BERNARD MALAMUD
537
the night. They whispered, they clucked, they howled. She suffered
piercing occipital headaches.
King Edward cursed her foully in the azalea garden . He called
her filthy names, reading aloud dreadful reviews of books she had
yet to write.
The king sang of madness, rage, incest.
Years later she agreed to marry Mr. Leonard Woolf, who had
offered to be her Jewish mother.
"I am mad," she confessed to him.
"I am marrying a penniless Jew," Virginia wrote Violet Dickin-
son. She wondered who had possessed her.
"He thinks my writing the best part of me ."
"His Jewishness is qualified."
His mother disgusted her.
She grew darkly enraged.
In fact, I dislike the quality of masculinity. I always have.
Lytton said he had no use for it, whatever. "Semen?" he asked
when he saw a stain on Vanessa's dress.
Vanessa loved a man who found it difficult to love a woman.
She loved Duncan Grant until he loved her.
She had loved Clive Bell, who loved Virginia, who would not
love him. Virginia loved Leonard who loved her. She swore she
loved him.
When Julia, the mother, died, the goat threw herself out of a
first storey window and lay on the ground with Warren Septimus
Smith. "He did not want to die till the very last minute." Neither had
she .
The old king emerged from the wood, strumming a lyre. A
silver bird flew over his head, screeching in Greek.
A dead woman stalked her.
Janet Case, her teacher of Greek, loved her. She loved her
teacher of Greek.
She loved Violet Dickinson.
She loved Vita Nicolson .
Leonard and she had no children. They lay in bed and had no
children . She would have liked a little girl.
"Possibly my great age makes it less a catastrophe but certainly
I find the climax greatly exaggerated."
Vanessa wrote Clive, "Apparently she gets no pleasure from
the act, which I think is curious. She and Leonard were anxious to
know when I had had an orgasm. I couldn't remember, do you?"
