Chapter Ten - Bloomsbury Redux 1911-1913

Thankfully, that evening, with the advent of Roger Fry the company broke up into smaller groups, discussing painting or writing or psychology. I was grateful to have the attention taken off myself and forestall any more probing into the nature of my relationship with George. They seemed terribly curious about it! How could I know they knew all the details of one another’s love-affairs, that it was the garden-variety pastime?

There were further surprises. When Lytton vacated the chair, to go to the back of the house in search of a book to bolster his thesis in an argument on the symbolism of the Gotterdammerung with Roger, George took the chair and pulled me up into it as well, where we spent the rest of the evening. It was capacious, but it nevertheless meant I had to sit on his lap, and I found this untoward behaviour very disconcerting. I could blame it on the whisky, except he hadn’t drunk much. I had seen him drink much more, in the Alps, with much more circumspection afterwards. This sensualist was an aspect whose existence in him I had almost never seen expressed, and I wasn’t sure how to cope with it. But he was perfectly casual, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to lean his head on my shoulder and play with my hair as he spoke with Duncan and Roger about the plans for the Second Post-Impressionist exhibit. It was, I only realised much afterwards, a way of soothing ‘die Löwinnen’, for I was very much just then a sort of wounded lioness.

Lytton came back in from the library with the wanted book, and with Virginia. I had a particular interest in their conversation because of Fräulein Bé, and my regular trips to Germany to hear the operas. When I went to the Wagner festival, I brought the scores with me and would sit with them open in my lap, following along, mouthing the words, and I did love the Ring cycle, but I had never really considered the symbolism of the Nibelung on its own, and the debate was fascinating.

The end of this epic tale from German myths involving incestuous twins, a philandering one-eyed god and a motherless son was, to Roger, Adrian, Lytton, and his brother James, who came in near the middle, not simply a rousing good tale, but a textbook of psychoanalytic dysfunction. Narcissistic personality disorder, castration anxiety, the impact of childhood trauma. They were, in such thinking, heavily influenced by Freud, and James and Adrian were to become his students, as well as followers of Ernest Jones.
The story, for those who are not Wagner lovers, is of the end of the cosmos in Norse mythology. It is preceded by Fimbulvetr, the winter of winters. Three such winters follow each other with no summers in between. Conflicts and feuds break out, even between families, and all morality will disappear. The wolf Skoll devours the sun, and his brother Hati eats the moon, plunging the earth [into] darkness. The stars will vanish from the sky. The cock Fjalar will crow to the giants and the golden cock Gullinkambi will crow to the gods. A third cock will raise the dead.

The earth will shudder with earthquakes, and every bond and fetter will burst, freeing the terrible wolf Fenrir. The sea will rear up because Jormungand, the Midgard Serpent, is twisting and writhing in fury as he makes his way toward the land. With every breath, Jormungand will stain the soil and the sky with his poison. The waves caused by the serpent's emerging will set free the ship Naglfar, and with the giant Hymir as their commander, the giants will sail towards the battlefield. From the realm of the dead a second ship will set sail, and this ship carries the inhabitants of hell, with Loki as their helmsman. The fire giants, led by the giant Surt, will leave Muspell in the south to join against the gods. Surt, carrying a sword that blazes like the sun itself, will scorch the earth.

Meanwhile, Heimdall will sound his horn, calling the sons of Odin and the heroes to the battlefield. From all the corners of the world, gods, giants, dwarves, demons and elves will ride towards the huge plain of Vigrid (‘battle shaker’) where the last battle will be fought. Odin will engage Fenrir in battle, and Thor will attack Jormungand. Thor will victorious, but the serpent's poison will gradually kill the god of thunder. Surt will seek out the swordless Freyr, who will quickly succumb to the giant. The one-handed Tyr will fight the monstrous hound Garm and they will kill each other. Loki and Heimdall, age-old enemies, will meet for a final time, and neither will survive their encounter. The fight between Odin and Fenrir will rage for a long time, but finally Fenrir will seize Odin and swallow him. Odin's son Vidar will at once leap towards the wolf and kill him with his bare hands, ripping the wolf's jaws apart.

Then Surt will fling fire in every direction. The nine worlds will burn, and friends and foes alike will perish. The earth will sink into the sea.

After the destruction, a new and idyllic world will arise from the sea and will be filled with abundant supplies. Some of the gods will survive, others will be reborn. Wickedness and misery will no longer exist and gods and men will live happily together. The descendants of Lif and Lifthrasir will inhabit this earth.

The Nibelung was, they maintained, not only the great man’s own neurosis and anxieties displayed, but that of the world, that it was a vision of coming times.

