Bloomsbury Group Archives - Page 10 of 11

Thoby Stephen

February 1, 2013 by Roy Johnson

original founder-member of the Bloomsbury Group

Julian Thoby Stephen was born in 1880, the elder son of Leslie Stephen and his wife Julia. His younger brother Adrian Stephen (b. 1883) became a psychoanalyst; his elder sister was the artist Vanessa Bell (b. 1879), and his younger sister was the novelist Virginia Woolf (b. 1882).

Because his mother had previously been married to the publisher Herbert Duckworth, Thoby had as half brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, both of whom were part of the large family that lived at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington.

His education began at Evelyn’s, a preparatory school. After failing to gain a place at Eton, he was sent to Clifton College in Bristol, which unlike most other public schools at the time placed an emphasis on science in its curriculum and was less concerned than most with social elitism. He studied Latin and classics, and from there he won an exhibition to Trinity College Cambridge.

At Cambridge he met Lytton Strachey and was considered for but not elected to the quasi-secret debating group called the Apostles whose other members around the same time included John Maynard Keynes and Leonard Woolf. Strachey fell in love with Thoby, attracted to his good looks, stature and masculine physicality: he nicknamed him ‘The Goth’.

When their father Sir Leslie died in 1904, the family house was sold and Thoby moved with his brother Adrian and two sisters to set up home in Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. They had found the Victorian atmosphere of Hyde Park Gate very oppressive, and moving to a district of London which at that time was not at all fashionable gave them a sense of slightly risque bohemianism.

Thoby invited some of his old Cambridge friends, along with writers E.M.Forster, Clive Bell and David Garnett, plus artist Duncan Grant, to a Thursday evening discussion group – which was effectively the birth of what came to be known (later) as The Bloomsbury Group. Leon Edel captures the impression he made on those around him in his psycho-analytic study Bloomsbury: A House of Lions

He was a solid male presence. Lytton said that Thoby was ‘hewn out of living rock’. His character was ‘as splendid as his appearance, and as wonderfully complete’. Leonard, half a century later, said that Thoby ‘had greater personal charm than anyone I have ever known. Thoby was loved alike by the Cambridge intellectuals and the hedonists. He shared with Clive Bell a delight in the out-of-doors—hunting, bird-watching, riding, walking, fishing. Thoby shared with Leonard a lively interest in politics, in philosophy—always with that poise and detachment out of which large figures are made. He shared with Vanessa a delight in form and colour and was himself a excellent draughtsman.

The next few years of his short life are rather a mystery – something his sister Virginia made into the central feature of her first great experimental novel, Jacob’s Room. The story is a ‘portrait’ of her brother – a composite of how he is perceived differently by the various people in his life

Thoby was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in 1906, but later the same year he contracted typhoid whilst on holiday in Greece, dying shortly afterwards. His ashes were scattered on his mother’s grave in Highgate Cemetery.

The Bloomsbury Group is a short but charming book, published by the National Portrait Gallery. It explores the impact of Bloomsbury personalities on each other, plus how they shaped the development of British modernism in the early part of the twentieth century. But most of all it’s a delightful collection of portrait paintings and photographs, with biographical notes. It has an introductory essay which outlines the development of Bloomsbury, followed by a series of portraits and the biographical sketches of the major figures.

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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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Thrown to the Woolfs

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Leonard and Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press

John Lehmann joined the Hogarth Press as a trainee manager in 1931 when it was in the full flush of its first success. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse had just been published, as well as T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land and Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude. This was to be the first of two periods of engagement with the Press, the second of which lasted until 1946. Thrown to the Woolfs his account of publishing and the literary world of the 1930’s is dominated by the figure of Leonard Woolf, whose own account of the Hogarth Press in his Autobiography confirms almost all of what Lehmann says – though they differed over issues of policy.

It’s a rather unglamorous world of working strict office hours in crowded basement rooms, with “a ramshackle lavatory, in which old Hogarth Press galley proofs were provided as toilet paper”. He was delighted to be mixing with some of the major figures of the modernist period, as well as the up-and-coming writers of the day. There are sketches of writers of the period with whom Lehmann dealt: Michael Roberts, William Plomer, and Christopher Isherwood, whom he introduced to the Press as the Great Hope of English Fiction (which people believed at the time).

