Hello and welcome to the Book Club Review. I'm Laura.
I'm Kate. And this is the podcast about book clubs and the books that get you talking. The Bloomsbury group: Books, deckchairs beautiful houses in the countryside and endless, endless letters. It might feel at times that we know everything there is to know about Virginia Woolf and her artistic circle. When 'Young Bloomsbury', a new book by Nino stretchy came along, I confess I wondered what else she could possibly have to add, but then...
Gender fluidity, drag, throuples. This is the Bloomsbury group as you've never seen them before, with Strachey introducing the younger generation of bright young things who came into the Bloomsbury orbit in the 1920s. That includes novelist Eddie Sackville-West, photographer Stephen Tennant, sculptor Stephen Tomlin, photographer Cecil Beaton and writer Julia Strachey. Talented, productive and ahead of their time, these larger-than-life figures had high achieving professional lives and extremely complicated emotional lives. The younger generation gave Old Bloomsbury a new voice, and in turn were given the confidence to embrace sexual equality and freedom, exploring open ways of living that would not be embraced for another 100 years.
And so listen in to hear more from Nino as she and I discussed the book in the atmospheric surroundings in the library at Charleston Farmhouse, home of Virginia Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell, and an important focal point of Bloomsbury get-togethers. We also hear of Nino's favourite Bloomsbury reads, and Laura and I chip in with a couple of our own recommendations at the end.
All that coming up here on the Book Club Review.
Here we sit, Nino, in the library at Charleston farmhouse, with a bust of your relative Lytton Strachey on the table to the left of us, he's actually looking away from us – I hope that doesn't mean anything. He's looking out the window, but I'm sure he's listening. You're obviously incredibly at ease being here. You're a trustee of Charleston, and you're also very much a part of Bloomsbury, I actually feel surprisingly intimidated. Just knowing where I am and with him just in the corner there, so listeners, if I sound slightly stilted, that's why. Tell us about your place within the Strachey family.
It's really interesting thinking about Stracheys because we turn out to be rather a rare and strange breed. There's probably only about twelve people with the surname Strachey left in the world at the moment. And that's partly because we have such a proud Queer heritage of which Lytton and his siblings were great demonstrations. Obviously you've have Lytton and his writings, his brother James and his wife, Alex, who were translators of Freud. You have his sister Dorothy, who wrote the wonderful lesbian novel Olivia by Olivia. And they come from a family with a long literary tradition based not in Bloomsbury but in Somerset since the 1640s. And I grew up in the house where Lytton's father grew up, which was the home of the Stracheys for over 300 years.
And for people who don't know this was a very important place for the Bloomsbury Group. Tell us how your cast of characters connected with Charleston.
Vanessa and Duncan moved here during the First World War at that point with Duncan's lover, Bunny Garnett, and it became a meeting place for many of Bloomsbury old and young, many of whom would pass through, particularly in the summer where this was a wonderful place to lie around and talk through the nights and also to paint because you had two artists studios here and Lytton would make an annual ceremonial visitation normally in September, and you had this rotation of visits from members of the Strachey family. So you end up, if you walk through the rooms here, you will find pictures of Oliver Strachey, Lytton's brother, for example, the father of Julia, and of course of Lytton's mother, who was Duncan Grant's aunt and rather bizarrely, his portrait of her is at the end of his bed. And I always think what would it be like to sleep with your aunt looking at your bed – because they were so intimately tied, because the Stracheys and the Grants were first cousins, so they were biological family as well as chosen family. You get the feel here of the continuing interaction of the different generations.
I love that you write the typical Strachey male or female, young or old, Somerset or Bloomsbury, will be found wrapped in a shawl with a nose in a book. Ah, I want to be a part of this family.
It's hilarious because Duncan Grant paints lots of pictures of Stracheys because he was Lytton's first cousin and living with them. In nearly every picture they're sitting there with a shawl with a book. We're not very active [laughs] stationery pursuits.
I always think this is one of the reasons for my own enduring fascination with the Bloomsbury group is they really did love a garden, a deck chair, a cup of tea and a book, and to me, that's just my idea of heaven. And I'm sure for many of our listeners, too.
