Young Bloomsbury, page 10
Living with a rare genetic disorder was no joke, but this didn’t stop hostile contemporaries from mocking his visits to a nursing home; serious illness tended to be dismissed as prevarication by those who were prejudiced against feminity in the male. Contemporary Maurice Bowra recognized Eddy’s courage in the face of adversity, describing him as “a frail, elegant little figure” who “went out with a stick and a muffler, and at times fell into fits of melancholy. But he had an indomitable will that refused to admit defeat, and he countered his blackest hours with a delicious sense of fun and a ringing laugh.”207 Racked with pain from recurrent lesions and episodes of random bleeding, Eddy was sometimes plunged into despair. Hyperesthesia left him abnormally sensitive to all physical sensation, a feeling of hovering between life and death: “Pain was personal to me, shared with no one else, an individual demon of intolerable beauty, with heart and hands that existed only as instruments by which I was kept for ever in this fiery suspension between the heaven of life and the viewless planet.”208
In Virginia’s novel, the young Orlando has Vita’s swashbuckling swagger, her physical energy, and her fine legs. Her talent for poetry also shines through, along with her predatory approach to women. But every now and then a hint of Eddy creeps in: Orlando has “eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them, and a brow like the swelling of a marble dome pressed between two blank medallions which were his temple… Sights disturbed him, sights exalted him—the birds and the trees, and made him in love with death.”209 Like Eddy, Orlando was swept by sudden moods of melancholy, flinging himself onto the ground to brood on mortality. Eddy kept a skull beside his writing desk and was photographed holding it on his shoulder and reclining like Hamlet, gazing lovingly into the empty eye sockets. Orlando “took strange delight in thoughts of death and decay”; Virginia imagines her protagonist climbing down into the family crypt to “take a skeleton hand in his and bend the joints this way and that.”210
Androgyny is a recurring theme in Orlando. When the Russian princess appears in the distance, skating determinedly across the ice, her gender is indistinguishable: “The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned”; Orlando assumes she must be a boy, as “no woman could skate with such speed and vigour.” Only as she comes closer does he decide that “no boy ever had a mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy had eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea.”211 The “Archduchess Harriet” is equally perplexing: she wears an elaborate mantilla and riding cloak to disguise her figure and talks knowledgeably about wine, sport, and firearms. “Harriet” turns out to be “Harry” masquerading as a woman in the hope of seducing Orlando. Confusions of this type were familiar in Bloomsbury; Virginia and Vita both commented on the bewildering similarity of young people with cropped hair. Eddy’s sister held a party at Knole in 1927 that Vita described as being full of “slim young creatures all looking as though they had come out of Tatler, all indistinguishable from each other, and young men to match. They lay about on the grass, like aristocratic young animals with sleek heads. I was acutely conscious of the difference of generations.”212
PAINTED BOYS
Vita’s role in the genesis of Orlando has been widely acknowledged, but the influence of Eddy and his circle of genderqueer Oxford friends tends to be downplayed. These were the graceful young men Virginia encountered at Garsington, surprising her with their tendency to “paint and powder.”213 Woolf’s terminology echoes the language of tabloid weekly journals like John Bull, which identified the “painted boy” as the “worst menace of modern times.”214 In a series of hysterical articles, right-wing journalist Harold Begbie denounced a West End venue for being a “modern Gomorrah” where “painted and scented boys congregate every day.” Begbie wanted the Conservative home secretary William Joynson-Hicks to rouse the Metropolitan Police and make “a clean sweep of so monstrous an iniquity,” removing “creatures who shame the name of England and degrade the face of man.” With patriotic fervor, Begbie wonders how Britain could have beaten the Germans in the First World War, only to find in London “an outbreak of this deadly perversion… which will surely rot us into ruin unless we recover our sanity and fight it to the death.”215
Begbie’s views were extreme but reflective of interwar prejudice against male expressions of femininity. When the Street Offenses Committee asked a Metropolitan Police constable if men arrested for importuning had any distinguishing characteristics, he replied, “Yes. Painted lips, powder.”216 A strange double standard seemed to apply. If found wandering near Piccadilly with a powder compact in your pocket, you could be charged with importuning for immoral purposes and sentenced to three months in prison. If invited to an expensive fancy-dress ball, you could smother your face in makeup and expect your photograph to appear in the press with little adverse comment, even if you were dressed as a foreign queen or a famous female film star. The context was critical, regardless of social background. Young men who enhanced their features on a daily basis were to be suspected of vice, their behavior a signifier of sexual transgression; Bright Young Things transforming themselves for one night to fit the theme of a party were quite another matter.