He does his best to be fair to Leonard Woolf, and his portrait corresponds accurately to that which one gains from other accounts, including Woolf’s own:

Leonard himself was, in general, cool and philosophical about the ups and downs of publishing: his fault was in allowing trifles to upset him unduly. A penny, a halfpenny that couldn’t be accounted for in the petty cash at the end of the day would send him into a frenzy that often approached hysteria… On the other hand, if a major setback occurred – a new impression, say, of a book that was selling fast lost at sea on its way from the printers in Edinburgh – he would display a sage-like calm, and shrug his shoulders.

It’s quite obvious from his account that although he was being employed in commerce as a publisher’s assistant, to write adverts, promote sales, and check proofs, his heart was set on being a ‘poet’ himself. The tensions he felt with Leonard Woolf became more serious, and within two years of securing what he at first thought of as his dream job, he gave in his notice and left under a very dark cloud.

He then gives an account of his wanderings in central Europe, inspired by Rilke’s notion that “In order to write a single verse, one must see many cities” (not having read Emily Dickinson, it would seem). Much of this part of the story revolves around Christopher Isherwood and Lehmann’s efforts in publishing the collection New Writing. But in 1938, having made up with the Woolfs, he bought out Virginia’s share of the Press and rejoined it as manager and full partner.

The theme then becomes ‘How does one run a publishing company during a war?’. The odd thing is that despite paper rationing, despite being bombed out of its premises in Mecklenburgh Square, and despite having to transfer the Press and its business to Letchworth, sales rose, because of general shortages:

Books that in peacetime, when there was an abundance of choice, would have sold only a few copies every month, were snapped up the moment they arrived in the shops.

Priority was given to keeping Virginia Woolf’s works in print even after her death, as well as the works of Sigmund Freud which the Press had started to publish. Other writers whose work appeared around this time were Henry Green, Roy Fuller, and William Sansom.

However, following Viginia’s death in 1941, there remained only two essential decision makers on policy. Without her casting vote, the differences between them grew wider and led to clashes. Lehmann wanted to publish Saul Bellow and Jean Paul Sartre, but Leonard said ‘No’. There were also misunderstandings about income tax returns and the foreign rights to Virginia’s work.

When the final split between them came about, Leonard solved the problem by persuading fellow publisher Ian Parsons of Chatto and Windus to buy out John Lehmann’s share. Parsons was the husband of Trekkie Parsons, who lived with Leonard during the week and with her husband at weekends – so as well as sharing a wife, they became business partners.

John Lehmann eventually went on to found his own publishing company, and the Hogarth Press was absorbed into Chatto and Windus on Leonard’s death in 1969. This is an interesting account of their joint efforts – partisan, but reasonable and humanely argued.

For literary historians it’s an interesting account of English culture and letters in the 1930s and the war years. And it’s also a fascinating glimpse into the world of commercial publishing. Anyone who wants to make judgments about the rights and wrongs in the disputes between the principals should also read Leonard Woolf’s excellent Autobiography.

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John Lehmann, Thrown to the Woolfs, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978, pp.164, ISBN 0030521912

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Uncommon Arrangements

July 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

married life in London literary circles 1900-1939

Most people know about the strange personal relationships which existed amongst the Bloomsbury Group, of whom it was said that they were a “a circle of friends who lived in squares and loved in triangles.” But the truth is that many other people in the artistic and literary circles of the period 1910-1930 were making what might politely be called ‘experiments in living’, or less politely, ‘having your cake and halfpenny as well’. In Uncommon Arrangements Katy Roiphe takes six examples of marriages and partnerships which were tested almost to the limit. These people were consciously overthrowing the restraints they felt Victorian and Edwardian mores were placing upon personal liberty – particularly the right to have sex with whoever one chose.

Her examples include H.G.Wells whose wife Jane tolerated his long string of mistresses, including Rebecca West, the one featured here. Katherine Mansfield gave as good as she got from her faithless husband John Middleton Murry. The feisty Elizabeth von Armin (Katherine Mansfield’s cousin) clung masochistically to Earl Russell, even whilst he treated her with disdain and physical violence. Vanessa Bell lived with her lover Duncan Grant, who was a homosexual. Una Troubridge performed a slavish role as wife and helpmeet to her lesbian ‘husband’ Radcliffe Hall, whilst Hall (who called herself ‘John’) enjoyed a nine year affair with a young Russian Evguenia Souline.

