LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
PAST Out: What was the Bloomsbury group? |
by Paula Martinac |
Soon after their father's death in 1904, Vanessa Stephen, a painter, and her sister, Virginia, an aspiring novelist, began to host regular meetings for other wealthy young intellectuals at their London home. Called the Friday Group, but later known simply as Bloomsbury (the neighborhood in which the sisters lived), the salon became a haven for artists and writersincluding many gays and bisexualswho wanted to break free from the artistic and sexual restrictions of the era. Bloomsbury's first members were the Cambridge University friends that Thoby Stephen brought to his sisters' home for dinnerhistorian Lytton Strachey, economist John Maynard Keynes, and writers Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf. The guests in turn invited others to the group, including artist Duncan Grant, who had been sexually involved with both Strachey and Keynes. Within Bloomsbury, these gay men found support for their sexual orientation at a time when the imprisonment of playwright Oscar Wilde in 1895 for sodomy was still a very fresh memory. The Stephen sisters were equal members in Bloomsbury, not just "hostesses," but they were the only women in the group for several years. At the turn of the 20th century, convention frowned on unmarried women socializing with young men without chaperones. But the Stephenswho had been reared to be genteel, upper-class wives and had not been permitted a university educationwere eager to have stimulating conversations about art, literature, and philosophy. After talking into the early morning hours, "one could stumble off to bed knowing that something very important had happened," Virginia later wrote. It wasn't long before the members were addressing each other by first names, instead of the polite "Miss" and "Mr.," and expanding the range of their topics. One evening, Strachey, noticing a stain on Vanessa Stephen's dress, suddenly quipped, "Semen?" It is said that after a shocked pause the group burst into laughter, and that from then on anything and everything was open to discussion. Although "Bloomsberries" (as one member called them) did share and critique each other's work, the group functioned mostly as a social one, with members living in close proximity to each other and occasionally together. Bloomsbury has gone down in history for the many contributions its members made to literature, art, and the social sciences. The group's intellectual core was Virginia Stephen, who became Virginia Woolf when she married in 1912. Today she is recognized as one of the great modernist novelists. She and her husband, Leonard, founded Hogarth Press, a publishing house that brought some of the most significant literature of the era into print when no one else would, including T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. In other fields, Keynes became one of the pre-eminent economists of his day, while Strachey achieved renown as a biographer. But the romantic record of the group's members is also noteworthy, because they demonstrated a sexual freedom and fluidity that was remarkably ahead of their time. Beginning in 1925, Virginia Woolf had a passionate affair with the dashing Vita Sackville-West. In the first flush of romance, Woolf wrote what has become a classic of queer fiction, the experimental fantasy Orlando (1927), which argued that love and passion ignore gender, and that gender itself is fluid. Others in the Bloomsbury group exhibited similar ambisexual tendencies. Although Vanessa Stephen married Clive Bell, the great love of her life was Duncan Grant, who was primarily gay and had been sexually involved with her brother, Adrian. She and Grant had a child together, but he continued to have affairs with men throughout their decades-long relationship. During World War I, they lived together at a country estate with David "Bunny" Garnett, who was lovers with both (and who, in a bizarre turn of events, later married their daughter, Angelica). Triangular relationships with a queer twist were, in fact, common within the Bloomsbury circle. Strachey was gayin the slang of the day, a "bugger"but in the early days of Bloomsbury, he proposed marriage to Virginia Stephen. In the 1920s, he lived in platonic bliss with surrealist painter Dora Carrington, who was part of the second wave of Bloomsbury. When they both fell in love with the same man, Carrington married the object of their mutual desire, and the three set up housekeeping together. The cross-dressing Carrington had affairs with women, confiding to a friend that she had "more ecstasy" with female lovers than with men"and no shame." She mused, "Probably if one was completely Sapphic, it would be much easier." Despite Carrington's marriage and many affairs, Strachey remained the most important person in her life. A few weeks after he died, she fell into a deep depression and committed suicide. In the early years of Bloomsbury, Keynes was also exclusively gay. But in 1923 he shocked the group by marrying Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, who was outside of the Bloomsbury circle and considered by some members unworthy of belonging. The happy marriage seems to have made an ex-gay out of Keynesaccording to one intimate, he never again pursued men sexually. By most accounts, Bloomsbury lost its soul and its force when Virginia Woolfwho was plagued by mental illness throughout her lifedrowned herself in 1941. Some members met sporadically until the 1950s, but without the same zeal. Today, their haunts and homes in the Bloomsbury district are part of the University of London.Paula Martinac is a Lambda Literary Award-winning author of seven books, including The Queerest Places: A Guide to Gay and Lesbian Historic Sites. She can be reached care of Letters from CAMP Rehoboth or at POcolumn@aol.com. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 12, No. 12, August 23, 2002. |