MORE THAN FORTY YEARS after the original publication of Journey to the Frontier—William Abrahams’s and my life of both John Cornford and Julian Bell—I decided to return to a reconsideration of the life of Julian Bell. I have observed with admiration that Sir Michael Holroyd has published subsequent versions of his great life of Lytton Strachey. (It originally appeared just after the decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain; hence now all could be told.) So did Noel Annan in the case of his intellectual biography of Sir Leslie Stephen. No doubt others have issued revised and expanded versions of a biography written earlier. But up to now I felt that I shouldn’t revise an already published text. Also, if a new version were to be done, it would have to be on my own, as my coauthor had died in 1998. It would still, however, be his book as well.
My attitude towards the question of a new version changed in the summer of 2004. The previous year I had published Sassoon: The Worlds of Philip and Sybil. If less literary than some of my previous work, and far less concerned with radical figures, it combined my interests in society, politics, and art with a comparatively new interest in Anglo-Jewry. Now I was at work on quite a different project: the Blitz. While in England in the summer of 2004, doing research on that book, I participated in several events associated with what is considered the one hundredth anniversary of the beginning of Bloomsbury. In 1904 the four Stephen children, all in their twenties, scandalized their elders, after the death of their father, Sir Leslie, by leaving Kensington and taking a house together, without a chaperone, in the respectable but nondescript area of Bloomsbury, hence eventually and inadvertently creating a term in literary history. In Journey to the Frontier Billy Abrahams and I had written on what might be considered a late aspect of Bloomsbury, that is, its second generation as represented by Julian Bell, Vanessa Bell’s son and Virginia Woolf’s nephew. I had also written on my own, many years later, about the very early years of Bloomsbury in On or About December 1910. In that study I explored as deeply as I could the Bloomsbury events that lay behind Virginia Woolf’s famous and somewhat tongue-in-cheek remark, “on or about December 1910 human character changed.”
Julian Bell was on my mind in 2004 as I chaired a session largely concerned with him at the first International Virginia Woolf Conference to be held outside of the United States, at the Senate House of the University of London, appropriately in the Bloomsbury district. Patricia Laurence had just published her Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes on Bloomsbury and China with much attention to Julian’s year and a half teaching at Wuhan University. A novel, K, had come out based on Julian’s affair there with Ling Shuhua. I also met William Beekman, a prominent Bloomsbury collector who had a particular interest in Julian and who owned many of the surviving letters that Virginia Woolf had written to him. Marking the anniversary was not only the Virginia Woolf conference but associated events, including a day visit to Charleston, most notably marked by a splendid interview with Olivier Bell. The climax of the celebration was a grand dinner at King’s College, Cambridge, Julian’s College as well as E. M. Forster’s, Roger Fry’s, and John Maynard Keynes’s (and mine, where I did a second bachelor of arts after my American one). There Dadie Rylands had given Virginia Woolf the lunch immortalized in A Room of One’s Own.
It hadn’t yet occurred to me that I might return to the study of Julian myself. There was a reception before the dinner, on the great lawn at the back of the Gibbs building at King’s—it was a ravishing summer evening, England at its best—with a view of the Cam, of Clare College, of the building where Dadie Rylands had his rooms, and of Bodley’s, where I had lived my first undergraduate year. There was a small display of photocopies from the King’s Archives to be looked at during the reception. Included was a letter from Duncan Grant to Julian saying that of course he must do what he thought best, but pointing out how much pain his participating in the civil war in Spain would cause his mother. And there was a copy of the few notes that Vanessa had jotted down about Julian’s life. She never really recovered from his death. These two documents, which had not been available years before, made me realize, as of course I would have known in theory, how much new material was likely to have surfaced in the forty years since Billy Abrahams and I had initially, with the extraordinary cooperation of Quentin and Olivier Bell, looked into Julian’s life. It suddenly occurred to me that when I had finished my study of the Blitz, I might well turn or rather return to the life of Julian Bell. I was going back to London by bus after the dinner, but just before hurrying to catch it, I had a message that Olivier would like to speak to me for a moment. She was wondering, in reaction to Patricia Laurence’s interest in doing a biography of Julian (some years later she would publish a pamphlet, The Violent Pacifist, about him), whether there should be another life of Julian. After all, as she kindly said, there was Journey to the Frontier. Pat Laurence had spoken to me earlier about this possibility, and I had urged her, should she so wish, to go ahead. When I had that conversation, it had never occurred to me that I might be interested myself. It was an idea, almost indeed a revelation, that came to me that evening on the lawn at King’s. I hurriedly indicated that possibility to Olivier and said that I would write to her about it. Indeed I did, although I knew that it wouldn’t be for some time that I would turn to looking again at Julian in any committed way.