With young Bloomsbury you are looking at something that many of us are quite familiar with the Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, sort of big names, but you've actually got an interesting angle, which is that you're considering the younger generation, the people who came along after them, and were drawn into their orbit. Tell us about that idea that lies behind the book.
Well, it was interesting because as in the way of all things, I started off thinking, I was going to write about one aspect and ended up focusing on another. So I think I've been fascinated by how Bloomsbury as we think of it today, as you just described, all these famous people, although they came together in the early 1900s, pre the First World War, they mostly only talk to themselves, because nobody else was listening to them. They didn't really become known to the world and become successful until the 1920s. When I began looking into that I was thinking, gosh, well, here they are, they're connected with this wonderful new generation of bright young people who took them into Vogue, who totally change their audience the way they're connected. And then lo and behold, they sold, here and in America. So I started off thinking about this role of inspiration and interconnectivity. And actually, it moved on. And I began to focus on the young people themselves, and what they were getting from this relationship with these older people who, above all, were completely accepting of them as individuals, because these were mostly Queer young people who were exploring their sexual and gender identities. And in Bloomsbury, they found a group of adults who could accept them for who they were, and allowed them to be more creative than they could ever have hoped to be. And that sense of freeing up and bringing joy and that creative enlivening this group of young people. Really, that's where I sort of flew.
Tell uus about some of the characters of this next generation. There are some very charismatic, fascinating figures in here.
Well, I think there's a wonderful range if we're thinking of the young people they were connecting with in the 20s, there were people like Eddie Sackville-West who was a young novelist, also a child prodigy at the piano, who later became a music critic and his friend, Steven Tennant. So often, they get written about in passing, rather than necessarily focusing on their actual achievements as writers and artists, and also some of the language that gets used about them. Because both of them I think we would describe nowadays as gender fluid. And the language at the time describes them as effeminate and aesthetes, and therefore, almost as a value judgement being taken place about the quality of their work, and even the nature of their health. Both of them were seriously ill. I mean, it's almost at death's door. And that they would be described as hypochondriacs. So you've got Eddie and Steven, and you have a whole panoply of young writers, artists, journalists. So you have sculptors like Steven Tomlin, you have writers like Julia Strachey, you have journalists such as Raymond Mortimer, who was one of the reasons why everybody got into the popular press at that time, because he was working for Vogue. So he introduced that whole group, and particularly the older members of Bloomsbury into vogue and Virginia Woolf talks about going along to be photographed and find herself being photographed at the Vogue studios beside a fashion shoot, and what that felt like, you know, when you're suddenly in new types of media and reaching new audiences do you wouldn't have been expected to connect with before. And it was Raymond who provided that pathway.
I love the way you write about the parties. In other , works they're written about in passing, to imagine the scene but you were focused on the parties in a way that I really loved and the dynamics of them and the dressing up and the costumes.
I think they were incredibly important in the context of the freedom of self expression, because I think there was a sense here that you were able to be whoever you want it to be. And that could be in terms of any form of gender expression that you felt like, and you could enjoy yourself maybe in a way that you might not be able to at any other place. And this was a period when it could be a frightening place, particularly for Queer young men who could be arrested. And one of the joys of Bloomsbury was that the parties were all happening in first floor rooms, and the police couldn't look into a first ballroom. There was a young dancer called Bobby Britton in Fitzroy Square, who was arrested because he was in a basement flat, and the police looked down through the windows, and they could see men dancing with men. But in Bloomsbury, you wouldn't be seen you're on the first floor. Virginia has the most wonderful description of a party where she invited everyone to come in white tie. And she describes how all the young men were waltzing around the room in each other's arms, and the young women were flirting with each other in corners. And that's just such a lovely vision in 1925, you might not have imagined that that was what was going to be taking place.
