High-minded
Jonathan Keates
Memories Frances Partridge (Gollancz pp. 248, £9.95) Loathing Bloomsbury is a little like having a severe attack of one of those illnesses which, as Shakespeare says, 'more suits it you to think than Ito speak of', or which the aunt of a friend of mine used to call 'a nasty men's disease'. The primary stage is manifested by a severe uneasiness regarding the friends and relations of Virginia Woolf. The patient is seen to twitch at a mention of Bunny Garnett or Dadie Rylands and a premature risus sardonicus develops when somebody starts talking about Vita Sackville-West. After several months the allergies andzold sweats begin ,and the secondary and most severe period ensues, when the merest uttering of `Rodmell' or 'Vanessa' produces uncontrollable spasms of disgust. The tertiary phase, however, is altogether more interesting, since nausea now arises from a different, though related, cause. Whereas earlier Bloomsbury itself stirred the bile, it is now the very fact of having to bother about it at all which galls us.
A cure is easily accomplished by setting aside Virginia Woolf, Forster and Keynes as figures of genuine merit and dismissing the rest as a collection of snobbish, posturing. Gallophilss interior decorators. 'Save Charleston — see Maggie Smith in Virginia' says an ambiguously worded poster, sounding like some scrambled replay of the American Civil War. Even with such worthy acts of salvage much of Bloomsbury, (pee the mania has subsided, is inevitably for the slagheap. Indeed it had better be, for the sake of pure common sense.
Meanwhile it continues to gratify our comfortable illusions, and such a necessary adjustment is in any case unlikely to take place while distinguished relics of the group (for movement it certainly wasn't) survive. Frances Partridge, if not the last of these, is perhaps the last with anything interesting to say. Mercifully she was not what is sometimes called 'a seminal figure', nor are her memoirs, suffused throughout with a high-mindedness which is nowadays so rare and unfashionable as to be positively refreshing, an attempt to suggest that she mattered to• the frequently selfish and unattractive people who surrounded her. She ought, of course, being a good and intelligent woman, to have mattered a great deal.
Fate seems rather archly to have prepared the young Frances Marshall for the whole experience by making her girlhood archetypal in its E. Nesbitt qualities of leisured liberalism. 'The Marshall family stood for love of Nature particularly in its wildest and most romantic form; for long walks . . for Wordsworthian poetry . . for eugenics, agnosticism and the march of science; for class distinctions courteously observed'. She had two godmothers living in Rye and, like numerous other small children, was dragged to teas with Henry James, 'a bulky figure looking much like a butler', who picked her up and held her dangling in his arms while he made a magisterial peroration, of which, alas, she can only recall the words 'My dear child . .', The obligatory sketch of nanny, a religious enthusiast called Lizzie Croucher, who told Frances 'If you want your hair to curl you must eat fried bread behind the door' (apparently with successful results) is as well done as that of the detested governess Miss Wells, whose career among the Marshal's was cut short when it was discovered that she had been steadily purloining their dresses and jewellery.
School was Bedales — where else indeed? — dominated by the potent, slightly satanic presence of J. H. Badley, 'the Chief', singling out the sultana of the moment with an unerring eye. While the spectral figure of Mrs B. emerged merely to instil the leavers with the higher Bedalianism, summarised in the injunction 'and never, never wear corsets!' the Chief (clothed) presided over life-saving drill for the girls (unclothed).
Distant Bloomsbury trumpets sounded at Cambridge, where Pernel Strachey, Lytton's sister, was principal of Frances's hall and quizzed her mercilessly on the duenna 'Mrs Kenyon' she had invented to cover her blameless entretiens with male undergraduates. The real thing finally confronted her in the depths of Birrell and Garnetes bookshop, where Woolfs and Stracheys and the people she refers to with charming imprecision as 'the Adrian Stephenses' stocked up on the supply of letters and memoirs which appear to have been Bloomsbury's chief source of literary nourishment. Her nostalgia for the bookshop is hopelessly contagious and embarrassing to reflect on in a city, where bookshops no longer exist.
On the subject of her marriage to Ralph Partridge she is as reticent as she can possibly be without sidestepping the issue altogether. Those who hoped for a Now-its can-be-told' will be disappointed, but it is enough to note that she was forced to cope not only with the wounded susceptibilities of Lytton, turning acid as the beefy Christ Church rowing blue slipped from his reach, but also with those of the wretched Carrington, whose limp attachment to Strachey himself was compounded by her love for Ralph. In the circumstances Frances's behaviour was beyond reproach and her faith in Ralph as something more than a hooray henry in a chunky sweater was aver* rewarded..
It would be unfair to Mrs Partridge 'S evident sense of the fitness of things to say that her memoirs contain much that is either sensational in its disclosures or rivetting curiosity value. They do not. The disquisition on the Woolfs and others at the end of her sixth chapter ought to be read by all the more gushing Bloomsbury enthusiasts as a model of good sense transmitted through the jejune and the pedestrian. The extracts from her diary — 'Ham Spray. A dazzling• morning. We walked, to the Gibbet and back, finding primroses in the copse on the way home; Carrington rode on Belle and Lytton entertained us with amusing anecdotes about Norman Douglas. . •' — reduce the whole business to something on the level of 'The Archers' and make us understand very precisely how, in trying so very hard not to be middle class, these figures of notional unorthodoxy succeeded in being just that. Nevertheless, while the belief endures in a prolonged country house week-end as a terminal event in modern English culture, Mrs Partridge's book will do as well as, I assume, it has already been doing. For me the most enthralling moment Comes when, in the early months of 1928, a monstrous flood engulfs Westminster, tearing up the streets and drowning several People in their basements: 'Aunt Ethel had her kitchen filled with black slime to the roof and all her china broken'. It sounds like God's judgment on Bloomsbury.
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