Bloomsbury’s Bohemia

Abstract

’saturday 6th March 1920… Then on Thursday dine with the MacCarthys, & the first Memoir Club meeting’ (Woolf, 1978a: 23). The idea of the club had been Molly MacCarthy’s who hoped this would be a way of getting Desmond MacCarthy to write the ‘big book’ he had always promised but frittered away in talk and journalism. The dozen members were to gather at one of their houses once a month to read a chapter of what was to become their full-length autobiography. In the event this proved too ambitious and members read occasional papers, some of which much later found their way into print. So there they were, on 4 March, twelve friends, according to Virginia Woolf’s diaries, or eleven according to Quentin Bell or according to Leonard Woolf thirteen; the same thirteen, he said, who had gathered together shortly after 1904 and now met again, in the same room at 46 Gordon Square. Thus Leonard Woolf names the MacCarthys, Clive and Vanessa Bell, himself and Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Adrian Stephen, E.M. Forster and Saxon Sydney-Turner (Woolf, 1967: 114; see Bell, 1968: 14-15; Edel, 1981: 258). ‘A highly interesting occasion’ thought Virginia Woolf of that first meeting of the club on 4 March. ‘Seven people read — & Lord knows what I didn’t read into their reading’ (1978a: 23). Clive Bell was ‘purely objective’; Roger Fry, ‘Good: but too objective’; Duncan Grant was ‘tongue enchanted’; Molly MacCarthy was ‘composed at first’ but suddenly broke out with ‘Oh this is absurd I can’t go on’ before shuffling her sheets, starting again on the wrong page, and continuing through to the end. And ‘Nessa’ started out ‘matter of fact’ before she was ‘overcome by the emotional depths to be traversed; & unable to read aloud what she had written’.