Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm Page B

(Bloomsbury’s preferred term for a homosexual) was never far was complete. Indeed, in the case of Virginia such talk was no longer of much moment or interest. She was doing regular reviewing, working on her first novel, finding Adrian irritating as a housemate, and looking for a husband. The society of buggers had, in fact, become “intolerably boring” to her. “The society of buggers has many advantages—if you are a woman,” she allowed. “It is simple, it is honest, it makes one feel, as I noted, in some respects at one’s ease.” But
    it has this drawback—with buggers one cannot, as nurses say, show off. Something is always suppressed, held down. Yet this showing off, which is not copulating, necessarily, nor altogether being in love, is one of the great delights, one of the chief necessities of life. Only then does all effort cease; one ceases to be honest, one ceases to be clever. One fizzes up into some absurd delightful effervescence of soda water or champagne through which one sees the world tinged with all the colours of the rainbow.
    The married Vanessa, on the other hand, continued to be drawn to queer society. “Did you have a pleasant afternoon buggering one or more of the young men we left for you?” she wrote to John Maynard Keynes in April 1914. (Keynes was another Cambridge bugger, who had joined the Bloomsbury circle around 1907.) “It must have been delicious,” she went on. “I imagine you . . . with your bare limbs intertwined with him and all the ecstatic preliminaries of Sucking Sodomy—it sounds like the name of a station.” Vanessa’s connection with Duncan Grant, which began during the First World War—he became her life’s companion, even while continuing relationships with a series of boyfriends—has been called tragic; Duncan’s inability to reciprocate Vanessa’s love because he simply wasn’t interested in women has been regarded as one of the sad mischances of her life. But the letter she wrote to Maynard and others of its kind—which appear in Regina Marler’s excellently edited and annotated Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell (1993)—give one a whiff of something in Vanessa that may have impelled her to deliberately choose a homosexual as the love of her life; they suggest that Duncan’s homosexuality may have been the very pivot of her interest in him. In a letter to Duncan of January 1914, Vanessa, bemoaning the British public’s resistance to postimpressionist painting, wrote, “I believe distortion is like Sodomy. People are simple blindly prejudiced against it because they think it abnormal.” Vanessa herself seemed almost blindly prejudiced for the abnormal.
    But we are getting ahead of our story. Let us return to the scene of the sisters sitting in the drawing room of 46 Gordon Square in the spring of 1908. We will never know how much of Virginia’s account is truth and how much comic invention. (“I do not know if I invented it or not,” she offhandedly remarks, by way of introducing the scene.) But one detail stands out in its probable authenticity: Clive had hidden all the match boxes because their blue and yellow swore with the prevailing color scheme . Here, we feel, Virginia was reporting accurately. And here, we have to acknowledge, Clive was doing something that, in its way, was quite as remarkable for a man of his background as talking dirty was for girls of Virginia and Vanessa’s background. In his hard-core aestheticism, Clive was behaving as few Victorian men behaved. Clive came from a rich family that had made its money from mines in Wales and had built a hideous and pretentious mansion in Wiltshire, decorated with fake-Gothic ornament and animal trophies. Numerous sardonic descriptions of the place have come down to us from Vanessa, who would visit there as a dutiful daughter-in-law and write to Virginia of the “combination of