Bloomsbury by Lamplight, Denouement

The Hotel at Tavistock Square

It was built post war, so does that make it faux-deco? Could it be that already, in this period of austerity, people were harking back to jammier earlier times?
      As we know, reader, there was no time in history when things were somehow more correct or morally upright than they are now, only periods of harmony and relatively good design. The deco era was eventually killed off by a surfeit of burnished wooden parts and gilt lines, or perhaps people just wanted something a little more functional and reliable. In any case, many of these sorts of detail are still visible in the Tavistock hotel.
      These days, it would be a cheap place to come for a pint of IPA (at London prices). Afterwards, during the hours of daylight, you can go for a stroll through the pleasant green area outside - one of many around here.


War (what is it good for? Apparently nothing)

Around the park you can see where the original railings once ran. These must have been stripped out in the Great Iron Swindle of the Second War. Most of this metal, the story goes, so patriotically given up (a huge propaganda effort), ended up dumped in the Thames as un-usable. As historical portents go this seems a symbol of the kind of unpleasant future we were heading for, something the unadorned buildings and public spaces shorn of their trimmings tend to testify to... one in which people will be continually deluded into parting with any kind of precious metal they may have accumulated should they be fortunate enough.
      You can say what you like about Britain in the 200 years or so pre-C20, in which public parks and (so-called) altruistic ventures like this one were popular, but there must have been at that time a great deal of, if not public spirit, then at least civic pride. I say so-called altruistic ventures because it seems to me that the kind of public spaces I'm taking about were good for everybody, and that the philanthropists who gave up their time, cash and land for such places - and built a fair sort of terraced housing for the workers they employed - were safe in the knowledge that they were giving something back, and fulfilling their part of the bargain with the land that had allowed them to become rich men. That 'social contract' was torn up now, in favour of blind patriotism, to pay for the wars of the 21st century - the irony being that it probably did no good at all, if indeed killing Germans can be construed as good.
      You can still see the stumps around any of our major towns, like cheery domestic reminders of the stumps on some of the veterans who came back from those wars. The ones here in Tav. Square have been replaced, with the effect of making the park about a foot smaller on each side. Nothing that is taken away can ever be restored without losing a little something.
      If you think that this kind of argument is just dumb commie socialist thinking, and not particularly relevant in a discussion of a part of London lived in (historically, since it isn't homes any more) by fairly or very well-off people, then try to imagine a property developer today reconstructing a large area of the middle of one of our major cities and building a large public park for every dozen or so houses. More likely they would be packed in like our lives depended on it.
      I am trying to establish an idea of the kind of world into which the Bloomsbury's of the tens and the twenties were born, and the kind of world in which they found themselves living only 20-30 years later. Not one that was wonderful, for sure, if one was lower class, but one in which the upper-middle could afford to be less mean, with class war still primarily a thing of the future.


The attitude of the Bloomsbury's towards the Second War appears to have been: Not again. Whilst the first one may have been a terrible thing against which those who did not fight were insulated to some extent, Vanessa and Clive Bell did lose a child, their eldest son Julian, to the Spanish Civil War. Mark Hussey has edited a volume of essays on Virginia Woolf's personal opposition to war, in both her fiction and nonfiction writing. Having said all that, they may have had vested interests: Leonard Woolf was a Jew. He and Virginia were both rumoured to be on a death list that would have been enacted had the mooted German invasion ever gone ahead.
      Any cultural advantages we may have enjoyed in this country in the later part of the twentieth century are due entirely to the fact that this pogrom never took place.
      Personally I have often thought that the rock band Queen is what popular culture would have looked like, and sounded like, had the Nazis won the Second World War. I cannot say why.


Leaving Tavistock Square


At the opposite end of the square there is even less left to find - one corner has been turned into a Starbucks now. The British Medical Association is next door. Charles Dickens used to have a house on this site. On the Seventh of July 2005, at this corner of Tavistock Square, a double decker bus exploded in a terrorist attack on London, the fourth and final of several devices that would go off on public transport that day. So it goes.


