Modernism Archives - Page 11 of 15

Some People (Harold Nicolson)

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

amusing character sketches, fictions, and memoirs

Harold Nicolson was a career diplomat, best known for the fact that he was married to Vita Sackville-West, who had a love affair with Virginia Woolf (and other women) and that despite his own homosexuality they kept going a marriage whose apparent success was recorded in their son’s account, Portrait of a Marriage. Nicolson blew this way and that in both literary and sexual terms, but in 1927 he produced a wonderful collection of portraits, Some People, which is part documentary and part fiction.

They are based on his experiences of public school and the diplomatic service. The idea he explained to a friend ‘was to put real people into imaginary situations, and imaginary people into real situations’. You can view this as a new literary form, alongside such works as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando or just a personal whim, but the result is surprisingly polished and amusing. The sketches are based upon just the sort of upper-class privileged life Nicolson had led – scenes of a childhood spent in foreign legations supervised by a governess; life as a boarder at Wellington College; and early postings amongst similar toffs at the Foreign Office.

In one story Nicolson accompanies Lord Curzon on a diplomatic peace mission to Lausanne where he is due to negotiate with Poincaré and Mussolini – but the whole of the tale is focused on the Dickensian figure of Lord Curzon’s valet who drinks too much and disgraces himself in comic fashion at a high-ranking gala.

The stories are written in the first person – and for someone who had the opinions for which Nicolson became infamous, they are refreshingly self-deprecating. The narrator is more often than not the character in the wrong, the person who has a lesson to learn from others or from life itself. Real people such as Nicolson himself, Marcel Proust, Princess Bibesco, and Winston Churchill flit amongst fictional constructions in a perfectly natural and convincing manner.

The world of public school and Oxbridge run straight through seamlessly into that of the diplomatic service, and even though Nicolson’s conclusions are that its stiff conventions should be challenged and even broken, his stories rest heavily on the shared values of the Old School Tie, letters of introduction, and the right accent.

They reminded me of no less than the early stories of Vladimir Nabokov (written around the same time) which similarly combine autobiographical memoirs with fictional inventions. And the style is similar – supple, fast-moving sentences, a fascination with foreign words and places, and the phenomena of everyday life pinned down with well-observed details.

There was a lake in front of the hotel, cupped among descending pines, and in the middle of the lake a little naked island, naked but for a tin pagoda, with two blue boats attached to a landing-stage of which the handrail was of brown wood and the supports of pink.

It was this that made me think again of Jeanne de Hénaut.

It is writing which is very sophisticated, and which ultimately flatters the reader – it draws you seductively into this world of privilege, clubishness, and money. And yet if he had written more, I should certainly want to read them.

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Harold Nicolson, Some People, London: Constable, 1996, pp.184, ISBN: 094765901

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Stanley Spencer

October 11, 2015 by Roy Johnson

visionary English modernist painter

Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) was an English painter from the early modernist period. He was the youngest child of a large middle-class artistic family who lived in Cookham, a small village on the Thames. The cultural ambiance in the household was one of music and church-going. Spencer had very little formal education, since his father had snobbish doubts about the local council school, but could not afford the fees for a private education. He ran his own private school in a shed in next door’s garden.

Spencer’s talent for drawing was encouraged by the wife of the local landowner. She suggested the Slade School of Art (where she had studied herself) and he was admitted and at his father’s insistence that he should not be subjected to any examinations, was allowed to bypass the written entrance requirements. He studied under Wilson Steer and the formidable Henry Tonks, and he was a contemporary of Mark Gertler, Richard ‘Chips’ Nevinson, Isaac Rosenberg, Dora Carrington, and David Bomberg.

self-portrait 1923

Being small, wearing glasses, and having the general appearance of a young boy, it was not surprising that he became something of a scapegoat and the butt of jokes amongst his fellow students, many of whom developed a life style that combined upper class raffishness with what we now think of as art school bohemianism. Nevinson called him ‘Cookham’, the village to which he travelled home by train every day. It was a nickname which stuck with him for the rest of his days at the Slade.

By the end of his first year Spencer had won a scholarship prize – though it was initially withheld from him on the technical objection that he had not taken the initial written entrance examination. Although he received very little instruction in painting whilst at the Slade, around this time he began to produce his now famous paintings of everyday life in Cookham village that also included religious figures and scenes from the bible (Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem).

Unlike some of his contemporaries at the Slade, he was not touched by the fashionable influences of the post-Impressionists, but continued painting in the same style as he had always done – a combination of realistic depiction with visionary subject matter. He also steered clear of all the intellectualising and theorising about the nature of Art that was rife amongst his fellow artists.

By 1912 he had twice won Slade prizes despite the fact that sometimes he had to work on the kitchen table at home, surrounded by his parents and brothers and sisters. He left the Slade in the same year, but was included in the second Grafton Gallery exhibition of post-Impressionists, alongside works by Picasso, Matisse, and Cezanne. Even though he behaved like a bucolic recluse, his work became sought after by collectors such as Eddie Marsh and Lady Ottoline Morrell, who bought his works both for her own collection and on behalf of the Contemporary Arts Society.

At the outset of war in 1914 he felt ambivalent about enlisting, but eventually joined the medical service and was posted to a recovery unit in an old lunatic asylum just outside Bristol. He hated the long hours, the drudgery, and the military discipline – but whilst there his painting The Centurion’s Servant caused a stir at the London Group exhibition in November 1915. He then volunteered for an overseas expeditionary posting, and was sent to Macedonia, which he found strangely exciting and exotic.

Swan Upping at Cookham (1915)

Spencer was pinned down in the Balkans whilst suffering from the irony that he had been asked to contribute to a war memorial. When the conflict finally ended he was given rapid transit back home – only to find that plans for the memorial had meanwhile been scrapped. However, he threw himself into the completion of one of his masterpieces, Swan Upping at Cookham which had been left unfinished at his conscription.

In 1925 his life changed quite dramatically. First he suddenly married a fellow Slade student Hilda Carline and he discovered a new subject for some of his later works – conjugal sex. The sudden change to his normally puritanical lifestyle presaged major disruptions. He moved back to live in Cookham trying (unsuccessfully) to recapture some of his earlier feelings and artistic inspiration. Then he met Patricia Preece, another former Slade student who was living in the village with her lover Dorothy Hepworth.

Spencer became obsessed with Patricia and eventually proposed a menage a trois with his wife Hilda, but she refused and divorced him. He immediately married Patricia who as a lesbian equally refused to consummate their marriage or even live in the same house. However, since she controlled his finances, when he signed over the deeds of his own home to her, his new wife forced him out, so he ended up with a wife, an ex-wife, and two children to support. Perhaps not surprisingly he had a nervous breakdown.

This period was also the source of one of his most controversial paintings – the Leg of Mutton Nude or to give the work its more correct title Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and His Second Wife (1937). This is an overtly sexual (though not erotic) portrait of Spencer and Patricia, with a joint of lamb in the foreground. It was never exhibited in his lifetime. Later, the outgoing president of the Royal Academy, Sir Alfred Munnings initiated a police prosecution against Spencer for obscenity. The irony in all this is that the portrait shows the bespectacled Stanley looking down longingly on the naked body of Patricia, the wife with whom he never had sex.

