Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  Virginia Woolf knew “Cambridge” could not have been hers, even if she had gone to Newnham, like some of her girl cousins. She both longed for the experience her brothers and friends had known at the university and dismissed it as a pillar supporting male privilege. In an incomplete and unpublished review of Euphrosyne, a small collection of poems brought out in 1905 by four of her “Cambridge” friends, she remarked caustically: “One would think that life was a very poor business save for those three or four years at College & that if he failed to enjoy those, you had not much to promise him in this world or the next—unless indeed there is some kind of university in the fields of Paradise.”

  Virginia Woolf was right to be caustic. Euphrosyne sank like a stone.

  ❧

  In a section of his 1933 Essays in Biography, John Maynard Keynes, who, as the government’s top economist, had lent the Bloomsbury group much of its luster, made a strong, even emotional case that Bloomsbury had grown out of the Cambridge Conversazione Society, and specifically from the philosophical ideas of his fellow Apostle and revered friend G. E. Moore. Following the publication of Keynes’s book, this claim was genially contested by Clive Bell in a talk he gave to the Bloomsbury Memoir Club. Bell asserted that Keynes, who was some two years younger than Thoby Stephen, Woolf, Sydney-Turner, and himself, had become part of the Bloomsbury group only some years after he went down from Cambridge.

  Asserting the primacy of “phenomenal” Cambridge over “real” Cambridge, Bell insisted that the first stone in the “foundation for Bloomsbury” had been laid by the Midnight Society. This was a play-reading group that Clive himself, along with Thoby Stephen, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and Saxon Sydney-Turner, started at Trinity. In the typed draft of his speech to the Memoir Club now in the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, Bell fondly recalled how, when they had finished reading the week’s chosen play, in the early hours of the morning the Midnight Society members would partake of cold pie and punch. In the ensuing inebriation (we are not talking Hawaiian punch here), they would pour out into Great Court and Nevile’s Court around 5 A.M., “chanting the better-known verses of Fitzgerald’s Omar Kayam to the tune of Abide with Me, or the choruses from Atalanta in [Calydon]. The Goth [Thoby Stephen] sang loudest and most heartily and most completely out of tune.”

  “Atalanta in Calydon” is a not unimportant detail here. The poem was the first success of Algernon Charles Swinburne, and as far as I have been able to make out through its fog of verbiage and pseudo-Greek allusions, it celebrates the joys of hunting, but it was its homosexual subtext, apparent to male readers at the time, that made it a success.

  For it was not mere happenstance that both Keynes and Bell were writing these accounts of the origins of Bloomsbury in the early 1930s. This was a time when many prominent men in England were denouncing Bloomsbury as a noxious collection of effete homosexuals and their sycophantic female acolytes. The artist and critic Wyndham Lewis led the attack from the British art world. The novelist D. H. Lawrence paid a visit to Cambridge, and after an evening at high table with Lytton and Maynard at their most wittily scatological, denounced them and all their kind as corrupt and unclean. Bertrand Russell, himself an Angel, opined that the Cambridge Conversazione Society lost its claim to intellectual superiority when it became militantly homosexual under Keynes and Strachey. Russell had a point. The letters of Strachey and Keynes prove that they elected “embryos” like Arthur Hobhouse on the grounds that they were handsome and thus potential “catamites.” “Catamite” is a very old English word for a young male lover.

  In the 1930s, homophobic criticism of Bloomsbury was still voiced only in private, but it was dangerous. Ever since the last decade of the nineteenth century, public opinion in Britain, inflamed by the popular press, had become increasingly homophobic, and for the first time, upper-class gay men who cruised the streets and bathhouses of London for working-class sex partners, as many of them did, ran a small but real risk of discovery, prosecution, and imprisonment.

