BLOOMSBURY & BEYOND
Juliet Nicolson celebrates the timeless literary vivacity of Bazaar, in whose pages her grandmother Vita Sackville-West and Vita’s friend and lover Virginia Woolf explored themes of sexuality and freedom, image and identity
Juliet Nicolson on how her grandmother Vita Sackville-West and Vita’s lover Virginia Woolf filled these pages with wit, wisdom and heartfelt emotion
As the melancholy aftermath of the Great Depression lifted, in October 1931 Harper’s Bazaar ’s shimmering red, grey and white graphic cover zinged with hope. The invitation to this writer, some 75 years later, to turn the pages of the late 1920s and 1930s archive editions of the world’s oldest fashion magazine feels like eating lunch in reverse, the sensual crème caramel of research before the sinewy steak of writing. The feel and sound of the still-glossy pages, the visual drama of the striking art deco artwork and even the smell of the paper throws up the immediacy of the tangible past and the arrest of the new in a way that few books can.
But above all, it was and remains the magazine’s unmistakable delight in language that deepens the artistic, intellectual and emotional response for the Bazaar reader. The care taken with the descriptions of clothes conveying the cut and the feel of the fabric is evident in every caption, reflected in every column and in accompanying advertisements. In the January 1937 issue, for example, a long Vionnet evening coat is described as ‘dahlia velvet, like a deep ruby, as sculpturesque as the robes of an ancient Doge of Venice’, and an awareness of literature pervaded every aspect of Bazaar; a lyrical article about mascara published the same year alludes to Hamlet, ‘a vision in black’.
A love of words has always illuminated these pages. The magazine’s literary heritage stretches back 150 years with Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy and Henry James among its distinguished contributors. From its earliest days, Bazaar championed the new, dissolving boundaries between fashion and the arts, coalescing elegance and innovation in both words and style. A distinctive writerly glamour permeates its between-the-wars pages, which were a showcase for all that was excellent in contemporary writing. Features commissioned in the August 1934 issue in Bazaar’s chic Stratton Street offices across the road from the Ritz included a discussion of the legacy of the Diaghilev ballet and a travel piece on Mexico illustrated by an amazing photograph of the artist Frida Kahlo with her husband Diego Rivera.
The compelling work of the Bloomsbury Group’s writers, artists, thinkers, diarists, travellers, family, friends and lovers also thrived in Bazaar. When I come upon a story written for the magazine by my grandmother Vita Sackville-West, it instantly recalls childhood terror balanced by awe at this tall, breeches-clad, un-granny-like figure, striding through the hop fields of Kent as I ran to keep up. Emerging once again is that rich, deep, smoky and undeniably aristocratic voice that I have not heard since I was seven years old, and that familiar, teasy sense of humour, so beloved by her closest friends and shared throughout their long marriage by my grandfather Harold.
Famous for her poetry, her novels, her journalism and above all her divine creation, the garden at Sissinghurst, Vita’s gift for emotionally penetrating short fiction is sometimes overlooked. Her stories for Bazaar tell of the conflicting demands of her complex sexual life as well as her tendency to reclusiveness. In ‘Liberty’ (October 1930), her sexual theft of a neighbour, Mary Campbell, from her poet husband Roy, a family friend of the Nicolsons, is disguised within the heterosexual story of a married woman’s affair with her best friend’s husband. In ‘The Strange Adventure of Mr Petherick’ (April 1933), the hero embarks on an existential walk in a London devoid of people. In contrast, her travel pieces are lighter, chatty, charming and reminiscent of the style and tone of her later popular gardening columns. In ‘The Province of Burgundy’ (July 1930) she shops in a market for ‘a blue glass bottle covered in punctuation marks’ and ‘an olive green corduroy coat’, each button the emblem of a different animal.
But it was Vita’s friend (and sometime lover) Virginia Woolf who was the most dazzling of Bazaar ’s 20th-century fiction contributors. Words informed every aspect of her life: in 1917, she and her husband Leonard Woolf set up the Hogarth Press, which went on to publish EM Forster and TS Eliot. In the 1930s, Virginia wrote her two most ambitious novels The Waves (1931) and The Years (1937); a haunting photograph of the author by Man Ray published in the January 1937 issue celebrates the publication of the latter. During that decade, she was commissioned to produce a series of short original fictions for Bazaar, among them ‘In the Looking Glass’, a surreal look at image and identity ( January 1930), and ‘The Shooting Party’ (March 1938), in which echoes of grief at the death a year earlier of her nephew Julian Bell in the Spanish Civil War reverberate unmistakably. ‘The Duchess and the Jeweller’ (April 1938) is an uncomfortable tale of corruption, while ‘Lappin and Lapinova’ (April 1939) is an unusually sexually revealing and claustrophobic love story, drawing in part on the secret, intimate role play of Virginia’s early married life when in a tender fantasy, Leonard took the part of a stringy mongoose and Virginia a more substantive monkey figure, a mandrill. The story also reveals Virginia’s own horror of being trapped in a marriage and, as she wrote to her sister Vanessa, of being reduced to ‘damnable servility’.