He undertook the enormous project of a decorated chapel at the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere, designing the chapel himself and modelling it on Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua. This work consisted of sixteen huge paintings depicting everyday scenes of shell-shocked troops in England and Macedonia, but with an emphasis on everyday events rather than the horrors of war. He was commissioned as a war artist during 1939-45 and completed paintings of shipbuilding on the Clyde which are now in national collections. But his main creative impetus was spent, and he died of cancer in 1956, the same year as he received a knighthood.

Stanley Spencer: illustrated biography – Amazon UK
Stanley Spencer: illustrated biography – Amazon US

Stanley Spencer (British Artists series) – Amazon UK
Stanley Spencer (British Artists series) – Amazon US

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Sylvia Beach

September 14, 2018 by Roy Johnson

Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) was an American-born bookshop owner and publisher who emigrated to Paris and became a central figure in the expatriate community between the first and second world wars. She is best known as the owner of the bookstore Shakespeare and Company and as the publisher of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922).

She was born in Baltimore, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and the grand-daughter of missionaries. At birth she was christened Nancy Woodbridge Beach, but she adopted the name Sylvia later. In 1901 the family moved to France when her father was appointed a minister at the American Church in Paris.

Sylvia Beach

Sylvia Beach (left) with Adrienne Monnier

She spent the next few years living in Paris until the family moved back to America when her father became a minister in Princeton. However, she made return trips to France, then lived in Spain and later worked for the Red Cross in Serbia.

During the later years of the First World War she went back to Paris as a student of French literature. She had very little formal education, though by the time she finally settled in Paris in 1916 she could speak three foreign languages – French, Spanish, and Italian.

In 1917, at the age of thirty, she entered Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop, joined the lending library, and found the woman who became her lover and life partner. She also discovered her vocation and in 1919 opened her own bookshop as Shakespeare and Company in a nearby former laundry. The business functioned as both a bookshop and a lending library. Both women’s enterprises were financed by their parents.

“My loves were Adrienne Monnier and James Joyce and Shakespeare and Company”

Primed with customers from Monnier who were interested in English literature, the new bookshop was an immediate success. One of her first loyal customers was Valery Larbaud who later became a translator of James Joyce’s work. Other early subscribers included Andre Gide, Eric Satie, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Joyce himself. Sylvia Beach formed an immediate bond with Joyce, who was then in the middle of writing Ulysses.

As far as the business was concerned, she was astonishingly inefficient. She kept almost no records, and didn’t even put prices on the books she was trying to sell. Hours were spent chatting to people who just happened to have called by – but she was well liked for being so receptive.

Beach took up the crusade on behalf of Joyce’s unpublished novel Ulysses when his principal benefactress Harriet Shaw Weaver failed to find people who would even set up the book in print.. It was considered ‘indecent’ by everyone – including Virginia Woolf.

When she decided to publish the novel herself she sent out publicity leaflets which had the interesting effect of attracting more American writers to visit her shop, eager for news of a work that was considered scandalous even before it was published. The visitors were also encouraged by a collapse of the Franc, which made living cheaper against the dollar.

Sylvia Beach poured all her time, money, and emotional resources into the production of Ulysses. Joyce sponged off her mercilessly – as he did off everyone else. The novel’s early years are now quite well known. It was vilified as ‘obscene’ and its author branded a ‘lunatic’. This only increased sales.

But not everyone was pleased. Gertrude Stein thought Shakespeare and Company was lowering the tone of the Left Bank by publishing indecent material. She also believed that the true genius of literary modernism was none other than her good self. She studiously avoided both Beach and Joyce at all cultural events.

Sylvia Beach

James Joyce

Beach stayed out of these social squabbles and concentrated on the task in hand. She began a game of cat and mouse with the authorities who wished to supress Joyce’s work. Copies of Ulysses were smuggled to America and England, and occasionally the customs officers would confiscate her parcels and destroy their contents. [My ‘old’ copy of the Bodley Head edition has this shameful record of prurient vandalism reproduced as a preface.]

She befriended more Americans in the next wave of expatriates – writer Ernest Hemingway and composers George Antheil and Aaron Copeland. In 1926 she brought out a fourth edition of Ulysses, which was printed with copies of revisions and corrections to the original text. Meanwhile Joyce had begun work on his next book Finnegans Wake which was to take him seventeen years to complete.

The cross-cultural fertilizations that took place in this period are well illustrated in the figure of John Dos Passos. He was a visitor to Sylvia Beach’s bookshop at the time he was writing Manhattan Transfer. He was naturally influenced by Ulysses, but he also met Soviet cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein with whom he discussed the techniques of collage, fast-cut editing, and montage, all of which he incorporated into his literary style.

Sylvia Beach

John Dos Passos

There was a small cloud on this endlessly sunny horizon when Ford Maddox Ford threatened to open a rival bookshop offering lower prices. Sylvia simply removed all his works from her own shop, his sales dropped, and his plans collapsed.

Whilst the fast sets of the Hemingways and the Scott Fitzgeralds passed their summers in month-long parties in Pamplona and Antibes, Sylvia and Adrienne retreated to an isolated farm in the Savoy mountains, living on fresh milk and sleeping in a hayloft.

By 1926 the American influence on Paris was in full spate. Josephine Baker was a succes de scandale in Le Revue Negre. Beach made her contributions to this fashion by organising a Walt Whitman exhibition and helping to promote the sensational performance of George Antheil’s Ballet Mechanique that ended in a riot.

But the American connection was not all sweetness and light. Samuel Roth, a notorious publisher in New York, brought out a pirated copy of Ulysses. The novel was not protected by copyright at this time because America had not signed the Bern agreement.

Sylvia Beach orchestrated an international protest, and meanwhile supported Joyce through gritted teeth when extracts from Work in Progress (which became Finnegans Wake) began to appear, much to general bewilderment. Harriet Weaver, his principal benefactress predicted that it would eventually become a ‘curiosity of literature’. History might prove her right.

In 1927 Beach’s mother was arrested in Paris on a charge of shoplifting in Galleries Lafayette. Rather than face the public humiliation of a trial, she committed suicide. Sylvia was devastated and, exhausted by her efforts to fight the Roth piracy, she put a little more distance between herself and Joyce.

Sylvia Beach

Ulysses – first edition

Around this time Samuel Beckett appeared and was added to the roster of unpaid ‘assistants’ to Joyce, who continued to cadge, borrow, and even steal money from anybody who had any.

This decade of license and excess – ‘The Roaring Twenties’ – came to an abrupt halt in October 1929 with the Wall Street crash. But not everyone suffered: Joyce continued to fund his lavish lifestyle with other people’s money and started the new age of austerity by biting the hand that had fed him for the previous ten years. He cheated Sylvia Beach out of the rights to Ulysses which she had gone to so much trouble to publish for him.

Yet with the burden of Ulysses removed, her financial position at the shop at first actually improved. But on the other hand, many of her expatriate American customers began returning to their homeland. The value of the dollar was falling, and European stormclouds were gathering. She was forced to sell off some of her precious first editions and manuscripts, and a ‘friends of Shakespeare and Company’ fund was established to keep the shop alive.

