BLOOMSBURY HAS its international fame. Studious visitors from abroad know it as the area of the British Museum and the University of London. Readers of fiction feel an immediate familiarity with its Georgian squares—each having a fenced-in bit of green park at its center—and streets, lined with well-proportioned, tall-windowed houses, large but not ostentatious, that served as homes for professional and merchant families throughout the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century Bloomsbury had been increasingly vandalized, in part by the destruction of the Second World War, in part by the constructions of the University of London. In 1940 Max Beerbohm was complaining that there seemed to be no limits to the University’s “desire for expansion of that bleak, bland, hideous, and already vast whited sepulcher, which bears its name.” He was referring to the University’s Senate House, the model for the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. But in 1904, the year of the “birth” of Bloomsbury, the changes that war and the University were to effect had not yet occurred: past and present were still harmoniously conjoined.
Early in that year, and nine years after the death of his second wife, Julia Jackson Duckworth, Sir Leslie Stephen had died of cancer. He was seventy-two years old. In his time he had been the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, editor of the Cornhill Magazine, essayist, literary critic, biographer, religious doubter, and a celebrated mountaineer and Alpinist—he was the first to climb the Schreckhorn. Soon after his death, the four children from his second marriage, Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian Stephen, sufficiently grown up and with sufficient money, settled upon themselves to do as they pleased and moved from the family house in Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, across London to Bloomsbury, where they took a house together in Gordon Square, No. 46. Nevertheless, relatives disapproved; it was considered shocking that four young people should live on their own. The move was an early indication that these four were determined to go their own way and make their own decisions. For them, it was a highly agreeable arrangement, but it had never been thought of as other than provisional, and indeed it was soon altered: first, tragically, in the summer of 1906, by the sudden death of Thoby Stephen from typhoid, contracted while traveling in Greece. Though known by his second name, Thoby, his actual first name was Julian. His death played a central role in the story of Bloomsbury (as did the death of his namesake, Julian Bell, thirty-one years later). Thoby’s death was an important factor in precipitating major changes in his sisters’ lives. His close Trinity College, Cambridge, friend, Clive Bell, married Vanessa Stephen a year later, in 1907, and in 1912 another close Trinity friend, Leonard Woolf, married Virginia. Indeed, in the correspondence after Thoby’s death between Lytton Strachey and Leonard, at the time in the civil service in Ceylon, Lytton argued that Leonard should marry Virginia, whom Leonard knew but far from well. In the new arrangement of things, Virginia and Adrian Stephen moved to a house of their own nearby in Fitzroy Square, and the Bells kept No. 46. It was there, on February 4, 1908, that Julian Heward Bell, their first child, was born: “Julian,” after his late uncle, and “Heward,” a Bell family name.
Bloomsbury, however, is not merely a place. It has a figurative as well as a physical existence. It stands for an idea, a philosophy, a style. It serves as a word of praise or deprecation. It provides an occasion for disagreement, for nostalgia, for condescension or approval. In all these aspects it would play an important part in Julian Bell’s life, from his earliest childhood even to the circumstances leading up to his death—that he went out to Spain as an ambulance driver rather than as a fighter in the International Brigade. Julian was always conscious of Bloomsbury, of its values and standards, from which he knew he was not to be exempted, and conscious also of its high expectations for him: that he was to be not less than its son. Of course, something of this sort would never be said; it would simply be taken for granted. But the pressure was there, the possibility of tension and opposition. And if he were to be a writer, there would be the complicated question of his relationship with his aunt Virginia. She loved him deeply, but as she was fully aware, she could be in a state of rivalry with writers, and at times that might influence her relationship with Julian. There is no question that Julian loved and admired Bloomsbury, and respected it, and even believed in it; yet at the same time, although only rarely explicitly and openly, he was in rebellion against it.
But how is this Bloomsbury, which figures now in literary histories as the “Bloomsbury Group,” to be described? Since the shorter telling of Julian’s life—Journey to the Frontier—was published, in 1966, Bloomsbury has been the subject of ever increasing attention, to a significant degree driven by the intense interest in Virginia Woolf. Almost without number have there been scholarly studies and more popular books, and innumerable biographies. Of the many biographies of Virginia Woolf herself, the two most important are one of the earliest, by her nephew Quentin, Julian’s brother, in 1972, and one of the more recent, the magisterial work by Hermione Lee in 1996. Not to be forgotten are the six volumes of her letters and the five volumes of her diary.
There is something rather daunting, or at least cautionary, about the statement by Clive Bell, one of the founding members, that Bloomsbury never really existed, that it was an invention of outsiders. Of course, he did not expect (perhaps not even want) to be believed; still, one does well to go cautiously. To speak of “members” where Bloomsbury is concerned is more than a little misleading, for it never was a formal Group, never issued a manifesto or declaration of principles, was never a movement (Bloomsburyisme) in the style of the Continent, and was not even, as its detractors darkly imagined, a conspiracy for self-advancement or a mutual admiration society. On the whole, one does best to conform to Bloomsbury’s own usage and describe it simply as a group (lowercase) of very close friends, many of them living in the same district of London (Bloomsbury), who saw a great deal of one another (in the early days frequently on Thursday evenings after dinner) either there or in the country (usually Sussex), and who gained imposing reputations in the various arts they practiced during the period 1910–1940: painting (Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant); the novel (Virginia Woolf, and in a sense slightly tangential to the group, E. M. Forster); art criticism (Clive Bell, Roger Fry); political theory (Leonard Woolf); biography (Lytton Strachey); and economics (John Maynard Keynes). Quite a few others would also be close friends, but these were at the group’s very center, with the possible exception of Forster, and were the members who achieved the greatest renown. They made extraordinary contributions to the culture of the twentieth century. Yet at the emotional heart of the group were Virginia and Vanessa, the Stephen sisters, and by extension, Vanessa’s children, Julian, Quentin, and Angelica.
Let us make a first approach to Bloomsbury—and to Julian—by way of an exchange of letters. It is April 1908. On Wednesday the 22nd, Virginia Stephen, who is on holiday in Cornwall, writes to Lytton Strachey in London. She has taken rooms at Trevose House, Draycot Terrace, St. Ives, a town she knows well as the Stephen family in earlier years had vacationed there frequently. She has been attempting to write a review, for the Cornhill Magazine, of a life of John Delane, a famous nineteenth-century editor of the Times. But the conditions are not favorable:
My landlady, though a woman of 50, has nine children, and once had 11; and the youngest is able to cry all day long. When you consider that the family sitting room is next mine, and we are parted by folding doors only—what kind of sentence do you call this?—you will understand that I find it hard to write of Delane “the Man”. . . . I spend most of my time, however, alone with my God, on the moors. I sat for an hour (perhaps it was 10 minutes) on a rock this afternoon, and considered how I should describe the colour of the Atlantic.1
On Thursday the 23rd, Strachey replies:
I went away last Friday, partly to get rid of my cold, to the Green Dragon, on Salisbury Plain, where James [his brother] and Keynes and others were for Easter. Of course it finally destroyed me—the coldest winds you can imagine sweeping over the plain, and inferior food, and not enough comfortable chairs. But on the whole I was amused. The others were Bob Trevy [Trevelyan] . . . Moore . . . and a young undergraduate called Rupert Brooke—isn’t it a romantic name?—with pink cheeks and bright yellow hair—it sounds horrible, but it wasn’t. Moore is a colossal being, and he also sings and plays in a wonderful way, so that the evenings passed pleasantly.2
This letter leads us to the early years of Bloomsbury, but before we follow it there, let us attend to Virginia’s reply, written five days later. It is Tuesday, April 28, and she is still at Trevose House in St. Ives.
