RH: How did you first become interested in the Bloomsbury
crowd?
RM: I wish I remembered exactly, so that I could offer a tidy
narrative. I had some vague undergraduate interest in Virginia
Woolf, enough so that when I was driving through the south of
England, I recognized the name Rodmell on a road sign and
remembered, "Oh, that's the village where Virginia Woolf lived." So I
took a detour. Monk's House was at the end of the village's one tiny
street. It was closed that day, but there was a bed and breakfast a
few doors up, so I went on to Charleston Farmhouse, which had just
opened to the public, and stayed the night in Rodmell. And that
night a terrible wind started up. I could hear tree limbs thudding
onto the thatched roof above me. It was the great storm of 1987, the
night a third of all the trees in the south of England came down. And
because all the roads were blocked, I ended up stranded in the
village for several days.
Somebody referred me to Quentin Bell, because I'd seen some of his
pottery and thought of buying a piece, and I drove over to meet him.
I kept up a correspondence with him afterward, and was slowly
ensnared. Professionally--apart from reviewing--I've done almost
nothing but Bloomsbury.
RH: It's amazing how a small group of writers and artists managed
to piss off an entire nation for decades.
RM: Isn't it wonderful? (laughs) And from so many
different sides. They attracted an incredible and bewildering array of
opponents. Even little things, like their celebration of French art,
would infuriate the English.
I think a lot of the reaction against Bloomsbury has to do with their
historical position. They were from the last generation of middle
class educated people who could afford servants. A live-in servant
would only cost something like $4,000 a year in today's money. As
little as ten years later, after the First World War, this kind of help
would be impossibly expensive. So they're remembered as wealthy
and leisured people, which is ridiculous. If you've ever been to
Monk's House or the farmhouse at Charleston, you'd notice right
away that they're remarkably grubby places, nothing like what
people imagine. And most of them struggled with the "Servant
Question." They didn't want to reinforce the Victorian social
structure, but they didn't want to spend their work hours washing
dishes, either.
Critics on both the right and left bring up "tea parties," in particular,
using it as a code word for a life of leisure, but they were
exceptionally hard-working artists. And they drank coffee. But
speaking of tea parties--among the bizarre pieces of trivia that came
up during the restoration of Charleston was that they found a
garbage dump from the '20s somewhere on the grounds, and some
devoted soul published an article in the Charleston newsletter
describing what they found. There was a belt buckle engraved "SST,"
suggesting Saxon Sydney Turner, and the top of a pianola that
Angelica used to play. And they found jar after jar of fish paste,
which had clearly been a staple of their diet. No doubt for all those
tea parties.
RH: One of the interesting critical tactics has been to attempt to
recuperate a favorite subject by suggesting that he or she wasn't
really part of Bloomsbury.
RM: You couldn't possibly fight the overwhelming opposition
to the idea of Bloomsbury. Opposition feels good, and so people cling
to their oppositions fiercely. I had a conversation at Stanford with
Eavan Boland, the poet, and she had clearly read Woolf very widely,
in depth and with great admiration, but she clung to a phrase in
Three Guineas in which Woolf says she is speaking to "the
daughters of educated men." In these few words, Boland felt that
Woolf was disenfranchising working class women, and she couldn't
forgive her for it.
For a long time, of course, E. M. Forster was considered the only
character in Bloomsbury worth saving. Later critics couldn't believe
he'd really associated with those awful people, those selfish, elitist
"Bloomsberries." And the same thing happened with John Maynard
Keynes.
Critics think they're being exceptionally clever when they use this
tactic of denying the Bloomsbury connection. They haven't read the
wider literature and don't know how many other writers have done
the same thing.
RH: A lot of the critical reaction against Bloomsbury is framed in
reference to the homosexuality of various Bloomsbury
members.
RM: It's fascinating. If I knew more about Wilde studies, I'd
love to juxtapose the two reactions; I don't think that he's treated
similarly to the way the Bloomsbury writers have been.
One of the interesting things about the Bloomsbury writers and
artists is that they had no hopes for homosexual emancipation. They
wrote shocking private letters and they talked openly among
themselves, but they hardly crusaded for gay rights. This was in the
immediate shadow of Wilde's imprisonment, and they decided to live
as freely as they could, as privately as they could. That eventually
became an unpopular stance in the mid-60s when the revival started
and readers could see that those mild-mannered memoirs of the
1950s and early 60s didn't tell half the story. It smacked of
hypocrisy.
