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dealer Harry Lunn, gallerists Charles Cowles and Klaus Kertess,
artists Judy Linn and Lynne David, and British heiresses Cather-
ine Guinness and Caterine Milinaire. Diane von Furstenberg
brought the young Arnold Schwarzenegger along.
One chronicler of the age had a particular take on the spec-
tacle: “Fran Lebowitz, then a writer for Andy Warhol’s
Inter-
view
, respected the pursuit of art as something pure and true.
She had known Mapplethorpe as a struggling artist in the back
room of Max’s Kansas City and considered the occasion not as
the beginning of his legitimacy, but as the end: “‘I thought the
party was a joke,’ she said, likening Robert in that context to a
once rebellious girl ‘showing you her big diamond ring and
telling you she’s marrying a rich doctor and moving to Green-
wich, Connecticut.’” Today, Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe might
have cashed in as a cable reality show.
After the sale of his collection to the Getty, and before his
slow withering fromAIDS, Wagstaff moved on to a new area of
collecting and market-building: “æsthetic silver” from England,
the Continent, and the U.S., including serving pieces like cof-
fee pots, butter dishes, napkin rings, a Tiffany tray. Gefter ar-
gues that Wagstaff was moved to recognize early and deeply
these sparkling artisanal works otherwise languishing in the ob-
scurity of the arcane, theorizing that his homosexuality is what
drove his desire to retrieve the “unconventional and unexplored
... to invent a parallel universe of symbols and meanings—such
as camp, for example—in a society that had for so long rejected
his kind.” But we may also wonder if there’s something pecu-
liarly “gay” in this need to acquire and collect anything at all. I
cannot escape the ghoulish sense that all this acquisitiveness
was Wagstaff’s race against time, as if he might escape the final
reckoning since, after all, there was always yet one more object
out there to be admired, studied, and catalogued.
32
The Gay & Lesbian Review
/
WORLDWIDE
T
HE DESCENDANTS
of the original
members of the Bloomsbury
Group—a name taken from the
neighborhood in which they
lived, not coined until the 1960s—are very
much among us. Earlier this year,
Van
Gogh: A Power Seething
, by Julian Bell, a
painter and writer who’s the grandson of
Vanessa Bell (and great-nephew of Virginia Woolf), received
front-page coverage in
The New York Times Book Review
.
Vanessa and her younger sister Virginia are the eponymous title
characters of a wonderfully appealing and compulsively read-
able novel by Priya Parmar. It’s told with style and authority by
a writer with just one previous book to her credit, a historical
novel about actress Nell Gwynn.
Parmar’s narrative relies for the most part on an imagined
diary kept by Vanessa Bell from 1905 to
1912. Before her marriage to Clive Bell,
Vanessa had been, in real life, a student of
John Singer Sargent at the Royal Academy
School and an admirer of Whistler’s works.
In an almost throwaway comment on the
pitfalls of fictionalizing such a well-docu-
mented group of people, Parmar writes in
an introductory note: “For me the difficulty
came in finding enough room for invention
in the negative spaces they left behind.” To
say that she channeled Vanessa Bell would
be facile, but her depth of scholarship and
obvious deep regard for the members of the
Bloomsbury Group are apparent.
In 1905, Virginia and Vanessa’s
beloved brother Thoby Stephen, along
with friends he had met at Trinity College,
Cambridge, moved back to London.
Among them were Lytton Strachey, Clive
Bell, and Leonard Woolf. They held
weekly salons to discuss art, literature, and
politics. At first, the sisters were the only
women invited. They would frequently
meet outside their salon, in various per-
mutations, sometimes traveling together,
sometimes forming passionate, platonic—
or even romantic— friendships, regardless
of gender or assumed sexual orientation. Strachey is quoted (in
the fictional diary) as saying: “We all love in triangles.” The
diary frequently veers off into extensive dialog that few diarists
would ever be able to replicate exactly. There’s much tragedy,
too, in Thoby’s 1906 death (from typhoid, contracted in
Greece). “Did you wake up in time to see your last morning?”
Vanessa’s diary entry wondered on the day he died.
Parmar creates tremendous tension around the many emo-
tional illnesses that Virginia Woolf en-
dured: “A few years ago, Virginia talked
for three days without stopping for food or
sleep or a bath. ... [Her] words unraveled
into elemental sounds: quick, gruff, gut-
tural vowels that snapped and broke over
anyone who tried to reach her. Her fea-
tures foxed with anger growing sly and
sharp. ... [She] spent a month in the nurs-
ing home recovering.” Vanessa’s husband,
Clive Bell, and Virginia may or may not
have had an affair. (Strachey was quite
sure there was nothing going on. “It is
your attention she’s after, not his,” he told
Vanessa.) Soon, Vanessa found herself in-
volved with the British artist and critic
Roger Fry, whose wife was permanently
institutionalized for mental illness. Fry,
who “galvanized Bloomsbury,” in the
words of Richard Shone, author of
Art of
Loving in Triangles
M
ARTHA
E. S
TONE
Vanessa and Her Sister
by Priya Parmar
Ballantine Books. 350 pages, $26.
Vanessa Bell, 1910