Bloomsbury

I'm continuing to be enchanted with the correspondence between George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis. What's caught my eye today is a passage from a letter from Lyttelton of December 18, 1956:

I have just finished the Strachey-Woolf letters. Not fearfully good are they? Good things here and there of course, but Strachey is often trivial and V. W. often shows off, and on the whole one sees why many people spit at the name of Bloomsbury. And I suspect they would spit even more if all the names were given. Neither had any humility, and I am more and more blowed if that isn't the sine qua non of all goodness and greatness. The trouble is that if you are very clever and don't believe in God, there is nobody and nothing in the presence of whom or which you can be humble. For instance, Milton and Carlyle, for all their arrogance, were fundamentally humble, don't you think? Here endeth the epistle of George the Apostle.

As the self-deprecating final sentence suggests, Lyttelton's closing position (Which, in the case of Milton, at least, surely we can question? "Justify the ways of God to man" smacketh not of humility, no?) seems to be more rhetorical or even intellectual than religious: Lyttelton elsewhere confesses himself to be not particularly religious, an admirer of The Book of Common Prayer but a waverer when it comes to actual belief:

And "believe' is too big a word to use about life after death. I vageuly feel, I occasionally hope, but that is all. That great man Judge Holmes surely hit the nail when he said 'I see sufficient reasons for doing my damndest without demanding to know the strategy or even the tactics of the campaign.'

But I'm getting distracted (surely blogging's most forgivable sin?) from the main point: Strachey-Woolf and Bloomsbury.

Any time Bloomsbury comes up in the essays, letters, memoirs, and whatnot of writers whose lives overlapped with it, I find myself feeling grateful to be from a later era and a different country: oh, the baggage Bloomsbury brings! All evidence suggests that they were just as cliquish and self-absorbed as their opponents say they were, but at this remove that matters less than their wholehearted devotion to the arts. I know plenty of people who can't stomach Virginia Woolf's novels--which I find still wholly alive, fresh, and moving today--but even they tend to acknowledge the fierce perceptiveness of her essays and reviews. Leonard Woolf, meanwhile, ought by all rights to be essentially a tragic figure but instead ends up an impressive one: picturing him working the binder on the earliest Hogarth Press books brings shivers of admiration. And Strachey . . . oh, how Eminent Victorians still bites and burns.

That said, Lyttelton isn't wholly incorrect in his verdict about the Strachey-Woolf volume. When I wrote about it a couple of years back, I acknowledged that the letters are "a bit mannered." That said, I think they're more interesting than Lyttelton gives them credit for being. As I wrote back then, they give

less the sense of guardedness or caution than they do of performance, of two people who, even as they dashed off notes, tried to bring all their intellect and wit to bear. What we lose in intimacy we gain in fun and insight; these are closer to, say, the composed, circumspect letters of E. B. White than they are to the endearing gushings of a Mitford sister.

Anyone who's gotten to watch two born skeptics--of formidable intellect--attempt to impress each other knows there's real pleasure to be had there. A meeting of the minds (let alone souls) it's not, but when the minds are such as these, feints, parries, and pas de deux are perfectly fine.

Lyttelton touches on Bloomsbury again in his next letter:

I have followed up the Strachey-Woolf letters by reading Clive Bell on his friends. He questions the existence of 'Bloomsbury' as a one-time centre of culture, but, however hard to define, it was surely recognisable all right. . . . Does anyone doubt that V. W. and L. S. and Co were exclusive, and fastidious, and highbrow, and contemptuous of past greatness, and mutual admirers, and if that isn't Bloomsbury, what is?

Perfectly true. Each of those characteristics has its dark side, no doubt, but given what we got from Bloomsbury, I'll gladly plump for the better part--of such confidence and ego are movements made.

"Of course my objection to letters is that they were all written in the 18th Century, an age I find unlovable," or, Lytton and Virginia

While in the library recently to pick up a volume of Virginia Woolf's essays, I spied a volume of her correspondence with Lytton Strachey that the Hogarth Press published in 1956. Tempted by its manageable slimness--it's not even two hundred pages long--I plucked it from the shelf, and I've been pleasantly rewarded for the decision as I wandered through it this weekend.

The correspondence is, while unquestionably friendly, at the same time a bit mannered; as Leonard Woolf and James Strachey note in their introduction,

[I]t occasionally gives an impression of self-consciousness--even of stiltedness--which was very far indeed from being usual in their letters. The fact was, no doubt, that each was a little wary of the other: in writing to each other they were always on their best behaviour, and never felt so much at ease as they did in their dealings with people whom they admired or respected less.

