Guest Post: The Bloomsbury Group and ‘The Silkworm’

ChrisC is a regular guest writer at HogwartsProfessor. He responded with what follows to my request that he write up thoughts he shared in private correspondence about J. K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike detective novels for your comment and correction. Enjoy!

Rowling, the Bloomsbury Group, and the (Possible) Literary Allegory of Silkworm

Throughout The Silkworm, author J.K Rowling offers what is more or less a running commentary on the current state of the publishing industry, and the authors who make up the literary world.

It’s not a pretty picture.

Throughout his investigation, Cormoran Strike runs afoul of publishers consumed by greed (with an implied over-fixation on any and everything digital that that hurts sales more than it benefits), writer’s quarreling among themselves for various slights both real, imagined, major, and minor.  Throughout all this it soon becomes (or at least should be) evident that the great majority of Silk is taken up with a scathing critique or Allegorical Satire of the Literary Establishment.

It’s the nature of that Satire that I’m interested in.  It’s been suggested here already that the Strike books are Ms. Rowling’s smuggled literary Key to the Potter Books.  Whether or not that prediction will hold true is a matter of time and whatever is written in the final books.  In the meantime, there were two clues that may hint at the possibly bigger literary fish has in mind with her Satire.

On page 56 (hardcover ed.), at the beginning of chap. 9, she makes the following reference:

“Leaning against a…wall…his gaze fell on a blue plaque fixed to a house opposite, commemorating the tenancy of Lady Ottoline Morrell, literary hostess.  Doubtless scabrous romans a’ clef had once been discussed within those walls too…”

Then there’s the matter of Owen Quine’s daughter, Orlando.  Later on, in an interview, publisher Daniel Chard informs both Strike (and therefore the reader) of the origin of the name.

“Named, he told me, for the eponymous protagonist of the novel by Virginia Woolf” (Rowling, 260, hardcover)

As it turns out, these two women have (had) a history together, and it’s here where the plot thickens.

Together, author Virginia Woolf and hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell made up part of group of painters, poets, playwrights, and artists who collectively are known as “The Bloomsbury Group”.

Technically, there’s a lot that can be said and talked about the Group.  They are, in essence, literary legends to those who know of them, both famous and infamous.  A list of the people who made up the group would be enough to make a publisher’s mouth water.  The list included such luminaries as poets Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Inkling friend Roy Campbell; painter Roger Fry, and art critic Clive Bell; and novelists such as Woolf, E.M. Forster, Ford Maddox Ford, and James Joyce.  Even economist John Maynard Keynes was considered a core member.

Together and separate they all made up the vanguard of the literary and artistic movement that is now called Modernism.  For a brief span of time, Bloomsbury were the taste-makers, mover-shakers and even the publishers of all who were considered “Best and Brightest” on the artistic front.  Any ink-stained wretch they should happen smile upon (say, a down-at-heels bank clerk like Eliot, or an itinerant struggling author such as Joyce) was potentially courted as the darling of the hour.  Together and apart, through novels, poetry, and most of all publication of critical essays, the Bloomsburys were thought to set the standard of everything that was right and “just so” about well written fiction.  The truth, however, is a lot more complex, and in time, it may have caught up with all the members.

The Bloomsbury Group is best thought of as the Anti-Inklings (or if you prefer, the literary Death-Eaters to the Inkling’s Phoenix Order, although this wasn’t true of all of them, as I hope to show).  The problem with the literary output of the majority of the Group lay in two things: their subject matter; and their treatment of Mythopoeic materials.

Tolkien critic Joseph Pearce has recorded a statement by writer (and Middle Earth fan) Patrick Curry that has a good deal of relevance to Bloomsbury, so I quote it in full:

“Angus Wilson once said that most modern novels are about adultery in Muswell Hill.  It was an exaggeration, but a pardonable one, for it drew attention to the tyranny of realism, narrowness, self-absorption, and ‘relevance’ that hold too many modern writers and critics in thrall” (Pearce, Man and Myth, 9)

That’s a line that has stayed with me ever since I first read it, and I think part of the reason was its succinctness.  However the more I’ve read of the Bloomsbury members in biographies of Mythopoeic writers Eliot, Joyce, Campbell, or Christopher Dawson, who were in close contact with the Group, the more Curry’s sentiment seemed to fit both the artists and their movement as a whole.  One of the things to be disappointed about the writings of most Bloomsbury authors isn’t the lack of fantasy elements or the like, but the lack of imagination; the lifeless prose and events that ultimately go nowhere; or else degenerate into a case of who snogged who (the irony there is, neither characters nor authors ever pause to wonder why they devote themselves to such empty pursuits, which would at least grant their mindless escapades a kind of tragic pathos).

