Mitz Page 3

  Mitz could climb trees, though, as she nimbly demonstrated in the garden of Monk’s House.

  The Woolfs had been happy to learn that Mitz was not afraid of cars. Driving to Rodmell she rode all the way on Leonard’s shoulder—she seemed to enjoy it particularly when the top of their Lanchester convertible was cranked back. But at Monk’s House she had the bad habit of escaping into the garden and climbing trees all the way to the highest branch, and then they had quite a time getting her down again. When calling and tongue-clicking did not work, Leonard resorted to temptation. He put a bit of honey or tapioca pudding (her favorite foods) into the lid of a tin and put the lid in the bottom of a butterfly net. He leaned a ladder against the tree and climbed it, holding the food out to Mitz. Down she came, to be caught in the net.

  As many times as Leonard played this trick on Mitz, she never seemed to hold it against him.

  But there were other times when even temptation did not work. For a half hour or more, Leonard would stand on the ladder, looking up through the leaves at Mitz looking back down at him in wonderment, as if she could not imagine what her man was doing down there waving that silly net.

  One Sunday evening, just as the Woolfs were getting ready to drive back to London, Mitz escaped from the house and immediately raced up the lime tree that stood by the gate. While Leonard went to fetch some honey and the butterfly net, Virginia went back into the house to dash off a letter to her sister. She had written four sheets, and still Mitz had not come down from the tree. His patience at an end, Leonard had a stroke of genius. “Virginia!” he called, clambering down his ladder.

  “Yes, Mongoose?” (Mongoose was Virginia’s pet name for Leonard.)

  “Would you come out here for a moment, please?”

  Virginia laid down her pen and went out into the garden.

  “Come here,” Leonard said. And Virginia went to stand under the tree beside him.

  “Closer,” he said. Virginia moved closer.

  Now, Mitz was a jealous creature, and whenever Leonard showed affection toward his wife in Mitz’s presence, Mitz would jump onto his shoulder and protest in her high-pitched staccato way. Seeing Virginia move so close to Leonard now, Mitz climbed down a few branches.

  Seeing Leonard put his arm around Virginia, Mitz dropped lower still.

  Seeing Leonard nuzzle Virginia’s cheek, Mitz shrieked and leapt onto Leonard’s shoulder.

  Unlike the sweets-in-the-butterfly-net trick, this one worked every time.

  FOUR

  One afternoon Virginia and Pinka walked to Charleston, arriving in time for tea. Charleston, Vanessa’s country retreat, which she shared with her companion, Duncan Grant, was about four miles from Monk’s House. In London, Vanessa and Duncan lived in Fitzroy Street, not far from Tavistock Square. Virginia and Vanessa were as close as two sisters can be. Vanessa was the elder by three years. Everyone called her Nessa, but to Virginia she was also Dolphin, and to Vanessa Virginia was usually Goat (these were names from their childhood).

  Charleston was like no other house in England—Vanessa and Duncan had seen to that, decorating every inch of it—walls to windowsills—with their own hands. Virginia never ceased to be ravished by such a profusion of pattern and color, and always after coming home from Charleston her own house looked to her very plain and dull. But that was also how she looked to herself: very plain and dull beside Vanessa—a goddess in Virginia’s eyes, a radiant madonna, a complete woman, impossible not to envy. Vanessa had what people insisted could not be had: her art and her children.

  At tea they discussed the same things they usually discussed: Vanessa’s painting, Virginia’s writing, family, friends.

  “And how is the marmoset?” Vanessa asked.

  “Very well, thank you,” Virginia said. “She was in rather bad shape when we got her, but Leonard has done such a wonderful job, she’s quite fine now.”

  “Well, I’m not surprised,” Vanessa said, slyly. “He’s had such a lot of experience with—monkeys!”

  At this Virginia began to laugh. Cup and saucer clattered like false teeth, making her laugh even harder. “With nervous—s-sickly—s-sensitive monkeys—don’t you mean!” Virginia spluttered, tea sloshing at every word.

