'I was surprised to find a lot about Quakerism in the book, though I should not have been: the surname Fry...' Photo: Book cover for Roger Fry: A biography, by Virginia Woolf
Roger Fry: A biography, by Virginia Woolf
Author: Virginia Woolf. Review by Simon Webb
After four years studying English Literature at university, Virginia Woolf stuck in my mind as an author I really needed to look at in more detail in later life. It’s only taken me thirty-five years and a global pandemic to get round to reading her biography of Roger Fry, originally published in 1940. I was surprised to find a lot about Quakerism in the book, though I should not have been: the surname Fry should have tipped me off that there was going to be some connection to Friends.
It may be that the subject of Woolf’s biography is little known today. Roger Eliot Fry (1866-1934) was a member of the influential Bloomsbury group, like Woolf herself. This group of intellectuals and artists was, as the Tate Gallery puts it, ‘in revolt against everything Victorian’. Fry is primarily known as a painter, but he was also an important writer on art and design. Given his eccentric look, engaging manner and mellifluous voice, he might have made an excellent television art pundit, like Waldemar Januszczak or the late Wendy Beckett. As it was, he had to be content with public lectures and radio talks.
It was Fry who set up the Omega workshops, founded with the intention of providing graphic expression to the best of a new generation of artists and crafters. These were also, in part, an attempt to reform English taste. By then Fry had already enraged the art establishment by introducing it to post-impressionism – indeed he invented the term ‘post-impressionism’ itself. In 1910 he curated an exhibition called ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ in London’s Grafton Galleries. In Woolf’s words, ‘the public in 1910 was thrown into paroxysms of rage and laughter. They went from Cézanne to Gauguin and from Gauguin to Van Gogh, they went from Picasso to Signac, and from Derain to Friesz, and they were infuriated’.
A child of Quakers, Fry was a product of a traditional Victorian upper middle-class household. Woolf’s account of his childhood shows how Victorian ‘respectability’ was quite incompatible with Quakerism as it is now understood. We can probably trust Woolf on this because, as a non-Quaker, she had no particular axe to grind for Friends – though part of the Bloomsbury ‘project’ was a sometimes harsh re-appraisal of all things Victorian.
It seems that, instead of the moral guidance we might expect from Quaker parents, Fry and his siblings were expected to live by a strict code that was never explained to them in terms that children could understand. This meant that when they were summoned by their mother – for instance when she had to convey news that had nothing to do with them at all – they were all fearful that they’d done something terribly wrong and were going to be punished. This seems to be particularly unfortunate in view of the fact that their father was Edward Fry, England’s first Quaker judge. He was a prominent man – knighted and sat on the Privy Council – and known as a wise one, arbitrating cases like the Welsh coal strike of 1898 and the Grimsby fishery dispute. He should surely have known better.
Instead of gentle Quaker give-and-take with their children, it seems that Roger Fry’s parents expected instant, unquestioning obedience, even if their offspring didn’t understand what they were expected to do in response to some barked order. This led to Roger’s inadvertent destruction of a much-loved poppy plant, for which he was subsequently criticised by his mother; this was an early disillusionment that haunted him forever.
As Quakers, Edward and Mariabella Fry paid lip-service to enlightened ideas of education, sending Roger to a new boarding school at Ascot where, they had been promised, there would be ‘no punishments’. They kept him on there despite his regular letters home detailing daily floggings by the sadistic head.
While Edward and Mariabella Fry should surely have had some grasp of Quaker egalitarianism, their children were encouraged to be very suspicious of most of the poor working-class people they encountered. In Woolf’s biography, these ‘types’ are represented by the red-nosed men who rented ice-skates to skaters on the pond at Kenwood, which Fry’s father loved to visit. As Roger himself wrote:
‘We were brought up to the absolute conviction that all men not in regular employment and receipt of a fairly high salary were morally reprehensible, that in fact the world was so arranged that wealth and virtue almost exactly corresponded, though every now and then we were allowed to despise some parvenu whose mushroom fortune had grown so quickly as to throw a dubious light on the theory itself.’
Instead of basing their plans for his future on some sense of Roger’s own desires, Fry’s parents insisted that he follow science, which he had studied at Cambridge. This had been the frustrated desire of Fry’s rather dour, troubled father, whose interest in zoology eventually saw him elected to the Royal Society. Why did their wayward son insist on following art? For a time, Roger had to live at home while studying art in London. This was a very uncomfortable set-up, given his parents’ disapproval of his choice of career. In fact the atmosphere at home was so stifling that Roger became convinced that his sisters should be helped to escape as soon as possible.
Given the negative and unimaginative influence of his parents, Roger Fry might have grown up supremely maladjusted, and settled into a life of frustration and failure. But Woolf repeatedly says of him that he had a ‘sanguine’ temperament, and tended to respond to problems and criticism with good humour and tireless ingenuity.
Fortunately, the family’s wealth meant that, although his parents were convinced that he was wasting his time, they were able to fund extensive study-trips to France and Italy, and to engage distinguished art tutors in London, and subsidise a decent studio for the budding artist. He was a late developer as a serious painter, but Roger was able to finance a home and family by writing about art (although, according to Woolf, he was not a great writer as such). Fry soon became so successful as an art expert that millionaire buyers like the US financier J.P. Morgan were prepared to pay him for his expertise.
Fry’s religious scepticism and his (fairly modest) forays into extra-marital relationships surely put him beyond the pale of his parents’ narrow Victorian conception of Quaker morality. But Virginia Woolf traces several aspects of his worldview back to Quakerism. In particular, she finds Quaker origins in his timid response to the outré bohemianism of some of his artistic friends.
From the modern Quaker point of view, however, Fry’s willingness to embrace new ideas seems particularly Quakerly. He was also happy to weather the storm that swept in after the opening of his post-impressionist exhibition in 1910. Like many modern Quakers, he attached himself to worthy causes, sitting on committees and often fundraising to help out. Unlike his bourgeois parents, he had faith in the potential of working people, and longed for a more egalitarian society. He also supported conscientious objectors during the first world war.
Reading Woolf’s biography during lockdown, one envies the way Fry was able to socialise freely with dozens of people every week, and work cheek-by-jowl with fellow-students in Paris, where their ‘easels were closely wedged together’. The Spanish flu of 1918, now a mirror for our own times, took its toll on those employed in the Omega workshops, and, though it may be sacrilege to compare Covid-19 with the first world war, Fry’s bewildered response to the events of 1914 have a familiar ring. He felt he was ‘living in a bad dream’; ‘the war seems to knock the bottom out of the universe in a quite peculiar way’.
