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BLOOMSBURY

'Bloomsbury' - you hear people say today, and it
is not a compliment. Applied correctly and incorrectly
to a number of persons of the highest individual distinction,
as a collective noun, it is used to express a complicated reaction,
including envy and contempt. Never, I believe, an admiration
or praise. And this essay is an examination, an explanation -
or an attempt to show the justice and the injustice of this.

Say 'Bloomsbury' and on the Freud Game, only too
often a string of words will follow, varying with the player:
'The Intelligentsia in excelsis'. 'Oh, that lot,' 'those
barren leaves.' 'N.B.G.', 'fagsandes', 'awful warnings.'
'mental hermaphrodites,' 'brittle intellectuals', 'that
bunch', and this applied to a group who, as individuals, are
admitted to high distinction and a very real place in our
national life. Yet, as a group, a picture-world follows them
about, a popular film, of untidy figures in shapeless,
expensive tweeds, horn-rimmed glasses, and dark women, un-
fashionably bobbed. A fragment, quite worthless, except as

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'trailer' for a much more interesting picture. Or as light
on the question - how a group of people, united long before
by birth and training, who, after the War, made a startling
bid - not in the arts only, but in most vital activities, to
lead our culture, and with such high individual achievements,
should twenty years later have come to an end, to stand for
something that has not succeeded; that is felt at once to be
equivocal and portentous, or as a simple-minded adversary
would say: 'no bon.'

A quick answer leaps to the mind - that it is only
the common English shame and fear before the fact of
intelligence, on the one hand, an attitude the press have
been quick to exploit, Or the centrifugal forces in our
culture trying to assert themselves against the centripetal,
that constant rhythm which, as Lytton Strachey pointed out,
for the first time since the early XIXth century, has become
dominant again.

What truth there may be in this is too obvious to
need working out. In fact, the public, the press, have always been
like that. For the true meaning we must look deeper, For
the cultural importance, or impotence of the group we call
'Bloomsbury', for many reasons, negative and positive is of
very great significance.

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[Cut.]

To begin - it must never be forgotten - that when the Peace came, they gave us all we had. It was their chance, and they took it. The War had taken our best, or broken or deflected them; and actually before 1914, from the standpoint of pure aesthetics, we were in a bad way. The essential <u>stature</u> of the nineties had found <u>no</u> enduring answer in the superficial philosophy, the superficial moralities of Wells or Shaw. Men like Hardy were still at work, but veterans are rarely <u>accounchers</u> at that re-birth of the arts which is the special glory of each generation. <u>So</u>, with most of the new birth dead in the womb, a little before the twenties, the world was disturbed, distressed and intrigued when, for one thing it found that Mr. Roger Fry, instead of qualifying gracefully for a G.O.M. <u>with learning & will, but without Qualifications</u> <u>convinced of</u> a <u>quakeress</u>, <u>and</u> <u>conviction of</u> the aesthetic <u>and</u> aesthetic grace, <u>had</u> returned again to the charge, still bringing over the new pictures that were being painted in France <u>and</u> <u>again</u> insisting that they were the only new pictures worth thinking about.</p>
<p><u>From about 1918, on, when it was over, and with the return of the Diaghilieff Ballet, the youth of England, <u>staring for lost education</u>, <u>knowing that its education had been suspended for four years and</u></p>

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hungry children, turned again to the lack of peace. First there was the Ballet, with its appeal to all, true artists and true artists when the roar and leap of 'Prince Igor' thundered on the stage of the Coliseum, London at least became very much aware of the Bloomsbury group, who had made itself liaison-officer for this new wonder out of Russia, interpreters of its more 'difficult' efforts to a starving world.

Perhaps, at that moment, those leaders of 'Old Bloomsbury', Fry and Bell and Maynard Keynes, ceased for a moment to be protestant, mere critics of our ignorance and insularity, but with the Ballet for excuse, the production for their future productions, for a moment, had our national culture as a movement in the nation's ballet. For the elite only, but that, after all, is the way - or one way - this work of art done; and backed up by great ladies and great parties, splendidly and publicly done; so that ever since then those short months remain in memory, charged with a power that those who have lived through them will never forget.

Also, at that same moment, unexpected but perfectly timed, came their own production, one entrancing, brilliant and utterly unexpected work of art, the "Eminent Victorians" of Mr. Lytton Strachey.

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Always good at timing, that was their moment. Intelligent enough to associate themselves with the Ballet, (make it among other things a shock-if-you-didn't) strong enough to force down the public throat the new painting out of France; with Mr. Clive Bell's 'On Art' for theory - the starting-point of a generation's discussions, they finished their first circumference, closed their first circle with a masterpiece of their own. They were now a ring, a magic ring, within which was gathered all that had been saved from the War - or as much as they thought worth saving; within whose circumference English creative ability could, if need be, extend itself.

[cut] (This was not how they would have put it. This is not their language. Yet it is, in effect, what for a moment they had done. Their failure fully to implement this promise or this possibility what follows will attempt to show.)

In one way nature was with them. Here we are when men thought once were no cosmopolitans from heaven knows where, no persons of doubtful antecedents and mixed blood; and at the time, no Jews. Almost too much perhaps a family party, an elaborate cousinship linked old Bloomsbury. Theirs was the old gentle or the tried merchant blood of England. "Eminent Victorians" in the third generation, Stracheys and Frys, Huxleys and Stephens. Two were Huxley's grandsons, the father of

[over]

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another had been Lord Chief Justice.Campact, they faced
young England, aching for a return to civilised values.
Their first production was praised by the Prime Minister
himself.]

"Eminent Victorians" was a piece of delicate explosive that, until quite lately, has been going off in gay little bangs. For in the early twenties every young man and woman was very fully aware of one thing - of the volcano on which they had been reared, the volcano which their parents had declared to be extinct. Might even try and declare extinct again - but not if their still-surviving young could prevent it. Every living being in their forties today have, if they can profit by it, the unique knowledge of having lived in two ages in one life. It was the transit that was so sudden, a transit in which we, rather than our parents, were left, as we said, with the baby to hold. A baby that proved a live shell. So, a period of anti-age reaction set in, of extreme severity. A judgment the fathers and mothers of England did little to counter by any kind of understanding.] Followed the orgy of de-bunking which, with the tact of genius, Lytton Strachey, died off, though he knew what it was to be dead.

With results which everyone might have expected

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So this was author's work and nobody did that everything of his was copied, except his learning, his intelligence, his wit, the essentials of his pure style; while his malice, his blind spots, his prejudices, his strange ignorance, his occasional sillinesses, have been these, to the discredit of our letters, which put even to infamous use.

[cut] So that, in all the years that have followed, it is possible to argue that he has had a hundred imitators and not one successor - As an indirect influence - those writers would have done good work if he had never lived - such lovely books as Lord David Cecil's "The Stricken Deer" and Mr. Duff-Cooper's "Talleyrand" show what he has helped do for us, what the indirection of his influence has been. Yet, if in his paradise he has a debt to pay, a debt to make up to him is due directly such honors as [Mexican Empire]? Will you do it? too many potted biographies, as a recent one on Cecil Rhodes, and many other such youthful gestures, lifting their legs to the lions, like Tom Moore's little dog.]

This certainly was an effort of his capital, the capital of Old London, which is higher than ours. So much for the instant effects. One aspect rather, for genius carries its own anti-septic, and there are other results of Lytton Strachey of which our letters can be glad. He took the triple tombstone, the old three vol. "Life and

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Letters," smashed it to bits, and showed once and for all
how to reassemble its fragments. Also,in the writing of
history he illustrated the overwhelming importance of rhythm,
design, a point of view, and above all, of scale.

[cut]

A point of view - There again, alas, only too many
took for his measure the impertinence of their own petty minds.
As they are still doing, making their weakness, real or invented
for them, the measure of the greatest and the wisest men.
The satyr Th�is
Became for which he is responsible when in the lightness of
his heart, he passed on the legend of great heroes and great
war seamen like Ulysses in his ship.