In 1936 Beach paid her first visit to America for twenty-two years. On return to Paris she found that a rival had moved in to live with her lover Adrienne. The political uncertainties of the late thirties were no good at all for business, and she only kept the shop going thanks to generous gifts from friends and a series of sponsored internships.

At the outbreak of war and the occupation of Paris by the Germans, Sylvia opted to stay put and keep the shop open. But when a Nazi officer threatened to close the business because she would not sell him a copy of Finnegans Wake, she hid her entire stock in an attic at the top of the building, where it remained throughout the war.

She was arrested in 1942 and interned at Vitell, later to be released following the influence of a friend in Vichy. At the liberation in 1944 she did not, contrary to popular myth, re-open the shop after it was ‘liberated’ by Ernest Hemingway. Instead, she organised help for her friends and began to write her memoirs.

Adrienne, her mentor, mother-figure, and lover committed suicide in 1955 to escape the double pains of rheumatism and Menieres disease. Beach lived on to establish a permanent home for her archive of Joyce materials at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and she died in her beloved Paris in 1962.

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Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties, London: Penguin, 1985, pp. 447, ISBN:

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T.S.Eliot biography

November 29, 2010 by Roy Johnson

education, poetry, marriages, Bloomsbury

T.S.Eliot (Thomas Stearns) was born in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1888. His father was a successful businessman, and his mother wrote poems. From 1898 to 1905 he attended Smith Academy where he studied French, German, Latin, and Ancient Greek. At the age of fourteen he began to write poetry, heavily under the influence of The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam which enjoyed a vogue around that time. He published his first poem in the Smith Academy Record when he was fifteen.

From 1906 to 1909 he studied philosophy at Harvard University, where he also discovered the poetry of Jules LaForgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. and the French symbolists. He wrote some of his early poems, including ‘Portrait of a Lady’ and the beginnings of ‘Prufrock’ and published in the Harvard Advocate.

He worked as a post-graduate teaching assistant in philosophy between 1909-1910 and then went to study philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. There he attended lectures by Henri Bergson and read poetry with Alain-Fournier.

He then returned to Harvard to study Indian philosophy and Sanskrit, and was awarded a scholarship to study at Oxford University. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 cut short a visit to Germany and his plans to study in Marburg. His short satiric poems. ‘The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock’ were published in Chicago, and in 1915 he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a Cambridge governess. By 1916 at Oxford he completed his PhD thesis on Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H.Bradley, but he did not turn up for the viva voce examination.

He became resident in London, and took up a number of jobs, including being a teacher, a bank clerk and assistant editor of the literary magazine Egoist. He also lectured at Birkbeck College which specialised in the teaching of adult students at the University of London. Bertrand Russell took an interest in Eliot’s work, introduced him to the Bloomsbury Group, and allowed the young married couple to stay in his London flat. This also gave Russell the opportunity to have an affair with Eliot’s wife.

He also taught French and Latin at a private school in Highgate where one of his students was a young John Betjemann. In 1917 he took a job working in the foreign accounts department of Lloyds Bank. ‘Prufrock and Other Observations’ was published at this time. Then on a visit to Paris in 1920 he met both James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, forming lasting friendships with both of them.

He became the London correspondent for the American literary magazine The Dial. and editor of The Criterion in 1922 when it was founded with the financial backing of Lady Rothmere, the wife of Lord Rothmere, owner of the Daily Mail. This was a highpoint year for Eliot, with the publication by the Hogarth Press of The Waste Land. In 1925 Eliot joined the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer, which later became Faber and Faber, where he remained as a director for the rest of his life.

Despite his literary success, Eliot’s private life was not happy, and he considered divorcing Vivienne, who was showing signs of mental instability. In 1927 he converted to a form of High Anglicanism and at the same time became a British citizen. Then when Harvard University offered him a visiting professorship for a year in 1932, he took the position, leaving Vivienne behind. On his return he arranged a legal separation from her and she was admitted to a mental hospital in Stoke Newington. He never visited her, and she died there in 1938.

In the 1930s T.S.Eliot turned his attention from lyric poetry to the production of verse dramas. Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion are open apologies for Christian religious belief. These were followed by essays and criticism which reaffirmed his belief in conservative traditionalism, then later The Cocktail Party (1949) and The Elder Statesman (1958). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.

From 1946 Eliot shared a flat with his friend John Davy Hayward, who became his literary archivist, gathering many of the poems Eliot had written whilst a student at Harvard. These were not published until after Eliot’s death as Poems Written in Early Youth. In 1957 Eliot suddenly married his secretary at Faber – Esmé Valerie Fletcher, who was thirty-seven years younger than him. The marriage was held in secret at 6.15 in the morning. Hayward moved out, taking his Eliot papers with him. He dedicated them to King’s College Cambridge the following year.

Valerie took over the role of literary custodian, and has dedicated her life to preserving a very tight control over Eliot’s papers ever since. In his later years Eliot suffered from ill health – bronchitis, tachycardia, and emphysema – all made worse by his heavy smoking. He died in 1965, was cremated at Golder’s Green Cemetary and his ashes taken to St Michael’s church in East Coker, the village in Somerset from where his ancestors had emigrated to America.

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

The Ambassadors

September 29, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary study resources, commentary, criticism

The Ambassadors was written between October 1900 and July 1901, and initially appeared as a serial running in the North American Review. Its first appearance as a single novel was in the autumn of 1903 by Methuen in London and Harpers in New York.

The novel comes from what is called James’s ‘late period’. The writing is mannered, baroque, complex, and focused intently on the psychological relationships between his characters. There is very little ‘plot’ here in the conventional sense. Much of the interest in the narrative is centred on the limitations of the principal character, from whose point of view the story is told. Lambert Strether is a morally upright, middle-aged American who feels that life has passed him by. He wants to do the right thing, but finds himself somewhat out of his depth when he visits Paris – which Walter Benjamin called ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’.

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

The Ambassadors – critical commentary

The Ambassadors is narrated in third person omniscient mode, almost entirely from Lambert Strether’s point of view. Just occasionally, James lapses into first person (plural) mode, speaking of Strether as ‘our friend’. The novel also follows a structural pattern, in keeping with its first publication as a serial, of taking each section (‘Book Tenth’) up to a point immediately preceding a dramatic climax, then beginning the next section after the dramatic event has taken place. The sequence of events is then re-traced retrospectively, with Strether reflecting endlessly on various possible nuances of behaviour.

In fact there is very little action in the novel at all. It consists of a series of conversations Strether has with other characters, punctuated by evocations of location (Chester, London, Paris). And the conversations consist almost entirely of the interlocutors trying to interpret or second-guess the psychological motivation and intentions of other characters in the plot.

These topics remain obscure for a number of reasons. The first is that almost all social intercourse is constrained by an elaborate set of protocols whereby everybody is forced to be extremely polite in their dealings with others. Nothing concrete or specific can be discussed openly, and all conversations are shrouded in mists of subtle inference, hints, allusions, and guesswork.