  And the sisters laughed and laughed.

  As a child Virginia had been known to her family as Apes. To her sister she was not only Goat but also Singe, which is French for monkey, and to her husband she was Mandril. (A mandrill is a large, ferocious baboon.) To her intimate friend Vita Sackville-West she was Potto, and a potto is a kind of lemur—not a spaniel, as one of Virginia’s biographers thinks—and a lemur, though not a true monkey, is a very close relation.

  Yes, Leonard was an excellent nurse, as who should know better than Virginia? Hadn’t he seen her through countless bouts of migraine and flu (to both of which she was unusually susceptible), as well as through more serious troubles? All her life Virginia had been plagued by illness. Different doctors had given different opinions. One said it was her heart, another said it was her lungs, a third thought the problem must be psychological. Fevers, tremors, insomnia, swoons, galloping pulse, splitting head, loss of appetite—on the symptoms, at least, all could agree. One endless summer she had lain in bed, as sick as she would ever be, and heard the birds singing in Greek and King Edward VII babbling obscenities. (Years later, when Vita was writing a book about Joan of Arc, Virginia would say, “I could tell you all about her Voices by the way.”) A fragile mind in a fragile body, Virginia was. It was because of this that the Woolfs had decided not to have children. As there was no definitive diagnosis, there was no cure. At various times she was treated with laudanum and Veronal, influenza germs, milk, and digitalis. But experience had shown that the best thing for Virginia’s health was Leonard’s patient loving care.

  Now, under the same care, Mitz was thriving. The sore on her neck was almost healed. The eczema was fading. Her eyes gleamed like glass buttons; her fur had a sheen. The swelling round her joints was gone. Gone, too, was the look of perpetual dolor. Now Mitz looked as monkeys should look: lively, sharp, curious. Gone was her hobble. She moved with ease. She had energy. She had spunk.

  “Victor will be pleased,” Virginia said. They had had a letter from Victor only yesterday: the Rothschilds would be returning to England in about a week.

  Leonard had predicted that Pinka would do Mitz no harm. He might have gone further and predicted that the two animals would become friends. But he would not have gone so far as to predict what in fact happened: Mitz grew passionately fond of Pinka.

  Pinka (also called Pinker) was eight years old—past the prime of a dog’s life, and, as with many a human past his or her prime, she was overweight, and her sight was failing. She had been a gift from Vita, whose own spaniel, Pippin, had had a litter. The Woolfs were enchanted. “An angel of light,” Virginia called her. “Leonard says seriously she makes him believe in God . . . and this after she has wetted his floor 8 times in one day.” (Virginia was prone to exaggeration.)

  Over the years Leonard had nursed Pinka through eczema, worms, lice, heat, motherhood, rheumatism, and a bad paw.

  And how could anyone ever repay such a gift? If you are Virginia Woolf, it might be with a book: Orlando, a novel inspired by Vita and about Vita and dedicated to her (“the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson called it).

  As Vita was the model for Orlando, so Pinka was the model for Flush. Flush, the biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, was Virginia’s latest book. In a letter to Frederick B. Adams, an American who had written to inquire about the original manuscript, which he was thinking of buying, Virginia explained that she had come upon the idea of writing a life of Flush while reading the letters of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. “But in fact very little is known about him, and I have had to invent a good deal.” Virginia counted among her inspirations the lives written by her dear old friend Lytton Strachey, now, alas, dead. His Eminent Victo
rians, his Queen Victoria (dedicated to Virginia)—these were the models she claimed to have in mind when she sat down to Flush.

  The book was begun as a relaxation—something to cool a brain that had seethed and bubbled over during the feverish labor of completing The Waves. The gods of literature punish writers who begin books in this spirit. Lightly though she took it at first, calling it a lark, a jeu d’esprit, it soon turned into what all book writing always turns into: work, work, work. And soon enough she was bemoaning: how endless the writing and the rewriting, how tedious the research, how dull and slow the whole business, and how she longed only to be quit of it—until it comes as no surprise to find her referring in her diary to “that abominable dog Flush.”

