by Gillian Gill
Dear Maynard, it is plainly quite superfluous for me to write and tell you how much we [she and Clive] had enjoyed ourselves at Asheham and so the only thing I can do, since you insist upon my writing, is to make my letter so bawdy that you will have to destroy it at once for fear of Lily’s [the maid at Asheham] seeing it. Did you have a pleasant afternoon buggering one or more of the young men we left for you? It must have been delicious out on the downs in that afternoon sun, a thing I have often wanted to do, but one never gets the opportunity and the desire at the right moment. I imagine you, however, with your bare limbs intertwined with him and all the ecstatic preliminaries of Sucking Sodomy.
From 1911 to 1925, there were four key men revolving around Vanessa Bell—Clive Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and John Maynard Keynes. The testimony of Quentin Bell in 1995 and the research of Robert Skidelsky, in his groundbreaking 2003 biography of Keynes, establish that, though Maynard was never Vanessa’s lover, he was something almost more important, a loving, generous, reliable friend. In 1916 it was Keynes—arriving at the decisive hearing with his official red attaché case, embossed with the royal crest, to impress the hell out of the local worthies—who managed to get Duncan Grant and Bunny Garnett registered as conscientious objectors and thus kept them out of jail. Then, for the two years when Duncan and Bunny worked as agricultural laborers in lieu of military service and kept on hold their careers as painter and writer, Maynard supported them, paying both men an annuity.
As Quentin Bell makes clear in Bloomsbury Recalled, when Vanessa was living at the Charleston farmhouse with her lover Duncan Grant and his lover Bunny Garnett between 1916 and 1919, Maynard was present more often than Clive and Roger and, as a member of the English homosexual community, fitted in more easily. The arrival of Maynard from Whitehall in his chauffeur-driven car, bearing gifts, was always a joyful event for all five members of Vanessa’s wartime household. The fact that Maynard never really hit it off personally with Virginia—who found his self-importance grating and pompous—or politically with Leonard made his friendship even more precious to Vanessa.
As he advanced in power and influence, Maynard continued to use them on behalf of his Bloomsbury chums. He obligingly paid Duncan and Vanessa to decorate his King’s College rooms, bought pictures at his artist friends’ recommendation, and served on art committees to aid struggling British artists. To be close to his friends, Keynes first sublet a large suite of rooms from Virginia and Adrian Stephen in Fitzroy Square and then took over the lease on that whole property, subletting it in turn to Clive Bell and a flock of other Bloomsbury characters before making it his main London residence. Growing fond of the Sussex countryside, he bought the Tilton estate that abutted the Bells’ Charleston farm.
After World War I, Maynard took over the investment portfolios of Clive, Vanessa, and Duncan. Given that Keynes was the man famous in university annals for turning King’s into one of the richest Cambridge colleges, this was a rather considerable advantage. It was in no small part thanks to Keynes that after 1918 Vanessa Bell was able to rent agreeable homes not only in London and Sussex but in France, and keep up a household staff that allowed her to entertain her friends and at the same time devote hours of every day to her painting.
Part of the fame enjoyed today by Vanessa Bell is the result of her art—the little exhibit of her photographs at the Dulwich College Picture Gallery organized by the singer and writer Patti Smith, in 2017, is a good example—but much of it also comes from the central role she played in the life of the Bloomsbury group. As Bloomsbury came into its glory days between the two world wars, Vanessa Bell became the Bloomsbury hostess par excellence, even as her sister became the recording angel. In her various homes, Vanessa developed a style of housekeeping whose mix of the Spartan and the sybaritic, of tolerance and tact, taste and intellect, charm and erudition, fresh air and fresh vegetables drew a select group of friends like a magnet. Visitors to Charleston after the end of World War I could rely on quiet mornings of solitary work followed by long walks on the Sussex downs, and then, after a splash of water on the face and under the armpits, there were boozy evenings full of gourmet food, society smut from Clive Bell, inside-Whitehall revelations from Maynard Keynes, and killing impersonations from Duncan Grant.