Your letter was a great solace to me. I had begun to doubt my own identity—and imagined I was part of a sea-gull, and dreamt at night of deep pools of blue water, full of eels. However, Adrian came suddenly that very day. . . . Then Nessa and Clive and the Baby [Julian, age three months] and the Nurse all came, and we have been so domestic that I have not read, or wrote. My article upon Delane is left in the middle of a page thus—“But what of the Man?” . . . A child is the very devil calling out, as I believe, all the worst and least explicable passions of the parents—and the Aunts. When we talk of marriage, friendship or prose, we are suddenly held up by Nessa, who has heard a cry, and then we must all distinguish whether it is Julian’s cry, or the cry of the 2 year old—the landlady’s youngest—who has an abscess, and uses therefore a different scale. . . . We are going to a place called the Gurnard’s Head this afternoon—and now I look up and behold it pours! So we shall sit over the fire instead, and I shall say some very sharp things, and Clive and Nessa will treat me like a spoilt monkey, and the Baby will cry. However, I daresay Hampstead is under snow. How is your cold? I got a stiff neck on the rocks—but it went.3
A certain acerbity in this need not be taken seriously—in fact Virginia would prove to be the most affectionate of aunts, devoted to her sister’s three children, Julian, Quentin, and Angelica, and they were devoted to her. But that is the future, to be looked at as it happens. Now we must go back, a few years at least, to the past, to where Bloomsbury has its origins: to Cambridge. In the autumn of 1899, Lytton Strachey, next-to-youngest son amongst the ten children of Lieutenant-General Sir Richard and Lady Strachey—a family long associated with the administration of India—went up to Trinity College. Very soon there formed about him a circle of young men almost as brilliant as himself. There was Leonard Woolf, from St. Paul’s School, the son of a London barrister. There was Clive Bell, from Marlborough, of a Wiltshire “huntin’-shootin’ ” county family who had got their money a generation back as owners of Welsh coal mines. And there was Julian Thoby Prinsep Stephen. Thoby Stephen died too early to fulfill the promise that his family and friends had recognized in him, but he would be remembered glowingly—especially by his sisters, who had worshipped him, and who looked for him, as it were, in the next generation, in Julian. He was truly a founder of Bloomsbury as a group, for he introduced Clive Bell to his sister Vanessa, and Leonard Woolf to his sister Virginia. The marriages that grew out of these introductions would give the group a center, a coherence, and a strength that came with family interconnection, which it would not otherwise have had. (In all this there is a resemblance between Bloomsbury and the Clapham Sect, that important evangelical group or movement of a hundred years earlier, among whose members had been the great-grandfather of Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, the great-great-grandfather of E. M. Forster, and the great-grandmother of Lytton Strachey.)
Strachey and his friends at Trinity—Bell, Woolf, Thoby Stephen, as well as A. J. Robertson and Saxon Sydney-Turner—were caught up in the prevailing Cambridge passion for “little groups” and formed an informal one of their own, the Midnight Society, which met on Saturdays at midnight in the rooms of Clive Bell. It was dedicated to the reading aloud of plays of a rather formidable character—The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, Bartholomew Fair—but the meetings were not as austere as this may suggest. The members fortified themselves with whisky or punch and meat pies, and when the last speech was spoken—usually at about 5 A.M.—they would sally forth, still exhilarated, to listen to the nightingales and sometimes to chant passages from Swinburne as they perambulated through the cloisters of Neville’s Court in Trinity.
There was another “little group,” distinguished in lineage and ostensibly secret, to which Strachey and Woolf—but not Clive Bell nor Thoby Stephen—also belonged, and which also met on Saturday evenings but a good deal earlier. (Indeed, the Midnight Society chose the midnight hour not only for its drama but simply to allow others to attend both meetings.) Founded in about 1820 by a future bishop of Gibraltar, this was the Conversazione Society, or the Society, or—to use the name by which it is best known—the Apostles. Over its history, the Apostles had had as members many of the most brilliant Cambridge undergraduates, from Tennyson and Hallam on, and most of them, as it happened, were at Trinity College. In 1899 the form was much as it had been since the beginning of the Society: weekly meetings, at which a paper was delivered by one of the members and discussed (dissected) by the others. Tradition provided that there should be a full and frank response to any question, objection, or speculation that might be raised, even at the risk of hurt feelings. On the whole, Apostolic papers were dedicated to abstract, or metaphysical, or political, or poetical, or ethical problems; the Apostolic aim was to pursue the truth with absolute devotion and personal candor. (On occasion, however, the aim seems to have been simply to amuse, as when Lytton Strachey addressed himself to the question “Ought the Father to Grow a Beard?” Since Victorian fathers were usually bearded, one presumes that the correct, Stracheyan answer would have been no. Strachey himself, in the later years of his life, grew a luxuriant beard, though he never married.) The concerns of the Society had always been more philosophical than literary; now, at the turn of the century, the inclination and professional interests of certain of its older members strengthened the claims of philosophy. At this time the number of undergraduate members was comparatively small: only about six. (Here a latecomer must be mentioned: John Maynard Keynes, who did not arrive in Cambridge as an undergraduate until the autumn of 1902, and who so impressed Strachey and Woolf when they went to call that he was brought into the Society in the winter of his first year.) But the membership as a whole had never been limited to the biblical number of Apostles, and there were still many active members who had already received their degrees. These included not only men still at Cambridge (usually as dons) but a few others—future literary figures in the very early stages of their careers, men like Desmond MacCarthy and E. M. Forster—who might come up from London to attend meetings. In Cambridge the most eminent of the older members, who of course were still young men at the time, were Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore (the Moore mentioned in Strachey’s letter to Virginia Woolf), and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. It is hardly surprising then that the bent of the Society should have been philosophical.
The young Apostles of 1900 felt quite consciously the need for a new philosophy for the new century. Strachey had already persuaded his friends to question the Utilitarian pieties of the past, and to hold in high disdain what appeared to be the hypocrisies, deceits, catchwords, cant, and uncertainties of their immediate ancestors, whom he would call those “Eminent Victorians” in his famous 1918 book by that name. One recognizes a familiar pattern: the opposition of fathers and sons, the war of the generations. Sir Leslie Stephen had been an agnostic, and he had resigned his fellowship at Trinity Hall, his College at Cambridge, because of doubts. But he doubted the existence of God with all the passion and soul-searching that his Claphamite ancestors had devoted to affirming God’s existence. With equal passion, his descendants and their friends would claim that the problem was not even worth considering. In 1906, after reading a memoir of Henry Sidgwick, an earlier Apostle who had suffered like Sir Leslie from doubts, Keynes commented:
He never did anything but wonder whether Christianity was true and prove that it wasn’t and hope that it was. . . . And then his conscience—incredible. There is no doubt about his moral goodness. And yet it is all so dreadfully depressing—no intimacy, no clear-cut crisp boldness. Oh, I suppose he was intimate but he didn’t seem to have anything to be intimate about except his religious doubts. And he really ought to have got over that a little sooner; because he knew that the thing wasn’t true perfectly well from the beginning.4
The publication of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica in 1903 struck the Midnighters and the Apostles with the force of revelation. A half century later, looking back, Clive Bell testified that Moore was “the dominant influence in all our lives.”5 Lytton Strachey, we are told by E. M. Forster (in his biography of Lowes Dickinson), welcomed Principia Ethica with the words “the age of reason has come!”6 And Keynes summed up its effect upon himself and his friends as “the beginning of a renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on a new earth.”7 Clearly, the future Bloomsburians (or Bloomsberries, as they were called by Molly MacCarthy) had found their Bible.
It should be said at the outset that Moore’s was very much a private philosophy—in itself and as interpreted by his disciples, who were not above picking and choosing amongst its elements those they found most congenial. As such, it provided a dramatic contrast, and contradiction, to the public philosophy of the nineteenth century, the Utilitarianism of Bentham, Mill, Spencer, and other thinkers in the Victorian galaxy. The Utilitarian notions of “good” as something fixed, already defined, and as publicly in the world as the memorial to Albert the Good in Hyde Park were firmly rejected. “Good” is an indefinable attribute, Moore explained; the sense of it is instinctive in oneself; one’s discriminations, based upon it, lead to evaluations of one’s own. One asks questions, and one questions the questions: “What exactly do you mean?” That famous, often parodied Bloomsbury remark originates here, in Moore’s own conversation—which his younger friends could find intimidating—and in the very first sentence of his preface to Principia Ethica: “It appears to me that in Ethics, as in all other philosophical studies, the difficulties and disagreements, of which its history is full, are mainly due to a very simple cause: namely to the attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely what question it is which you desire to answer.”