Very much. I love the way that it was situated in context and the time like that. It's hard for me to imagine but you write: 'This was after all a decade, dominated by the Conservative government of Stanley Baldwin, with fashionable youth culture standing in frivolous contrast to the sober ethos of the prevailing political regime.' And so yes, you've got these young people who are trying to figure out who they are, who they want to be. And then the older generation of Bloomsbury provide a home in a way that feels like a place where there's acceptance and there's tolerance and openness to different forms of sexuality and expression is encouraged.
Completely. I mean, again, it's what we would describe today as a family of choice, a group of Queer friends and allies who come together to support members of the younger generation. And I think that was quite a rare thing to find that date. And a lot of the young men that I've been writing about had just been through different forms of conversion therapy. So Eddie Sackville-West, for example, had just been in Germany, where he'd had injections and psychotherapy, dream therapy, and then came back to England and was able to find a place where he could be accepted for who he was. And that made a huge difference to his life and for many of the young people here. And there is this strange contrast, just as you say, between this, what you think of in the 20s, this wonderful world of the Bright Young Thing and dressing up or whatever, but actually, you had a Conservative government who was cracking down on open sexual behaviour in the streets, on nightclubs and on all forms of what they were considering to be perversion at the time.
And you're describing relationships, family dynamics in a way that these days we are more ease with. We have a vocabulary for that. When you're used to reading about Bloomsbury it feels quite surprising when you come across lines like this in the book – you describe the relationship between Ralph Partridge, Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey as a 'polyamorous throuple, a consensual relationship between three people'. But we do have a term now. And that means something to people, but back then, they didn't.
I think that's so interesting, because I think what we hopefully now we're getting to a stage where we can decease to have this sense of prurient voyeurism, and actually thinking about here were a group of people who were experimenting with different relationship models, very successfully, and ones that were then a benefit to other young people. I mean the Lytton / Carrington / Ralph trio is fascinating. And it was lovely to find out more about that. And really to think about how inclusive it was.
It feels in some ways, like quite a sensual book, there's a lot of sex, sexuality, a Lytton Strachey quote, I made a note of, he asked despairingly when he had been through a period of not feeling very well, 'when should I ever be able to frisk again?' And I thought, yes, there's a lot of frisking isn't there and a lot of experimentation with sexuality and finding a way to live.
I hope what comes across is the sheer sense of joy. I was writing this during lockdown. And so it was wonderful to be writing about people who were all getting together in different ways and communicating and inspiring each other. It really did feel like this sense of a creative crucible, and particularly this intergenerational connection and I felt rather jealous – maybe I need to develop it. That sense of being able to tune in and have relationships with people in their early 20s who have been shaped by a different age, exposed to different influences, and how rejuvenating that was, essentially, and that helped all the older members of Bloomsbury with their own artistic practice.
Many people will know that Orlando was inspired by Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf's great love. But what I didn't know was that the character of Orlando was also inspired by Eddie Sackville-West, who Virginia knew and was quite taken with. Tell us a little bit more about that.
I love the sense in Orlando, the constant never knowing quite who is who and Orlando certainly has an inspiration, obviously from Vita, but also from Eddie. And there's a lovely photo that Vita takes of Virginia at Knowle, standing at the bottom of the steps leading up to Eddy's rooms at Knowle. And you just had this lovely sense of how Virginia was entwined in both their lives. She was so supportive of Eddy. She even asked him to come and bring his diaries to read out to her so that she could help him with his relationships. And there are bits of Orlando that absolutely Eddy, he had this fascination with skulls and he had kept a skull on his writing desk, and she talks about Orlando going down into the family vault and holding bones. And Eddy also had this habit of throwing himself onto the ground in despair. And that, again, is very Orlando. So you see these themes woven through, and again, the sense of gender fluidity and moving between different genders over time.
And I was fascinated by these young men who wore powder on their faces, they wore jewellery, they loved dressing up, they loved to stage photographs. And then they started to make films where they were, as you say, performing these roles, and I just hadn't really known about any of that. I found that really interesting.
