This warm mid-June Wednesday (June 16th 2021), decreed this year to be “Dalloway Day”, is just the most perfect opportunity for a city stroll. Not the famous London walk from Westminster to Bond Street that Clarissa Dalloway made all those years ago to buy flowers for her party, but a virtual guided tour with Bonnie Greer through some of the haunts of Clarissa’s creator and her friends – and, what a radical bunch they were; more than queer, however one chooses to define the word, some were, like Duncan Grant, unabashedly taking the private into the public space – and making art out of it.
Each Dalloway Day, then, can be none other than an opportunity for a sometimes loud, but often reflective, celebration of Virginia Woolf and those in her orbit; artists all, who were inspired by their favorite haunts in a city coming to terms with the monumental intellectual and material changes of modernity – its tempo and its promises.
Most people take the economical way to Keynes! Not so me – rather, beyond name recognition, my introduction to one of the greatest economists of the 20th century came via the Woolfs, in whose lives and amongst the other brilliant players in “Bloomsbury”, Maynard Keynes played a significant role. Love it that the young British playwright, James Graham, should choose him as a “great life” in the BBC Radio 4 “Great Lives” series. I hope he retains his enthusiasm, for what great stuff there is in this life – for theatre or for film!
…and into the light of day. Gifted now to Charleston, an extraordinary collection of erotic works by Duncan Grant; and as explained in this BBC News video clip:
Produced during the 1940s and 50s, the more than four hundred works were given by Grant to his close friend and fellow artist Edward Le Bas (here some biographical details at Charleston, and here some of his work at the Tate) in 1959, and after Le Bas’ death in 1966 presumed to be lost. We now know, they just moved on; changing hands, ending up about eleven years ago with the theatre designer Norman Coates, and it is he whom is to be thanked for providing for this interesting addition to the complicated artistic legacy surrounding the Bloomsbury Group.
It also says something, and one tends to forget, about just how very recently it is that society (and not just British) has changed such that homoerotic works, like Grant’s drawings, may be openly shared without fear of legal repercussions or gasps of outrage.
Diving in and out of Virginia Woolf’s diaries and biography anew, I have been attentive to her intense relationship with place. The homes of her childhood and younger years are never far away; returning as fragmented memories, misplaced, reimagined and memorialised in her writing – think about the Stephen family’s “Talland House” and childhood summers in St.Ives and the Ramsay’s summer house on the Isle of Skye in To the Lighthouse. Or the walks she took and places she went as related in many a diary entry, then reimagined and true to the time in the city as seen through the eyes of Mrs. Dalloway or any Pargiter.
Charleston, West Firle, in East Sussex. Antiquary -CC BY-SA 4.0
And for Woolf, Sussex is a very special place. Here, at the time of her marriage in 1912, she found in “Asheham House” near Beddingham sanctuary from the distractions of London, but still near to “Charleston Farmhouse”, the Firle home of Vanessa and her complicated family and their seemingly endlessly brilliant string of guests. Distractions it seem had a way of following her, and were perhaps never quite as unwelcome as often would have it!
Later, in 1919, she and Leonard purchased “Monk’s House” in the village of Rodmell which would remain until her death her (their) constant retreat. The walks, the garden, the weather, the famous “writing shed” – that room of her own, all the visiting and being visited upon; as much as the profound inner life and intellectual musings – and the gossip! – it is the every day, often the mundane, as lived in her rural sanctuary that bring her diaries to vivid life, just as flowers come to bloom.
Cover, First edition, 1944.
By the way, Asheham is no more, but an afterlife was granted it by grateful Woolfs – the romantic Leonard getting the better of the cerebral self in an autobiographical aside and a spirited Virginia imagining a ghostly couple bound for eternity in a short story entitled A Haunted House, first published by Hogarth in Monday or Tuesday in 1922, and later in a collection published by Leonard in 1944. Who was this ghostly pair? Perhaps the shades of their very selves, the Woolfs, viewed from a distant future; forever young, forever in this place.