From where her bust stands, at the opposite corner of the square from where events on 7/7 took place, if she were to turn to her right Virginia might just be able to make out the British Telecom Tower (what Alan Moore re-dubbed in V for Vendetta as 'The Ear') - 'we are at least listening to you, if not actually watching you,' behing the implication here. It's little wonder that Thomas Pynchon found such paranoia present in this city to fuel his encyclopedic novel Gravity's Rainbow (published 1973. The tower was finished in 1966, though its existence remained an official 'secret' until the nineties, when it was finally allowed to appear on OS maps).
      On my particular pilgrimage Virginia Woolf was ultimately as elusive as another of Pynchon's characters, V, who is both woman and symbol, who may once have existed but ultimately affects us from the realm of the inanimate, to which all worlds, eventually, tend. Now, almost seventy years gone, Virginia exists in the mass consciousness on the written page, ethereal, not the electronic proof we demand of our present-day public figures (only one recording of her exists; it is well worth hearing). She might have been amused that people have seen fit to erect a work of statuary to her at all: 'if I had received that kind of adulation in my lifetime,' she might have said, 'I should have killed myself.'
      Down the way, informal students sit gathered under the tarpaulin of a small café, smoking shishas. Many of them may not have heard of Virginia Woolf, but seventy years ago she wrote her thoughts down, and they are still present, in a real way, that I doubt any of our electronic media will be in a hundred years time. Informational entropy seems to have reached a near-maximum in the city: everyone is talking, but no-one is saying anything. Did she present a part of this, with her stream-of-consciousness, her constant talk about her self; or did she represent something different, a genius, someone for whom life was truly worth celebrating, for whom words were the medium?
      I went to London to find her; she was not there. Anyone else who wants to look for her would be well advised to try somewhere else. The books would be a good place to start.

Bloomsbury by Lamplight, 2

Virginia Woolf is a tantalising figure, as close as she is, just out of reach - she died in 1941, at the age of 59, and had she lived a little longer she might have left more to the media age that we live in today than a handful of meandering novels, diaries and essays.

      From 1904 to 1912 Virginia Stephen lived in Gordon Square, which she left following her marriage to Leonard Woolf (with whom she would ultimately found her own publishing house, the Hogarth Press). In 1924 the Woolfs returned to neighbouring Tavistock Square, in which she'd live until the outbreak of the Second World War, when they moved again to nearby Mecklenburgh Square. The Tavistock Hotel now stands on the site of the house.
      In those days a publishing house would have been just this - a house with a printing press inside it.

      In 1940 the house at Mecklenburgh Square was bombed, necessitating a move to the country. Poetically enough, as it turns out, the end of Virginia's association with the area also marked the beginning of her own end, as in 1941, in the darkest days of the war, suffering from depression again, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in Sussex.

Her literary afterlife began with her books falling out of fashion, lacking in relevance to the common reader, but, ironically, she was quickly rehabilitated by the kind of leftist critics who had rejected her, as one of the original names in feminist literature. In the sixties and seventies. Virginia became, if not a popular culture figure, than at least a cult figure. 

      Patti Smith has written poetry about her, and Nicole Kidman portrayed her on film. Along with Slyvia Plath she exerts a particular and almost unique kind of fascination. And yet, in an age where you can get cross-platform stars like Nick Cave reading their own book aloud on your iphone (and actually playing music to go with it as well), in which this kind of gimmick is almost expected of authors, Virginia exists, almost alone, on the printed page.

      There is the work, the letters, and what nephew Quentin Bell told us in her biography, and another follow-up book about the Bloomsbury 'set'. Virginia's extensive diaries were published in an edition of five volumes from 1977-84. No doubt one could get as good an idea of what was going on behind these closed doors in Gordon Square in 1910 as you could about Lady Gaga from reading a modern day gossip column. 

Gordon Square 

The first house that we come to belonged to Virginia & her sister, Vanessa Bell, the painter (also her brother Adrian, who would, it's worth noting for fans of such footnotes, go on to become one of the first British psychoanalysts). Most of these houses seem to be offices or classrooms for the UCL today. The blue plaque on the door here commemorates not the prodigal Stephen children but their friend the economist Maynard Keynes, who lived here after them.

50 Gordon Sq.

      Keynes was an influential figure, a liberal thinker who invented Keynesian economics and had a building named after him at my old university for his trouble. He seems to have lived more-or-less openly as a homosexual until he met a ballarina, called Lydia Lopokova, whom he married in 1925, and thus became a more-or-less ordinary establishment figure. 

