The spirit of Bloomsbury: talk, literature and sex

BLOOMSBURY, A House of Lions, by Leon Edel; Lippincott, 288 pp., $12.95.

TELLING LIVES: The Biographer's Art, edited by Marc Pachter; New Republic Books/National Portrait Gallery, 151 pp., $9.95.

By Don A. Keister

Edel's title, Bloomsbury, refers not to place but to some "rather superior people" (as novelist William Plomer has called them) whose intellectual and artistic activities centered for the first few decades of this century in London's Bloomsbury section.

Vanessa and Virginia Stephen were the first to come there in 1904. Their brother Thoby, just down from Cambridge, soon joined them, bringing his friends around for talk, at first about philosophy and then, as the stiffness wore off, anything under the sun.

One of Thoby's friends, Clive Bell, married Vanessa. She painted, he had discovered art and would write about it.

Another, Leonard Woolf, fell in love with Virginia, and eventually overcame her reluctance to marry. She wrote, of course. So did he, but after an early novel (about Bloomsbury) he turned to political topics and as writer and editor helped shape the development of the Labor party and the League of Nations.

Two other Cambridge friends, Lytton Strachey, whose Eminent Victorians set a new style in biography, and John Maynard Keynes, whose economic theories have affected all our pocketbooks (not necessarily for the worse), were homosexual. Sex in all its varieties, incidentally, was one of the topics Bloomsbury freely discussed. Bloomsbury was leading the way toward the twenties and beyond.

Edel includes three others in his collective biography: Roger Fry, painter and art critic; Desmond MacCarthy, literary critic; and Duncan Grant, painter, who lived with Vanessa after Clive Bell's roving affections brought about a separation.

Edel's narrative stops at 1920. By then all the friends were successfully launched. Middle age was upon them and they formed a Memoir Club and listened to each other read reminiscent papers.

But they weren't finished by any means. Even Strachey; the most fragile he died in 1932 had books about Victoria and Elizabeth still to do. Only one of Virginia Woolf's novels was written before 1920; Keynes, too, had published only one book, and that was on the Versailles peace conference.

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Bloomsbury has had a lot of attention lately too much, some think. And about these nine persons there is an appalling mass of material to be, got through. If he had wanted to, Edel could easily have filled more than the five volumes he gave to Henry James.

But Edel thinks of biography as an art, likes to experiment with form, and in following these interlinked lives he has set himself a fascinating problem in selection and arrangement. He has solved it in an efficient and unobtrusive way

that makes his book a delight to read.

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and that

Edel discusses his art of biography in general in his contribution to Telling Lives, which collects the contributions to a recent symposium on biography at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

The other contributors are Marc Pachter, with some introductory generalizations, Justin Kaplan on whether or not the biographer's chief task is to discover "the naked self," Geoffrey Wolff on the interest that lies in "minor" lives, Alfred Kazin on autobiography, Doris Kearns on what it was like to write about Lyndon Johnson, Theodore Rosengarten on his problems with oral autobiography and Barbara Tuchman on "biography as a prism of history."

Rosengarten is over-long, but each essay contributes to understanding biography as what at its best it truly is an art form. Don A. Keister is a professor emeritus of the University of Akron.