With cosmetics more widely available than ever before, it was all too tempting to cross the line. Lipstick, powder, rouge, and eye shadow were being mass-produced by international beauty companies and could be bought easily over the counter at department stores. Cinema provided a heady image of female glamour, and the advertising industry had geared up to besiege young women with a seductive range of products. Eddy’s circle of male undergraduates proved equally susceptible, experimenting with clothing as well as skin care. Eddy’s friend John Rothenstein conjured up a vivid image of twenties student life in his memoir Summer’s Lease. Individual sexual interests may have varied, but sartorial expression was similar: a “cult of the effeminate” blossomed in the “prevailing homosexual climate.” According to Rothenstein:
This cult of the effeminate did not necessarily denote effeminacy in the generally accepted sense, nor even homosexuality, ubiquitous though this was… It was the product of several causes, not the least of which was the defiant assertion of the dandified intellectual (or “aesthete” as he was called) in the face of the formerly hectoring athlete, or “hearty.”217
At Oxford, aestheticism was expressed in multiple ways, giving freedom to explore different identities. Decorating your room with homoerotic Aubrey Beardsley prints sent signals to your close friends, but clothing and makeup made a wider impression. John Strachey was rumored to carry a ladies’ handbag and played cricket for Magdalen wearing a large French peasant’s hat adorned with trailing pink ribbons. His beautiful friend Jeffrey Prendergast might have stepped straight from the pages of Raymond Mortimer’s satirical novel The Oxford Circus: “Prendie” could be spied pulling a white woollen lamb down the street and was once found mourning the loss of his famous allure. Eddy Sackville-West took a more literary angle. He declared his love for the French decadent writers of the 1890s, modeling himself on des Esseintes, the self-indulgent hero of Joris-Karl Huysman’s À Rebours (Against Nature). He began writing a Gothic novel, vowing to retreat one day to a house in the country, wearing black velvet. Reveling in sensory description, and fired by the sorrow of a broken love affair, Eddy poured his heart into emotionally overcharged passages. Virginia’s friend Molly MacCarthy met Eddy at around this time and left a telling description of the budding aesthete, who had been a child prodigy at the piano, playing Chopin and Brahms by ear: “I liked Sackville-West, I see he’s not as limp as you would think as he played beautifully and every now and then went upstairs and had a good write at his novel.”218
Eddy Sackville-West, John Strachey, Philip Ritchie, and Roger Senhouse had all been part of the same close-knit Oxford circle; all four were involved with the melodramas staged by John at Magdalen, and all four gradually found their way to Garsington Manor and the welcoming arms of the Bloomsbury Group. Always open to confidences, Virginia loved being drawn into the emotional complexities of young Oxford lives. She and Clive Bell were often blamed for spreading rumors, and a terse letter from Eddy in 1926 produced a partial apology: “My only shred of ‘mature wisdom’ is that such things are the penalty one pays for the pleasure of talking freely. I’ve paid it dozens of times. At this moment, doubtless, Philip Ritchie is repeating what Eddy says Virginia says and next week it will come round to me—Such is life in Bloomsbury.”219
Whatever Virginia’s faults, she provided a sympathetic adult ear in a period when same-sex love was open to hostile challenge. Sadly, many families were not so understanding. By the time she met them at Garsington, Eddy and several of his more overtly “painted and powdered” student friends were already being subjected to a bizarre form of conversion therapy at a clinic run by Dr. Marten in Germany. Marten was a medical doctor who combined experimental psychoanalytical techniques with painful protein injections. Ottoline Morrell had a positive experience at his Freiburg clinic and merrily recommended his services to Garsington visitors. Marten appears in images of her summer garden parties, recruiting potential clients. Lytton declared this “a ludicrous fraud”:
