David Herman
The Bloomsbury Group
David Herman - The Bloomsbury Group
- Thank you. Hello, I’m David Herman, and I’m in London. And today, I’m going to be talking about the Bloomsbury Group. And as some of you may have heard some of my talks before, you’ll know that very often I talk about Jewish writers. And you may think, “Well, the Bloomsbury Group are the least Jewish group of English writers imaginable.” In fact, not only were they the least Jewish group, they were perhaps the most anti-Semitic group of English writers imaginable. So I’m going to be talking about the good things about the Bloomsbury Group and what they achieved, and also some of the sort of darker side, if you like, of the Bloomsbury Group. It is not hard to see the appeal of the Bloomsbury Group. There is the fascinating mix of class and sex, which has always fascinated people, especially homosexuality. In the famous words of the American writer and critic, Dorothy Parker, “They lived in squares and loved in triangles.” Add the genius of Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, and Maynard Keynes in particular and it seems an irresistible cocktail, hence all the many, many biographies, memoirs, and films about the Bloomsbury Group. But there’s something else. Reviewing the letters of Leonard Woolf in 1990, Noel Annan wrote, “Anyone who studies British culture in this century,” and he was then talking about the 20th century, “will find that many, though not all, of the dominant ideas and attitudes in that culture are to be found in the Bloomsbury Group. For the generation that grew up in the shadow of the First World War they were liberators, all the more so because they enraged the Establishment in London and the universities.”
As we’ll see, this became a kind of dominant way of thinking about the Bloomsbury Group for many, many years. And in recent years, however, since about the 1990s or mid-1990s, there’s been a revisionist view of the Bloomsbury Group, and we’ll look a little bit at that history of that revisionist look and see why it took the form it did. The central figures of the Bloomsbury Group were mostly born around the 1880s. The art critic Roger Fry, who was born in 1866, who was the oldest of the group, who brought post-impressionism to England. Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, born in 1877 and 1882, respectively. Clive and Vanessa Bell. Clive Bell was born in 1881, and Vanessa Bell, the sister of Virginia Woolf, was born in 1879. E.M. Forster was also born in 1879. Lytton Strachey, famous and controversial man of letters, was born in 1880. Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia, was born in 1880. And Virginia Woolf herself was born in 1882. Maynard Keynes, the greatest, perhaps the greatest British economist of the 20th century, was born in 1883. And the artist Duncan Grant in 1885. Their beginnings, the beginnings of the Bloomsbury Group, were actually not in London itself. Bloomsbury, I should explain, is a set of squares in central London. But the Bloomsbury Group itself began properly speaking in Cambridge. Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner all met Thoby Stephen, the brother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, in Cambridge.
And that became the start. That was the beginning. Bloomsbury was what Noel Annan called the intellectual aristocracy. He wrote a very famous essay in 1955 where he talked about the web of kinship that United British intellectuals. And he was talking really about the Darwins, most famously Charles, the Huxleys, the Macaulays, and others in the 19th and early 20th century. Annan gave his speech originally at a celebration of the 75th birthday of the historian G.M. Trevelyan, who, as David Cannadine, present day historian, puts it, “was the most famous, the most honoured, the most influential, and the most widely read historian of his generation.” He was also without doubt the best connected British academic of his day. The son of Sir George Otto Trevelyan and the great nephew of Thomas Macaulay. His relations included Butlers, Darwins, Galtons, and Booths. His wife was equally well born. Her great uncle was Matthew Arnold, and her cousins were Julian and Aldous Huxley. The Bloomsbury Group were similarly linked. They were a similar kind of network where everybody seemed to know everybody, always related to somebody. “They were linked by a tangle of family interconnections and intellectual alliances,” in the words of Quentin Bell in his very readable short book “Bloomsbury.” He was one of the children of Vanessa Bell and Clive Bell. There were a number of key themes or aspects of the Bloomsbury Group. First, geography. Cambridge, Bloomsbury, and Sussex were the centres of the Bloomsbury Group.
In Quentin Bell’s words, “Bloomsbury was begotten in Cambridge at the beginning of the 20th century,” and he means the very beginning. All the male members of the Bloomsbury Group, except Duncan Grant, the artist, were educated at Cambridge, either specifically at Trinity College or at King’s College Cambridge. Most of them, except Clive Bell and the Stephen brothers, were members of an exclusive Cambridge society known as the Apostles. At Trinity in 1899, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, Saxon Sydney-Turner, and Clive Bell became good friends with Thoby Stephen, brother of Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, later Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. And it was through Thoby and Adrian Stephen’s sisters, Vanessa and Virginia, that the men met the women of Bloomsbury when they came down to London. So if Cambridge in 1899 was one turning point in the beginnings of the Bloomsbury Group, the other was when it became Bloomsbury in 1904. Leslie Stephen, father of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, died in 1904, and his children at once moved from Hyde Park Gate, a very exclusive address and residence in central London, to 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. At about the same time, many of Thoby Stephen’s Cambridge friends came to London and began to visit him and his sisters, especially Vanessa and Virginia.
These apostolic young men, wrote Duncan Grant, the artist, who later was introduced to the circle by his cousin Lytton Strachey, found their amazement that they could be shocked by the boldness and scepticism of two young women, Virginia and Vanessa. Perhaps the essential element in the situation, wrote Quentin Bell many years later, and that which made it so attractive, was the sense of liberation at 46 Gordon Square. The Stephen children were orphans. Not only had their father just died, but their mother had died sometime before. They were young. And now the characters of the Mrs. Stephen was such that the freedoms of Cambridge were continued in London and conversational petticoats had, in the end, to be discarded. Then came the marriage of Vanessa Stephen, Virginia’s sister, to Clive Bell, the art critic and artistic entrepreneur really. And that meant that the Bells settled at 46 Gordon Square, and Virginia and Adrian Stephen moved to Fitzroy Square, another Bloomsbury Square, and the third central location for the Bloomsbury group was Sussex. The group met not only in their homes in Bloomsbury and central London, but also at countryside retreats. And the two particular ones which stand out are near Lewes in Sussex, where today Sussex University is. One is Charleston Farmhouse, where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved in 1916, and the other is Monk’s House in Rodmell, owned by Virginia and Leonard Woolf from 1919.