  And when she finally had finished the book came a further ordeal: the anxious waiting to see what would happen to it. Virginia never allowed anyone to read a book of hers before it was done. Now strangers would paw it. Critics would claw at it. There would be reviews. As always, Virginia braced herself. Leonard, as always, held her hand. Virginia herself had already disparaged the book as “a joke,” “a waste,” “a bore”—“silly,” “foolish,” “witless,” and “too long”—but, oh, did that mean she was pleased to have Rebecca West agree, in a review in the Daily Telegraph, suggesting that it was a joke that should never have left the room where it was born? West was not alone in her criticism. (Another reviewer wept crocodile tears: as a serious writer Mrs. Woolf was now dead.) But in the literary world Virginia had many friends and admirers, and these friends and admirers praised the book to the skies. (Why was it, she wondered, that criticism was always “either mere slobber or mere abuse”?) Joke though Flush might be, it was a joke that sold, and sold, as she had known it would. The Book Society chose it for their Book of the Month. Ha-ha! The American Book-of-the-Month Club wanted it, too.

  Virginia Woolf was a liar, declared Dame Rebecca West on television five decades later: She said I have hairy arms, and I don’t have hairy arms.

  Mr. Adams decided not to buy the manuscript of Flush after all.

  Mitz would sit for hours going through Pinka’s soft wavy coat, separating the hairs with her claws, searching for fleas. When she found one, she would pop it into her mouth. It was a service for which Pinka was no doubt grateful, and the Woolfs should have been grateful, too. And yet it was a disconcerting sight in one’s sitting room and took some getting used to. This business is called grooming, and it is a sign of love. (And if there was any mystery as to whom Mitz loved best: she spent most of her time grooming herself.)

  Every morning when Leonard came downstairs, Mitz would hop onto his shoulder and groom the sleep out of his eyes. Evenings, as he sat reading, she would sit on his shoulder or on the back of his chair and go through his hair, just as she went through Pinka’s. Virginia did her best to ignore them but could not help being alarmed when Mitz would find something and examine it for a long, suspenseful moment before popping it into her mouth. Leonard no longer has to worry about dandruff, she announced to astonished friends.

  Another thing that took some getting used to was Mitz’s noise. Virginia was a skittish person—hardly less skittish than Mitz herself—easily startled by any loud noise or sudden movement, and Mitz’s screeching (often the result of her having been startled) had made Virginia fling her pen into the air more than once. But Virginia liked Mitz—the Zet, or the Zed, as Virginia sometimes referred to her. The Zet had wet her arm or left a smut on her blotting paper. Virginia bore such annoyances well. Once, when Leonard’s niece Philippa was visiting Monk’s House and Leonard was not at home, Mitz jumped onto Virginia’s head and became hopelessly entangled in her hair. She could not free herself, and the more Virginia and Philippa tugged, the deeper she sank in her claws. Finally they gave up, and Virginia and Philippa sat talking and waiting for Leonard to come to the rescue, which he did in about half an hour.

  Virginia was not above teasing her rival, snuggling up to Leonard now and then precisely in order to provoke an outburst. When Mitz was really piqued, her white tufts would erect themselves like a headdress; she would rock back and forth, smacking her lips and sticking her tongue out at Virginia in the lewdest fashion. And Virginia invented a game to play with her—a form of peekaboo. While Leonard sat reading with Mitz on his shoulder, Virginia would stand in front of his chair and dance from side to side, agitating Mitz, who would jump back and forth from one shoulder to the other—until at last Leonard lost patience and cried, Oh, ladies, please!

  Now, fleas were not the only wonder of Pinka’s coat. Remember: Mitz could not bear the cold. It did not take her long to find the warmest place in the house. On cooler, damper evenings—and there are many cool damp evenings in an English summer—the Woolfs would light a fire. Virginia would sit in her chair, reading or perhaps writing in her diary, and Leonard would sit in his chair, reading or writing, too. And on the rug in front of the fire lay Pinka sleeping, and Mitz lay nestled against her. Sometimes the two animals would curl up together in a chair or in Pinka’s basket.