But Moore contributed more to Bloomsbury than a conversational gambit. The central aspect of his doctrine, as it helped bring about a Bloomsbury “attitude,” was his assertion that
By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves; nor, if we consider strictly what things are worth having purely for their own sakes, does it appear probable that anyone will think that anything else has nearly so great a value as the things which are included under these two heads. . . . [This] is the ultimate and fundamental truth of Moral Philosophy. That it is only for the sake of these things—in order that as much of them as possible may at some time exist—that anyone can be justified in performing any public or private duty; that they are the raison d’être of virtue; that it is they . . . that form the rational ultimate end of human action and the sole criterion of social progress: these appear to be truths which have been generally overlooked.8
Here then was the new Gospel but, unlike the old, arrived at, so its believers thought, with complete rationality. In fact, there was considerably more in Principia Ethica than this exaltation of “certain states of consciousness,” but Moore’s disciples chose not to notice those aspects of it that dealt with the relation of ethics to conduct. “We accepted Moore’s religion, so to speak, and discarded his morals,” Keynes wrote in 1938. “Indeed, in our opinion, one of the great advantages of his religion, was that it made morals unnecessary—meaning by ‘religion’ one’s attitude towards oneself and the ultimate, and by ‘morals’ one’s attitude towards the outside world and the intermediate.” What Keynes and his friends took from Moore’s “religion, so to speak” was the belief that “one’s prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge.”9
Obviously, if one is to practice a religion that gives primacy to “certain states of consciousness,” one must be capable of discriminations and subtlety and deep feeling. But there are two preconditions outside oneself that must also be fulfilled: first, a stable society; and second, a measure of financial security. A chaotic or threatened society involves the individual in its concerns; anxieties about money, the mere business of survival, preempt the major areas of consciousness. At the time of which we are writing, both preconditions obtained. In 1903 the world was at peace: no “shadow of a war,” such as darkened the 1930s, haunted the imagination of the sensitive. Indeed, as Leonard Woolf recalled, there were events like the vindication of Captain Dreyfus that seemed to justify one’s taking an optimistic view of the future: the day of reason was almost at hand. As for financial security, that too, in varying degree, Moore’s young disciples had. None was rich—Strachey and Woolf could count on very little money—but all had the assurance, the poise of identity, that was inherent in belonging to a certain class in a certain place at a certain moment in history. None was in the position of poor Leonard Bast in E. M. Forster’s Howards End. A clerk living on the very fringes of the middle class, Leonard has been educated (at the expense of the state) up to a level of cultural aspiration: he yearns, shall we say, for “certain states of consciousness.” But for him they are unattainable, and Forster makes it clear that this is because Leonard lacks money:
Give people cash, for it is the warp of civilization, whatever the woof may be. The imagination ought to play upon money and realize it vividly, for it’s the—the second most important thing in the world. It is so slurred over and hushed up, there is so little clear thinking—oh, political economy of course; but so few of us think clearly about our own private incomes, and admit that independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means. Money: give Mr Bast money, and don’t bother about his ideals. He’ll pick up those for himself.10
The period in which Forster was writing, in which Bloomsbury was coming into being, was the Edwardian heyday, a time when money was having a golden age. Rarely has it been regarded with such adulation. After all, it was England’s main product—money making money—and most of the coupon-clippers, the rentier class, had little sense, and cared less, of what was actually happening in some vague place in the Empire in order to keep them in pounds. Money was to be collected and spent. It was the era of the last great splurge—the fantastic country house weekends devoted to killing as many birds as possible, changing into as many clothes as possible, and eating as much food as possible. In all this, Edward VII, in his liking for bankers and financiers, set the tone of his age. England was more egalitarian than the Continent and would permit the plutocrat “to get ahead in society.” But it had never happened at quite the pace that was set in the first fourteen years of the twentieth century.
Ironically, the money-making-money that made possible the endless extravagance of the echt Edwardians also made possible the life of Bloomsbury with its emphasis upon personal relations and aesthetic experience. The money of its Victorian forebears had been wisely invested. Certainly in the Cambridge period, the future members of Bloomsbury did not overly concern themselves with the sources of their income: as Apostles they had made it a point, in the rather austere tradition of the Society and of Cambridge itself, to turn away from worldly values. (Here, perhaps, it should be noticed that Clive Bell, who was not an Apostle, was the one among the group who chose to have a foot, as Desmond MacCarthy, another member of Bloomsbury, observed, in two very different communities within the University. “He seemed to live, half with the rich sporting-set, and half with the intellectuals.” And MacCarthy recalled that at their first meeting Bell was “dressed with careless opulence” in a dark fur coat with a deep astrakhan collar.11 Not, one ventures to think, the ideal of Apostolic costume.) Unconcerned with wealth and power, indifferent to fame and success, these young men tended to regard the world where such things mattered with contempt—although with some pity also for its being so unenlightened. As late as 1906 Keynes was writing to Strachey, not humorously, “How amazing to think that we and only we know the rudiments of a true theory of ethic.”12 This was an abiding characteristic of the Apostles—a certain elitist point of view towards the world—and it was reinforced by Moore’s philosophy, which emphasized the importance of individual judgments and discriminations. At the same time, and this too was Apostolic, there was a willingness to enter the world, if one were summoned, and help it along its way. (It seems not unreasonable to suggest that Keynes’s attitude towards economics and one basis for his economic theory derive from this cast of mind.)
In fact, when their period at Cambridge ended, Moore’s disciples did not, as one might have expected, withdraw into contemplation and a further refining of sensibility. Instead, at their own pace and in their own fashion, they began careers—as writers, artists, editors, publishers, civil servants—and they went into the world. There was, however, remarkably little dispersion. Except for Leonard Woolf, who went out to Ceylon for seven years as a junior colonial officer, carrying in his luggage a set of Voltaire in ninety volumes, they remained a group in London as they had been in Cambridge. Only the setting of the conversation changed: from Neville’s Court at Trinity College to Gordon Square in Bloomsbury to the house that the four Stephen children, Thoby, Vanessa, Virginia, and Adrian, had taken on their own. From time to time they added to their number regular visitors: most importantly, in the prewar years, Roger Fry, E. M. Forster, David Garnett, Desmond MacCarthy, and the painter Duncan Grant, who was a cousin of Lytton Strachey and the lover of Maynard Keynes. And they proceeded with their work.
Moore’s text speaks of “the enjoyment of beautiful objects.” Keynes, in his paraphrase, makes a significant addition: “the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience.” Indeed, the creation proved formidable in quality, and in quantity. It’s worth remembering that Virginia Woolf, for example, despite periods of mental illness when she could do no writing at all, had produced twenty-four books before her suicide, at the age of fifty-nine, in 1941. Vanessa Bell painted almost a thousand pictures. E. M. Forster, who is traditionally regarded as having written very little, has fourteen books to his credit. As a group, its members seem, in retrospect, to have been as industrious as Victorians.
I stay myself, . . .
These are the opening words of Julian Bell’s poem “Autobiography,” which appeared in his second and, as it proved, final volume, Work for the Winter (1936). The remark is characteristic of his strong sense of individuality: “I stay myself, . . .” Yet at the same time he recognizes that he is also
. . . the product made
By several hundred English years,
Of harried labourers underpaid,
Of Venns who plied the parson’s trade,
Of regicides, of Clapham sects,
Of high Victorian intellects,
Leslie, FitzJames.
This, of course, is the Stephen inheritance. And it is equally characteristic of Julian that he should acknowledge it with a kind of sweeping inclusiveness: from the missionary austerities of the Clapham Sect to the violence of the regicides. We are dealing here with something very different from “the enlightenment of Bloomsbury.” His mother and his aunt might accept as just the praise accorded their father, Sir Leslie; they would be less likely to respond to praise for their uncle, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, who as a conservative Utilitarian had a decidedly more authoritarian cast of mind. Bloomsbury, with Lytton Strachey in the forefront, had attempted to discredit the immediate past at least, while Julian, one might almost say, revels in it, revels in it all. “I stay myself, the product made . . .” On the one hand, there are “high Victorian intellects”; on the other, “not among such honoured, marble names,
That cavalry ruffian, Hodson of Hodson’s Horse,
Who helped take Delhi, murdered the Moguls
He was “At least a soldiering brigand,” a category for which Julian would always entertain a certain fondness. “There were worse,” he goes on to say,
Who built a country house from iron and coal:
Hard-bitten capitalists, if on the whole
They kept the general average of their class.