And today, of course, it feels so familiar to us, particularly when we think of drag culture and you look at the images taken by Beaton designed by Tennant. And absolutely it's obvious what they're expressing. And I particularly love the photo that's on the cover of the book, which shows Stephen Tennant and a group of young people of indeterminate gender, I think is one of the phrases about it. Because although they're dressed as shepherds and shepherdesses, actually the costumes are all unisex. There's no differentiation between male and female there, and it really does give sense of that openness to different identities. That same day Tennant went over to tea would Lytton Strachey and told him all about it. Lytton talks about them having been shepherds and shepherdesses in the morning and nuns the night before and who knows what the next day. There's that opportunity and joyfulness of being able to express themselves like that.
I didn't know about the Bloomsbury bookshop, which just sounds so heavenly: 'With so many prospective purchasers nearby success for the bookshop Birrel and Garnett was guaranteed. The ground floor rooms didn't have a proper shopfront. They had plenty of room for shelves and space for Omega workshop tables. Bunny and his business partner Frankie Birrell stocked up on all the things most likely to tempt the local audience, a goodly selection of 18th-century literature ripe for inclusion in Lytton's library, the latest English and French novels, newly fashionable Russian translations and everything you might need on modern art. Hogarth Press books were present, along with Carrington's quirky oil paintings. It was a comfy sofa to settle down in and chat and impromptu sessions could be expected after hours, especially when Bunny joined the group of lodgers living upstairs, Birrel and Garnettformed a key meeting point between the generations, a ready source of fresh blood for the Bloomsbury family.'
It was during lockdown when we were allowed to go for walks and I went to Gordon Square. Taverton Street is literally just off the corner. So it was pole position and you could see why everybody in that area went to Birrell and Garnett because you could come and sit down on a sofa like we're sitting on today. Have a chat. Look at the latest art books. Look at what Virginia and Leonard had been printing, Carrington's paintings were there. It was there, for example, that Bunny Garnett met the sculptor Steven Tomlin who just walked in one day to buy an art book. And they started talking and one thing led to another and they connected and then they ended up with this wonderful creative partnership between Tommy and Bloomsbury where he ended up creating really the definitive images of everybody in Bloomsbury, particularly Virginia Woolf. I mean, ironically, because she hated sitting for a portrait, but it's that image that is the enduring and most well known where it's obviously in Tavistock Square itself, it's here at Charleston, there's a version at Sissinghurst, I mean almost you name it, it's her most ubiquitous image. And we're sitting here today looking at Tommy's bus of Lytton, which similarly, there is a version in the Tate. It's a really tender portrayal of a loved one. And I think that is what comes through in Tommy's sculptures of the people he knew, and the men and women he loved is that sense of connectivity at an artist and sitter. I'm so glad that that young sculptor was able to create that enduring legacy because he died in his 30s himself. And yet his images live on.
You get quite drawn into that story, don't you about Tommy and about Julia Strachey, and their fairly catastrophic relationship, which feels very sad. And she was an interesting figure.
Well you see I challenge you on it being sad, because as one of the things that I suppose that I really got into, in thinking about these relationships, this idea of consensual non-monogamy, because most of the people we were talking about, like Julia and Tommy went into these relationships, absolutely assuming that they will be having relationships with others. And Tommy continued having relationships with men and women, Julia mostly preferred men. Although she was very happy for Carrington to flirt with her.
I found it all fascinating. And I think reading it, you do get caught up in this heady swirl, and it feels exciting and full of adventure and possibility. And I love the way that you've made it seem incredibly fresh and relevant, bringing them to life for our present day.
One of the messages I was really hoping to get across is this loving sense of acceptance for young people who are experimenting with different gender identities, different types of relationships. And here we are in 2022, one hundred years on, and it feels like we're in a better place right now. And that young people would feel more able to behave in the same way. But you never quite know the direction that history is taking us. And so it's a lovely circle, a way to think about how people were behaving one hundred years ago, and how that mirrors and reflects what we're doing now.
Clive Bell wrote about the beauty, the romance and the fun of life. And I thought, yes, that sums this book up.
And of course, we're sitting in Clive's library right now. This was the room that he relaxed in and came and spent time here. And I suppose again, thinking about consensual non-monogamy, how inclusive all those relationships were, and how communal, I mean, that was the other joy, both old and young, all living together in groups, and constantly talking and sharing and painting and sculpting makes me feel my own home is maybe not as creative as it should be.