‘The Boer war proved it,’ Adrian said. ‘The hubris of this nation could not be more illustrative of Odin’s bringing about Ragnorok, because of pride.’
‘But how are you so certain that the Boer war did not fulfil that prophecy?’ Roger asked, pushing up his glasses. He was lying on the floor with his head in Virginia’s lap, taking up most of the floor space. He looked like nothing so much as the Professor he was, with his silvered mass of curing chestnut hair topping a boyish face and outré artistic clothes.
‘Because we are still here,’ Adrian said, ‘and Germany was not involved. Germany will be involved. The Boer war a mere local conflict, a warning to us against the lust for global imperialism.’
‘How do you reason that, my dear?’ Lytton asked blandly.
‘Wagner’s own career suggests it.’ Adrian said, shaking his hair from his face as he sat on the floor near us. ‘It was, first, an allegory of the rise of capitalism, but by the time we come to Rognarok, it has become a global mythos. It is no more poor naïve little Siegfried. He has become Everyman, all of us. We are Siegfried, and the gods will have their revenge.’

‘That’s very pessimistic,’ Clive said.
‘Decadent, at least,’ Roger said, smiling faintly.
‘It’s true!’ Adrian was passionate in pursuit of his idea. ‘We’ve gone beyond the romanticism of Percival—’ he looked up at George here. ‘The golden age cannot be regained. It is broken forever when Odin broke the spear. Our spear is not yet broken, but it will be, mark me.’ He closed his eyes and quoted,
‘Alas God, how wretched, through excessive plaint, Comes the prophecy To the race of Troy. A coiled serpent, proud and merciless, on golden wings out of Germany. It shall conquer England and Scotland, from the Shores of the Scandinavian sea to the Severn.’
‘That’s not Wagner,’ Lytton protested, leafing through the score he held in his lap.
‘No,’ Adrian smiled. ‘It is Taliesin. But the same cycle.’
I was fascinated by his leaping from one tradition to another with such ease. It was implying there was a universal understanding of historical cycles and experience. Roger evidently thought so too.
‘You’re infected with Jungian heresy, Adrian.’ He said.
‘Say more,’ I entreated.
‘Jung just published a book,’ James explained. ‘The Symbols of Transformation. In it, he says there is a – “collective unconscious” – a basic understanding in people of all races of the symbols of myth. But darling,’ he rounded on Adrian, ‘you’re implying that Wagner knew this forty years ago.’
‘I am,’ Adrian said complacently.
‘I can’t agree,’ Clive said.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Because Wagner was seriously influenced by Schopenhauer and Buddhism, ‘ He explained. ‘Both of which have an extremely pessimistic worldview, that cravings and longing are not just what we do, they are what we are and they are the source of all evil, he says. There is no escape. Jung’s observations about the collective unconscious and its applications to the content of myth, are in Wagner’s case much more positive than the composer ever was.’
‘Ah,’ said Roger, smiling. ‘Now you are infected with Nietzschean heresy! Miss Sanders, as you may know since you seem to know Wagner’s work, he and Nietzsche were friends, until they fell out over Wagner’s anti-Semitism—’
Adrian coughed loudly here, but Roger went on relentlessly. ‘Yes I know, Adrian, that you think Wagner had reason to be anti-Semiitic, but we will leave that for now. Nietzsche wrote s series of blistering rebuttals to Wagner’s worldview, staring with “The Case of Wagner”, and then “Die Gotzen-dammerung” – a parody of the Gotterdammerung—’
‘I’ve heard of that,’ I said. ‘I saw it in a shop in Munich, but it looked like it would spoil the joy of the operas, so I didn’t read it.’
‘As well you might,’ Roger agreed, looking at both George and me. ‘It is a severe criticism of romanticism, death as a grace, and Christianity.’
‘I don’t care so very much for Christianity,’ George protested, stirring a little.
Roger laughed softly. ‘No! But I have heard you wax long on the person of Jesus as a noble figure, Galahad, and Nietzsche refutes even that! In the event,’ Roger continued to address himself to me, ‘this was followed on by “Der Antichrist”, whose clear intention was to undermine not only the mythology of Christianity, but the very values of our society which derive from it.’
‘So he was an anarchist?’ I asked. I had learnt that much from George.

‘Oh, much more than that!’ Roger said. ‘He put forth that society is not, as our common philosophy would have it, an the ascent from ancient times, but on the decline, because
an animal, a species, or an individual is “depraved” or “decadent” when it loses its instincts for that which sustains its life, and “prefers what is harmful to it.”
‘”Pity”, says Nietzsche, is “practical nihilism”, the contagion of suffering. By elevating pity to a value – indeed, the highest value – its depressive effects thwart those instincts which preserve life, establishing the deformed or the sick as the standard of value. The rejection of pity did not proscribe generosity, magnanimity, or benevolence; what is rejected is to allow the ill-constituted to define what is good. Nietzsche's attack on “pity” was triggered in part by his revulsion against Wagner's Parsifal—’ He smiled here again, at George. ‘Sorry, dear boy! Nietzsche found it maunderingly pious, and that Wagner, an agnostic, had sold out to the market gods, for Parsifal as you know, was an holy knight, who fell because he succumbed to the sins of the flesh.’

