a new monastery. They had supplied it with contingents from war fronts, with welcoming shelters and convent outposts. She lightly touched on signs and spells, perhaps to dispel the ambiguity of feeling, the unsettling apprehension. She tried to decrypt the esoteric symbols hidden in the sculptures on the facades of splendid churches, and was baffled at finding, here and there, traces of the Druidic culture hybridised with the Roman—they had undoubtedly produced distinctive vernaculars, with a strong arcane influence that couldn’t be eradicated.

Then, they reached Vézelay, the land of the Aedui, of the Mandubii, the Sequani, and the Lingones until the Gaul occupation. After that, a constitution was adopted that overtook the Lex Romana Burgundionum, and was based on the fundamentalist and instrumental notions of Roman law.

It was the Burgundy kings who adapted it to their liking. Gundobad and Sigismund. 180 chapters. Nothing but annotated charts taken from the Theodosian, the Gregorian and the Hermogenian Codes. And assemblage of amendments, in other words. Wise paradigms that had been invented to safeguard only Roman citizens.

Then, a dynasty rose that the Holy Roman Church called "chosen".

Conversion, even under coercion. "I saw a writing, / which said, ‘Pope Anastasius I hold, / whom out of the right way Photinus drew⁴". Another faith could never be accepted. King Clovis did what he had to do to obtain rewards and valuable donations. Burgundy.

Her studies had been precise, learned, thanks to notions acquired from youth readings, snuck from volumes that her father kept and jealously protected in his well-stocked library. History seemed to freeze when typed on white pages. She’d play with events and adventures. She’d memorise what she wanted to remember. With and without dates. Just for fun. It wasn’t often that history was banal and boring: "They drank coffee, they listened to the band, ships came, old people spat on the ground, and at night they couldn’t sleep because of the bedbugs⁵".

"Suppose we start on Saturday 22nd…", she wrote to Vita Sackville-West on September 8, 1928 from Monk’s House, Rodmell. A modest, shambolic home. No running water, gas or electricity. Oil stove and oven. A squat toilet behind a cherry laurel hedge. Around it, just a two-acre garden. So they worked on it, to have a residence where they could live with a few more comforts.

Husband and wife.

Leonard and… Then came water, and a bathroom with a toilet. As soon as possible, they’d purchase the adjacent field so that they could preserve their view out to Mount Caburn, beyond the peat bogs taken over by King Stephen’s Normans. To be able to imagine "the feelings of a strapping young man, climbing it with his wife, children and career in the City¹. Sometimes, a red cloud appeared in the sky that seemed to sit on that mountain like a throne, and tugging a little at its anchor, moved very slowly across the sky, and over Mount Caburn, and so away⁶".

She’d never denigrate her own hidden "urban" essence. Living the city. Didn’t she once wander and stroll around a town on the Thames for Good Housekeeping magazine?

"The Tower, the Beefeaters, the Heads on Temple Bar, and the jewellers’ shops in the city⁷". Then, "as the sun sank, all the domes, spires, turrets, and pinnacles of London rose in inky blackness against the furious red sunset clouds⁷".

If she wanted, she could have walked along the banks of the great river, which marked a civilization.

The docks.

"Tramp steamers, and colliers and barges heaped with coal… which… brought bricks from Harwich or cement from Colchester—for all is business… on this river⁸".

The Lever Brothers⁹ had launched the Clean Hands campaign for child health. It was right for children to keep away from dirt and germs. They were imperiously urged to wash their hands before breakfast, before dinner and after school. Meanwhile the motherland, in an act of appropriate and unusual generosity, had given up its boundless empire. In its place, it created the Commonwealth, where wealth was to be intended as wellbeing.

The Docks revealed "dilapidated, crumbling warehouses⁵".

Almost like the East End?

Fas et nefas¹⁰. "A dwarf city of workers’ houses⁵". The consequence of an abominable war, too. Nine hundred thousand dead. Then, more than a million unemployed. Meanwhile, the high, foggy funnels of some comfortable ship blended with the staggering smokestacks of factories. Irregular work. Improving the Poor Laws. From 15 to 20 shillings per week. And birth control, too, to have less mouths to feed.

Malthusianism had become the eminent doctrine for the working class.

Even Hanover Square, Bond Street and Regent’s Park seemed to be subject to irritating, dark miseries.