But gradually I began to do so. In the spring of 2006 I spent some time in New York, and at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library I read the small archive of the papers of Ling Shuhua, Julian’s Chinese mistress, which Patricia Laurence had used in her work. That summer I spent a few days in the Archives at King’s College, read some material, and acquired a sense of how very much had come to light over the years. And then, in 2007, I spent February and March in Cambridge, much enjoying a residency at Wolfson College. I also reread Journey to the Frontier. I thought that the book had held up well, and I did wonder, as had Olivier Bell, whether another version was necessary. This does raise a fundamental question. Julian’s life was one of promise and beginnings, very sadly cut short five and a half months after his twenty-ninth birthday. What he had accomplished in his short life, in his writings, his poetry, his ideas, was of considerable interest. But he was, no doubt, a minor figure. Nowadays we are interested in such lives, not only the lives of fulfilled accomplishments and importance. And then there was the matter of Bloomsbury. Interest in Bloomsbury can become excessive. There are those who can never get enough about the Bloomsbury figures, and there are others who loathe the very idea and are sick of what is sometimes referred to as the “Bloomsbury industry.” Julian himself had somewhat mixed feelings about his situation. He was at the very heart of Bloomsbury: the two sisters, Vanessa and Virginia, and Vanessa’s children. Their husbands, Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf, at times felt a sense of exclusion. Clive in fact spent a decreasing amount of time with Vanessa, whose more constant companion was the homosexual Duncan Grant, the father of her third child, Angelica. Julian’s closest relationship was with his mother, and in many senses he was a great supporter of Bloomsbury’s values. But in other ways he turned against them. He felt that Bloomsbury’s politics had to be updated in order to deal with the contemporary situation of the 1930s. He enjoyed being a child of Bloomsbury and the status and advantages that it gave him. But he also wanted to be his own person and be on his own. He felt driven to prove his worth to Virginia and Leonard, and he might not have minded if they had been a little less honest in telling him their views of his writings. Bloomsbury believed in the overriding importance of personal relations. But that did not mean, as some might think, that the obligation was necessarily to be endlessly supportive. Rather it might mean, in the tradition of English moralism, telling one’s nearest and dearest what one actually thought about what they were doing and writing (although Leonard did recognize his wife’s fragility and was always supportive in reacting to her work, no matter what he might privately have thought).
On rereading Journey to the Frontier, I was impressed at how good it is. I feel it is not immodest of me to say this, as I believe the voice of the book is more Billy’s than mine. This led me to have doubts and problems about how to proceed with a project of writing a fuller life of Julian Bell. I did not wish to rewrite and destroy the original text. What I have tried to do then is to rewrite, but only to an extent, the original text about Julian, and when appropriate to provide some account of this search for Julian Bell from its beginning until the present, a span of more than fifty years. (I first wrote about him when I was an undergraduate.) But I have also incorporated the extensive and I believe very important new material that has become available. This is to a considerable extent a new book, almost double the original text.
Much of the new material is personal. Bloomsbury has always had an intriguing relationship between the private and the public. As pioneers of the modern, freeing themselves from what they saw as Victorian conventions, its members believed that they should live the lives that they wished. But that was not to say that there were not many personal problems and issues. A willingness and an effort to be “honest” about personal relations does not necessarily lead to personal happiness, particularly as it might involve informing others of your honest opinion about their characters and actions. On the other hand, Bloomsbury was not “postmodern.” This has led some to accuse it of hypocrisy. It did not necessarily believe that private life, which in theory (although sometimes not in fact) was to be as free as one might wish, should become public. Angelica Bell felt that she was badly treated in not being told until she was eighteen that Duncan Grant, and not Clive Bell, was her father. Duncan Grant, who led exactly the sexual life that he wished, still felt uneasy even in the post-Wolfenden age, when homosexual activity had been decriminalized, that all should be revealed in Michael Holroyd’s pathbreaking life of Lytton Strachey. Members of Bloomsbury were still figures of the upper middle classes who might well feel that those in the know should know and those not in the know should not. Mightn’t it be better, as Roy Harrod, Keynes’s first biographer, thought, that those who knew had it confirmed that Duncan Grant and Maynard Keynes were lovers through the publication of the photograph of Grant and Keynes looking dolefully at one another rather than through anything more specific? Quentin and Olivier Bell couldn’t have been more helpful to us many years ago when we were working on what is now the first version of Julian’s life, but they didn’t feel it was appropriate to tell us all the ramifications of Julian’s love life. And much of the material documenting it and other aspects of his life had not yet come to light. Now Julian’s story can be told in much more depth and detail. That is what I have attempted to do.