ABSTRACT
Formed early in the Edwardian Era and named after the West Central London district in which many of its members lived, the Bloomsbury Group was a remarkable and influential constellation of early twentieth-century British cultural figures composed of ten core members: two art critics (Clive Bell and Roger Fry) and, with Fry, who coined the term, an equal number of innovative postimpressionist painters (Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant); a renowned economist (John Maynard Keynes); one of the most prominent literary journalists of the first half of the century (Desmond MacCarthy); a trailblazing biographer (Lytton Strachey); three fiction writers (E.M. Forster, Leonard Woolf, and Virginia Woolf); and, in the Woolfs, two of the century’s great social and political theorists. He, after serving as a colonial administrator in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), became a socialist, an outspoken critic of imperialism, and an architect of the League of Nations; while she was the central English-language feminist theorist of her time and arguably of the twentieth century. Bloomsbury was, in the words of one wit, a circle composed of (sexual) triangles who lived in squares (Bedford, Fitzroy, Russell). “Bloomsbury” was also, as the radio historian Kate Whitehead argues, perhaps a misleading moniker for a group of cultural figures who spent a lot of time at the BBC (“Broadcasting” 121). It has long been a critical tendency-–in R.G. Collingwood’s phrase, an “absolute presupposition” of modernist historiography (67)––to regard high modernist art, literature, and cultural theory in Britain as expressions of intellectuals’ hostility to mass culture and, by extension, to “the masses.” John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1930 (1992) contains one of the most forceful expressions of this tendency in recent years. Carey’s central argument is that “modernist literature and art can be seen as a hostile reaction to the unprecedentedly large reading public created by late nineteenth-century cultural reforms,” and, moreover, that “the purpose of modernist writing was to exclude . . . newly educated (or
‘semi-educated’) readers, and so to preserve the intellectual’s seclusion from the ‘mass.’” (vii). Carey’s argument is marred by an often unmitigated contempt for modernism. However, even some critics who are generally sympathetic to modernism’s many liberal and socialist agendas have continued to accept Andreas Huyssen’s Great Divide theory about modernism’s categorical opposition to mass culture. Patrick Brantlinger, for example, in The Reading Lesson (1998), assumes “the modernist reification of the antithesis between high and mass culture” (206). However, a growing number of critics has begun to develop convincing alternatives to that starkly manichaean approach to early twentieth-century cultural history. Alison Pease notes, for example, in an essay on how I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis, and T.S. Eliot incorporated mass-cultural techniques like “shock and sensation” into their critical writing, that “the relationship between mass culture and modernist criticism was more fluid and more complicated than we have yet to recognize” (77)––an observation that may easily be expanded to modernist writing and other art forms in general. For her part, Melba Cuddy-Keane, in Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (2003), addresses the commonly “perceived division between elites and masses” in order to question “essentialist notions about cultural division” and to complicate the neat highbrow-lowbrow dichotomy that she sees operating in much modernist historiography (17-18). Especially in Britain, there remains a lingering critical suspicion that the Bloomsbury artists and writers themselves were unrepentant upper-class aesthetes who sought refuge from the vulgarities of modern mass and popular culture in a rarefied atmosphere of social privilege marked by the unfettered consumption of aesthetic impressions. Since the beginning of the Bloomsbury Boom during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when biographies of Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf and the explosive interest in the latter sparked by second-wave feminist critics heralded the reemergence of Bloomsbury into both literary-critical and broader cultural consciousness, writers have typically located the group in the history of aestheticism, a late-Victorian cultural phenomenon that, until recently, was almost universally perceived as an aesthetic movement as elitist in its own way as was, supposedly, its modernist legacy. As Michael Holroyd writes, the Bloomsbury Group “represents more truly than anything else the culmination and ultimate refinement of the aesthetic movement” (Influence 53). Aestheticist principles, inherited from art for art’s sake and decadent Victorian writers like Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, inform a great deal of Bloomsbury’s cultural productions and political writings. However, the members of Bloomsbury were no mere modernist reincarnations of George Du Maurier’s notorious Jellaby Postlethwaite lunching ocularly on “an aesthetic midday meal” of a freshly cut lily in a glass of water (Small, The Aesthetes, Plate 3), or of the Oscar Wilde pilloried in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience as a leader of that “greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery” crowd. Nor, as Holroyd suggests-–qualifying his aestheticist genealogy of Bloomsbury-–were the Bloomsbury intellectuals simply the progeny and propagators of entrenched Victorian cultural traditions and theories (Influence 54). Rather, as widely connected and politically very deeply engaged early twentieth-
century intellectuals, they were acutely sensitive to the effects of a rapidly changing technocultural landscape upon residual Victorian cultural and ethical ideals, aestheticist and otherwise. The Bloomsbury Group’s involvement in radio during the 1920s and 1930s is a key example of how an important collection of modernist intellectuals strove to preserve their deeply held ethical and aesthetic beliefs between the world wars while adjusting them to fit the demands of an increasingly technologized mass culture-–and more specifically, the demands of a new and, in terms of its capacity to enable connection with vast numbers of people, an unprecedented medium of mass communications. The first part of this chapter explores the institutional and ideological tensions caused at the BBC during the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s as Reithian cultural and moral imperatives clashed with efforts by some broadcasters and BBC producers to promote a diversity of opinion greater than Reith wished to permit. The second part offers a critical survey of broadcasts by E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and the Woolfs, and locates their talks against a background composed partly of the stylistic evolution in radio talks during the 1920s and 1930s, and partly of BBC policy. The third and final section narrows its scope and considers the ways that Desmond MacCarthy’s eighteen-part 1932-33 series of radio talks on “The Art of Reading” epitomizes the Bloomsbury Group’s pluralist ethics and their related efforts to theorize a new mass culture on the ethical principles of friendship and beauty which many of them had learned from G.E. Moore and other ethical thinkers at Cambridge University at the turn of the century.