This, of course, is the Bell inheritance, his father’s side, very different from the Stephens and representing a family which had made its money in coal, and at whose large, ugly Victorian country house, at Seend in Wiltshire, the Clive Bells and their children spent some vacations and, with some reluctance, most Christmases. To his indulgent parents, Clive nevertheless appeared to be a wild radical, and a dangerous advocate of a new aestheticism, or so they interpreted the fame he had won as the author of such books as Art and Civilization; as an exponent of the idea of “significant form”; and as a sponsor—along with their central organizing figure, Roger Fry—of the notorious exhibitions of Postimpressionist painting in 1910 and 1912, which introduced Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso to England in the years before the First World War. But if he seemed almost a black sheep to his own family, to the Stephen side he seemed almost a little too conventional in his “huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ ” interests (quite a bit of which he conveyed to his son) and in his comparatively conservative political views, except in his absolute pacifism in both World Wars. Virginia Woolf, in a memoir of Julian written immediately after his death, felt that Julian owed a great deal to the Bell inheritance, particularly in his yearning for the active rather than the contemplative life. This differentiated him somewhat from her beloved Thoby, whose death in 1906, thirty-one years before Julian’s, had had such a profound and lasting effect upon her. Thoby’s tragic, early death from typhoid that year helped focus, in reaction, the attention of his great friends on his sisters, and played an important role in bringing the Bloomsbury group into sharper focus. Julian’s death, and Virginia’s subsequent suicide, as well as the earlier deaths of Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, were crucial moments in its later stages. Julian’s death brought back to Virginia Thoby’s. Though Thoby was more worldly than his sisters, and had become a barrister, “in fact Julian was much rougher, more impulsive; more vigorous than Thoby. He had a strong element of the Bell in him. What do I mean? I think I mean that he was practical & caustic & shrewd. . . . He had much higher spirits. He was much more adapted to life. He was much less regularly beautiful to look at. But then he had a warmth, an impetuosity that the Stephens dont have.”13
This is to give the Bell inheritance its due. But it must be said that Julian’s family, in its loyalties and intimacies, almost seemed to exclude the non-Stephen part of it. Clive did not completely fit into the Stephen inheritance of “Clapham sects, / Of high Victorian intellects,” nor did Leonard. Clive and Leonard were certainly original progenitors of Bloomsbury, of undoubted importance; nevertheless, one feels the slightest sense of unease in their relationships with their wives, the Stephen sisters, who were the heart of Bloomsbury, whatever its masculine intellectual origins at Cambridge. Both men were perhaps a little too worldly. If Clive was a little too much to the Right in his political thinking, perhaps Leonard went a little too far in his interests in the practice of radical socialism. And if Clive’s squire background did not exactly fit with the Stephen inheritance, neither did the London professional and mercantile background of the Woolfs, not to mention that family’s being Jewish. In her memoir of Julian, Virginia speaks of “L’s family complex wh. made him eager, no, on the alert, to criticise her [Vanessa’s] children because he thought I admired them more than his family.”14 But it seems not to have occurred to her that this imputed preference of hers was almost certainly the case and, more importantly, that there was indeed a Stephen “family complex” of mutual affection and admiration that must have been formidable (as well as enviable) to an outsider.
Julian was born on February 4, 1908. The most important person in Julian’s life, from its very beginning to its very end, was his mother, the gifted and beautiful Vanessa Bell. Theirs was a relationship without a break and without concealment: in it the full implications of Bloomsbury candor were taken to their limits, and the connection between mother and son never weakened. Vanessa herself made it so evident in her notes about him jotted down in the fullness of her grief in the month of his death, July 1937:
When I first held him in my arms—the softness of his dark brown silky hair. All pain had become worth while. Confused overwhelming feelings one did not understand. . . . Intense peace & joy. Painting him in his cradle every morning as he lay & kicked. Drawing him as he began to stagger about. . . . Telling the hospital nurse at Seend I would never punish my child. Argument—she became angry & thought me foolish & ignorant. . . . My life changed, invaded by this creature suddenly alive. . . . going away when he was 6 months old—to Italy for a month or so—but I could hardly bear it.
When he was three and a half, she remembered when he “put a handful of gravel and earth all over my head & neck—R[oger Fry].’s astonishment that I did not scold him.” In London, during the air raids of the First World War, “he was cross at not being taken out to see them but allowed to sleep.”15
Although they would become very close, Julian’s aunt Virginia’s early reaction to him was far less enthusiastic, treating Julian as an object rather than as a person. As she wrote on May 13, 1908, to Violet Dickinson:
I had a fortnight at St. Ives. Adrian and Nessa and Clive came for the last week. I doubt that I shall ever have a baby. Its voice is too terrible, a senseless scream, like an ill omened cat. Nobody would wish to comfort it, or pretend that it was a human being. Now, thank God, it sleeps with its nurse. Now and then it smiled at Nessa, and it has a very nice back; but the amount of business that has to be got through before you can enjoy it, is dismaying. Clive and I went for some long walks; but I felt that we were deserters, but then I was quite useless, as a nurse, and Clive will not even hold it.16
But her attitude towards him changed, and they were eventually very close, as she was with Vanessa’s two other children, Quentin, born in 1910, and Angelica, her child by Duncan Grant, born in 1918. Virginia remarked in her diary in 1919, “Do I envy Nessa her overflowing household? Perhaps at moments.”17
It was an extraordinary rapport that Julian had with his mother, which one cannot but admire, and impressive testimony to Bloomsbury’s belief in personal relations. Yet in some ways the relationship was so perfect and intense that it may have truncated others, provided a standard impossible to achieve elsewhere. The possibility will have to be considered in its place, many years later, in the history of Julian’s grand and casual passions (should one share one’s private life completely with one’s mother?). From the first, his mother took great pains with his upbringing, intending it to be as “natural” and undogmatic as possible: he was not to be Victorianized, a miniature grown-up, seen but not heard, in a spotless pinafore. Yet for all their intellectual adventuresomeness, the Bells were still a fairly well-to-do upper-middle-class family in the comfortable years before the First World War. There were maids and a series of governesses—one of whom Julian got rid of by pushing into a ditch. And whatever they might think of religion “upstairs,” Julian found it impossible to escape completely the religion of his country “downstairs,” although it would leave no permanent mark upon him. In a fragment of autobiography written shortly before going out to Spain, he remarks: “I remember as independent ideas—more or less—a Darwinian argument with Mabel and Flossie—our nurses—which must have been very early—pre-war Gordon Square.” In other words, this memory dates from before Julian was six. “Though obdurate I was secretly frightened of Jehovah, and even asked to be taught prayers. (Later, learning the Lord’s Prayer, I used it as a magic defence against ghosts, and still do: or as a soporific.)” But religion was hardly very significant in Julian’s life. Far more important was the education he received from his mother. He writes of this same prewar time, “The great liberating influence of the period was the reading aloud by Nessa of elementary children’s astronomies and geologies.” And there was a similar intellectual excitement when she read aloud to him a shortened translation of the Odyssey. Before he was able to read himself, he made Flossie read to him a school textbook of history. History, like astronomy, was a passion. “There was also the famous occasion when Roger [Fry] demonstrated a home chemistry box, and brewed coal gas; Mabel was sent out and bought a clay pipe from a pub: it was tamped with plasticine, and, being cooked over the fire, eventually produced a jet of flame.” In 1916, when he was eight years old, he had what he called his “first, definite, independent idea. It was a solution of the desire for immortality. I worked out a possible cycle by which a human body would return through grass and sheep, into another human body.”18 But it would be very misleading to give a picture of a male bluestocking pondering his science, classics, and history at a tender age. Rather it would be more accurate to see him as an extremely adventurous, reckless child bounding from activity to activity, his parents anxious to introduce him, through explanations and discussions, to the Bloomsbury dictum of rationality, which held that even irrational behavior should be understood. David Garnett, in a memoir of Julian, describes him as
Virginia Woolf and Julian Bell, Blean, near Canterbury. Taken by Vanessa Bell, 1910. ©Tate, London, 2010
a wilful child, swift and erratic in his movements; he looked at one from large eyes and planned devilment. . . . Julian was shrill, sometimes noisy, always rather catlike and quick. My first row with him was when I found him standing, unconscious of evil-doing, on some vegetable marrow plants that he had trampled to pieces. . . . He had in those days often to be exhorted to reason, often to listen to tedious explanations about the consequences of his violent experiments. He flung newly-hatched ducklings into the pond and after they had raced ashore flung them in again and again until one or two were drowned. He was not punished as a child, but reasoned with: one saw on his face the lovely sulky look of a half-tame creature.19
The free-thinking socialist Edward Carpenter, a good friend of Roger Fry’s, was still enough of a Victorian that he was shocked while visiting Fry at Durbins, his house in Guildford, that Julian could pour dirt on his mother without being reprimanded.20 Virginia had a similar memory from about the same time—or when Julian was slightly older: “We were packing up the tea things. He took a bottle of water & smashed it. He stood there in his knickerbockers with long naked legs looking defiant & triumphant. He smashed the bottle completely. The water or milk spread over the path. . . . He stood quite still smiling. I thought, This is the victorious male; now he feels himself the conqueror. It was a determined bold gesture, as tho’ he wanted to express his own force & smiled at the consternation of the maids.”21
One should not make too much either of the enthusiasm of a little boy for astronomy and history, or of his mischief and high spirits, although it is of some interest that Julian himself should have remembered the former, and those of his parents’ generation, the latter. Still, it does not seem too fanciful to read into the division the first hints of a theme that was to figure importantly in Julian’s life, and in the lives of many of his contemporaries: how to reconcile the conflicting demands of the life of the mind and the life of action.
