VIRGINIA
I should never have married you. Women see the worst of men, how cruel they are at home, how they believe in ranks and ceremonies, how they demand praise and management. We bring out what’s bad in each other. We should live separately.
LEONARD
Virginia, I admit I have been a brute. I told you that before you married me. I have faults, vices and beastlinesses. I am lustful, a whorer, a gazer after women, a vicious man who has loved the refinements of vice. I have seen the filth of the brothel, know that it is filth and still I’ve lain with the ugliest whore. I have been selfish, jealous, and cruel. You are the most beautiful, most magical among women. Yet I must have you, and not some inferior female who would enrage me with her inferiority and submission. I am terminally and unconditionally in love with you. God, the happiness I’ve had being with you and talking to you – mind to mind and soul to soul. I don’t care so much for the physical part. You are the best thing I have ever had in my life. I will never be content, now, with second best.
VIRGINIA
And here am I, a failure, childless, no writer and insane. You confessed your sins before we married, but I knew I was insane with a mad sister and a madder uncle and yet I married you.
LEONARD
Tell me the truth. Why did you marry me, the penniless, trembling Jew?
VIRGINIA
Perhaps only because you were my beloved brother Thoby’s best friend. He said, I’ve met a man so violent, so savage, he trembles with contempt for the whole human race. And that was you.
LEONARD
Thoby was so beautiful it was difficult to speak with him of iniquity or despair.
VIRGINIA
Thoby had the kind of beauty that defends itself from caress.
LEONARD
And you’re the same. With such gestures one falls in love for a lifetime.
VIRGINIA
Thoby and I were so close until he went away to that school, where the boys fought and buggered. When he came back he was so different, harsh and cruel. He beat me. I just stood there and let him pound me with his fists, feeling the most awful sadness; why hurt another person? He showed off by abusing me. I refused to surrender the space we used to have, but he said, Girls must give up. That’s what it means to be a girl. It was essential for the fellowship of men that I be kept out. Because you were his greatest friend I hoped the best of him lived on, in you. But you are nothing like him.
LEONARD
The Goth was always a law unto himself. He didn’t acquire friends, he annexed worshippers. You and Vanessa looked so like him our Circle called you “Visigoths.” Misses Virginia and Vanessa Stephens, so beautiful that dogs turned to look at them in the street.
VIRGINIA
Trust me, it’s not that pleasant having dogs turn to look at one in the street. So, you married me, thinking I was like Thoby and you were disappointed.
LEONARD
Virginia, you must stop thinking everything is your fault. We were primed to fall in love because of our friendships, but we actually fell in love because we saw each other’s true selves.
VIRGINIA
I saw how shocked you were when you realized you had married a madwoman.
LEONARD
Life may be an obstacle race but that doesn’t mean one would want the obstacles removed.
VIRGINIA
I should have told you!
LEONARD
Did I tell you my tremor is hereditary? My father had it, too. Should I have confessed that? We didn’t want to talk about our families. We wanted to revel in each other’s hopes and dreams.
VIRGINIA
When we talked, I forgot everything except the joy of our conversation. Originality and freedom, purity and restraint, we discussed it all. Here’s someone who cares, I thought, about the hidden pockets of emotion, someone who wants to work like a steam engine at uncovering the truth. I needed to know that when I weep, I am not the only weeper. You almost persuaded me we could change the world with just our two brains.
LEONARD
Nothing’s more important than the two of us united.
VIRGINIA
Yet somehow here I am, locked up in a madhouse.
LEONARD
Virginia, this isn’t a madhouse and you are not insane. But we need the doctor’s permission for you to leave. We must figure out, the pair of us, how you can assume control. I don’t believe in guilt or apologies. I know what it is to be driven beyond endurance but I know I can avoid the whirlpools if you help me, Virginia. Let me help you learn how to assume control.
VIRGINIA
What’s the use of men talking to women, we’re too different. We must hate and fear each other. Women can’t even step outside their doors with any safety. If you could strip off my skin you would see my nerves gone white with fear of you.
LEONARD
You’re talking to the member of a despised race rooted out as pests wherever we settle. My nerves should be white with fear of your kind. It’s a fetid, sordid world. Yet we two are somehow different. In Ceylon, I took out my gun to put an end to the utter foulness, the stupid blind vindictive foulness of everything. You see, we have that in common.
VIRGINIA
You did? You really tried to shoot yourself?
LEONARD
I thought that the only reason one doesn’t commit suicide is that one is either a selfish coward or already dead and rotten. The one thing that saved me was a vision of you, the beautiful Miss Stephen who wrote like an angel and quoted Plato. I longed to meet you. But I was so afraid of making a fool of myself my very soul and stomach trembled.
VIRGINIA
You stayed alive because of me?
LEONARD
I did. So you must return the favor. Lytton Strachey and I wrote long letters back and forth. He argued against suicide and insisted that I propose.
VIRGINIA
Lytton asked me to marry him once. Thank God, I didn’t. The very idea of his criticisms would have kept me from writing anything.
LEONARD
He understood all that. He said the only person who was right for you was me.
VIRGINIA
But he didn’t know about my spoiled, ruined body.
LEONARD
You have a perfect body!
VIRGINIA
Currently being stuffed like a Strasbourg goose, thanks to you. Strapped down, force fed, shot with drugs.
LEONARD
All because you refuse to eat. Let me order dinner right now and feed it to you. How about that?
VIRGINIA
I’m not hungry. Oh, let me die, Leonard! Let me go! Find a girl who can love you properly! I failed in the bedroom – you made that perfectly clear.