The second big theme of the Bloomsbury Group is birth, family, and marriage. Clive Bell married Vanessa Bell, the sister of Virginia Woolf, in 1907. Leonard Woolf married Virginia Woolf in 1912. And they were stable marriages and varied and complicated affairs, which is a large part of the mystique or the appeal of the Bloomsbury Group. Cambridge apostle friendships brought into the group Desmond MacCarthy, his wife Molly, and the novelist E.M. Forster. The third hugely significant element to the Bloomsbury Group was class, and is one of the reasons that D.H. Lawrence was so antagonistic towards the Bloomsbury Group. He found them too posh, too London-based, too full of themselves and their own world. Fourthly, and crucially, there’s the modern. “They were, quite simply, in revolt against the parental influence,” wrote Quentin Bell. Virginia Woolf was famously certain when modernism began. She wrote in, “Or about December 1910 human character changed. All human relations shifted, those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children.
And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.” And a key part of this change in human character was sexual liberation. Not only were many of the best known members of Bloomsbury Group gay, but many were bisexual, many had relations outside their marriages, and many spoke openly about sexuality in a way that was really unheard of at this time. On 11th of August 1908, Lytton Strachey, no stranger to controversy, no stranger to Scandal, saw a stain on the front of Vanessa Bell’s skirt and said to her, “Semen?” This is quite, quite unimaginable for 1908, for an English upperclassman to say that to an English upperclasswoman. The other aspect of the modern that was so important to the Bloomsbury group was post-Impressionism. And here, Roger Fry and Clive Bell played a hugely important role. In 1910, the first post-impressionist exhibition was held at the Grafton galleries. And in 1912, the second post-impressionist exhibition was held. Essentially, Bell and Fry introduced post-impressionism to British culture. And of course related to this was modernism itself, and no one was more important in this in bringing literary modernism into British culture than Virginia Woolf. And then finally, another aspect of the modern that the Bloomsbury Group brought into British culture was psychoanalysis through somebody called James Strachey, who is not so well known now, but was very significant at the time. He was born in 1887. He was a British psychoanalyst; and with his wife Alex, became a translator of Sigmund Freud into English.
To be more precise, became the translators of Sigmund Freud into English. James Strachey is perhaps best known as the general editor of what’s known as The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, which, for many years, was the standard English translation of Freud’s works. He was, incidentally, the younger brother of Lytton Strachey. You kind of need a family tree really if you’re embarking on any serious reading of Bloomsbury Group. And then, also crucially, feminism. “Women,” Virginia Woolf wrote in “A Room of One’s Own,” “are perhaps the most discussed animal in the universe.” And what she was speaking against, writing against, was what Quentin Bell, her nephew, called the boredom, the restriction, the oppression of family life, especially for young women. There’s a great moment in a George Bernard Shaw play where a heroine of his says, “Girls withering into ladies. Ladies withering into old ladies. Nursing old women. Running errands for old men. Oh, you can’t imagine the fiendish selfishness of the old people and the maudlin sacrifice of the young. Oh, home, parents, family, duty! How I loathe them!” And what happens around the early 1900s and beyond is a reaction against that, particularly by the young and particularly, excuse me, in the vanguard with the Bloomsbury Group.
Homosexuality, as I mentioned, played, excuse me one moment, played a hugely important part in the mythology surrounding the Bloomsbury Group. Forster was gay, Lytton Strachey was gay, and Lytton Strachey’s cousin and lover Duncan Grant became close friends of the Stephen sisters, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Duncan Grant had affairs with Vanessa Bell and her brother Adrian Stephen, as well as David Garnet, Maynard Keynes, and James Strachey. “By 1900,” Quentin Bell wrote in his book “Bloomsbury,” “it seemed that the time had come for a reexamination of human emotions and the need for new honesty and a new charity in human relations, and I think that everyone in what was to become Bloomsbury felt this.” And something else was to happen very soon after the two great post-impressionism exhibitions in London in 1910 and 1912, which also played a huge part in this new thinking about human relations which was, of course, the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and the great debate about nationalism or, looked at another way, patriotism. And the Bloomsbury Group were key figures in the opposition to the tremendous outburst of patriotism and nationalism that greeted the outbreak of the First World War. And there was this big divide in British culture between those who thought Britain was quite right, Germany was quite wrong, and it was important to enlist and to support Britain, and the Bloomsbury Group were very undecided about this.
And a very interesting introduction to this is the film “Carrington” about the artist Dora Carrington and her relationship with Lytton Strachey. After the First World War, between 1918 and 1946, was really what one might call the heyday of Bloomsbury, not so much in terms of relationships, in terms of who married whom and who was related to whom, but in terms of the kinds of books and publications they produced. In 1918 came Lytton Strachey’s famous book of essays, “Eminent Victorians,” which was an open onslaught on some of the more famous iconic figures of the Victorian age. And it was a way of sort of announcing that there was something deeply wrong with Victorian values and that it was important to think very differently about all kinds of what the Victorians considered virtues, what Lytton Strachey considered vices. In 1919, the year afterwards, Maynard Keynes wrote one of his most famous books, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” which was an attack on the whole issue of reparations and the Versailles Peace Treaty. In 1919, Virginia Woolf wrote her novel “Night and Day.” In 1920, following year, Roger Fry wrote “Vision and Design.” In 1921, Lytton Strachey wrote his attack on Queen Victoria called “Queen Victoria.” In 1922, Virginia Woolf wrote “Night and Day.” 1924, E.M. Forster published “A Passage to India.” In 1925 and 1927, Virginia Woolf wrote two of her masterpieces, “Mrs. Dalloway and "To the Lighthouse.”
