GLR January-February 2023

Dick Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Ten der Is The Night , was what his friends Hem ingway and Fitzgerald would have called a “pansy.” In other words, most of this behav ior can be understood within the homosexual and bisexual categories. Nevertheless, “as the mother of a child who identifies as gender fluid and queer,” Nino Strachey dedicates

despite the fact that everyone wanted to sleep with him, suffered bouts of deep de pression that ultimately caused his wife, Julia Strachey, to leave him. And then there was aging, for the original Bloomsburys. “My dear Virginia,” Clive Bell said one day while taking a walk with Virginia, “life is over. There’s no good denying it. We’re 45.

YOUNG BLOOMSBURY The Generation That Redefined Love, Freedom, and Self Expression in 1920s England by Nino Strachey Atria Books. 304 pages, $29.

this book to “all those who push beyond the binary.” But is that what the Bloomsburys were—genderfluid or non binary? Eddy Sackville-West walking to a bar in Berlin on a leash held by his German boyfriend, Lytton being spanked by Roger Senhouse, Ralph Partridge moving from a boyfriend of Lytton’s to the husband of Frances Marshall, or E. M. Forster sharing the policeman Bob Buckingham with his wife over the span of many years were not necessarily genderfluid. Those who slept with both men and women we could call bisexual, though it’s not clear that they thought of themselves in this way. The one time Cecil Beaton had sex with a woman, for instance, it was because that woman was Greta Garbo. So what was that, sex or snobbery? Bloomsbury seems to have been an inimitable blend of elements that rarely coexist. Amid the disillusion caused by the War, the onslaught of modernity, fatigue with Vic torian mores, a group of artists got together who refused, as a point of pride, to consider anything taboo. “You can’t imagine what it has been for me to know Bloomsbury,” one of the Young Bloomsburys told Virginia Woolf. “They’re different human be ings from any I thought possible.” MAKING LOVE WITH THE LAND Essays • JOSHUA WH I TEHEAD

I’m bored, I’m bored, I’m unspeakably bored. I know my own reactions. I know what I’m going to say. I’m not interested in anything. Pictures bore me. I take up a book & put it down. No one’s interested in what I think any more. I go about thinking about suicide.” Twenty-four hours later he met a young actress and was back to being the “Don Juan of Bloomsbury.” Vir ginia’s take was more succinct: “My theory is that at 40 one ei ther increases the pace or slows down.” After World War I, they increased the pace. The original group not only reassembled in Gordon Square but were given a new lease on life via the young generation who found their way to their doorsteps. Like all young people, they kept their elders from petrification and at the same time drew sustenance from them. “The growing number of young fringe-Bloomsburys who gathered like bees around a honey-pot,” Nino writes, were not just seeking celebrity; they were seeking affection. As queer young people they were looking for a place where they could be themselves, amidst adults who would accept them for who they really were. Bloomsbury writers and artists seemed to have defied conventional morality and lived to tell the tale—faith, fidelity, heterosexuality, and patriotism had all been rejected, but without noticeable penalty. Ahead of their time, they had established an open way of living that would not be embraced for another hundred years. Young Bloomsbury belonged to a different England; the shock and horror of the Great War gave way to the Bright Young Things. Some of the latter even discovered Berlin and tried con version therapy at a German clinic run by one Doctor Marten, where, as Lytton described it in a letter to Dora: “They walk about haggard on the lawn, wondering whether they could bear the thought of a woman’s private parts, and gazing at their lit tle lovers, who run round and round with a camera, snapshotting Lytton Strachey.” In short, things got quite gay. One chapter in the book is titled “The Cult of the Effeminate,” with subsec tions called “Mincing in Black Velvet” and “Painted Boys,” cul minating in the incomparable Stephen Tennant (famously photographed “in a tunic, in an attitude”). In 1923, Eddy Sackville-West gave a gender-reversal party at which his friend “Cedric had on an unbuttoned brocade waistcoat with a pair of black lace drawers underneath.” And here’s Eddy going out in the winter of 1928, in Berlin, with a young man who “led me with his dog-lead in the street (at night) as we were on our way to dance at the Lokal. I nearly expired with ecstasy.” All this will be familiar enough to gay readers. Yet the opera tive word in Nino’s book is “queer.” The only time the word “gay” is used is to describe a “gay novelist” named C. H. B. Kitchin, of whom I’d never heard, but who was, Wikipedia says, a prosper ous businessman who lived for years with a male lover and pro duced five novels with gay themes. At the end of the book comes the even more startling news that Gerald Murphy, the model for

“Joshua Whitehead pushes at the possibil ities of form, and the results are consistently a mix of the revela tory and the sublime. A ff ectionate, resolute, playful, and wise.” ALEXANDER CHEE, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

University of Minnesota Press Available at better bookstores or to order call 800-621-2736 • www.upress.umn.edu

January–February 2023

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