Notes from London

Since December I have been almost entirely penned inside my London flat, disabled by a very heavy fall. This means that the world must get on without my help, and I am reduced to observing as in a mirror, like the Lady of Shalott. It is true I see no long-haired page in crimson clad, no abbot nor an ambling lad, but there are plenty of the long-haired who are not pages, and plenty of lads where they take their rest and indulge their peculiar pleasures. For this is Bloomsbury, where people really were afraid of Virginia Woolf, with her viper’s tongue and unbalanced jealousies. The Bloomsbury Set were really based on the teachings of Moore in his Principia Ethica, though Moore might have been more than a trifle startled by the behavior of some of his disciples. High Thinking and Low Living seems to have been the motto of many of them. There can seldom have been a coterie with so much disorderly living and so much malicious and dishonorable gossip. Virginia Woolf might be excused, for she was quite demented for long periods, but there was little to be said for the preposterous Lytton Strachey, with his complicated and unsavory amours, his ear fetishism and his gloating study of judicial tortures, or for J. M. Keynes with his breathtaking vanity and his utterly squalid homosexuality.

The only one of the famous Bloomsbury figures who is still undiminished in stature is E. M. Forster whose recent death was noted with obituaries of hushed reverence. I find this curious. How did a man whose last fiction was published in 1924 continue to be regarded as the greatest novelist of his age? I was always a heretic with regard to Forster. I thought Howards End was snobbish, meanly facetious in some places and commonplace in others. A Passage to India struck me as wisdom-of-the-East hokum and obviously the work of a man whose passage was in an air-conditioned first-class carriage.

CB

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Colm Brogan

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Since December I have been almost entirely penned inside my London flat, disabled by a very heavy fall. This means that the world must get on without my help, and I am reduced to observing as in a mirror, like the Lady of Shalott. It is true I see no long-haired page in crimson clad, no abbot nor an ambling lad, but there are plenty of the long-haired who are not pages, and plenty of lads where they take their rest and indulge their peculiar pleasures. For this is Bloomsbury, where people really were afraid of Virginia Woolf, with her viper’s tongue and unbalanced jealousies. The Bloomsbury Set were really based on the teachings of Moore in his Principia Ethica, though Moore might have been more than a trifle startled by the behavior of some of his disciples. High Thinking and Low Living seems to have been the motto of many of them. There can seldom have been a coterie with so much disorderly living and so much malicious and dishonorable gossip. Virginia Woolf might be excused, for she was quite demented for long periods, but there was little to be said for the preposterous Lytton Strachey, with his complicated and unsavory amours, his ear fetishism and his gloating study of judicial tortures, or for J. M. Keynes with his breathtaking vanity and his utterly squalid homosexuality.

The only one of the famous Bloomsbury figures who is still undiminished in stature is E. M. Forster whose recent death was noted with obituaries of hushed reverence. I find this curious. How did a man whose last fiction was published in 1924 continue to be regarded as the greatest novelist of his age? I was always a heretic with regard to Forster. I thought Howards End was snobbish, meanly facetious in some places and commonplace in others. A Passage to India struck me as wisdom-of-the-East hokum and obviously the work of a man whose passage was in an air-conditioned first-class carriage.