Some Bloomsbury interviews and memories - 20th-century philosophy

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1997 by Wilfred Stone

There were other points of difference. Garnett took issue, for example, with my statement about the Cambridge "Apostles," when I said that "Apostles selected Apostles." He asked how else can any group continue? I replied. "There are many other ways. You could take all comers, you could have a 'draw' system," and then went on to say that, though I intended nothing especially critical in that statement, I was opposed to a similar method of selection in the fraternity system in American universities and colleges.

Nor did Garnett like the importance I gave to Freud's statement that "a happy person never phantasies [sic], only an unsatisfied one ..." (124).(15) He insisted that fantasy was primarily a form of "play," and I pointed out that I had acknowledged the play element on the preceding page. Garnett then asked: "Do all fairy tales and legends and stories of the gods spring from frustration?" I replied: "I wouldn't make any guess as to all, but surely fairy tales or stories of the gods often do represent wish fulfillments, don't they? Cinderella, for example, or Prometheus? Does not the dignity of Prometheus's suffering for the good of mankind redeem him, just as in a much lighter sense Cinderella is rewarded by a magic release from her pain?" [I still think that frustration and fantasy have close affinities, but I felt on uncertain ground in this talk about the gods.](16)

Garnett also took me to task for seeming to claim that art was "not of this world" (109). To this I replied:

You ask me why art is not of this world while presumably ships and machines, etc. are. I think you slightly misunderstand me here. I am not talking about art in general but in the way Forster viewed it (when he was most idealistic). Art with him, as the hierarch of Aspects makes clear, is a passage from the seen to the unseen, the world of representation to the world of "value" - which with Forster in some sense transcends the actual and the material. He wants a novel which has as its final realization the music that is heard "after the orchestra stops playing." Of course novels cannot leave the earth and earthly like that, and Forster recognizes it (see my last paragraph, p. 121), but still he dreams of some such consummation.

David became especially heated in refuting what he took as my claim that Bloomsbury was an "ivory tower." I answered:

But I don't call it an ivory tower. I call it something more paradoxical than that. On pp. 52-54 I specifically examine the question: In what sense can Bloomsbury be thought of as a "revolution"? My answer is that it was a revolution of"ideas," and that ideas can be weapons. Surely that is right, isn't it? That seems to me to be the very essence of the liberal ideal at the heart of the Bloomsbury ethos. The revolutionary changes effected in art by Fry and Bell and in economics by Keynes were essentially changes in attitudes. Keynes is by far the most engaged in social and political affairs, but it is well known how some other members of Bloomsbury raised eyebrows at Keynes's mixing with the "world."