LEONARD
Perhaps copulation is inherently degrading. Really, horseback riding is more pleasurable.
VIRGINIA
But there’s children to look forward to, surely.
LEONARD
I don’t want children and if you really read The Wise Virgins, you’ll know why.
VIRGINIA
But we won’t raise them in a strict Jewish home!
LEONARD
There’s your prejudice again! It wasn’t the Judaism, it was the endless striving for dominance of tiny minds. How I hated it!
VIRGINIA
Father shrieked and screamed that we were sending him to the poorhouse with our expensive household bills. I brought him a catalog of King’s College classes for Ladies but he said he couldn’t spare me because it was my turn to pet him, soothe him, cut his meat! I wanted to write, but I couldn’t keep it private. Once I had a diary with a lock but Thoby stole it, so I pasted my secret pages into a book.
LEONARD
After my father died we really were headed for the poorhouse. My brother had to work to support the family.
VIRGINIA
Don’t you think every family is a lonely caravan, absolutely private, silent and unknown? I see us wedged in together, surrounded by vast space we couldn’t cross. It seemed impossible to break through the dark cloud and shed light on those shrouded, curtained rooms. Censors, visionary figures everywhere admonished us. Father told me no intelligent being had any right to believe in God, but when I was six years old, I dreamed that I was God.
LEONARD
And your mother?
VIRGINIA
Mother said there couldn’t be a God because no just God would have killed the splendid Herbert Duckworth, her first husband. She loved him so. She never told my father she loved him.
LEONARD
Never?
VIRGINIA
Never. I wrote stories in which clever, courageous children rescue their families and bring hope to the sick. Do you believe in God, Leonard?
LEONARD
No one believes in God. Virginia, we must refuse to be determined by our pasts. Our parents had too many children to cope but we won’t make the same mistake. Don’t you want to be free, Virginia? With so many mouths to feed, freedom’s never possible.
VIRGINIA
I know you’re only saying that because Dr. Hyslop insists the mad should never propagate.
LEONARD
I swear I’m not. Nessa has children – and with all her lovers looks to spew many more – wouldn’t that be enough for you?
VIRGINIA
(turning away)
Surely loneliness destroys us. Futile and infertile – aren’t those more than adequate reasons for self-murder?
LEONARD
We’ll never be futile, not us. You’ve written a wonderful novel, Virginia. I know you’ll write many more.
VIRGINIA
Received by my family in complete silence.
LEONARD
They’re barely literate. My whole point is that family shouldn’t matter. I’ve freed myself – I never see my mother if I can help it. Remember how upset she was to be excluded from our wedding? Surely an ambitious person’s gaze should widen, take in more?
VIRGINIA
Take in who? Society, like the Countess of Carnarvon? Publishers like Gerald?
LEONARD
How about other modern thinkers, trying to do what we are doing? Finding new ways to be, see, think, do, connect. Roger Fry with his “significant form”. Maynard Keynes with aggregate demand, E. M. Forster’s clever novels. The literary impressionism you attempted in Voyage Out.
VIRGINIA
Forster isn’t clever. He thinks women should be banned from the London Library Board and never allowed on the grass at Cambridge. How on earth can dry, dusty books ever make up for real, live children?
LEONARD
Was your childhood really anything you’d care to revisit, Virginia?
VIRGINIA
Yes, yes, yes. If I could only tell you, or anybody. Oh, the magic summers at St. Ives! Lost, gone forever. Paradise before, catastrophe after. Now whatever it is I want I cannot tell. I was born with extraordinary capacities for feeling, but you say bury my emotions or they will never let me out.
LEONARD
Not bury them, Virginia. Manage them. We need to convince the world that you are fine and well. Let’s get to the bottom of the ideas that torment you. How many years was that paradise of childhood, really? Two or three? We have our whole, long, fruitful lives ahead of us.
VIRGINIA
It was paradise before the deaths began.
LEONARD
There’s no escaping death, Virginia.
VIRGINIA
You intimate that children would drive me mad?
LEONARD
They would certainly stop you working. Can you see a house filled with nannies, nurses, servants, their followers and lovers? Cockney quarrels and endless Bedlam difficulties? You once described your nursery as a cage where you were forced to perform compulsory tricks.
VIRGINIA
And what do you call this damnable house? Cousin Madge says you’re mean and think of nothing but money.
LEONARD
Madge is an idiot. Let’s resolve to cut all idiots on principles of health.
VIRGINIA
If that were only possible! Here I am in George’s house, sentenced to eternally hawking Gerald’s books!
LEONARD
But George isn’t here. And there are other publishers in the world besides Gerald.
VIRGINIA
Worse ones, doubtless. Did you read Gissing, or even Meredith?
LEONARD
Then we’ll publish our books ourselves.
VIRGINIA
(turning to face him)
Could such a thing be possible?
LEONARD
Of course, it is. You know your Women’s Cooperative promotes apprenticeships. I think the Working Man’s College teaches printing.
VIRGINIA
Oh, imagine if that were so! How I’d love to print! I used to bind books, I liked that. The tools were so beautiful. Papers from Italy, leathers from Africa. The smell alone was heavenly.
LEONARD
Don’t these doctors recommend handiwork?
VIRGINIA
Tat-work! Or crochet!
LEONARD
Let’s defeat them, then. Can’t we, together, push the world our way? Or at the very least carve out a tiny corner where we can live and thrive?
VIRGINIA
If only I could trust you.
Alysse Aallyn 