So 'Bloomsbury', 'Old Bloomsbury', 'Upper Bloomsbury' started off well, and in those early years, added new members to the collection - as Roger Fry said in 1922, 'the decided intention of the Englishmen' - one specimen from across the ocean, the New Englander, T.S. Eliot.

As Strachey said on Essex' choice of a bride, they
'made an impeccable choice', the future poet of the Waste Land,
the one great poet of that generation, (unless you count Edith
Sitwell,) the one part of the group. Though here and later on,
much later on, we come to the ways' crossing, the Ocean of
the poet of Catholic Christianity.

This though is not the place for an estimate of Eliot.

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[aut]
A story that is by no means [illegible] yet, of a poet who set out
in the 'boat-called-millions-of-years.'

Another candidate who 'passed' at the same time,
by grace and election as well as birth, was Aldous Huxley -
the Aldous Huxley of "Leda" and then of 'Antic Hey'. A book
that to many of us remains his best, with a tune to it and a
pace, a design inherent in the action, as though there had
passed into it something of the Ballet itself.

"My men like satyrs grazing on the lawns
Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hey" -

Meanwhile, what were the other writers of England,
who had survived the war, writers and artists whose names
were known, or who would be known - what were they making of it?
One was too young to judge, sitting in Roger's studio in
Fitzroy Street, being painted by him, enjoying one had never
enjoyed before contact with a superb and generous mind.
Mind and understanding that allowed for one's own, that did
more than tolerate, that encouraged one's crude immaturities -
Not with patience, not with tolerance, but with grave,
sometimes even excited interest. Youth and maturity neck
to neck, it was all adventure, discovery, an unenvious race.

[aut]
One of whose results was not vanity, but

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most needed confidence, a delight of give and take which had in
it a strengthening humility, a desire, as the only return one
could give or he desire, to make something of... A
debt one can never over-estimate, a contact from which (perhaps
by some miracle) one received its utmost good, its very least
harm. A debt whose acknowledgment one put off until death
precluded it.

That was my introduction, indeed the only time that
one was in immediate and deep contact with them, and then only
through him. Yet, even then, there went with it an unequally
divided judgment. Unequally but deeply divided between
gratitude, affection and intellectual delight before the event
splendid mind and heart had ever been - these and the secret rapture
of a country-bred child before the rich comic possibilities
or only an up-blowing someone can know about inherent in
the whole situation.

[cut]

Still, for a while, Roger Fry was the centre, the
one who was to catch me up and send me out into a world no Bloomsbury
ever trod. I had learned enough and not too much. Enough to make me
some sort of an observer, some sort of a
so far as Bloomsbury persons were concerned,
who was never again to be wholly in or wholly out of

[over]

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touch. When work again was complete a little later than the
youngest of Old Almshouse.

Yelwos, looking back a hour ago, I then wasat the time

Now one is reminded - one was reminded at the time -
was it a sequence, what was once called a Signature, or an
example out of Mr. Dunne?

- Years before, when the Titanic went down, Thomas Hardy published a poem. One of those poems of his which, as Lytton Strachey says, without a single poetic grace, have the secret of *lancing* the marrow in one's bones. I only remember one line, but in it he describes the assembling, the growth of a great ship; and how at the same time, in the fog and chill darkness of the Polar Seas, nature 'grew the ice-berg too'. The vast, the universal implication, wanted, was, of it.

To find its sudden application, we must

When Roger Fry at Cambridge had been getting his
double-first, when St.John Hutchinson was being called to
the Bar, when Aldous Huxley was preparing for Eton, there was -
as H.G. Wells said of Cato of Utica - running about some garden
a horrid little boy, a sturdy man-child, bearing a name
not unknown in Victorian history. A boy who was to fling him-
self into the War, as an Artillery Officer - become something
of a soldier, take hold of battle with both hands and endure

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it nearly unto death.

A thing no Bloomsbury ever did. A thing I could not but accept. Then, after a time at the Slade, on the strength of his obviously immense gifts, was to be found for a while at that strange workshop, at once one of Bloomsbury's completeness failures, yet which the world has never quite managed to forget.

And if ever a group warmed a serpent, help hand-rear a doom, grew the ship while nature grew the ice, it was when young Wyndham Lewis went to work at the Omega.

Then he left it, just at or just before the time when I was with Roger Fry almost every day. That happy interregnum - Roger by day and the Ballet by night - then it was that the berg moved into action, and there appeared the first counter-attack, criticism, caricature, challenge, first steps of the anti-masque to their masque, goats'-foot beat of a very different, antic hey.

"The Caliph's Design" - loyalty apart, it was clear that a new and formidable voice was speaking. On behalf of all the arts, in being or to be, On behalf of every other artist in England outside the Bloomsbury ring? No, not that. Hardly at all. A low voice speaking, a more violent gift, experimental, unfinished, 'futurist' was the current label; exceedingly male in quality, by no means free from the

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neuroticism of virility, and above all contemptuous of the
intricacies, the private jokes, the derivative, feminine
elements, the snobberies, the pedantries of culture.

[at] [Culture - that in its finest sense was Old Bloomsbury's great asset, and also, as the agile strategist against them tried to show, their greatest snare. It would be hard to find any great, whose business was with the making as well as with the assessment of the arts, where the standard of pure knowledge was so high. Roger Fry was a superb scholar, a man of such living learning that every human being who approached him will remember it as a unique delight. In the criticism of art he has left no successor. In letters there was, by Lytton Strachey to match him, and Virginia Woolf. And the other day a publisher's 'blurb' referred to Aldous Huxley as 'the most educated young man in England.']

Now, at this moment, in the common mind, there is a
complex reaction to literature. The old sheer respect for scholarship
for pure learning, for the educated man, at least in cities,
is gone. The popular press is producing the shoddiest imitation
of it, by which the semi and very recently literate are
taken in. Yet, like love, ardent or brooding or the arts, it is one
of the values that cannot be faked, the slightest attempt shows
itself up instantly. You have either entered into the work,

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the books, the music, the building of such and such masters.
Or you have not. At the same time, real knowledge, real
familiarity lends itself to a kind of family shorthand,
exasperating to those outside.

With Bloomsbury it was absolutely genuine, natural,
happy, and, within their idiom, profound, fused with their
entire nature, their approach to life. [[Not the New England [cut?]
version, the often over-education, the culture for culture's
sake one has heard Roger gently deprecate, but the real thing.

[Of the kind whose parent is Cambridge rather than Oxford;
and it must not be forgotten that, for the majority of them,
Cambridge was more even than a university - it was their home,
of their bodies as often as their spirits, it was Cambridge,
the platonic idea of the University itself.] [cut?]
was a factor in their decision.

Yet there remained in their knowledge that weakened
them; and in their inherited, inherent liberalism, pledging
them, so to speak, in advance to Advanced Thought; that, for
one thing, to be a panache, or pride in high position
or an honourable name. Physical elegance they despised.

[cut] [That even became a cult, Leading perhaps to one of their greatest mistakes.] Who, on what seemed arbitrary, rebours
principles, their private virtuosity, a family chic, called
people beautiful, who, to the eye of youth were merely queer.

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Features, appearances in persons or in things, strange tools, etc. Who could always justify this by some recondite example, some *trouvaille* out of the past or the distant. [au] U.e.] and it was Aldous Huxley who later tried a 'rappel à l'ordre' in 'The Pierian Spring', an essay by which he will be remembered, [au] the comparative virtue of the amusing and the beautiful, [au] the current mania for conferring them.

It was in this knowledge of theirs, I think, that they felt safe, and their mastery each of his own special knowledge.

[at] There no one could attack them, there no one could imitate them or hardly equal them.] It was their sure ground - the wonderful, disciplined knowledge, the power to go lightly back into the past and bring back treasure, arguments, examples, parallels, precedents, illuminations, from every art and action, thought or work or personality that has ever been.