Virginia’s willingness to have her new fiction published in a fashion magazine – albeit such a literary one – is not as surprising as it may seem. Her fascination for the quotidian detail of life, and especially for clothes, contradicts the assumption that she lived life for the cerebral and cared little for appearance. Jeremy Hutchinson QC, the defence lawyer in the Lady Chatterley trial who is now aged almost 102, is perhaps the only person alive to retain first-hand memories of Virginia’s physical style and presence. ‘She simply sparkled,’ he tells me. ‘Her appearance in a room was always the very opposite of dowdy.’ Virginia had been a willing model for the clothes created between 1913 and 1919 by the Omega Workshops under the direction of the Bloomsbury painter and critic Roger Fry, which were also worn by Lady Ottoline Morrell
and English society’s star trio of beauties, Lady Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard and Iris Tree. Yet Virginia remained acutely self-conscious, her anxiety at being inappropriately dressed a constant theme in her diaries and letters, as well as her fiction. Writing to Vita in 1928, she confesses that during a debilitating shopping trip for a party hat, she had eventually found one ‘in green felt: the wrong coloured ribbon, all a flop like a pancake in mid air. Even I thought I looked odd.’ The response, she told Vita, from a ‘dashing vermeil-tinctured’ guest was simply to stare at her, and then think ‘Ah what a tragedy!’ In ‘Lappin and Lapinova’, Rosalind, a naive, intimidated daughterin-law, wearing for the second time her virginal white wedding dress, almost crumples in the presence of her formidable new mother-in-law ‘sumptuous in yellow satin… flushed, coarse, a bully’. And Virginia’s fascination with Vita’s emotional and sexual duality was compounded by her envy of her stylistic individuality and outward confidence. Vita’s uniform of silk shirt and pearls completed with twill breeches and high-laced boots indicated a soft femininity rounded off with male robustness; Lady Chatterley above and Mellors beneath. She was the inspiration for Orlando, Virginia’s novel published in 1928, which celebrates the fluidity of literary style, gender and of the clothes that the hero/heroine wears over the course of 400 years – just as the Bloomsbury Group themselves were pioneers in rejecting sexual, political and social boundaries and instead embracing opportunity and tolerance.
The decade before World War II, a time of change and contradiction, of androgyny, feminism and outspokenness, of optimism and approaching fear, liberated writers to push at the boundaries. The series of essays by Vita’s husband, and my grandfather, Harold Nicolson, written especially for Bazaar in his distinctively clear, analytical prose, are of their time as well as ahead of their time, outspoken, witty, and sometimes to a modern reader, disturbingly un-PC. Nicolson never euphemises his content. Writing for a literary fashion magazine offers him a platform for a stimulating range of opinions from marital companionship (‘When November approaches I find myself ruminating on divorce’), to money, luxury, alcohol, hypocrisy and servants.
Other famous literary, artistic and eccentric names glitter in Bazaar ’s pages. There are poems by Vita’s cousin Margaret Sackville, reviews by the critic Frank Swinnerton, articles by EM Forster and short stories by Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. A 1931 article on ‘Artists Whom The Royal Academy Ignores’ celebrates Duncan Grant as ‘a painter of great facility’. The audacious adventurer Claire Sheridan, cousin of Winston Churchill and lover of Charlie Chaplin (and also an intimate friend of Vita’s) recounts stories of her travels in Mexico and in North Africa, as she and her 11-year-old son camp beneath ‘butterflies as big as bats’ and ride camels in the Atlas Mountains where dawn ‘which cannot be described in terms of colour, appears luminous, brilliant metallic’.
There are also gossipy insider pieces about where the intelligentsia chooses to dine. In July 1929, at Boulestin in Covent Garden, you might have spotted Lytton Strachey at a quiet corner table with the Maynard Keyneses, the Woolfs and the Nicolsons, or JM Barrie enjoying a dish of ‘prawns like pale petals in pink cream’, seated near HG Wells, who could be depended upon to order the bouillabaisse. Thomas Hardy’s widow tended to dine alone and silent, while the Bazaar columnist noted tables boasting half-empty jeroboams of 1869 liqueur brandy. In contrast, over at Savrani in Jermyn Street, a restaurant popular with ‘The Bright Young People’, they were eating ‘goldfish from the Volga’ accompanied by Imperial vodka rescued from the cellar of the late Tsar.
But when darkness and conflict came, it hit hard at the heart of Bloomsbury; first, with the death of Julian Bell in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, then, most devastatingly, with Virginia’s own suicide four years later. Extracts from her final diaries in 1940 and 1941 were eventually published in Bazaar, but not until November 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. It was another time of renewed hope, yet these entries retain their poignancy, as Virginia’s own words fragment in reflection of the disintegrating world around her. Their relevance feels acute even today. As always, she identifies truth in detail, imagining her beloved London changed for ever: ‘If a bomb destroyed one of those little alleys with the brassbound curtains and the river smell and the old woman reading.’
Our fascination with Bloomsbury has never waned. As the Hogarth Press celebrates its centenary, two exciting new exhibitions in London this year are devoted to the work of Vanessa Bell and to Sussex Modernism, an interpretation of the range and distinction of those radical Bloomsbury artists who were drawn to Sussex, its coast, its Downs and its villages during the first half of the last century. Charleston, the Sussex countryside home of the Bloomsbury Group and still a shining centre of art and literature, has reissued several of Duncan Grant’s covetable 1930s textile designs. Meanwhile, Vanessa’s granddaughter Cressida Bell continues the Omega Workshops tradition with her beautiful range of fabrics, lampshades and silk scarves. And Bazaar also maintains its own literary and artistic heritage, with its involvement in Charleston’s annual cultural festival, and its commitment to seize every opportunity to introduce a new readership to the enchantment of all things Bloomsbury – and also to its own enduring love of words… Harper’s Bazaar will be celebrating its 150th anniversary at the Charleston Literary Festival on Sunday 28 May.