It was not by chance that in 1918 John Maynard Keynes drafted much of his famous pamphlet “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” in a deck chair in the sunny walled garden at Charleston. Soon to be recognized as the greatest economist of his time, Keynes foresaw terrible consequences should the victorious allies decide to bring Germany to its knees in retribution. Keynes would be proved right. Adolf Hitler was one of the men who never forgave the vindictive terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. But as he sat envisaging a second armageddon in his lifetime, Keynes could find a kind of elemental comfort in the pandemonium of children and chickens and wet canvases that surrounded queenly Vanessa Bell.
Between 1918 and 1925—the year when Maynard married Lydia Lopokova—he, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant were what Quentin Bell describes as a happy, carefree “triumvirate.” Largely at Maynard’s expense, the trio dined out at the top London restaurants and took lavish trips to the Continent in Keynes’s limousine. One gets the impression from the memoirs of Quentin Bell that in some ways Maynard Keynes was more of a father to him than either his actual father, Clive Bell, or his mother’s chosen partner, Duncan Grant. Both Vanessa and Virginia found Keynes’s wife, Lydia Lopokova Keynes, impossible, but Quentin as a boy had the run of the Keyneses’ house in Bloomsbury, and he calls the Maynard-Lydia marriage “a vast success.” Quentin Bell concludes that, when Keynes dropped out of their lives, or was forced out by Vanessa’s hostility to Lydia, life for his mother and Duncan Grant “was permanently impoverished.”
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By 1911, using words that would have shocked her mother, reading salacious literature, partaking of the latest gay gossip, and enjoying Maynard’s largesse were no longer enough for thirty-two-year-old Vanessa Bell, and she began a love affair with the art critic Roger Fry. The affair came to a shuddering halt in 1914, but while it lasted it was immensely exciting not just for Vanessa but for all the Bloomsbury group.
Vanessa had briefly met Fry back in 1906 after one of his art lectures, and when she spotted him at the Cambridge railway station in January 1910, she claimed an acquaintance. In the train compartment on the way back to London, the busy Fry put his papers aside and soon showed that he was not only an excellent lecturer but a good listener and a wonderful conversationalist. Fry, Vanessa remarked as she sat back and let her husband and Fry talk, was the rare Cambridge bird who seemed to both like and desire women, especially intelligent, art-loving women. Now in his mid-forties and famous, if not rich and titled, Fry had a flock of art groupies, including Lady Ottoline Morrell.
That initial favorable impression of Fry was confirmed in late 1910 after Vanessa gave birth to her second child. The baby came three weeks later than expected and was a second son. Vanessa was disappointed. She had been sure that the second child she was bearing was a daughter and had a name ready for “her”—Clarissa, a name that lives on in two of Virginia Woolf’s novels. Revealing a lack of interest in her second son that he himself felt persisted all his life, Vanessa begged friends like Saxon Sydney-Turner to come up with a name for the baby. Gratian? Or perhaps Claudian? She did not settle on the name Quentin for more than a year and, as an auntly joke, Virginia Woolf would still be referring to Quentin as Claudian when he was twenty.
When the new baby failed to thrive even more dramatically than her first child, Julian, had done, Vanessa was distraught, and when it came to howling babies, Clive was, of course, nowhere to be seen. Following this difficult postpartum period, Clive invited Roger Fry to dinner, and the interest Vanessa had in Fry’s ideas on painting turned into something much warmer. Somehow, while Clive went off to fetch some wine, she felt able to confide her worries about her baby to their guest. Fry listened and said he and his wife, Helen, had
also had “fearful times” with their newborn son. “I had a sort of inkling then,” wrote Vanessa to Roger in October 1912, “that you would be sympathetic and understand. No one else that I cared about had been and I had had to keep most of my worries to myself.” When the Bells invited Roger to join them and Harry Norton, an old Cambridge friend of Clive’s who now formed part of Vanessa’s gay coterie, on a trip to Turkey, Fry happily agreed.