[at] Roger too had a joy, a kind of delighted horror in ignorance, when it was without pretension or accompanied by creative gifts. Telling me how, at Constantinople, under Justinian's walls, 'dearest Vanessa said: 'Who was Justinian?' Incredible, Mary, and adorable. Can you believe it?'

I could, but not of them, whom I imagined ban, bare, lisping the Pandects. Hung on tight to my own slender knowledge,

[over]

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to listen to sentences on the nature of Roman law, which
made me see in Roger, the once brilliant barrister, the Lord
Chief Justice's son.

Indeed, it was Roger Fry who illustrated all the
strength of their knowledge, with none, unless in the matter
of his own painting, of their weakness - the trap it laid for
them. For set above the rest of our world and its reviving
culture they aspired to lead, it also, and by some quality
inherent in its quality, set them outside it.

It was, at that very moment, moving out of its
original darkness, its isolation and its proper mystery,
when the berg arrived upon their seas, grown and ready for
action. A powerful intelligence, confident also of ability
to beat them at their own game; outside them, yet in possession
of some of their secrets - a sea mountain, a sea monster
they had thought once to have in tow.

As Lytton Strachey said of Voltaire's 'Abakia: 'The
Caliph's Design' was written by a demon with a grudge. A
strong demon, and as tough a customer as ever lived - The
hard-bitten soldier, back from that Occurrence they
had tried to ignore; and it is the measure of their superbita
that they nearly did so. For these were no garden-city cranks -

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[cut]

> one remembers Roger Fry's gentle surprise when, allowed as always to say what one really meant, / might one think? A war whereof was there no name, that is, no name at all. In two places, / in some other, with so much martyrdom the better, and the other too great.

Heaven knows how Lewis ever got to the Omega, who had his own place and his own plans, who had already edited 'Blast' and written 'Tarr', that strange novel, which was to be parent of so much, of Hemingway; which never, itself (however hard one pretended) came alive; whose brutality to their suavity, their eclectic liberalism, was a blow, a wound, an indecent gesture. Also a challenge.]

To return though to 'The Caliph's Design'. Its key passage, from the point of propaganda, was a malicious searching, savage, scandalously witty attack on Roger Fry, to himself, which even his tolerance was unequal. It was, and remains, a speaker of Lewis as a creature Bloomsbury had cast out, I detected a nut—almost of self-deception. Certainly of entire will to believe that Lewis was no good.

[cut]

> Inevitable, in one so sensitive to the criticism of others; and many years later, Lewis himself was to make some amends, the only amends that would have satisfied. / But again, amends, but came too late. Now that was to be an obituary notice and with Renoir and

[over]

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Cezanne, in the Elysian Fields, Roger Fry is relieved of these
pre-occupations.]

"Only pretending to be a bee" - that was the measure
of Roger Fry, the measure of them all. Pretending to be
the honey-makers, the rock-comb builders, the fertilisers,
the 'holy, light and winged'. Only in a papier-mâché garden
of wax flowers. [Indeed, when Roger, in Camden Town, found
his Victorian house, complete with conservatory, complete with
rockery, complete with pool and grotto and painted plaster dog
with yellow eyes, and kept the dog, even I felt he was going
too far.)]

'Faisande' - 'high' - and again Lewis had scored.
They were setting off the young kunstforchers of England up
the garden path, and the wrong garden at that, making them
liable to become art-fanciers, turning their taste only too
devoutly towards wax fruit and flowers made out of feathers,
things made of one substance pretending to be things made
out of another; young craftsmen to turn out their (often
pleasing) variations on those themes; young painters to an
orgy of still lives - very nature mortes - and strictly non-
representational portraits. A good game while it lasted,
but they made too much of it. Until again it was [Aldous

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Huxley's essay which sounded the call to order, with the simple reminder that between a XIV century ivory and a bowl of wax fruit, between a Heppelwhite chair and a shell and gilt inlay round a panel painted with Windsor Castle, there is a difference, not relative, but absolute.

It was a game they were playing. And Art is not a game. A game with values, and the values of art are ultimate values - That was the substance of the attack in 'The Caliph's Design'; [cut] which one read with a sense of delighted disloyalty. Tried to defend the Designer: 'He's a devil, Roger, but a devil to be reckoned with. A demon in the making, but a great demon.' For once Roger Fry would not have it. Yet no one knew the truth better than he, as witness 'The Ottoman and the What-not' in that classic on aesthetics 'Vision and Design'. A book that for all its suavity comes to grips with its subject, which has passed into our letters; besides which, Clive Bell's 'Art' is no more than a stimulating frivolity. [interview] - which we read, feel loyal, after reading a delight we came across here in the Making do like something in one's nerves to do. One rather than one's understanding the savage vitality, the Jr. creating sentences, half stumbling, half revealing, the tiger spring - [At Bloomsbury by way of illustration, but at the very question of what art is.]

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but 'The Snap of a fine gut string'. So that was how it was, what it was like. [introduction] As one read, a cord of one's own allegiances snapped. [The author one hardly knew, did not like, had hardly ever known. With one's immaturity Roger Fry had been the first person to take notice, let alone pains.] Personal affection could not change, but the people who were going to make art come alive again in England were - not necessarily going to paint or write like Wyndham Lewis, but go his dangerous road. A much longer road, a stony, limber-haunted road. A hardy, dangerous, beautiful road. Inside the Bloomsbury garden there would be flowers grown, interesting plants, Mayan rarities, træall known, our pastiche on the Far tribes, foregone knowledge, or carpet-bedding brought up to date again. Only not those flowers which, after all, are the gardener's first care, not the rose or the iris, the larkspur or the lilies, the poppies or the hyacinth, the great hieratic flowers. Or, if you found them there, could you be sure they were not copies; how sure were you that you might not even be stung there - by a synthetic bee?

The work that draws its life from the centre, from the source, from Plato's country, that does not depend, ultimately, any more than religion, on tolerance, or elegance of outlook or on 'vain learning'. But it was like that, but not that, because of those things we are.

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is not in bondage to them — of what work or service
Shakespeare said because he could do everything — well, on that
count, avantage had not been done nothing else, and he had and
he would have the tough who had written 'The Caliph's Design'
had blasphemed a warning and a reminder.

You could see him with a bayonet on his chimney-piece, not with a wax pear. [a cut] (Damn funny joke of his about the plate and Roger's trousers).] You could see him tight, but not on aesthetic emotions; you could see him with a harem — and heaven help it! not with a lady-like boy. You could not see him on his knees to man or woman, painting a devil. You could to God.

He believed in the supernatural. They did not.

So much for slowly-elicited first thoughts. [a cut] It was just about then that another aspect of the business presented itself. Or rather, there began to shape the first positions of a most intricate affair. A subtle and searching story, its episodes, its peripateia flashed on and off at long intervals over a space now of many years; its den and don, so it seems now, postponed indefinitely. A story which cannot be more than indicated here. Of part of its beginning I happened to be witness, who also was about to make my own decision — to stay, as at that time I believe he would have allowed me, safe at

[love]

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at all costs under Roger Fry's wing, or to accept this new
impulse, the creed implicit in _The Caliph's Design_. Hardly
quite aware of this, yet it was this precisely that I had to do.
That later I knew I had done. With *and* without regret.]

Youth, under one formula or another, cannot do without moralities, and, as such, moralities were forbidden in Bloomsbury. Where it seemed to be assumed, either that one was perfect in them, or that they did not exist. An assumptionoltaire that all civilised beings, *but* because they were civilised, had sol ted *the question of ethics*, had to *difficultly decide w hat they should do*. *惟独当此方 识道人道的唯物主义者* [At most heeded but a slight recall to the necessity of tolerance, *a word* what sometimes seemed, *a rather self-conscious naughtiness*. (As when Roger, so he told me, used regularly to be called in to take a husband out to dinner and re-reconcile him to his wife's choice of an alternative mate. Only, *au fond*, Roger knew that it was not quite so simple as all that.) Less civilised than they. I was not so sure; the feminine variety of horse-sense nagging at me. For it seemed *that* to act only on impeccable taste you would need to be a god; that logically, tolerance would land you in a new intolerance; or equally in a state that left no meaning in the word.]