In 1928, Clive Bell wrote his book “Civilization.” In 1929, Virginia Woolf wrote her famous essay, “A Room of One’s Own.” In ‘32, Lytton Strachey died. In '34, Roger Fry died. In 1941, Virginia Woolf committed suicide. And in 1946, Keynes died. And really I think it is safe to say, with this flurry of deaths in the 1930s and 1940s, we see the passing of the heyday of the Bloomsbury Group. In the mid-1980s, I produced a television programme with Martin Amos and Saul Bellow. And in his memoir, “Inside Story,” which was Martin Amis’s final book, published in 1920, just a few years before his death, earlier this year, he describes strolling through Bloomsbury in the mid-1980s with his friend and father figure Saul Bellow. And this was immediately after they’d recorded the discussion that I produced with them. And Amis writes, “We strolled through Bloomsbury, the garden squares, the plaques and statues, the museums, the houses of worship, and the houses of learning. As we crossed Fitzroy Square, I talked scornfully about the Bloomsbury Group, in my view a disgrace to bohemia; and we moved on to the major class antagonisms that were only now beginning to fade. Saul Bellow needed no goading to think ill of what he called Bloomsbury patricianism, though he was surprisingly relaxed about Bloomsbury Judaeophobia.
'But Saul,’ I said, ‘it was so fierce and it was all of them.’ ‘Yes, Sir Bellow, even Maynard Keynes. But they were only reflexive anti-Semites, not visceral. Being anti-Semitic was just one of the duties of being a snob.’” “Maybe also,” Amis said, “one of the duties of being second-rate. The only one who wasn’t was E.M. Forster, not anti-Semitic and not second-rate. As for Virginia Woolf…” “But bear in mind,” said Bellow, “she was married to a Jew. Leonard, that kind of drawing-room anti-Semitism, it’s mostly just a posture. They would’ve been horrified by anything serious.” “True, I suppose,” said Amis. “But that Virginia though. Imagine reading ‘Ulysses’ and mainly coming away with the notion that Joyce was vulgar. You know, common. And that’s what strikes her most. Unbelievable.” “Well, it’s a hard life, being a snob,” said Bellow. “You can’t relax for a moment. You know, a decade ago I spent six weeks in the Woolfs’ country house in East Sussex. It was very cold, and I expected Virginia to haunt me and punish me. But she never did.” 30 years after Bellow and Amis strolled through Bloomsbury, the BBC produced a drama television series called “Life in Squares” about the Bloomsbury Set, which was actually really all about their sex lives. Between the conversation between Amis and Bellow in the mid-1980s, and the BBC Two series in 2015, however, critics and biographers began to ask disturbing questions about the dark side of the Bloomsbury Group, particularly their anti-Semitism.
Since the 1990s, there has been a dramatic change in British literary criticism. And one should say since Noel Annan published his book “Our Age,” since Quentin Bell published his book “Bloomsbury,” there has been a real sea change, not just in literary criticism in general, but specifically in relation to the Bloomsbury Group. Critics like Bryan Cheyette, who some of you may have heard his recent talk for Lockdown University, Anthony Julius, who wrote a famous attack on TS Elliot’s anti-Semitism, and Professor Phyllis Lassner from Northwestern in America have started to write about anti-Semitism in the work of leading British writers Pound and Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and Virginia Woolf, and the Bloomsbury Group, not E.M. Forster, he isn’t there. As Cheyette writes in his very first book, “Constructions of the Jew in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875 to 1945,” which was published in 1993, immediately after Noel Annan’s book “Our Age,” immediately after Quentin Bell’s book “Bloomsbury,” neither of which mentioned anything about the anti-Semitism in connection with the Bloomsbury Group. Bryan Cheyette wrote, “The Question of race has, for the most part, been written out of literary historical studies of 19thn and 20th century writers,” by which he means English writers.
“More recently, however, a new generation of critics have,” he writes, “noted the race thinking in the major work of virtually everyone published before the Second World War. They have pointed out,” he writes, “the extent to which race thinking about Jews was in fact a key ingredient in the emerging cultural identity of modern Britain.” What is immediately noticeable is that all of these critics I just mentioned, Bryan Cheyette, Phyllis Lassner, Anthony Julius, and there are others, are all Jews. And those who wrote about Bloomsbury without mentioning their anti-Semitism were not Jews. And if you read some of the best recent articles and essays on Bloomsbury and anti-Semitism, for example, John Gross’s superb review of Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Leonard Woolf and commentary in 2006, and Jonathan Wilson’s fascinating essay in the “Tablet” in 2020 about Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s trip together to Nazi Germany in 1935, it is also worth mentioning that Gross and Wilson are also both Jewish and both perhaps more sensitive to the question of anti-Semitism than Noel Annan and Quentin Bell and other literary critics and cultural critics of a previous generation. “I do not like the Jewish voice,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary. “I do not like the Jewish laugh.”
In November 1933, Virginia Woolf met the young Isaiah Berlin at Oxford. Berlin was a Jew from Latvia, born in Riga, who then spent the Russian revolutions in Petrograd, briefly passed through Latvia on his way to England where he and his parents settled just after the First World War. Berlin then became an undergraduate at Oxford and then subsequently a postgraduate at Oxford and basically spent most, nearly all of his adult life and significant years in Oxford. “There was the great Isaiah Berlin,” Virginia Woolf wrote afterwards. “A Portuguese Jew by the look of him, Oxford’s leading light, a communist, I think a fire eater.” It is worth pointing out of course that he was neither a Portuguese Jew in any sense. He was not remotely Sephardi, he was Ashkenazi. And secondly, he was of course absolutely not a communist, indeed he was a lifelong anti-communist. In his biography of Isaiah Berlin, recently republished earlier this year, Michael Ignatieff writes, “Berlin could see that Virginia was a terrible snob, but he liked her aristocratic autre. Berlin reported that whenever he met her, he felt a trembling before and a tingling afterwards. Berlin dined with Virginia and Leonard Woolf in Bloomsbury in 1938, and Virginia grew fond of him,” Ignatia writes.
