Biography Archives - Page 2 of 13

Bloomsbury Recalled

May 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

memoirs and portraits of Bloomsberries from an insider

Quentin Bell is the son of Clive Bell and Vanessa Bell, the nephew of Virginia Woof, and the friend of many of the major figures in the Bloomsbury Group. Bloomsbury Recalled is his scrapbook of reminiscences focused on some of its major figures, plus one or two minor characters many people will not have heard about. The first part of his memoir concerns his parents. He treads carefully between respect for their individuality and an objective account of their behaviour.

This even stretches to his description of a turning point in family life when his mother, still married to his father Clive, but entangled in a romantic liaison with the artist Roger Fry, realises that she is actually in love with the homosexual Duncan Grant, with whom she spent the rest of her life. This seems to epitomise Bloomsbury lifestyles without a doubt.

He also deals in separate chapters with Duncan Grant and his proclivity for rough trade; David Garnett and his relationship with Quentin Bell’s own ‘sister’ Angelica – who was actually the daughter of Duncan Grant; John Maynard Keynes who switched from men to a Russian ballerina and whilst being an important economist also became a farmer and landholder, seeking to create a feudal aristocratic lineage out of nothing.

There are also some surprising details – Leonard Woolf teaching his visitors to play bowls and keeping a pet monkey; Desmond MacCarthy, like something out of a novel by George Meredith, a man with eternal promise who did not deliver; E.M.Forster setting his trousers on fire during a visit to the Woolfs at Monks House; and Matisse boring everybody rigid with his vanity and egoism on a visit to the Stracheys. He also supplies brief glimpses of minor figures such as the art critic and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, and Ethyl Smyth, the pipe-smoking lesbian composer who fell in love with Virginia Woolf.

He writes with a rather touchingly old-fashioned naivety (‘Virginia broke her fast in bed’) and he certainly reaches into a rich lexicon of outdated terms (‘sodomy’, ‘catamite’, ‘buggery’, ‘pederast’) to describe the activities of Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes. He’s also good at bringing out contradictions which might surprise some people today – examples of great family wealth and yet Spartan living conditions, and upper class connections and yet socialist sympathies.

Don’t expect any rigour or consistency in chronology, place, or even subject. These are just personal memoirs built around themes – rather like an old jazz pianist sitting down and tinkling out variations on some of his favourite songs. He doesn’t even bother describing scandals if he has written about them elsewhere.

There are no scalding revelations here, but anyone who has the slightest interest in the Bloomsbury Group and its members will be grateful for a first-hand account which captures the flavours and textures of a bygone era which nevertheless has much still to teach us about the politics and the aesthetics of daily life and personal relationships.

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Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury Recalled, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, pp.234, ISBN 0231105657

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Bloomsbury: A House of Lions

June 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

biographical portraits of Bloomsbury Group principals

It’s easy to make fun of the Bloomsbury Group, because they were a privileged upper-class clique; they were often snobbish; and they created personal relationships of extraordinary complexity. But Leon Edel takes a balanced and largely sympathetic view which helps to bring out their positives:

they were a group of rational and liberal individuals with an arduous work ethic and an aristocratic ideal…They had a passion for art; they liked the fullness of life…They wrote. They painted. They decorated. They built furniture. They sat on national committees. They achieved a large fame…They criticized the Establishment but, unlike most critics, they worked to improve it. They hated war. Some refused to fight; others believed they had to see the 1914-18 conflict through to the end. All actively worked for peace.

His account follows the unusual structure of starting with a portrait of one character, then passing on to another when the two meet. For instance, at Trinity College Cambridge, Leonard Woolf (stoic, disciplined, intellectual) meets Clive Bell (lightweight, bon viveur, artistic dreamer) and before long they both form friendships with Lytton Strachey (clever, lofty, neurasthenic).

Shortly afterwards Thoby Stephen, John Maynard Keynes, and Sidney Saxon-Turner join them as members of the Apostles, and all of them come under the influence of G.E.Moore, who published his influential Principia Ethica in 1903.

Edel’s account takes very much a psychological view of these characters – and yet it is from a distance. There is very little personal detail. You would never know from his opening chapters that Strachey and Keynes were lovers for instance.

Once the Cambridge connection is made, other characters are introduced: the charming Desmond MacCarthy, and Leslie Stephen, visiting his son Thoby in his own alma mater. He brings with him his two daughters Vanessa and Virginia, up for the May Ball. It is like the plot of a novel unfolding.