The examples might reflect only the author’s tastes and enthusiasms, but in all of them the men come out worst as monsters of egoism, opportunism, double standards, and worse.

H.G. Wells treated his wife like a doormat, pleading that she could not meet his sexual needs, and all the time protesting that he loved her dearly. John Middleton Murry left his wife Katherine Mansfield on her own when she was suffering a terminal illness, and wrote endless letters saying how much he missed her. And Earl Russell (Bertrand Russell’s brother) engaged not one mistress alongside his marriage, but two. The same was true of Philip Morrell, who announced to his wife Ottoline that both his mistresses were pregnant, in the hope she would help him out of an embarrassing scrape – which she did.

The one exception she explores is Vanessa Bell, who managed to keep her husband Clive Bell, her lover Duncan Grant, and her ex-lover Roger Fry co-existing as friends together under the same roof without any overt friction.

Katy Roiphe reveals the facts and recreates dramatic episodes of these people’s lives in a successful journalistic manner, but when it comes time to analyse contradictory behaviour she often retreats behind rhetorical questions. Why did X tolerate this? Why did Y never leave him/her?

Her evidence for these accounts comes from what they left behind in letters and diaries. This is a slightly risky procedure, because what they said needs to be placed in its context. The motivation for saying something needs to be taken into account, and contradictions with other evidence noted.

But there’s a more obvious and serious weakness in her approach: it’s that she fails to recognise the legal and economic basis of marriage, and (to quote Frederick Engels) its relationship to the family, private property, and the state. She is more interested in comparing these social pioneers with the plight of contemporary relationships. As she rightly observes

Marriage is perpetually interesting; it is the novel that most of us are living in.

Of course, as Victoria Glendenning has observed, “physical fidelity was not greatly valued in the marriages of the British upper classes” – which is true, so long as the all-important conventions of inheritance are not disturbed. The niceties and social concerns of who couples with whom are something of a smokescreen; they are the superstructure of which concern for preserving inherited capital are the base. And as soon as we look at the economic foundations of these relationships, many of the mysteries evaporate immediately.

Jane Wells tolerated her husband’s flagrant infidelities because he was rich and kept her in economic security. Elizabeth von Armin kept the receipts for items she purchased for her own home, so as to be able to prove ownership in the event of a dispute with her husband Earl Russell – a dispute which did eventually take place in the courts of law.

Una Troubridge clung to her humiliating position as Radcliffe Hall’s lesbian ‘wife’ for nine years, and was rewarded by being made Solo Executrix to Hall’s will – whereupon she took economic revenge on her former rival.

In fact these cases of strange arrangements could have been made more acutely with other examples. She could have included Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville West, as well as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, both of whose marriages tolerated sexual plurality (though Virginia’s tolerance was never tested) as well as the most extraordinary union between Dora Carrington and Ralph Partridge, who lived together with the man they both loved, Lytton Strachey.

It might be that the solution found by Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackvill-West was easier to tolerate. They both had lovers of the same sex. Does this leave people less existentially threatened? (to sound for a moment like Katie Roiphe). But when Vita ‘eloped’ with Violet Trefusis, Nicolson and Dennis Trefusis chartered an airplane and flew across the Channel to bring them back.

This book raises a number of contentious issues which are still of interest today. Ho does one reconcile the desire for sexual freedom with the comforts and protection of pair-bonded monogamy? Can women ever have the same sort of freedoms as men unless they have economic independence?

It’s a readable and very stimulating narrative, but it lacks a serious theoretical underpinning – though she does in the end show that many of her chosen examples, no matter how radical they appeared to be on the surface, were at a structural level clinging to the Victorian conventions they thought they were rebelling against. After all, the Bloomsbury radicals were still summoned to breakfast, luncheon, and dinner by bells rung by servants at fixed times throughout the day.

But readers who don’t already know the shenanigans and the apparently ‘curious arrangements’ of this sub-group will be very entertained. This book doesn’t pretend to answer any of these questions, but it presents examples of pioneers who thought the struggle worth fighting for.

