Kaleidoscope

By Christopher Porterfield

BLOOMSBURY: A HOUSE OF LIONS by Leon Edel

Lippincott; 288 pages; $12.95

Only two kinds of books seem to be published nowadays: those that are about Bloomsbury and those that are not. Every survivor of that glittering artistic and intellectual cabal, every survivor's survivor, has given testimony. Leon Edel is one of our leading literary biographers, the author of the magisterial five-volume Henry James. But what can even he add to the existing mountain of data? Only two characteristic Bloomsbury virtues: form and sensibility.

The "Bloomsberries," as they were dubbed, were born into well-connected families and came of age during England's long Edwardian afternoon. Most of them met at Cambridge, then gravitated to the squares of London's Bloomsbury district. Although their communal spirit was strong, their gossipy, party-filled life was a kaleidoscope of shifting alliances -- aesthetic, social and sexual.

At one point Biographer Lytton Strachey wrote to Economist Maynard Keynes of his "adoration" for Painter Duncan Grant, little knowing that Keynes would soon make Grant his lover. Grant later lived with Painter Vanessa Bell; when she bore their child, the happy event was cheered not only by Keynes but by Vanessa's absentee husband, Art Critic Clive Bell, and her former lover, Critic-Painter Roger Fry.

Edel uses a novelist's skill to keep all this straight -- if straight is the word. Strachey's Eminent Victorians, he notes, was written "in a new kind of ink -- the ink of Vienna, of Sigmund Freud." Edel's portrait of Virginia Woolf includes a pow erful analysis of the roots of her art and madness. She was haunted by deaths in her family (symbolized by a horrible animal face that once appeared when she looked in a mirror) and sexually traumatized by her halfbrothers' childhood groping. At the same time, her identification with her dead father and brother, and her rivalry with her sister Vanessa, alternately undermined and reinforced her will to live. This was "the circular dance of Virginia's buried incestuous feelings." In such passages Edel neither simplifies nor obfuscates. He has that rarest of traits among psychological interpreters: tact.

Ultimately, this is less the biography of people than the fever chart of an ideal. The Bloomsberries aspired to a spiritual bohemianism that would throw off Victorian customs and morals. They shaded 19th century liberalism into a reformers' zeal for the good, the beautiful and the outspoken. In literature they allied themselves with the experimental; in art they coined the term post-impressionist and introduced the English public to Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso.

Yet the Bloomsberries' influence in publishing, journalism and the arts struck some observers as malign, a means of thwarting outsiders and puffing their own productions. In sanctifying personal relations and sexual freedom, they risked seeming ingrown and self-indulgent. D.H.

Lawrence likened them to beetles, a "hor ror of little swarming selves."

Edel raises these criticisms mainly in order to sweep them aside. His valuable summary is designed not to debunk Bloomsbury but to celebrate it. Its gifted members, he argues, were essentially ra tional and humane people whose work ethic was as highly developed as their pleasure principle. Whatever their snobberies or follies, they never stopped writ ing or painting. The secret of Bloomsbury, imbibed at Cambridge, was that "they learned not to have lazy minds. They were not afraid . "

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