Some of the latter even discovered Berlin and tried conversion therapy at a German clinic run by one Doctor Marten, where, as Lytton described it in a letter to Dora: “They walk about haggard on the lawn, wondering whether they could bear the thought of a woman’s private parts, and gazing at their little lovers, who run round and round with a camera, snapshotting Lytton Strachey.” In short, things got quite gay. Young Bloomsbury belonged to a different England the shock and horror of the Great War gave way to the Bright Young Things. In fact, Dora married Ralph Partridge, one of Lytton’s boyfriends, to keep him in their ménage à trois with Lytton, and after Dora killed herself-which was soon after Lytton died-Ralph married another woman, an English writer named Frances Marshall. Lytton made a home for himself at Ham Spray (where do they get these names?) with the apparently heterosexual artist Dora Carrington in a platonic marriage of sorts, during which both of them sometimes had sex with the same young man. Lytton took a pillow to his hearing to sit on because he had hemorrhoids and, when asked what he would do if a German soldier attempted to rape his sister, replied: “I would try to interpose my body between them.” He and Woolf are the two presiding spirits of Bloomsbury, or at least the ones you keep hoping will be quoted. When World War I erupted, most of the original Bloomsbury set were conscientious objectors. It would be hard to imagine a more formidable queen than Lytton Strachey: arch, maso-chistic, attracted to masculine tops. However, even after reading this book, I found it very hard to say just what Bloomsbury was: bisexual, homosexual, polyamorous, genderfluid, or simply English intellectual. Old and Young Bloomsbury seem to have achieved the dream of a communal sexual utopia that inspired the Oneida Community in 19th-century America, or movies, much later, like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Threesomes and shared lovers were almost the norm as the handsome young Oxbridge graduates kept showing up before and after the War, some of them butch, some femme, all available to both sexes. They saw no point in divorce: if a husband or wife fell in love with someone else, or decided to live apart, that was no reason to dissolve the union. Suffice it to say, the members of both Bloomsburys fell in love, or lust, had sex, and moved on to other partners, without apparent resentment, heartache, or feelings of rejection. Sex, of course, is one of the reasons Bloomsbury has been written about so much though one may, reading this personal, intimate, anecdotal book, have to google occasionally to identify the individuals being discussed in the roundelay.Ĭouple and thruple they did, like bunnies, which leads us to the second theme of Strachey’s book: what she calls their “gender fluidity” (though I’m not sure that is quite the right word for it). Instead, we have excerpts from letters still kept by the Strachey family, not to mention the heap of books already published in what has become a cottage industry of Bloomsbury history, which even includes a biography titled simply Bloomsbury Stud: The Life of Stephen “Tommy” Tomlin-a sculptor who not only made busts of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey but also was desired sexually by just about everyone. Here is Nino, for instance, musing about “Beautiful Teddy Strachey, so handsome that he was known as ‘Venus’ in the Grenadier Guards,” or about “His uncle Harry, an artist who painted lyrical images of athletic young men in his rendition of the naked torso.” There were so many Stracheys (Lytton was one of thirteen children) that one could use a family tree. But, then, the book’s author, Nino Strachey, was literally surrounded by portraits and photos of her ancestors when she composed it.
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