4. Bloomsbury

Bloomsbury

AFTER graduation from Cambridge, Keynes and many of his Apostle colleagues took up lodgings in Blooms-bury, an unfashionable section of north London. There they formed the now-famous Bloomsbury Group, the center of aesthetic and moral avant-gardism that constituted the most influential cultural and intellectual force in England during the 1910s and 1920s.

The formation of the Bloomsbury Group was inspired by the death of that eminent Victorian philosopher and classical liberal, Sir Leslie Stephen, in 1904. The young Stephen children, who felt liberated by the departure of their father’s stern moral presence, promptly set up house in Bloomsbury and began to hold Thursday evening salons. Thoby Stephen, while not an Apostle, was a close friend at Trinity of Lytton Strachey. Strachey and other Apostles, as well as another of Strachey’s good friends from Trinity, Clive Bell, became regular salon guests.

After Thoby died in 1906, Vanessa Stephen married Bell, and Bloomsbury gatherings divided into two groups. Since Clive was a budding art critic and Vanessa a painter, they established the Friday Club salons, concentrating on the visual arts. Meanwhile, Virginia and Adrian Stephen resumed the Thursday emphases on literature, philosophy, and culture. Eventually, Trinity Apostle Leonard Woolf, a friend and contemporary of Keynes, married Virginia Stephen. In late 1909, Keynes moved to a Bloomsbury house very close to the Stephens’, sharing a flat there with Blooms-bury artist Duncan Grant, a cousin of Strachey’s.

Bloomsbury’s values and attitudes were similar to those of the Cambridge Apostles, albeit with more of an artistic twist. With a major emphasis on rebellion against Victorian values, it is no wonder that Maynard Keynes was a distinguished Bloomsbury member. One particular emphasis was pursuit of avant-garde and formalistic art—pushed by art critic and Cambridge Apostle Roger Fry, who later returned to Cambridge as Professor of Art. Virginia Stephen Woolf would become a prominent exponent of formalistic fiction. And all of them energetically pursued a lifestyle of promiscuous bisexuality, as was brought to light in Michael Holroyd’s (1967) biography of Strachey.

As members of the Cambridge cultural coterie, the Bloomsbury Group enjoyed inherited, although modest, wealth. But, as time went on, most of the financing for the various Bloomsbury exhibits and projects came from their loyal member Maynard Keynes. As Skidelsky writes, Keynes “came to give Bloomsbury financial muscle, not just by making a great deal of money himself [largely through investment and financial speculation], which he spent lavishly on Bloomsbury causes, but by his ability to organize financial backing for their enterprises.” Indeed, from the first World War onwards it was almost impossible to find any enterprise, cultural or domestic, in which members of Bloomsbury were involved, which did not benefit in some way from his largesse, his financial acumen, or his contacts. (1983, p. 250; see also pp. 242–51).