by Gillian Gill
Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury was larger, fuzzier, busier, less sybaritic, more porous, more integrated, more down-to-earth. After World War I, unlike her sister’s, it blossomed with stimulating and supportive friendships with women while remaining rooted in the love of one man, her husband and partner, Leonard Woolf.
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If Virginia had hoped to show her sister that Vanessa had married a man far inferior to their father or their older brother Thoby, she succeeded. If Virginia had hoped to separate the Bells, she failed. It suited Vanessa far better to be a Mrs. Bell, with a husband in tow—at least on odd weekends—than a Miss Stephen or a divorcée. In some ways Clive Bell was a model husband—affluent, socially adept, even-tempered, and generous, a pampered man and inclined to pomposity, certainly, but not hard for a clever woman to manage. Even after they went their separate ways, the Bells continued for some years to find pleasure in bed when under the same roof, and as late as 1912 Vanessa still saw her husband as a prime candidate to give her the third child she wanted. “Do you miss your Dolph, my legitimate Male?” she coyly wrote to Clive.
Children had come to be even more important than painting to Vanessa Bell, in part because they were her trump card in the lifelong game of one-upwomanship she played with her sister. Virginia was the first to admit that, however well her books and articles might sell, she would always feel inferior to Vanessa because she had no children. Vanessa Bell was in no way a modern “helicopter”-style mother, and she often went off on long vacations without her children when they were young. That said, she was as committed as her mother, Julia Stephen, had been to ensuring that her children assumed their proper place in English society. That commitment will, as we shall see, take especial importance for her third child, Angelica.
For her children’s sake, it was essential for Vanessa Bell to secure the support not only of her “legitimate Male” Clive Bell but also of his wealthy father. In this she succeeded. She made the children an enjoyable joint enterprise in which Clive and his family supplied the money and she did the parenting. Clive took pride in his paternity and was ready to enjoy his sons as soon as they changed from howling banshees to articulate charmers. As for Clive’s father, William Heward Bell, an ill-tempered man with strong patriarchal instincts, he was gratified by his “artistic” younger son’s ability to sire two healthy male offspring in as many years. As part of the generous settlement George Duckworth had negotiated for her at the time of her marriage, Vanessa personally received Mr. Bell’s check for one thousand pounds for each child she produced—some fifty thousand in today’s pounds. Hence, although Vanessa dreaded her visits to the home of her parents-in-law and wrote vivid accounts to her sister of the horrors of life at Cleeve House, she continued to make the annual pilgrimage to Wiltshire, dragging her increasingly reluctant children with her.
Socially, Vanessa’s mask of serenity, her policy of non-confrontation, her silent but steely determination to do what suited her best paid dividends for many years. It made a sister-husband affair that smoldered for over three years into something incidental, unworthy of gossip even in gossip-addicted Bloomsbury. She accepted without demur the fact that her husband was a serial philanderer whose mistresses grew younger and younger as he himself grew old. As the years went by, Vanessa would chuckle over stories of Clive’s sexual adventures, entertain his mistresses in her home, flatter his ego, and smile at his prejudices. She was his reliable ally in the social battles he chose to engage, notably the one with Lady Ottoline Morrell, the flamboyant socialite and generous patron of the arts whom Clive could not forgive for saving him from the army by offering him employment on her estate at Garsington during World War I and requiring him to do no actual work. For Clive Bell such aristocratic patronage was insupportable, so Clive and Vanessa and their friend Lytton Strachey, another major beneficiary of Lady Ottoline’s largesse, were very nasty indeed about her behind her back.
Clive hated unpleasantness and mess, and since divorce in those times was inevitably messy and unpleasant, the question of divorce seems rarely to have arisen in the sixty-three years of the Bell marriage. By lavishing on her husband the charm and tolerance for which she would become famous in the Bloomsbury group, Vanessa kept Clive tied to her by a long, flexible leash. But if, deep down, Vanessa Stephen had hoped to find with Clive Bell the passionate devotion that her adored mother, Julia Stephen, had secured in both her marriages, she had failed. Cynicism, disillusion, and unfulfilled sexual needs would henceforth color Vanessa Bell’s worldview.
