DARK SIDE OF THE BLOOMSBURY SET
IT IS not hard to see the appeal of the Bloomsbury set. There is the fascinating mix of class and sex, especially homosexuality. In the famous words of Dorothy Parker, they “lived in squares, and loved in triangles”. Add the genius of Virginia Woolf and Maynard Keynes and it seems an irresistible cocktail. Hence all the biographies, memoirs, films and, now, BBC2’s new drama series, Life in Squares.
In recent years, however, critics and biographers have begun to ask disturbing questions about the dark side of the Bloomsbury group, notably their antisemitism.
“I do not like the Jewish voice,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary. “I do not like the Jewish laugh.” Lytton Strachey wrote to Virginia’s husband, Leonard, himself Jewish, condemning the “placid, easy-going vulgarity of your race”, and Maynard Keynes wrote: “It is not agreeable to see civilisation so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and brains.” And about Einstein, “He is a naughty Jew boy covered with ink — that kind of Jew.”
There have been two kinds of defence put forward by apologists for the Bloomsbury group. First, it was never really as bad as all that, just a few letters or diary entries, nothing really vicious. For instance, Isaiah Berlin called Keynes’ antisemitism, “a kind of club antisemitism, but it is not a deep, acute hostility to Jews — as in the case of, say Hilaire Belloc or Chesterton.”
Secondly, you have to put these remarks in context. People had different attitudes then and we shouldn’t judge them by today’s standards. Noel Annan, for example, wrote of “that faint contempt for Jews characteristic of their class.”
It is true that many of the most damning quotes come from letters and diaries. After meeting the young Isaiah Berlin in Oxford, Virginia Woolf noted: “There was the great Isaiah Berlin, a Portuguese Jew by the look of him”. Or after meeting Sir Philip Sassoon in 1929, she 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 the single exception of Leonard, might well have been drowned, without the world wagging one ounce the worst.”
This is nasty but should we judge her as a writer on the basis of it? However, this antisemitism did leak into her fiction, too, especially in the 1930s. In her novel, The Years (1937), a young woman is entertaining a friend in her cheap lodgings in London when they hear the sound of water being turned on in the room next door. “The Jew having a bath,” she explains. “The Jew,” Abrahamson, is a fellow lodger. “And tomorrow,” she adds, “there’ll be a line of grease round the bath.” He can be heard coughing and snorting through the thin walls and he leaves not only a greasemark in the bath but hairs as well. The sense of physical revulsion is extraordinarily strong.
Shortly after The Years was published, Virginia wrote a short story,
The Duchess and the Jeweller. Its central character, Isadore Oliver, had started out as “a little Jew boy” (hooked nose and all) in an East End alley and ended up as the richest jeweller in England. These are not Woolf’s major works but we can’t build a firewall between casual remarks in her diaries and her published fiction.
It is also clear that the bestknown figures of the Bloomsbury group — including Woolf, Keynes and Lytton Strachey — were all capable of appalling examples of casual antisemitism. Not as nasty as Eliot and Pound but unpleasant enough. Take this description by Woolf of Mrs Loeb: “She is 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 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 “but no Jew”.
Of course, these were different times, almost a century ago. But not everyone shared these assumptions. In 1939, E M Forster, himself on the fringes of the “Bloomsber- ries”, published an article, “Jew-Consciousness,” which concluded, “To me, antisemitism is now the most shocking of all things.” This was about choices, even then.
What is perhaps most perplexing is that the Bloomsbury group could be capable of antisemitic remarks but also had close Jewish friends like the artist Mark Gertler and the translator Samuel Koteliansky.
Keynes helped refugee scholars after 1933, spoke out against Nazi persecution and as early as 1919 passionately condemned Lloyd George’s casual antisemitism at the Versailles peace conference.
The new BBC series, however, has airbrushed all this out. They prefer the sex and gossip to the history.
‘Life in Squares’, BBC2, Mondays, 9pm.