“She liked his quickness, but still looked on him as,” quote, “a violent Jew,” end quote. Although her anti-Semitism, which could become obscene and uncontrolled when she was mad, did not stop either of them from becoming friends. Lytton Strachey wrote to Virginia’s husband, Leonard, himself Jewish, condemning, quote, “the placid, easygoing vulgarity of your race.” And Maynard Keynes wrote, “It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews, who have all the money and the power and brains.” Keynes wrote about Einstein, “He’s a naughty Jew boy covered with ink. That kind of Jew. The kind which has its head above water, the sweet, tender imps who have not sublimated immortality into compound interest. He was the nicest and the only talented person I saw in all Berlin, except perhaps old Fuerstenberg, the banker Lydia liked so much, and Kurt Singer, two foot by five, the mystical economist from Hamburg. And he was a Jew; and so was Fuerstenberg and so was Singer. And my dear Melchior, a Jew too. Yet if I lived there, I felt I might turn anti-Semite. For the poor Prussian is too slow and heavy on his legs for the other kind of Jews, the ones who are not imps but serving devils, with small horns, pitch forks, and oily tails. It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and brains. I vote rather for the plump hausfraus and thick fingered wandering birds. But I’m not sure that I wouldn’t even rather be mixed up with Lloyd George than with the German political Jews.”
It is disturbing to read perhaps Britain’s greatest intellect of the 20th century, certainly it’s most famous economist of the 20th century, writing in this kind of language. There have been several kinds of defence put forward by apologists for the Bloomsbury Group. First, they say their anti-Semitism was never really as bad as all that. Just a few letters or diary entries, nothing really vicious. For instance, Isaiah Berlin called Keynes’s anti-Semitism a kind of club anti-Semitism, but it’s not a deep acute hostility to Jews as in the case of, say, Hilaire Belloc or G.K. Chesterton. And it is certainly true that many of the most damning quotes do come from letters and diaries. After meeting Sir Philip Sassoon in 1929, a Jewish figure from one of the great Jewish families, Virginia Woolf called him an underbred Whitechapel Jew.“ She didn’t like her Jewish in-laws. And after one lunch, described them as nine Jews, all of whom with a single exception of her husband, Leonard might well have been drowned without the world wagging one ounce the worst. She wrote to her friend Ethel Smyth on the 2nd of August 1930, "How I hated marrying a Jew. How I hated their nasal voices and their oriental jewellery,” their oriental jewellery, and their noses, and their wattles.“ She confessed to a friend later, in writing to friends to announce her engagement, almost always the first thing she let them know was that her fiance was a Jew, or perhaps because it sounded more piquant, a penniless Jew.
In 2006, the writer and critic John Gross, formerly editor of the TLS, wrote a powerful review of the Victoria Glendinning’s newly published biography of Leonard Woolf. He writes, "As an adult, indeed it was only when he married Virginia that Woolf was made to feel like a true outsider. Virginia’s sister, who was in favour of her marrying Leonard, told her not to worry about his being Jewish, but the thought obsessed her. In writing to friends to announce her engagement, almost always the first thing she let them know was that her fiance was a Jew. Leonard himself had to put up with complaints from her that he was so foreign, but it was his family who really got her going. The jeering account of Marie Woolf, that she wrote after their first meeting, was only the first of a long series of jibes delivered over the years, directed primarily at Marie, whom she found effusive and sentimental, but taking in her children as well. Some of Virginia’s observations about the Woolfs might be amusing if one came across them in a milder context. Occasionally, too, she relented acknowledging the undoubted decency of this or that member of the family, even of Marie, but the prevailing tone was nasty and the racial slurs were uninhibited.” The best known figures of the Bloomsbury Group, including Woolf, Keynes, and Lytton Strachey, were all capable of appalling examples of casual anti-Semitism. Not as nasty as Eliot and Pound, but unpleasant enough.
Take this description by Woolf of Mrs. Loeb: “She’s a fat Jewess, coarsely skinned, with drooping eyes and tumbled hair. Her food, of course, swam in oil and was nasty.” Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s Jewish husband and a leading man of letters in his own right, was nicknamed Jew, used freely both by Virginia and their friends, and often in his presence. Keynes once told Virginia’s sister Vanessa Bell that when he visited the Woolfs, Virginia was there, quote, “but no Jew,” unquote. A second defence of the anti-Semitism of the Bloomsbury Group was they should be given a free pass for their anti-Semitism because of their brilliance. Virginia Woolf was one of the great novelists of the 20th century. Keynes revolutionised economic theory. Fry and Bell had a huge impact about modern art. I leave it to you to decide whether that is a justification or a defence or not, and what kind of person would consider that a defence. Thirdly, you have to put these remarks in context. People say, “People have different attitudes then, we shouldn’t judge them by today’s standards.” Noel Annan, for example, wrote, “Bloomsbury grew up in the heyday of imperialism and displayed that faint contempt for Jews, so characteristic of their class.” He wrote this in 1990. Of course these were different times, almost a century ago. Fourthly, there were exceptions.
Not everyone in the Bloomsbury Group shared these assumptions. In 1939, E.M. Forster himself, on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group, published an article “Jew Consciousness,” which concluded, “To me, anti-Semitism is now the most shocking of all things. This was about choices even then. Jew-mania,” he wrote, “was the one evil which no one foretold at the close of the last war. No profits, so far as I know, had foreseen this anti-Jew horror, whereas today no one can see the end of it.” Keynes, famously helped refugee scholars after 1933, spoke out against Nazi persecution. And as early as 1919, passionately condemned Lloyd George’s casual anti-Semitism at the Versailles Peace Conference. George Orwell wrote an article on anti-Semitism in Britain in February 1945. He wrote, “There has been a perceptible anti-Semitic strain in English literature from Chaucer onwards. And without even getting up from this table to consult the book, I can think of passages which, if written now, would be stigmatised as anti-Semitism in the works of Shakespeare, Smollett, Thackeray, Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and various others. Anyone who wrote in that strain now would bring down a storm of abuse upon himself, or probably would find it impossible to get his writings published.” I would wish that Orwell was right, but of course he wasn’t right about this.