  Since the death of Lytton Strachey in 1932, the Bloomsbury man at particular risk in this climate of opinion was John Maynard Keynes. From his schoolboy days at Eton and right into his thirties, Keynes had a series of passionate relationships and numerous casual couplings, which for some years he systematically recorded in his diary. In his conversation and in his correspondence with his like-minded Apostle Lytton Strachey, the young Keynes was forthright about his sexual tastes and activities, and he subscribed with great enthusiasm to Lytton’s gospel of the higher sodomy as laid out by Plato in the Phaedrus.

  While living as a fellow of King’s, a college famous for homosexual dons like Oscar Browning, Keynes enjoyed a measure of protection. He once jokingly remarked that he had been shocked to find himself the only man in Cambridge who was not openly an “invert.” But once Keynes became influential in government and diplomatic circles and moved to London, he needed to exercise extreme caution in his private life. It would take only one disgruntled lover to make a call to a London newspaper (the “blackmailer of Bordeaux” is one notation in Keynes’s diary) to put the great economist’s career in jeopardy.

  In 1925, to the horror of his last known “catamite,” Sebastian Sprott, and to the exasperated incredulity of his old chum Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Keynes, soon to become the 1st Baron Keynes of Tilton, got married to the tiny, effervescent, quintessentially feminine Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Needless to say, in his 1933 autobiographical essays, Keynes gives not the slightest hint that he was (or had been until recently) an active homosexual, and that several of the men he refers to admiringly in the book (Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant, for example) had been not just his friends, but his lovers.

  As Keynes took steps to rub the homosexual text off the blackboard of his life, he confidently expected his “Cambridge” friends to rally to his side, and no one was in a better position to do this than Clive Bell. As the acknowledged Don Juan of Bloomsbury, Clive was just the right man to put a new spin on the tricky issue of homosexuality from Cambridge to Bloomsbury.

  In the draft of his talk to the Memoir Club, Clive Bell took a subtly different approach from the one Virginia Woolf had taken in her talk some ten years earlier. He did not contradict what she had said about Old Bloomsbury’s “obsession with buggery,” but he insisted that both he and his best friend, “the Goth,” who might rightly be considered the father of Bloomsbury, thought it was a huge joke.

  The Goth [Thoby Stephen] and I were not in love though later when we had both gone down Lytton occasionally amused himself by pretending that we were . . . the Goth and I used occasionally to discuss what he called (referring I imagine to a correspondence with Leonard [Woolf]) the Singhalese vice. He was then inclined not to censure, but to [illegible] and I to laugh . . . My relations with the Goth, intimate and affectionate at the same time [were] wonderfully impersonal as our correspondence shows . . . There is little or nothing about the feelings, no gossip, not a word about what is called unnatural vice—and next to nothing about natural.

  This is a clever piece of rhetoric. Bell was able to refer openly to Lytton Strachey’s homosexuality since Lytton had died in 1932. He could reliably cite Leonard Woolf, the husband of Virginia and another man with impeccable heterosexual credentials, to suggest that homosexuality is a foreign vice, endemic in Asian cultures like that of Sri Lanka, and perhaps an unfortunate byproduct of Britain’s colonial past. As Clive Bell would have it, in the Cambridge he knew, homosexuality was not a vice. It was an interesting matter for intellectual discussion and casual conversation but not a subject for reproof or censure. He and the Goth happened to desire women while Lytton desired men, but they all three lived together like the three men in the tub. Among true friends, it did not matter who was “gay” and who “straight,” to use the terms of today.

  This seems, at face value, a very modern position to be taking in the early 1930s. Many of us in twenty-first-century American society would agree that the barrier separat
ing the gay and the straight should be a permeable membrane, not a wall, a matter of interactions between individual men and women in specific contexts, not of fixed categories. Part of the importance and the mystique of Bloomsbury is that copious documentation exists to prove that the group endorsed, lived, and promulgated this view from the very early years of the past century.

  However, once you look at the hard evidence on British homosexual life provided by historians like Graham Robb and Matt Houlbrook, it becomes plain that this tolerant attitude, this delicate and affectionate balance between men of different sexual tendencies and activities, was not new to Bloomsbury. It was, in fact, eminently Victorian. In the twentieth century it would be forced to move underground, but as recent television chronicles of the private lives of prominent men such as Princess Margaret’s sometime husband Antony Armstrong-Jones and the political leader Jeremy Thorpe reveal, it was still going strong in Oxford in the 1940s and 1950s.

