REVIEW OF BOOKS

David Garnett on friends and friendship

,1-,?villg? The worst thing about this excellent 7"rveY* of the principal figures of 'Bloomsbury' is the Child which to my ears sounds what ildren used to call "soppy." For it was not 1ngness that bound us together, if I may e myself (a debatable point). It was iatniliarity, that deep, amused and affectionate 1.(aowledge of each other that is sometimes ,aund in brothers or sisters who have grown up logether and which is usually found in twins. Of course love was there, but it was not sendeatal or obtrusive. Nor does the author uggest it in his text. Sometimes he gives a wrong idea, and e2rrects it later on. For example, he writes: "Its

were were aesthetes — that is to say they

re concerned primarily with feelings and the -hxPression of feeling. What was felt was right, owever it was regarded by society...." That gwes a

eiy wrong impression. General Gadd

F,rcts it in his last chapter with the words: e • habit • quality they had in common was the in of applying reason to all aspects of life, a eluding those in which emotion or sensibility doMinant, and the intellectual insight which ebnabled them to do so. They did not accept, that Sethey did not find it reasonable to do so, at there are large areas of life in which rules ;Ivention has the force of law. They broke the v when they thought them stupid." This is jperY different from asserting that their criteretrill-13f right was strong feeling, which is the

„ of a small child. Nor should I call them aesthete "'

fit rut S • most certainly the term does not Le "LaYnard Keynes, or Harry Norton or onard Woolf. ahlalso have a bone to pick with General Gadd. ;alit Bloomsbury's attitude to the first world ot,r' He writes: "Bloomsbury stood aside, trasell4ng the human drama, even at its most gic, with ironic detachment."

stAdrian Stephen, Clive Bell, Lytton and James uGerraacihdeY, Duncan Grant, David Garnett, and

Shove were conscientious objectors. a,.1,!!1carl Grant refused an offer to be a 'war in'Llar as it would have meant being an officer Onthe army; Clive Bell's pamphlet Peace At vce was burned by order of the Lord Mayor. We Were all strong pacifists and I can assure "ener ae. al Gadd that there was not much ironic ,:achment possible when working a full week dges a farin labourer, reading of many of one's ,._arest friends' deaths and knowing that the avaest

majority of one's fellows thought one was For eruptible coward. tor Gadd the rest I have only high praise. General c

hien, overs the ground well, showing how the l part•ushiPs developed and intertwined. He is vvo cularly good in his account of Virginia and°1f, and her work, and of Lytton Strachey as ,.11111s. Although I myself rate Mrs Dalloway the' of Virginia's novels, am pasghted by his praise of Orlando: "If with the fcr,,,sage of time, the language and mood and difficult of Virginia's other novels become too 'G and strange for any but the literary ci)ricatalist to enjoy, if that time ever comes, remain available to ail as a rhe• tiavid _croing Friends: a Portrait of Bloomsbury k-radd (The Hoearth Press £3.001.

marvellous tale with which to beguile a winter's night. Just for a moment Virginia finds herself in the company of Boccacio or Lesage." I would have added Chaucer. There is often much of Chaucer in her love of life: It appeared in her letters and her conversation.

General Gadd is at his best in his account and analysis of Lytton Strachey's character, correcting Holroyd's Life, which is flawed by lack of judgment and a desire to discover unworthy motives. He also corrects Holroyd's and Brenan's view that Ralph Partridge was a bluff and breezy extrovert who had seldom opened a book until he met Lytton. He was indeed an extrovert, but he was as devoid of heartiness as he was of ambition or Christian feeling, and he was, as Lord David Cecil has pointed out, "congenitally unconventional."

There is a good chapter on Lady Ottoline Morrell which answers a rhetorical question at the beginning of the book: "If Lady Ottoline Morrell was not one of the circle, why was she not?" My answer is as follows. If a conversation were going on beside the fire between, let us say, Vanessa, Virginia, Lytton and Clive and the door opened and Duncan, or Maynard, or Norton, or Saxon, or Desmond, or Molly, or Forster came into the room, a chair would be pushed forward, a place made and the conversation would continue with the newcomer adding to it. That would have been. unthinkable if Lady Ottoline had arrived.