Well, I feel sure if I had a room like this, it would do great things.
[laughs] Yeah, obviously.
Now, Bloomsbury and books. It was lovely to see at the end of your book, there is a fairly comprehensive list of books that you found useful, which is I always find fun, fascinating when you've enjoyed a book, you know, and then you look at the books that the author has worked their way through. I always think that's really interesting. Any particular standouts for you? Anything that you really hadn't expected to love, but did?
It's hard because I think I probably loved almost everything I read for the book, and I would direct everybody to the wonderful editions of letters. And we're so lucky that you've got Woolf's letters. You've got Lytton's letters, you've got Carrington's letters, which are so magical with their illustrations. And obviously you've got Keynes, and Lopokova, I mean, you name it, you can draw on their own words, as well as the biographical interpretations that there are and I suppose I would have to direct people to Michael Holroyd's biography of Lytton Strachey which is interesting because it's almost a record of a historical moment in itself, because it was one of the first post 1967 biographies – when we think that homosexuality was only partially decriminalised in '67. This was one of the first biographies to be able to honestly talk about homosexual relationships. You know, now that just seems so automatic to us. How on earth would you not talk about that aspect of people's lives, but it caused a huge stir when it was published. And obviously, it's been revised, but I think it gives an extra level to it, reading it, thinking about the difference that it made and the honesty that is introduced, and how that then maybe paved its own bit of a way for changing biography in the same way as Lytton change biography in the UK by being honest about the Victorians.
What's his book The Eminent Victorians like, is it good? It was a huge sensation in its day wasn't it?
Oh it was a massive hit. And I suppose again, there's what we forget is that of the Bloomsbury group writers Lytton was the most successful in his lifetime in reaching a broad audience, both for Eminent Victorians and for Queen Victoria, and for Elizabeth and Essex, which maybe is not such a good read but sold hundreds and thousands of copies, then, but no, I think Eminent Victorians is worth reading. And is interesting because you get the sense of irony weaving through it. And I remember Cyril Connolly talked about it being really the first book of the 1920s because it was being honest and critical of a generation who had previously been worshipped these heroes of the Victorian era, so probably quite in tune with our feelings today in terms of thinking about Empire, and about religion and government and all that. It's definitely worth a go.
Interesting. I've always wondered about it. Now I asked you for recommendations. So what else have you got in your pile,
I've got another Strachey book, which is one of my favourites which is Julia Strachey's Cheerful Weather for the Wedding. I've actually got with me here the first edition that was published by Virginia Woolf with its lovely Hogarth press wolf's head colophon. I think what I enjoy about it is the irony of the title because it's got 'cheerful' in it. And yet, it's an absolutely tragic book. Have you read it?
I'm not familiar with it, only through reading your book.
They made it into a film a couple of years ago. And even then, I'm not sure the full sense of that comedy and tragedy comes through in that she's writing about middle class wedding and a bride who's getting ready for that. But as you progress, she drinks she's getting progressively more drunk, and then she spills black ink on her wedding dress. And gradually what emerges is that she's marrying a man who she doesn't love for his money, having got pregnant with twins the year before with another young man, and she's abandoned the twins abroad, or they're being brought up by someone else. Their family have covered it up and he or she is going to marry this other man and her previous lover turns up. There's a bit of autobiographical truth in this. Julia accompanied her own mother giving birth when she was only five to an illegitimate child who the mother was due to give away, but she actually kept it and brought it back to England. So this was an experience that Julia had her own memories of. It's actually a surprisingly cheerful read, despite the tragic subtext.
Oh, and I couldn't help but recommend Orlando for all the reasons that we've been talking about in terms of Young Bloomsbury and in celebrating in this case, gender fluidity, over 400 years, I think Orlando covers and the wonderful characters that you're introduced within it, and the joyful weaving of history and contemporary themes. But also, I mean, I think what I'd like to reflect on was the initial idea that she had, and being inspired to write this book by the death of a member of Young Bloomsbury, who was Philip Ritchie, which really stopped Woolf in her tracks, and she started thinking about how could she write a history of all her contemporaries while they were still alive, so that she was capturing them before they suddenly disappeared, and that turned into a much grander project. But that initial idea was sparked by the death of a young man who she wished she'd known more intimately.