That people turned a blind eye to the anti-Semitism of the Bloomsbury Group for at least another 40 or 50 years, until the revolution in English speaking literary criticism on both sides of the Atlantic. Fifthly, what is perhaps most perplexing is that the Bloomsbury Group could be capable of anti-Semitic remarks, but also had Jewish friends like the artist Mark Gertler and the translator Samuel Koteliansky, known as Kot, because a lot of the Bloomsbury people found it very hard to get their tongues around Koteliansky. Catherine Mansfield’s husband, John Middleton Murry wrote that Koteliansky looked like some Assyrian king with an impressive hooked Semitic nose, a fine head of coarse black curly hair, and massive features: very dark eyes with pince-nez.“ I suppose it’s the language, it is the cliched language about large noses, Assyrian kings, oriental jewellery that is so striking. The failure to come up with any kind of original language for people who are supposed to be and, indeed in some cases were, great writers, major art critics, major economists, major psychoanalytic figures. Sixthly, isn’t this just gossip, passing references rather than the fiction itself?
It’s not in the body of the great writing. In 1927, Virginia Woolf wrote a piece, "Street Haunting: A London Adventure.” This was not some piece of juvenilia, it was two years after her masterpiece “Mrs. Dalloway,” and the same year, as to another masterpiece, “To the Lighthouse.” She writes, “They do not grudge us, we are musing, our prosperity; when, suddenly, turning the corner, we come upon a bearded Jew, wild, hunger-bitten, glaring out of his misery; or pass the humped body of an old woman flung abandoned on the step of a public building with a cloak over her like the hasty covering thrown over a dead horse or donkey. At such sights the nerves of the spine seem to stand erect; a sudden flare is brandished in our eyes; a question is asked which is never answered.” In 1932, Woolf sketched a portrait of the great jeweller included in her list of caricatures and later developed into a short story, “The Duchess and the Jeweller.” Its central character, Isador Oliver, had started out as, quote, “a little Jew boy”, unquote, complete with hooked nose of course, in an East End alley and ended up as the richest jeweller in England. His business practises are questionable, obviously, although some of the title ladies he deals with are pretty devious too. The story was sent to the author’s New York agent who urged her to change Isador’s ethnicity. She reluctantly complied.
The jeweller was transformed into Oliver Bacon, possibly Bacon was a defined little joke. Explicit references to his Jewish origins were removed. Woolf removed all direct references to the fact that jeweller is a Jew. And in 1938, the story was published in its revised form in Harper’s Bazaar. Then there’s her novel “The Years” in 1936, in which a young woman is entertaining a friend in her cheap lodgings in London when they heard the sound of water being turned on in the room next door. “The Jew is having a bath,” she explains. The Jew, Abrahamson is a fellow lodger. “And tomorrow,” she adds, “there’ll be a line of grease around the bath.” He can be heard coughing and snorting through the thin walls. And he leaves not only a grease mark in the bath, but hairs as well. The sense of physical revulsion is extraordinarily strong. She knows this because she’s obliged to share the bathroom with him. And in the exchange with her friend that follows, the idea of this enforced intimacy is made to seem even more disgusting. These are not Woolf’s major works by any means, but can we build a firewall between casual remarks in her diaries and her published fiction in the way that many would like to do? The 2015 three-part BBC Two series, however, airbrushed all this out. They preferred the sex and gossip to the history and to the anti-Semitism.
What has happened, though, in the last 30 years is the critics and cultural historians have started to look more closely and very differently at Bloomsbury, along with Eliot, Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and others. In the context of the history of anti-Semitism and English literature in the first half of the 20th century, so it’s not just Bloomsbury, of course, it is a completely revisionist new take on English literary culture in the first half of the 20th century, the Bloomsbury Group, without question, had a huge impact on British art and literature and on British culture. But in recent years, some of the key figures, Virginia Woolf in particular, have come under fire for their anti-Semitic views. How will their reputation survive? And why did it take so long for these questions to be raised about the Bloomsbury Group? So those are some of my reflections on the Bloomsbury Group. Let me just see. I can see there are some questions already.
Q&A and Comments:
Jennifer from Los Angeles, “Congratulations to Wendy in lockdown, on your magnificent new website,” which I shall leave to others to talk about, I think.
Elaine Khan, “We visited their cottage in Lewes and saw their irreverent nativity scenes painted in the nearby church. It was an unexpected trip and a worthwhile tour.” Good.
Q: Ronnie Gotkin, “How did Leonard feel about Virginia’s anti-Semitism, which presumably he was aware of?”
A: Ronnie, that’s a very interesting question and it has become the subject of Victoria Glendinning’s relatively recent biography and of a lot of writing about Leonard, because her antisemitism towards him and towards his family was quite open. I think he was quite aware of her spells of madness, which resulted in her suicide in 1941. And he’s generally regarded as a kind of saint of sorts, of somebody who put up with all the difficulties of living with her, including her anti-Semitism. Whether that is quite a proper explanation as to how he really felt about it, how he felt about this language, this hateful language, this very difficult, for a Jew in the 1930s, in 1930s England, to be married to an anti-Semite is an extraordinary situation. As Jonathan Wilson wrote quite recently for the American online publication Tablet, they did travel together to Nazi Germany just for a few days in 1935. And of course had there been a successful Nazi invasion, instead of the Battle of Britain, Len Woolf would’ve been killed. Virginia Woolf would perhaps have been killed as the wife of a Jew. So it is a really mysterious question, set of questions, troubling set of questions. And also there’s the question about all of them. How did these people, one of them wrote a book called “Civilization,” how did this fit into their view of civilization? How did Keynes, on the one hand, speak very honourably about Jews and anti-Semitism, played a huge part in trying to help Jewish refugees, refugee academics and intellectuals come to Britain in the early 1930s after the rise of Hitler in ‘33, and at the same time use this kind of vile language? And I suppose this is the troubling question, which first really got raised with Pound, then got raised with Eliot, and now is becoming raised more often about members of the Bloomsbury Group. These are very troubling questions. They’re dark questions. They were asked, of course, also about Heiddeger, about the great French writer Celine. There is no end of viciously anti-Semitic and even pro-Nazi famous thinkers.
Lily Kotowski says, very briefly, very simply, “No justification.” And I think she’s right. I’ve tried to put what I consider a number of explanations or justifications, but I think I agree with Lily Kotowski. There is no justification for this. And what is also extraordinary is how these leading intellectual figures like Noel Annan, like Quentin Bell, who was professor of History of Art at Sussex University not that long ago, Noel Annan was provost of King’s College Cambridge not that long ago, how they could just sort of turn a blind eye to this? Again, these are troubling questions, I’m afraid.