The Bells made their home in Bloomsbury, but they were often in the country, and Julian, in his attachment to the land, grew up much more a child of the country than of the city—there would always be something equivocal about his feelings for London; certainly they did not go very deep. Whatever the attractiveness of Bloomsbury for the grown-ups, the children found life more exciting and memorable in the country: to a degree at Seend, the house of their Bell grandparents, and at a variety of rented houses—such as Asheham, near Lewes in Sussex, rented by the Woolfs from 1911 to 1918, where Vanessa and her children spent much time, and where Carrington fell in love with Lytton Strachey. After the birth of Julian’s brother, Quentin, in 1910, Clive and Vanessa, while remaining on close terms, drifted apart as a couple. She and Roger Fry were lovers from 1911 to 1913, and remained very fond of one another thereafter. Roger would play an extremely important part in Julian’s life. But by 1913 her closest male friend was the painter Duncan Grant, and they would live together until her death in 1961, both in London and in the country. Grant was a happy homosexual, beloved by Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and Adrian Stephen, and enjoyed a series of affairs. In 1918 he and Vanessa had a daughter, Angelica. In a way, it was quite a paradoxical situation for the two Stephen sisters. Bloomsbury was dedicated to sexual freedom. Yet both sisters had a somewhat restricted sexual life. One reason, perhaps, for the intensity of the relationship between Vanessa and her son Julian was that it was to some degree a compensation for the difficulties, devoted as she was to him, of her largely nonsexual relationship with Duncan. So too, apparently, Leonard and Virginia shared a very limited sexual life, and her later affair with Vita Sackville-West, immortalized in Orlando, was comparatively brief, although they remained very close friends.
In his poem “Autobiography,” Julian recalls “the passage of those country years.” England was at war, and his was “a war-time boyhood,” as he acknowledges. But apart from this reference, the details he chooses to record (in the poem) are timeless, of
orchard trees run wild,
West wind and rain, winters of holding mud,
Wood fires in blue-bright frost and tingling blood,
All brought to the sharp senses of a child.
These are the simplicities of a child’s (and a poet’s) world. For Julian’s parents and their friends the war brought a more complex experience: a true crisis of conscience. On the whole, Bloomsburians, as we have earlier suggested, tended to live at a certain aloof distance from the world. (This attitude is not to be mistaken for unworldliness. If they had little desire for luxury, or even the creature comforts, they did not scorn the world in its more amiable, civilized aspect: civilization, as they defined it, meant taking in the pleasures of food and wine and conversation. And Clive Bell was a great believer in savoir vivre and savoir faire, bearing as he did an English Francophile’s conviction that living and doing were done better across the Channel.) Apart from Keynes and Leonard Woolf, they were indifferent to the day-to-day or even the month-to-month practice of politics. The demands of the private life left one no time for that sort of public interest; one lived au dessus de la mêlée. The war changed all that—at least for the duration. After 1914 an attitude of aloofness became increasingly difficult to maintain, even untenable.
Maynard Keynes, Bloomsbury’s authority on the subject, predicted a short war brought to an end by economic causes. This must have been some consolation in the beginning, for Bloomsbury was opposed to war in general (“the worst of the epidemic diseases which afflict mankind and the great genetrix of many of the others”22) and to this war in particular. But Keynes’s optimism was confounded by events. The war was prolonged from one year to the next, and it required increasing tough-mindedness to withstand popular pressure to conform to the war enthusiasm. Not unexpectedly, Bloomsbury, with its belief in the importance of the private life and private convictions, proved extremely good at this. But in 1916, for the first time in British history, conscription was introduced, and thereafter the men of Bloomsbury were compelled to make public their consciences; that is, to declare themselves conscientious objectors to military service.
As such they came to public attention. At Trinity College, Cambridge, for example, Bertrand Russell’s lectureship was not renewed; his unpopular pacifist opinions had much to do with the College’s action. Lytton Strachey, called before the Hampstead Tribunal in London to prove his conscientious objections, made in passing his celebrated reply to the military representative (“What would you do, Mr Strachey, If you saw a German soldier attempting to rape your sister?” “I should try and come between them.”)23 Some days later he had a military physical examination, and the point became moot: he was declared unfit for any military service. Although he was not required to do so, he spent quite a bit of time at Garsington, Philip and Lady Ottoline Morrell’s manor house outside Oxford, where friends, such as Clive Bell, were fulfilling their obligations by being farmers. Bell, a pacifist, who had argued in his pamphlet Peace at Once (1915) that “the war ought to be brought to an end as quickly as possible by a negotiated peace,” was working on the land under the provisions of the Military Service Act. Duncan Grant and David “Bunny” Garnett (who earlier had been with a Friends’ Ambulance Unit in France) went to Wissett Lodge, outside a remote little village in Suffolk, where they meant to become fruit farmers. Duncan’s father, Major Grant, was managing the farm and was willing for Duncan and Bunny to work on it, though disapproving of their conscientious objection. That summer (1916) Vanessa, with Julian, Quentin, and the maid Blanche, came down from London to Wissett to keep house for Duncan and Bunny, who were lovers at the time. The lodge was “a little early Victorian house with numerous small, exceptionally dark, rooms,”24 shadowed by an enormous ilex, which Julian and Quentin called “the safety tree,” for there, in its branches, they were safe from the grown-ups. Life went cheerfully at Wissett. Vanessa painted; the men worked hard in the orchard, kept bees, kept fowls—a large flock of white leghorns; there were frequent visitors: Oliver and Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lady Ottoline Morrell. For Julian it was a memorable time: “orchard trees run wild, / West wind and rain.” Long afterwards, with astonishing vividness, he recalled his first evening’s fishing at Wissett, “when I must have caught a couple of dozen roach. . . . Bunny was fishing also: Clive advised me. They started to bite hard in the evening: that pond had never been fished before. I think my second was a big one—perhaps an eighth of a pound; impressive enough to a child. We filled a bucket, slimy, fishy smelling; there is something extraordinarily sensual and thrilling about a fish’s body in one’s hand: the cold, the vigour and convulsive thumping, the odd smell, the gasping open mouth you jag the hook out of.”
It was at Wissett too that he read Gardiner’s History of England from Henry VIII to the Corn Laws (“God knows how much I understood”), and it was there that he first developed “a passion for war and war games.”25 The irony of this, a war-minded child in a conscientiously objecting household, needn’t be insisted upon: Julian himself saw it as “a reaction.” He knew quite soon that his family and their friends were COs; it explained “the isolation, and later, at Charleston, the expectation of hostility.” The war game, which grew increasingly complex and took a variety of forms over the years, originated with Quentin, with Julian as an enthusiastic and inventive collaborator. In one version it was played on a board, moving counters about; in another, it was played “life-size.” Perhaps its very beginning can be traced back to an afternoon when Bunny Garnett mounted firecrackers on shingles and sailed them across the pond. There was the normal desire of little boys to play soldiers, to reenact historical battles (“the Armada . . . the Roman wall with oak-apple armies”), although out of deference to the household, contemporary history was not drawn upon: the opposing sides were never English and German. What is remarkable about the war game is that the interest in it should have continued well beyond childhood, and that war and military strategy fascinated Julian until the day of his death.
