[Vwoolf] Bloomsbury-bashing

Mark Scott mark.travis at frontier.com
Sun Mar 24 03:14:11 EDT 2019


This is such a gross misreading and slanted interpretation of ‘Three Guineas’.  This Mr. Dalrymple seems to be completely ignorant about Woolf or else he is deliberately ignoring many facts about her life.  I am currently reading her collected letters in tandem with her diary entries.  I have reached Volume 6 of the collected letters and am currently reading the letters and entries from March of 1936.  She talks about all of the anti-fascist organizations she joined and signed petitions for even though she didn’t really give much credit to their effectiveness.  Leonard Woolf was working hard as Secretary for the Labor Party and she attended meetings and conventions with him.  And she was working, at this time. Hard, laborious work, retyping, correcting and rewriting sections of ‘The Years’, trying to get it out to the printers so she could keep up with her responsibility to the continued solvency of the Hogarth Press.  She was also plowing through a mass of correspondence and documents in preparation for writing her biography of Roger Fry.  And all during this time her ideas for ‘Three Guineas’ were percolating in her mind, while she was forced to put them on a back burner so she could complete the tasks at hand.   Her writing and her work for the Hogarth Press were her jobs.  She was not ‘a woman of such languorous, highly strung, thoroughbred equine beauty’.  She was a working woman who wrote a book of her observations about the flaws and repressions that she perceived in a patriarchal society.

But I’m not telling any of you anything that you don’t already know.  This inane piece of garbage produced a rant from me and I hope you will forgive me for posting it here.

There was mention of Christopher Reed’s essay in ‘Queer Bloomsbury’ on ‘Bloomsbury Bashing’.  I had meant to write about ‘Queer Bloomsbury’ when I finished reading it some months ago.  It was fresh in my mind then but procrastination has taken its toll and I would have to read the book again in order to recall everything I wanted to say about it.  I would like to thank Brenda Helt and Madelyn Detloff for putting the collection together and editing it so well.  I am not someone who has done much reading of this type of material so it was somewhat of a new experience for me.  As someone who inhabits an askew perspective of life, I have spent my life struggling to navigate the perpendicular structures of most of the rest of the world in order to survive.  It was refreshing to read about the viewpoints of so many others who have shared the same experience.  It was enlightening to read about how they interacted with and inspired one another.  And I enjoyed all of the different lenses used to view their work and their relationships to each other and the world around them.

Mark Scott
Common Reader  

From: Melanie White via Vwoolf 
Sent: Saturday, March 23, 2019 1:12 PM
To: 'Neverow, Vara S.' ; 'Mark Hussey' ; 'Woolf Listserv' 
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Bloomsbury-bashing

Years ago when I was just getting acquainted with VW and Bloomsbury, I chanced upon this essay, and I have never forgotten it. I was blown away by the writer's contemptuous vitriole. He seemed to go very far out of his way to take the most negative interpretation possible on everything to do with her. I had trouble imagining why anyone would take this so very seriously, as if he'd suffered personally as a direct result of something VW said or did. I still don't understand it. Something in the Bloomsbury subculture reeeeally pushes some peoples' buttons. 

 

https://www.city-journal.org/html/rage-virginia-woolf-12371.html

 

 

 

From: Vwoolf <vwoolf-bounces+melanie.white=comcast.net at lists.osu.edu> On Behalf Of Neverow, Vara S. via Vwoolf
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2019 2:06 PM
To: Mark Hussey <mhussey at verizon.net>; 'Woolf Listserv' <vwoolf at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Bloomsbury-bashing

 

Thanks, Mark! Much appreciated. And thanks, Stuart, for posting a similar snarky rant by the same Bloomsbury-hater. And, of course, thanks to Brenda for the reference to Christopher Reed’s extremely detailed and nuanced essay. 

As to my own rationale for the request, I think it’s worth keeping track of these snide remarks. They illuminate the motivations, misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the adversaries and reveal the flawed rationales for their various vendettas. 