  What distinguished Bloomsbury from “Cambridge” was the grafting of two women, Vanessa Stephen Bell and Virginia Stephen Woolf, onto the all-male, gay-straight-who-cares? stock and, for a brief but key moment in his Memoir Club talk, Clive Bell recognizes this. “The second stone” in the foundation of Bloomsbury, he tells us, “was laid, it is my belief, when I went to stay with the Goth at Fritham [one of Leslie Stephen’s summer rentals], and met the two Miss Stephens, but that event is far too exciting & significant to be touched on . . . It deserves an evening to itself.”

  On the surface, this statement is a graceful acknowledgment by Clive Bell of the presence in his audience of Mrs. Bell and Mrs. Woolf. But what Clive, with his studied yet perfunctory bow to Vanessa and Virginia as the two mothers of Bloomsbury, fails to point out is that, whereas “Cambridge” had indeed for generations pieced homosexuality seamlessly onto homosociality, it was ignorant and suspicious of women to the point of enmity. This was an issue that both the founding mothers had been obliged to meet head-on.

  For if the Apostles were all men, as were all the members of the Midnight Society, this was not just because the women of Girton and Newnham were all locked away behind high walls by eight o’clock every evening—though they were. By their own free testimony, Thoby Stephen, Clive Bell, and Leonard Woolf, the three Bloomsbury men who identified as straight and are known to have had sex with women before marriage, did not see their love affairs and the women they slept with as subjects for conversation and comment. Women were not interesting per se, and discussion of ladies who might become wives was off limits among gentlemen. In contrast, the love affairs between male friends were a subject of absorbing interest, and as Bell volunteered in his Memoir Club talk, he and Stephen and Woolf, all straight men, discussed “buggery” all the time, both in private and in semiprivate groups like the Apostles.

  Between the men of “Cambridge” or the men of “Oxford” and young women of their own class, there was, the novels and memoirs of the period indicate, an abyss that could be bridged only by a proposal of marriage. Whether gay or straight, whether enthusiastic copulators like Bell and Keynes or aching virgins like Sydney-Turner and (until his late twenties) Lytton Strachey, they all were united in a profound alienation from women, which could at any moment turn into overt misogyny. This was true even of the most outstandingly heterosexual man in “Old Bloomsbury,” Thoby Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s adored older brother.

  Thoby Stephen was a complicated man. In his childhood, according to Noel Annan, inertia seems to have alternated with neurotic attacks verging on the suicidal, not unreminiscent of those that would afflict his sister Virginia. Notably reticent, Thoby had in him a resistance to meeting the expectations of others that aroused the respect of his peers if not his superiors. In adulthood, that resistance manifested itself in a kind of animal impassivity—Henry James, who had known the Stephen children from infancy, once called Thoby Stephen “a big mild mastiff.” After scraping into Cambridge University on the strength of his family connections, Thoby came down after four years with a third-class degree and began to read for the bar. He had no obvious enthusiasm for the law at the outset, and a barrister’s life was a risky one. Energy and verbal fluency were the main engines of success, but good social connections and an independent income certainly helped. Thoby Stephen was not brilliant, not articulate, and not wealthy.

  Seen from the outside, Thoby Stephen was a failure, but in te eyes of his father, who, to use Virginia Woolf’s word, “demonstratively” worshiped him, of his friends from his prep schools, Evelyn’s and Clifton College, and finally of his fellow undergraduates at Cambridge, Thoby Stephen more than made up for all debits with muscular masculinity. Once installed in his rooms at Trinity College, Thoby Stephen, some six foot four and broad of shoulder, found himself swimming in a sea of admiration, an object of explicit desire for gay Lytton, of silent envy for straight Bell, Woolf, and Sydney-Turner.