The Sackville-West youth was there to be cured of homosexuality. After 4 months and an expenditure of £200 he found he could just bear the thought of going to bed with a woman. No more. Several other wretched undergraduates have been through the same “treatment.” They walk about haggard on the lawn, wondering whether they could bear the thought of a woman’s private parts, and gazing at their little lovers, who run round and round with a camera, snapshotting Lytton Strachey.220
Lytton had no time for the “miserable German doctor,”221 but others allowed themselves to be persuaded. Eddy’s Oxford contemporaries Kyrle Leng, Eddie Gathorne-Hardy, and Peter Ralli all made their way to Marten’s clinic, with predictably unsuccessful results. Kyrle seems to have been first in line and wrote encouraging Eddy to join him in Freiburg: “There is a quaint atmosphere about the place satisfying to the aesthete, while for the virile exist all forms of pleasure and excitement… Martin [sic] will psychoanalyse you and cure you. He may be curing me, I cannot tell, my faith in doctors was shattered long ago.”222
Conversion therapy is, at the time of writing, still legal in Britain today, with traumatic results for queer young people exposed to a range of religious or pseudoscientific “treatments.” Germany only banned the practice in May 2020. From a twenty-first-century perspective it feels disturbing to see Kyrle and Eddy submit so willingly to a “cure.” But they were living at a time when homosexuality was viewed by most as a disease or perversion, punishable by imprisonment if exposed. They were also putting themselves at risk by choosing clothing and cosmetics that made them stand out from the crowd. If gender nonconformity was acceptable only in the fancy-dress context, then these young men were sailing close to the wind. There was an added poignancy to the situation: Marten’s treatment was expensive, so it seems likely that all four Oxford students would have been subsidized by their families, implying a degree of parental pressure to conform. Looking on the bright side, Marten’s analysis may at least have given some support for other emotional or family issues they may have been experiencing. Eddy certainly enjoyed writing down his dreams and received an unusual diagnosis for his stomach problems: “Martin [sic] says my indigestion is mainly due to a maternity complex.”223
Kyrle Leng was determined to make the best of a bad situation, fantasizing with Eddy about the fun they might have outside the clinic, “skiing over the snow fields hand in hand with a divine Celtish boy, a Laplander, or a German,” or, failing that, “sitting in the Casino, while… boys of all nationalities drift past or sit sucking their mochas with glances so frank, candid, fresh and lovely that one might take them for invitations.”224 Eddy seems to have been more susceptible to the negative messaging, declaring in his diary that he would try to appear changed when he got home, avoiding homosexual talk where possible. The injections of novoprotin had excruciating results: “At the end of dinner it had a sudden effect on the seminal glands & I spent 3 1/2 hours of intolerable agony. Martin [sic] said my subconscious mind was prepared for pain just here. God! What agony it was.”225 One of the many terrors was the potential impact of the treatment on his creative abilities: “I am certain that my happiness depends on having written something every day.”226 Eddy was grateful when Dr. Marten reassured him that “psycho-analysis will not spoil my artistic faculties.”227
Thankfully, Eddy’s creativity survived unscathed: he published two novels in quick succession after leaving Oxford in 1924. Having set up home with John Strachey on the Cromwell Road, the pair set about pursuing their respective careers. John wrote articles for his father’s magazine, the Spectator, but struggled to reconcile his literary ambitions with his commitment to the Labour movement. Eddy’s efforts were more focused: his work was widely reviewed, and occasionally prizewinning, but little of it remains in print today. Heavily influenced by his beloved French decadents of the 1890s, the language can feel overblown, the characters overwhelmed by the sensations they experience. His Gothic novel The Ruin was panned by most critics for its melodrama, but Piano Quintet was generally well received. The Evening News decided it was “produced with a finesse and finish usually associated with a mature writer,” while the Daily Chronicle was even more complimentary: “Yet another Heinemann first novel reached high watermark. For musical folk it will be a pure joy.”228 Virginia had enough faith in him to commission a piece on Rimbaud for the Hogarth Essays series, and Lytton invited Eddy to Ham Spray to celebrate the publication of his third novel, Mandrake over the Water Carrier. Roger Senhouse posed for photographs on the verandah, holding a watering can symbolically in the air. Virginia sent her commiserations, likening authorship to childbirth: “Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the misery, the grind, are forgotten every time; and one launches another, and it seems sheer joy and buoyancy.”229
