UNDERGRADUATE ARTICLE .
A Bloomsbury Fantasia
By R. S. GRIFFITHS (UnNersity College, London) . . . and walking alone among the Russell Square citadels, I saw myself as a child, a precocious child, playing in the sand, quitting my pies and looking up and seeing the benign face of a gentleman and shouting, " Mummy, Mummy," and watching him take a book from his pocket and watching him sign it and then hand it to me . . . Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats . . . and the dream faded and I found myself in one of the interminable streets of one-night cheap hotels . . .
Bloomsbury does affect people like that. Especially hyper- sensitive young men. - A, young man learns that he is coming to Bloomsbury and from then onwards he eats and drinks, he lives and sleeps and dreams on Bloomsbury. He very probably peruses a map—a fatal move. Maps were made for the Romantic. Our young man gives rein to his imagination. He notes the frontiers beyond which, for him, lies the cold unreal world. He notes the, Underground and those names, Euston Square, Warren Street, Goodge Street, Tottenham Court Road, and suddenly they are hideous bastions warning off the infidel from the holy of holies. He marks the British Museum and conjures up images of the learned troglodytes that haunt the Reading Room; he sees the squares as tranquil refuges. And Bloomsbury becomes the one oasis in a ferro-concrete desert.
I came myself, I am forced to admit, with much the same attitude. I too wanted to emulate, so painfully unaware of the rigours of emulation. For here were the men that " one cannot hope to emulate," as Mr. Eliot says, the inaccessibles, the untouchables. It was not long, too, before I learnt that in Bloomsbury all the .4` best ' people take morning constitutionals—" the happy preludes to days of academic application and domestic bliss," I was told. Constitutionals are usually exhilarating, but a Bloomsbury constitutional can be most disconcerting. At seven in the morning one's critical acumen is not always at its best and Bloomsbury demands the best in every man at all times. It is not just a question of a progression forward in time of one half-hour, but of being prepared to retrace two, three, or even four decades. One morning, I turned from my room on the furthest fringes of Bloomsbury, no more than .a whistle blast away from the giant bowels of Euston, St. Pancras and King's Cross, and proveded in a spirit of seemingly unwarranted abjection to circumnavigate my own particular fragment. 1 was well fortified; I had buttoned up my Edwardian greatcoat to within an inch of my chin and I carried that implement which makes so many friends for man—my umbrella. For Bloomsbury seems to be in a continual climatic vacuum—I have heard it called a cultural vacuum on occasions—and becomes prone to heavy rain and ominous cloud and to a piercing, shrieking wind. This wind, many habitues have assured me, was spoken of endearingly in certain circles as a private personal Bloomsbury Mistral. I myself would have rather likened it to the wind of the Inferno. It has its place, of course; it alleviates the torrid Bloomsbury summer heat, but it also helps peel off the stucco and give a respectable aura of dustiness to not a few of the enigmatic statues. But on these sorties one begins to expect too much of the quartier ; on this particular morning and on many subsequent occasions when I passed through Woburn Walk, I half-expected, even to the point of pausing, to see the young vital cravatted Yeats of the Sargent esquisse emerge from his rooms there. Such flights oppress everyone in Bloomsbury. loaded as it is with so many overtones of association, and, as is regrettably inevitable, I began to muse, not precisely on the Infinite, but at least on the wider horizons of the " new " Bloomsbury.
Three terms come.to mind: anachronism, analogy, anomaly. Already I was beginning to make that thirty year retrogression to the heyday of Georgian Bloomsbury. Questions were posed : where we were in relation to those vrais gens, where do we fail to measure up to them, where were we alike ? They were unanswerable. Perhaps they do not have to be - answered. " Notts sommes les gens de tnaintenant," says one of Moliere's young lovers—we of the present are the people that matter. It is all a question of various strata; we perhaps exist at a lower plane than those of the 'twenties, but Bloomsbury is a haven for kindred spirits and a few decades this way or that does destroy a common bond. There have been innovations of course : squares that once heard the shrill, cultured voice of a Lytton Strachey now listen to the less familiar tones of Hindi or Tamil or Urdu, the sari has .come to. be as familiar as the bustle, and the " Chust pyjama " (or more commonly Jodhpur) is just another variation on the Edwardian " drain- pipe ' theme. The soirée has been superseded on the lower level by the student's beer orgy—and one begins to regret the departure of the Lady Ottolines. The aesthete is now de- fined as " impecunious." The garish Fulbright-type clothes and accents have come almost to harmonise with the architecture. A renaissance is in the offing. When plans materialise and the " new " Bloomsbury achieves itself, London will have its own Latin Quarter—at least we are on the Left Bank, although slightly in the hinterland—and even then there will be no anomalies in the character of Bloomsbury. There will still remain a common motive in the constant search after know- ledge. The Old Bloomsbury will still be there, in the squares, in the odd little side streets, in the associations recalled by a plaque or a statue, and in the perennial types to be found in every Bloomsbury pub Discipline ! Easily sentimental, I was beginning to see myself as an embryo Boswell or Frank Swinnerton, a Bloomsbury raisonneur. I was still before the former home of Yeats. I read the plaque again: WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS Irish poet and dramatist • lived in this house then known as 18 Woburn Buildings.
1895/1919.
I hurried home, afraid of the Furies, the departed Bloomsbury shapes. I took to my bed, carefully selecting the more sober fantasy of the Oxford of Zuleika Dobson for my edification.
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