The Loving Friends, A Portrait of Bloomsbury, by David Gadd {Harcourt, 210 pp., $6.95). David Gadd started out with a great idea: to write, not an intellectual history, but a Baedeker to Bloomsbury, pointing out the principal monuments and curiosities for the sake of those who were put off by the imposingness of Michael Holroyd’s two volumes on Lytton Strachey, Quentin Bell’s big book on Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf’s five volumes of autobiography. But in compressing this mass of material into a slim volume, and in deliberately avoiding much discussion of what these people thought and wrote, he winds up painting a group portrait so unattractive that I can’t imagine anyone who didn’t already know Bloomsbury finishing this book, let alone going on to Holroyd or Bell or Woolf. Mr. Gadd hasn’t learnt from his subjects that to convince a reader you musn’t merely tell him, you must show him. Thus, he tells us from time to time that Virginia Woolf was witty and loving and fun, but the only incidents he details show her being bitchy, unfunny, and cruel. He describes Roger Fry’s affair with (Mrs.) Vanessa Bell, but doesn’t mention, for example, Roger Fry hilariously trying to teach E. M. Forster how to look at pictures. He gives us a sense of the querulousness of Lytton Strachey’s life, but not the dignity of his death. The Loving Friends is useful for its overview, and I liked the section on Ralph Partridge. But I wish Mr. Gadd had taken an extra fifty pages to justify his title.
LINDA BRIDGES
Comments