The second is that most of the characters talk to each other in a manner which is almost a continuation of James’s own style as narrator. Nobody speaks in the concrete and the here and now as most human beings normally do. They use elaborate metaphors and allusions, talking about other characters and the events of the novel (in so far as there are any) in oblique, orotund terms:

‘Ah,’ Miss Goostrey sighed, ‘the name of the good American is as easily given as taken away! What is it, to begin with, to be one, and what’s the extraordinary hurry? Surely nothing that’s so pressing was ever so little defined. It’s such an order, really, that before we cook you the dish we must at least have our receipt. Besides, the poor chicks have time! What I’ve seen so often spoiled,’ she pursued, ‘is the happy attitude itself, the state of faith and—what shall I call it?—the sense of beauty.’

There is a third reason that makes it difficult for the reader to form judgements about the events and the characters of the plot. James has them refer to each other as ‘tremendous…wonderful…magnificent… [and] immense’ – but none of the characters is shown or dramatised doing anything by which we can form an opinion on these matters. Everything is filtered through the eyes of Strether or James – and it is often difficult to see where one begins and the other ends.

There is also a great deal of concealment going on in the novel. Quite apart from the nature of the relationship between Chad Newsome and Mdme de Vionnet being concealed from Strether, it is also concealed from him by Maria Goostrey. She conceals her desire for Strether himself out of deference to his theoretical attachment to Mrs Newsome. This is not apparent to Strether until the end of the novel, though it can be perceived by the reader. This is a mild form of dramatic irony that James offers as easily digestible crumbs to readers whilst they grapple with the larger issues of obfuscation.

Moreover there is a larger form of concealment practised by James himself. As the author and the outer narrator he is in possession of all the facts from the very start of the novel, and occasionally shows his hand by mentioning that something will be revealed later (‘two or three incidents with which we have yet to make acquaintance’). But he deliberately obfuscates events and motives in a way which is likely to strain the patience of all but the most tolerant readers.

Homo-eroticism

Strether is a typical figure from James’s late works – a middle-aged man taking stock of his somewhat emotionally empty life. He has lost his wife and child; his only social function is acting as the titular editor of a literary magazine which is funded by Mrs Newsome (and doesn’t sell many copies); and he is very conscious that life seems to have passed him by.

“I seem to have a life only for other people … it’s as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having the gumption to know it was there. Now I hear the faint receding whistle miles and miles down the line”

There are also a number of homo-erotic undertones to the novel – as there were in the latter part of James’s own life. Both Strether and Waymarsh have removed themselves from intimate contact with women (Strether’s wife is dead, and Waymarsh is separated). They travel together, and they share a certain scepticism regarding the opposite sex – all of whom are regarded as potential predators. In an early scene Strether visits Waymarsh whilst he is in bed. Waymarsh tells Strether ‘You’re a very attractive man’ and they joke about being married.

He looked across the box at his friend; their eyes met; something queer and stiff, something that bore on the situation but that it was better not to touch, passed in silence between them.

In fact whenever the male characters in the novel meet each other, there is a great deal of eye contact and touching of the knee, the hand, the shoulder. Although he is technically engaged to Mrs Newsome, Strether gradually drifts away from her during the novel and spends all his time in concern about her young son, who he describes in rhapsodic terms.

Strether is also pursued by Maria Goostrey, but when she finally makes him an offer of marriage, he rejects the opportunity on grounds that he wouldn’t wish to be seen profiting personally from the errand on which he has been sent. In other words, he rationalises his fear of heterosexual intimacy on grounds of a lofty self-denying moral principle.

Study resources

The Ambassadors – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Ambassadors – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Ambassadors – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Ambassadors – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Ambassadors – Dover Thrift – Amazon UK

The Ambassadors – Dover Thrift – Amazon US

The Ambassadors – Kindle eBook (includes sixty James books)

The Ambassadors – York Notes – Amazon UK

The Ambassadors – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Ambassadors – etext of the 1909 edition

The Ambassadors – audioBook edition

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James – biographical notes

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, web links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, web links, study resources

The Ambassadors – characters

Lewis Lambert Strether	55 year old American widower, magazine ‘editor’, engaged to Mrs Newsome
Mr Waymarsh	a rich American lawyer, separated from his wife, Strether’s travelling companion
Miss Maria Goostrey	American woman living in Paris who offers herself as ‘a guide to Europe’
Mrs Newsome	a rich American widow
Chadwick Newsome	a 28 year old heir to his father’s successful business
Sarah Newsome	Chad’s 30 year old sister, married to Jim Pocock
Jim Pocock	a leading Woolett business man, married to Chad’s sister
Mamie Pocock	Jim Pockock’s young sister
John Little Bilham	an American enthusiast about art, friend of Chad’s
Miss Barrace	a slightly eccentric American spinster and commentator on events
Signor Gloriani	a famous Italian sculptor
Countess Marie de Vionnet	a society beauty, separated from her husband, friend of Chad’s
Jeanne de Vionnet	her attractive young daughter

Paris interior – La belle epoque

The Ambassadors – plot summary

Lambert Strether is a middle-aged American widower who is engaged to be married to Mrs Newsome, the widow of a wealthy manufacturer. She dispatches him on an errand to bring back her son Chadwick (Chad) who is living in Paris, so that he can take his place at the head of the family business. She also fears that he has fallen under someone’s bad influence, presumably a woman.

Strether makes the journey, and on the way meets Miss Goostrey, a spirited American woman who has lived in Paris for years and offers to act as his ‘guide to Europe’. He discovers that Chad has improved and become more confident and sophisticated during his stay in Paris. This seems to be largely due to his relationship with Madame de Vionnet, a glamorous countess who is separated from her husband and who has an equally attractive daughter. Strether is not sure with which of the two women Chad is contemplating a relationship, but he too is attracted to them, and he also falls under the positive influence of the capital city and its pleasures.

When Strether fails to send Chad back to America and decides not to return there himself, a second rescue party is sent out to effect the diplomatic mission. This comprises Sarah, Chad’s sister, her husband Jim Pocock, and Mamie, Jim’s younger sister. The principal characters spend a great deal of time speculating about which of them is having the greater degree of influence on the others, but eventually Chad’s sister reveals that both she and her mother think Madame de Vionnet is a disgraceful woman. Mrs Newsome makes her displeasure felt by suspending her correspondence with Strether.

Strether thinks he has a solution to the problem, but on an outing into rural France he encounters Chad and Mdme de Vionnet in a situation that reveals their true intimacy, which other people have known about all along. Strether feels he has been used and betrayed, but nevertheless that Mdme de Vionnet’s influence on Chad has been positive. Knowing that he can no longer count on his engagement to Mrs Newsome, and turning down an offer of marriage to Maria Goostrey, he decides to go back to America, and face an uncertain future.

The novel in a nutshell

“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? … I’m too old—too old at any rate for what I see… What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t, like me to-day, be without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it, and now I’m a case of reaction against the mistake… Do what you like so long as you don’t make it. For it was a mistake. Live, live!”

