Book Review: Nino Strachey’s ‘Young Bloomsbury’

“Those were the days.” Everyone has heard it, and most have said it. But were they? Particularly in the largely free parts of the world, today invariably exceeds yesterday.

Looking back to 100 years ago, London was apparently glowing. “Bright Young Things” were the thing. Novels and books have been written about this period. One that stands out for me is D.J. Taylor’s 2007 book Bright Young People, about post-WWI social life in London. Taylor wrote of the well-born of that time and their post-war doings, but seemed to do so with a somber wink of the eye. Life quite simply wasn’t that great. He reported that, among other things, “the number of people in the United Kingdom whose annual income, net of tax, exceeded L10,000 fell by two-thirds, from around 4,000 to 1,300.” Basically, a mindless war had ended a few years before, but the war on work continued.

Arguably worse for the psyche of the nation, a pound that had been fixed at 4.86/$ was devalued to 3.50/$. Taylor indicated that the people were devastated. In his words, the devaluation’s “significance for the average British citizen, raised in an atmosphere of solid Edwardian prosperity, cannot be overstated.” We work for dollars, pounds, euros, yen, yuan, and name your currency, but we’re really working for what they can be exchanged for. In post-WWI England, the headline tax on work was high in concert with a shrinkage of the pound. How could people have been happy? Or were they?

These questions explain why 1920s England and its history are of interest to me. While this was again the period of “Bright Young Things” having too much fun, times were tough. What to make of the contradictions? Still in search of answers, I agreed to read and review Nino Strachey’s recently released book Young Bloomsbury: The Generation That Redefined Love, Freedom, and Self-Expression in 1920s England. While the gossipy book is surely entertaining, I’ll say I’m still looking for answers. Importantly, and to Strachey’s credit, her look back to an era in which her family members loomed large raised new questions about a very interesting time.

So, what was “Bloomsbury”? It should first be said that it was an area in London. As the author puts it, “Assembled within a radius of about a hundred yards were an impressive array of ‘Brains.’” The brains included Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, Dora Carrington, and numerous other well-read, creative, and frequently well-bred types all being smart, ironic, and wildly sexual. 46 Gordon Square was seemingly the center of this small center where so many “Bright” types congregated.

The first response from your reviewer is to imagine the unseen. Great Britain had lost so much human capital so needlessly just a few years before. Imagine how brightly lit London would have been literally and figuratively absent the fighting that so much defines British history, but that arguably in ways we’ll never know, subdues it.

To the above lament, Bloomsbury types might reply that it was the war that shaped this most interesting group. Sure enough, the most notable of the young “Bloomsberries” was Lytton Strachey. He wrote the successful and critically acclaimed Eminent Victorians, which “’struck the note of ridicule the whole war-weary generation wanted to hear, using the weapons of Bayle, Voltaire & Gibbon on the creators of the Red Cross and the Public School System. It appeared to the postwar young people like the light at the end of the tunnel.’” Or in the author’s words, Strachey’s book “anticipated the mood of the twenties.”

All of which speaks to a level of seriousness in the notables featured in Young Bloomsbury that the book perhaps did not vivify. Strachey makes it more than plain to readers that the Bloomsbury atmosphere was such that you could “say what you liked about sex, art or religion,” and the impression is given of people who are maybe flighty. Which didn’t read right. Even if all of “Young Bloomsbury” hadn’t seen the war, all of this crowd surely knew people very well who had. Men or women regardless of age had seen enormous trouble. How could they not have? It’s a way of suggesting that these were individuals who had much more than “sex, art or religion” on their minds. What was it? And let’s not answer with they were merely trying to forget. What’s awful can’t be forgotten, so what was on their minds when they weren’t “buggering” everything within eyesight?

Furthermore, how the Bloomsbury crowd lived surely forced a level of seriousness on all that they thought or did, simply because homosexuality was still illegal. And it was still viewed as something to be cured, including cures “involving painful testicular injections.” This rates prominent mention given the individuals Strachey is writing about. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that close to everyone prominently featured in Young Bloomsbury was homosexual. The previous truth raises questions that will be asked in a bit.

For now, the fact that homosexuality wasn’t a legal way of life had me wondering if memories of 100 years ago are grander than the life itself. Weren’t these individuals running scared?

One hint provided by the author that suggests not is that the “painted and powdered” men in particular were as previously mentioned, well-born. From there, it’s no reach to say that class privilege affords all sorts of immunity including, perhaps, immunity from the laws that others were expected to abide. Strachey writes a fair amount about E.M. Forster, who moved seamlessly in and out of the “Bloomsbury” crowd, and who wrote Maurice, a novel about a conventionally well-bred male in all ways but for his homosexuality. Though not officially published until 1971, Forster wrote it in 1913 and 1914. It was a risky act, but maybe not for those of this crowd? Strachey seems to answer yes to the latter. She writes that “Wary of backchat from expensive lawyers, the police were generally reluctant to tackle wealthy targets. Class privilege provided a degree of protection to those who dressed smartly.” It all makes sense.