Another woman faced with the dual challenge of both Virginia and Mrs. Raven-Hill would have looked at once for a lover of her own, but instead, Vanessa found support and solace in the company of her husband’s most amusing friends, first Lytton Strachey and then Maynard Keynes. That both men were outrageously gay was part of the complicated appeal they had for her.
Lytton Strachey, as we have seen, enters our story as a close “Cambridge” friend of both Thoby Stephen and Clive Bell, as Leonard Woolf’s loyal correspondent during Woolf’s years in Sri Lanka, and as an influential member of both the Cambridge Conversazione Society and the play-reading Midnight Society. Delighting in gossip and fascinated by the way heterosexuals fell in love and got married, Lytton in 1906 had helped stoke the fire of Clive Bell’s passion for Vanessa Stephen even as he was trying to convince Leonard Woolf to come back to England and woo Virginia. Now, in the early, confusing, and distressing years of the Bell marriage, Lytton Strachey became Vanessa’s most intimate friend and closest ally.
If Vanessa had personal reasons to cut connections with the Kensington world of her parents, Lytton was by her side to tell her enthusiastically that she was right to do it. The Victorian world had finally gone unlamented into its grave, crowed Lytton. He and Vanessa were part of a new and wonderful generation of artists and rebels. “I sometimes feel,” Lytton had written to Leonard as early as 1904, “as if it were not ourselves who are concerned but that the destinies of the whole world are somehow involved in ours. We are—oh!—in more ways than one—like the Athenians of the Periclean Age. We are the mysterious priests of a new and amazing civilization. We are greater than our fathers; we are greater than Shelley; we are greater than the eighteenth century; we are greater than the Renaissance; we are greater than the Romans and the Greeks.”
In an autobiographical fragment, Vanessa Bell identifies Lytton Strachey as the catalyst for transforming the “Old Bloomsbury” of her conventional brother Thoby into a group that rebelled against the parental generation. “Only those just getting to know [Lytton] well,” she wrote, “in those days when complete freedom of mind and expression were almost unknown, can understand what an exciting world of explorations of thought and feelings [Lytton] seemed to reveal. His great honesty of mind and remorseless poking fun at any sham forced others to be honest and showed a world in which one need no longer be afraid of saying what one thought, surely the first step to anything that would be of interest and value.”
In the new Bloomsbury that formed after the death of Thoby Stephen under the influence of Lytton Strachey, by common consent and in personal statements that amounted almost to a manifesto, morality was to be divorced from sex, and ethics was displaced in favor of aesthetics. Heterosexuals in the group, especially male heterosexuals, were authorized to observe a code of conduct common among homosexual men. Every man had the right, amounting to a duty, to follow the dictates of his heart—or, to put it less delicately, go where his dick led him, and if a man desired the lover or spouse of a dear friend, he would have him or her if he could. Spouses and lovers and friends would, of course, let out howls of pain and hurl accusations after such betrayals, but they were expected to get a grip in short order and harbor no hard feelings.
Given the dangers of sex with professionals (this was the era when venereal diseases flourished unchecked in brothels that catered to heterosexual men and before AIDS wreaked havoc in the gay community), Bloomsberries (a name coined by Molly MacCarthy) sought wher
e possible to find sex partners in their own set. Thus, though knowing his dear friend Lytton Strachey was passionately attached to Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes had no real compunction about securing Duncan as his own lover. When Duncan moved on, he and Lytton and Maynard all remained friends. Similarly, Clive Bell switched from Anne Raven-Hill to Mary Hutchinson and then Gwen St. Aubyn, Christabel Aberconway, and so on, while pursuing Molly MacCarthy, the wife of his dear, charmingly adulterous friend Desmond, and later, Frances Marshall, the lover and eventually the wife of his friend Ralph Partridge.
In the brave new world of Gordon Square, women would enjoy, or at least have, the same right to complete sexual freedom as men. This was the doctrine preached by Lytton Strachey, the doctrine accepted, with tragic results, by his female companion, Carrington. Basking in Lytton’s praise and extrapolating from Lytton’s ideas, Vanessa Bell was not yet ready to take a male lover of her own, but she embraced the idea of a society in which a woman, or at least a woman like herself, could exercise autonomy, own her body, consult her own interests, follow her desire, paint a nude picture, or pose for one, as she chose.