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Katie Roiphe, Uncommon Arrangements, London: Virago, 2008, pp. 343, ISBN 1844082725

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Vanessa Bell a biography

July 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Bloomsbury painter, matriarch, and bohemian

Vanessa Bell is best known as the sister of Virginia Woolf, but she was a distinguished artist in her own right, and her reputation has risen in recent years, along with other women artists such as Dora Carrington and Gwen John. Her father Leslie Stephen was a literary figure (editor of the Dictionary of National Biography but he encouraged Vanessa’s early enthusiasm for painting and drawing, and in 1901 she entered to study at the Royal Academy. Then following her father’s death she moved with her sister Virginia and their younger brother Adrian to live in Gordon Square.

When their elder brother Thoby brought home his friends Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Saxon Sydney-Turner from Cambridge, it was there that the Bloomsbury Group began. She married Clive Bell in 1906 and achieved what seemed like immediate happiness with him – yet within two years she was completely taken up with her son Julian, and Clive had resumed an affair with his previous lover Mrs Craven-Hill.

As a biographer, Frances Spalding is frank and explicit regarding the behaviour of secondary characters, but she protects her principal subject behind a smokescreen of evasion and omission. Even though she documents the movements and actions of her characters on what is often a day-to-day basis, Vanessa has been engaged in a sexual relationship with Roger Fry for several months before it is even mentioned, and then obliquely, as if it is solely his decision:

Roger Fry was still legally married. Discretion necessarily surrounded his affair with Vanessa which at first was kept from Clive

She is on much stronger ground when discussing the development of Vanessa Bell’s painting. The influence of Roger Fry, the Post-Impressionists, and her exposure to French art (Gaugin, Derain, Picasso, Braque) are traced quite intelligently and linked well to the illustrations in the book which have been selected to represent some of her most important works.

Despite Frances Spalding’s efforts to turn her into a saint, Vanessa Bell emerges as a fairly scheming egoist – quite content to keep both the legal and sexual connection with her husband intact, whilst developing her affair with Roger Fry, then replacing him with Duncan Grant, and keeping all three in her orbit – which Spalding interprets as an example of generosity of spirit. On their part maybe, but on hers?

When Duncan Grant (who was a homosexual) makes her pregnant, the resulting child (Angelica) is passed off as Clive Bell’s for the sake of propriety and probably economics (given the amount of money which Bell’s family was pumping into hers). It was something which had fairly dire consequences for the girl, as she documents in her own version of events, Deceived with Kindness. But all this is passed over with very little comment.

Despite all the bohemianism, everything is based on a foundation of rock-solid middle-class economics: multiple property ownerships; a permanent retinue of servants (cook, housemaid, nurse, housekeeper); and stock-market investments carefully managed by John Maynard Keynes. Since he was at the time was an advisor to the Treasury, this is something we would today call insider trading. It’s is a world where bells (not Bells) rang at one for lunch, five for tea, and dinner at eight.

In the 1920s and 1930s Vanessa divided her time between Charleston (the much decorated house that she shared with Duncan Grant) and Cassis in France, where she helped to popularise the Cote d’Azur amongst artists. Her exhibitions were quite successful, and she had commissions for decorative work.

It’s often said that she retreated into a reclusive lifestyle at this time, but she flits from Paris to Rome, and back to London and Sussex at a dizzying rate, and Spalding’s pages are dense with the names of writers, artists, and upper-class socialites, plus Duncan Grant’s gay hangers-on (who presented a constant threat to their partnership).

Then there comes a period of personal loss: the death of Lytton Strachey, followed by Roger Fry, and most damaging of all her son Julian (killed in the Spanish Civil War) and her sister Virginia’s suicide. Further losses were sustained in the post-war years, but she continued to paint and complete decorative commissions.

But the later years of her life were dominated by her pleasure at being a grandparent [always much easier than being a parent] and though she became something of an establishment figure (sitting on artistic committees) her retreat in the last two decades of her life was into the pleasures of what was left of her family and friends.

Despite my reservations about the picture created here, this is a thorough and a scholarly biography, with all its sources fully documented. It’s simultaneously the complete account of a life, a rich documentary on the Bloomsbury Group, and a historical account which begins in the Victorian era and ends in modern post-war Britain.

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Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell, London: Macmillan, 1987, pp.399, ISBN 0333372255

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Vanessa Bell biography

September 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

artist, lover, matriarch

Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) is best known as the sister of Virginia Woolf – but in fact she was a talented artist in her own right. She was born in May 1879 at Hyde Park Gate, in central London, the eldest of four children of Leslie Stephen, a Victorian scholar and writer, and his second wife Julia Duckworth. Vanessa like her sister was largely educated at home, but they were both encouraged to develop their individual talents. Vanessa started having drawing lessons, and in 1899 she entered the Royal Academy.