I particularly adore the lovely edition of love letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West that brought out recently. It just fits in the palm of your hand, it's just lovely and I walked around with it for a little bit, the immediacy of their communication and the loving nature of it. And again, actually moving beyond sexual relationship to a long term loving friendship and how that was mutually supportive, and not least for the Hogarth Press because thanks to Vita they earned more money than any other author by selling Vita's books.
Because she also was incredibly successful wasn't she.
Yeah, she way outsold Virginia. And you have this lovely moment, because I think it was the Edwardians that had sold really well. Virginia writes about how she had enough money to put in a downstairs lavatory at Monk's House.
That's the dream. Yes, I read that last summer [Love Letters: Vita and Virginia]. And I think absolutely, as you say, the immediacy, you just feel as with any Bloomsbury letter, you know, from anyone, they really knew how to write great letters didn't they! You do just feel like they're right there next to you. But also, as you say that transitioning the evolving of that relationship, as they age as their lives change into this really important friendship. It just felt slightly miraculous to be able to witness that to see it captured on the page, I thought was what was really special about that book. I absolutely loved it. And just to say about Orlando, I wonder people who haven't read Orlando maybe feel like it's going to be difficult. I think books like the waves really put people off Virginia Woolf and maybe the thing to say about Orlando is it's incredibly readable, incredibly accessible. I feel like it's the one that's always the most fun in some ways.
Absolutely. And it was the one that sold the best during her lifetime. It's a ripping story, it rollicks along and what's so nice is it is so evocative when you read the list of acknowledgments at the end all the people she drew in and you get this sense of the joyfulness life. One of the people who loved it was Noel Coward, for example, she gave a dedicated copy to him. That connectivity with drama and liveliness and fun, right there.
And then how about something a bit more contemporary?
I also wanted to mention the wonderful LOTE by Shola von Reinhold, which I'm reading at the moment and absolutely loving because if you're thinking about an evocation of people and lives and an interplay between today and the 1920s. What Shola does is conjure up this amazing vision of a group in the 1920s of lotus eaters. It's like a sort of a aesthetic and religious and philosophical response into which some of the characters of Young Bloomsbury appear in fictionalised versions, for example, Stephen Tennant, but you have a really interesting perspective in that you have a lead character who is black and Trans and looking to find the history of a lost and under regarded black Trans artists from the 20s called Hermia and how her life is revealed through the stories. I'm nearly finished and I'm loving it at the right now.
Great! Sounds like a book that the older Bloomsbury members would have absolutely loved.
Absolutely, they all would have gone for it.
Well, Nino, it has been the biggest treat not only to read your wonderful book, but also to be here in Charleston, in this atmosphere of intellectual endeavour and creativity. And everywhere I look, I can see something that feels inspiring. Thank you for joining me here.
Thank you, Kate. It's been an absolute joy to talk about Young Bloomsbury in this place in which so many of the people who appear in the book lived and loved and hopefully had a wonderful time.
How much do you know about the Bloomsbury Group? Laura, are you a fan?
Well, if you had asked me, before your interview with Nino, I would have said I know a reasonable amount. But actually, I think I had a very superficial understanding up till now. Really, you know, Virginia Woolf, of course, I've read most of her novels, and we read and discussed all passion spent by Vita Sackville West, on episode 12. Way, way back in the ancient history.
Great book club book.
Great book club book, but really, that's about it. So this has been rather edifying and super intriguing. What about you?