Lambert Strether to Little Bilham Book Fifth: Chapter Two

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

Washington Square (1880) is a superb early short novel, It’s the tale of a young girl whose future happiness is being controlled by her strict authoritarian (but rather witty) father. She is rather reserved, but has a handsome young suitor. However, her father disapproves of him, seeing him as an opportunist and a fortune hunter. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant New York town house. Who wins out in the end? You will probably be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, offering a sensitive picture of a young woman’s life.
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The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
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The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
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Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

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The Bloomsbury Group – 1920-1987

August 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

1920. Roger Fry, Vision and Design (a series of essays). Leonard Woolf writes leaders for The Nation. Omega workshop closes. First meeting of the Bloomsbury group Memoir Club. Desmond MacCarthy becomes literary editor of The New Statesman. E.M. Forster becomes literary editor of the London Daily Herald. Duncan Grant has his first one-man show in London. Carrington, Partridge, and Strachey visit Gerald Brenan in Spain.

1921. Virginia Woolf publishes her collection of experimental short stories, Monday or Tuesday, then falls ill and inactive for four months. Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria. Dora Carrington marries Ralph Partridge, but continues to live with Lytton Strachey (who is in love with Ralph Partridge). E.M. Forster works in India as temporary secretary to Maharajah of Dewas. Leonard Woolf, Stories from the East and Socialism and Co-operation. John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Probability.

1922. Virginia Woolf publishes her first modernist novel, Jacob’s Room and starts her love affair with Vita Sackville West. Leonard Woolf is defeated as Labour candidate for the Combined University constituency. John Maynard Keynes, A Revision of the Treaty. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant decorate Keynes’s rooms at King’s College, Cambridge. Lytton Strachey, Books and Characters: French and English. E.M. Forster, Alexandria: A History and a Guide. T.S. Eliot founder and editor of The Criterion. David Garnett, Lady into Fox. James Joyce’s, Ulysses published in Paris. Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party.

1923. The Hogarth Press publishes T.S. Eliot’s, The Waste Land. John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform: he becomes chairman of the board of The Nation and Atheneum, whilst Leonard Woolf becomes its literary editor. E.M. Forster, Pharos and Pharillon. Leonard and Virginia Woolf visit Gerald Brenan in Spain. Carrington begins an affair with Henrietta Bingham (one of Strachey’s former lovers).

1924. E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India widely acclaimed: (the composition of the novel was interrupted by the first world war – as was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain). Virginia Woolf’s manifesto on modern literature, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’. The Hogarth Press publishes Freud’s Collected Papers and begins the Psycho-Analytic Library. Lytton Strachey, Carrington, and Ralph Partridge move to Ham Spray House, Berkshire. The Woolfs (and the Hogarth Press) move to 52 Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury. First UK Labour government formed under Ramsey MacDonald (lasts nine months).

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. 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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1925. Virginia Woolf publishes both The Common Reader and Mrs Dalloway, then is ill for three months. Leonard Woolf, Fear and Politics: A Debate at the Zoo. Lytton Strachey’s play The Son of Heaven is performed, and he lectures on Pope at Cambridge. John Maynard Keynes marries Lydia Lopokova, and takes a lease on a house at Tilton, near Charleston, which remains his country home.

1926. UK General Strike. Adrian Stephen and his wife Karin obtain bachelor of medicine degrees to become psycho-analysts. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant decorate the house of Mr and Mrs St John Hutchinson. Roger Fry, Transformations. Ralph Partridge leaves Dora Carrington for Frances Marshall. Carrington begins an affair with Julia Strachey (Lytton Strachey’s sister). Vita Sackville-West wins Hawthornden Prize for her poem The Land.

1927. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse. Clive Bell, Landmarks in Nineteenth Century Painting. Leonard Woolf, Essays on Literature, History, and Politics. E.M. Forster gives the Clark lectures at Cambridge, which are published as Aspect of the Novel. He also becomes a fellow of King’s College. Julian Bell enters King’s College as an undergraduate. Roger Fry becomes an honorary fellow of King’s College. His study Cezanne is published.

1928. Virginia Woolf, Orlando, a biographical ‘love note’ to Vita Sackville-West. Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History. Desmond MacCarthy succeeds Edmund Gosse as senior literary critic of the Sunday Times. E.M. Forster, The Eternal Moment and Other Stories. Clive Bell, Civilization. Leonard Woolf, Imperialism and Civilization. Death of Thomas Hardy. First Oxford English Dictionary published. Carrington starts an affair with Bernard Penrose.

1929. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, which was first delivered as a series of lectures at Cambridge. Roger Fry lectures at the Royal Academy. Collapse of New York Stock Exchange. Start of world economic depression. Second UK Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald.

1930. Leonard Woolf helps to found The Political Quarterly and becomes its first editor. Roger Fry, Henri Matisse. John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money. Vanessa Bell has an exhibition of her paintings in London. Pipe-smoking lesbian feminist composer Ethyl Smyth falls in love with Virginia Woolf. Mass unemployment in UK. Death of D.H. Lawrence.

Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. An attractive and very accessible introduction to the writer and her intellectual milieu.

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1931. Virginia Woolf, The Waves. Leonard Woolf, After the Deluge. Lytton Strachey, Portraits in Miniature. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion. John Lehmann joins the Hogarth Press for the first time. Resignation of UK Labour government, followed by formation of national coalition government.

1932. Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader. Death of Lytton Strachey from stomach cancer, followed by suicide of Dora Carrington. Exhibition of paintings by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in London. New Signatures published by the Hogarth Press. Roger Fry, Characteristics of French Art and The Arts of Painting and Sculpture. Hunger marches start in UK.

1933. Virginia Woolf, Flush, a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s pet dog. Roger Fry appointed Slade professor of art at Cambridge and, Art History as an Academic Study. Clive Bell becomes art critic of The New Statesman and Nation. John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Biography.

1934. Clive Bell, Enjoying Pictures. E.M. Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. Death of Roger Fry, and publication of his Reflections on British Painting. Exhibition of Vanessa Bell’s paintings. Virginia Woolf publishes Walter Sickert: A Conversation.

1935. Private performance of Virginia Woolf’s unpublished play, ‘Freshwater: A Comedy in Three Acts’. John Maynard Keynes helps to establish the Arts Theatre in Cambridge. Leonard Woolf, Quack, Quack!.

1936. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. E.M.Forster, Abinger Harvest, a collection of essays on literature and society. Virginia Woolf ill for two months. Death of George V in UK, followed by Edward VIII, who is forced to abdicate. Stalinist show trials in USSR. Julian Bell goes to participate in Spanish Civil War.

1937. Virginia Woolf, The Years. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant both have exhibitions of their paintings. John Maynard Keynes seriously ill. Julian Bell killed in Spain.

The Art of Dora Carrington At the age of 38, Dora Carrington (1893-1932) committed suicide, unable to contemplate living without her companion, Lytton Strachey, who had died a few weeks before. The association with Lytton and his Bloomsbury friends, combined with her own modesty have tended to overshadow Carrington’s contribution to modern British painting. She hardly exhibited at all during her own lifetime. This book aims to redress the balance by looking at the immense range of her work: portraits, landscapes, glass paintings, letter illustrations and decorative work.

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1938. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, her ‘sequel’ to A Room of One’s Own. John Lehmann joins the Hogarth Press for the second time as its general manager, buying out Virginia Woolf’s financial interest. Leonard Woolf appointed as member of the Civil Service Arbitration Tribunal, on which he sits for seventeen years. Germans occupy Austria. Chamberlain meets Hitler to make infamous Munich ‘agreement’ to prevent war.