What ethics were there implicit in *The Caliph's*

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Design' ? None to be written home about, but, such as they were,
they were not negative.
Von far alsor how the apothecary do bleaven us, seeth us,
been - kader, or it sometime
seen it do, to a kind o' take tof' carcin
radewene creasing up, after the war, of an' where me dead,
hanshling, a belief in humanity which appeal to so far not so far
an' other ineluctable obituary blast to 'Blast' as much as
had obseved in Old J knowley.

[at]

to Bloomsbury. [ The Designer might admire - or pretend to
admire - the king who ordered the Assyrian Lims
approval - if it was an approval - was a positive assessment.
A saying 'Yes; that certain values (right or wrong) were
good or bad.

Loyalty, for example, and friendship. (That question
then arose suddenly). The Caliph's Designer would probably give
his friends hell. I knew nothing about that. Only recently,
and this is the story, I had seen a friend fall out of
favour in Bloomsbury. A far more important friend than I,
a young man they (Roger Fry especially) had, through the most
wonderful creature under the sun. Often, as I sat posing,
I had heard how wholly right, how completely first-class he was.
Wit, brilliance, with amazing learning - for Roger a kind of
spiritual son? Not quite. Then lately Roger had begun to
tell me of a different set of stories about him. Stories
as wonderful as he was, only I could not quite agree with Roger,
when he seemed somehow filled with the idea that in some way

[over]

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When you're gone we'll be disloyal to them all. After all, he was a foreigner. He hadn't been born into their set, into the cradle of England; he had his own way to make in the world. If he wanted to go to Rome, get in with the 'Blacks' and the Embassy people and be friends with a king or two - why shouldn't he? Wear conventional clothes, and wear them very well? He had once poked his head round the studio door, a young man with jade and ice-coloured eyes and a smile I had seen before, on a very rare Chinese image, come to life. Not in tweed, either or in grey flannels, too, which was somehow cheering. If he didn't put on weight, Roger was quite right, the gods had left a gift on their doorstep.

Only, I had seen it in a flash, round a half-open door, with an imagination, far larger than all, a sensibility, of a kind they might not admit. Allow him to enjoy; and being a foreigner here in England, just over the edge of our _sacred_ land, he was in tricky country. Something might easily go wrong.

All this I saw; but what I heard was first the story of his grace, then of his fall from it. His grace and his disgrace. For reasons which, even at the time, seemed wildly inadequate.

Down came the curtain. It was about this time that

25

[cut]
I met, for the first time, Clive Bell at a party, and he had asked me if I thought I had an anal-erotic complex; and next day, in an almost trembling voice, Roger Fry asked me if he had, and I was only young enough to giggle. Then, it must have been seven years later, I met the angel who had fallen out of Bloomsbury, become perfectly social and terribly distinguished; and he had put on weight and was persona grata everywhere, with as many kings as he wanted to play with.

At the same time I found out that he had never recovered from his expulsion from Eden. Any more than he had understood it. From those days and these he had never found out why, nor ceased to grieve over it. Any more than I knew why. I only knew that it had happened, and that there was something else going on. It took us another seven years to disclose, again as if by accident, what might have been a part of the reason why.

It had profoundly affected - his inner life rather than his career. For he had loved Roger Fry, more even than I, and with more reason, being in his own way his equal. A foreigner, for an instant, at the moment of his coming, he had been in contact with England, in a way, I think, that he never achieved again. Though he knew by then at least half England that was

[obc]

26

worth knowing, he remained, not so much a foreigner as the cosmopolitan _in excelsis_ still. An alien, with a season ticket to the heart of England, incredibly learned in its high-roads and its by-paths, but never able to go cross-country there. Or, if he tried, to find his way barred by an armed ghost. And that ghost, Roger Fry, before his death and after. For there was no reconciliation, still less any _éclaircissement_ between them.

A story that leaves one with a story of which not one tenth has been told, Nor known. An unfinished symphony. Or one that is not finished yet.

That left one in one's youth with the simple nagging question: "Was it possible that these great people had not been fair?" ]

x

x

x

x

27

[PART II.]

Yet at the time mode of this nation over here, who was also a little while through a truer than the time went by, did a very different land, a very different land. Save in a little while through a truer than the time went by, did a very different land, a very different land. What could be saved of our own youth from the war. Yet always just sufficiently in touch with that brilliant group to mark their progress in time. Who were to be admired, decried, imitated, attacked, snubbed, snubbed - Until the people getting born when I was young have grown up and entered Bloomsbury; and the term has widened, and the term has narrowed, and as individuals they have wised up, justified their fame, yet as a whole are not _bien vus_, and the word 'Bloomsbury' has to some extent become a reproach.]

So, again, it seems that the moment has come to ask: 'What has it all meant?' 'What has it stood for?' 'What are its casualties?' 'Its final successes?' 'Is it over?' How is it over?' 'Why?'

Roger Fry is dead. So is Lytton Strachey. T.S. Eliot apart, perhaps their chief claim to incontestible fame. The Sitwells (if you count them) seem settled down as Litterateurs. Unless you count Duncan Grant, they have not produced a first-class painter.

28

Surely, in those first years, they might fairly claim that, the ancients apart, nearly all the living art in England grew in their garden enclosed. (What has been the succession from 'Blast'?) 'So much the worse for English art,' said the Designer. To which the reply, perhaps too easily made, is 'sour grapes'. There was Aldous Huxley with his extremely individual work, going on from success to success. Eliot, adding to his handful of poems, whose trouble was that they had to carry within their compass the whole weight of a new aesthetic, the burden of another major poet's life work. Only, with that, he had his review to spread the light. and there was all the New Statesman to play with.

Again, there were the Sitwells - (Can you count the Sitwells?) who were never really Bloomsbury, but Chelsea - Mayfair, with perhaps a link in Edith Sitwell's case. It was the world outside who insisted on breaking them together, once to it was thought, the war over, they had the leisure sufficiently to improve their minds.

[at]
There was Virginia Woolf and her husband. (Who, in his earlier days, had written one small masterpiece his own people seemed to have forgotten. That was curious. For one reason or another, 'The Village in the Jungle' would not do,

[ove]

29

from a man they had assessed as politician and as 'Virginia's
husband.'

There was Maynard Keynes and Oliver Strachey at the
F.O. to carry on the tradition that attached them to public
life, there was St.John Hutchinson and Montagu Sherman at
the Bar.

There was Lowes Dickinson, and in the earliest days,
Jane Harrison in scholarship and to hold down the chair of
music for them at Cambridge, Edward Dent. In science, Julian
Huxley and James Strachey and his wife.

A pretty wide corporation - with its eyes ever open
for new talent; yet, as Lytton Strachey said of Congreve,
their feet so down in good English earth that more than once
the called did not remain the chosen, and Mr. Middleton Murry
came - and went.

[at?]
[With their relation to the visual arts this study
has less to do, It is harder for a writer to estimate, and
there, perhaps, they were less successful, attracting as
they did too many young Jews of talent. As Sickert said:
"Roger must not cry 'wolf! wolf! too often." ]

There was Waley, with his Chinese translations,
doing what no one had ever done before; here, there and every-

30

where there was Clive Bell, with his gay, excited theorisings,
for compère, and producer and publicity-man. There was E.M.
Foster, their J.M. Barrie, whose one masterpiece was a best
seller. There was Desmond MacCarthy for critic and incompar-
able wit; and David Garnett to make them little toys in letters,
bibelots as charming, [if you like that sort of thing,] as
anything out of the cases at the Chinese Exhibition.