‘The Lovers again!’ said Adrian.
‘What a horror,’ Lytton squeaked in mock-dismay.
‘The pure fool falls, ripely, ripely’ Duncan said, with a long look at George. ‘Far be’t from me the virgin’s mind to taint: Seduction’s dread is here no slight restraint.’ George started, and almost recoiled at this. But, Duncan, sensing panic, desisted and the enigmatic remark went by the way.
‘So,’ Adrian said provokingly to Roger, toying with the fringe of his chair as he spoke in almost indifferent tones, ‘you think Wagner was a pious fraud and a Jew-hater and not a prophet?’
‘We shall see, shan’t we, love?’ Roger returned, silkily.

‘The sceptic,’ pronounced Lytton, ‘is the only truly free spirit, for the sceptic no longer thinks of human life as having its origins in ”spirit” or in “divinity”, but recognises that we are all a natural part of the animal kingdom, free from false moralisms of societal structures set up only to bolster the furtherance of commerce.’ This sounded very much to me like Shaw – which should not have surprised, as he was a friend of theirs. But its underlying idea – that there was no grace to our being, no essential spark – I found very depressing, and said so.
‘Do you think?’ Virginia asked from her place on the floor between Roger and Rupert.
‘Yes! I know there is something beyond mere animism! I have felt it, in the mountains, in art, in music—’
‘The child has it,’ Duncan said, to the others.
‘Well,’ Virginia murmured, perhaps there’s hope for you.’

When we were at length on our way home, well after midnight, being preoccupied with the horrible fate delineated by Virginia’s fortune telling, I asked him what it was that he needed or wanted me to understand about him, that we shouldn’t have the crashing disaster Virginia had foreseen. He looked at me quickly. Even in the dark he looked pale and tired. The evening had been trying for him as well.

‘Are you up to it, just now? The Lord knows I’m not! I’ve had quite enough excitement for one night.’ He ran his hand through his hair and nudged me closer. ‘I’m sorry they were so hard on you. I didn’t think they would be. Even Rupert, Jesus! I need to have a word with him... Anyway, it may help to know I didn’t find it much fun either. I don’t mind talking about relationships, but not if every word from the listener is a dig.’ He lapsed into silence.
I was grateful that he decided to say nothing, I was surprised to discover just them. I really was too overwrought. It would be easy to become just the sort of hysterical shrew Virginia envisaged.
‘Do you mind awfully?’ George asked at last.
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Good.’ The reward for being malleable was a kiss on the forehead. ‘We can have a nice chat when I come to town next week, I promise.’

We had come to my house. The light was on and the shadow in the window could only be one person.
‘Ah, Grace has waited up for you,’ George said.
‘Yes,’ I smiled a little. ‘And will wake me in the morning to be sure I am not late. Or you.’ He paid off the driver and we went inside. Oh I was tired, so very tired! I wanted to sleep forever and forget the slings and arrows.
‘I was proud of you tonight,’ He said, before we parted in the upper hall. ‘You were splendid, Diana.’ It brought me to tears, as nothing else could.

‘Oh my god!’ I covered my mouth, so as not to wake my sisters. He took my hands down. His own were warm, as his eyes were, in the dark.
‘Silly thing!’ He murmured. ‘Why are you so brave on mountains and so hopeless off them?’ For some moments we stood wrapped in warm affection, and presently the nervous fit subsided. ‘Goodnight, liebling,’ he murmured at last. ‘You were magnificent.’ He made to go down the hall, but stopped after a few paces. ‘Virginia’s right, you know,’ he said quietly. ‘There will always be some man to adore you. This one, anyway. Goodnight.’ It meant more than anything he ever said to me, and was the nearest to a declaration I ever got.

Among the Bloomsbury people, I became good friends with Duncan Grant. He was Lytton Strachey’s cousin, and a painter, good friends with Roger Fry, and the pair of them were really responsible for bringing painting into the preponderance of literature in Bloomsbury. It was Duncan who encouraged Vanessa Bell to paint. When Clive and Fry put on the First Post-Impressionist exhibition, the Bloomsbury group were catapulted in to public recognition; that it was at first through infamy hardly concerned them. After the First Post-Impressionist exhibition to celebrate they had a fancy dress party, which was so successful and publicly celebrated that one of the guests admitted at a later similar party of Duncan’s that she expected to find her host clad in nothing at all – and was rather disappointed that he, and the Stephens, were garbed (by Roger Fry) as Gaugin’s Tahitian savages.