The individual studies are not biographical in the conventional sense. There is no attempt to document historical facts. Instead, they are impressionistic, psychological, and unashamedly subjective – though clearly based on detailed knowledge. This method has some interesting results when dealing with such topics as the sexual rivalry between the Stephen sisters, or meditating on the imagery of mirrors and death in Virginia’s writing.

After they all left Cambridge, Thoby Stephen began the Thursday Club in Gordon Square at which members were invited to discuss topic such as The Good, The Beautiful and Truth. Then Vanessa (less intellectual) established the Friday Club where the subject was Art – preferably modern.

Much of the rest of the story is reasonably well known. When Vanessa marries Clive Bell, Virginia and her younger brother Adrian set up a separate home in Fitzroy Square. Then Vanessa takes up with Roger Fry as a lover – only to replace him with Duncan Grant soon afterwards.

Edel covers the strange but ultimately successful marriage of Virginia and Leonard Woolf (though omitting to mention that Vita Sackville-West was for some time her lover); the impressive achievement of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians; and Maynard Keynes’ work at the Treasury and his role in the Versailles Treaty, which culminated in his resignation and the writing of Economic Consequences of the Peace.

His main focus is on the period 1900 to the 1920s – for that is when he sees the essential spirit of the group forming and having its strongest influence. By the 1930s a change of zeitgeist meant the modernist baton was passed on to a younger generation – though many Bloomsbury members (Duncan Grant and Leonard Woolf, for instance) carried on working into the 1960s and 1970s.

So despite its psychological approach, this is not a volume for gossip and tittle-tattle. For that you will need to consult other memoirs and biographies. But what Edel brings to this group portrait are his biographical skills, his enormous literary erudition, and an imaginative respect for his subjects.

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Leon Edel, Bloomsbury: A House of Lions, London: Penguin, 1988, pp.288, ISBN 0140580247

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Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

alternative lifestyles amongst modernist bohemians

What are Bohemians? Are they people who choose poverty in order to produce works of art – or characters who dress flamboyantly, take drugs, and parade up and down Kings Road in Chelsea, hoping to become famous? Well, it appears it can be either or both of those things – and more besides. Elizabeth Wilson brings together both major and minor bohemian figures from two centuries and both sides of the Atlantic in a scholarly attempt to define the phenomenon. She identifies the key element of Bohemia as a gravitation towards the city, to be free of the constraints of provincial life.

And she opts for Paris as its true birthplace – despite offering Byron as the first great Bohemian figure, though she does follow him with Arthur Rimbaud and Oscar Wilde who have stronger Parisian connections. Her chapters are built on themes, and the content can be both chronologically lose and geographically disconcerting. One minute it’s the opening night of Alfred Jarry’s scandalous Ubu Roi, next it’s California’s Venice Beach in the 1950s, and then on without pause to Viv Stanshull setting fire to himself in bed in 1995.

But at least this does have the virtue of suggesting that what she calls Bohemia can exist at any time and in any place. She speaks of it in the past tense, and yet there’s every reason to believe that this sort of world still exists – though as Malcolm Cowley, speaking of Greenwich Village in the 1920s observed, “Bohemia is always yesterday”.

She’s particularly good on the role of women in relation to Bohemianism – whether as muse to a male artist (Elizabeth Siddall, Alma Mahler) or as long-suffering wife-supporter (Dorelia John, Caitlin Thomas). But I think she’s stretching her notion of Bohemia rather for including relatively successful female artists such as Louise Colet and George Sand.

Despite her scholarly approach, her prose style occasionally slides into a poetic mode, as in her comments on the relationship between cafe life and smoking:

To smoke was more than a way of passing the time. It was the classic ‘displacement activity’ which gave coffee drinkers who had long since emptied their cup, lovers who had been stood up, and intellectuals who had lost their ‘circle’ the feeling that they were doing something, had a purpose. I smoke, therefore I am. Smoking orchestrated time, gave it a rhythm, punctuated talk, theatrically mimed masculinity and femininity, was the intellectuals’ essential accessory, and was also an erotic gesture, enhancing the mystery of some unknown drinker seated at her table, veiled in a bluish haze.

Her chapters are packed with interesting characters and rich in social history. She covers the surrealists, Parisian night life, and the cult of negritude in the 1920s, symbolised so magnificently by Josephine Baker.