The resulting letters, however, give less the sense of guardedness or caution than they do of performance, of two people who, even as they dashed off notes, tried to bring all their intellect and wit to bear. What we lose in intimacy we gain in fun and insight; these are closer to, say, the composed, circumspect letters of E. B. White than they are to the endearing gushings of a Mitford sister.

Take, for example, this passage from a letter sent by Strachey on January 3, 1909. He had recently moved for a time to Rye, in Sussex,

spending the time since in a semi-stupor, among mists and golfers, so that by this time I'm feeling so much a la hashisch that I can hardly imagine that anywhere else exists. however, by an effort of will I can just bring to my mind a dim vision of Bond Street, the Heath, and a Square or two.

After some savage reflections on the idiocy of the local lawyers and clergy ("all golfers as well") and some reflections on Merimee, he notes,

Talking of Great Authors, I've seen Henry James twice since I came, and was immensely impressed. I mean only seen with the eye--I wish I knew him! He appeared at his window as I passed the other day--most remarkable! So conscientious and worried and important--he was like an admirable tradesman trying his best to give satisfaction, infinitely solemn and polite. Is there any truth in this? It has since occurred to me that his novels are really remarkable for their lack of humour. But I think it's very odd that he should have written precisely them and look precisely so. Perhaps if one talked to him one would understand.

It's unclear whether Strachey thinks James does or doesn't look like he ought to based on his novels; at a century's remove, he seems perfect for them, almost to the point of parody.

Woolf didn't address the question of James in her reply, but she did mention him in a letter of October 22, 1915:

I should think I had read 600 books since we met. Please tell me what you find in Henry James. I have disabused Leonard of him; but we have his works here, and I read, and can't find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane & sleek, but vulgar. . . Is there really any sense in it? I admit I can't be bothered to snuff out his meaning when it's very obscure.

More fun is the closing of her letter, which was written during a recuperation from one of her many bouts of poor health:

Nurse now thinks I must stop writing. I tell her I'm only scribbling to a relative, an elderly spinster, who suffers from gout, and lives on scraps of family news. "Poor thing!" says nurse. "Arthritis it is", I remark. But it won't do!

In another letter, sent from Richmond on July 25, 1916, Woolf offers an account of the difficulties of composition that ought to cheer any slow-working author:

My industry has the most minute results, and I begin to despair of finishing a book on this method--I write one sentence--the clock strikes--Leonard appears with a glass of milk.

Then there's this, from a letter she sent on October 12, 1918:

I'm extremely sorry to hear distressing accounts of your diseases. . . . However, you must consider that boils, blisters, rashes, green and blue vomits are all appointed by God himself to those whose books go into 4 editions within 6 months. Shingles, I can assure you, is only a first instalment; don't complain if the mange visits you, and the scurvy, and your feet swell and the dropsy distends and the scab itches--I mean you won't get any sympathy from me.

Later in the letter, she turns, as in most of the letters, to books:

I read the Greeks, but I am extremely doubtful whether I understand anything they say; also I have read the whole of Milton, without throwing any light upon my own soul, but that I rather like. Don't you think it very queer though that he entirely neglects the human heart? Is that the result of writing one's masterpiece at the age of 50? What about your masterpiece?

Strachey didn't answer the question, perhaps because he knew that he'd already published his masterpiece: Eminent Victorians was at that time a mere five months old.

The letter wherein Strachey gave his first indications that he was kicking around ideas for kicking around the Victorians ("They seem to me a set of mouthing bungling hypocrites, but perhaps really there is a baroque charm about them which will be discovered by our great-grandchildren."), sent on November 8, 1912, quickly spins off into wonderfully vibrant visions of the future of literature:

I should like to live for another 200 years (to be moderate). The literature of the future will, I clearly see, be amazing. At last it'll tell the truth, and be indecent, and amusing, and romantic, and even (after about 100 years) be written well. Quelle joie!--To live in those days, when books will pour out from the press reeking with all the filth of Petronius, all the frenzy of Dostoievsky, all the romance of the Arabian Nights, and all the exquisiteness of Voltaire! But it won't only be the books that will be charming then.--The people!--The young men! . . . even the young women! . . .

In this age that seems to prefer professions of doom for the world of literature, Strachey's optimism, so gleefully expressed, is bracing.

Early in the correspondence, Woolf wrote to Strachey, "Really, if you go on writing, you will vitiate John Bailey's stock phrase, 'the art of letter writing is dying out--'." We should all be so lucky as to have such a correspondent; I'm fortunate enough to have a couple--and with Strachey's industry as my example, I'm off to put pen to paper. It's best not to enter the holiday season in arrears.