Young Bloomsbury
Nino Strachey (John Murray, £25)
THE Bloomsbury Group can be divided into Old and Young. Old is the Stracheys, led by Lytton, from whom the author is descended, and the Stephenses, particularly Virginia (Woolf) and Vanessa (Bell), and their allies: Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes and Roger Fry. Young Bloomsbury flourished in the 1920s through second-generation Stracheys— sharp-eyed novelist Julia, Lytton’s niece, and the socialist politician John—and clever gay men such as Cambridge scholar Dadie Rylands and music critic Eddy Sackvillewest, all then in their twenties. They were, indeed, young, bright-eyed, many markedly beautiful and mostly wealthy. They glitter and sparkle as they skip their way through these pages like irrepressible guests at a non-stop party, casting about for love, meaning and joy. Clive Bell wrote in 1922, ‘always life will be worth living for those who find in it things which make them feel to the limit of their capacity’.
Nino Strachey describes how they also paid tactful—and often intimate—homage to their free-thinking mentors. We find them rolling about on the lawns of Garsington Manor, Charleston, Ham Spray and so on. When not under the admiring eyes and cross-examining tongues of Old Bloomsbury, they were dancing through London—androgyny and make-up de rigueur—talking incessantly. Talk really mattered. They were artists, writers and critics, and they fell in and out of love with each other.
It is clear that the two generations provided mutual acceptance and reassurance: the Old giving the Young Bloomsbury-ites the space and confidence to explore their sexual and intellectual identities; and the Young helping Old Bloomsbury to rediscover themselves after the dark days of the First World War. There are hints of wider societal intolerance, police persecution and ‘cures’ for ‘deviance’.
The author argues the bold, younger set foreshadowed the current shifting boundaries of self-determination, especially sexual and gender identity. This is the serious side to an highly entertaining, pacy volume, based on considerable research and a must for modern Bloomsbury fans, whether young or old. Jeremy Musson