BLOOMSBURY is, just now, like one of those ponds on a private estate from which all of the trout have been scooped out for the season. It is not a natural place for fish, but rather a water stocked for the fisherman so that he may not cast his line in vain. It is a catered pastoral, and lively, thoroughbred trout rise to the fly with a special leaping grace and style. But it wearies as an idea, a design, a gathering, and one would like to have each speckled specimen alone, singular. The period, the letters, the houses, the love affairs, the blood lines: these are private anecdotes one is happy enough to meet once or twice but not again and again.
Certain peripheral names scratch the mind. To see the word “Ottoline” on a page, in a letter, gives me the sense of continual defeat, as if I had gone to a party and found an enemy attending the bar. We, foreigners, will never take her in, although it seems we must. She is everywhere, but what is to be made of her? She engages them, Englishmen, endlessly and the rest of us not at all. Her invitations, her gifts, her houses, her costumes — the best minds of a generation (or two rocked back and forth, pro and con, up and down over the quality and meaning of these. For years I thought Garsington, Lady Ottoline’s house, was a town name, a resort clever people were always going to or making a point of not going to.
Hedonism is only a habit and the brightness of its practices fades with the dawn.
“What a fool Clive Bell is!” Lawrence says in one of his letters. Is that true, just? The one certain thing is that he is Virginia Woolf’s brother-in-law, husband of Vanessa, father of Quentin Bell, the author of the important Virginia Woolf: A Biography.
The worst thing before the present exhaustion of Virginia Woolf was the draining of Lytton Strachey. This is a very overblown affair, right down to his friend Carrington, who committed suicide forty years ago — an unreclaimable figure, fluid, arrested, charming, very much a girl of the period, with the typical Bloomsbury orderly profligacy and passionate coldness.
Her marriage and her love affairs are held in the mind for a day or so after hard study, but they soon drift away to the Carrington haunt. Ralph Partridge, yes: he turns up again at the Hogarth Press.
In a recent New Statesman, there was a moving and, to me, instructive portrait by V.S. Pritchett of the painter Mark Gertler, another Bloomsbury figure and another Bloomsbury current biography. Gertler grips your feelings immediately because of the sufferings he has passed and because of their roots in the fatalities and miseries of social history — for his link with the universal, for a drama in which the world plays a part. In him are absent all the proprieties of education, circumstance, and style that marked the Bloomsbury friendships. Gertler was Jewish, poor, contracted tuberculosis from the London slums; his marriage failed, his children suffered illnesses; he was eccentric, melancholy, one of those persons who will, no matter what successes briefly touch them, know lingering failure. “Nazism and anti-Semitism in Germany were the last straw” and he committed suicide.
Idly, even wistfully, pursuing the beaded cross references of this study, I looked him up in the index of Carrington. And there indeed lay the bones of the tormented man: “Gertler, Mark:…C. has sexual relations with, 50-51, 53, 68-69; C.’s break with, 63-67…”
Lytton Strachey, brilliant, master of a rich, balanced popular style, had about him an arrogance that did not exclude the possibilities of loyalty, friendship, and love for those persons he could tolerate. He is witty, eccentric, curious, learned, and outrageous, a perfect Bloomsbury blending of homosexuality and donnish talents, true ones. He is likely to switch from the question of conscription in World War I to “the really interesting question” of a paper he read at the meeting of the Apostles group at Cambridge in 1911:
The really interesting question concerns me — the particular me — and Alexis – the particular (but not too particular) Alexis. It concerns the particular kiss I gave him on a particular day, in the sun, with the hollyhocks all round, and the lawn, and some confused people out of sight in the distance — don’t you see it all? Oh, but it is just the all that you don’t see.
Alexis, whom one and perhaps Strachey himself had thought of as a golden-haired youth, is soon admitted to be dull, ugly, nearly bald, and this bit of a reversal, this reality, the questioning of it, the bold, mannered embarrassment of it, occupied Strachey, and no doubt his conversation, as much as Queen Victoria or Florence Nightingale. The popularity of his writing is surprising — or, rather, it is surprising that he could wish to write in so successful and dramatic a way. His person, loved in his circle, was not very likely to take in ordinary humanity. He was too free in his eccentricities, too marked by his class and the wild peculiarities of his appearance and manners.
And what do we have in the end about Bloomsbury from the small score of personal anecdote relentlessly repeated? I am struck — in the memorials and essays by writers who were young and yet present when Virginia Woolf was alive — by the sameness of tone, the valuable little core of things each one held close. Still, this was it, the reality – and anything further or different would be a straining for novelty and perhaps, for the English, an irreverence, a violation of a genius and character altogether rare, high, and tortured.
Something is wrong. For myself I could never have imagined especially wishing to read Leonard Woolf’s autobiography except for the accounts of Virginia Woolf’s breakdowns and suicide – and these fall very short of what I might in a low moment have liked to have. There are many biographies, from all countries, like that of Leonard Woolf. He was a good man; he worked hard in a number of colorful settings; he knew many interesting people; he engaged in creditable actions and held decent
opinions with tenacity. No matter, in the end Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter was worth it all, although one would never have wanted to think this when the books were freshly coming out.
Then the force of Bloomsbury and “brightest things that are theirs” claimed the mind. The wood smoke, a life still courteous and unconventional, people handsome and malicious and serious and never boring — and as all of this swells and inflates there is reason for gratitude and pride in it. It is an English matter. Americans cannot quite get it straight except for the grand, isolated singularities like Virginia Woolf, fortunately a feminist, and E. M. Forster, fortunately the author of an international novel.
Bertrand Russell cannot be brought under the umbrella of Bloomsbury, nor can Maynard Keynes, except in his homosexual youth. What is popular about Bloomsbury at the moment is its gay liberation, its serious high camp.
hexafu 