Social revolution à la Lytton began with names. Upper-middle-class Englishmen before World War I habitually referred to one another by their surnames, and women were Miss X or Mrs. Y, but the denizens of Bloomsbury used first names. Bell became Clive, Strachey became Lytton, Forster became Morgan, Miss Stephen/Mrs. Bell became Vanessa, or even Nessa. Bloomsbury men and women also had the same esoteric vocabulary, from “catachresis” to “catamite,” from “Coptic” to “copulate,” and together they acted out bawdy Restoration comedies and discussed anything from Beethoven to Botticelli to Bolshevism to buggery. As her letters amply prove, Vanessa Bell had, in the words of her biographer Frances Spalding, “entered the smoking room and she . . . began to produce bawdy words with all the glee of a spoiled child.”
Both Virginia and Vanessa recorded how excited they had been to talk like the men. “The word bugger was never far from our lips,” wrote Virginia Woolf proudly in “Old Bloomsbury.” “We discussed copulation with the same excitement and openness with which we had discussed the nature of good.” For women to be made privy to things that men habitually said only to one another was new in middle-class English society, and this inclusiveness has been heralded in Bloomsbury literature as an “antidote to Victorian Puritanism.” “Vanessa by her behavior was making social history,” writes Spalding. “Not only was she using words that her mother would have pretended not to understand, but she was doing so in conversation with men, thereby insisting on an equality rare even among feminists.” (Spalding is, I think, right on the money when she says that Victorian women “pretended not to understand” certain words, not that they did not know them. In her frequent visits to the London slums, Julia Stephen Duckworth certainly heard words like “cunt,” but, unlike her daughter Vanessa, she never used them in her correspondence.)
It was Lytton who, in an incident that would go down in Bloomsbury mythology, entered the Bell drawing room, spotted a white stain on Vanessa’s dress, and remarked, “Semen?” It was Lytton who instructed Vanessa to read Les liaisons dangereuses, an eighteenth-century novel of subtle and delicious perversity that was written, not incidentally, given the later importance of Bloomsbury correspondence, entirely in letters. It was Lytton who lent Vanessa his “most indecent poems,” as an astonished and delighted Maynard Keynes reported to Duncan Grant, and gave her permission to type them up and circulate them.
Given the exalted claims Lytton in 1904 was making for Bloomsbury as the new “Periclean Age,” it is fun to look at one of the poems that Vanessa Bell found so liberating. As an appendix to the second volume of his biography, which is devoted to celebrating Lytton Strachey’s literary legacy, Sir Michael Holroyd reproduces Lytton’s 1904 long narrative poem “The Death of Milo.” If I may summarize, the “mighty boxer” Milo decides on a trial of strength with an oak tree and becomes inextricably caught in its fork. (I am not making this up!) Milo dies in the tree’s grasp but defies his fate in an orgasmic act of what, in the argot of the Strachey clan, was known as “forthing”—excretion and micturition. “From the opening gut,” begins one stanza, “slow as the child of anxious birth it voyaged . . . then hung one trembling moment, and to earth.”
Reportedly, when Vanessa passed her poems like this, Virginia Woolf laughed. I think Woolf was right. As a piece of second-grade humor or adult male rodomontade, if I may borrow from Lytton’s French vocabulary, “The Death of Milo” is very funny in ways that its young author probably did not intend.
Apart from his literary work, Vanessa took a friendly interest in Lytton’s amatory pursuits, and by April 28, 1909, she was writing to him from Florence, noting that the pensione where she and Clive were staying “has some awful females, but two young men who sing you might flirt with. They walk past our windows on their way to the baths every morning and there are strange goings on on the veranda at all hours of the night. There might be still stranger if you were here.”
