Some Bloomsbury interviews and memories - 20th-century philosophy

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1997 by Wilfred Stone

The proposed tour did take place, and Garnett visited Stanford in mid-December 1966. Professor Tom Moser, another friend of David's, did most of the hosting, since my wife and I were packing for a teaching sojourn in Italy. But we did manage to open our doors to him for one evening, when he gave a talk on Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell to an appreciative audience of students and faculty.

But earlier that year (1966), David and I had a lively epistolary exchange, an exchange that, among other things, casts a light on his affiliations, emotional and intellectual, with Bloomsbury. He took sharp issue with some of the things I'd said in The Cave and the Mountain about Bloomsbury and other matters. (I seem to have lost his original letter, but his points are clear from the paraphrases in my reply, dated Apr. 1, 1966.) He objected strongly, for example, to my statement that "Bloomsbury produced no poets, no respectable critics of poetry, and very few practising artists" (184). In his letter he claimed Julian Bell as a poet and argued that Virginia Woolf could be considered one, since even Forster so identified her.(13) And he reminded me that Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and Roger Fry and Angelica Bell - and some others like Jane Bussy - were all painters. This was my reply:

If I were to rewrite that statement now, I would qualify it further, but I still think it is essentially true. Of course, in making it I had in mind eminence, lasting greatness or importance. Let me take up its three parts in order.

Julian Bell was, to my mind, a noble and promising human being, and he wrote poetry, but can he be called a poet [in the above sense]? I honor him deeply, for many reasons, but don't you agree with me that his poems are not of the first rank, that he was essentially an amateur? And isn't it also true that, in his tragically brief life, he had not really found his vocation? How then can one think of him as a poet?

You don't question the "no respectable critics of poetry" part, so I will pass it by.

Now for the "and very few practising artists." I do recognize with you that Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant are important practising artists. Fry of course is far more important as a critic than as a painter, and, as I'm sure you would admit, was not a very good painter. I knew that your wife Angelica painted, but I thought it was rather an avocation with her. I thought of Quentin Bell more as an editor than as a painter. Jane Bussy I know only as a name connected with Lytton Strachey. But granting that all the above are painters, does it invalidate the statement: "and very few practising artists"? (By artists, of course, I mean painters, as the next sentence on p. 184 makes clear.) Considering all the names in Bloomsbury, not many fall in the practising artist category. As Virginia Woolf herself said of the original group: "Politics and philosophy were their chief interests. Art for them was the art of literature; and literature was half prophecy" [Roger Fry 51].

Finally, you say that I ignore, in literature, Strachey, Keynes, Fry, Bell, Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, and Madame Bussy. But my statement concerns eminence, not all those who wrote. Perhaps I should have included Strachey along with Virginia Woolf and Forster, but I was thinking at the time of creative writers rather than essayists, biographers, or critics. Elsewhere I most certainly honor those others in their several ways. (I would never, however, have thought of Keynes as a "literary" figure. He wrote a lot of interesting articles and sketches in addition to his economic writings, but I think it would be quite misleading to refer to him as "eminent in literature," don't you?) But the burden of those beginning sentences on p. 184 establishes, I think, a most important point: that Bloomsbury was breaking with a largely puritan past and felt a strong moral drag in their creative efforts in art; there tended, therefore, to be a drift from art to theory, to explanation, to analysis. In short, my point is that there were fewer makers of art in Bloomsbury than one might suppose, though there were plenty of makers of other kinds.(14)