How to rate Bloomsbury?
the work or the lives?
Have never reached a settled opinion on Bloomsbury. Only one actual A grade genius (Keynes). Woolf close but valued for all the wrong things. Clive Bell and Roger Fry are more unreadable than Thomas Carlyle. Cult around the holy sites (Charleston!) and paintings is off-putting and misguided. Their morality is somewhat admirable. Paul Johnson basically blames them for everything that went wrong in the entire 20th century: seems a bit much. Lytton Strachey as good an essayist as Britain has produced. Enormous blind spots on race and class waved away. But would rather bask in Woolf’s diaries than read dull contemporaries like Orwell. Always think about the fact that when Hermione Lee was asked if she had fantasies of meeting Virginia Woolf she said she would have been too afraid to have tea with her.
That is Will Lloyd. I am sympathetic to his perspective. He was responding to Tanjil Rashid.
Indian novelist and art critic Mulk Raj Anand - TS Eliot’s assistant at the Criterion - offers the most withering critique of Woolf of all. Overlooked by literary scholars, his account of being bullied in Woolf’s drawing-room can be found in Conversations in Bloomsbury (1981).
The root cause seems to be that Twitter is sharing the moment in Woolf’s diary when she is appalled that T.S. Eliot converted.
Obviously Virginia Woolf was unbearably acidic: racist, snobbish, happy to bully the young in front of others. Will is right that the insistent need to defend, praise, enjoy, apologize for Woolf as a person means she is very often valued for extra-literary reasons.
I do not think her prejudices should invalidate her novels. Lots of novels are full of prejudice! But the apology for her personality does spill over into how the work is read. Reacting to John Carey’s book The Intellectuals and the Masses, in which Carey writes about Woolf’s violent hatred of the working class, Hermione Lee defended Woolf’s prejudice:
I want to praise her for her malice and see it as a vital aspect of her energy and style. Stroll through the pages of the letters and diaries and you come away with handfuls of shining aphorisms. It is like reading Oscar Wilde, or Dorothy Parker.
Up to a point Lord Cropper! Lee elided the question of which parts of Woolf can be so defended. As you look through Woolf’s diaries, you find that the poor are ‘detestable’, ‘imbeciles’ ought to be ‘killed’, traveling down Kensington High Street she almost vomited ‘with hatred for the human race’. There’s also a passage where she compares black people to ‘chimpanzees’. Oscar Wilde? Not quite.
It is of course very interesting to see how Woolf modulated her prejudices when she wrote fiction, but Lee’s flat-out defence is the same as the general denial of Keynes’s belief in eugenics. What would a modern Strachey make of Keynes or Woolf? Or Strachey himself, who was quite the “Eminent Edwardian”.
Here is Strachey, by the way, talking about the working class—
It was queer finding oneself with four members of the lower classes — two of them simply roughs out of the street — filthy dirty — crammed behind a screen in the corner of the room, and told to undress. For a few moments I realised what it was like to be one of the lower classes — the appalling indignity of it! To come out after it was all over, and find myself being called “sir” by policemen ticket collectors was a distinct satisfaction.
The Bloomsbury Group loved to puncture reputations and we love to inflate theirs. They were, very often, as sanctimonious as their predecessors.
To defend as an emblem of high civilization someone who was quite so deeply prejudiced while defending the prejudice cannot work. I wonder how many of the misogynistic remarks in the diaries of Woolf’s contemporaries Lee would be willing to praise as “shining aphorisms”? No-one wishes to defend T.S. Eliot’s anti-semitism or Churhill’s racism (ideologues aside). Woolf herself, of course, was smart enough to know what had to stay in the diaries and what was publishable.
And yet, Virginia Woolf believed “the Bloomsbury group’s triumph is in having worked out a view of life which was not by any means corrupt or sinister or merely intellectual; rather ascetic and austere indeed.”
The Bloomsburys all knew Keynes. He learned from them, a great deal, but what did they learn from him? Their “view of life” would have benefited from his ideas.
But this is all besides the point. We ought to not to be making them into such exemplars: they cannot personally bear the moral weight put upon them. Nor should they.
What will last from the Group is mostly Woolf’s work, with some parts of Strachey such as the Queen Victoria.1 Will is right about Fry and Bell. Vanessa’s paintings are good, but a lot of the work beyond Woolf is rightly relegated. She is unavoidable, marvelous, a great genius who is frequently indefensible. I do not think of her as Bloomsbury, though I do think of Bloomsbury as sociologically important to her work.
They were an important cultural movement—especially the Hogarth Press,—but I say, keep the best work and ignore the “view of life”. Ultimately, their class kept them insulated from much of the world and shaped many of their views. This gave them many advantages but also many disadvantages.
If you wish to defend them as a group, you may be able to accept the side-effects of that social isolation. (Much of the work beyond Woolf and Strachey doesn’t escape that social isolation.) Otherwise, you are free to admire Woolf’s genius and not make her into a saint that doesn’t fit her own pedestal. We do not need to admire the lives to admire the work.
She was a genius. That ought to be enough.
The simple fact is that Strachey exaggerated, distorted, and elided all the way through Eminent Victorians, often making grossly unfair claims to fit his aesthetic and ideological agenda. He is fun to read, but only in a state of ignorance.