Odd this day

20 January 1918

On this day 107 years ago, biographer, critic and Bloomsburyist Lytton Strachey popped round Virginia Woolf’s gaff and talked dirty.

According to Woolf’s diary, (although she wrote the entry the following day):

This was not the only occasion on which Mr Strachey had lowered the tone at Bloomsbury HQ. Later in life, Woolf wrote a sort-of memoir, Moments of Being, and described an occasion about a decade earlier:

Another scene [which] has always lived in my memory — I do not know if I invented it or not … It was a spring evening. Vanessa [Bell, Woolf’s sister] and I were sitting in the drawing room…

A couple of pages earlier, she wrote that when she’d first met him in around 1904, Strachey (and two friends, painter Saxon Sydney-Turner, and Duncan Bell, still Vanessa’s husband-to-be at that point)

came in hesitatingly, self-effacingly, and folded themselves up quietly [in] the corners of sofas. For a long time they said nothing. None of our old conversational openings seemed to do.

But it seems the intervening years had cured ‘The Strache’ of his shyness. He was given that nickname by Virginia and Vanessa’s ill-fated brother Thoby when they were at Cambridge together — when Strachey had, however, already developed the habit of bursting into people’s dwellings and making inexplicable exclamations.

The Robertson referred to was fellow student A J Robertson

At some point after Cambridge, according to Bonnie Kime Scott’s Refiguring Modernism: Women of 1928, Thoby had initiated the Thursday evening gatherings in Bloomsbury. He had sadly succumbed to typhoid in 1907, but the soirées — and Woolf’s friendship with Strachey — continued.

In summary, anyway: during the late 1910s, the man who went on to write Eminent Victorians said ‘semen’ in more or less polite society, and

With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us.

What a charming mental picture, Virginia, thank you.

Sex permeated our conversation.

So, even if sexual intercourse began in 1963, at least a few people had already been talking about it for 45 years — although not always in the high-minded terms Woolf initially claims. Before the paragraph is out, she’s confessed that they listened to the stories of their gay friends’ affairs “with rapt interest”:

We followed the ups and downs of their chequered histories; Vanessa sympathetically; I … frivolously, laughingly. “Norton tells me”, Vanessa would say, “that James is in utter despair. Rupert has been twice to bed with Hobhouse” and I would cap her stories with some equally thrilling piece of gossip; about a divine undergraduate with a head like a Greek God — but alas his teeth were bad — called George Mallory.

That is, indeed, the George Mallory who died on Everest in 1924 — and who used to exchange letters with Strachey in which he employed such phrases as

What a wicked old sodomite you are

Camp correspondence: letters reveal George Mallory's flirtatious side

So, yes: here I am taking the piss out of far-more-eminent-writer-than-I Virginia Woolf, while pruriently fishing out the salacious bits of history myself. Well, of course I bloody am. Those are the interesting parts.

But if you want proper intellectual curiosity, let’s nip back to the top there, and the clearly most important question posed by the British Sex Society in the early years of the 20th century. No, not the bit about Jonathan Swift’s penis (Lilliputian? Brobdingnagian?) — although I shall of course be investigating that one day. No, I mean:

whether cats use the w.c.

Thanks to another significant cultural figure — this time a legendary jazz musician — we know the answer.

You can (if you can forgive me for recycling not-even-that-old material) find out more about that here:

Christopher’s Christmas Cracker 2024

(although that involves a bit of scrolling if you don’t want to read all the other guff). If you want a version that cuts to the chase, though, there’s this:

Charles Mingus Cat Toilet Training Program - CHARLES MINGUS

So, that’s a thing you know now. You really are most welcome.