1939. Leonard Woolf, After the Deluge, vol.II, The Barbarians at the Gate, and a play, The Hotel. The Woolfs and the Hogarth Press move to 37 Mecklenburgh Square. Fascists win Civil War in Spain. Stalin makes pact with Hitler. Germany invades Poland. Britain and France declare war on Germany. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake.

1940. Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography. Hogarth Press bombed in Mecklenburgh Square, moved to Herfordshire. Angelica Bell’s 21st birthday: ‘the last Bloomsbury party’.

1941. Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, then commits suicide by drowning herself in the River Ouse. Death of James Joyce.

1942. Virginia Woolf’s essays The Death of the Moth and Other Essays published posthumously. Angelica Bell, Duncan Grant’s daughter, marries David Garnett, her father’s former lover. John Maynard Keynes elevated to the peerage and takes seat as Liberal in the House of Lords. He was also the chairman of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (which becomes the Arts Council in 1945).

1943. Virginia Woolf’s A Haunted House and Other Short Stories published posthumously. Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Quentin Bell complete paintings for the parish church at Berwick, near Firle, Sussex.

1944. John Maynard Keynes is senior British representative at the Bretton Woods International Conference to plan for the aftermath of war.

1945. E.M. Forster elected honorary fellow at King’s College Cambridge, and takes up permanent residence there after his mother’s death. John Maynard Keynes goes to America to negotiate a loan for Britain. United Nations founded. Huge Labour victory in UK general election. Clement Atlee becomes prime minister.

1946. Death of John Maynard Keynes. Leonard Woolf sells John Lehmann’s interest in the Hogarth Press to Chatto and Windus. Vita Sackville-West made Companion of Honour for her services to literature.

1947. E.M. Forster, Collected Tales. Posthumous publication of Virginia Woolf’s The Moment and Other Essays.

1948. Death of Adrian Stephen. T.S. Eliot awarded Nobel prize for literature (for the UK).

1949. Posthumous publication of John Maynard Keynes’s Two Memoirs.

1950. Bertrand Russell awarded the Nobel prize for literature. Posthumous publication of Virginia Woolf’s The Captain’s DeathBed and Other Essays.

1951. E.M.Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (essays) and writes the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd. Desmond MacCarthy knighted.

1952. Death of Desmond MacCarthy. Death of George V. Accession of Queen Elizabeth II at 25.

1953. Leonard Woolf, Principia Politica (vol.III of After the Deluge and also publishes extracts from Virginia Woolf’s diaries as A Writer’s Diary. E.M. Forster, The Hill of Devi. Death of Stalin – and Prokofiev on same day. Nobel prize for literature – Winston Churchill (UK).

1956. Leonard Woolf publishes his correspondence with Lytton Strachey. Last meeting of the Memoir Club. Exhibition of paintings by Vanessa Bell.

The Bloomsbury Artists: Prints and Book DesignsThis volume catalogues the woodcuts, lithographs, etchings and other prints created by Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant – with various colour and black and white reproductions. Of particular interest are the many book jackets designed for the Hogarth Press, the publishing company established by Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. Also included are ephemera such as social invitations, trade cards, catalogue covers, and bookplates.

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1957. Exhibition of paintings by Duncan Grant. Homosexuality decriminalised in UK.

1958. Posthumous publication of Virginia Woolf’s Granite and Rainbow: Essays. Duncan Grant decorates Russell Chantry, Lincoln Cathedral.

1959. Duncan Grant has retrospective exhibition of his paintings at the Tate Gallery.

1960. Leonard Woolf, Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880-1904 and revisits Ceylon.

1961. Leonard Woolf, Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904-1911. Death of Vanessa Bell: memorial exhibition of her paintings.

1962. Leonard Woolf, Diaries in Ceylon 1904-1911. Death of Saxon Sydney-Turner. Death of Vita Sackville-West.

1964. Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918. Death of Clive Bell. Vanessa Bell: A Memorial Exhibition of her Paintings by the Arts Council.

1965. Posthumous publication of Virginia Woolf’s Contemporary Writers. Death of T.S. Eliot.

1967. Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939.

1969. Leonard Woolf, The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years 1939-1969. Portraits by Duncan Grant: An Arts Council exhibition. E.M. Forster awarded the Order of Merit. Death of Leonard Woolf.

1970. Death of E.M. Forster at the home of friends. Death of Bertrand Russell.

1971. Posthumous publication of E.M. Forster’s overtly homosexual novel, Maurice (written in 1913). Posthumous publication of Lytton Strachey by Himself: A Self Portrait.

1972. Publication of Roger Fry’s Letters 2 vols. Duncan Grant: exhibition of water colours and drawings. Posthumous publication of Lytton Strachey’s The Really Interesting Question and Other Papers. Posthumous publication of E.M. Forster’s The Life to Come and Other Stories.

1973. Posthumous publication of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway’s Party: A Short Story Sequence. Vanessa Bell: Paintings and Drawings, An Exhibition.

1987. Death and burial of Gerald Brenan in Malaga, Spain.

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The Bloomsbury Group and War – 1/2

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

internationalism, pacifism, and social resistance

Almost without exception, the members of the Bloomsbury Group were opposed to the first world war. Their attitudes varied from outright pacifism through conscientious objection to quietism and a form of radical internationalism normally only found in figures such as Trotsky and Lenin. The origins of these attitudes – which were extremely unusual at the time – lay in the liberal, laissez-faire, free-thinking and non-religious beliefs which seemed to have spread from late nineteenth-century intellectuals such as Sir Leslie Stephen (father of the Bloomsbury Group) and the next generation of Cambridge undergraduates of the period 1895-1905 who were heavily influenced by the philosophy of G.E.Moore, whose Principia Ethica promoted ideals of friendship and love towards others.

Conscription began in 1915, and whilst the government lied to the country about conditions at the front for propaganda purposes, the Bloomsbury Group were tipped off about the horrors of the trenches by Maynard Keynes, who as a member of the Treasury, and had insider information on government matters. He had also visited soldiers convalescing at Cambridge. They were recovering from shell shock and the grim truths of bayonet charges and ‘going over the top’. None of them wanted to go back.

Art critic Clive Bell was the son of a nouveau-riche family who had made their money in coal-mining in southern Wales, but established a fake-Tudor manor in Wiltshire, invented a family crest, and sent him to Marlborough College. Despite this very conservative background, in 1915 Bell 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 copies of his essay were burned by the Public Hangman. Bell resisted conscription on the grounds of being a conscientious objector, and he spent some of the war years doing what was called ‘alternative service’ on a farm owned by the politician Philip Morrell and his wife Ottoline.

Leonard Woolf came from a background quite unlike other members of the Bloomsbury Group. He was the son of a Jewish barrister. Nevertheless, he met his fellow Bloomsberries at Cambridge and like them was influenced by the ethical theories of G.E.Moore. He served in the colonial service between 1905 and 1911 and developed first hand a healthy distaste for imperialism.

With the outbreak of the war, he was rejected as unfit for military service, and campaigned actively for peace. He joined the Labour Party and the Fabian Society and became a regular contributor to the New Statesman. In 1916 he wrote International Government which outlined future possibilities for a international agency to enforce peace in the world. The book was incorporated by the British government in its proposals for a League of Nations at Geneva.

