GLR January-February 2023

ESSAY

Dora & Lytton & Ralph & Frances A NDREW H OLLERAN

E VEN IN A BOOK that opens with a Dramatis Personae, it’s easy to lose track of the people who come and go in Young Bloomsbury . Even the places where they gathered (Tidmarsh Mill, Ham Spray, Tavistock, Garsington, Charleston Farm, Swallowcliffe) tend to blur as the reader tries to keep track of, say, Stephen “Tommy” Tomlin, or Ralph Partridge, or Roger Senhouse, or Eddy Sackville-West, as op posed to Eddie Gathorne-Hardy. Young Bloomsbury is a desul tory, rambling sort of book, without a timeline, overview, or single figure to carry us through, not even its two presiding spir its, Virginia Woolf ( Mrs Dalloway ) or Lytton Strachey ( Emi nent Victorians ). But, then, the book’s author, Nino Strachey, was literally surrounded by portraits and photos of her ancestors when she composed it. Here is Nino, for instance, musing about “Beauti ful Teddy Strachey, so handsome that he was known as ‘Venus’ in the Grenadier Guards,” or about “His uncle Harry, an artist who painted lyrical images of athletic young men in his rendi tion of the naked torso.” There were so many Stracheys (Lytton was one of thirteen children) that one could use a family tree. In

the second theme of Strachey’s book: what she calls their “gen der fluidity” (though I’m not sure that is quite the right word for it). Suffice it to say, the members of both Bloomsburys fell in love, or lust, had sex, and moved on to other partners, without apparent resentment, heartache, or feelings of rejection. They saw no point in divorce: if a husband or wife fell in love with someone else, or decided to live apart, that was no reason to dis solve the union. Threesomes and shared lovers were almost the norm as the handsome young Oxbridge graduates kept showing up before and after the War, some of them butch, some femme, all available to both sexes. Old and Young Bloomsbury seem to have achieved the dream of a communal sexual utopia that in spired the Oneida Community in 19th-century America, or movies, much later, like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice . However, even after reading this book, I found it very hard to say just what Bloomsbury was: bisexual, homosexual, polyamorous, gender fluid, or simply English intellectual. Whatever they were, even during their lifetimes they were well known. The most famous members of Old Bloomsbury were Woolf ( To The Lighthouse , Orlando , A Room of One’s Own ), Keynes ( The Economic Consequences of the Peace ), Lyt authors’ parties, houses, and hats for Vogue. The age of the mag azine had begun. Today, we also have their letters and diaries, chiefly Virginia Woolf’s. The denizens of both Bloomsburys valued discussion and honesty about all subjects, especially their sex lives. Wrote Woolf in her diary: There was nothing one could not say, nothing that one could not do, at 46 Gordon Square. ... Sex permeated our conversa tion. The word bugger was never far from our lips. We dis cussed copulation with the same excitement and openness that we had discussed the nature of good. ... It may be true that the loves of buggers are not—at least if one is of the other per suasion—of enthralling interest or paramount importance. But the fact that they can be mentioned openly leads to the fact that no one minds if they are practiced privately. Thus many cus toms and beliefs are revised. John Maynard Keynes put it this way: “We repudiated entirely customary morals, tradition, and conventional wisdom. We were ... immoralists.” ton Strachey ( Eminent Victorians ), and E. M. Forster ( Where Angels Fear to Tread , Maurice ). Young Bloomsbury, in contrast, produced novels like Eddy Sackville-West’s Piano Quintet (1925), David “Bunny” Gar nett’s Lady Into Fox (1922), and Julia Stra chey’s Cheerful Weather for the Wedding (1932), which are less well known today. By the time Young Bloomsbury arrived, the young Cecil Beaton was photographing their

stead, we have excerpts from letters still kept by the Strachey family, not to mention the heap of books already published in what has become a cottage industry of Bloomsbury history, which even includes a biography ti tled simply Bloomsbury Stud: The Life of Stephen “Tommy” Tomlin —a sculptor who not only made busts of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey but also was desired sexu ally by just about everyone. Sex, of course,

There were two Blooms burys: the one that began in 1906 at Cambridge, and the one that resumed after WorldWar I, when a new generation of “Bright Young Things”emerged.

is one of the reasons Bloomsbury has been written about so much; though one may, reading this personal, intimate, anec dotal book, have to google occasionally to identify the individ uals being discussed in the roundelay. However, Nino Strachey’s book does have two explicit themes. The first is that there were two Bloomsburys: the one that began in 1906 at Cambridge University when John Maynard Keynes, the eminent economist, and Lytton Strachey founded a discussion society called The Apostles, in which great minds talked about ideas with handsome young undergraduates; and the one that resumed after World War I, when a new generation (who were part of, but not co-extensive with, the “Bright Young Things”) emerged. They came to Old Bloomsbury because they were looking for a society, a place, in which they could not only write, paint, sculpt, and talk frankly about sex, but couple, and thruple, outside the bounds of Victorian matrimony. Couple and thruple they did, like bunnies, which leads us to

Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand .

January–February 2023

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