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Apéndice (IX)

Septiembre 27, 2009 · 4 comentarios

viernes 7

9 a.m. tengo a partir de este momento sólo una semana para escribir una novela o algo que se le parezca, 150 páginas (¿), medianamente leíble, mínimamente digno; suficientemente bueno y malo al mismo tiempo como para que la pila de papeles con tapa pase desapercibida. se lo debo entregar impreso, en tamaño carta a dos espacios con márgenes de cuatro centímetros en letra times new roman (por qué se llama así) tipo 15 el 14 a las 12. (más…)

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Cloaca Maxima
The following term, in May 1928, the last of his second academic year, Blunt received a definitive token of his position as a protégé of Cambridge Bloomsbury. He was elected to or “born into” the Apostles, or “the Society”, as its members called it; the secret debating society still presided over by Keynes, of which almost all the key male figures of Bloomsbury had been members.

From the Society’s records it is impossible to know for sure who inducted Blunt into the Apostles. Although new members were “fathered” by existing Apostles, new recruits (or “embryos”, in the tedious pregnancy metaphor employed by the Society) were usually suggested by several people and had to be vetted by older members like Keynes, Dadie Rylands was already a member, but the two most recent recruits to the Society were also friends of Blunt’s, and it seems probable that they put him up for election. Alister Watson, a King’s mathematician-turned-physicist, was one: he was probably also the only undergraduate Blunt knew at this time who was a Marxist. Watson was the most active Apostle of his generation, giving nineteen papers to the Society, all but two as an undergraduate. The other was Dennis Proctor, an economist a year older than Blunt, who was the last great unrequited passion of Goldie Lowes Dickinson.

The existence of the Apostles was supposed to be a secret. This was ostensibly to discourage would-be members from canvassing for election, and to ensure that in debates members would say exactly what the felt anf thought, without fear or censure; the implication being that they would openly discuss taboo subjects. (In the early years of the century, when homosexual acts were criminal offences -they would remain so until 1967- “the higher sodomy” had been a favourite Apostolic topic). Of course, the secrecy and intellectual snobbery did nothing to reduce the Society’s cachet. The main obligation of Apostles in discussion was to be as frank and honest as possible, even at the risk of hurting feelings. For the Apostles of Keynes’s generation, the experience of such intellectual and verbal freedom had apparently been intoxicating. Bertrand Russell, who had been an active member in the early years of the century, along with Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, the social historian G.M.Trevelyan, Ludwig Wittgenstein and G.E.Moore, wrote, “It was a principle in discussion that there were no taboos, no limitations, no barrier to absolute speculation.”

By the 1920’s the Apostles’ heroic period was over. “I think that in my generation the importance [of the Apostles] had become less great”, Blunt later wrote. “If one heard people like Forster and Strachey and particularly [Goldie Lowes] Dickinson talkng about it, it was clear that the Saturday evening meeting of the Apostles was the centre of their life, and that everything was regulated according to this, and everything that was non-Apostolic was in some way inferior.” By 1928 the secret was much less secret, and plenty of non-members seemed to know about it. Membership seems to have become an acknowledgement of intellectual standing and clubbability, rather than anything else. Julian Bell wrote that his election was “the most important event of my Cambridge life”, because it meant that he had “reached the pinnacles of Cambridge intellectualism.” Eddie Playfair, who was put up for election by Bell, was blackballed by Blunt “for being intellectually inadequate”; or so Leonard Woolf thoughtfully told him. All the Society’s members were from King’s or Trinity and were already part of the extended circle of Bloomsbury and its protégés. In the mid-1930s, when the society was supposed to have been dominated by Marxists, a new member was told by J.T.Sheppard, the ageing and exceptionally camp provost of King’s, that the main criteria for membership were that “one must be very brilliant and extremely nice”. In some more lurid accounts, the Apostles has been portrayed as a kind of knocking shop for predatory homosexuals, among them Blunt. This vastly overstates the case. While it seems that a few young men were elected for their beauty rather than their brains, this was far from the norm and of Blunt’s friends Bell, Proctor and Watson were all clubbable, clever and heterosexual, as were two more young men he would induct into the Society, Victor Rothschild and Hugh Sykes Davies.

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Apéndice (IX)

Septiembre 27, 2009 · 4 comentarios

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