As does your reviewer’s assertion that ideologically perfect as libertarianism is, it has elitist, class privileged qualities. Strachey’s book seems to support this view in that the crowd she writes about reads as very libertarian, not to mention that it succeeded by virtue of it “reaching an audience eager to challenge traditional conventions.” The “Bloomsberries” were very much of the belief that “every person had the right to live and love in the way they chose.” Ok, so how to say this? Libertarianism of the small l variety is correct, but it also appeals to an elite that not only believes in freedom to live and let live, but that also can live and let live.

Along the lines of the above, Strachey writes that “their resistance to conscription and antipathy to nationalism to drew them [the proverbial Bloomsbury family] philosophically together.” Strachey describes them as “Conscious of their status as outsiders from the mainstream,” but the reply here is that they could be outside because they were already on the inside. These were Public School types who, if they attended college, attended schools of the Oxford and Cambridge variety. It’s easier to be outside, to challenge conventions, to challenge nationalism, when you can move seamlessly with those who don’t. This isn’t a knock on the individuals Strachey celebrates as much as it’s an observation.

They once again believed deeply, but they also could believe deeply in what at times rejected societal norms. Author Strachey notes that Lytton, after having been denied objector status for WWI, showed up to the draft tribunal and offered “to interpose his body between his sister and the German if a soldier attempted to rape her.” He “was then rejected on grounds of ill health.” About this story, it’s possible I read it wrong, but as I see it only a well-born type could have and would have so blatantly revealed his sexual orientation in this way in the first fifth of the 1900s.

Again, none of this is meant as criticism of these people. As a believer once again that libertarianism is the perfect ideology for it being all about freedom to choose, it’s hard not to be drawn to historical figures whose motto was there “was nothing one could not say, nothing that one could not do.” This is how it should be. It’s just that it seems easier to be as one should be when privileged.

Was the book unputdownable? That can’t be said, though it may well be unputdownable for those who know the world about which Strachey writes. The chapters were very short, which was great. The problem with the chapters for some will be that they read as gossipy streams of consciousness, and because they do, they don’t support Strachey’s contention that the “collective value” of the individuals she writes about “has been consistently underplayed.” The response here is that Strachey perhaps has a point, that these people were ahead of their time in their view that “every person had the right to live and love in the way they chose,” so why not focus more on their deep belief in freedom over the endless mentions of how Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, Stephen Tennant, et al personified polyamorous?

Maybe there’s much less of a book without it, but the chapters go from conquest to conquest. This will perhaps excite some, bother others, and bring on indifference in still others. At the same time, there’s an argument that what Strachey reports has useful significance about the present. Indeed, while reading Young Bloomsbury I found myself wishing those on the hunt to ruin existing lives for how some acted in the past would read Strachey’s book. To do so would be to see that those who were part of “Young Bloomsbury” were seemingly all sexual predators. Keynes, whom Strachey describes as “one of the wealthier hosts in Bloomsbury,” “used his position” to “befriend and seduce undergraduates.” It all reads as normal until we see individuals in the here and now losing their careers for doing in the past what so many did. One guesses that Keynes’s predatory ways with younger males was an open secret. Right or wrong, at the time it was seemingly viewed as normal within this elite world. And it’s something to think about as we apply present-day morals to what happened in the past. Eventually what George Will describes as “presentism” will get us all.

All of which brings us to the question that kept coming up while reading Strachey’s book. There was something unbelievable about it. It’s hard to describe what caused disbelief, but I wanted to know what privileged or non-privileged others thought of the Bloomsbury set. These were the celebrated “Bright Young Things” about whom so many thought and wrote, yet they were as mentioned seemingly majority homosexual. Men and women. That’s what’s hard to believe. I don’t write the latter out of homophobia or anything of the sort. It’s more with wonder. Was London really this advanced in the 1920s whereby all the culture wars about sexuality that took place in the U.S. in between were leapfrogged? Again, questions. Were the homosexuals of that era at the top of the social heap as Strachey seems to allude, or truly outsiders for living as they did? And if outsiders, why did they shine so bright?

Lots of questions. Hopefully others who understand the era better can answer the questions that Nino Strachey’s surely interesting book unearthed in me. For now, I’m just unsure, and unsure about the import of those she writes about mainly because Strachey herself seems unsure.