Yet despite several attempts, she never gets round to defining bohemianism successfully. She simply chains together various types of outsider or larger-than-life figures. Sometimes her subjects are members of a quasi-artistic sub class, but often they are just alcoholics, scroungers, and hangers-on.

There’s a big difference between someone who produces great works of art but dies young (Modigliani) and someone like Marianne Faithful (mentioned more than once) who does very little except take drugs and who is no more than a talent-less has-been, .

Her book could do with a different title. Many of the people she describes were not really bohemian – just famous, dissipated, or so rich they could do as they pleased. Other were neither glamorous nor outcast. Some were fat, ugly, and badly dressed, and others cast themselves out simply by choosing not to work. But it’s a fascinating collection of portraits nevertheless.

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Elizabeth Wilson, Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts, London: Tauris, 2003, pp.275, ISBN: 1860647820

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Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Virginia Woolf’s previously unpublished early works

This is an unusually exciting event for Woolf fans – the first publication of an undiscovered notebook which had been lost for seventy years. Carlyle’s House was written in 1909 when Virginia Woolf was living with her brother Adrian in Fitzroy Square. She was struggling with her first Novel, The Voyage Out and wondering if she would ever be married. It was discovered only a couple of years ago, in Birmingham. The contents of the notebook (which she made herself, by hand) is a series of seven portraits written, as she says of them herself as a sort of artist’s notebook: “the only use of this book is that it shall serve for a sketch book; as an artist fills his pages with scraps and fragments, studies of drapery – legs, arms & noses … so I take up my pen & trace here whatever shapes I happen to have in my head … It is an exercise – training for eye & hand”.

They are an attempt to capture people visually, socially, and even morally. She is trying out the literary techniques which were later to make her famous – capturing the sense of life by a combination of shrewd observation, making imaginative connections between disparate subjects, and sliding effortlessly into philosophic reflections on the topic in question.

Some of her observations and commentary are amazingly snooty and condescending. Speaking of the children of Sir George Darwin who she visits in their campus home in Cambridge, she observes:

Margaret is much less formed; but has the same determination to find out the truth for herself, and the same lack of any fine power of discrimination. They enjoy things very much, and fancy that this is due to their superior taste; fancy that in riding about the streets of Cambridge they are building up a theory of life.

Even people’s furniture and choice of paintings and home decor is subject to a scrutiny so close that it becomes like a moral measuring tape:

In the drawing room, the parents’ room, there are prints from Holbein drawings, bad portraits of children, indiscriminate rugs, chairs, Venetian glass, Japanese embroideries: the effect is of subdued colour, and incoherence; there is no regular scheme. In short the room is dull.

As Christopher Reed argues in his authoritative study of this subject, Bloomsbury Rooms, the aesthetics of interior design and furnishing held amongst the Bloomsberries was shot through with a political ideology.

Woolf idolatrists will have to swallow hard to stomach the disgusting anti-semitism of her revealingly entitled piece ‘The Jews’ – for it is in fact a sketch of a single person, Mrs Loeb, who she had visited at Lancaster Gate.

There’s a commendably thorough introduction by Woolf specialist David Bradshaw, full explanatory footnotes, and a foreward by Doris Lessing which is so poorly written that it throws the style of the young Virginia Woolf into high relief. Bradshaw also offers a commentary on each sketch, setting it in context and bringing together all the observations from wide-ranging Woolf scholarship which throw light on these episodes.

This might be the work of the young and untried Woolf, and it might reveal the less-developed and even unappealing side of her character. But we know that she revised many of these attitudes and beliefs in later life. This is a brief collection which enthusiasts will not want to miss.

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Virginia Woolf, Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches London: Hesperus, 2003, pp.88, ISBN: 1843910551

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Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Art, love, and Bohemian life in Bloomsbury

Dora Carrington was a painter, an early feminist, and a figure who flits in and out of the lives of several members of the Bloomsbury Group, of which she was a significant member. This is the (so far) definitive biography of her troubled existence, which covers her day-to-day life in great detail – much of it based upon her voluminous correspondence. She grew up in a stiflingly conventional home in Bedford, loving her father and hating her mother.

With a talent for art, she was glad to get away from home at seventeen and spread her wings at the Slade, living in Gordon Square, right in the heart of Bloomsbury. Her style of painting and drawing was firmly traditional, and it fitted with the aesthetic of the Slade.