Now, let me see if I can write, see if I can find some more questions.
Q: Arlene Goldberg writes, “Why did Virginia Woolf marry a Jew if she was anti-Semitic?”
A: Arlene, that’s a fantastically good question. And why on earth did she? I have absolutely no answer. And do you know, even more puzzling, I’ve never seen anyone else ask that question. It’s a brilliant question. Why did she? I mean, Leonard was a very cultured, very smart man. He was a very close friend of a number of the Cambridge undergraduates who frequented her home in Bloomsbury after they graduated. So he was part of a very close intimate circle. He was the only Jew among them, apart from Gertler and Koteliansky. Koteliansky was a refugee, Gertler was a Jewish immigrant from the East End. So Leonard Woolf had a very different background. He was sort of middle class. He was not as posh as the Bells, as Stephens, or as some of the other, the Stracheys. But nevertheless, he’d gone to Cambridge. He was from a different kind of cultural group from Mark Gertler and Samuel Koteliansky. He was very smart. He was a very interesting and cultured man. I don’t know if that answers the question.
Ruth says, “I didn’t know how virulent their anti-Semitism was.” Well, it’s only now really becoming more widely discussed. And for many years, it wasn’t discussed at all.
Sarah Papano, “Keynes thanks Lord Kahn, a Jewish economist, in the preface to the general theory. Kahn was taught by Keynes at King’s College and perhaps embodied the Jewish brain you mentioned.” Yes. Sarah, you’re absolutely right. We find this coming up again and again and again, these strange double standards where on the one hand you can say openly anti-Semitic things about people you know or people you don’t know and don’t care about. And on the other hand, when it comes to particular individuals who you do know, you say, “Well, these are smart, interesting people.” And so how does one reconcile this very strange, these double standards?
Janet said, “Modern writers don’t hesitate today to comment negatively about Israel when they have no connections with the country and it’s irrelevant to their work. , yes. Now I’ve temporarily forgotten the name of the very popular young Irish woman writer who’s been hugely successful in recent years who refused to have their books translated in Israel. You’re absolutely right. This is a very serious and concerning issue also.
Q: Stephen Nassal writes, "Do you have any reflection on the parallel experiences of Leonard and Virginia and Leslie Stephen with Sidney Lee?”
A: Now, I’m afraid to say, I don’t know anything really about Sidney Lee so I can’t, I’m afraid, compare and contrast. So I do apologise, Stephen. I will try and find out more and come back to this perhaps on another occasion. It is curious. And I do wonder also what Vanessa Bell, Virginia’s sister, made of it all. Not that she married a Jew, she married Clive Bell, who was a gentile, mother of that Cambridge cohort. But I wonder what she did think of it. And I wonder what some of the others thought of it.
“Sally Rooney, for example,” says, Janet. Thank you, Janet. Sally Rooney. Of course that’s who it was, who refuses to allow her books and novels to be translated in Israel.
Q: Rosemary Wolfson, “Sorry, late to Zoom. However, in my book group, when reading "Mrs. Dalloway,” members of group wouldn’t admit any anti-Semitism by Virginia Woolf, only praised how well Leonard Woolf had looked after his wife with such devotion. Any comments?“
A: Well, yes. I mean, Leonard, as I said earlier, he is regarded as a kind of great saint, saintly figure by many people for the way he looked after Virginia, who was a troubled and difficult person. And of course, also in the 1920s and '30s, it was difficult for somebody, for a man who was not, you know, who was a very male dominated, patriarchal culture, and it was very difficult, I suppose, to be married if you are not as successful or famous as your wife and then to have the double whammy of her anti-Semitism. It really is a mystery and it’s a very troubling story. And I’m sure there will be more written about both their relationship and her feelings about his family and he himself. And, you know, he lived for many, many years after her suicide in '41. It’ll be interesting to see what comes out about this.
Q: Shelly Shapiro, "Why did Len Woolf go to Nazi Germany in 1935? Weren’t there already Nuremberg Laws against Jews?”
A: Yes. Well, of course there was anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany in 1935. Yeah, I do recommend this piece by Jonathan Wilson in Tablet. I think it came out in 2020. Tablet is an online Jewish American publication, and it’s a really interesting read. And what he says is that because she was so famous, and she was not Jewish, therefore they were given a perfectly acceptable welcome into Germany. And there was not a problem since he was married to a very famous non-Jewish writer.
Q: Ron Bornstein or Bornstein, I’m not sure, my apologies, “Do you have any insights into Samuel Courtauld’s relationship to the Bloomsbury Group, or their attitudes towards Jews? I believe Roger Fry donated, bequeathed a great deal of art to Courtauld Gallery, and Keynes’s was a keen buyer of Degas work at his estate auction in Paris, many of which are at Cambridge.”
A: Thank you, Ron, for such an interesting set of points. I’m afraid I don’t really know very much about Roger Fry. He didn’t really fit into my talk very much, except that he and Bell played such an important part in bringing certain kind of modernist art, particularly from France into England before the First World War. And I don’t really know anything about Samuel Courtauld’s relationship to the Bloomsbury Group, I’m afraid, or indeed his relationship to their attitudes towards Jews. Fry and Bell are two figures who were hugely important at the time, both to the reputation of the Bloomsbury Group and to its association with modernism and the rise, explosion of modernism into English culture on the eve of the First World War. I say English culture because it very much was English culture rather than British culture at this time. The big exhibitions were in West End, their publishers were in London, they lived in London and in Sussex, they went to Cambridge. They didn’t have connections with Glasgow, or Wales, or Ireland. So they had a hugely important impact on both the rise of the Bloomsbury Group, but also on the association of the Bloomsbury Group with modern art and therefore with modernism, and are perhaps less well-known now, much less well-known now than, say, Forster, Keynes, and Virginia Woolf, or even little Lytton Strachey. So history has not been kind to them in that respect.