Yeah, well, as you know, I've over the years have read many of the books that there are about Virginia Woolf and I have loved her letters and her diaries. I haven't read that many of her novels, I did attempt to tackle The Waves with my book club not so long ago, and actually had to give up, I retreated in defeat. That's a very hard book, but I also read To the Lighthouse not so long ago, that was a magical experience. I absolutely love that and hugely recommend it. It's great. And then I suppose you know, every so often, you kind of sort of slightly go down that Bloomsbury rabbit hole. You know, one book then will lead me on to another so last summer I read the book of letters that Nina and I were discussing, which I absolutely loved, and then that prompted me to read more about Vita Sackville West. I didn't actually know that much about her as an individual. I only knew about her through her connection with Virginia Woolf and so then I ended up going down this real Vita Sackville West rabbit hole and getting really into gardening, her writing on gardening was absolutely wonderful. I adored it. And there's a book called Sissinghurst, which is about the garden at Sissinghurst – her house that she created herself – like a half castle that she and her husband Harold Nicholson created from nothing really, it was a ruin when they went there, and they created this magical garden. Sarah Raven, who is a well-known gardener is married to Vita's grandson, Adam Nicolson, and lived at Sissinghurst for a while and so wrote this wonderful book that was sort of part practical gardening manual, and part exploration of Vita's hands-on experience of living there and gardening the way she likes to do it. And then these wonderful columns that she used to write for the newspaper, and she was just so wonderfully forthright, and eccentric and opinionated, and funny and charming and poetic. She's a wonderful writer, I urge anyone if you ever have a chance to seek out any of her writing and gardening to do so because it's wonderful.
Kate famously loves a gardening book, despite not gardening herself, long listeners of the podcast will know that
I can now keep a houseplant alive, which is a new development for me.
Okay, so you're quite well versed with the Bloomsbury group and have read much more extensively than I have. What books would you recommend to our listeners inspired by your trip to Charleston?
Well, I would just recommend one that that I read a couple of years ago now and I was just really surprised at how delightful it was. I hadn't expected to enjoy it as much as I did. It's a fairly slight book. It's called A Boy at the Hogarth Press by Richard Kennedy. Richard Kennedy was a young man, he left school at the age of sixteen, and he ended up getting a job through family connections at Leonard and Virginia Woolf's press, the Hogarth Press. This is famously their press that they set up so that they could publish Virginia's books and other books that they felt deserved an audience and Virginia Woolf would literally sit there and hand set the type herself. They were both of them very hands-on, it was a tiny basement operation, but they did have a few people who worked for them. And one of them was Richard Kennedy. 'Though home from home for London's intellectual elite the press's damp basement at Tavistock Square was anything but elegant with the legendarily mean Leonard Woolf, keeping a close check on everything, including the toilet paper, and frequently exploding when confronted with Richard Kennedy's latest idiocy. The Woolf's clearly developed a fondness for their apprentice, but when he left several years later, Leonard Woolf pronounced him the most frightful idiot he had ever had the privilege of meeting in a long career of suffering fools.'
And so what's magical about it is that it's this very sort of sideways glance into their lives. From quite an unexpected perspective. This was in no way when they were formally entertaining or presenting a certain view of themselves. This is when they were just working and getting on with the sort of manual labour of getting these books out into the world. And as anyone who has ever worked in publishing knows, books are quite complicated things, and the process of making them never goes smoothly. And so they have all kinds of disasters. Richard Kennedy, it's not that he wasn't bright, but more I think it he intellectually, you know, these are some of the brightest and cleverest minds of their generation. And, you know, he was just, you know, a fairly average young man. But he did have this extraordinary talent for drawing. And that really was his gift. And so one of the other things that makes this book so special is that it's liberally illustrated with his little sketches that he made, and they absolutely bring it to life, these people leap off the page in a way that I really love. It's almost the illustrations tell as much of a story as the little diary memoir that you get, and it's very funny, you know, he's sort of very dry, and he's just observing everything that went on and himself as a fairly hapless participant. Reading between the lines, you can kind of see why Leonard found him so frustrating. He doesn't make this really disastrous judgement call on something towards the end of his time there where he absolutely caused an enormous problem. And I don't think Lennar was ever able to forgive him. And I think he stopped working for them shortly after that. But you you know, your heart absolutely warms to him. He's very charming. It's a lovely book, I really recommend it.
That sounds great. Especially because has a bit of the behind the scenes in the book world. And we always love that.