She was unaffected by the craze for Post-Impressionism which followed Roger Fry’s famous 1910 exhibition at the Grafton Galleries which Virginia Woolf claimed changed human nature that year. She cut her hair short in a style which became famous (‘crop head’) and two of her fellow students, ‘Chips’ Nevinson and Mark Gertler, promptly fell in love with her. This resulted in the first of her many love triangles, plus a form of unhappiness for all concerned. Although she behaved in a provocative manner, she refused to choose between them, or to have a sexual relationship with either of them.

In 1914 she met D.H. Lawrence and David Garnett, joined Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop, and was moderately successful in her decorative art work. Then in 1915 she spent a weekend amongst the Bloomsbury Group at Asheham which was to change her life. Lytton Strachey (who was in love with Mark Gertler) made a sexual pass at her, and she immediately fell in love with him.

Although she had kept Gertler at bay for five years, she gave herself to Strachey from the outset – then ended up having a sexual relationship with both men at the same time, even though Strachey was really a homosexual. [Remember – this is Bloomsbury.] Eventually she set up home with Strachey at Tidmarch Mill House and found her first sustained period of happiness.

Yes – that’s Dora Carrington

However, with a twist which typifies relationships in the Bloomsbury Group, they moved Ralph Partridge in to live with them. Carrington shared his bed, and Strachey fell in love with him. She then moved to live with Partridge in Gordon Square when he was given a job at the Hogarth Press, and then married him in 1921, even though she claimed she was still in love with Strachey – who with characteristic generosity paid for their honeymoon, and even joined them on it.

Not long afterwards she started an affair with her husband’s best friend, Gerald Brenan – around the same time that Partridge moved his new lover Valentine (actually Gladys) Dobree into their family home at Tidmarsh.

It is commonly assumed that Carrington sacrificed her artistic possibilities to the effort of looking after Strachey and Partridge, but Gretchen Gerzina argues that on the contrary, she was at her most productive when her domestic and personal life were settled and untroubled by romantic entanglements.

But the level of emotional masochism in her life is remarkable. Whilst her husband took his new lover Frances Marshall on holiday to Paris, he forbade her to even write to Gerald Brenan. She distracted herself from this humiliating position by starting an affair with Henrietta Bingham, the daughter of the American ambassador, a foray into Sapphism which made her regret she hadn’t started earlier. And this didn’t stop her sleeping with Gerald Brenan as well – so by this time she had certainly got rid of her earlier sexual reluctance.

Almost all the evidence for this personal narrative comes from letters. These people were super-communicative on paper. But the correspondence needs to be carefully interpreted – because they often wrote knowing that third parties might read what they said. Partridge not only banned Carrington from writing to Brenan, but insisted on reading all her correspondence. So she developed the strategy of inserting personal messages into secret addenda – which were nevertheless sometimes intercepted. And she was much given to reading other people’s private mail too.

As the menage she helped to create with Strachey and Partridge began to fall apart, she consoled herself with Bernard (Beakus) Penrose [brother of Sir Roland] in one last romance. But it was Strachey who remained her most lasting affection, and when he died (of undiagnosed stomach cancer) in 1932 she felt that she could not live without him. So she shot herself – aged just thirty-nine.

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Gretchen Gerzina, Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington 1893-1932, London: Pimlico, 1995, pp.342, ISBN 0712674209

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Charles Dickens biography

September 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

1812. Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth. His father was a clerk in naval pay office: hard-working but unable to live within income. Several brothers and sisters.

1822. Family settles in Camden Town, London. Father gets into financial trouble. Charles put to work in shoe-blacking factory (traumatic event for child). Father imprisoned for debt, and family (except Charles) visit him in Marshalsea Prison.

1827. Dickens becomes a clerk in Grays’ Inn firm of solicitors. Studies shorthand and becomes freelance reporter in the Courts of Law and Parliament. Praised for his speed and accuracy.

1830. Dickens meets Maria Beadnell and falls madly in love with her. She treats him coldly and calls him ‘boy’.

1833. Dickens publishes his first story – ‘Dinner at Poplar Walk’ in Monthly Magazine.

1836. Sketches by Boz successful early fiction earns 150 pounds for the copyright. Commissioned to write stories to accompany sporting prints. Invents Mr Pickwick for Pickwick Papers and the whole enterprise a big success. On the strength of this he marries Catherine Hogarth. Ten children follow. Dickens an enthusiastic family man fond of home entertainments and amateur theatricals.