The fruit farming at Wissett proved unsatisfactory: it had been entered upon, at Keynes’s suggestion, to ensure the two men exemption from military service. But the Appeals Tribunal, to which their cases were referred, “declared that though the Wissett Lodge holding might qualify as work of national importance, it was out of the question for us”—we are quoting from Garnett—“to be [in effect] our own employers.” The solution appeared simple enough: to continue doing work of “national importance,” that is, to continue farming, but on someone else’s farm. So Wissett was abandoned. It was thought “preferable,” Garnett explains, “to go back to the neighbourhood of Asheham, where Leonard and Virginia were living, and where Vanessa had pre-war acquaintances among the Sussex farmers, rather than to seek work in Suffolk.”26
Thus it was that the Bells came to Charleston. From 1916 on, where Vanessa and her children lived was initially determined by Duncan, shaped by his need to fulfill alternate service during the First World War. Duncan discovered that such was possible in Sussex, and so Charleston, a short distance from Asheham, was rented in the autumn of 1916; it was thereafter their beloved place in the country. Virginia had discovered the house and wrote to her sister about it in May 1916:
I wish you’d leave Wissett, and take Charleston. Leonard went over it, and says its a most delightful house and strongly advises you to take it. It is about a mile from Firle, on that little path which leads under the downs. It has a charming garden, with a pond, and fruit trees, and vegetables, all now rather run wild, but you could make it lovely. The house is very nice, with large rooms, and one room with big windows fit for a studio. . . . It sounds a most attractive place—and 4 miles from us, so you wouldn’t be badgered by us.27
The following September she wrote again: “The garden could be made lovely—there are fruit trees, and vegetables, and a most charming walk under trees. The only drawback seemed to be that there is cold water, and no hot, in the bathroom; not a very nice w.c, and a cesspool in the tennis court. . . . I’m sure, if you get Charleston, you’ll end by buying it forever. If you lived there, you could make it absolutely divine.”28 It was owned by Lord Gage of nearby Firle Place and continued to be so until 1981. The house was a considerable challenge, for water needed to be pumped and heated by wood, and there was no electricity until 1933. For Julian, as for his brother, Quentin, two years younger than he, and his sister, Angelica, born in 1918, Charleston was central for their lives.
Charleston was rented by the Bells in the autumn of 1916. Until 1918 they lived there without interruption, having given up Gordon Square; thereafter, they divided their time between Charleston and London. In the late 1920s, they frequently rented a house in France, at Cassis on the Mediterranean. For Vanessa and Duncan, Charleston was their country base until their deaths. For Julian, Charleston came to represent childhood and the long summer holidays from school; it was the place in which he was most happy, the most loved of his homes.
Charleston is a short distance off the main Lewes-Eastbourne road, right beneath the looming green eminence of Firle Beacon, the highest point on the Sussex Downs. At the turn of the century the house had been a simple country hotel, and many of the small, low-ceilinged rooms still retained porcelain number plates on their doors. There was an orchard, a walled garden, and across the patch of lawn from the front door, a small pond (large enough, however, for naval engagements). There was also, fulfilling the immediate needs of the household, a farm nearby, and there the conscientious objectors loyally carried on work of national importance until eleven o’clock in the morning of November 11, 1918.
In the first decade of the postwar period, Charleston became the center of what Quentin Bell called “Bloomsbury-by-the-Sea,” a triangular outpost populated by the Charlestonians (the Bells and their frequent visitors), the Tiltonians (Maynard and Lydia Keynes, who took up residence at Tilton on a very short branch off the road leading to Charleston), and the Rodmellians (Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who moved from Asheham to Monk’s House at Rodmell, on the other side of Lewes). The house, rambling in its construction and haphazard-seeming in its additions and outbuildings, was full of many oddly placed and sized rooms (not a disadvantage) and provided (apart from the usual bedrooms and sitting rooms, and a dining room with an immense fireplace) a library for Clive Bell, and studios for Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, who when not busy painting canvases, were busy painting the walls, bedsteads, cupboards, tables, chairs, plates, and other flat surfaces they could find. The result of their industry was to give the house a color and a magic (in its unexpectedness) that is unlike anything else: one has no sense, nor is one meant to have, of the self-conscious work of art. The children found the house, its grounds, and the surrounding countryside a perfect place for endless activity: for adventures, walks, war games, butterfly hunting, capture of animals—and when they were older, shooting of birds—and noise: so much noise that poor Clive Bell, in desperation, built himself a little study apart from the house, in which he hoped to gain some quiet. In any case, he was frequently not there. Clive was more in London, and would lead something of a separate life, marked by a series of lovers, most notably Mary St. John Hutchinson. His influence on Julian is not to be neglected, however; his love of the outdoor life and his wide-ranging interests were reflected in his writings, which tended to be more broad than deep.
The children, along with the grown-ups, were at the center of life at Charleston: that is its immediately distinguishing quality. They were not put to one side, categorized, or patronized, taken up enthusiastically and unceremoniously let down. That this did not happen is a tribute in part to their own considerable charm, and even more to the character of the grown-ups, who had not only the ability to love children but also, which is rarer, the ability to respect and to sympathize with them, to educate and to entertain them. Of all the grown-ups, it was Vanessa, naturally, who came first in their affections; and after her, Aunt Virginia. Her arrivals “were a signal for rejoicing on the part of Julian and Quentin who had secrets to share with her. Thus she was always led aside and from the corner of the walled garden where they were ensconced came her clear hoot of laughter—like the mellow hoot of an owl—and Julian’s loud explosions of merriment, protests and explanations.”29 There were relationships of rare closeness, too, with Clive, Bunny, Duncan, and Roger Fry. (Indeed, all that seems to have been lacking in this childhood was the presence of other children. When the Desmond MacCarthys came to visit, they would bring their daughter Rachel; one hears also, when Julian was eleven, of the daughter of a woman who was at Charleston to help in the house: with the daughter, Julian fenced and wrestled. But such encounters were the exception, not the rule. On the whole, the children depended on each other and on the grown-ups for company.)
Something of the spirit of Charleston can be glimpsed in the family newspaper that Julian, the editor, and Quentin, the illustrator, put out quite regularly throughout the twenties whenever they were in residence, although in its later period it was carried on with more devotion by Quentin than by his elder brother. Such enterprises are not unusual among families; the Stephen children had done the same in the Hyde Park News. Only one copy was produced—printed (that is, typewritten) or handwritten—some of the text being in Virginia’s hand. In fact, she would write quite a bit for it, most notably in special Christmas issues, again illustrated by Quentin. There were such texts as “Scenes in the Life of Mrs Bell,” “Eminent Charlestonians,” and “The Messiah,” in seventeen parts largely devoted to making fun of Clive. It was handed round for the enjoyment and edification of its readers, usually at the lunch table, generally when the family was in residence at Charleston. There were weather reports, nature notes, news of arrivals and departures (“Today Mr Raymond Mortimer arrived to the great joy of the family”), and accounts of Duncan’s difficulties in building an ornamental pool (“Grant’s Folly”), Clive’s search for peace, and the foibles and adventures of the servants, with particular emphasis on the attraction of Grace, the housekeeper, for most of the male population of Lewes and the surrounding countryside. (Grace Higgens, only five years older than Julian, came to work for Vanessa in 1920 and became a central figure in the Bell household, especially at Charleston but also in London; she went with the family to France, particularly to look after Angelica.) Mortality was not neglected in the publication (“We regret greatly the death of Marmaduke, the perroquet, who expired suddenly through unknown causes this afternoon. We fear he will be much missed”), and daily events were chronicled (“Angelica triumphed again yesterday, she succeeded without difficulty to persuade Nessa to cut her hair short. Afterwards, she danced a triumphal ‘black-bottom’ to celebrate her victory”). There was even an occasional advertisement:
The Life and Adventures of J. Bell by
VIRGINIA WOOLF
profusely illustrated by Quentin Bell, Esq.
. . . a profound and moving piece of work
. . . psychological insight.
WESTERN DAILY NEWS
. . . superb illustrations . . . unwavering truth . . . worthy of royal academy
. . . clearly the work of a pupil of Professor Tonks
ARTIST AND CRAFTSMAN
The paper, which began as the Charleston Bulletin, changed its name quite early in its history to the New Bulletin. It was very much a holiday publication: during the summer and for the Christmas and Easter vacations. There were in all 188 issues “published” from 1923 to 1927.30 It did not, however, until a later issue, state its credo: “‘The Bulletin’ is unique among daily papers in being controlled by no millionaire or political party. It is not perhaps unique in having no principles.”
