The ants' nest
Beverley Nichols
• Personal Record — 1920-1972 Gerald Brenan (•Ionathan Cape £6.00) Lurfo Among Lions Diana Holman-Hunt (Michael Joseph £6.00) .1.-re there any new stories to be told about Ploornsbury? About Lytton Strachey and arrington" and Virginia Woolf and Maynard
Ynes and Aldous Huxley and Morgan Forster and Iris Tree and all that little lot? Yes there are. There is my story about the ants' nest. It vvas a Spring evening in the early 'twenties, and the setting was King's College, Cambridge, where one of the youngest and most sparkling the dons was giving a party to the faithful. there was a great deal of champagne at six s.hillings a bottle, and I drank so much of it that was tactfully guided to the next room and laid on the bed. For the record, I had very pink Lb eeks and very curly hair.
_ It was then that I had this terrible nightmare. !dreamt that I had fallen head first into an ants' I twisted and turned and gasped and sPlnest. uttered, trying to escape from the horrible eatures that were swarming all over my face. then there was a dull thud as an alien body fell 'off the bed. I sat up, looked down and observed some astonishment that the ants' nest was attached to the distinguished features of e author of Eminent Victorians, who was gr°Ping for his spectacles on the carpet. I was Oat too pleased. We had not even been nroduced and it occurred to me that he had L'een taking too much for granted. s ub Maybe this bizarre encounter coloured my _sequent reactions to the Bloomsbury gang. 100 many of them, for too many years, took too ,.111,_unh for granted. They took it for granted that `"eY were heaven-sent geniuses to whom !Cociety owed a living. They took it for granted hulat such cataclysms as a world war were ueneath their attention. Virginia Woolf's Pretulant preoccupation with the critics during ;;I,le Worst days of the war was quite nauseating. "0 degree of genius excuses an attitude so arrogantly aloof. , There was of course, an abundance of talent inn,ut there was also an abundance of folly. rtrarid Russell had a giant's intellect but in "IS judgement of contemporary history — tably in his assessment of Soviet Russia — he dw.as wildly off the mark. In spite of his jaMond-sharp intelligence Aldous Huxley is Treacly dated. Of the painters only Sickert and , and possibly Guevara, seem likely to ',stand up to the Scrutiny of posterity. Blooms `-' '1.',L1rY's corporate mentality is best illuminated ,Y a record of the persons they despised. 'Needless to say, I was held in total contempt, P.I.ticularly after my first best-seller. Shortly tui!fll ore his suicide — (not a moment too soon) — ee notorious Brian Howard, who was greatly s.,peined, described me as 'The dung-heap." hese reflections are prompted by two books which Bloomsbury is subjected to further ',ittiny. The first, Personal Record — 1920-1972 Gerald Brenan, has a special authenticity wise the author had a long and stormy affair teah Canington, of whom he writes with such wrlhderness that he is obviously still having it. s at was it about Carrington that aroused E:h Passionate reactions? She was not w autiful, her talents were second-rate, her wit 08 usually pure cattiness, and On the rare
arc ns casio when I met her, she struck me as an
aoh-egomaniac. Fortunately she does not roinate Persona/ Record, which is one of the
St absorbing autobiographies that have Deared for some years. Brenan, at the age of eighty, has lost none of his lust for life, and his memory of distant passions is so vivid that the ashes are still smouldering. He has all the qualifications of the ideal autobiographer — honesty, the power of instant recollection and an exceptional gift of employing all his five senses in the evocation of a mood.
Another aspect of Bloomsbury is revealed in Latin Among Lions by Diana Holman-Hunt.
This is the authentic portrait of a genius and unlike most such portraits, it comes off. The genfus in question was the painter Alvaro Guevara, whose portrait of Edith Sitwell hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Here again I can offer a personal recollection. I first met Guevara at the Cafe Royal when he sent me
across a note asking me. to come across for a drink in order to approve a portrait that he had
sketched on the marble table-top. When I joined him I found that he had produced a striking likeness but, as he had chosen to portray me in the nude, I politely declined his suggestion that I should sit for a full-length portrait.
Eventually we sorted that little matter out, and 1 went to stay at his studio in the Fulham Road where he produced a masterpiece which, alas, was blown up during the war. The ten days which he spent in painting it have for me a nightmarish quality, crowded with a ceaseless procession of freaks — Nancy Cunard, maquillee like a clown rattling jungle bracelets, Ronald Firbank, drunk at breakfast time, Mark Gertler sobbing his heart out for love of Carrington.. Not really my cup of tea. On my departure he presented me with a very beautiful picture of e woman which was obviously inspired by Picasso's Woman with Absinthe. I took it back to Oxford and hung it in my roo.m at Balliol. Then, one day Sacheverell Sitwell arrived in a state of great agitation with the news that "Chile" Guevara — as we all called him — was on his way up to Oxford with a knife, because he was going to murder me for stealing the picture. Which was the end of our brief but beautiful friendship. Was Guevara mad? TO answer that question you must read Latin Among Lions, and it is well worth reading. The portrayal of genius demands a pen of genius, and Miss HolmanHunt has more than a touch of it.
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