1837.Writes his fiction as regular monthly instalments for magazine publication. Publication of Oliver Twist begins.

1838. Dickens and illustrator Hablot Browne travel to Yorkshire to see the boarding schools. Publication of Nicholas Nickleby begins.

1841. Publication of The Old Curiosity Shop begins.

1841. Travels in Scotland and United States. Disappointed by experience of the U.S.

1842. Begins work on Martin Chuzzlewit.

1844.Dickens and family travel to Italy. Successfully treated Madame de la Rue with hypnotism.

1846. Family tours in Italy, Switzerland and France, returning to London the following year. Dickens involved in philanthropic work for the rescuing of prostitutes and other issues of social concern. Publication of Dombey and Son begins.

1848. Dickens’ sister Fanny dies.

1849. Publication of David Copperfield begins.

1850. Begins his own weekly magazine, Household Words, which combines entertainment with a sort of reforming social purpose. Heavy work both writing and editing it. Dickens indefatigable journalist.

1851. His wife Catherine Dickens suffers a nervous collapse. John Dickens, the father of Charles Dickens, dies. His daughter Dora Dickens dies when she is only eight months old.

1852. Publication of Bleak House begins.

1853. Dickens gives the first of what were to be very popular public readings from his works.

1854. Publication of Hard Times begins.

1855. Secret meetings with Maria Beadnell, his first love, at her suggestion. Dickens disappointed by the experience. Family move to Gad’s Hill, Rochester. Dickens involved in theatrical ventures with friend Wilkie Collins (author of The Woman in White) through which he meets actress Ellen Ternan, who probably becomes his mistress. Publication of Little Dorrit begins.

1857. Hans Christian Anderson visits Gad’s Hill.

1858. Separates from wife with considerable publicity and bitterness. Begins new weekly, All the Year Round. Gives public readings and acts out dramatised scenes from his work which are very popular. Quarrels with Thackeray.

1859. A Tale of Two Cities published.

1860. Begins publishing Great Expectations in All the Year Round to boost flagging circulation. Burns quantities of his personal letters. Death of Dickens’ brother Alfred.

1863. Dickens’ mother dies. Reconciled with Thackeray.

1864. Death of Dickens’ son Walter in India. First installment of Our Mutual Friend is printed.

1865. Dickens is involved in the Stapelhurst railway accident, along with Ellen Ternan and her mother. Ten people killed and fifty injured. Dickens tries to prevent publicity, to avoid embarrassment.

1867. Despite poor health, embarks on punishing tour of American to give lucrative readings which help to boost sales of his magazine and novels.

1869. Dickens ordered by his doctors to discontinue the public readings. begins writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

1870. Further public readings as a ‘farewell tour’ in England. Private audience with Queen Victoria. More amateur theatricals. Dies of stroke. Buried in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, with full public honours.

The Oxford Companion to Dickens offers in one volume a lively and authoritative compendium of information aboutDickens: his life, his works, his reputation and his cultural context. In addition to entries on his works, his characters, his friends and places mentioned in his works, it includes extensive information about the age in which he lived and worked.These are the people, events and institutions which provided the context for his work; the houses in which he lived; the countries he visited; the ideas he satirized; the circumstances he responded to; and the culture he participated in. The companion thus provides a synthesis of Dickens studies and an accessible range of information.

Charles Dickens – web links

Charles Dickens at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, tutorials and study guides, free eTexts, videos, adaptations for cinema and television, further web links.

Charles Dickens at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary techniques, his influence and legacy, extensive bibliography, and further web links.

Charles Dickens at Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts of the major works in a variety of formats.

Dickens on the Web
Major jumpstation including plots and characters from the novels, illustrations, Dickens on film and in the theatre, maps, bibliographies, and links to other Dickens sites.

The Dickens Page
Chronology, eTexts available, maps, filmography, letters, speeches, biographies, criticism, and a hyper-concordance.

Charles Dickens at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of the major novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages

A Charles Dickens Journal
An old HTML website with detailed year-by-year (and sometimes day-by-day) chronology of events, plus pictures.

Hyper-Concordance to Dickens
Locate any word or phrase in the major works – find that quotation or saying, in its original context.

Dickens at the Victorian Web
Biography, political and social history, themes, settings, book reviews, articles, essays, bibliographies, and related study resources.

Charles Dickens – Gad’s Hill Place
Something of an amateur fan site with ‘fun’ items such as quotes, greetings cards, quizzes, and even a crossword puzzle.