Annoyance at the nightmarish, whispered gossip, all about lives spent among vitriolic snobberies. Annoyance at those who left London for fear of not catching any more salmon, or not taking any more photographs because of the bad weather. At those who attended eight-or nine-course luncheons in Harley Street. At those who demanded acceptance because their annual income was twelve thousand pounds. At those who were happy be surrounded by maids in lace aprons and bonnets, by crystalware and Sheffield silverware. At those who demanded their compulsory one-hour rest after breakfast. At those who loved their roses more than any other non-English creature. Perhaps they were just the signs of poorly hidden loneliness.

Why then pine for that city in her memory?

On September 16 she had to write to Vita again: "I have written for two first class tickets and cabin on boat for Monday… I am melancholy and excited in turn… Suppose we started on Saturday 22nd… Saulieu, Auxerre, Semur, Vézelay… Shall you be bored with me? As an experiment this journey interests me enormously¹¹".

Anxiety dispersed in an unconscious delirium, consumed within herself.

After all, she revered the worldliness of those lofty ladies with their regal stride, who glided through parlours in the pleasant, rainy London afternoons, haughty and swoon-worthy. In fact, she ought to admire anything that implied humble devotion to the duties of the high-borns. Therefore, it was difficult for her to examine her feelings without inevitably giving in to her impertinent needs, without being betrayed by inner doubts—considering also the inadequacy she felt at being from Kensington, near the West End. Perhaps not only because of that!

She cultivated loves that were innately regal. She’d give in to their charm.

A game Virginia had played since childhood. A youthful crush on Madge Vaughan. She was "very charming, and artistic, and worked away like a hero… but I can’t conceive a drearier life¹²". Madge. She was like "a starved bird … and it was quite pathetic how eager she was to talk, and how full of ideas and theories—which had to be silenced the moment her brother Will came into the room—or he would call them ‘morbid’¹²". Only kisses and caresses. A cousin.

Go away, then. Get lost elsewhere. In a France she already knew. Like that one time in Cassis, between Toulouse and Marseille, at the mouth of the Rhône, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea among "such chattering long-winded wrynecked dry boned duffers as Tomlin and Anderson¹³".

Merry brags. And irksome drunkenness amongst exquisite food, budding vineyards, blooming olive trees. A welcoming cliff, so that she could write among the undertow. Gravelly roads for arduous walks. And the heat that let the tulips bloom. And the colours! Reds and whites. Sheets of colour. And orange boats to break up the blue of the sea.

The Mediterranean! It was 1925 then.

Now, she’d explore Burgundy, the Yonne. To mitigate anxieties and set the seal on her latest literary effort. A "biography inspired, to a point, to the story of a real English family … a work of fiction, written very simply¹⁴". Orlando, just finished, and written to decode sap-like, affective bonds. If nothing else, "the longest … love-letter in literature¹⁵".

Was it a way to further punish herself with an act of lèse-majesté?

Perhaps a careful, but transparently ironic, revenge. It might even have been a gift, an androgynous sprite indulging her inherent inadequacy by braving dazzling noblewomen. Adoring their ineffable haughtiness. Their apparent disinterest towards impulsive behaviour. On her side, was only the cautious, attentive concern for aesthetics.

And what about Vita Sackville-West, for whom lineage and wealth were paramount? Vita Sackville-West with her indescribable, staunch and unrestrained anti-Semitism? Should she hide her husband with Jewish traits, Leonard Woolf, a "poor devil who paid for his unfortunate mistake in being born a Jew by discharging the whole business of life¹⁶". And the others? A number of relationships. Moral, seductive affections. The aristocracy, of course. A different social class.

Acquaintances from her youth and relationships, perhaps to hone her personal intentions and a profound desire for imitation. Particularly for Lady Katie Cromer, Lady Beatrice Thynne and Lady Nelly Cecil, who represented a languid, magical world where she could feel safe. One, Lady Katie Cromer, "with her calm brows, so majestic … and more than ever like the Venus in the Louvre … she didn’t look ill—only a little pale¹⁷". The other, Lady Beatrice Thynne, "pathetic … grown into middle aged fast set womanhood without any caring for or sympathy¹⁷. And Lady Nelly Cecil, who was the best of those elderly aristocrats… what mind she had was quite honest… she also had several women as crossing sweepers, but she didn’t patronise them¹⁸".

Past affections, of course!

Pushing aside those memories, Virginia was however unsure about this unknown, but intensely desired journey; even in the confused ambiguity of her own wishes, even in the fragile complicity of gazes and memories, since they had comforted each other with tender gestures by the fire, while Vita was curled up at her feet, on the rug… Vita who had "the body and the brain of a Greek God¹⁹". She had liked Vita’s story, Seducers in