Woolf maintained his anti-war and internationalist stance throughout his life, except for the period of the 1930s and the Second World War, when he somewhat reluctantly accepted that the threat of fascism was worth fighting against. He was also, like George Orwell (who had also served in and quit the colonial service) one of the few British intellectuals who saw through to the totalitarian tyranny underpinning Stalin’s sham democracy.

Bertrand Russell was a contemporary of the other Bloomsberries at Cambridge, but unlike them he took up an academic career, teaching philosophy. Although he was elected to the Royal Society in 1908, Russell’s teaching career at Cambridge appeared to come to an end in 1916 when he was dismissed from Trinity College because of a conviction for anti-war activities. Two years later he was convicted again. This time he spent six months in prison. It was while in prison that he wrote his well-received Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919).

He continued to hold radical and anti-war views throughout the rest of his (long) life. In the 1950s and 1960s he was politically active in the campaign for nuclear disarmament (CND) and he opposed the American war in Vietnam. He established the International War Crimes Tribunal in 1966 with Jean-Paul Sartre and other Nobel prize winners.

The Bloomsbury Group and War — Part 2

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The Bloomsbury Group and War – 2/2

September 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

internationalism, pacifism, and social resistance

The painter Mark Gertler was a pacifist who refused to support Britain’s involvement in the First World War. After the Battle of the Somme he painted Merry-go-Round (1916). Considered by many art critics as the most important British painting of the First World War, Merry-go-Round, shows a group of military and civilian figures caught on the vicious circle of the roundabout. One gallery refused to show the painting because Gertler was a conscientious objector. Eventually it appeared in the Mansard Gallery in May, 1917.

Society hostess Ottoline Morrell was educated at home and at Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied politics and history. Her husband Philip Morrell became a Liberal MP (for Blackburn) following the general election in 1906. He was critical of the government’s position on the First World War. They sheltered a number of conscientious objectors on their farm estate at Garsington near Oxford, including Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, and Mark Gertler. It was there that Siegfried Sassoon, recuperating after a period of sick leave, was encouraged to go absent without leave in a protest against the war.

Much scoffing has been expressed by their guests in thinly-veiled depictions in their novels about the luxury and extravagance of Garsington – but the truth is that the Morrells were sailing financially close to the edge, and eventually they had to sell the entire estate. Because Ottoline Morrell had a brief relationship with one of her members of staff, it’s assumed that this provided the creative spark for D.H.Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

The writer Gerald Brenan was unusual as a member of the Bloomsbury set, because he did serve in the war. He was the son of an army officer, and was partly educated at the military academy at Sandhurst. He served from 1914 to 1919 and was, as his biographer Jonathan Gaythorne-Hardy points out, a ‘brave, successful, conscientious and enthusiastic officer’. He spent over two years on the Western Front, reaching the rank of captain and winning a Military Cross and a Croix de Guerre.

David Bomberg – The Mudbath 1914

Biographer Lytton Strachey was a conscientious objector during the war. He is famous for his confrontation with the board which interrogated objectors. His claims of pacifism were challenged by a board member asking him what he would do if he found a German soldier raping his sister. His witty riposte was ‘I should try and come between them’. What is less well known is that Strachey could easily have evaded the inquisition on medical grounds, but didn’t. Even less well known than that is the fact that he wrote a polemical essay against the war.

The painter Duncan Grant was a pacifist, like most of the members of the Bloomsbury group, In order to be exempted from military service during World War I, he and David Garnett (his lover at the time) 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.

Harold Nicolson worked as a diplomat in the Foreign Office. Because of this, he was exempt military service during the first world war. After the end of the first world war he took part in the Paris Peace Conference, and he was very critical of the punitive reparations extracted by the allies (which also caused his fellow Bloomsburyite John Maynard Keynes to resign from the commission).

Between the wars he flirted briefly with Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascists, but then entered the House of Commons as National Labour Party member for Leicester West in 1935. (His wife refused to visit the constituency, regarding it as ‘bedint’ – a family slang term for ‘unacceptably low class’.)

He was very active as a parliamentarian, and became a keen supporter of Winston Churchill, especially during the second world war, when he was appointed private secretary to the Minister of Information in the government of national unity. He lost his seat in the 1945 election, and then despite joining the Labour Party, he failed to get back into parliament. He is a fairly rare example of someone from the upper class whose political allegiances moved leftwards as he got older.

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John Maynard Keynes lectured in economics at Cambridge on and off from 1908. He also worked at the India Office and in 1913 as a member of the Royal Commission on Indian finance and currency, published his first book on the subject. His expertise was in demand during the First World War. He worked for the Adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and to the Treasury on Financial and Economic Questions. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war, and the acquisition of scarce currencies.

He represented the Treasury at the Versailles Peace Conference, but resigned in strong opposition to the terms of the draft treaty which he set out in his next book Economic Consequences of the Peace, (1919). Keynes argued that the war reparations imposed on Germany could not be paid by a country which had been devastated by war. He warned that this would lead to further conflict in Europe – which of course turned out to be true.

The poet Rupert Brooke is often (quite erroneously) classed as a ‘war poet’ because some of his early works glamourised the idea of war – and he was in fact a fervent supporter of it. But he never saw active service. His poetry gained many enthusiasts and he was taken up by Edward Marsh, who brought him to the attention of Winston Churchill, who was at that time First Lord of the Admiralty. Through these connections he was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a temporary Sub-Lieutenant shortly after his 27th birthday and took part in the Royal Naval Division’s Antwerp expedition in October 1914.

He sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 28 February 1915 but developed sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. He died on 23 April 1915 off the island of Lemnos in the Aegean on his way to a battle at Gallipoli. As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, he was buried in an olive grove on the island of Skyros, Greece.

The Bloomsbury Group and War — Part I

Bloomsbury Recalled is written by Quentin Bell, one of the last surviving members of the Bloomsbury circle. He offers a disarmingly candid portraits of his father, Clive Bell, who married the author’s mother, Vanessa Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s sister). He 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, Angelica. 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.’ Acclaimed biographer of his aunt, Virginia Woolf, Bell here defends her as a feminist and pacifist. Along with chapters on John Maynard Keynes, Ottoline Morrell and art historian-spy Anthony Blunt, there are glimpses of Lytton Strachey, novelist David Garnett (Angelica’s husband) and Dame Ethel Smyth, the pipe-smoking lesbian composer, who fell in love with Virginia Woolf.
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The Bloomsbury Group portraits

August 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Sir Leslie Stephen (1832—1904)

Julia Stephen (1846—1895)

Thoby Stephen (1880—1906)

Adrian Stephen (1883—1948)

Vanessa Bell (1879—1961)

Virginia Woolf (1882—1941)

Lytton Strachey (1880—1932)

John Maynard Keynes (1883—1946)

Leonard Woolf (1880—1969)

E.M. Forster (1879—1970)

Roger Fry (1866—1934)

Bertrand Russell (1872—1970)

T.S. Eliot (1888—1965)

Duncan Grant (1885—1978)

Clive Bell (1881—1964)

Vita Sackville-West (1892—1962)

Harold Nicolson (1886—1968)

Mark Gertler (1896—1939)

David Garnett (1892—1981)

Ottoline Morrell (1873—1938)

Gerald Brenan (1894—1987)

Dora Carrington (1893—1932)

Katherine Mansfield (1888—1923)

Rupert Brooke (1887—1915)

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The Bride of the Wind: The Life of Alma Mahler

July 27, 2012 by Roy Johnson

Alma Mahler was one of the most famous (some would say infamous) grandes dames of the first part of the twentieth century. She was rich, famous, gifted, and very glamorous in her younger years. And she had a penchant for artists, writers, and men of power that led to a succession of husbands and lovers. She was born in 1879 to a father who was a rather feckless painter and a mother who was an ex-singer. The family eventually became successful via some royal patronage that was common in the Hapsburg Empire at that time. But their rise in fortunes was cut short when the patron shot himself and her father died when she was quite young.

