Feature
Bloomsbury Trailing
by Diana Wichtel
Diana Wichtel almost bumps into Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell and their avant-garde circle as she visits the wonderful homes they lived in.
The bridge at Southease is a stark and lonely structure. The river Ouse (pronounced, remorselessly, ‘Ooze’) is, at this point, a dun-coloured ditch through farmland. I’m in East Sussex, after a few days in London spent trooping around the squares that housed the writers, artists, critics and professional house guests who made up the Bloomsbury Group. I half-expected to see one of those familiar blue plaques affixed to the bridge: “Virginia Woolf. 1882-1941. Novelist and critic. Washed up here.”
There’s nothing – just a policeman with a dog straining on a lead, looking for goodness knows what. It was a sober milestone for a wayfarer on the Bloomsbury Trail. The End.
Of course it wasn’t. The group began back in 1904, when Sir Leslie Stephen’s orphaned children fled “the respectable, mummified humbug” of Kensington for unfashionable, un-fettered Bloomsbury. The oldest, Thoby, died in 1906, but had introduced his beautiful sisters, Vanessa and Virginia, to his Cambridge friends, who included iconoclast biographer Lytton Strachey, novelist EM Forster and economist Maynard Keynes. Strachey famously pointed a bony digit at a stain on Vanessa’s dress and enquired “Semen?” Polite conversation was never to be the same.
The Bloomsberries. Some carried on right up until the manners of modern times overtook their once outrageously avant-garde ways. All the couples were triangles, goes the mocking mantra, and lived in squares.
“Triangle” hardly does justice to Bloomsbury’s routinely bisexual, convoluted amorous origami. My already-simmering Bloomsbury obsession came to a boil when, in 1971, I travelled for a few days along the Katherine Mansfield Trail with my then father-in-law, Antony Alpers. He was writing his second biography of Mansfield. Her problematic relationship with Virginia Woolf gets a whole chapter. Mansfield brought out the fearful snob in Woolf: “We could both wish that one’s first impression of KM was not that she stinks like a – well civet cat that has taken to street walking.”
In fact, Mansfield made Woolf’s husband, Leonard, laugh like a drain, which didn’t help. Woolf also said, after Mansfield’s death, that hers was “the only writing I have ever been jealous of.”
Alpers makes a good case for Mansfield’s influence on Woolf’s Kew Gardens, a short story that set her off on her true, experimental path. There’s a case to be made, too, for the influence of Mansfield’s luminous evocation of her childhood, Prelude, on Woolf’s similarly powerfully autobiographical To the Lighthouse.
Gray’s Inn Rd, where Mansfield once lived, is right on the border of Bloomsbury.
Bloomsbury carried on in the country, too. Not far from the bridge at Southease, cycling distance from Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Monk’s House in Rodmell, is Firle. Look for the turn-off to Charleston Farmhouse. In 1916 Virginia wrote to her sister, artist Vanessa Bell: “It has a charming garden, with a pond, and fruit trees, and vegetables, all now rather run wild, but you could make it lovely.”
She did. It still is. Here, Vanessa set up a defiantly irregular household, including her husband, art critic Clive Bell and his lovers; her ex-lover, artist and critic Roger Fry; her current partner and life-long companion Duncan Grant; his lover David Garnett …
“Nessa presides over the most astonishing ménage,” wrote Virginia. “Belgian hares, governesses, children, gardeners, hens, ducks, and painting all the time, till every inch of the house is a different colour.”
The “Woolves” visited often. “Last night at Charleston I lay with my window open listening to a nightingale,” wrote Virginia. “Fishes splashed in the pond. May in England is all they say – so teeming, amorous, and creative.”
The 17th-century house is of pink-tinged brick, with climbing roses. The pond, beside which Lytton Strachey was often snapped, folding his attenuated frame into a deck chair, is a Monet in the hazy sunlight. Along the top of the walls of the garden to the side, an eclectic collection of busts does duty for gargoyles.
Which is appropriate seeing that Charleston is to the Bloomsbury nut what the Vatican is to a Catholic. It’s also the loveliest of small museums. Run by a private trust, it radiates a rumpty vitality.
Uncapped pens sit ready to write and, in the studios, tubes of paint look freshly squeezed. Charleston smells of flowers from the garden and real laughter floats from the kitchen, where someone’s preparing food for some event.
You can wander freely through rooms hand-painted and stencilled to within an inch of their lives. The general aesthetic is as if arts and crafts, post-Impressionism and a cup of modernism had been whizzed in a blender and hurled at the walls. Changing Rooms, circa 1916.
It’s not grand. In the sitting room are lamp bases made from chunks of telegraph poles. The decorative style is loose, eclectic, sometimes rough and ready, sitting confidently alongside a de la Croix etching here, a Picasso there. Art, every-where. In Vanessa’s original bedroom, Duncan Grant painted a cockerel and hound to wake her in the morning and guard her at night.
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