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PARTISAN REVIEW
among its heirs.
Our understanding of Bloomsbury has become so dominated by the
presence and genius of Virginia Woolf that it is sometimes forgotten that
the coterie was less her creation than that of her intimate (and one-time
fiance), Lytton Strachey. Strachey always saw himself as an "animateur," a
man with a mission. He came to great clarity about that mission very
early in his life. Seizing on the question of taste, Strachey proposed to re–
define the ethic and nature of the British elite. While he was still an un–
dergraduate at Cambridge, and later, in and around the First World War,
Strachey set his essentially Oedipal task: To define a new era in British
opinion by organizing the most shining offspring of the eminent
Victorians into a group bent upon destroying the philistinism, hypocrisy,
and repression which, he claimed, defined the loathed and loved world of
their parents.
In practical fact, what Strachey summoned up in the Bloomsbury co–
terie became a kind of intellectual mafia created to allow the offspring of
the British establishment to join the adversary culture without any sacri–
fice to their status in the hierarchy into which they had been born. The
Bloomsberries correctly understood the modernist revolution to be the
greatest cultural force of their time, and they also believed it was a chal–
lenge to everything their parents had thought important. Strachey showed
his followers how to join that culture in such a way that their elite stand–
ing would be enhanced. This was not easy, but Strachey, greatest off–
spring of a British family notable in all its branches for molding and ma–
nipulating British opinion, accomplished it. His purpose plainly was to
reinforce rather than undermine the aristocratic status into which the co–
terie's members had been born. Plebeian or non-U types, no matter how
impressive, had no place in the network. The need to knock his parents
off their pedestal was not exactly D. H. Lawrence's problem. Bloomsbury
therefore treated Lawrence as a parvenu, and rejected the "underbred"
James Joyce, until the genius of both had become so successful they could
only make themselves ridiculous by denying it. Bloomsbury was an in–
house operation of the British elite.
Strachey himself was a rather nasty item. Julian Bell's brother Quentin
Bell describes him as "a creature torturing and self-tortured, slipping from
one agony to another, a wretched sighing hand-wringing misfit, a quite
impossible person." Though time has partly justified Strachey with
Bloomsbury's many triumphs of taste and influence, one must note that
apart from Virginia Woolf Bloomsbury produced almost no artists who
can hold their own in the true first rank. Following Strachey's lead, the
coterie remained far too preoccupied with questions of mere taste to
touch real greatness. As for debunking the Victorians: One also can't help
noting that a quintessential Victorian, George Eliot, wrote far more intel-
