Two Visits to Bloomsbury with a Legacy Prologue

Lytton and Virginia

Today we were driving to suburban Cleveland for shopping at Legacy Village and Trader Joe's with a fine salad at the Cheesecake Factory in between when "Is She Really Going Out With Him?" came on the radio and I thought about a lonely, pre-secure night in Rotterdam sitting in the lobby of the hostel, half-drunk glass of dark beer in hand, musing over my happiness that my first solo European excursion, my testing ground as it were, had come off without incident, and a sting of sadness that the contingent of fellow Castle dwellers who had unexpectedly also arrived in town had not invited me out with them to any place in particular. At that moment a recording I have never since been able to find of Joe Jackson performing the song a capella, backed by some female gospel singers who kept intoning the word "stranger" over and over again, came over the hostel's p.a. I think about Europe every time I hear "If my eyes don't deceive me there's something going on around here," and so much of today triggered reminiscences, like the sight of people walking their dogs along the crisp road to the Castle, dogs who always looked at you with vague interest and never barked or roared, as friendly and accepting as their masters, while today I can't walk down East Parkside, a block over from my house in Boardman, without every dog barking to shake off the wood at me…is this what the technological seclusion of America has come to? And a scrap of conversation at the Apple store reminded me of how no matter how amiable he is, and he was one of the most genuinely nice people in the Netherlands, there are few things more embarrassingly annoying than hearing a gay man with a particularly lilting voice read an entire quasi-love half-heartbreak letter out loud while you desperately try to write.

I notice things which trigger other, past notices, and I've been in a noticing mood since yesterday when I read Virginia Woolf. She noticed things. To the Lighthouse is one of the greatest works of fiction ever composed, and its power comes solely from how her stand-ins notice details, changes in nature, tones of voice and unstill eyes and tilts of head, clouds on the horizon and the position of the silverware. A Room of One's Own sees her turn her eyes away from the commonplace to the grand sweep of history, and again she notices what few other people take the time to even train their eyes on for nanoseconds—the two sections where she conjures up Judith Shakespeare, for all their designed tossed-offedness, made my muscles freeze. I don't want to talk too much about A Room of One's Own because anyone who reads this blog could read the entire thing in an afternoon, but it will fill you with more of a love of literature than you previously had—which in my cases says something—and equal indignation against and sorrow for both sexes. The final thoughts about the unity of the mind, that a novelist must tap into both parts of their androgynous brain or else truly great writing can never emerge, point the way towards not just better literature but a better level of understanding between the sexes. Her assertion that true masterpieces can only come from those with unified minds who have accepted the fact—Shakespeare and Austen are her great examples, two people able to write with self-confidence and no sense of exterior pressure—is the one false note. The greatest books I have ever read came not only from Shakespeare and Austen but from drunks, chauvinists, racists, intellectual narcissists, and people with rather limited world views (in her estimation, for I would shrink from calling George Eliot limited). But she makes me believe that anyone with five hundred a year and a room of one's own—someone who has worked into a position of independence, experience, and enough self-determination and freedom from outside influence (which women sadly lacked)—could change the world. And her criticisms of Jane Eyre are smashing.

One of Virginia and Leonard's best friends in Bloomsbury was Lytton Strachey. When Strachey wasn't living with Dora Carrington (madly in love with him) and her husband Ralph Partridge (whom he madly loved) and competing in the Best Beard of the 20^th Century contest, he was proving himself the forerunner of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and The Onion. Eminent Victorians, written in 1918, is one of the greatest biographies ever written. Period. Just go in with a few modicums of knowledge about Cardinal Henry Manning, Florence Nightingale, Rugby schoolmaster Dr. Thomas Arnold, and General Charles Gordon (who amazingly did look like Charlton Heston), for his portraits rely on the accepted opinions and perspectives on their deeds for their witty power. Eminent Victorians is extremely political, Strachey's revolt against all the flaws of the Victorian mind by documenting what lay behind the devotion to progress for all mankind: oppression, scheming, self-centeredness, and hypocrisy. It was not that people had not previously recognized these traits in public figures, but no one quite like Strachey delved deep into the weaknesses of the progressive arguments before. The book still stands as a warning to conservatives and liberals alike, to always aim for the best but never enter situations believing in your goals' ultimate superiority, or worse, your ultimate superiority, for the results will be psychologically devastating. In its way, Eminent Victorians is a masterwork of anti-partisanship rhetoric and overall skepticism even among believers. In Strachey's world, the mixing of church and state, or morality and the state, only creates power-jockeying and ill-formed arguments where one's opinions are foisted on the world. Public service can drive one to monomania. Education is merely indoctrination into ideology. And the government, a fickle creature whose opinions change not from an overall goal to deceive but from constant reshufflings of positions and the conflicts between certain individuals, should never be trusted, always be feared. It sounds depressing…but it is sympathetic, somewhat hopeful that we might be able to figure it out…and it is also extremely funny. Seriously, seriously funny, mixing the long, slow, build-ups to the ultimate punch line brilliantly employed by the Onion and the social postures of Stewart and Colbert. I'm a Victorian diehard, but I can say now that I adore Lytton Strachey.