Fry gave several public lectures, including one at the Grafton Gallery that George and I attended, which was afterwards published in the Fortnightly Review. Duncan at this juncture was asked to join the New English Art Club, but he eschewed the honour in favour of Walter Sickert’s Fitzroy Square Group, which afterwards became the Camden Town Group. There was a feeling of a new era begun.

Though many people thought Duncan bizarre, I always found him kind and warmly friendly. I enjoyed his playfulness very much, for it was not barbed, at least, not to me. I sometimes used to go to his studio in Fitzroy Square before the Thursday or Friday meetings, on my way from work, meeting George there. One day, I got there before him and was sitting in the great old leather guest’s chair at the back of the room beside the windows. Duncan had very kindly fetched me a cup of tea, much needed, and while he was gone I was looking at the pamphlet from Fry’s lecture. In it there was a Matisse reproduced. I got an idea. When he came back, I said to him eagerly,
‘Duncan, I have an idea!’
He smiled, handing me the cup. ‘Do you?’ He sat down on his little folding three-legged stool that he used for painting, leaning his elbows on his knees. ‘Tell me!’
‘I’d like to make a picture for George. As a joke, you know. He’s always going on about discovering a Postie painting in a stall – a great find – so I thought, just now, can we paint one? Just to tease him, for he’s quite persistent. Can you help me?’

He frowned a little.
‘What do you mean by help? Do you want me to paint it?’
‘No, no, I want you to show me how. Just something small. Is it possible?’
‘I suppose so.’ He laughed, suddenly, joyfully, and leaned back on the stool. ‘Why not!’
I clapped my hands. ‘Splendid!’
‘What shall we do, Cottie?’
‘Ah now, that is where you need to help me, for I haven’t an idea.’
There was the sound of footsteps on the stair. That would be George! Duncan laid his finger beside his nose and said in a low tone, ‘Let me give it some thought and I’ll see you next week. Can you come at the same time?’
I nodded as he got up as George appeared at the door.

The next week when I appeared, deliberately early, having given up part of my lunch to make it on time, Duncan had decided that a Dutch couple would be the most convincing as an authentic Matisse. He had visited the artist at his house outside Paris, where he had seen a painting similar in colour and style to what he had in mind, in bold colours and strong outlines, which, he insisted, should not be too difficult for me to attempt with his help.

I learnt more about the theory and purpose of Post-Impressionist art in those three sessions with Duncan than in any visit to a gallery just talking about it. I asked a thousand questions as we laid down the sketch and painted the background and the rough shapes of the figures in blocks of colour. The background was a medium pale acid green, which colour was just then very popular and which Matisse, so said Duncan, had taken from a tin of preserved plums in his wife’s pantry. The couple themselves, variegated in shades of beige with bright clothing in scarlet and azure, were fairly flat-looking and disappointing to me, having spent hours in galleries looking at Renaissance art with George, but Duncan said,
‘No no, it’s perfect. We don’t want too much modernist detail – we want it to look experimentally mediaeval.’ He rolled his eyes at me with an ironic smile. ‘We also don’t want it to look too much like my own work, with George knows very well.’ The paints Duncan had used were, I thought, surprisingly quick-drying for oils. He explained that this was a trick he had got from mediaeval artists. Within a month, the little painting was ready to give to George. I took it home the day before he was supposed to come up for a weekend, and put it on the kitchen table.

‘What’s that?’ Jack said taking one of the chunks of bread and butter Grace had put on the big kitchen table for tea.
‘A painting for George.’
‘I can see that!’ He grinned. ‘Hullo, for George? What for?’
‘A joke,’ I said.
‘I don’t understand. How can a painting be a joke?’
‘I made it,’ I said. He and my sisters turned round to stare at me.
‘You what? Crikey!’ Jack picked up the cardboard and examined it. It was not very big – only five by seven – a test piece, as Duncan explained. ‘Well well, there’s some hope for you after all, even if you are uneducated.’ He smiled as I made a face at him. He put the picture back on the table and Jenny took it up. ‘Well I for one would like very much to see how Galahad takes this one!’ Jack said.
‘Well you will if you don’t go out, because he’ll be here in a moment.’
‘Oh jolly!’

George arrived shortly afterward, and if he was perplexed by the extra attention from Jack and my sisters, he didn’t show it. We all trooped into the kitchen and there, to my great embarrassment, was the picture, propped up against the milk jug. I should have been happy at the closeness of my family but, my goodness! Couldn’t I even pull off a harmless joke without them in my pocket?
‘Cottie has a present for you!’ Jack blurted, like a four year old. ‘Jack!’ I protested, but George only smiled his elfin smile. ‘Do you?’
‘Yes,’ I said, rather irritated now that the joy of the joke was spoiled. I picked up the picture and gave it to him. There, in the lower left hand corner, was a signature Duncan had copied from a letter he had from the artist. The wonder on George’s face was worth all the trouble taken.
‘A Matisse? You found a Matisse? For me!’
To my astonishment he put the picture down on the table and danced round the kitchen with me.
‘Thank you thank you thank you!’

Jack and Jenny were laughing now and even Grace smirked as she stood with her arms crossed at the end of the table.
‘But where did you find it?’ George asked at last as we came to a stop. He took up the picture again, and examined it closely.
‘In London,’ I said, not wishing to be too suspiciously specific. ‘Duncan helped me.’
He looked up, startled. ‘Duncan! When did you find it?’
‘About a month ago… he went along to the dealer to make sure everything was correct.’ A small lie but necessary. George was absorbed in the picture and did not appear to be listening.
‘Shall we sit down?’ Grace asked, practical as ever.

We sat down to tea, George marvelling over the little painting, comparing it to the Bathers with Turtles we had seen at the exhibition – and indeed it was not dissimilar, both in the colour of the background and the outlining of the figures – and I began to realise how very careful – and clever – Duncan had been in the composition. He really had enjoyed it! George really liked the ‘unmitigated’ colour of the clothing (the styles of which Duncan had taken from old Dutch Masters, van Eyck and others.) As he sat there exclaiming, obviously moved and delighted, my family began to exchange conspiratorial glances. But when George said suddenly, ‘You must tell me the shop! You must! I want to see of there are any other such gems. Perhaps I can convince my parents that it would be a worthy Christmas present—’ I could bear no more.

I hadn’t expected him to take it all so seriously, hadn’t expected him to take it for anything but what it was, a mock up, a parody of Matisse – and of his obsession with him. I wasn’t half clever enough to think up an art dealer’s shop on the spot, and felt rather backed into a corner now. I looked at Jack, who sat at my left. He looked so smug! I wanted to kick him under the table, but I dared not!
‘George,’ I broke in to his raptures. ‘I have something to tell you about the little painting—’
He looked up in surprise. ‘What?’
‘I didn’t get it at a dealer,’ I began.
‘Coward!’ Jack chortled. Oh he was enjoying this far too much!
George looked perplexed at this. ‘Eh? Where did you get it, then?’
I found myself colouring. ‘I didn’t get it anywhere,’ I stammered. ‘I was talking to Duncan about how you’re always going on about finding one on the cheap – and I had the idea – Oh! To make one up. So—’

He paused, thunderstruck, and looked from me to the little painting. Confusion, disbelief, and a dawning possibility all showed in his face in those long speechless moments. At last he managed,
‘Do you mean to say… that Duncan painted this? Oh, I say!’
‘No,’ I confessed at last. ‘Duncan didn’t paint it… I did… But he drew it and gave me the colours….’ I looked at him feeling painfully deceitful now. ‘You’re not angry with me, are you? I – I just thought it would be a good joke! I never thought you’d think it an original!’
He stopped, thunderstruck again, his eyes wide as saucers. ‘YOU painted this?’
‘That’s what I said,’ Jack murmured drolly.
I swatted him with my napkin.
‘You painted this?’ George repeated, unable to take it in. Then the humour of the whole thing slowly began to dawn on him, and his face bloomed with delight, silent at first, then he said, repeatedly as the enormity of the joke sank in, ‘Oh! Oh!’ in the way that he had.
Then he laughed out loud and I was able to breathe again.

As we closed the door behind us on our way to Bloomsbury, George paused, his hand on the latch, and said,
‘I really want to thank you for this little picture, you know. It was a good joke, but it is an even better present, because you and Duncan cooked this up and made it yourselves, just for me. That makes it even more special than an actual Matisse. Thank you.’ His look was warm. This was too public a place for any other sign of affection. It was my turn now to be genuinely embarrassed, for I had had no such high motives as that! But how could I tell him so?

We walked over to Bloomsbury, and when we came into the parlour Duncan knew instantly we appeared that the joke had come off successfully. He smiled like a Cheshire cat from his place in the great chair that separated the two parts of the room.
‘I scent success,’ he murmured with great satisfaction. George went and embraced him, with kisses in the Italian manner.
‘You’re quite wicked,’ George said good naturedly, tugging at a lock of Duncan’s abundant chestnut hair.
‘But of course, darling,’ Duncan returned. ‘If one cannot be wicked, what is the point of life?’ This insouciance was belied in his expression, which was quite tender. Now, Duncan was supposed to be a terrible cynic, social rebel, and fickle, but I had never seen him so. He could be coy, and waspish sometimes to others, but to George and to me he was also so very kind. This contributed in great part to my bewilderment later.
‘So let’s see it,’ Clive said, coming forward, something in the manner of the landlord demanding the rent.

George and I looked at one another. Before we had come out I had tucked the thing in my handbag, and good thing that I did! ‘They’ll want to see it,’ he had agreed then. I took it out now and handed it over. Vanessa, Clive, Roger and Duncan all stood together examining it, holding it this way and that, to the light, at arm’s lengths, and so on, like a specimen.
‘Well, I say,’ Roger murmured, looking over the tops of his glasses. ‘This is quite extraordinary! You painted this, Cottie?’
I smiled, with a glance at Duncan. ‘Well, I was the hand, yes, but the design and colour and all were all Duncan.’
‘Nevertheless, execution counts for much,’ Clive said.
‘It’s not complicated,’ I protested.
‘But you’ve never painted anything before,’ Vanessa said.
‘Good heavens no!’
‘I think you make a splendid team,’ Vanessa said, with an arch look at Duncan. ‘You could have a brilliant career in art forgeries.’ This, I discovered later, was as close as the group ever came to complimenting one another on their painting.

Among those who came that evening were Hilt Young, Geoffrey’s brother, and Katherine Cox – Ka, as she was known, was one of the Neo-Pagans, a group of mostly university aged people interested in the ‘simple life’, Fabianism, and naked bathing. This last activity was attended by both sexes, but was never a bacchanal, according to the participants, including Geoffey Keynes. Ka was Virginia’s very good friend, which was for me perhaps the sole saving grace about Virginia, for if she loved Ka she could not be completely intolerable. Tall and well proportioned, with a strong athletic body, and masses of chestnut hair, Ka was handsome rather than pretty, as can be seen in Duncan’s various portraits of her, including The Seated Woman. She was also an artist by profession and was then in the midst of a triangle with Rupert and Noel Olivier (whom Rupert loved rather hopelessly). She had had a proposal recently from Roger Fry, and although she turned him down there were no hard feelings – none that anyone saw, at any rate. She was afterwards to marry Will Forster, George’s and my good friend, but that was after a disastrous sojourn in Germany with Rupert which left them both rather scarred.

Hilt of course was well-familiar to us. He knew the Stephens because his father George was good friends with Sir Leslie, and as a child he had played with Thoby and Adrian in Kensington Gardens. But he was fantastically interested in Post-Impressionism, much to my surprise, for Geoffrey had no taste for it. Hilt had recently become the financial editor of the Morning Post, after having spent a year and a half as the assistant editor of the Economist, which was so much more than a financial magazine. Personally, I’d have preferred the Economist, but I suppose the career boost of being a head editor was more important to him than variety of work. Hilt was very much interested in Cezanne especially, but at the Second Post-Impressionist exhibition, when it came, he bought several works by lesser artists, and one of Duncan’s version of The Dancers.
Hilt was, as he described himself, ‘an insider on the outside’ at Bloomsbury, for the group was ‘very exclusive – it did not suffer fools gladly. They lived in an intellectual enclosure. But they were curious about the outside world, rather, one might say, as a collector of beetles, for instance, is interested in the world of beetles. They were glad that some selected beetles, as it were, should come into the enclosure for them to find out what was going on there outside: that was how I came in. My own gradual change from orthodox opinion was no doubt already in progress: but I have no doubt that its progress was helped by contact with those fine minds, which had so wholly freed themselves from the burden of tradition.’

I wondered if George was as perplexed by this odd brood as I was on first meeting. They appeared very open and casual, but their every word seemed haunted by nuances and elisions to open secrets known only by the group. The Stephens were brilliant, there can be no doubt – Thoby at Maths and Classics, Adrian at Logic and Psychoanalysis, and Vanessa and Virginia at painting and scribbling, respectively – but there was something unaccountably wrong about them, a persistent flat or off-key note that destroyed the symphony.

By the time I met them, Thoby had died of typhus after a family trip to Turkey, and their father had also died, of cancer I think it was, and Adrian and the girls had moved into Gordon Square; Vanessa had married Clive Bell, and they had invited Duncan Grant into their intimate circle, so I never got to know the bright-eyed young man who looked out from photographs, except by hearsay. But I always thought him the steadiest and most promising of the lot, and that it was a great cruel irony that he should have been the one to die so young. Leonard Woolf said of him, ‘In his monolithic character, his monolithic common-sense, his monumental judgments he continually reminded one of Dr. Johnson, but a Samuel Johnson who had shed his neuroticism, his irritability, his fears. He had a perfectly “natural” style of writing, flexible, lucid, but rather formal, old-fashioned, almost Johnsonian or at any rate eighteenth century. And there was a streak of the same natural style in his talk. Any wild statement, speculative judgment, or Strachean exaggeration would be met with a “Nonsense, my good fellow”, from Thoby, and then a sentence of profound, but humorous, common-sense, and a delighted chuckle.’