Best,

Vara

Vara Neverow
Department of English
Southern Connecticut State University
New Haven, CT 06515
203-392-6717
neverowv1 at southernct.edu


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From: Mark Hussey <mhussey at verizon.net>
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2019 1:59:34 PM
To: Neverow, Vara S.; 'Woolf Listserv'
Subject: RE: [Vwoolf] Bloomsbury-bashing 

 

Not sure why anyone would want to waste their time on this old buffer’s ramblings, but here Heffer goes again… (It is possible to register for a free account to have full access to a limited number of articles; the readers’ comments are even more depressing and ill-informed than Heffer’s nonsense):

 

 

Last summer, at my wife's suggestion, we went to Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, a place of pilgrimage for devotees of the Bloomsbury Group. In the Twenties, this collection of writers and artists supposedly changed – in their view, modernised – British culture. Charleston was acquired by Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf, during the Great War. Her husband was Clive Bell, an art critic. However, Mrs Bell shared the house with Duncan Grant, by whom she had a daughter, Angelica. Grant was homosexual, and one of his boyfriends had been David Garnett, a novelist, whom Angelica married. It is little wonder that biographies, diaries, films and television programmes about the denizens of Bloomsbury seem to have such enduring appeal.

But is it all a bit of a con? Charleston heaves with visitors. Yet the decor – Bloomsbury colour schemes imposed on the walls, furniture and doors, the paintings, even the lampshades – causes the uncouth, me among them, to marvel at its crudity. It gave me the same sensation as seeing ancient cave art, only without the anthropological resonance. One senses that most who go to Charleston do so to commune with the spirit of Bloomsbury, which hangs heavily over it. Leonard and Virginia Woolf were frequent visitors; so were Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey.

Yet when one reads about these people, one soon realises the benefit of Bloomsbury for those who were part of it: the mutual backslapping, with everyone praising everyone else's work. The paintings of Grant and Bell are not in the league of Picasso; and yet many regard them with comparable reverence. Not everyone has fallen under the spell: in 1935, the Cunard Line commissioned Grant to design murals for the first-class lounge of the Queen Mary, but ordered them to be removed once they saw them the following year.

The literary side of Bloomsbury continues to capture the imagination of successive generations; and Woolf and Strachey, from the group's hard core, are the most prominent. (EM Forster, often accused of being a Bloomsbury man, had far more diverse connections.) Both Woolf and Strachey merit more detailed consideration than there is space for here, but a general observation about each will suffice.

Woolf was brilliant at conveying her own psychoses in her prose, and in her adoption of the stream of consciousness as developed by Proust and Joyce. I have yet to detect any originality in her literary conceptions, although she was capable of effective communication of scenes, characters and ideas. Her fiction is laced with her snobbery, and her criticism throbs with it: if one finds such things amusing, then Woolf is a hoot.

Strachey had an entirely destructive mentality. Eminent Victorians (1918), praised for its wit, makes cheap laughs out of twisting the truth. His essay on Thomas Arnold is a travesty, and his decision to mock a culture that made Britain into the world's leading power is instructive – though only of Strachey himself. He shared the self-obsession of the rest of the group, who were united above all by an unshakeable belief in their superiority. Perhaps the Bloomsberries were rather superior in their time. Happily, the intervening years have given the rest of us the chance to catch up, and see through their collective self-regard.

 

 

From: Vwoolf [mailto:vwoolf-bounces+mhussey=verizon.net at lists.osu.edu] On Behalf Of Neverow, Vara S. via Vwoolf
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2019 10:00 AM
To: vwoolf listserve
Subject: [Vwoolf] Bloomsbury-bashing

 

Greetings,

Possibly of interest is a link below to an article in the Telegraph. The article seems to be is dedicated to Bloomsbury-bashing. Alas, the article is only accessible to subscribers. Perhaps someone who has access will be able to share it with those of us who do not. 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/snobbish-crude-self-obsessed-has-bloomsbury-group-lost-bloom/ 


     Snobbish, crude and self-obsessed: has the Bloomsbury Group lost its bloom? - telegraph.co.uk

      www.telegraph.co.uk

      L ast summer, at my wife's suggestion, we went to Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, a place of pilgrimage for devotees of the Bloomsbury Group. In the Twenties, this collection of writers and ...
     




Best,

Vara

Vara Neverow
Department of English
Southern Connecticut State University
New Haven, CT 06515
203-392-6717
neverowv1 at southernct.edu 



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