She also notes as a feature of the landscape bound to interest Lytton that “as we came along in the train a row of naked boys saluted us.” To judge by Lytton’s correspondence, Vanessa Bell here is echoing comments about small naked foreign boys she had heard from her gay male friends. One particularly egregious example can be found in an August 1931 letter Lytton wrote to his lover Roger Senhouse, offering news of a recent trip taken in Spain and Morocco by their mutual friends Raymond Mortimer and George “Dadie” Rylands. “Dearest dearest creature,” wrote Lytton to Roger, “a letter from Dadie at Tocklington contained the following—‘The Spaniards do not quite see eye to eye with us in affairs of the body, but there was a guide at Marrakech—and R[aymond] bargained (in vain) for a child of five summers. I was most distressed.’” Presumably owing to the bargain being attempted, rather than its failure.
Vanessa Bell, it seems, in an attempt at urbane sophistication, was picking up on a particular kind of cultural blindness among these men at this time, which would become a problem she had to solve as the mother of two boys. Was it possible that friends whom she welcomed in her home, like Senhouse and Mortimer, might pose a threat not just to anonymous little boys in Spain or Morocco, but to her darling Julian and his brother? When is a boy old enough to engage in a sexual relationship with an adult male? In England between the world wars, people like the Bells, who enjoyed sexual freedom, practiced tolerance, and scorned conventional morality, were content to leave that question to classical scholars. They had been reliably informed that in the original, unexpurgated text of the Phaedrus, Socrates extolled the love of a man and a boy as the highest form of human love. What was good enough for Plato was surely good enough for Bloomsbury.
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It was Lytton Strachey who brought John Maynard Keynes into the Bloomsbury group, and he may have come to regret it, since Maynard struck almost everyone but Carrington, who worshiped Lytton, as Lytton to the power of ten. All his life, Keynes could get more done in a day than other able men in three, and once installed in the ranks of academia and government, he moved smoothly up the ladder of power. Even Bertrand Russell, the famous philosopher, pacifist, and Nobel Prize winner, acknowledged the diamond brilliance of Keynes’s mind even though he could not stand to be with Keynes the man.
Keynes knew from boyhood that he was homosexual. At Eton, where he won all the prizes while excelling at the notoriously bloody Wall Game and was elected to Pop, the elite social club, Keynes had at least one male lover, Dillwyn Knox, and several of those passionate friendships that at public schools were allowed to hover deliciously on the very edge of orgasm. At Trinity College as an undergraduate and at King’s College as a fellow, Keynes felt both sexually and intellectually at home—love affairs between men were too common to provoke comment, much less punishment. Homosexuality was central to Keynes’s self-identity, and right up to the time of his marriage, in 1925, he pursued love and lovers with the same energy, pragmatism, and success that h
e applied to economic theory, international finance, and the stock market.
Once Keynes moved to London, he became close to the members of the Bloomsbury group. In 1909, Vanessa and her husband, Clive, were staying in Cambridge, and Maynard had them to tea at King’s. While Vanessa poured and passed the scones in her best Kensington manner, Maynard regaled her and Clive with the latest homosexual gossip. Harry Norton, they learned, was despairingly in love with James Strachey, who was madly in love with Rupert Brooke, who had an endearing way of diving nude into a lake and emerging with a full erection. Maynard himself was successfully competing with Lytton Strachey for the favors of Duncan Grant. Maynard wrote of his meeting with the Bells to Duncan: “Vanessa explained how interesting it was for her to come up and have a look at us, Lytton having explained every one of our secrets. She was perfectly lovely—I’ve never seen her so beautiful—and very conversational . . . She seemed to hold the floor.” This scene of shared conviviality between men and women at King’s College contrasts strongly with the scene of silence and intellectual dismissal described, as we saw in Chapter 11, by Virginia Woolf at Trinity College at around the same time.
As Lytton became increasingly entangled with Lady Ottoline Morrell and Carrington and absorbed in the writing of his great book Eminent Victorians, Maynard Keynes replaced him as Vanessa Bell’s closest friend. Maynard was deeply attached to both his mother and his sister and partial to the company of women as long as they didn’t try to be clever, and he savored Vanessa’s charm, bohemian style, devotion to painting, and scabrous conversation. Thus, in April 1914, following an enjoyable weekend at Asheham, the Sussex house that she and Virginia had subleased to Maynard, Vanessa was on sufficiently intimate terms to open a thank-you letter as follows:
