E. M. Forster, Gerald Heard, and Bloomsbury

87 E. M. FORSTER. GERALD HEARD. AND BLOOMSEURY By George H. Thomson (Cambridge, Massachusetts) In 1929, E. M. Forster Jotted down some thoughts about Bloomsbury . These give a valuable Impromptu lnslsht Into Forster's attitude toward his nearest contemporaries. But on the specific question whether he should himself be accounted a member of the Bloomsbury group, he Is non-commltal. The suggestion of a balanced summing up by an outsider Is countered by the personal resonance of the assertion: "They are in the English tradition." Concerning the question whether Bloomsbury exists, the Note Is also silent but for a very different reason. Forster takes Its existence for granted. It seems probable too that he had no fussy Ideas about precisely when It came Into being. He says In effect that friendship Is characteristic of the group, and It Is a well known fact that more than half of those who by any standard must be accounted members were close associates at Cambridge before the turn of the century. Forster's testimony Is especially valuable right now when Michael Holroyd, In his Impressive biography of Lytton Strachey, has rather pooh-poohed the whole Idea In his chapter "Bloomsbury: The Legend and the Myth." A close reading shows that Holroyd's analysis Is more ambivalent than his title would suggest. But one can hardly fall to be Impressed by the statement that Bloomsbury was a "largely fictitious coterie." Forster's I929 Jottings are an Implicit denial of this Judgment. What Induced him to set these thoughts down, we do not know. He may have been considering an essay on the topic. Or he may have been responding to an immediate Irritation: W. J. Turner's suggestion that Bloomsbury would not enjoy Schnabel. "Why drag the place In . . .?"he asks. Or, again, his reading of a book by Gerald Heard may have focused the subject for him. At any rate, he wrote "Bloomsbury, An Early Note: February, 1929"; and In November 1956 he published It In Pawn ( a magazine produced In King's College, Cambridge). There he concludes that Bloomsbury may be understood In the light of Gerald Heard's analysis of lntellectuallsm. In saying this he does not explicitly Invoke Heard's general theory of evolving civilization and advancing consciousness, but I would propose that our understanding of the complexity of Forster's relationship to Bloomsbury Is enriched by an awareness of Heard's theory. The Note has four paragraphs. The first says Bloomsbury "Is the only genuine movement in English civilization. . . . The other movements are antl-Bloomsbury, and cheap, envious and self-conscious . ..." Moreover - and this Is a point Leonard Woolf aas Insisted upon - Bloomsbury Is "composed of people who hold similar opinions and like being with one another." In their stance towards others they are unkind, yes; but on a more serious charge 88 they are found not guilty: "Contempt for the outsider plays a very small part In Bloomsbury*s activity and rests on Inattention rather than arrogance." Forster here answers a common complaint, and one which two years later was to receive vicious expression In L.H. Myer's novel. Prince Jail. In that story a group of extreme Individualists who make up the coterie known as the Pleasance of the Arts are said to depend, after all, upon a "solid, shockable world of decorum and commoa sense. They had to believe that a great ox-like eye was fixed upon them In horror . Without this their lives lost their point."1 In the third paragraph of the Note the Bloomsberrles are called gentlefolks. One thinks of the opening sentences of Chapter VI of Howards End, sentences which those who hate Bloomsbury have gone out of their way to make famous: "We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk . ..." In the Note Forster says these gentlefolk require a culture In harmony with their social position. "Hence their stability." Hence the way they contrast on the one side with Joyee and D.H. Lawrence ("gamlndom" - the street urchins of literature , so to say) and on the other side with the...