Writing about Rupert Brooke and the Olivier sisters and all their sexual shenanigans (or not - the point being that women were always at the risk of ruined reputations and pregnancy) reminded me of Virginia Woolf's diary entries re Marjorie Strachey. There was a lot of discussion over her saying she had fallen in love with a married man (Jos Wedgewood) - Virginia Woolf says that she certainly seems to be in love. But Jos Wedgewood was a "pillar of the establishment", with a wife and seven children, albeit his wife had left him two years earlier. The discussion revolves around the fact that to be an ordinary mistress would lead to "ruin" - there is no way in which she can have this relationship and stay respectable. Of course it all ended badly - Jos Wedgewood finally divorced his wife then promptly married his deaf governess. According to Virginia Woolf's diary Marjory had renounced him ( Letters, 15/7/1918) and was quite sprightly about it. ( I found all this out with the usual Googling, but then I noticed that you could buy a complete Virginia Woolf including the diary and all the letters for £1.92 - the thing being that while it might not be so satisfactory reading the letters and diary on a Kindle, having the ability to search for "Marjory Strachey" though all the works is a great thing. A great thing. It beggars belief the amount of sheer library slog biographers would have had to go through before the digitization of everything. This is so easy now, to search for references and cross - references).
There's an article in the Guardian (A century later, why do we still kneel at the shrine of the Bloomsbury set?) that says, essentially, they were successful Bohemians but only because they had money. Which is true, of course, but there were plenty of other people who had money that didn't live or behave like they did, so it doesn't seem to right to write off their experimentation and way of living as the pure and only result of a private income. Would it have been possible without the money - no it wouldn't. And here's my point, given the riches that large numbers of us live with these days, there are opportunities to experiment and do different stuff! And given the huge wealth of literature and film and insights that are available to us the fact that Bloomsbury still shines through, not only in the writing of Virginia Woolf but in the lives they chose to lead it's not just a matter of televisual lives of posh others that we watch in superbly recreated costume environments, there's more substance and sustenance than that. It's all about choices (Barcode Brothers), as ever.
Before I stop and have some more coffee, have to mention Kinglsey Amis's Memoirs which have that witty wicked voice describing such a dull dreary life in the 1930s to 1950s, which seems to me to be the absolute opposite of the more life affirming dalliances of the Bloomsbury set. It's funny to read, but full of bile at the same time - a tale of relatives and upbringings in Norbury and Purley, perhaps this savage tone is the only one that is adequate. It reminds me uncomfortably of my own writing - the Clive and Beth stories where Clive is a cynical and desperately sad character who would love to be loving and real but just can't quite make it. I've read Lucky Jim a couple of times and it is a comic classic - the next book, whose title I forget is less successful, a portrait of a young man with a wife and child who is trapped in every sense of the word by circumstance, but utterly fails to live the life he could - its a weary and miserable comedy, brought alive by some of the set pierces but collapsing under it's own black mood.
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