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Charles Dickens critical guide

June 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

introductory study, background, and resources

This is an introductory survey of Dickens and the major parts of his work written for students and general readers who perhaps want to know more about this perennially popular novelist. Donald Hawes begins Charles Dickens – A Critical Guide with a sketch of Dickens’s life – the hardships he suffered as a child, his early success as a writer with Sketches by Boz, and then his rapid rise to be the most successful writer in both England and America.

It’s easy to forget Dickens’s astonishing productivity: he regularly composed more than one novel at once, wrote and published his own weekly newspaper, and contributed to other people’s journals as well. This is to say nothing of his prodigious physical energy: walks of up to forty miles a day taken at high speed.

And for all the close association with Englishness and London in particular, he also travelled widely in Europe, living in France and Italy on a regular basis.

What follows is chapters which offer accounts of his major works, alternating with studies of themes and issues important to his work as a whole.

The first give potted plot summaries as well as critical insights which will be particularly useful for beginners. The latter explore recurrent symbols and those topics which Dickens made his own – for example nineteenth century London and its relation to the labyrinthine system of jurisprudence which permeates Bleak House, or the prisons, most notably in Little Dorrit.

Donald Hawes clearly knows Dickens’s work inside out, and all his arguments are illustrated by well-chosen details from the best known works. In most cases he gives some notion of their contemporary reception, plus an account of how these reputations have lasted into the twentieth century.

There’s a very good chapter on Dickens’s unforgettable rogues, villains, and comic masterpieces, analysing why they so brilliantly conceived and executed. Another on the theatre places Dickens’s enthusiasm for the genre firmly in the realm of what we would now call ‘popular culture’ – since at that time, in mid nineteenth century there was little else the lower orders could enjoy. The same was also true of Dickens’s public readings from his own works – which both made him rich and probably shortened his life.

I hadn’t previously realised just how much Dickens’s friend John Forster had played in the composition, revision, and editing of his writing, but there’s a good chapter on Dickens’s relationship with his friends and contemporaries.

Other topics considered include prisons, education, doctors and hospitals, social class, Christmas, and even a section on animals – especially dogs and ravens (both of which Dickens possessed).

So, Hawes covers all the major novels, the stories, and some of the occasional writing. With this and the thematic chapters, plus an extensive bibliography of further reading, there’s everything here for someone who wants a comprehensive departure point for further Dickens studies.

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Donald Hawes, Charles Dickens, London: Continuum, 2007, pp.167, ISBN 0826489648

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Clive Bell biography

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

art critic and Bloomsbury socialite

Clive Bell (1881-1964) was raised at Cleve House in Seend, Wiltshire. His father William Heward Bell was a rich industrialist who had made his money in coal mining at Merthry Tydfil. He fashioned himself Squire and re-built part of the house in the style of a Tudor mansion, adding a family crest. Clive was educated at Marlborough (a ‘public’ school – that is, private), then at Trinity College Cambridge. It was there that he met Thoby Stephen, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and Leonard Woolf. After university, he went to study in Paris, originally intending to do historical research. He was very influenced by the art he saw there and switched his studies to painting.

Back in London, when his friend Thoby Stephen invited fellow students home to an evening discussion group in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, Clive met Thoby’s sisters Vanessa Stephen and Virginia Stephen. It was there that the network of friendships and liaisons was formed which became known as the Bloomsbury Group.

He became romantically attracted to Vanessa Stephen, but she turned down his first two proposals of marriage. However, in 1907, following the deaths of both her father and brother Thoby, she accepted him. They had two sons, Julian and Quentin, both of whom went on to become writers.

In 1909 he met Roger Fry by accident on a railway journey and became involved in the promotion of modern art which culminated in the famous Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1910. Fry became a close friend of the family, and in 1911 went on holiday with them to Greece and Turkey. When Vanessa became ill, it was Roger Fry who nursed her back to health, and the pair began an affair, leaving Clive Bell to turn his romantic attentions back onto an old flame, Mary Hutchinson (who also had affairs with both Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria).

He published his first major work, Art, in 1914. In this he set out his idea of ‘significant form’, which is a notion that foregrounds the importance of form in painting over its overt subject matter. Like almost all other members of the Bloomsbury Group, he was opposed to the first world war, and in 1915 published a controversial pamphlet, Peace at Once, calling for a negotiated settlement to the conflict. This was considered an outrageous suggestion by the establishment of the time, and his essay was burned by the Public Hangman.