This is, to a certain extent, explained by Mr Gathorne-Hardy in Ottoline at Garsington.** His is a touching tribute to one of the most .extraordinary women by the devoted friend of 1her old age, who died recently before the book was in print. Yes, touching, but unnecessarily so. The editor bitterly resents the legends, which only add to our own understanding and to her stature. Stephen Spender described how he saw Lady Ottoline near Gower Street "Sporting a shepherd's crook with Pekinese dogs attached to it by ribbons." This delightful

"Ottoline At Garsington Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell Edited by Robert GathorneHardy (Faber and Faber £4.95) 467 vision is laboriously disproved. There was no shepherd's crook in her house in Gower Street. All this is so trivial: the glory of Ottoline was that if she had thought of going out with a shepherd's crook and her dogs — pugs, in my day — tied to ribbons, no consideration would have stopped her. She was a marvellous woman and her eccentricities enhanced life.

Nowadays our aristocracy have turned. their ducal homes into zoos. Lady Ottoline had the same inStinct though there were no crowds ready to pay for a sight of D. H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russell, Lord Oxford and Asquith and the rest. Lions and tigers 'demand raw meat and are liable to bite the .hand that feeds them. Monkeys make faces, moorland ponies kick, and even little squirrels and dormice become tiresome pets. So it is no wonder that if a Phoenix burst into flames in her face, Lady Ottoline got burned and she bore the scars indicted by her collectiOn all her life. They almost always turned out disappointments: however helping and generous she might be, they preferred their freedom and were totally unpredictable. Alvaro Guevara, the painter, wanted a sparring partner, not an easel. Under her mask, Katherine Mansfield was clearly contemplating monkey tricks and even 1, an ugly duckling if ever there was one, spread my wings and flew away when I most unexpectedly turned into a swan Of course she could lash out with the animal trainer's whip. Her violence against Clive Bell was perhaps provoked by his circulating the allegation that a peacock which died of natural causes had produced an outbreak of food poisoning after being served up for dinner, and that she had steamed open the letter in which he spread the story.

What does it matter whether the legends are true, or false? For a great, noble • and extraordinary figure attracts legends. Ottoline, though she lived in Bloomsbury, was never one of the 'Bloomsbury Group' and would have been horrified to hear herself included among them. She knew some of them very well: Lytton Strachey foremost, and she always, she says, "felt very fond of Duncan Grant," but much her best bit of description is curiously of Maynard Keynes: "Even Bertie, who obviously doesn't like him very much acknowledges that he thinks far quicker than he does himself . . . his personality — a detached, meditating, yet half-caressing inter

est in those he is speaking to, head on one side, a kindly tolerant smile and very charming eyes, wandering, searching and speculating, then probably a frank, intimate and perhaps laughing home-thrust ..."

The Loving Friends presents a different portrait of Bloomsbury, ot course, but it is no less fair and interesting. I do think, however, that General Gadd is a little unfair to Clive Bell. My guess is that he was not elected an "Apostle" at Cambridge, not for lack of intelligence, but because he had too loud a voice, too hearty a laugh and talked too much. And there are a few errors of fact: Duncan Grant never got to Paris in 1916, for example. But now that almost every English Department of an American university has its "Bloomsbury Course," more and more books on this cluster of friends will be written. It will be a surprise if any of them are as good as The Loving Friends, showing as much understanding and refraining from using the subjects to prove some clever irrelevant theory the author has thought up.

There is still no limit to the number of books written about D. H. Lawrence. Tens of thousands of theses have been written about him. The poor students begin to need a change. But apart from the need of subjects for university lectures in the United States, why this interest?

General Gadd gives the answer in these true words: ". . in its attitude to homosexuality,

marriage and love-affairs generally Bloomsbury was only a short distance ahead of its time ... It is perhaps in this field that• Bloomsbury's habit of applying rational processes to emotional questions has been of peculiar importance in shaping present-day society ... its rebellion was a quiet one. Bloomsbury did not campaign, or march against the barricades: its only demonstration was that which showed the possibility of living ' rationally and happily in defiance of convention."

I congratulate the author on a most excellent book.

David Garnett's most recent novel is Plough Over The Bones.