Conversations in Bloomsbury

Conversations in Bloomsbury is a 1981 memoir that depicts writer Mulk Raj Anand’s life in London during the heyday of the Bloomsbury Group, and his relationships with the group’s members. It provides a rare insight into the intimate workings of the English modernist movement, portraying such prominent figures as Virginia Woolf, T.S Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. Anand challenges the cultural narrative that many have received about these literary figures.

Visions of the Bloomsbury Group

Anand leaves a snapshot of the Bloomsbury Group for posterity, focalizing the individuals within the group through issues of colonial prejudice. His revelations, written decades after his experiences, and retrospectively framed by a postcolonial perspective, often give uncomfortable perspectives on the racist and casually jingoistic attitudes of a seemingly liberal movement. Commentary often engages with the significance of the British ‘civilising’ mission. Comments include T.S. Eliot’s remark ‘I wish that Indians would tone down their politics and renew their culture’.^[1] Retrospectively, it is possible to point out shortcomings of these writers, inviting a re-examination of their work.

The text gives a highly subjective reading of the Bloomsbury Group, one which is elevated from a biographical recording to a complex and amusing satire of intellectual prejudice, by virtue of Anand's position on the margins of the group. The form of the text allows Anand to set up an ironic distance between the voices of the Bloomsbury Group and the silent undercurrents of their conversations. The prejudices and biases of the group become glaringly obvious because Anand guides the reader to see the dismissal of colonial cruelties that the insular nature of the group prevents them from seeing themselves.

Anand expresses particular disillusion with the group's ignorance of other cultures, arguing that this is an obstacle to the modernist endeavour. He is also critical of their disengagement with both national and international politics, particularly on the issue of Indian independence.

Genre

Published in 1981, the text’s frame of reference leads the reader to question the veracity of Anand's account. Most of the people he comes across have extensive bodies of work, and the reader cannot be sure where the line is between the people he met in 1920s London and the perceived personas of these writers years later. Described by Anand in the dedication to the 1981 edition as ‘gossip’ and as ‘reminiscences’ by Saros Cowasjee (Introduction), Conversations can be classified as life writing. It resembles a memoir, with the ‘snapshot’ style of the narrative implying that there is an element of entertainment to its construction. The text shows stylistic influences as wide as melodrama and travel writing. Anand shows the personalities of historical figures outside of their literary context. The text also shows a self-conscious understanding of its author’s own intellectual maturation. Anand perceives the existence of racial bias against him, which prompts a harsher diagnosis of the group. Though his Indian perspective gives a diverse insight into the British ‘greats’, his cultural and racial feelings of discrimination influences the way he depicts those around him.

The text’s relationship to modernism

As an Indian living in a society with a strong imperial presence in India that held the prejudice that came with it, Anand struggled to find his place within the intellectual community of Bloomsbury. He found himself having to assimilate to the culture in order to fit in. In the text, he describes how he exercised self-restraint over his strong political views, and engages in an internal dialogue in which he examines the role that race plays within literary modernism. The text gives an insight into how his cultural background contributed to shaping his experience as a writer working within Eurocentric structures. He dismantles the image of modernist writers by exposing and critiquing the prejudices that influence their work.

Despite his critical view of his modernist contemporaries, Anand was nonetheless influenced and inspired by them. Conversations alludes to the influence of writers such as James Joyce and his introspective novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on Anand’s own emergence as a young writer.

In the memoir, Anand perceives himself as a social commodity for the Bloomsbury group; he feels accepted more for his cultural identity than his intellect and personality. The group’s members seem to think they already understand Indian culture. They use Anand’s company not as an opportunity to learn, but rather to have their judgments received and ratified by a colonial subject.

References

1. Mulk Raj Anand, Conversations in Bloomsbury (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1995) 150.