How about you?
Well, it's a quick recommendation to start. I wanted to flag to our readers Evelyn Waugh, who needs no introduction, because almost everyone seems to have read Brideshead Revisited, but I want to put on people's radar, one of his earlier novels, which is Vile Bodies, which is set in England, between the wars, and it is dark and kind of nasty, but it is very much about the Bright Young Things, and the emptiness and vacuousness of their existence. He doesn't dwell on the trauma of World War One although that's pretty much the fuel I think for this story, but you get an insight into the partying, the drinking, the sex. It's kind of a time capsule in some ways, and probably an interesting compliment to Nino's more researched accounts of similar lives during this time.
I have a copy of that on my shelf that I've never opened.
I went on an Evelyn Waugh reading spree a while back because I found all these beautiful old editions. He was quite the character, and then it comes through in his writing. But what I wanted to dwell on at a bit more length was a bit of a change of pace. While we had the Bloomsbury Group, and then Younger Bloomsbury writers in the 1920s, as Nino explores, at the same time, over in Paris, we had the Lost Generation, a group of American writers with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald being the most famous, but they were circling around in a kind of similar artistic circle with Gertrude Stein, Picasso, James Joyce, EE Cummings, they too, were creating new patterns for themselves, often with quite acrimonious and heartbreaking consequences. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway is the memoir of his time living in Paris. He wrote it in the 1960s. And it was actually published three years after his death. So it wasn't published on his watch, which is interesting. Have you read? that feel like everyone's read that.
I have.
And it is delightful, right? It is such a window into what Paris was like, right? You know, that fairly dreadful film Midnight in Paris with Owen Wilson? You know that one? I've never seen it. Well, I think for Americans, that artistic group, that literary group has a lot of cachet, probably, maybe the same way the Bloomsbury group has for us.
That's interesting. They're like the US equivalent.
With Paris mixed in there, right? A bit more glamorous.
Well, and then of course, there was this whole south of France thing going on?
Yeah, exactly. So they too, had a place of pilgrimage. They would go to Villa America, which was the home of Gerald and Sara Murphy, who weren't writers themselves as my recollection, but were just these kinds of charismatic Bohemian forward thinking charming people who wrapped their arms around Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, and kind of brought them all together to create art in whatever form. So this milieu was somewhat similar to the Bloomsbury Group. My recommendations are a Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway, and then, just changing pace, I really want to suggest that people also read an amazing compliment, which is Mrs. Hemingway by Naomi Wood, and that is a novel written in the last 10 or 15 years. And that is the life of Hemingway but told through the perspective of his four wives. His very first wife, Hadley Richardson, followed by the Vogue journalist Pauline Pfeiffer, the famous war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and journalist Mary Walsh. And this book came after The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, which was dedicated to the life of Hadley Richardson, and in a way kind of established this genre, these fictionalised accounts of the last generation and the individuals who had relationships with these these heavyweights of American literature, but The Paris Wife, not very good. Mrs. Hemingway? Surprisingly excellent. Really great. My book club read it, I think pre-pod days, so we never discussed it. But a really excellent book. And you know, hey, always important, I think, to think about the historical records of these amazing, incredibly talented, incredibly inspirational artists and writers, but thinking about it through the lens of another person whose experience might have been slightly different. And that was certainly the case are the four wives of Ernest Hemingway.
Well, it feels like we have navigated quite far away from the the downlands of Sussex and the squares of London to Paris, and then the Cap d'Antibes, but this is the way of it, one book leads to another. And I'm sure that with this range of recommendations from Nino, and also from us, there will be something in there that will tempt you, or your book club.
That's nearly it for this episode, you'll find details of all the books mentioned in the show notes and on our website. That's also the place to find an episode transcript and our comments forum where you can let us know any thoughts you have on the subject or book recommendations. We especially love to get those. You'll also find our archive of over one hundred episodes to listen to plus articles on such things as our favourite book podcasts, or our favourite Georgette Heyer novels. That's all at the www.thebookclubreview.co.uk. You can find Nino on Twitter and Instagram @NinoStrachey.
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