Kathy Bratt, “I’m so upset. These were the heroes I studied, read, and learnt to love of my English lit courses, both in A levels and university. Never heard of their anti-Jewishness in my studies, let alone the disgusting terms in which they say it.”
And Kako says, “Same with me, a course at NYU in the 1960s.” Well, yes. Kathy, I don’t know when you were studying A levels at University. Kako, was it NYU in the '60s? Yes, I mean the point is there was really a huge sea change, not so much in relation to Pound because of his notorious broadcast, pro-Mussolini broadcast during the Second World War and the controversy of the Bollingen Prize, which Pound was awarded in which many Jewish figures, including Saul Bellow, it was an absolute outrage. And there is a very interesting book called “The Bughouse” about how Pound ended up at St. Elizabeth’s asylum in Washington, and the poets who, the American poets, who came to visit him. And one of the very difficult questions that this book raises is was Pound ever really diagnosed by psychiatrists as being mad or was it just a way of conveniently getting him out of the way and not having to try him for treason during the Second World War? And the book is called “The Bughouse.” And I strongly recommended it A, because of its fantastically interesting accounts of the visits by so many leading American poets to visit Pound when he was in the madhouse. But also this very, very troubling question about why exactly, what exactly was Pound, was pound mentally ill in any way? Was he diagnosed in any way? Was he given medication of any form? These are very, again, more difficult and troubling questions, I’m afraid, I’m sorry.
Going back to Kathy and Kako’s points. Yes, I mean this is the problem, that this kind of anti-Semitism, critics, literary critics, academics, school teachers turned a blind eye to anti-Semitism for decades. And it was really only in the 1990s, and this new generation of critics, nearly all of whom are Jewish, who started to look at this very differently. And that is just as, you know, I don’t know how many courses there were about the Holocaust at NYU in the '60s or when Kathy was at university. Certainly when I was at university, I shuttered to think how long ago that was, 1970s, in the late 1970s, there was almost nothing taught about the Holocaust. And certainly, when I studied English, I would never heard anything about their anti-Semitism. So the times, they are changing. Although, of course, with more and more Israelophobia in British universities, I wonder how that will affect the discussion of anti-Semitism in English literary culture and English culture.
Ronnie Gotkin, “People always think that the good Jew they know is the exception. Also, Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, for example, seems to be something that does happen from time to time.” Ronnie, you’re absolutely right, that people very often know a Jew who is the exception and Heiddeger and Hannah Arendt are very good examples. And Hannah Arendt, of course, is undergoing a tremendous revival of interest at the moment. There’s a new biography coming out shortly from Lyndsey Stonebridge. There’s been several other books about her recently. And it will be very interesting to see how Lyndsey Stonebridge’s biography treats Heiddeger’s anti-Semitism and Arendt’s relationship to Heiddeger’s anti-Semitism.
And there’s somebody I can’t quite pronounce his name, Shushuki perhaps, who says, “Leonard Woolf knew Virginia was mentally challenged. He married her because he knew she was also a genius and wanted to nurture.” Well, yes, perhaps, and perhaps it was very exciting to be married to one of the most famous writers in early 20th century England. And also, of course, she and her sister Vanessa were part of this tremendously intimate circle, which included so many of his closest friends from Cambridge. And there was the sense of excitement, of the kind of sexual emancipation, the kind of way people were talking about sexual feelings, sexual relations. It was very daring, it was very exciting. And perhaps some of that excitement and the fact that these sisters were orphans meant that there was much less inhibition than in so many of middle and upper middle class homes at that time, including perhaps his own home. So, you know, I’m sure all that was very exciting. Through her, he met other writers, other major writers. They ran a very successful publishing house. You know, it is a complicated story, I think.
Q: Bernard Victor asks, “Did they also have racist views?”
A: Not that I know of, or at least I haven’t read anything about. I mean, the thing you have to remember is of course there was a very small Black and Asian population in England just before the First World War, just after the First World War. Whereas, there was a growing Jewish population because of the tremendous rise of immigrants in the East End. And, you know, that rather fascinated Woolf, this image of this Jewish, rather crazy Jewish man with a wild beard and so on who she comes across, people from the East End. That was a very different kind of sense of who Jews were. You know, very large influx of Jews from Poland, from the Russian pale during the 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s and I think that was also an important factor. The mix of class and race is a very toxic one. And I mentioned class, perhaps I should have, and I don’t think there’s time now, but perhaps I should’ve said more about class. These were people from the upper middle class and upper class, people who went to Cambridge, people who lived in Bloomsbury. Therefore, people like Mark Gertler from the East End and the so-called Whitechapel Boys, the Jewish immigrant artists who were mostly the sons, one or two daughters, but mostly the sons of Jewish immigrants from the East Europe, and they were a different class of people. And it must’ve been phenomenally hard for Mark Gertler to fit into that world of posh people who’ve known each other since public school and since Cambridge. It must’ve been incredibly difficult. And he has played by Rufus Sewell in the film “Carrington,” which I do recommend tremendously. Jonathan Pryce plays Lytton Strachey, I think it’s the young Emma Thompson plays Dora Carrington, I think. It’s a fantastic film, came out in the '80s or '90s and touches on a lot of these issues.
Kathy Bratt, “P.S. Ray marrying a Jew, we’re so avant-garde, moths to a flame.” Well, indeed. Yeah, we should be careful about how we judge others and who we cast stones at because of course now people would say, “Well, that’s all very well, the way you’re talking about how other people talked about anti-Semitism but how do we talk about Black people, Asian people, immigrants, slavery, and so on?” And these are complicated questions and we’re only really starting to have this kind of debate of the impact on slavery on British history and British culture.
Stephen Massel again, “Sidney Lee, a Jew,” thank you, “was Stephen’s deputy and successor, as editor of the DNB, was Leslie Stephen’s deputy and successor at DNB.” That’s very interesting. I will read up about that, Stephen. Thank you so much for clarifying that. That is a really interesting question. I don’t know about Leslie Stephen, questions of anti-Semitism. I’ve not come across references, but I’ve not read any biographies of him. So it’d be interesting to find out. I’m really grateful to you for that, Stephen. It’s very kind.
