2.17 The Scandalous Bloomsbury Group

I imagined that John Maynard Keynes, being an economist, would be a dull sort of a chap. I was wrong!

John Maynard Keynes, Painted by his lover Duncan Guest in 1917

The Bloomsbury group have come up as I have researched a few of the essays that I have written recently, and I have been surprised by my ignorance of who they were and what they did. I had this image of a cultured and artistic group of young people from the early years of the twentieth century, perhaps outspoken on matters to do with sex, but I had never delved much further. I assumed that there would be poets in their number and when I discovered that Rupert Brooke was, whilst not a member, a close friend of the group, I felt sure that they would mostly be poets. I was amused to discover that the economist John Maynard Keynes was a part of the group. He seemed a real odd man out to me. Surely someone whose monetary and political theories I had heard talked about in dull news items and articles about political theory on BBC Radio Four couldn’t have ever been a real part of such a radical set of free-spirited artists as the Bloomsbury group. How wrong I was.

Thankfully, the comments section below my article on Brooke saved the day. Helen Rice and Anjie Wastling pointed out my error, prompting me to take a closer look and discover that Keynes was far from dull and boring, I also discovered that I was wrong to think that the Bloomsbury set were mainly poets, (they were mainly artists and writers) and was right to think that they had something to do with sex (they were unashamedly mad on it!)

Perhaps the most famous member of the group was Virginia Woolf. I remembered the name from the late sixties when I was a precocious pre-pubescent boy. The stage play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? had been made into a film which caused a bit of a scandal. I had heard talk of it on the news. I was aware that it had something to do with sex, and I was taken with the resemblance of the name Virginia with the word Vagina. Putting the word Vagina next to the words afraid and wolf must have lit up all sorts of Freudian connections in my developing brain. At some point when I was a bit older I saw the film and didn’t really get it. It was all Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor arguing with each other. It did nothing for me, I had been hoping for more of a sex-romp along the lines of Confessions of a Window Cleaner.

So I relegated Virginia to the back of my mind, filed under scary sex thoughts along with Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, and next to Golden Virginia Hand Rolling Tobacco.

But I have kept coming across the Bloomsbury group ever since, and my most recent encounters have awakened a nostalgic feeling in me, recollecting the days of my youth and young adulthood, when everything seemed possible. From the school sixth form to University, when reading books and writing essays were good alternatives to working for a living, and oceans of time could be devoted just to the pursuit of pleasure¹. How I would have loved to have a group of friends like the Bloomsbury group. Sadly, in my case the pursuit of pleasure revolved more around drinking, watching rock bands, being in rock bands and generally messing about rather than anything involving sex. I was far too afraid of the wolves for that.

Virginia and her Bloomsbury group pals weren’t afraid of the wolves at all and they never seemed to shake off that youthful idealism and pursuit of pleasure. They may not have been happy all the time (after a number of failed attempts, Virginia eventually took her own life in 1941 at the age of 59), but there is a lot to be admired in their stories, their creativity, their ideas, and their appetite for sexual adventure.

The American poet and writer, Dorothy Parker, is reputed to have coined the phrase that the Bloomsbury group “lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles”.

In her memoir, Virginia Woolf spoke of an interchange between two of her housemates, Lytton Strachey (writer) and Vanessa Bell (painter). Strachey questioned a stain on Vanessa Bell’s dress with the word “semen?”

“With that one word”, she said, “all the barriers of reserve went down, a flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us, sex permeated our every conversation and the word bugger was never far from our lips”.

And buggery, or other, equally forbidden practices, was never far from their thoughts. Many, if not all of the members of the Bloomsbury group were bisexual to some degree, having passionate and often complicated same sex relationships. John Maynard Keynes was very much a part of this. He may have married a glamorous Russian ballet dancer, Lydia Lopokova, in 1925, but before that he had a number of relationships and encounters with both men and women – sometimes simultaneously. It is impossible to say whether or not he carried on after his marriage, because at that point he gave up the habit of keeping detailed notes of every sexual encounter he had. What he got up to before marriage is well documented.

A number of these encounters would have been with Duncan Grant, an artist who had been a schoolfellow of Rupert Brooke. Grant painted Keynes’s portrait in 1917 in the Garden at Charleston House, a Country residence of the Bloomsburies situated near Eastbourne. Apparently whilst being painted, Keynes was concentrating on his government work, calculating the most cost effective ways to finance the escalating costs of World War One as part of his government work.

Keynes was a trusted government advisor throughout the war and was involved in the financial negotiations in the treaty of Versailles when it ended. He resigned when he realised that the allies were making demands on Germany that were too punitive, warning that such a financial settlement would inevitably lead to a Second World War.

Throughout his life he was a keen supporter of the arts, and was responsible for setting up the British Arts Council in 1946.

There were so many love affairs and sexual liaisons going on amongst the members of the Bloomsbury group and their friends in the early decades of the twentieth century that it is easy to imagine that they were all having a whale of a time. However, they were not free of the torments caused by jealousies, unrequited advances, break ups, and unfulfilled desires.

Vita Sackville West (poet, novelist and garden designer) was close to the group. She had relationships with both men and women in their number, one of them being a lengthy love affair with Virginia Woolf. She must have known what it was like to love in triangles, and expressed the anguish of it in her short poem, Trio.

Trio by Vita Sackville West

So well she knew them both! yet as she came
Into the room, and heard their speech
Of tragic meshes knotted with her name,
And saw them, foes, but meeting each with each
Closer than friends, souls bared through enmity,
Beneath their startled gaze she thought that she
Broke as the stranger on their conference,
And stole abashed from thence.

1. I was very fortunate to have gone to university at the time of grants rather than loans. There was no need to work at all.