  In the section of “A Sketch of the Past” where she discusses how she and her brother interacted during their father’s final years, Woolf says that she and he would argue vigorously over books and ideas, but never speak of anything personal or exchange confidences. Thus, as she puts it, Thoby Stephen passed from boyhood to adulthood before her eyes “without saying a single word that could have been taken for a sign of what he was feeling.” Thus, as I would put it, Thoby Stephen, an adult living in the same house as his father, and with great influence over the older man, led a secret life of his own far from his family and closed his eyes to what his father and elder stepbrother were doing to his two sisters.

  Julian Thoby Stephen, age twenty-six

  In her 1922 novel Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf stretched her imagination and staged a little scene that explores the homoerotic current that ran silently beneath her brother’s friendships with other men. In the novel, Jacob Flanders, the protagonist Woolf based on her brother Thoby, is sailing around the Scilly Islands off Cornwall in the small boat of his university friend Timothy Durrant, a character based in part on Thoby’s close friend Clive Bell. Tiring of the Shakespeare play he has brought along for light reading, Jacob plunges into the sea for a swim—and if the modern reader assumes that he must be wearing a bathing suit, that reader would be wrong. When Jacob gets back in the boat after his swim, one might equally assume that he would towel off and put his clothes back on, but again one would be wrong. Jacob puts on his shirt and then sprawls in the bottom of the boat to dry off, naked from the waist down, calmly, confidently offering to his smaller, plumper friend at the tiller a full view of his magnificent male assets.

  The importance of this scene lies in its sexual ambiguity, and here Woolf had a radical insight into the male society of her period that is easy to miss. This is not a gay seduction scene. Flanders and Durrant are not homosexual, and they do not want to have sex together. But they come from a class of boys who grew up in an all-male culture where homosociality blends imperceptibly into homosexuality, where boys and men, quite literally, are often thrown into a bed with each other. Flanders is the son of a poor widow, while Durrant is affluent. He owns the boat and stands at the tiller. To establish dominance in the male hierarchy, Flanders, sure of his straightness, unselfconsciously borrows from the gay playbook. Flanders is big, and both men know that is what counts.

  Woolf then contrasts Jacob’s cool display of raw masculinity with his best friend on the boat with his silent, awkward behavior in mixed company. The sailboat moors near the home of Timothy’s widowed mother, and it turns out that in these social circles, packing a dinner jacket, however crumpled and salt-soaked, is de rigueur, whereas a bathing suit and a towel are not. Jacob is given a very warm welcome by Mrs. Durrant and, as for Timothy’s sister, Clara Durrant, she is struck dumb with admiration for tall, broad, handsome Jacob. Jacob finds Clara attractive as well, and the two are allowed a few minutes alone, picking fruit for lunch, but it is not enough. Clara is inhibited and inexperienced, and Jacob rarely says much of anything to anyone, so nothing of any significance happens between them.<
br />
  Back in London, Jacob and Clara occasionally meet, but he is busy reading Sophocles and Marvell with his Cambridge friend (a version of Lytton) and cavorting at bohemian parties. Nothing is said between Jacob and Clara, and while he goes off to fight in World War I and die, Clara stays at home to pour the tea and watch the rain fall. Here, in a few brief paragraphs, Woolf illustrates the sad, silly result of the social chasm separating English-public-school-educated men from women of their own social caste.

  In real life, as opposed to his sister’s imaginative reconstruction of him, a strong strain of active misogyny seems to have emerged in Thoby Stephen after he left Cambridge, moved back home to Hyde Park Gate, and began to move in mixed company. He was happiest in his evening sessions with Lytton Strachey, under whose guidance he found his way through the Elizabethan poets and the eighteenth-century wits, the more obscure the better. The two friends also reveled in ancient Greek plays like Lysistrata, even though they were obliged to read them in the bowdlerized English versions created by Victorian scholars like Benjamin Jowett. Unlike their friend Saxon Sydney-Turner or indeed Thoby’s sister Virginia, neither the Goth nor “Strache” could ever really wrap his head around Greek grammar.