Out of the ordinary

Priya Parmar’s latest takes historical fiction to a delightful new height.

May 02, 2015 03:21 pm | Updated 03:21 pm IST

Vanessa and HerSister; Priya Parmar,Bloomsbury India,Rs.499.

Vanessa and HerSister; Priya Parmar,Bloomsbury India,Rs.499.

I picked up Priya Parmar’s book Vanessa and Her Sister with no great expectations.

The languid opening pages promised a lazy Sunday read. Lazy being an appropriate adjective for a book about the Bloomsbury Group, a set that represented an effete dilettantism that used to once set my teeth on edge but rather amuses me now.

Then, on Page 11, there was this sentence: “I wanted Thoby’s friends to see her dazzle the way she can when she chooses to rake the conversation into a leafy pile and set it alight.” That’s when I sat up. A line like that could only promise a book out of the ordinary.

And it is. Priya Parmar’s book sizzles like some fiery comet, with language, wit and intelligence. It tackles what is not really an easy subject, for while it is a chronicle of the Bloomsbury set, whose lives excite endless curiosity, it is also a deeply personal and revealing account of Virginia Woolf, one of the most dazzling members of that eccentric constellation. But it is her sister and artist Vanessa Bell who is at the centre. The sister who must recede so that insecure Virginia might shine; who deeply resents Virginia’s insanity and genius, and the way it consumes everything in its way.

The format is unusual — it pretends to be Vanessa’s personal memoir. And the jottings are interspersed randomly with the postcards the Bloomsberries exchanged; their boat or train tickets, like a Portsmouth Ferry ticket to Le Havre; the telegrams they sent out about serious stuff like illnesses or frivolities like ‘please bring gruyere i like. stop’; or Vanessa’s shopping lists for paints and brushes and canvases.

These are all obviously part of the rich material that Parmar studied to produce such an authentic voice for Vanessa and, indeed, for all of the group members in this meticulously researched book. But putting these tickets and telegrams into the book, like one would stick stuff into a travel journal, is a quirky touch that adds a lot to its charm. And almost instantly sets the mise-en-scène like no amount of mere description of the era could do. The device also acts as a window into the heads of the Bloomsberries, performing the role of omniscient narrator that a journal could not otherwise do.

The Bloomsbury Group was a precocious bunch of intellectuals who got together in the early 1900s to become what was later recognised as a bridge between England’s Victorian and Modern eras. With members like Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, and Leonard Woolf, the group was practically a Who’s Who of its times. Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and T.S. Eliot were sometimes associated with them.

Radical and avant-garde, the eclectic bunch met regularly in the house in Bloomsbury that the four Stephen siblings, Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia and Adrian, had set up after the deaths of their parents. They cocked a snoot at all Victorian mores, whether in literature, criticism and painting, or feminism, pacifism and sexuality.

Their lifestyles were bohemian, as they experimented with homosexuality, cohabitation or ménage-a-trois. Not just this but their preoccupation with themselves and their life choices made them the object of much derision. D.H. Lawrence famously described them as “little swarming selves”.  Parmar’s book recognises this self-obsession. Desmond MacCarthy’s fiancée asks, much to the group’s utter consternation, “Why would others care what boundaries are broken in this house?” And an amused Vanessa notes in her diary ‘I honestly do not think it had occurred to any of us that what we did was unimportant’.

Vanessa was the group’s anchor but, most importantly, she was anchor to Virginia, who teetered dangerously on the edge of madness (now thought to be bipolar disorder). Parmar paints Virginia from a sister’s eye, warts and all, and shows her pathological dependence on Vanessa, to the point of deeply resenting her marriage to Clive Bell, whom she proceeds to seduce. Virginia’s lesbianism is also latent — she asks Vanessa to marry her — foreshadowing her future affair with Vita Sackville-West, wife of diplomat Harold Nicolson.

Vanessa struggles to hold on to her self against Virginia’s imperious commandeering of her time, attention and affection. “Her way is acquisitive. She is always interested in more — more affection, more attention… more warmth, more secrets.” Vanessa’s anger and resentment seethe below the surface, because Virginia would not survive an open confrontation. But, despite this, there is also love, sympathy and pride in Virginia’s immense talent. One evening, listening to her talk with the assembled men, Vanessa says, “Her voice broke free of its rusted shell and slid like a deep river over rocks. I watched them watch her. She stands with them as an equal…”

The book picks Virginia bare, but it is also an intimate insider view of the Bloomsbury group at their vulnerable, personal moments, rather than their strident public persona. But, most of all, it is a sister’s account of living with and loving an unstable genius.

Parmar writes the book exactly as the painter Vanessa might have, seeing the world in colours and shapes.  “…we four wrung the last hours of tumbling sunshine from the summer,” says a journal entry. Or this: “No… It is no longer a single, straight-syllabled word… Instead it is a tumbledown cottage of a word, furnished in curiosity and thatched in doubt.”

Mainly, though, Parmar imagines the drawing rooms, the dinners, the conversations and journeys of the famous group with an unerring eye for detail and tone that makes them come alive. This book takes historical fiction to a delightful new height.   

Vanessa and Her Sister;Priya Parmar, Bloomsbury India, Rs.499.

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