The New Bulletin, subsequently The Bulletin, did not confine itself to the activities of the residents of Charleston and their visitors but spread its coverage, and the circulation of its single copy, to Tilton and Rodmell: “The local countryside is now menaced by a new peril. Following Nessa’s sensational purchase of a Renault the Woolves have purchased a Singer. And the denizens of Tilton are now the proud owners of a secondhand Morris Cowley. Whatever we may think of the problem of pedestrian traffic and the missuse [sic] of motor-cars, we must all agree that the car will be a great asset to the house and a permanent source of instruction and amusement to the rats in the duck shed [which was being used as a garage at Charleston].” Towards Tilton, where the style of life was somewhat grander than at Charleston and Rodmell, the young editor and the illustrator maintained an attitude of amused tolerance: “We learn that Mr and Mrs Keynes are putting their chauffeur in livery. We remind our more absentminded readers that the Keynes arms are as follows: Innumerable £s rampant, numberless $$$ sinister in concentric circles or; Field black. Crest St George Killing the Dragon.” Keynes was referred to as “the Squire of Tilton.” Julian and Quentin were quite aware of Keynes’s importance in the world: hence the references to “Economic Consequences” and “Conferences” that are slyly introduced into accounts, not only of the “Squire and his lady” but of the majordomo of the household, Harland, who assumes mythological proportions in the paper as a drunkard, bore, and unsuccessful suitor for the favors of the alluring Grace. In 1925, while at Charleston for Christmas, the brothers recorded a pheasant shoot in Tilton wood: “We have heard from certain sources that Mr Maynard Keynes & some of his business friends formed the party. From the same source we learn that the bag consisted of: 2 pheasants, 4 rabbits, a blackbird, a cow, 7 beaters, 19 members of the party (including leaders, onlookers, etc.) and 1 dog (shot by mistake for a fox).” In the next number, along with the familiar teasing, there is a clear reflection of Keynes’s bitter and justified opposition to the return of Britain to the gold standard: “ ‘We learn that the story that the Keynes are at Tilton has now been fully authenticated. The reason they are not flying a flag to indicate that they are in residence (as, we believe, they intend to in future) is that the price of Union Jacks has risen owing to the introduction of the Gold standard, & only red flags are obtainable.”
Towards the Rodmellians, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, The Bulletin was more benign, although it entertained a somewhat equivocal attitude towards their dog Grizel. (Tiltonian dogs, too, were looked at askance: “A stray mongrel, possibly the property of the Keynes’s, appeared in the orchard this evening. If seen again it is to be shot at sight and the remains returned to its presumed owners.”) Perhaps Mrs. Woolf appears most memorably in these pages as
THE DISAPPEARING AUNT
On August 15, 1925, The Bulletin reported:
On Sunday the Woolves paid a visit to the Squire. Virginia, unable to face a Tilton tea with Harland in the offing, decided to walk over to Charleston. She was seen on the road by Angelica and Louie [a Bell servant], and her voice is thought to have been heard by Duncan. She failed to appear at tea, however, and did not afterwards return to Tilton. The most widely accredited theory is that she had a sudden inspiration and sat down on the way to compose a new novel.
The next day a sequel was given: “Nessa and the Illustrator visited the Woolves this afternoon and found the disappearing aunt safe and sound. It appears that for some whim she decided to eat her tea under a hay stack instead of in Charleston dining room. The difference, however, is not great, and it is even possible that she mistook the one for the other.”31 In 1927, Julian and Quentin, probably more the latter than the former, in a piece entitled “A Hundred Years After,” even commented on the Bloomsbury group itself and how its history would be misremembered. It is a short play with a guide providing, as does indeed happen now, a tour of Charleston:
This cactus is a shoot of the original cactus brought over by the Soviet parachutist Lopokova. . . . The photos on the wall are pictures by Vanessa Bell. You will observe that many are signed Duncan Grant & this is owing to the illiberal prejudices of the 20th century against women painters. . . . Here were congregated such figures of 20th century British culture as Virginia Sackville West and her husband Sir Clive Bell, the famous sportsman and wit. Bernard Shaw, Galsworthy, Augustus John, Huxley, Sir James Barrie and other members of the so-called Bloomsbury or WC1 group, must have all been constant visitors. . . . It was in this studio that the colossal statue of queen Mary which bestrode the harbour of Sydney Australia was first conceived by the artist who signed himself Grant but whom modern research has shown to be Sir Percy Bates and Lord Kenneth Clark.32
That same year The Bulletin published a story by Virginia Woolf, “The Widow and the Parrot,” a charming children’s tale that takes place in Rodmell. Appropriately, in 1982, it was published with illustrations by Julian Bell, Quentin’s son and Julian’s nephew and namesake.
Let this presentation of the family newspaper stand for what in fact it was: the charming world of the private joke, the private reference, the intimacy and reassurance within a closely knit family, the glorious world of childhood. Let it also stand for the badinage, the chaffing, yet the deep sense of intellectual and emotional community that existed among the Bloomsbury family and friends—most particularly at the very nucleus, Virginia, Vanessa, and the Bell children.
It was in precisely this spirit of playfulness and affection that Virginia, in the splendidly ironic preface to Orlando (1928), acknowledged, along with a galaxy of famous names, “the singularly penetrating, if severe, criticism of my nephew Mr Julian Bell . . . my nephew Mr Quentin Bell (an old and valued collaborator in fiction) . . . Miss Angelica Bell, for a service which none but she could have rendered.”
But Charleston, pleasant though it was, was not the whole of Julian’s childhood and youthful experience. To begin with it was “Baths in the kitchen. Playing by the pond. Tobogganing on the downs.” But there was the matter of his education. There were informal lessons with his mother in astronomy and geology and Greek mythology, and presumably in other subjects as well. The experiment was made of having a little school with some other children with him, but that didn’t work at all. There were governesses, such as Miss Edwards. “Pretty, silly, intolerable, bullied by children—sent away in 6 weeks.” Then Mrs. Brereton, a friend of Roger Fry’s, who found Julian an unruly pupil. Vanessa commented about her, “On the whole not unsuccessful—though a stupid woman.”33 David Garnett, in the years when he was living at Charleston, taught him “a little elementary science: biology, the evolution and principles of heredity in animals and plants, their physiology and anatomy; the elements of physics and astrophysics, the calendar and the weather.” As Julian grew older, Clive began to direct his reading; the father proved, in his son’s words, to be “a most admirable educator.” And of course there was the education to be got from listening to the conversation (which he was permitted to do, and did) of Clive Bell and Roger Fry on matters of aesthetics and philosophy. If at eleven, then, he was officially unschooled, he was not entirely uneducated. But an education at home, unfortunately, in the eyes of the state and of most parents is not judged sufficient, and so Julian was sent to school from the age of eleven on.
Unlike most male children of his class and age (or a year or two younger), he was not sent away to boarding school to be prepared for public school but attended a day grammar school in London. Owen’s, the school chosen by the Bells, was one of the best-known City of London schools, founded in 1613 by Dame Alice Owen and administered since that time by the Brewers’ Company. Technically, Owen’s was a public school, taking boys until they were eighteen; Julian, however, was there for only two years. He entered in September 1919, at the age of eleven and a half; and for a boy for whom childhood had been unusually pleasant, it was his introduction to the darker side of life. He had not been often in the company of other children, except for his brother and sister, and so had little experience or expectation of the cruelty that children en masse are capable of. He did not have even an older brother to warn him, or, more likely, to give him a foretaste of the bullying that is endemic among schoolboys: as the eldest child in his own family he was probably accustomed to being able to subdue Quentin and Angelica. But he seemed to adapt quickly to this aspect of school life. “Owen’s,” he wrote in his memoir, “after a first day of utter horror, and a bad week or so, grew not intolerable.” On that first day he was “mobbed,” the inevitable fate of being a new boy, especially one whose hair was thought too long. But his childhood had not been either so gentle or so sheltered that he had not learned to wrestle and box a little, and as he was heavier and taller than his contemporaries, he soon discovered that he could hold his own. Looking back upon the experience some eighteen years later, he wrote: “I was able to beat off individual bullies, and even, on occasion, intimidate mobs. My natural nervousness, very much increased by isolation and unpopularity, is consequently counteracted by a belief in the efficiency of force and the offensive. When things come to the point of violence I find my nerves under control and my spirits rise.”34 This belief in force—so at variance with the rationality of Bloomsbury as to be a bothersome problem to him thereafter—was learned outside the classroom; inside, in the true business of the classroom, he was less demonstrably affected, perhaps because, as the headmaster of the school in the 1960s tactfully suggested, “the special interests of Bloomsbury were not in line with Owen’s.” Although the school was more progressive than most at that time, it still emphasized “the acquisition of facts above all else.”35 Julian was exposed to them in a wide range of subjects: English, Divinity, Latin, French, Mathematics, History, and Geography. At this point, as well as for the rest of his life—perhaps it was the fault of his earliest education at home—his spelling was terrible and his handwriting pretty lamentable. In her letters to him, his mother, overindulgent as she might have been in general, tried to correct the former, without success. At Owen’s he also received instruction in Drawing, Choral Practice, and Woodworking, as well as in Games. But he did not do well. At the end of his first year, he was ranked eighteenth in a class of twenty-three boys; at the end of his second and final year, he was still eighteenth but in a class of thirty-three. His one official distinction was to win one of the Reading Prizes given to the Junior part of the school—about 150 boys. Julian himself was prepared to acknowledge that Owen’s “taught me what little arithmetic and algebra I know, and football—soccer,” but he thought it “dreary, dingy, and a baddish education,” a verdict that must be considered in the light of the phrase that immediately followed: “at home . . . was a refuge.”