  And so were they all four in their places this particular evening at Monk’s House (more like Monkey’s House now, teased Vanessa) when the telephone rang and Leonard picked up. “Victor! Well, how are you? How was the trip?” After this Leonard was silent for a long time, listening to Victor’s reply, which was understandably lengthy, for it had been a long trip. Virginia was writing in her diary. (Virginia believed that a day on which she did not write in her diary was a day wasted; a thing was not real, Virginia believed, unless she had written it down.)

  “Hope you’ll understand . . . happier here . . . grown awfully fond . . . responsibility . . .” Though Virginia was not listening to the words, Leonard’s meaning sank in.

  “So,” she said, as he hung up the phone. “Is Victor angry?”

  “Not at all, not at all.” Leonard clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back with a satisfied air. It was just as he had suspected: Victor was relieved.

  FIVE

  In October the Woolfs returned to London bearing a heavy grief. Their friend Roger Fry had died in September. They had reached the age when the death of friends had to be expected. It seemed only yesterday—and not more than two years ago—that they had lost Lytton.

  Virginia had admired Roger, as a critic and as a painter—the most intelligent of her friends, she called him. Twenty years ago Roger and Vanessa had been lovers. They had remained close until he died, and now a good part of Virginia’s suffering was seeing how Vanessa suffered. She knew that Roger had hoped that she would one day write his biography, and one day she would; but for now all she could do was mourn.

  In the wider world, too, there was ample cause for dismay. In Germany the Nazis had gone from strength to strength and were rapidly building up armaments. There was rattling of sabers in Italy as well. On a state visit to France, the king of Yugoslavia had been slain, along with the French foreign minister, by a Croatian nationalist. It was beginning to look as if only a miracle would preserve peace.

  The Woolfs did what they always did in the face of despair: they threw themselves into their work. Leonard became even busier with the political activities to which he had devoted much of his life, serving on committees, giving speeches, writing journalism—and it was he who did most of the work of the Press. He began writing a book, an attack on Nazism and fascism to be called Quack, Quack!

  Virginia was also writing a book, a new novel for which she had not yet settled on a title.

  By this time, Virginia had published ten books of fiction, including her masterpieces To the Lighthouse and The Waves. Her reputation was secure. In our own day the eminent critic Harold Bloom would find a place for her in his canon, between D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce (about both of whom Virginia herself had her doubts). Canonization would not have surprised her; she knew her work would endure. (A high point of that autumn was a meeting with Yeats at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s—and hadn’t the great man himself praised The Waves?) But: her picture on the side of
a bus driving down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue? What would Virginia have thought of this—she who had declined to sit for her portrait for the National Portrait Gallery? That one or another of her books might be made into a film—this would not have surprised her; it was something that was already happening to books back then. But: She and her friends—Vita and Ottoline and Tom and Lytton and Carrington—impersonated on stage and screen? A 1990s fall fashion collection inspired by a film about Carrington—tweed suits and velvet coats and rooster-feathered hats that Carrington would not have been caught dead in but that might indeed have been worn by Vita or Ottoline or Lady Colefax? What would Virginia Woolf have said to all this?

  At the time we are talking about, however, it was not homage that was on Virginia’s mind: it was hostility. Here she was, in a new book by Wyndham Lewis, raked over the coals. The length of a chapter needed to say that her work was of no significance at all. Here was Bloomsbury mocked and reviled—not for the first time or the last. But this time she would fight back. She would defend herself, she would. She would publish a letter—

  No, she would not. Not for the first time or the last, Leonard stopped her. She must not let herself be baited, he said. To let herself be dragged into public controversy would only make things worse. Well, then, what should she do about such abuse? Pay no attention, get on with her work. And if she couldn’t work, what then? If such attacks upset her so that she couldn’t write—what then, Mongoose, what then? Then she should read until she could write again; that’s what books were for.