Roger Fry stood out from the old Cambridge pack by being a scientist by training, an art critic by vocation, and a straight man who—like Thackeray—had a mad wife. Fry had graduated from Cambridge some twelve years before Clive Bell, and unlike him, had been elected an Apostle. After getting a first-class degree in the natural sciences Tripos, Fry, unlike Lytton Strachey, was immediately offered a fellowship at Cambridge but refused it to follow his interest in the fine arts. That decision incurred the wrath of his wealthy father, who cut off all future economic support. Undeterred by the need to earn his own living, Fry not only followed his passion for art but married a fortuneless fellow artist, Helen Coombe, and quickly had two children with her. A man of astonishing brilliance, inexhaustible curiosity, and restless energy, Fry quickly established himself as an expert on early Italian painting and a great art critic.
Fry seemed destined for England’s highest academic honors and an eventual knighthood until his attention was drawn away from Duccio and Guido Reni to Cézanne, Degas, and young living artists like Picasso and Matisse. Roger Fry came from an illustrious Quaker family, and though he had given up the faith, he had the strong backbone and the nonconformist instincts of his ancestors. Refusing to trim his ideas and interests to fit his professional prospects and financial needs, Fry in lectures and essays began to advance revolutionary ideas on art. These so set the teeth of the English art establishment on edge that he was blackballed for top academic posts. He was then obliged to take on an exhausting schedule of writing and lecturing in order to support his family, especially after his wife was admitted to a private clinic for the insane. Helen Fry had become unmanageably crazy, a danger to her children as well as herself: after her death, an autopsy revealed that the bone of her skull was progressively thickening, crushing her brain. Roger had felt he had no choice but to commit his wife, but her pathetic pleas to be allowed to return home to him and the children weighed heavily on him.
When planning the expedition to Turkey, Clive had expected Vanessa to cope with Harry Norton while he went around the cultural sites with Roger. Clive was setting himself up as an expert on contemporary French painting, and Roger’s rejection of storytelling art and his theory of “significant form” fascinated him. Once they arrived in Istanbul, however, the foursome began to split up in an unexpected way. Fry was soon speaking passable Turkish, scouring the bazaars for local arts and crafts, and generally taking on the role of guide, companion, and interpreter. He also proved to be an enthusiastic painter, and he and Vanessa began setting up their easels side by side before some picturesque landscape.
When the quartet of English tourists moved on to the provincial city of Broussa (or Brusa), Vanessa suddenly suffered a major breakdown. She became terrified that, like her sister Virginia, she was losing her mind. This collapse proved too much for Clive, who went off with Norton to tour the city’s famous mosques, and it was left to Roger to keep Vanessa’s spirits up. When she was haunted by nightmares and unable to sleep, he watched through the night with her, listening to her fears, keeping her back from insanity as he had tried in vain to do for his wife. It was now to Roger Fry, not Clive Bell, that Vanessa reached out a bare, shapely arm, and the two spent hours in absorbed conversation. Forgetting Lady Ottoline Morrell, who had quite unexpectedly taken him into her bed the night before his departure for Turkey, Roger Fry was soon madly in love with Vanessa Bell, and she showed herself more than receptive to his feelings.
Meanwhile, back in England, Virginia, after another stay in Jean Thomas’s private clinic, was in good health but increasingly concerned about her sister, who had been suffering from unexplained fainting spells. Despite reassuring telegrams and letters from Clive, Virginia became more and more convinced that something bad was going on in Turkey, and her fears were confirmed when, as she was en route for a holiday in Greece with her friend Ka Cox, she learned that Vanessa had suffered a miscarriage in Broussa and was now bedridden. Seizing on the role of the strong, capable sister, Virginia set off alone at once to help bring Vanessa home. In a letter to Violet Dickinson she wrote after returning to London, in May 1911, Virginia described what had happened:
Did you hear of our adventures in the East? Nessa managed to bring off a miscarriage in Broussa a days journey from Constantinople. I went out and found her surrounded with males and with a chemist for a doctor. We had to have a litter made to carry her stretched on it, through Constantinople and home by the Orient Express. It was the oddest parody of what we [Virginia and Violet] did five years ago in Greece . . . We had the oddest time abroad. I was there for a week. Roger put everything down to insanity, which was puzzling at first. [my emphasis]
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As this passage shows, Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry, who both had experience of mental illness, diagnosed Vanessa’s problems as more psychological than gynecological. In fact, when Vanessa Bell got back to London and indignantly confronted the doctor who had given her permission to embark for Turkey, he denied that she had suffered a miscarriage. Be that as it may—and there were no quick tests for pregnancy back in 1911—there was a pattern in Vanessa’s behavior that her sister picked up on. Just as in 1906, Vanessa was unconsciously staging a bout of invalidism in order to make a difficult transition in her life. That transition again had to do with a potential sex partner—not a prospective husband, this time, but a prospective lover whom she had identified as Roger Fry. Given how hesitant both Clive and Vanessa had been to give Virginia a clear picture of the situation in Broussa, it is possible neither of them exactly welcomed her arrival in Turkey.