Bloomsbury had little hope for homosexual emancipation, but on the
other hand they didn't have to worry about identity politics. They
didn't feel they'd be letting the cause down if they slept with a
woman that night, or married a man. They were able to exercise a
very fluid sexuality, which in itself was frightening to critics. It's
easier to dismiss Lytton Strachey as a queer than it is to discuss the
bisexual activities of a major figure (and a married man) like John
Maynard Keynes. We like to put people in a single, easily agreed on
category, and this relates back to critics' desires to rescue their
favorite writers from the taint of Bloomsbury. If you're as great as
Maynard Keynes, you can't be part of that troop of pansies.
Critics don't make fun of Bloomsbury homosexuality as openly as
they did in the 60s and 70s, but they will, as they have with Woolf,
for instance, attempt to tie it in with childhood trauma to suggest
that her lesbian tendencies were symptoms of her emotional
problems, or they'll talk about Strachey's "mincing" prose tyle. They
did it with Forster: "We'd always noticed a slight chill to his prose;
now that we know he was homosexual, we understand why he
couldn't write about normal human emotions."
Christopher Reed argues, and I think he's right, that homophobia has
been the most significant factor in the reaction against Bloomsbury
and its achievements. Carolyn Heilbrun has been arguing since the
'60s that it's specifically their androgyny that is so threatening.
RH: But with the possible exception of Woolf, who's really more of
an overall feminist icon, none of these people has really been
recuperated by queers.
RM: They're too problematic because of other things like class,
or the problems of identity politics. You'd think queer writers and
readers would embrace Duncan Grant, but then, he did live with a
woman for fifty years and had a child by her.
The class issue is ironic, because Vita Sackville-West has more
popular appeal than the Bloomsbury homosexuals, though she was a
Tory aristocrat and not such a good writer. But she's a romantic
figure...
RH: Dealing with the changing critical reaction to the painters was
an interesting strategy.
RM: There hasn't been much work done in that context. The
artistic reception is interesting because more money is involved.
When you rescusitate the reputation of a writer, there's often not
much money to be made, even if you own the copyrights. But it's
easy to make large amounts of money from the works of even a
minor artist if you can stir up a small vogue.
You have to admire the business acumen of someone like Anthony
d'Offay, who took on the Bloomsbury artists when there was a small
resurgence of interest in British modernism, organized wonderful
shows of their work, put money into restoration, made a lot of money
on them, and then when their estates dwindled down, he moved on
to more recent and more profitable schools of art.
There are some other, smaller projects that don't generate great
profits but are truly worthy. My friend Tony Bradshaw has
commissioned a group of native weavers in Zimbabwe to make rugs
based on the designs of the Omega Workshop, for example, and
they're really quite beautiful.
There's going to be an enormous Bloomsbury show at the Tate at the
end of 1999 curated by Richard Shone. So this suggests that interest
in Bloomsbury will continue, but I can't imagine the show will get a
good critical reception, especially from English critics.
RH: The difference between English and American reactions to
Bloomsbury are vast.
RM: The hostility in England simply isn't known here. America
just didn't have figures comparable to F. R. and Queenie Leavis,
charismatic teachers influencing three to four generations of English
literature. We didn't have a book like Boris Ford's Pelican Guide to
English Literature, which was culturally pervasive and anti-
Bloomsbury in every sense.
But I think that Woolf isn't read as much in America by young men
as she is by young women, and as a result she's less identified with
modernism at large than she is with, well, women. And she's
therefore seen as less important an author for men to read.
RH: So what's next for you? Do you intend to stay focused on
Bloomsbury?
RM: I'll just say that when I finished this book, it was such a
relief to be able to read recreationally again. The writing for
Bloomsbury Pie only took a year, but the research took three years,
and drew also on what I learned in the previous four years, while I'd
been editing Vanessa Bell's letters. I feel an intense affinity with
certain members of the Bloomsbury group and their work, but I'm
tired.
It would be nice to work in a less specialized field with a broader
appeal to readers. I've been working on a novel and a play. After
that, I have another non-fiction project in mind that might touch
upon Virginia and Leonard Woolf, in the context of relationships
between talented, creative people.