The young Stephens had a very difficult childhood. Their father, the great man as he was known to the world, the first man to climb the Schreckhorn, was difficult: taciturn, withdrawn, moody, with a tendency to draw everyone into his depression, which was quite an unpleasant surprise about the adored author of The Playground of Europe when I came to know it, in a hansom with George after another particularly bad evening in Gordon Square which ended for me with an icy confrontation with Virginia – whom, I must confess, I never came to like.
‘You should not blame Virginia too much, sweetheart,’ he said, taking my hand.
‘Why ever not?’ I fumed. ‘She’s a perfect bitch to me and she always has been.’
‘It’s not her fault,’ he sighed. ‘She’s already had a couple of nervous breakdowns, and is rather fragile.’
‘Oh.’ Well now, I felt crass indeed. Just another instance of putting my foot in it! I should have known better. ‘What happened?’

He told me the story that Sir Leslie had been married once before, to Harriet, or Minny, Thackeray – thus there was a connection between them and Ruth Mallory’s family, for Hugh Turner was a distant Thackeray relation. The Stephens’ daughter Laura, their only child, turned out to be mentally deficient and insane and was first institutionalised when she was just eight years old. Then Minny died, and within a short while, he married Julia Duckworth, a widow. With Julia, came three children in tow: George, Gerald, and beautiful Stella. Their parents were, in Virginia’s words, ‘Beautiful often, even to our eyes, were their gestures, their glances of pure and unutterable delight in each other.’ But her home life was quite irregular. She told Vita Sackville West years later that their upbringing had been ‘a horror’ – No school; mooning about alone among her father's books; never any chance to pick up all that goes on in schools – throwing balls; ragging; slang; vulgarities; scenes; jealousies. The girls were unsocialised into common life.
The Duckworth children were a great deal older than their Stephens siblings, and it was
when Julia died, when Virginia was thirteen, that the trouble began. Stella mothered her younger siblings as much as she was able, until she married, but even she could not prevent abuses.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked George.
His face went grim and quiet, and he tossed back his hair, sighing. ‘Gerald was perverted and had sex with both the girls from the time they were barely in their teens. But mostly Virginia.’ The bluntness with which he offered this terrible statement was as shocking as the news. I could hardly take it in.
‘With his own sister? That’s disgusting!’
‘Well, Byron did the same,’ George said flatly, running his hand through his hair again. He was more disturbed by this revelation of the ugly side of human nature than he liked to show, I saw.
‘Well, my goodness! Did no one ever inform the police? How do you know about it?’
He smiled a little now. ‘No, no police. What a lovely scandal that would be! The respectable Sir Leslie’s children involved in such an imbroglio! No, they kept it to themselves. As for how did I know—’ He paused here, yawning. ‘Excuse me. Virginia told me.’ He looked at me directly.
‘Why would she tell you?’
He sighed and went quiet. ‘Because she found a kindred spirit in me. I was quite depressed when there one evening – about ... a friend of mine at Cambridge – and she came near and asked me what the matter was. When she is not in one of her low periods she can be quite devoted and sympathetic. So I told her something of it and she commiserated with me and told me she understood the burden of bearing secrets... and told me what had happened to her. Ever since then, I have been more patient with her moods, for she has suffered a very great deal more than any of the rest of us are likely to do.’ He paused. ‘She had a mental breakdown after her mother died, which surely was exacerbated by her monstrous brother. And when Thoby died, she had another. She went for a rest cure in the country both times. The Lord knows what they did to her there! That too, is among her secrets, for she wouldn’t tell even me that.’ He took my hand again. ‘So forgive her, if you can, won’t you?’
‘Yes.’ How could I not, the poor creature?

One may question, since her brother, Maynard Keynes, and James Strachey all were interested in psychology and Adrian and James afterwards became Freudian analysts, why didn't Virginia have an analysis? Now, she was quite scathing in her remarks about Freud, but Virginia was scathing about everyone and everything; it was part of her internal destructiveness no doubt related to her depressive illness. I asked Adrian about this years afterward, and he told me that analysts are usually reluctant to treat patients who have actually been mad and Virginia's first breakdown could hardly have been treated even by Freud himself: it was contemporaneous with his Studien über Hysterie. The Freudian techniques had barely have been heard of in this country at the time of her second breakdown and even in 1913 when she had her third, there were very few analysts in the country capable of treating such in entrenched illness. James at that time was not yet qualified as an analyst, and neither was Adrian, though in the latter case it was probably not a good idea that her brother attempt psychoanalysis on her.

But crucially, there was in addition a deep suspicion on the part of a number of the Bloomsbury Group because of the psychoanalytic designation of homosexuality as a pathological condition to be cured. Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey as active homosexuals would have shied away from any such therapeutic endeavour.
Lytton’s great friend and fellow Apostle at Cambridge, Leonard Woolf, who afterwards married Virginia, had reviewed Brill's translation of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1914. He also claimed to have read the translation of The Interpretation of Dreams published the year before, in 1913. Leonard’s interest in Freud was sympathetic and apparently extensive and he was proud of it, at least in later years. He must have been reading these works just at the time that Virginia was having her major breakdown in 1913-1914.