The other problem comes from writers who seem to have at least some working knowledge of alchemical literary symbols, and who then use and abuse such symbols in narratives that are little better than quiet, modern updates of either Roman Shows, or just mindless pornography.  If a collection of symbols is all any story amounts too, then it stands to reason that those symbols have a value that is attested by their ability to uplift and entertain, and therefore should treated with a least a modicum of respect.  This respect was something most of the Bloomsbury Group could often never give to their writings.  It’s hard, after all, to respect anyone or anything if you truly believe they’re worthless.  That, I think, is the great flaw at the heart of the Bloomsbury story.  They didn’t think life or the people in it were worth anything, and so they passed that attitude onto what they put on page, screen, or canvas; and the worst part is they used what Eliot called the “Mythical Method” or Mythopoeia to do it.

To be fair, there was a bit of consolation to be had for some of the writers who drifted into Bloomsbury’s orbit.  T.S. Eliot, who always seemed to have a stable head on his shoulders, found his evenings with the Woolf’s and their set declining as his Anglicanism increased, Joyce, perhaps as an act of self-preservation seems to have limited his contact with the Group, and spent the rest of his career making peace with his Irish Catholic past, while Maddox Ford discovered that he wrote better not amongst the London Literati, but as a farmer working alongside Italian peasants.  These three writers, like the Inklings, seemed to have recognized something valuable in the symbols they worked with.  At the very least, they seemed to have grasped the Quality that Shakespeare termed “Mercy”.

If all this sounds familiar to anyone, it should come as no surprise that the malady of this one group of writers bares a notable similarity to the publishing world Cormoran Strike encounters throughout Rowling’s book.  None of the Bloomsbury Books that I’ve looked into are anywhere near as dire as Bombyx Mori, but it is easy to identify the sense of decay Strike discovers along the way with the sad, monotonous self-absorption of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, or Pounds Fascist Poetry.  Also like the Group, the troubles that the Publisher’s of Silkworm display seem connected to that same inability to see the value in life, and hence each other and their work.

This lack of a sense of values (Rowling may suggest) can have disastrous trickle-down effects not just on one’s personal life, but also on any given place of business.  In the case of Silkworm that business is the Publishing Industry.  It was no exaggeration when I said Bloomsbury carried real clout within the business as it was in their day.  The Woolfs brought Eliot into the spotlight, and Lady Ottoline was his patron for a time.  What is disconcerting is how well the book world has learned from the Group’s example.

The common complaint of struggling author’s these days is how publishers won’t touch their stuff unless it has things like Brand Names or Pre-awareness behind it.  In the old days it used to be the complaint that fantasy or science fiction wouldn’t sell.  Both are established criticisms Ms. Rowling has had to put up with, first from publishers and critics when she was writing the Potter series, and now (perhaps) she has had to deal with the second hurdle when it comes to marketing the Strike books under a pseudonym.

In both cases, the main problem is a lack of respect for the written word as a thing of value in itself, regardless of either name awareness or genre.  This lack of respect has determined, in a large measure, which books are chosen for publication, and even whether they will end up on store shelves or be relegated to the out-of-the-way online corner.  My fear is that the attitude of the Bloomsbury authors in their capacity as publishers may have influenced how the current industry sells it’s wares.  The basic thinking might go something like this: if what I write means nothing, why should I care how I have it published?  Who cares!

In all this, I can’t help wondering whether or not it was the practices of writers like Woolf or Pound and their one time clout that are determining the current shallow treatment of the written word.  I also can’t help but wonder if Ms. Rowling is either hinting at this, or at least something like it in her Allegory of the Silkworm.