      Keynes essentially suggested that if there are not enough jobs to go round, the government should bury some dollar bills down a hole and pay men to dig them up. Some of my friends at Housman's bookshop would perhaps agree with this kind of keen thinking. Others might less kindly suggest we should bury Keynes down a hole.

     Not far down, at number 50, another plaque mentions Virginia, Clive Bell and the Stracheys. Clive was an art critic and formalist who married Vanessa. He seems to have been, by all accounts, rather a prig, but perhaps he gets a thin crack of the whip by reputation as he was married to Vanessa Bell in only a legal sense for the majority of their relationship. Although they never divorced, they lived separately, had many other lovers, and allowed her daughter Angelica to grow up believing she was Clive's until the age of 17. Her real father, the painter Duncan Grant, another colourful character in the Bloomsbury tableaux, was a former lover of Maynard's!

      Lytton Strachey was another author, one of ten surviving children, who wrote a satirical work of biography, Eminent Victorians, that laid some of the ground for Virginia's Orlando. He never married, but conducted affairs with Keynes and the artist Dora Carrington (allegedly), although, according to friends, he was more interested in her husband Ralph Partridge. After Strachey died, at 51, Carrington killed herself, seeing no reason to go on. Today she is perhaps best known for designing woodcuts for the Hogarth Press (and for being played on film by Emma Thompson).

    

Next: A stop at the Tavistock Hotel

     
 

BLOOMSBURY by LAMPLIGHT pt.1

Notes on a trip to London, 2.10.2010

Housmans (Housmans.com)

A stonesthrow away from the Kings Cross station, around the corner on the Caledonian road stands Housmans ('London's oldest radical bookshop'), a little socialist-radicalist bookseller with an array of London-centric titles and leftist propaganda published by everyone from tiny-run individuals who have doctored the sleeves of their job centre booklets to make a 'zine to 'serious' books from (ironically) the big corp. publishers. A mouldering basement formerly held stacks of second hand travel books, periodicals and lousy paperback fiction, unfortunately on the occasion of my last visit this was closed for the foreseeable. Upstairs, at the back, a man sat at a computer behind a curtain eating a Marks & Spencer's sandwich and, presumably, planning world revolution.
    Housman's opened in 1945, when a wave of optimism about what was possible if we all 'pulled together' saw a brief turn towards socialism in this country, at a point when such thinking was popular. It seems to have been re-emerging, blinking and brushing the dust off, into fashion and people's consciousness at intervals, when the moment has allowed it, ever since that time.
    A quick, cursory glance at the stand that holds those limited works of vitriol, comix and pamphleteering that we might for want of a better word term 'fanzines', reveals those that have been accepted for display to date back, mostly, to the nineties or earlier, suggesting that no one has seem fit to cull the stock since that time. One such august publication looks at the possibillity of global one-world government becoming a possibility in 1984, in line with Orwell's fictional depiction of that year. Might we be, it suggests, in the nineteen eighties, in a new age of austerity, echoing the spirit of fifty years earlier?
    Up the road, twenty minutes away or a short hop by underground train or London taxi, art-deco lamps from the guilded age are burning in the foyer of the Tavistock Hotel, Bloomsbury.


Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, authoress of essays and exponent of modernism who killed herself in 1941 when she decided the modern world we had created was not worth living in any more. She was somewhat upper-crust: her mother seems to have been a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters including Edward Burne-Jones; her father Leslie Stephen was an editor and critic, which means that she would have grown up around the detritus of Victorian literary society. They were a large family; both parents had been married before, and both had children from an earlier marriage.

Woolf's mother?

    Her beloved mother and father died while she was still young, and, following a series of nervous breakdowns, Virginia went to live with sister Vanessa and brother Adrian in a house at 49 Gordon Square.
    Gordon Square is reached if one walks up Bloomsbury Street from Centre Point past the British Museum, turning right at Bedford Sq. past the unbelieveably Orwellian ('Ministry of Truth') menacing Senate House building, where the rather grand facades of Georgian terraces face on to green spaces in the shape of small parks, now closed up at night, which must have looked roughly the same in Virginia's time. But, by the end of her girlhood, it must have become quite clear to her that the world was changing in ways she never previously could have envisioned.

next: a trip around Gordon Square.