Certainly, within weeks of her dramatic return to London on a stretcher, Vanessa had found a sympathetic psychiatrist and, under the cover of a yearlong recovery from her supposed miscarriage, she and Roger engaged in a passionate love affair. Vanessa was anxious to keep her affair secret from both her husband—whose desire revived as soon as he saw a heterosexual male closing in on his wife—and her sister, whom she saw as a rival. When introduced, Virginia and Roger had immediately become fast friends.
Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry were lovers for less than two years, but that brief period was immensely stimulating and huge fun. Fry was intent on stirring up the stodgy English art scene, and in the fall of 1911 and 1912, with the enthusiastic collaboration of his new Bloomsbury friends, he put on two exhibitions of paintings at the Grafton Galleries for which he coined the term “post-impressionist.” These exhibitions were greeted with howls of outrage and accusations of obscenity by press and public alike, but to British artists like Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, the paintings that Fry had personally identified, shipped, and hung were a revelation. The Grafton exhibitions did nothing for Fry’s reputation in the English art world, but undeterred, he raised a little money from friends and launched the Omega Workshops. An homage to the Arts and Crafts movement of the late nineteenth century and a precursor of the Bauhaus movement, the Omega Workshops were conceived as an artists’ cooperative that would foster, collect, and market the latest in British design.
The sexual passion that flamed up in Vanessa soon died down. One gathers from Frances Spalding’s twin biographies of Bell and Fry that Roger Fry was too straightforward, too idealistic, too energetic, too intellectual, too poor, too old, too nice, and too Quaker for Vanessa. Worst of all, perhaps, as a painter, he seemed to have learned nothing from the Picassos or Matisses he had transported to London. Fry could turn his hand to almost anything—mending a broken water pump at Asheham, turning a pot on a wheel on his first try, translating the obscurantist French poet Mallarmé—but the paintings he produced in such p
rofusion and with such enthusiasm seemed to Vanessa pedestrian, fuddy-duddy.
For Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell was the ideal woman. He listened to her, sympathized with her, adored her unconditionally, and desired her passionately, but he failed to understand her. In the end, what he wanted from their relationship was what all too briefly he had had with Helen Coombe—a wife who would keep his hearth burning and welcome him with open arms when he returned from his forays into world art. But Vanessa Bell was not interested in ordinary domesticity, and the husband she had suited her in many ways. Clive had given her orgasms as well as sons, still supported her in agreeable affluence, and, unlike Roger, never felt compelled to get up immediately after a good lunch, jump on his bike, and do six more things before dinner. As Virginia Woolf wrote to John Lehmann after she, Leonard, Roger, and Fry’s sister went on a trip to Greece, “Roger is the greatest fun—as mild as milk, but if you have seen milk that is also quicksilver . . . He disposes of whole museums with one brush of his tail. He plays chess when the dust is sweeping the pawns from the board. He writes articles with one hand & carries on violent arguments with the other.”
And then there was Duncan Grant, the old family friend whom Vanessa now, thanks to Roger Fry, met almost every day in the galleries and in the Omega Workshops for which both artists worked and served as trustees.
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From the very first, Vanessa Bell’s letters to Roger Fry are fatefully peppered with the name Duncan, and it is fascinating to trace the way she unconsciously transferred her erotic fantasies from one man to the other. In the very first letter we have from her to Fry, she wrote on June 23, 1911, “[Duncan] and I have decided to emulate Gill and paint really indecent subjects. I suggest a series of copulations in strange attitudes and have offered to pose. Will you join? I mean in the painting. We think there ought to be more indecent pictures painted, and you shall show them in your show.”