Alma was not close to her mother, and had no time at all for her younger sister. The remainder of her life seems to have been a search for powerful authority-figure substitutes for the father she had lost. As a young woman, obviously aware of her physical attractiveness, she had a series of chaste but coquettish relationships with older men. Her widowed mother married one of her father’s artistic colleagues, and Alma mixed at her social ease in the Secessionist artistic circles that were established in Vienna towards the end of the nineteenth century.

One of her first serious connections was with Gustav Klimt, but the relationship was nipped in the bud by her mother, who disapproved of the liaison. When she began to develop her own interests in music in the form of song composition, she engaged the services of Alexander von Zemlinsky. She thought he was hideously ugly, but in order to become his student she flattered him by saying that he was ‘becoming too attractive to her’.

This characteristic flirting would persist throughout her life. Nevertheless, she was on the point of giving herself to Zemlinsky when she met Gustav Mahler, a composer who was just on the point of becoming great. He proposed to her on their fourth meeting – on the condition that she give up all thought of her own musical ambitions for herself. There was only to be room for one musician in the Mahler household.

She submitted to this egoism, produced two children, yet kept her musical friendships with Zemlinsky and Pfitzner alive in order to maintain her self-respect. It’s perhaps understandable that passages in this excellent biography dealing with her marriage to Mahler are dominated by the husband’s professional difficulties and triumphs rather than her own development.

Gustav Mahler achieved great success in Europe and even America where the family lived for the part of each year. But Alma characteristically developed a sense of restless disaffection from her husband, and ended up having a nervous breakdown which called for a sanitorium ‘cure’. [This is the era Thomas Mann deals with in his novel The Magic Mountain.]

Whilst taking the cure she met the architect Walter Gropius and started an affair with him. On return to Vienna she was prepared to equivocate between these two attachments, but Gropius upped the ante by writing to Mahler, saying that he wanted to marry his wife. Mahler was devastated, and suddenly found it in himself to support Alma’s musical interests – but it was too late. He died shortly after this.

Gropius perhaps wisely, put his relationship with Alma on hold – and she meanwhile temporised with relationships with musician Franz Schrecker and biologist Paul Kammerer – then in 1912 met the artist Oskar Kokoshka.

Their’s was a stormy love affair that lasted three years. Kokoshka wanted to marry her, but she resisted shackling herself to a poor and (then) unknown artist. They quarrelled a lot, and he was terribly jealous of her previous attachments, but he produced lots of important work, including his masterpiece The Bride of the Wind which gives this biography its title.

Kokoshka enlisted in the first world war, almost as a gesture of despair about their relationship; he was badly wounded, and whilst he was convalescing she married Gropius.

If the Gustav Mahler episode was not sufficient proof, her relationship with Kokoshka certainly demonstrates to power of Alma Mahler as an inspiring muse to great artists. It’s interesting to note just how many of Kokoshka’s great paintings were produced around this time.

However, with Gropius she seemed to have found a partner with whom she could find some semblance of emotional tranquillity. She was even eager to start another family with him, which they did in 1915, after a secret marriage. The outcome was her daughter Manon, who proved to be a tragic child who died of poliomyelitis whilst still young.

Gropius was himself called back into the war, leaving Alma to fall in love with the poet Franz Werfel who was ten years younger than her, and just at the start of his career. In 1918 Alma suffered the premature birth (with complications) of her fourth child Martin. Gropius was summoned from military duty on the assumption that the child was his. He discovered fairly rapidly that it was not.

There was a showdown between Gropius, Werfel, and Alma – but she refused to choose between them as husband and lover. Eventually, Gropius agreed to a divorce. He went on to establish the Bauhaus project: Werfel gradually abandoned poetry and wrote instead a series of commercially successful novels, all of which are now completely forgotten.

Alma now had everything she wanted, yet her life continued to be full of restlessness, distress, and antagonism with her daughter Anna, who was married several times, and had an affair with the writer Elias Canetti.

Alma eventually married Werfel, despite their political differences. He was a leftist with non-partisan sympathies for both the communists and the social-democrats: she was an arch conservative who admired Mussolini and was so anti-Semitic she even thought her own children were tainted by ‘miscegenation’.

She rejoined the Catholic Church in 1932 and almost immediately started an affair with Father Johannes Hollnsteiner, a professor of theology – an affair that Werfel knew about and tolerated in exchange for a quiet life.

Fortunately, all these dubious goings on are surrounded in this biography by some first rate political mise en scene. There’s a very readable account of the collapse of Austria and Vienna in particular amidst the competing factions of fascists, social-democrats, monarchists, and communists.

Despite her right-wing sympathies, when Austria was threatened by Germany in 1938 Alma had the good sense to transfer her money to Zurich, and she escaped with Werfel, ending up in the south of France along with many other European refugees at that time. Their escape route was the now familiar one of Marseilles to Perpignon on the Spanish border; over the Pyrenees in secret; then from Spain to Portugal, and a boat journey to freedom. It was a route travelled by many others, including Victor Serge, Walter Benjamin (who did not survive the suicide capsule he shared with Arthur Koestler), André Breton, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp.

After a rapturous reception in New York Alma settled in California. As her fellow refugee Arnold Schoenberg put it she was ‘exiled to paradise’. A comfortable home with a strictly Ayrian butler was established, from which she deemed the Allied forces fighting in Europe were ‘weaklings and degenerates’. She thought Hitler was a ‘superman’ and claimed that the Red Cross facilities in the concentration camps were ‘excellent’. When her husband died in 1945 she didn’t even go to his funeral.

Yet after Werfel’s death she seems to have lost her sense of purpose and direction. She sorted out his papers and wrote her own self-justifying autobiography And the Bridge is Love, and went to live in New York. There were some attempts to retrieve her property in post-war Austria, but when she visited her old home in Vienna it was in ruins. Even the marble had been ripped out to furnish nearby houses.

There was a quasi-reconciliation with her daughter Anna, who was so disoriented she didn’t even know who had won the war. They were like characters at the end of Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus. She lived until 1964, still drinking a bottle of Benedictine a day, then at the age of eighty-six the light went out on her life – and on the end of an era.

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Susan Keegan, The Bride of the Wind: The Life of Alma Mahler, London: Secker and Warburg, 1991, pp. 346, ISBN: 0670805130

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The Bride of the Wind: The Life of Alma Mahler

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