His relationship with Vanessa had virtually come to an end, although the couple remained on friendly terms, and Clive was a regular visitor to the family home at Charleston in Sussex. Vanessa had in fact moved on from Roger Fry to Duncan Grant, and even though he was an active homosexual, they spent virtually the rest of their lives together.

However, Vanessa had another child, Angelica. The father was Duncan Grant, but for the sake of propriety, she was given Clive’s name and passed off for nearly twenty years as his daughter. This deception and its dramatic consequences are described in Angelica’s memoir Deceived with Kindness.

His friend from Cambridge, Lytton Strachey described the various facets of Bell’s personality:

His character has several layers, but it is difficult to say which is the fond. There is the country gentleman layer which makes him retire into the depths of Wiltshire to shoot partridges. There is the Paris decadent layer, which takes him to the quartier latin where he discusses painting and vice with American artists and French models. There is the eighteenth-century layer which adores Thoby Stephen. There is the layer of innocence which adores Thoby’s sister. There is the layer of prostitution, which shows itself in an amazing head of crimped straw-coloured hair. And there is the layer of stupidity which runs transversely through all the other layers.

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

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Twentieth century literature

Coltrane: The Story of a Sound

March 20, 2011 by Roy Johnson

biographical outline of a musical Odyssey

This is not a conventional biography but a study of the development of John Coltrane as a major figure in American musical culture in the two decades of major creativity that embraced his tragically short life. Ben Ratliff bases his study on a combination of interviews and his analyses of the recorded legacy – and he does this in a non-hagiographic manner. Indeed he seems almost over-critical of some of Coltrane’s early performances with Miles Davis, such as the Prestige sessions which were not under his control but part of the contractual obligations that Davis knocked out as quickly as possible (no planning, no rehearsals) in order to fulfil and escape his contract for the more lucrative one he had signed with Columbia.

Ratliff takes the story from the early recordings Coltrane made whilst he was still in the navy through his work in rhythm and blues bands to his seminal work with Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk, and then to his own quartet which made such an impact with Giant Steps – which turns out to be in this account the ne plus ultra of harmonically-based jazz music.

Ratliff is very good at explaining just why Coltrane’s music was so exceptional – his profound sense of musical structure, his grasp of harmonic sequences, his compositional imagination, and his ability to completely transform musical sequences into something nobody had ever heard before. Think of how he re-shaped a banal show tune such as My Favourite Things into a thundering anthem of black cultural affirmation.

There’s quite a bit of musical theorizing, and the weakness of basing judgements on interviews is that asking any artists what they think they are doing is that first of all they might not know themselves, and even if they say they do, they might not be able to articulate it properly. Their claims might not even be true. Music is an abstract art form. It doesn’t actually mean anything, even though it is a very powerful emotional force.

The two common approaches to musical analysis point in opposite directions. The formal approach says ‘Eb7 modulates into C#6’ which might be accurate and true, but tells us nothing about the nature or effect of such transitions. The other essentially romantic approach says ‘the heart-stopping modulations in the final eight bars resolve themselves into a majestic finale which express a surge of joy’. One approach seems dry as dust, the other is just subjective and emotional. Ratliff bravely attempts to combine the two.

The late 1950s and early 1960s were the high point in Coltrane’s creative life – and it might be significant that this was a period when he seemed to be free of drug addiction. After that, though Ratliff tries his best to make a case for the discordant, non-harmonic and unstructured music Coltrane produced towards the end of his career, it’s rather uncomfortable reading to be reminded of the descent into chaos that this ‘development’ represents (and I speak as someone who saw some of these concerts on his European tour with Eric Dolphy).

In the second part of the book he turns from biography to an essay on Coltrane’s influence on other musicians and a study of the development of his style. Placing this very firmly in a cultural and historical context, he reminds us that many other lesser names were more popular at the time. In the same year that Coltrane released My Favourite Things (30,000 copies sold), Atlantic’s best-selling jazz albumn was Les McCann and Eddie Harris’s Swiss Movement (500,000 copies). There are some excellent gems about the economics of night clubs and how much musicians were paid for their performances.

Coltrane’s influence is traced in the work of other jazz musicians, in the music of rock and pop groups, and in the social influence drawn from his music in the writings of jazz critics – most of whom were themselves understandably baffled by the ‘developments’ of the early 1960s onwards. Ratliff doesn’t shirk the fact that Coltrane lost a big percentage of his audience when he embraced the ‘free jazz’ movement which was so obviously both then and now a dead end. It’s also sadly possible that Miles Davis’s claim that Coltrane died from taking too much LSD might be true.

