Bloomsbury
摘要
Bloomsbury Mary Butts (bio), Camilla Bagg, and Nathalie Blondel “Bloomsbury”—you hear people say today, and it’s 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 dislike. Never wholly 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 then, 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.” [No Bloody Good], “faisandés,” “awful warnings,” “mental hermaphrodites,” “brittle intellectuals,” “that bunch.” These 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 and horn-rimmed glasses, or of dark women, unfashionably bobbed. A fragment, quite worthless, except as a “trailer” for a much more interesting picture. Or as light on the question—how a group of people, [End Page 32] united 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, twenty years later should have come 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 mind—that it is only the common English shame and fear before the fact of intelligence, 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 nineteenth century, has become dominant again. What truth there may be in thi