Following her mother’s death in 1895, Vanessa took on the role of housekeeper for the family. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was rather demanding, and Vanessa struggled to balance this domestic role with trying to develop her artistic interests. However, her father died in 1904, so she was released from this responsibility. The family home was sold and she moved with her sister and two brothers, Adrian and Thoby, to a start a new and emotionally more liberated life at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury.

The move to their new home enabled Vanessa and her sister and brothers to entertain their own friends. On Thursday nights Thoby invited his literary friends from Trinity College, Cambridge University to the house, and Vanessa started the ‘Friday Club’, a meeting for artists. The Bloomsbury Group grew out of these meetings of artists and writers.

Vanessa Bell, Frances Spalding’s excellent biography, records the effects of this liberating move. One of Thoby Stephen’s friends at university was Clive Bell. In 1905 he asked Vanessa to marry him, but she declined. She also rejected a second proposal from him a year later. (Virginia did the same with Leonard Woolf.) Her reasons were that although she valued his friendship, she did not want to be married.

However, after the sudden death of her brother Thoby from typhoid fever in 1907, she changed her mind and accepted him. They had two sons – Julian and Quentin – both of whom went on to become writers. Vanessa continued to paint, but her time was increasingly taken up with looking after the children. In 1910 they met Roger Fry when he came to speak at the ‘Friday Club’, and the following year they went on holiday with him to Greece and Turkey.

When she became ill on holiday, Fry nursed her through the illness, and they started an affair. She and Clive nevertheless remained friends, and Clive continued to support her financially, but he resumed a relationship with a previous mistress. Such is Bloomsbury, and there is more to come.

Another artist who joined the Bloomsbury Group was Duncan Grant. Vanessa admired his work and bought one of his paintings. The Art of Bloomsbury shows via beautiful colour reproductions how Bell, Fry, and Grant influenced each other. In time she became close to Grant, and despite the fact that he was a promiscuous homosexual, she started an affair with him. This displaced Roger Fry, who was miffed but remained friends and part of the Bloomsbury Group.

She and Duncan Grant were devoted to each other and lived together for the rest of her life. They had a daughter, Angelica, who they pretended was the daughter of Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell. This deceit was maintained until the girl was nineteen years old. She records her own account of this dubious episode in her memoir Deceived with Kindness.

During the First World War, Vanessa and Duncan Grant moved to the Sussex countryside, so he could avoid conscription. They rented Charleston Farmhouse, and moved there in October 1916 with Vanessa’s children and also the writer David Garnett, who was Duncan’s current lover.

Duncan and Vanessa chose rooms for their studios at Charleston and immediately started to decorate the house. The walls, fireplaces, door panels, and furniture were all decorated to harmonise with their paintings, and Omega fabrics and ceramics were incorporated into the overall décor.

Clive Bell came to visit his sons, and Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived only four miles away. Other guests included Maynard Keynes and his wife the Russian dancer Lydia Lopokova and Lytton Strachey and his sisters. Amateur dramatics were a popular form of entertainment at Charleston. There were a number of pageants and drama shows put on between the wars – what came to be called ‘The Long Weekend’. Virginia Woolf satirises a country house pageant in her last novel Between the Acts.

The thirties were a time of personal difficulty for Vanessa. Roger Fry, with whom Vanessa had remained close, died after a fall in 1934, and in 1937 her son Julian was killed while serving as an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War. More unhappiness followed with the suicide of her sister Virginia in 1941, and estrangement from her daughter Angelica in 1942. This was caused by a twist which illustrates the complex personal relationships amongst the Bloomsbury Group.

Angelica discovered the truth about the identity of her real father only when she was nineteen, and then much against her mother’s wishes, and in a manoeuvre which you do not need a brass plaque on your front door to understand, she married David Garnett, her father’s former lover, who was twenty-six years older than her.

Charleston became a full-time home again during the Second World War as it was safely out of reach of the bombs falling on London, and Vanessa continued to live there for part of each year until her death in 1961. Duncan kept the house on for a few years longer but it was too large for him and he eventually moved out. The house is now maintained by The Charleston Trust who have renovated and opened it to the public.