"I came one-half hour early. My watch [had] gone on a rampage. Lucas [is] a gray-haired man of about 60, [with] finely chiseled features, markedly piercing blue eyes — a look of intelligence and elegance about him — but the elegance is all in his face, not in his clothes. We talked about Bloomsbury. So much of what Lucas said was in quotations — English, French, and German — that I cannot remember or reproduce it. One emphasis he made was that Bloomsbury was a jungle — that the society of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey was far from being in the ordinary sense a happy family. They were intensely and rudely critical of each other. They were the sort of people who would read letters addressed to others. In real crises they could be generous, but in ordinary affairs of life they were anything but kind. He kept insisting that Dickinson and Forster were not really in Bloomsbury. They were softhearted and kind. Bloomsbury was certainly not that. Lucas stayed out of this “jungle.” Also, they tormented each other with endless love affairs. Strachey was openly homosexual — a surprising thing in view of his later relationship with Carrington. Lucas went to Cambridge in 1913 [and] after one year went to war. Returned in 1919. Strachey and the rest were coming into their fame. The notoriety of Eminent Victorians was partly a chance of time and place—the frantic 20s were to assist him no end."
January 1, 1970