Q: Janet, “Why on earth did Leonard Woolf tolerate the anti-Semitism? Didn’t he fight back?”
A: It seems not. But as I say, there were two sides to this, Janet. You know, she was a famous writer. She was a great writer. It allowed him to be part of a kind of fascinating, cultural world, the most exclusive and exciting cultural group in England at that time. And that he knew many of these people very well. He’d been at Cambridge with many of them. He’d been very close friends with many of them. And it was through them, through Thoby, the brother who died in 1906, that he met the sisters Vanessa and Virginia and then entered this exciting new social world. This liberated, emancipated, very exciting world compared to what most Edwardian homes were like. I don’t know if you remember John Gielgud’s wonderful performance as the father of Charles Ryder in “Brideshead Revisited.” Incredibly captures brilliantly the sense of how stuffy English middle class life could be. And Bernard Shaw, the young heroine in that Bernard quotation captures brilliantly how terribly oppressive it was for young women and also, in different ways, for young men. So, you know, these were exciting new times and exciting new people. And so perhaps he sort of weighed that up in some way.
Rita, thank you so much for your kind words.
Jackie Gordon, “Perhaps Leonard Woolf as an anti-Semitic Jew himself. He may have agreed with Virginia.” I don’t think there’s any evidence for that. But of course, again, he may have thought also, putting it in context, these were anti-Semitic times in British culture. And he may have thought, “Well, there are many wonderful things about Virginia.” To be truthful, I don’t know. And it’ll be interesting to see as more and more research comes out about this over the coming years.
Q: David Garfield, “Anything to say about Virginia Woolf’s suicide?”
A: Not really, except that of course she had a long history of very serious mental illness, how much that was related to her mother’s early death and then becoming an orphan. And there’s a fascinating book, and I’m afraid I can’t remember the name of the author, published in the 1980s, I think, possibly the early 1990s, called “Virginia Woolf and the Mad Doctors” about the many different psychiatrists she was sent to see because of her repeated problems with mental illness. I’m sorry, I can’t remember the name of the author, but if you look up Virginia, let’s see, “Virginia Woolf and the Mad Doctors,” I think it is “Virginia Wool and the Mad Doctors.” Anyway, she had a long history of very severe mental illness. And I should’ve added that as a seventh possible explanation for very intense anti-Semitism.
As Michael Ignatieff points out this biography of Berlin, that it did seem to get worse at times, her anti-Semitism, when her mental health got worse. She killed herself in '41. There might have been concern what would happen, yes, all right, the British had won the Battle of Britain, what would happen, nevertheless, if the Germans did manage to successfully conquer Britain? Her husband would certainly be killed. Maybe she would’ve been killed as the wife of a Jew. You know, there are a number of different issues.
Kathy Bratt, “I don’t quite know how to use this to reply, but isn’t it awful? I feel cheated. The way my old loves, and indeed occupy in recent times are anti-me.” Yes, well, indeed. These are very disturbing questions, disturbing discoveries. You can love the poetry of T.S. Elliot and indeed of Pound and the novels of Woolf, and what do you do with what you don’t like about them as people? These are very difficult questions.
Judith Weidman says, “He was in love with her. She needed his stability. They married.” Right, well, he clearly was in love with her because they remained married until she died. She certainly needed his stability. How she reconciled her need for his stability and his decency and the way he looked after her with these vile comments, that, I’m afraid, I don’t know.
Bern Victor points out, “They go as an anti-Semite.” Indeed. Well, yes. I mean, the list of late 19th century and early 20th century major, major cultural figures who were anti-Semites, I’m afraid, would take us all through the night.
Q: Leon Fein, “Is the dislike of being Jewish by self-hating Jews fundamentally different to the dislikes of anti-Semitic writers?”
A: My God, Leon, you’ve really put the cat among the pigeons there. I couldn’t possibly say. And I don’t know any, I’ve never known any self-hating Jews. I know there are sort of classic figure in cultural thinking. I’m afraid to say I’ve never known any, so I really can’t bring anything to contribute to this.
Ruth Freidman, “Sally Rooney supports the BDS movement. An absolute disgrace.” I agree.
Q: Diane Marcus, “Was Leonard a self-hating Jew?”
A: I have no evidence for this, but I obviously need to do more reading about Leonard Woolf.
Vivian Freeman, “No, Annan was at UCL, not King’s.” And Sarah Papono responds, “He was provost of King’s before UCL.” Yes, he was involved with UCL. And yes, before that he was provost of King’s, which is a very honourable and distinguished position. And he knew everybody who was anybody. And yet, yet he didn’t seem to be terribly troubled by the issue of anti-Semitism in his book “Our Age,” which is a fascinating account of 20th century British intellectual culture.
Cheryl Shapiro, and I think we may have to finish here, Cheryl, “From Simon, making exceptions for individual Jews while being anti-Semitic isn’t rare. My introduction to Canadian anti-Semitism after I immigrated from South Africa was a colleague who told me, 'I don’t like Jews. They’re too rich. But don’t take it personally. You’re not rich, so you are okay.’” We’ve all been there.
Louie Sweet, finally, “I’m surprised at the surprise, in Southern Bloomsbury and reading diaries and letters, the anti-Semitism was visible. I think that who knew something about this still have to think about how we relate to the art of anti-Semites.”
Yes. Ruth Book is looking at the Bloomsbury figures this way, different from the current 1617 project. Well, as I mentioned, you know, the quest of the debate about the history of slavery and its impact on British and American culture is really only just beginning to take off. So, Ruth, that is an important question and this is going to continue and continue and continue.
I think, I’m afraid, there are many, many more questions I would love to be able to try and answer them, or at least respond to them, but I fear it is quarter past six UK time, quarter past one US time, and I should let you get on with the rest of your evenings. Thank you so much for all your very interesting questions, points, observations. I’ve learned a great deal. I will go away and read a lot more about this before I speak about it again. I’m most grateful to you for all your time and thank you so much for joining us, for joining me this evening. It’s been an absolute pleasure. And I look forward to speaking to you all very soon. Thank you.