STEPHEN KOCH
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ligently and with far more real feeling about sex than the modernist
Virginia Wool£
Still, Strachey's subversion of middlebrow mores needed doing.
There was power, inevitability, and great beauty in the modernist experi–
ence. Only in retrospect do Strachey's disingenuousness and intellectual
perversity seem to dominate his struggle to provide his allies with an ever–
more-secure platform for despising the British middle class.
For the coterie's rationale Strachey borrowed a cult of "friendship"
from the Cambridge philosopher George Moore, so that to this day E. M .
Forster's silly pseudo-thought (it was borrowed from Moore: the business
about having the guts to betray one's country before betraying one's
friend) is almost invariably raised in any discussion of the Cambridge
spies. And when your "friends" are collaborating in the deaths of hun–
dreds of thousands of people who do not have the privilege of your ac–
quaintance? What then?
Yet for all his talk about the sanctity of "friendship" in the
Bloomsbury group, Strachey protested much too much. The reverse is
more like it. As we know from the incredibly voluminous documentation
of every shiver and sigh of every single member of the coterie, there was
nothing so wonderfully amiable in Bloomsbury conduct. Even by the un–
gentle standards of most literary cliques, Bloomsbury was exceptionally
malicious within its own ranks, and with outsiders cruel to the point of
systematic sadism. All the talk about "friendship" concealed quite different
interests.
Paul Johnson describes it well: "Not for nothing was Strachey the son
of a general. He had a genius for narcissistic elitism and ran the coterie
with an iron, though seemingly languid hand. From the Apostles he
grasped the principles of group power: The ability not merely to exclude
but to be seen to exclude. He perfected the art of unapproachability and
rejection: a Bloomsbury mandarin could wither with a glance or a tone of
voice. Within his magic circle exclusiveness became a kind of mutual life–
support system. He and [Leonard] Woolf called it 'the Method.' "
Friendship was not the true motive, any more than the long-term aim
was a social club for bright undergraduates. Strachey's legacy was to show
how elite standing could be encoded in anti-establishment contempt -
always in the name of friendship, friendship. Nonsense, of course. First,
last, and always, the real politics of Bloomsbury was a search for elite cul–
tural power in England.
In the first generation, few members of the Bloomsbury coterie were
fellow travellers and fewer still were true Stalinists. Leonard Woolfs soft–
left writing on Imperial policy is more like it, even though the Woolfs'
political mentors, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, became more or less abject
Stalinist propagandists. But Strachey's legacy, which placed the new man-
