Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm

Stella, descended on the Stephen family. In the fall of 1906, on a trip to Greece with his siblings, Thoby Stephen contracted typhoid and, apparently because of medical bungling (his illness was at first diagnosed as malaria), died a month after his return to England, at the age of twenty-six.
    In the annals of Bloomsbury, Thoby’s death, though as brutal and pointless as Julia’s and Stella’s, has not been accorded the same tragic status. Rather, in fact, the annalists have treated it almost as a kind of death of convenience, like the death of a relative who leaves deserving legatees a bequest of such staggering size that his own disappearance from the scene goes almost unnoticed. What happened was this: The previous year, one of the dingy young men, Clive Bell—who was actually neither as dingy nor as intellectual as the rest—had broken ranks and proposed to Vanessa, and she had refused him. Four months before Thoby’s death, he had proposed again, and had again been refused. But now, two days after Thoby’s death, Vanessa accepted him, and two months later she married him. As Leslie Stephen’s death had allowed the children to flee from the ogre’s castle, so Thoby’s death melted the ice princess’s heart. After Clive’s first proposal, Vanessa had written to a friend, “It really seems to matter so very little to oneself what one does. I should be quite happy living with anyone whom I didn’t dislike . . . if I could paint and lead the kind of life I like. Yet for some mysterious reason one has to refuse to do what someone else very much wants one to. It seems absurd. But absurd or not, I could no more marry him than I could fly.” Yet now, in the kind of emotional tour de force usually achieved by love potions, Vanessa’s feeling for Clive suddenly ignited, so that three weeks after the death of her brother she could write to another friend, “I as yet can hardly understand anything but the fact that I am happier than I ever thought people could be, and it goes on getting better every day.”
    Quentin Bell, Vanessa’s son, writing of Thoby’s death in his extraordinary biography of his aunt, Virginia Woolf (1972), pauses to “wonder what role this masterful and persuasive young man, together with his wife—for he would surely have married—would have played in the life of his sisters.” Quentin then goes on to coolly enumerate the advantages that accrued to the sisters from their brother’s death:
    I suspect that, if he had lived, he would have tended to strengthen rather than to weaken those barriers of speech and thought and custom which were soon to be overthrown amongst his friends. It was his death which began to work their destruction: Mr Sydney-Turner and Mr Strachey became Saxon and Lytton, they were at Gordon Square continually and in her distress Virginia wanted to see no one save them and Clive . . . It was then that Virginia discovered that these young men had not only brains but hearts, and that their sympathy was something different from the dreadful condolences of relations. As a result of Thoby’s death Bloomsbury was refounded upon the solid base of deep mutual understanding; his death was also the proximate cause for Vanessa’s marriage.
    Since Quentin’s own existence was precariously poised on this concatenation of events, he may be forgiven for his rather unfeeling words about his unfortunate uncle. Whether Thoby’s influence on Bloomsbury would in fact have been as baneful as Quentin postulates cannot be known, of course. But this much is clear: the never-never-land household of the four happy orphans had to be broken up (just as the netherworld of Hyde Park Gate had to be fled) if Bloomsbury was to attain the form by which we know it—a coterie of friends gathered around the nucleus of two very peculiar marriages.
    After their wedding and honeymoon, in the winter of 1907, Clive