Bloomsbury Boom

Book Reviews Bloomsbury Boom Regina Marler. Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997. 296 pp. $24.00 I WAS RECENTLY introduced at a seminar by my host as the author of a book on Bloomsbury and she asked whether yet another book on the subject was necessary. In a recent New York Times Book Review Bruce McCaIl in an allegedly humorous way attacked what he called "Bloomorama! Bloomania! Bloomsburiana!" ending his piece as follows: "Asked to account for the enduring public fascination with the Bloomsbury Group, one Los Angeles literapsychologist responds with an eloquent shrug. 'It's clearly the cult thing. Or the English social snobbery thing. Or maybe the nostalgia thing, which is as addictive today as the suffering artist thing has always been. Running through it all, remember , is the confused-sexual-identity thing. And to top it all off, the idea of artists as celebrities, and vice versa, is as old as F. Scott Fitzgerald, if not quite as old as Joan Collins.'" To lapse into the rather Philistine tone that anti-Bloomsbury seems to bring out, the Group somehow pushes people 's "button" and they feel perfectly justified in being gratuitously rude or to attempt to be mocking in surprisingly blunt ways. Why? Regina Marler's splendid Bloomsbury Pie goes a long way to answering that question. One is deeply grateful to have her appropriately witty discussion written with great verve and distinction. Certainly there is no doubt that interest in Bloomsbury has vastly increased over the last thirty years and one understands it far better thanks to this study. Although Bloomsbury's detractors will have one believe that the most obscure discussion of the most peripheral member of the group will bring out book buyers in their thousands, such is far from being the case. If anything, "Boom" may be too extravagant a word, although perfectly appropriate as a subtitle, as such central texts as Andrew McNeillie's definitive and brilliantly done volumes of Virginia Woolfs essays have minuscule sales. Marler perceptively analyzes the history of the interest in Bloomsbury . She pinpoints the publication of Michael Holroyd's mammoth biography of Lytton Strachey of 1967 and 1968 as a cardinal text, although 317 ELT 41 : 3 1998 Holroyd's two subsequent revised editions have, not surprisingly, caused much less stir. There are, in my view, deep ironies in the importance of this work, which have been intensified in the subsequent editions . Strachey may have been moving towards a more public position on homosexuality before his premature death in 1932, but on the whole Bloomsbury firmly believed in total personal freedom within the context of the strong English tradition of "doing what you want but don't disturb the horses," i.e. not going public. (Needless to say, this attitude is now resented ; that they weren't out of the closet is seen as yet another example of elitism.) The Strachey biography came at an extraordinary moment, in the wake of the Wolfenden Report's finally implemented recommendation that the British anti-homosexual laws be repealed. There was also, of course, that extraordinary growth of political activity and belief in sexual freedom of the late 1960s. It could be argued that the biography had far more influence on the genre (as Strachey's own Eminent Victorians had had in 1918) than it did in popularizing Bloomsbury; it heralded the biographer's right to tell all. But despite the increase of interest in Bloomsbury that the Strachey biography brought about, it also did Bloomsbury a disservice, even more emphasized in subsequent editions: the life became more important than the work. True, in the wake of the boom, fugitive works of Strachey were published and his papers were conveniently flogged to the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas. The interest in his life has fortunately meant that most of his works are now in print in paperback. Strachey does not have the mega-position occupied by Virginia Woolf. In his case, gay studies—masculism?—has not made him the hotly disputed figure that has characterized the "boom" aspects of Woolf. And of course she is the greater writer...