Green Loaning
THIS publishing of an autobiography in widely separated volumes has disadvantages. Hares are started in one volume and months or years have to elapse before the reader is allowed to pursue them: hares are pursued in a later volume whose first starting it is then difficult to remember (the reappearance of the elusive 'T.T.' in David Garnett's second volume, for a minor example, loses much of its flavour if her brief introduction near the close of the first is not fresh in the reader's, mind—which it hardly can be, if that volume was read when it first appeared two years ago : similarly his later relations with the Lawrences need to be read with his first introduction to them as a boy). Further, it makes it singularly difficult to judge the development of the book as a whole: to appreciate the contrast between the back- ground of the first volume—the kaleidoscope of vaguely liberal- minded but otherwise ill-assorted intellectuals with whom the elder Garnetts were professionally in contact—ranging from Belloc and Galsworthy, Conrad and Henry James and Wells and Hudson and Rupert Brooke to Lenin and Kropotkin—and the unified philosophy, the close-knit intention of that involuted aristocratic society in which the author was to find his own place in the second—Keynes and the Stracheys, the Woolfs and Stephenses, the Bells and Duncan Grant and Fry and Francis Birrell—the 'organic unity' we call 'Bloomsbury.'
The Golden Echo began with Flodden Field, skipped fairly rapidly to the opening decade of the twentieth century, and closed, tantalisingly, with the outbreak of war in 1914. The Flowers ol the Forest (an allusion to the Lost Generation) takes us through the war into the ensuing peace: through the author's life as 8 manual labourer, first on relief-work behind the lines in France and then on an East Anglian farm, to his establishment, in 1923, with the publication of. Lady Into Fox, as a phblic figure in his. own right : to his marriage with his first wife, and the birth of his second. The literary background (as has already been remarked) is more and more exclusively 'Bloomsbury.' Indeed this book provides the fullest and most evocative, almost day-by-day account of the life of that society which has yet appeared. Reading it I found myself irresistibly driven to re-read The Tale of Genii-- and from that, moment I read on with one book in each hand. For it is a fascinating comparison. Here were two, societies, separated by a thousand years in time and half the circumference of the globe in distance, both basing themselves on the twin fundamentals of G. E. Moore's ethic—the contemplation of beautiful objects, and the cultivation of personal relationshiris. The comparison of course must not be pressed too far: the society of tenth-century Japan was the flowering of an established order, the society of twentieth-century Bloomsbury a society of rebels and apostles, thus inevitably the cruder, more gothic of the two. But the fundamentals of belief were the same.
Valuable as this picture of Bloomsbury is as history (and I boric that for the benefit of future historians the third volume will include an index to all three), the book is correctly described as autobiography, not memoirs. For what emerges most clearly of all is the character of the author himself : an •extraordinarY character, impossible to sum up in a few lines because in it the intellectual and the wild animal are so curiously blended. Throughout the whole story these twin threads of personality run inextricably. The author of Lady Into Fox. . . No wonder, one feels on laying down The Flowers of the Forest-- no wonder he wrote that exceptional story with so much passion,
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