In fact the loss occurred at a time when the material ground in which jazz took root began to disappear. Night clubs, jazz clubs, and dance halls closed as popular culture in America changed in the late 1960s, and most jazz musicians found themselves out of work. Superstars made occasional rock-concert-like appearances, but many regular musicians either took up teaching or went back to jobs in the factory.

What makes this study much more than a conventional biography or appreciation is that Ben Ratliff takes his subject even beyond Coltrane’s death to examine both the continuation of his influence and the state of jazz in the last few decades. The prospects are fairly bleak, but he sees a small glimmer of hope in Coltrane’s influence as a successful leader of bands. Let’s hope it turns out to be the classic quartet or quintet at most – and not the noisy conglomerates in which he finished his career.

There’s an excellent bibliography to the book, and a full range of notes on all his sources, but no discography. However, he does make reference to a work in progress which has since been issued as surely the most authoritative account of Coltrane’s recorded work – Yasuhiro Fujioka and Lewis Porter’s monumental The John Coltrane Reference Work.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, London: Faber and Faber, 2007, pp.250, ISBN: 0571232744

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David Garnett biography

September 18, 2009 by Roy Johnson

author, editor, bookshop owner

David Garnett (1892-1981) was the son of Edward Garnett, an influential publisher’s reader and Constant Garnett, a translator who did a great deal to popularise the Russian classics in England. He first met members of the Bloomsbury group in 1910, but was not a regular member until 1914 when he became Duncan Grant’s lover.

Like most of the members of the Bloomsbury group, Garnett was a pacifist. In order to be exempted from military service during World War I, he and Duncan Grant moved to Wissett in the Suffolk countryside to become farm labourers. Although they were at first refused exemption by a tribunal, they appealed and were eventually recognised as conscientious objectors.

When Duncan Grant formed his lifelong relationship with Vanessa Bell, Garnett went to live with them at Charleston. What happened after that fully illustrates the complex personal relationships which characterise the Bloomsbury Group and the behaviour of its members. First of all in 1918, Vanessa gave birth to a child Angelica, which was fathered by Duncan Grant. But because Vanessa was still married to Clive Bell, the child was given to believe that Clive Bell was her father – a deception which was to have problematic consequences.

At Angelica’s birth, Garnett admired the child and wrote to Lytton Strachey “I think of marrying it. When she is 20, I shall be 46 – will it be scandalous?”

Quentin Bell was one of the last surviving members of the Bloomsbury circle. In Bloomsbury Recalled he offers a candid portrait gallery of major and peripheral Bloomsbury figures. His father, Clive Bell, married the author’s mother, Vanessa Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s sister) in 1907 but pursued love affairs while Vanessa, after a clandestine affair with art critic Roger Fry, lived openly with bisexual painter Duncan Grant, with whom she had a daughter. Clive, Duncan and Vanessa were reunited under one roof in 1939, and the author conveys a sense of the emotional strain of growing up in ‘a multi-parent family’. Along with chapters on John Maynard Keynes, Ottoline Morrell and art historian-spy Anthony Blunt, there are glimpses of Lytton Strachey, novelist David Garnett, and Dame Ethel Smyth, the pipe-smoking lesbian composer, who fell in love with Virginia Woolf.

Garnett operated a bookshop in Soho. In 1923 he married Rachel (Ray) Alice Marshall, a book illustrator. He had a success with his first novel Lady into Fox (1922) and its follow-ups A Man in the Zoo (1924) and The Sailor’s Return (1925).

When the marriage to Ray Marshall failed, he turned his attentions back to Angelica Bell (really Angelica Grant) who was now growing up. When she became nineteen, she found out the truth of her father’s true identity. A year later she married Garnett, her father’s former lover, just as he had profetically suggested twenty years earlier. This relationship was disapproved of by her mother Vanessa Bell, and it caused a rift between them which lasted for years. Angelica Garnett gives her side of this odd story in her memoir of Bloomsbury childhood, Deceived with Kindness.

Garnett also edited the letters of T.E.Lawrence and the novels of Thomas Love Peacock. Later in life he produced three autobiographical volumes: The Golden Echo (1953), The Flowers of the Forest (1955), and The Familiar Faces (1962).