Vol. 17 No. 7 · 6 April 1995
pages 28-31 | 4475 words
Wild Hearts
Peter Wollen
- Virginia Woolf by James King
Hamish Hamilton, 699 pp, £25.00, September 1994, ISBN 0 241 13063 8
In 1978, at a seminar on John Maynard Keynes held by the University of Kent, Raymond Williams talked about ‘The Significance of Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group’. He accepted Leonard Woolf’s characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide’ through those classes. Williams also noted the importance of the Imperial bureaucracy in this tangle, especially the top echelons of the administration of India. Finally, he characterised Bloomsbury as an upper-class ‘fraction’, which turned against its own class without identifying itself with the subaltern classes and peoples, except insofar as it saw them as ‘victims’. This fraction played an important ‘liberalising’ and ‘modernising’ role, producing ‘adaptations’ rather than ‘basic changes’. It was against the ‘dominant ideas and values’ of the English upper class, while ‘still willingly, in all immediate ways, part of it’.
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Letters
Vol. 17 No. 10 · 25 May 1995
From Boris Ford
Peter Wollen’s copiously documented article (LRB, 6 April) about Virginia Woolf’s involvements with British feminism, European Modernism and its attendant sexual revolution, and with her own social-intellectual milieu raised an uneasy question or two in my mind. For in the midst of his 630 lines there appear the following six: ‘James King’s new biography, punctilious but pedestrian, gives us an opportunity to think anew about these questions, condensing, as it does, twenty years of scholarship and research since Quentin Bell’s classic two-volume Life came out in the early Seventies.’ And this is all we are told about King and his 700-page book. But this leaves me asking whose scholarship and research is it that King has condensed: his own, or that of the multitude of journeymen and women who have trudged up and down this stretch of Bloomsbury turf for the past twenty years? Moreover, how much of Wollen’s very detailed story is a punctilious condensation of King’s pedestrian condensation – but without acknowledgment? In short, is the scholarship in this article, or only the ‘new thinking’, a product of Wollen’s own hard labour on Virginia Woolf? I presume Wollen knows the answers to these gentle questions, but if so he takes care not to share them with the reader.
Boris Ford
Bristol
Peter Wollen writes: My review covered themes and areas James King scarcely touches on. There is no mention of Raymond Williams in his book or his bibliography, no mention of Diaghilev or Poiret or Carpenter or The Making of Americans. Harriet Weaver is characterised simply as a ‘devoted admirer’ of Joyce, and Rupert Brooke flits through a few breathless pages alongside a host of other friends, acquaintances and house-guests. Like the Bennett and Galsworthy novels Virginia Woolf disparaged in the Twenties, King’s massive door-stopper of a biography does little to advance ‘new thinking’. Next to nothing in my review-essay was derived from his work.