There were more young entry, highly-intelligent,
young men and women. ~~Two of the Davidson brothers, the painter
and the critic of painting, were authors of the brilliant
biography of Edward Lear. [Also Ray Strachey, who out of her
family papers produced that most fascinating book "Group
Movements in the Past". [Equally valuable as material, and as
indicating the strength and the limitations of the mind that
composed it. A curious transition down three generations. Or
from the author back to the adorable Quaker grandmother
('Without mysticism there is no common-sense.') With, for
link, in the second generation, the exquisite and New Englander,
almost if not quite at the heart of Old Bloomsbury, the author
of 'Trivia', Logan Pearsall-Smith.]

All these and many others, and the type that is now
called 'Bloomsbury' beginning to impress itself upon the

31

public mind.

Now it is impossible to under-estimate or to be un-
grateful for all this, [as it is so fatally easy for anyone
of English blood to laugh at, a movement that claims to be
founded on reason and on intellect, that claims, at least, to
be cosmopolitan, anything that makes fun of our national
simplicities or touches up our John Bullishness. 'Let us have
men around us - who are not too clever -' Since the close of
the XVIII century, it would seem that the whole nation has
echoed that wish.] [can staus, ta, ... same hapable]

Been granted it, it was the first time for a very
long time (Disraeli was an exception) that a group has made a
bid for power and cultural leadership whose appeal was based
on, an area of intellect; whose eclecticism, in practice, left out
of count, all those sides, of men's nature that lie deeper than
the purely rational mind. I do not mean that they left
psychology out - No one, for example, played more happily
with psycho-analysis than they did. [a]t was not the wish
of their desire to make a cultural cadre into which all scientific theory or
discovery could be incorporated, one of their chief desires?

32

Yet, here it is we come to the ready, the obvious criticism. Their attempt was legitimate, but in handling it they made an error, an ingenuous one for men and women of their intelligence, showing them as blind to their own blind spot as the most bird-witted of their philistine opponents.

Whose confidence they have shaken, but have not shaken enough. Because it is not enough to despise him, from their most real authority thrust him aside, annihilate him, strip him, make game of him. Dance circles round him, a witty dance, a ballet of their own composition. "My men like satyrs--" It was excellently done. Only it was not enough. Their enemy was not the real enemy. Their enemy was not an enemy at all, but the man they could not make friends with. (The Philistine is easy game.) [Immortal - and anyhow we should have to revive him to give us something to do.] But in another world, the 'real' world, the larger world of men of good will; the world that does not want satyrs dancing at it all the time.

Roger Fry, Eliot? No, Eliot, for reasons which will be seen later, stands apart; and Roger, one of the oldest of them, had in him some quality which seemed, to me at least, as if it were something remaining, something, as it were, left over from a cleaner and lordlier world.

For all the rest [and in him also] there was a quality

33

exceedingly hard to describe, that for all their learning,
their science, their wit, their considerable art of living,
that carried with it an all-pervading insufficiency. A kind of
hole in the centre, into which the mind fell instantly, the moment
the question was asked, and very soon it began to be asked 'What
is it?'

**[cut]** 'What is it? These people touch on life at every side.
What, if they had their way, would be the result, the pattern,
the intelligible whole? Or, simply: 'what are they letting us
in for?'

Questions that were not answered. That never have
been answered. [Meanwhile, their works appeared; and with the
London Group to show their pictures, with the press interested
and the Universities sending along recruits, the country, in
its queer way, began to be proud of them.]

[cut]

Since the war, with our centripetal forces in full
swing, gone was the old childish insularity; we had no objection
to cutting a dash with our neighbours[ on their own ground.
'They can't call us boors now,' was the half-conscious thought
in many an honest heart when their children came home, with a
new hair-cut and a new slang. A new point of view - A new set
of values or what looked like them. The people who had done
this were the cleverest people in England. What was it going to
mean in the end?

[over]

34

Their arts decoratifs, Some aspects did not last long, as the latest chic, had a good run and is dying hard. For future observers it will be a very delicate point indeed to estimate accurately when and how chromium furniture, and on the walls a single 'composition', abildene und e circleliea relation to one another (or even a pair and the like) a cigarette) replaced the wax and feathers, and Mr. Ben Nicholson had his innings, at a hundred and fifty pounds a run. [at tp. 36. end of 1st part ?]

[That side to their activity was never so important, or only as a symbol, being entirely derivative. No, it was not what their Aunt Sally, Matthew Arnold, called 'their criticism of life,' whose enduring value, however, did abiding life weather-like, did the business of their enquiry to confront.]

Here we begin to get down to it, - the truth of the popular mind caught hold of, the popular press fed, when it coined its stupid impertinence 'high-brow'. By that time, some few years later, by the middle twenties, Old Bloomsbury had other disciples - Not of its own choosing. The inevitable band of the second-rate, who must at all costs be in the intellectual swim. Some were genuine young entry; some, by living in the locality, by their clothes, their mannerisms, their slang imposed themselves on the world outside as the real thing.

35

[cut] [ Not on their model, whose particular qualities - it cannot be too often repeated - are those it is not possible ever to fake.

In the same way, it is hard to over-state the difference between this New Bloomsbury and the Old. Both are still going strong. If death has removed Lowes Dickinson, Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey, no one supposes (in one sense) that Aldous Huxley has said his last word, but that St. John Hutchinson will never again defend an unpopular case, or that Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell have ceased to paint.]

So we are left with Old Bloomsbury still going strong, and a New Bloomsbury, largely composed of self-elected, a curious mime on the old. Worth a little study of its own. Full of Jews, a different kind of Jew from those who had their baptism in Old Bloomsbury. All in the natural order, these things must happen; yet in the criticism implied with something of a judgment about it. A far cry from 'Africa Dances' to the gay enthusiasm that welcomed the Ballet, and set off Clive Bell writing in the Twentieth century, metaphysical verses to Lytton Strachey.

[cut] [ It was not only because they were older, because they were born into governing England or were essentially country-bred.

[over]

36

Rather than these things meant that they belonged to a finer tradition. Theirs were childhoods spent in a serener England; and with all their wit, their strength was drawn from something deeper than the intellect; that they hesitated to examine or allow for this, was one of the deepest errors that they made. 'Amor Intellectualis' - might have been their device. Only of that key-sentence the third word omitted. Whose omission is, among other things, the story of what they have failed to do.

By this time the reader who has got so far as to be able will be asking what that is. Saying: 'Grant their fame, their vitality, their achievement, why has it come to be felt - unquestioned, if you like, but insufficient? On its pretensions in the end, something of a sham? Get down to it.'

Here it is. Or, at least, this is what happened next.

Remember all this time, now becoming closer with every year, the re-alignment that is going on in human society. A re-alignment whose basic idea is this: that of a new kind of society. Remember now that as Old Bloomsbury went on from triumph to triumph - easy triumph to easy triumph - too easy? the same anti-masque attended their mask, and the Caliph's Designer rarely let his pen rest.

Once sat with his mate in a ditch And he took an old cracked lute, And sang in a voice that was more than a screech --'

37

[cut]

all this was leading up to a blind alley; but in the end all he did. That/this would not do. [He wrote about other things as well, about the Hitler Putsch two years before the real one came off, with almost superhuman prescience saying what would happen in Germany. With Hemingway he started off a new kind of letters, that was to be the very opposite of everything that ever came out of Bloomsbury; that is 'like an animal talking.' Then he wrote books like 'The Childermass' it is very hard to understand at all; and if Plato, or Plot, were to be the only two who were alive to the conditions of the dialogue, were to rise and deliver him over to his idea of his idea, one could only say: 'Let pass the justice of God.'] He saw enemies everywhere (especially among his friends). But he saw the Enemy also. The Enemy of souls, busy over the world to its damnation. He did not put it like that, but that is what he meant.

As he shewed, justly and unjustly, but with little points of appalling discernment, among the instruments of the Enemy, the high, gay, confident persons of Old Bloomsbury.