But in the midst of this undercurrent of morbidity, they did not lose their taste for practical jokes. Adrian encouraged Virginia and Duncan Grant to take part in an exploit, dressing up as the Emperor of Abyssinia and his retinue. They informed the admiralty that the Emperor wished to visit the Channel Fleet of the British Navy and its flag ship the ‘Dreadnought’. They were received with the dignity and ceremony appropriate to their apparent standing. They talked in a mixture of Swahili and an invented language and Adrian acted as the group’s interpreter. Again their hoax was later revealed but the Navy were keen to keep scandal under wraps. It was not until much later when he was well established as an analyst that Adrian wrote up their exploits as The Dreadnought Hoax which was published in 1936 by the Hogarth Press.
When war broke out both Adrian and his wife Karin, as well as Duncan and Lytton and James and Leonard, became conscientious objectors. They spent the First World War working on a farm in Essex.

Then there was Eddie Marsh, Sir Edward, as he became later. He was a friend of George’s at Cambridge, having gone to Trinity. He was a climber, and often part of the Pen-y-Pass scene, and was one of those who went in for naked cliff-climbing in Cornwall with George and Geoffrey in the summer of 1911. In 1906 he entered the civil service and became the private secretary to Winston Churchill, holding the post for 23 years.
Eddie was also friends with Rupert, and by this way he got to know the Bloomsberries.
In 1911 he bought a painting by Duncan Grant from Robert Ross's Carfax Gallery and he developed an interest in contemporary British painting. He also became a patron for other artists such as Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, and Stanley Spencer. While staying at Raymond Buildings with him in 1912 Rupert gave Eddie the idea of compiling an anthology of modern verse. So, on 19th September they gave a lunch at the Raymond Building flat for Harold Monro and his friend Arundel del Re, together with Wilfrid Gibson and John Drinkwater, They discussed the proposed anthology and in December 1912 Harold Monro published the first volume under the title Georgian Poetry, and over the next decade a further four volumes followed with Eddie as the editor. Apart from Rupert and Monro, other original contributors were James Flecker, Walter de la Mare, and D. H. Lawrence. In 1917 they were followed by Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves – George’s old Carthusian – and Robert Nichols. It was George who introduced Robert Graves to Eddie, thus being instrumental in launching his career as a poet and writer. It is for Georgian Poetry that Rupert is best remembered, but Eddie is known to the world as a diplomat and not an editor or a climber, though he was quite well known round the crags in Wales and the Lake District before and between the wars.

But I cannot leave this recollection of Bloomsbury days without mentioning Will Arnold-Forster, for he became a lifelong friend to me. I may have met him eventually through George or Geoffrey Young, both of whom knew him well, but it his connection with Rupert and Duncan as a fellow painter that I came to know him in 1911 and 1912.
Tall, spindleshanks, with tousled brown hair, spectacles and an habitually quizzical expression, Will was enquiring, incisive, sceptical, insightful, romantic and kind. He spent a good deal of time in Italy, studying painting, just before the war – much of it with Geoffrey – and his paintings have about them, early and late, the lovely quality of light of Tuscany. He was the head of the Labour Party in Cornwall; his father before him, had been one of Gladstone’s firm supporters in Parliament, through the bad days of the Parnell scandal and the Irish Home Rule question, for the Arnolds and the Forsters were Anglo-Irish – and one of his first books was on the blockade during and after the Great War. His writings of the history of peace negotiations after both wars stand out as treasures illustrating what can be accomplished by men of fair minds and right hearts. Many of them were published by the Hogarth Press, which was set up by Leonard and Virginia in 1917. He was related in some fashion – cousins, I believe – to the Huxley family, Trevenen, Aldous, Julian, Margaret, Julia and so on, and it is because of Will that I cam to have an interest in their writing. Even George could not convince me of that!

In early youth, he had been a Lieutenant in the Navy, but his natural predisposition was anything but militant; Will spoke out against arms profiteering, in print and under testimony to the Arms Inquiry Council in 1935. He was a member of the Headquarters Executive of the League of Nations, and was a correspondence at the conferences at Geneva. In addition to all this, he was a famous gardener, and wrote several gardening books famous throughout the country right down to the present time.

But Will’s primary attraction was his charm and lovability. Ruth Mallory said of him as early as 1914 when she met him that she ‘could love him very much’. It makes me very happy to know that she afterwards did, and to play some small part in getting them together. His marriage to Ka Cox was one of the smoothest, most compatible I have ever witnessed, and certainly deserved by them both, especially dear Ka, after her disastrously damaging affair with Rupert and the winter in Germany in 1913. But in no way was the marriage, for Ka, settling for ‘second best’ or merely to salve a broken heart. There was real love there, because it began in friendship, in the days of our country walkabouts and the bathing parties that were subsidiary to the Bloomsbury gatherings.