PHYLLIS ROSE
447
ance, but of people's deeper drives her perception was dim. She
compensated in her novels by making character of secondary impor–
tance, by diffusing her own lyrical response to life throughout them. In
her personal life she compensated by being an intrepid asker of
questions. How does it fee l to wake up in the morning on a Tuscan
farm? How , exactly , does a scientist ex tract protein from minced liver?
She had a hunger for precise information. But almost everyone who
mentions this habit of hers mentions also their sense of the alienation
behind it. She questioned, because she felt cut of[ from the world of
fact. Iris Origo has described her as an insect beating against a pane of
glass to get
to
a li ght on the other side. David Cecil thought her like a
beautiful mermaid , who would swim up out of the sea to have a look at
the rest of us-remote, but very curious. Alix Strachey said she always
looked as though she
were
surprised to find herself there. Her bodily
ex istence
was
a surprise, and not always a pleasant one.
People who knew her freq uently descr ibe her like a fairy-tale
princess, so unusual as
to
be otherworldl y, so elegant of build, with
such deep-set eyes, so wraithlike, so distinguished, and so fragil e.
When she rubbed her hands by the fire, you could almost see through
them. But what made her one of the most enchanting people in the
world to be with was her wit and imagination. She was a lways " taking
off," talking about the most unexpected subjects or developing some
absurd premise into a spectacularly baroque verbal edifi ce . Since
people were not quite real to her, she often made them up-to their
faces and
LO
their as tonishment. Once she had pried loose from them a
nugget of fact , she went on
to
coa t it, to engulf it in her own
imaginative wave. IL did not seem
to
occur to her that people might
object to serving as fodder for her fantasies . She was far from being a
comfortable and kindly presence-people who demand to be amused,
who demand of themselves that they be amusing, rarely are comfort–
able to be with-but few people seemed to mind. One looked for
kindliness elsewhere; one turned to Virginia for imaginative delight.
Chi ldren, those excell ent judges of adu lt vivacity, a lways looked
forward to her visits. She was, in conversation, a fantasist, an inventor,
a teller of tales, not a scrupu lous intellectual. Wild, spontaneous,
abundant, her talk seemed
to
come from the same part of her mind as
the racing thoughts of her madness and the inspired frenzy of her
writing. When she laughed so hard at something she'd said that tears
came
to
eyes, Leonard wou ld begin to look concerned.
Beneath that high-strung inventiveness was a soul that guzzled
affection. As a child, she would ask her sister " Do you like me better
than ... ?" naming a list of friends and relatives. As a woman in her