[cut] (Not on the self-elected, on them he never troubled to waste powder and shot.)

what they had done

Because it would not do. Because they had led the world a dance, a ballet, which was only a family charade.

[cut] [Because they took their own jokes too seriously. Because they represented in our culture the feminine element, that was

[over]

38

negative and derivative as well as in masquerade. (Though 'there must be a female mountain,' he said once, 'and I should like to go there.' He does not seem to have had that fortune.) Because they were a mutual admiration society. _Because, au fond, they were not serious at all._ Frivolous, the wrong order of frivolity. (Not his kind, _entendu_.) A man against a group who could never share the same jokes.

He was crabbed, rude, unkind, ill-bred, unjust. He allowed for nothing that they could do, for Strachey's crystal style, for Roger Fry's magnanimity. He seems to have taken particular care that not more than one man in ten should understand what he has to say. He was uncharitable, bitter, unperceptive. He left most readers in a very dim state as in what he himself put his trust.

Yet, through it all from _'The Caliph's Design'_ and _'The Childermass'_, from his drawings and his manifestos, he gives an overwhelming impression (much as he would blaspheme the imputation) of an intelligence at once most powerful, searching, original, discontented, wounded, thwarted, maimed, unconquerable.

[cut] [A war-casualty, madeirdy on a bike, making as it were, an eye (and that 'a regular piercer') one foot, half the fingers,

39

one lung and a body-wound that has never closed, do duty and
more than duty for a superb original physique. Of which he
was robbed in a business his enemy refused to share.

This does not make his attack a personal one. There
is a personal element in it, but that is not the heart or the
force of it. Only (with others) he has been in places, of the
body, of the spirit, no member even of Old Bloomsbury ever trod.
That is true. Oh! they can afford to be magnanimous to him,
who have had all the rewards, and Miss Sitwell to write of him
as of a beloved but wayward child. Theirs have been the
secular triumphs, they stand high in honours and prosperity,
in the most comfortable forms of social and professional success.
Proper indeed that one voice should say: 'You have had your
reward.'

As proper as that it should be so, that they should have
it and enjoy it. On their own terms it has been fairly earned.
Equally fair that it should be scrutinised, that it should be
asked, 'what do these people stand for?' 'What have they done?'
'What have they not done?' 'What is the value of their work,
judged in relation to itself? 'To this age?' 'To any age?' ]

This brings one to the publication of 'The Apes of God'.

It does indeed. A book whose value it will not be easy
to judge until the time comes when it has ceased to be perhaps

40

the most comprehensive libel 'a clef' that has ever been written.

[act]
[Heaven knows what subsequent generations will make of it.
(If they make anything at all). Unless indeed he supposes that
wide范围of his saltire
his characters will all have their place in the saga of
England, independent of his action. Which is to pay many
of them far too high a compliment.

Only for us, totting up his characters like a cast,
joyfully identifying them and working out on the fly-leaf a
key for posterity, a book of some importance.

Appalling ballet - anti-masque become masque with a
vengeance! Actually, as an attack, its theme is wider con-
siderably than Old Bloomsbury or New. Almost the whole of what
might be called fashionable - in the best sense - culture.
Bloomsbury - Chelsea - Whitechapel - Mayfair - Montparnasee.
Its agonists - protagonists sounds too mild - are not Bloomsbury
at all. (Unless you count the Sitwells) The dumb beauty-boy
who passes through it all in such a strange state of trance
is not even an Englishman. Yet one opening chapter passes in
the penetralia of Old Bloomsbury; and a great part of the
action at a single party, where many of them appear. And if you
count the Sitwells or not, no one has wasted time pretending
that three of the chief victims of that episode are not identical
with them.

"This is the most Peter Pannish family ever born."

41

A comparatively merciful remark. For the rest, he gives to
that long summer night's entertainment, the quality, modernised
and put into prose, of something like a canto in Dante's Hell.
The sense of movement in a circle, and what a <u>vonde</u> - a violent,
purposeless, demon-scourged fleeting of lost souls playing at
salvation. And all terrified of nothing - But this is not a
review of '*The Apes of God.'*

[at] [Salvation. One does not know the basis of Lewis's
philosophy, but in all his work one is aware of an agreement,
implicit or explicit, that the business of the artist is not to
amuse us with toys, or games however witty, but that his
business, <u>in effect</u>, his excuse, his justification, his reward,
is to bring men into relation with truth; or, as a contemporary
of Plato's said: 'to make men better in their cities.'

Try that theory of aesthetics, <u>on</u> your next cocktail
party. ]

X

X

X

X

Clearer and clearer the double alignment of
European society begins to show, where all forces are shaking
down onto two fronts with the Waste Land between them. Put in
its final, simplest terms: the world is dividing itself and
will be divided into believers in a supernatural order, of which

42

the natural is a development, a reflection, an aspect; and on
whose relation to which its health depends. Or the believers
in a natural order only, plastic to man, for him to determine,
probably on some variant of the Marxian dialectic, first and
foremost in relation to his physical needs. After which all
other things will be added to him. If he still wants them.
And if you protest that this is to remove all 'higher' values
from life and from the world, the answer is a very curious one,
and Mr. Julian Huxley is the man to make it.

Now, one does not know how far Wyndham Lewis subscribes
to this. One can imagine him bowing the knee to some
Transcendence which is not the mirror of his suppressed wishes.
Still less to the vegetarian phallos round which Mr. Shaw's
petrefied lambs skip.

On the other hand one cannot see him working out
a re-statement of the *philosophic perennis* with Christopher
Dawson, and Jacques Maritain. Here, as a Bloomsbury critic,
his questions asked, his function ends. A great dog, he
has hunted them. He has not brought them to bay, or to the
huntsman's knife.

x

-x

-x

x

[at] "Oh bury them down in Bloomsburee" - Not a very long

[over]

43

time ago an old friend of his, Ezra Pound, who many years
ago shook off the dust of England. Impervious, satisfied, in
the matter of scholarship hard-boiled England, paid us a
visit; and shortly after, in a Paris anthology, this song
appeared in canon form.

"Where the damp dark rot
Is never fagot
O bury 'em down
In Blooms
buree
Where the soup tastes like
Last night's
graves -"

One recognised a natural irritation. It makes a very
good canon. At about the same time discovered for oneself
another source of discontent - in the intrinsic limitations
of their ideas on interior decoration, and its effect on
the homes of England. Their game with _Victoriana_ was a game,
a good game, but it developed quickly into a decadance and
sterility, to quite dreadful _voulu_ assemblages of junk; and a
particular form of insincerity known as 'tattery' spread over
all sorts of young homes in a fungoid growth.

Repetition aesthetically and in another key of the
same order of ideas as Horace Walpole's, most of whose genuine
taste was forgotten, and his legacy to Strawberry Hill gothic in

44

place of the pure perceptions of the XVIII century.

Superseded now, as one has seen, by chromium furniture and 'compositions', which owe much to the electrophoresis of Röntgen. (Who will work out the correspondence between this and one half of our alignment and the determinism of Marx? With which is included a secret of the inner life of Pablo Picasso, told once, by Jean Cocteau, lightly, which at the time I was to remember rather than understand.)

Much of this applied aesthetic was perhaps latent in the Omega Workshop, yet some of the work there, designed by Fry himself, had real beauty, quality and functional use. Just the things he complained people would not buy, that commercial firms were to steal from, weaken, prettify and sell.

As, for example, in the bridal suite in the latest catalogue Jean Anouilhac.

The significant moment, I think, unheralded, unrecognized, is the detail which unknown, came when T.S. Eliot parted metaphysical company with them. One day, it must be twelve years ago and more, I was walking in Paris, again with Ezra Pound, and listening to his lamentation on the fact that Eliot was taking Dante seriously. Aesthetically, as a poet, yes, but also his beliefs. Still too young to feel that modern

45

be right - but still wondering how it was possible to come to
any sort of terms with Dante and leave his religion out... [and
at that moment, in me the heresy was born which said that it was
about time for all these people to make up their minds, instead
of more or less politely ignoring the occurrence, what their
attitude to religion was.]

