She was delighting us with: “Never trust a sailor an inch above your knee.”Īt its conclusion, I noticed that the housemaid, supported by the cook, was being led downstairs sobbing. Unfortunately, Walter Richard Sickert, who had been paying court to her, had discovered that she could sing and had an extensive repertoire of the old risqué music-hall songs which he adored. At another, at the home of John Maynard Keynes and his wife Lydia, the guest of honor was the prolific romance novelist Berta Ruck, who was idolized by the household servants. David “Bunny” Garnett, a fixture of the group, recalled seeing Picasso chatting to the swashbuckling silent-film actor Douglas Fairbanks. Sex permeated our conversation.”īloomsbury parties attracted an eclectic and distinguished crowd. A flood of sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us. One afternoon in 1907, Lytton Strachey walked into the parlor where Virginia Woolf was sitting with her sister, Vanessa Bell, and pointed to a stain on Vanessa’s dress, demanding, “Semen?” After a hushed moment of astonishment, Woolf recorded, “All barriers of reticence and reserve went down. The Bloomsbury set weren’t a particularly shy bunch to begin with. Photograph: Dora Carrington/Getty Images Bloomsbury, 1920s, London: ‘The lack of refinement of their idols’ Some members of the Bloomsbury set at a quiet tea on the verandah in 1929. Her sister Norma remembered the deliberate effort she and Edna put in to become modern girls: “We sat darning socks on Waverly Place and practiced the use of profanity as we stitched. I took her to the bathroom and told her what to do and she did it, and she was all right after that.”Īt that point, the sensitive Millay was still “a shy little girl, right out of Vassar”. I suddenly looked up at her and she was green, positively green. Little Vincent was sitting there with us and had a couple of glasses and we were all talking intensely. Then we’d put the poker in the wine to heat it. We’d burn anything we could find, wooden street signs, anything. “It was an extremely cold winter, one of the coldest in the history of the city, I believe. “We were sitting in front of our fireplace drinking mulled wine,” he recalled. In 1917 the painter Charles Ellis was a recent arrival from Ohio, but he already knew who the current literary sensation was, and invited her to a party with his friends at their Macdougal Street apartment. But the everyday parties were more intimate, born of the desire to meet and misbehave with fellow writers and artists. Social life then centered on the Provincetown Playhouse and the “Pagan Romps” and “Art Model Frolicks” of Webster Hall. Poet and party girl Edna St Vincent Millay was a fixture of Greenwich Village bohemia in the 1910s and 20s. Photograph: Corbis Edna St Vincent Millay, New York, 1920s: ‘She was green, positively green’ Edna St Vincent Millay, pictured here in 1925, was one of the most-admired poets of her time.
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