Not-so-sweet Virginia
Novels may be works of fiction, but Norah Vincent’s “Adeline” is not the only debut to reach publication thanks to its nonfiction connections. Vincent is the best-selling author of two daring works of participant observation, “SelfMade Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man” (2006) and “Voluntary Madness: Lost and Found in the Mental Healthcare System” (2008). Moreover, the nonfiction subject matter of “Adeline,” thanks to the success of Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours” (1998), has proved to be publishing industry catnip: Few marketing departments would be able to get behind a novel about a tortured, spiteful and condescending female protagonist without Virginia Woolf’s famous name behind it.
Vincent’s novel takes the form of a series of encounters between Woolf and her intimates, in which they discuss their preoccupations, Freudian and otherwise: consciousness, sexuality, art, literature, the Great War and themselves. It is a shame that while the brio and immediacy with which Woolf captured her moment is recalled in Vincent’s stately elegance and lyrical acuity, much of the novel forgoes this homage to Woolf’s style in favor of dialogue-heavy stretches of philosophy and gossip.
Beginning with Woolf’s immersion in a bathtub, “Adeline’s” frequent images of water and meditations on suicide never let the reader forget that Woolf — born Adeline Virginia Stephen — drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941. Vincent’s investigations into the relationship between creativity and mental illness serve her well in her conception of Adeline, a self whom, Vincent pos- its, split off from Woolf just after her mother died. She is rendered expertly here as a sulky, vulnerable 13-year-old who haunts the adult Virginia. “She is stuck there in my past,” Woolf explains, “and her only real wish, her only release will be in death.”
Readers who celebrate Woolf’s gay leanings may find themselves dissatisfied by the queasy tone Vincent’s Woolf adopts toward “buggery” and “Sapphism.” Quick to dismiss Vita Sackville-West as “Not very bright” and “outsized and smotheringly maternal in a faintly ursine way,” when Vincent finally describes the sex between Vita and Virginia, she does so in notably unsexy terms: “They have reclined together for hours, Vita cradling, Virginia nestling in the supple comfort of Vita’s bosom.”
Readers who love Woolf for her feminism may be disappointed by the snark with which Vincent’s Woolf is quick to dismiss her female friends, among them Dora Carrington, the straight female painter who lived with gay author Lytton Strachey and made caring for him her life’s work. When Carrington quotes Strachey quoting David Hume, Woolf casts her jealousy over Carrington’s place in Strachey’s heart in sneeringly sexual terms: “In lieu of his seed, Virginia thinks, he no doubt sprinkled their pillow talk with such pearls — the learned sayings of great men — and Carrington surely swallowed them as eagerly as if they were pearls of those other spontaneous ejaculations that she so vainly desired him to emit.”
The scene in “Adeline” that left me feeling most betrayed comes a few pages later, when the grief-stricken Carrington threatens suicide. Woolf asks Carrington if she really wants to kill herself, and Carrington, after a long pause, replies. “‘Is there any reason not to,’ she declares. It is not a question. She is not asking, nor is she looking to Virginia for an answer. If she is expecting anything, it is only a single-syllable proof, if there is one, that what she has said is patently false or mad. Yet it is not Virginia, but Adeline who answers. ‘I can think of none,’ she says dully, and Virginia can feel herself scrabbling to take the awful words back,” but adds nothing. Carrington kills herself the next day.
If Woolf had really encouraged a friend to commit suicide, surely an Internet search would turn this story up. Instead, we find the real Woolf offering consolation and distraction, suggesting that Carrington illustrate a novella by Strachey’s beloved niece Julia. In this moment of deviation from the biographical record, we see a glimpse, not of Woolf the woman as she might have been, but of Woolf the vision as she must have appeared to the author. It takes as much courage to cleave to the vision one’s imagination offers as it takes nerve, in today’s market, to write a novel with an unlikable female protagonist, and I admire Vincent on both counts.
I did not enjoy this book, and I dispute the accuracy of the peevish light it casts on Woolf. But not all works of art are intended to be enjoyed, and not all novels that make use of biographical figures are intended to be biographically accurate. Vincent has as much right to a Virginia Woolf of her own the rest of us do, and if what you see in Woolf is an idol in need of toppling, this book will hit the spot. That said, when one thinks of all the hagiography of great male writers on offer, from “Bright Star” to “Shakespeare in Love,” one has to ask: Does Woolf really get so much positive attention that Vincent’s uncharitable portrait provides a needed corrective?