For that moment 'Ulysses' was appearing. [and then my
mind slipped back, as it still does, to those then not far
distant years when, a girl, Roger Fry was telling me about
art and about values; and I wondered what he was thinking, about,
and I wished I knew.] [caused to say new language]

It was a challenge, a challenge of challenges,
to the whole supernatural, sacramental conception of the world,
our societies, our lives. Not only of sex, but of all the key
points in human life and the values we attach to them; the
most stupendous, Calvinist-puritan/manifesto ever issued:
to one's own private mind, the most stupendous aberration of
genius.

[and] [We hear less about it now. (Are the Surrealists the
next logical step? This wants looking into.) Why? This is
not the place to attempt an answer. But it is plain that Joyce

46

could not stop there; and 'Anna Livia Plurabella' the next inevitable step.

But then everyone was reading it, and here was an
obvious suspicion in the heart of Ezra Pound that his friend,
Mr. T.S. Eliot's reactions were not, or would soon not be,
aesthetically pure. [at] He was saying: "I don't know if it's what
your darned country does to people, but there's Eliot just
said that a work of art exists in its relation to moral values.
If he means all he has any business to mean by that, this is
not the time to say it." (I have got this essentially right).
Pensive I walked by his side along the Rue des Saints Pères.

And as we walked, as we walked because we were doubtful. For we knew
that we knew that we knew that we knew that we knew that we knew that
Ezra Pound could never know, the nature of English sacramentalism. So
that was what Eliot was choosing, was it? His dip in the
lucky bag that is 'forever England'? And what would Roger say?
[at] Not quite knowing yet what I did know - that there
the question lay. There the whole business was stated, given.
Like the hazel-nut in whose image Juliana of Norwich saw
the Divine Mind in operation, on that walk that passed so
quickly along the Rue des Saints Pères.

Roger Fry, and from now on read that name for
summary and for convenience, for all the names of the movement

[love.]

48

he captained; for the Wolf's and the Stracheys and the Huxleys,
their allies and affiliations; not on points where one or
all might disagree, but for the tendency, the intellectual
outlook, the philosophy. One would think their old friend,
Matthew Arnold's 'criticism on art' Old Bloomsbury at its
best.

What (as I used to say to myself) would Roger say?

I know who to leave toiah by the sea, but Roger shall.
Roger would not be pleased, any more than Ezra./Roger
would say that you could make poetry out of anything, just as
you could make a picture of his old trousers, hanging on the wall
from a nail, their cylinders cut by the sickle of an Omega plate,
a composition replete with significant form. So you could,
if you were a Van Gogh, but just the point that had sent the
Caliph's Designer off so wickedly.

[it] [Roger though had/who/else made me/ read Hopkins just
before everyone else had begun to try, and I couldn't; had
pretended, quite unsuccessfully, and had not taken Roger in.
Then, a little later, he had written about him, to point out
how, if he had not been a priest, what a happier man (and
consequently a better poet, entendu?) he might have been.
Still one had to/that period one at least tried to agree, still eagerly,
still as a matter of course. And yet? Not quite Roger at his

[ove]

48

he captained; for the Wolf's and the Stracheys and the Huxleys,
their allies and affiliations; not on points where one or
all might disagree, but for the tendency, the intellectual
outlook, the philosophy. One can see their old foe, Old Bloomsbury at its
best.

Roger would not be pleased, any more than Ezra./ Roger
would say that you could make poetry out of anything, just as
you could make a picture of his old trousers, hanging on the wall
from a nail, their cylinders cut by the sickle of an Omega plate,
a composition replete with significant form. So you could,
if you were a Van Gogh, but just the point that had sent the
Caliph's Designer off so wickedly.

[at] [Roger though had to make me/ read Hopkins just
before everyone else had begun to try, and I couldn't; had
pretended, quite unsuccessfully, and had not taken Roger in.
Then, a little later, he had written about him, to point out
how, if he had not been a priest, what a happier man (and
consequently a better poet, entendu?) he might have been.
Still one had to be that period one at least tried to agree, still eagerly,
still as a matter of course. And yet? Not quite Roger at his

[love]

49

best.] It was from this caravansary, or as we used to call it, the world's worst, that the intelligent world, whose beliefs and opinions filter down now to the mass of the people, to form the ambience of the social mind, and, however, even if it were conceivable, even half a century hence, must either abandon their scepticism or justify it. Half beliefs, suspended beliefs, agnosticisms, modernism, indifferences [at] (leaving out of count all the ersatz religions Aldous Huxley knows all about) are becoming more impossible. For it is another war for which we are preparing, the Armageddon, perhaps the real Armageddon, of our societies, our civilisation, that three thousand years adventure we date (for convenience) from the siege of Troy.

Has it all been one essential fake, a brilliant self-deception, with one form or another of the Marxian dialectic; that grim re-orientation, transvaluation of all values, first practised in a country of mysiticism run to seed; for its last word?

[at] [Very fast the world is dividing now, and at first sight it looks as though the enemy had all the advantage. (who want to live) For they know exactly what they want, (what they accept,

[ove]

50

what they reject; and on our side where is there any such
certainty?

Or, from another angle, can we incorporate in our
Three Thousand Year Plan our recently acquired科学, for
what it is worth and for what it is not worth, what it can give
us and what it cannot give? It tells us how things behave,
but nothing at all about what things matter, servant as much
as God to the unjust and to the just.

[ut] [As this is seen, more and more these questions begin to be asked. As I began to ask them myself, walking with Ezra Pound in Paris.] The questions we all began to ask, night and day, on the publication of 'The Waste Land.'

What did Roger Fry think about it?

[ut] (All this is obviously, an extreme simplification. It would take a book, as long say, as the one on the Romantic Agony by 'the Abbe' Pradt, to tell the story about things done of the shapings and groupings, the rejections and discoveries, the slow or sudden deaths of all of us war-survivors, out together in the Waste Land. It even looked for a moment, or so I have heard, as though T.S. Eliot were to have his way easily, lead back the English Intellectuals, a band of penitents into the Church of their fathers, the Catholic Church.]

51

[cut]

[ H. for a moment, but even though like happening, as one
/ If that was true for one moment every moment it was shown
quickly it was not received
that one was happy solution was to be found us. Notice how
the vogue for Eliot has been followed by that of Auden, that of
new aesthetic express, that Desmond MacCarthy described so
widely
/ brilliantly, with not a seat to be had. Auden, whose astounding
poem 'The Two' published in 'The Listener' next to a straight-
forward, manly, broad-bottomed religious talk about nothing in
particular, illustrates exactly the confusion in our state today.

His dreadful, brilliant play followed. A play of
the deadliest, expressionist realism that ends with a quotation,
an aspiration, a generous piety from another age:-

'From each his strength, to each his need.' To
bring down the curtain before it rises again on the Marxian
epiphany.

Those people know what they want, and being English,
want it generous. Whose terms preclude generosity. (Which,
being English again, they will not see.)]

What would Roger say? Actually, in those early days,
at least, Roger had not made up his mind - The question yet
hardly formulated, with the U.S.S.R. in its bloody infancy,
[cut] (Though how often, after times spent, in Paris, with one's White
Russian friends, one has longed to take all France with them to any

[love]

52

place in Russia, or to one of its prisons where the commissars
were getting busy. And watch their reactions to the thing
in action. How often, and to how many people today, one has
wanted to do that.

