Bloomsbury and France:Art and Friends (review)

Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends. By Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird Wright. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. xviii + 430 pp. $35.00.

"The two things Clive cared about were art and friends," Frances Partridge told one of the co-authors of Bloomsbury and France in 1997. Much of the art and many of the friends were French, of course, and Clive Bell's francophilia was shared by his contemporaries Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Dora Carrington, Dorothy and Lytton Strachey, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Clive and Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Vita Sackville-West, and Ottoline Morrell. And across the Channel were the anglophiles: André Gide, Jacques Copeau, Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Charles Vildrac, Charles Mauron, and others.

However, if Bloomsbury loved France, Caws and Wright caution that "their Francophilia was selective": Matisse and Picasso, but not Robert and Sonia Delaunay or André Breton, for instance. Whereas Duncan Grant was in Paris at the time of the Fauve exhibitions (1905-06), he admitted he had not been conscious of the movement. Roger Fry had met the French surrealists but disliked them, as he did the other avant-garde movements of the day. Lytton Strachey, despite his fluency in French and frequent visits to France, disliked the use of French and even refused to address his sister Dorothy's husband, Simon Bussy, in his language. In fact, "despite their lifelong attachment to France and periodic residence there, the Bloomsbury group as a whole were not particularly integrated into the principal political and intellectual currents of French life" (8).

Yet aside from this selective isolationism, the Anglo-French interrelations were remarkably wide-ranging: Fry promoted French art (Cézanne) and literature (Proust) for the Bloomsbury group, and also disconcerted British viewers by mounting the momentous 1910 and 1912 Post-Impressionist Exhibitions in London; chemist-turned-translator Charles Mauron rendered Forster and Woolf into French--Fry commended him (write the co-authors) for "smoothing out her unevenness"--while Fry translated Mauron's books on psychocriticism into English, as well as the works of Mallarmé, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud; Clara Malraux, first wife of André, translated A Room of One's Own; Dorothy Strachey translated Gide; Clive Bell published books about Cézanne; Lytton Strachey, Fry, and Sackville-West wrote studies and biographies of French artists, writers and historic figures; Duncan Grant collaborated closely with theater director Jacques Copeau. There were also strong affinities between Grant and Degas and Chardin; between Vanessa Bell and Pissarro; and--in their own bathers, still lifes, harbor scenes, and landscapes--a debt to Cézanne, Matisse, and Derain. In early 1914, when Grant discovered some rolls of wallpaper in his Paris hotel closet, he gave them to Picasso--who used them in seven collages!

There is something heady at the thought of Clive Bell, in 1920s Paris, sharing a café table with the Braques or Fernand Léger or Max Jacob; meeting Proust and Joyce at an evening celebrating Sergei Diaghilev; examining Gertrude Stein's art collection; or being flirted with by an intoxicated Isadora Duncan in Montmartre. There were also deeper friendships: Fry thought Gide "almost too ridiculously my counterpart in taste & feeling. It's like finding a twin," he wrote to Vanessa. And there were deeper tensions. Fry on Clive Bell: "He has no rudder; he simply floats in the current of avant-garde opinion." Bell on Fry: "what he pleases to call translations of Mallarmé." In 1928, on holiday in France with Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West recorded in her diary: "Virginia is curiously feminist. She dislikes the possessiveness and love of domination in men."

The emotional and sexual interconnections were as intoxicating as the intellectual ones, and Bloomsbury and France makes good use of hitherto unpublished letters, journal entries, and photographs from numerous archives to allow us a glimpse at the underlying passions and jealousies that permeated these intersecting circles of friends and lovers. Dorothy Strachey's masochistic...