Virginia’s letters position Eddy as an equal—a writer ally against the cohort of Bloomsbury painters, who were prone to be patronizing over matters of domestic taste: “Yes, I like the painters, but I find their attitude a little agonising. ‘Poor beetle’ that’s what they say. At once I have eight legs all squirming. It is for this reason: their ascendancy is over all objects of daily use… so that when they come, their presence is one long criticism, from the heights. We, who deal in ideas, are moreover, sensitised to draw out, always more and more, other peoples [sic] feelings never inflict this chill.”230
When Eddy fell briefly in love with Duncan Grant, the artist did his best to keep the relationship secret, conscious that Virginia might interfere. Grant’s letters to Eddy are tender and affectionate, full of self-deprecation. He apologizes for his lack of education, for his failure to read Eddy’s books, and for his shocking handwriting and spelling. He paints sensuous word pictures of his recent encounters with Eddy and downplays his own success: “I have a very low opinion of myself as a painter, but [have] come to the conclusion that if one is allowed to continue to paint by the world one is very lucky.”231 Even when their passion faded to friendship, Grant recorded his pride in receiving confidences denied to Virginia. Bicycling over to Monk’s House, the Woolfs’ country retreat, in September 1926, Grant arrived in time to hear her reading out a letter from Eddy, which sounded much less sexually candid than the one he had just received.
PRINCE CHARMING
Eddy Sackville-West always drew a certain amount of attention from the press, but he could never compete with a new friend who sprang onto the social scene in 1926: the artist Stephen Tennant.
Although possession of a powder puff was still a source of suspicion in court, tabloid opinions on acceptable male attire for the fashionable young man about town seemed to be changing in the second half of the 1920s. According to a 1928 piece in the Daily Express, Tennant’s “appearance alone is enough to make you catch your breath—golden hair spreading in flowing waves across a delicate forehead; an ethereally transparent face; clothes which mould themselves about his slim figure.”232 Five years younger than Eddy, Tennant paired up with the photographer Cecil Beaton to promote a carefully constructed image of personal beauty. Beaton’s career thrived as a result, and journalists identified them as effeminate examples of gilded youth. When the Sphere asked, “Who are the young men of today? Or rather who are the models on which they are bidden to mould their personalities?” it was Stephen and Cecil they chose: “Both these young men are in their early twenties; are slender, with a knowledge of clothes that embraces the female wardrobe, with a most definite artistic sense which their predecessors in the rough old days might envy.”233
Tennant and Beaton became difficult to miss. In June 1927, twenty-one-year-old Tennant had invited Eddy to join a group of “poets, novelists and artists”234 for a weekend at Wilsford Manor in Wiltshire—the home of his mother, Lady Grey. American poet Elinor Wylie was the most established author, followed closely by the Sitwell brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell. Eddy already had two novels under his belt, while Rosamond Lehmann’s first book, Dusty Answer, was hot off the press. Cecil Beaton had signed his first formal contract with Vogue that month, while painter Rex Whistler was finishing a set of murals for what was then the Tate Gallery, at Millbank. Their host produced beautiful line drawings in the style of Aubrey Beardsley. Beaton photographed the entire party lying upside down under a leopardskin, and the image duly appeared in Vogue as an “amusing and decorative portrait of ‘Intelligent Young Persons.’ ”235 Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell would have also seen the duo sprinkled with gold dust at the Nautical Party in July 1927, and press accounts snowballed through the summer as they appeared in ever more elaborate costumes at other events.