Yet to return to the heart of the whole matter -

However much he may deny, this religion or that,
it is not easy, perhaps it is hardly possible, for the artist
or for the man of genius to deny altogether the supernatural.
For, as Ellis-Roberts says, 'of all men he needs it most.'
Besides, there was that in Roger Fry's blood, a love of art,
a love of nature, that protested against that denial, and he admitted
the protest. You are not for nothing the son of centuries of
Quaker contemplation. [at]
So we used to argue, I stupidly, as at
the obvious, pointing out for proof of the supernatural the
very arts he loved. And Roger would be very interested and
never scornful at all.

On the other hand, take the whole range of their work,
of all Old Bloomsbury whose names are now so celebrated, try
the tone of it. Scepticism too sceptical even to come down
on the materialist side of the fence. 'Dainty jests', as
Charles Williams said in one of his rare flashes of bitterness,
'at the Trinity and the death-agony of Philip of Spain.'

53

From E.M. Foster, their substitute for the values of J.M. Barrie, and his occasional flirtations with purely pagan ghost-to-daimon-hauntings. [Leading up in 'A Passage to India', his one great work, to a sensibility, in itself uncanny, to the antique horror of the Marabar caves. With the courage, also, to admit that something out of the common happened to Alexander at the oasis of Siwa.] Foster their limit in one direction; on the other the sentimentalist rationalisations of Julian Huxley, his brother's remorseless accidia, the will not to believe. Lytton Strachey's gay version of what he believes Voltaire, [Achieved, as all rationalists seem to do, by omitting every word the great Frenchman wrote that does not square with their pattern of his mind. [His violent anti-atheism; that it was considered offering him the Cardinalate; that, in fact, his attack was not in essence on Christianity, but alone on Catholic Christianity; but justly and effectively, superbly and unscrupulously on Catholicism as practised in XVIII century France. ] [cut?}

All this - to take these few examples out of so many - Lytton Strachey omits, as cheerfully as he dismisses

54

described the ideal of the Middle Ages as 'holiness and dirt'; J. Ogg Desmond MacCarthy, who while admitting that the stories of Pius V were true, draws further conclusions about what would have done down very well in the age of Age, making today has decided to turn this attention elsewhere.

No, the joke is and the point - that for people of their pretensions, they show as strange a set of intellectual limitations as any of the people they have held up to scorn. Many have been their victims, because of them any doing was A waste of time. It was sometimes exquisitely done, but once out of their skilful hands, where has it got us?

To the de-bunking campaign; which began as art, [art] began as history; became a game, became a vulgar game. Until by now, a lower stratum of writers have taken it over, men who reach a wider public, scoop a bigger purse.]

Very quickly this has happened. Already the original players and spectators are tired of it, tired and a little ashamed. A decadence moreover, inherent and discernible, from the very first. Aldous Huxley's analysis of Pascal will add nothing to his fame. Other Christians have been sick men

55

[at]
and out of love with the world - without being Pascals. [So
one critic said, and as criticism it is final.] As to St.Francis,
it would take some doing to find a man, by temperament as much
as by training, as unable to appreciate the Umbrian saint as he.

[at] [ Yet all this, and by now with a wider public, sets
the tone for a falsification and a lowering of values; not,
as in the XIX century, by excess of sentiment, but excess of
cynicism; [ that is only the @ of sentiment @ of type @ above all].
What attracts are exactly those qualities which, if any, a book

attract are exactly, are the qualities which, if any, a book

[at]
Yet Saints, though give a touchstone; [or that part of the
business seen in miniature perfection, as in a diminishing glass.]
and an @ as near as possible @ to real life.

[at] Saints, Huxley is not only untruthful, he is comic; and
when he writes about sanctity becomes *mirabile dictu*, not only
one of the least perceptive, but the most ignorant of men, *cautionné*
*au moindre risk de la vie d'un libraire ou d'un book store librairie*.

[at] [ 'Look' (in paraphrase) he says 'at the Saints. History is full
of men and women, who were not saints, doing the most interesting
and important things. Yet the Saints they thought so much of,
what did they amount to? Just dull, undifferentiated goodness.'
[With the implication that nothing but a kind of auto-suggestion
by that extraordinary, though explicable, superstition of theism,
Christian theism at that, ever managed to put that fake' [aut?]]

[at?]

[over]

56

One thinks too of St. Cyril, St. Bonaventure, of
Joan of Arc, Francis of Sales, of Assisi, Peter Claver,
Teresa (who Crashaw saw as 'the undaunted daughter of desires'
and William James as not having visions but engaged in social
work.) Catherine of Sienna, of Genoa, St. Jean Vannier,
and the bull-dog of Aquin.

Monotonous goodness. Well, well. How about you, varlet?

Yet 'in Bloomsbury' it's still a fairly common thing.

A very fine epicureanism, all the advantages of the cloister
with none of its supposed disadvantages, at least in the old
exclusive days, was the note of existence there. An eclecticism
which, at least when I knew it, had almost perfected itself;
and which of all systems imposes the most obvious restraints.
For if you are to taste everything, you have rarely time to
sit down to a long meal.

In effect their discipline was strict, every aspect
of existence, war, sport, physical adventure; mystery, passion,
even the delights of strictly fashionable life, all liable to
interfere, and all explicitly banned.

By inclination - certainly. Yet, except in some cases, perhaps, for the last, absolute liberty was allowed. Only, such a return

57

as they, bless their hearts! believed to be the late XVIII
century, very soon, as the Caliph's Designer lost no opportunity
of pointing out, presented them to the public eye as people
as much under a glass case as any of their own present fruit.

'Only pretending to be a bee.' The fun of it. Or
is it finally fun, when the genuine bee, or perhaps the wasp,
sits down on you? As one has tried to say before, one does
not suppose that any simple person who has ever been a
bee, has any point of contact, has not at moments longed to hurl them -
into life - into the sweat and heart-break of things, see them
at Deauville or the Derby or the Devil. (Or, equally, give
them a taste in action of the revolution they are about to bring about
on paper, that some of them are so elaborately prepared
to welcome here.)

However they persuade themselves, the very first
people to be 'liquidated' is, I think, the word, if the
Commissars from Glasgow got going, and the bloody wheel one
has watched turning down all history, here in England begins
to turn and spin.

Infinitely too intelligent not to know that, amply
courageous to die with elegance and wit, yet to conclude,
surely the demand that men the common intelligence of our
time, would make on them is to ask: "You who know so much and

58

can say it so well, is there nothing more you can do for us?'

Ever more clear, sharp, and deep with an abyss between,
shows the double alignment of western society. It has become a
commonplace to say that our civilisation is on its trial.
Who knows enough, who writes well enough to give life to that
commonplace? Who has sufficient belief? And in what?

Threatened, challenged, in deadly danger - as it has
not been since the classic Empire fell before the barbarians.
Who will warm the knowledge of this to life through an
and illuminate it by their intellect? Who might have the
courage to scrap all they have hitherto held, for the intelligence
sake?

No one doubts they would die well enough. Have they
not wit enough to prevent so disagreeable a conclusion, for
themselves, as well as for us all?

One is doubtful. Because to become what they have
become they have lost - what to win again T.S. Eliot had
to endure all that went to the making of 'Ash Wednesday'.
'Ash Wednesday' after The Waste Land.' The thing that always
gets lost when men set themselves to live as they have done,
as Olympians playing, yet uncertain of the validity or the
origin of their power. The quality we call Simplicity of mind,

59

by which alone the intelligence, out of the mixed heap of
virtu we call the good life, knows how to pick out the stone
of great price, by end which end alone valuescore pressd out.

[cut] Only that would allow them to answer the question:
'For what do you stand?' Only then should we know what they
really believe, what at a pinch their intelligence is prepared
to justify, prove or disprove; what trust we can or cannot have
in them. They would even know it themselves.]

Civilisation is their business. They have made it so.
From them its Enemy, the Enemy, their's and the world's,
and the Enemy of Wyndham Lewis, the old Enemy of the
Intellectual Love, one of whose الغمires they are, might get
its quietus. Or it might not.

One wishes to hear their answer.

One wishes they knew it.

Sennen.

June 1936.