TABLE TALK

The last of Bloomsbury

DENIS BROGAN

The death of Leonard Woolf removes the last and, for me, the most attractive of the 'Bloomsberries'. It is quite true, as is sug- gested in the Times obituary, that his attempts at a general philosophy of politics were not very successful. And in the admir- able notice in the Guardian, a solution to the problem of why his political writings are unsatisfactory is suggested. Born in the golden age of liberalism, of a highly culti- vated Jewish family, he, like matey other people of his age, found it impossible to believe that progress had stopped and, in many ways, had gone backwards.

The rational approach to public affairs that animated him was at a loss faced with Hitler or, for that matter, with Stalin. He was too old to accept the painful fact that the humane, optimistic, progressive world in which he grew up and which he adorned was possibly a brief, happy interval in the long and sad history of mankind. He was a product and a chronicler of our Antonine age. But Gibbon knew that human history in general was very unlike the Antonine age and Leonard Woolf could never bring him- self to accept the fact that folly anAsavag- ery were perhaps the natural human condi- tion. He lacked, that is to say, an adequate sense of original sin.

In the Times obituary, he is compared with Graham Wallas, but not only had Graham Wallas the good fortune to die sooner than Leonard Woolf, but some of the later writings of Graham Wallas seemed to me to shdw a more critical, 'sceptical, and illuminating view of life than anything produced by Leonard Woolf.

But it would be very unjust to regard Woolf as an intelligent political writer who didn't quite come off. For a good many people, as one can see from the obituaries, he was chiefly important as the husband of Virginia Woolf. I am inclined to believe that some of his limitations were duet° his being embedded in the Bloomsbury group by his marriage to Virginia Stephen. He has been described as living the role of the husband of a genius. Virginia Woolf was at best a genius of the second order. Leonard Woolf remained very loyal to hav,ife's memory and, a short time before his death, wrote me a more pained than indignant letter when I suggested in these columns that she was, after all, a minor figure in English literature. But I cannot help think-

ing that Leonard Woolf would have been a more effective propagandist for ge.sviews had he escaped from the hothouse of Bloomsbury.

We know a little more about Bloomsbury than we did, or than most of us did, thanks to the publication of Mr Michael Holroyd's remarkable life of Lytton Strachey. On the whole, Mr Holroyd's picture of Bloomsbury does not make us regret not having been a member of the group or even a hanger-on,

and perhaps makes us even regret the exist-

ence of the group. There was a thinness about the achievement of most of the Bloomsbury group in spite of the impressive minds and real genius of J. M. Keynes and of E. M. Forster.

I don't think that E. M. Forster's A Passage to India is by any means his best book, and that famous belligerent Indian, Mr Chaudhuri, once rebuked me in a vehement private letter for mentioning Kipling contemptuously compared with Forster. He said Kipling knew far more about India than did Forster, and that Kim was worth ten of A Passage to India. After

my first and only visit to India, I began to think that Mr Chaudhuri had something. On the other hand, I admired and admire greatly some other works of E. M. Forster,

Keynes was undoubtedly a genius al- , though in many ways a malignant genius. His historical role is open to a great deal of criticism. I was interested to see, for example, that Bertrand Russell, in the last-. volume of his autobiography, raises a moral question which I myself had raised in my for interieur about Keynes's moral standing" in the first war. For Keynes was a pacifist and would, we are told, have been a con- - scientious objector if called up. Yet he worked with great skill and energy and

success to get the Americans to provide weapons to be used by people of a less delicate conscience. This seems to me the kind of moral attitude that would have pro- voked the indignation and ironical com- ments of George Orwell.

I don't take very seriously the revelation of the high homosexual life of King's or of the Apostles. First of all, it was in many. cases not news to me, and secondly I unit not sure that it was important. I have even been told, indirectly it is true, by a very close friend of Keynes's, that his homo- sexual activities were in fact purely literary= and mythical. He was, so it is said, rather:;-, like Colette's last husband whom she des- cribed as le coca imaginaire. Keynes was a pelderaste imaginaire, and if he was suffer- ing anything was suffering from what was-4-

described in a famous blue record of the 'thirties as 'empty bed blues'. But there is

no doubt that for good and evil—a great deal of good and some evil—Keynes was a very great figure. But did he and Morgan Forster add much to Bloomsbury or would. they not have been more effective if they had cut themselves off from that inter- marrying, inter-loving, self-admiring group?

This raises the question of whether, at the best of times, such literary groups are a good idea. There is the great problem of mutual back-scratching. This does not

matter very much, I think, and is worse in Paris than in London. Possibly some boob were reviewed more seriously because they came out of the Bloomsbury circle than they would have been if read in cold blood. (It may be a revelation of the great literary blanks in my mind that I can never remem- ber whether Virginia Woolf was the author of Orlando and Vita Sackville-West the heroine, or the other way round.) But doei anyone now read or re-read either Clise Bell or Roger Fry or pay much attention to the paintings of Vanessa Bell? And perhaps the hothouse atmosphere of the Blooms. berries accounts for some of the unattrac- tive aspects of their writings.

I think some of Keynes's remarkably bad political judgments came from the fact that he didn't meet enough ordinary people, and his intellectual arrogance, which made him so bad a negotiator with the Ameri.1 cans, might have been smacked down a bit if, for example, he had had to serve in the army or had known something of the world outside Eton, King's, Bloomsbury and the City.

A certain amount of self-admiration and mutual admiration is involved in the liter- ary life. I was not really annoyed when was recently approached by an eminent writer telling me how good his un- published book was to be, and insinuating that I would review it highly favourably. I did review it, but my views were not in the least altered, one way or the other, b this simple, indeed naïve approach. course, again things are worse in Paris, hangers-on of les chers maltres, given the French system of reviewing, are bound t butter up the great man and to receive few kind and helpful and indeed profitabl words in exchange. This also means that Paris members of different groups can extremely hostile to each other, conductin a generation-long internecine war.

As for America, the literary circles New York are so cut off, it seems to in from a great deal of the real life of United States—indeed, a great deal of real life of New York—that although the are circles of admirers, and circles writers who get deserved admiration, f all that, there is no American equival of Bloomsbury. On the whole, I prefer solitary or nearly solitary writer like. us say, Joseph Conrad, to these inb groups. I don't know whether the Bloc berries ever appreciated how reveali foolish was the contempt of Virginia W for James Joyce, how much it revealed isolation of this small, snobbish, u middle class group from the real life literature, not only in England. but in 0 countries. And if I am told that Virg Woolf herself is very much admired Paris, so was, and as far as I know so Charles Morgan.

Leonard Woolf with his generosity. ironical and sometimes highly impr humour, and his pioneering work, in w his wife shared, in the Hogarth Press, perhaps the victim and the exemplar the myths and attitudes of Cambri Bloomsbury to life. At any rate, he w great citizen, if not a great writer, and very bold and original publisher wh taste was usually justified. We shall look upon his like again, which is re table; but he had in fact outlived the WO in which he grew up and never adjusted a world which he had never made a perhaps in the last years of his life, d really live in.