What institution, one wonders, devoted to the education of prepubescent males could possibly compete for fascination, charm, and intellectual stimulation with a household like the Bells’? That Julian needed to be schooled is not in question; but it seems highly unlikely that any school to which he was sent would have pleased him. Owen’s had not, nor would Leighton Park, the public school to which his parents, conforming to the educational pattern of their class, sent him in January 1922. There was no tradition of a particular public school in Bloomsbury, as there was a well-defined tradition of Cambridge, and even within Cambridge, of Trinity and King’s. Clive Bell had gone to Marlborough, but there was no compelling reason for Julian to follow him there. The choice made was Leighton Park School near Reading. On paper it must have looked a particularly appropriate choice, as it was, and is, the leading Quaker public school in England, founded in l890 in succession to the defunct Grove House School, Tottenham. Both schools have their historic interest, for they can be seen to represent, in the earlier instance, the liberalization of English life and, in the later, its increasing class consciousness. Grove House School had been established in 1828 to prepare boys of Quaker families to take advantage of the new University of London (1827), which unlike Oxford and Cambridge was open to Nonconformists. Leighton Park, founded some sixty years later, was clearly intended to be a school for the wealthier Friends, and as such formed a rather late addition to the boom, largely for social reasons, in public school foundations in the second half of the nineteenth century. But the fact of its being Quaker made it somewhat different from other schools: more serious and more “guarded” in its education, more unified in its student body (in the 1920s half the students were Quakers), smaller, less obsessed with sports and games, and in theory at least, more tolerant of the individualist, the nonconformist, who like the Quakers in society itself wishes to go his own way. It was also free from the traditional public school activities of beating and fagging; and one would have had reason to expect, thanks to the Quaker background, a minimum of bloody-mindedness.
There were other, more particular circumstances to predispose the Bells to the school. Although they were not Friends themselves, Vanessa’s aunt Caroline, a sister of Sir Leslie Stephen, had become one, and had long been interested in their educational activities. She had become particularly close to Virginia. Roger Fry (quite irreligious himself) was a member of a famous Quaker family and would have known Leighton Park: junior Frys and Cadburys, both families well known for their association with the manufacture of chocolate, were usually in attendance there. But most important was the attitude of conscientious objection to war which the Quakers and Bloomsburians shared, although perhaps not for the same reasons. In 1914 the headmaster, Charles Evans, had resisted pressure to set up an Officer Training Corps at the school (an omission that Julian rather regretted, given his military interests). He did establish an ambulance training scheme, however; and it should be noted here that twenty-five Old Leightonians lost their lives in the First World War. The Bells had had dealings with Evans, on matters having to do with conscientious objection, during the war, and had found him impressive; he was still headmaster in the 1920s. In short, all the omens were favorable.
But as it happened, 1922 was not a particularly good time to go to Leighton Park. The school’s official historian regards the period 1920 to 1928, the last eight years of Evans’s headmastership, as a period of decline. Evans was an exciting, imaginative man, and the years of moral crisis—particularly for Quakers—during the war had brought out the best in him. But expansion of the school (which became, officially, a public school in 1922) and many of the educational problems that arose after the war needed more of an administrator than Evans was: he tended to let the affairs, and particularly the discipline, of the school get slightly out of hand. At some schools, Eton being a notable example, the years immediately after the First World War were marked by a kind of radicalism on the part of the boys, a demand for greater liberalization and less stodginess. At Leighton Park too the boys were demanding more power and influence than they had previously had, but there the situation took a rather odd turn: the boys appear to have been less liberal than the masters, more philistine and sports-minded, more interested in chaos and rags than intellectual activity. This was particularly true in Grove House (named after the predecessor school), the perennial winner in school athletics, where the tone was aggressively hearty. Unfortunately, it happened to be the house to which Julian was sent.
He came to the school late in the academic year—a bad beginning. Rather than entering in the Michaelmas term of 1921, he was allowed to spend the time, undoubtedly much more enjoyable, with his family at St. Tropez; on his return to England he fell ill with influenza, so he did not enter Leighton Park until January 1922 in mid-Lent term. On the day after Julian left Charleston, Quentin, age nine, reported in the New Bulletin: “Yesterday Julian departed for Layton Park to the great grief of the household. ‘The New Bulletin’ has suffered greatly by his absence since he is the joint editor of ‘The New Bulletin’ and founded The ‘Charleston Bulletin’ this household will never forget the invaluable services he rendered to the anti kitcheners army during the last ware when he held the office of Generall in cheif.” On practically his first day there, Julian wrote home, “I am quite happy but things are very odd and strange.”36
His late arrival put him at an obvious disadvantage: the other new boys would have had a chance to settle in during the first term, and would gang up on him as a logical victim. Then, as part of his recuperation from influenza, he was not supposed to play games or take cold baths—the sine qua non of a public school—and so gained immediately, or felt he had gained, a reputation for dirt and weakness. Then, having been placed in a form too high for him, he did badly even in his studies. But “the chief memory I have of the school is of bullying by the mob.”
Although I sometimes managed to hit back [he wrote in his “Notes for a Memoir”] I was pretty permanently terrorised and cowed. I lived, often for months on end, in a state of misery and nervous tension. It was not only the pure physical suffering: there were also the horrors of expectation and insecurity. I defended myself to some extent by becoming expert in mob psychology and distracting attention with alternative acts of naughtiness or with other victims. I suppose there were periods of peace, but never of much happiness, though when Q. came [in 1924] we could, in summer, escape on bicycles butterfly-collecting. But up to the very last I was always nervous and always subject to attack.37
That this should be his “chief memory,” and that he should record it so vividly and with such urgency fifteen years later, is highly suggestive. But looked at objectively, the four and a half years that he spent at Leighton Park were not quite as lamentable as one might infer from this fragment of autobiography, nor were his responses during those years as bleakly despairing as he remembered them to have been. In fact, he could hold his own, not only in rugby but also in rags, pranks, and “alternative acts of naughtiness,” to which he may have resorted as a way of “distracting attention” from himself, but which he also enjoyed for their own sake. “When things come to the point of violence I find my nerves under control and my spirits rise.” He could be a bully himself and participated in the rather anti-Semitic rags against one poor student, Stern, “the German Jew,” who as Julian wrote to his mother, “was hanged from the beam of the Junior dormitory with the fire-rope. Unfortunately he did not appreciate it properly.”38 He may, as he thought, have been bullied “to the very last,” but there is reason to suspect the worst was over long before then. J. Duncan Wood, who came to Leighton Park two years after Julian, and looked up to him as an older boy, envied him his bulk: “For one thing it protected him against attack.” His spirits seem often to have been exhilarated. One evening he conducted a raid on School House (one of the two other boarding houses), passing through the dormitories, overturning beds and creating chaos, then leading his followers down the housemaster’s private stairs and out by the front door before there was any possibility of reply. “The whole affair, which cannot have lasted more than ten minutes, was a brilliant piece of strategy and caused School House considerable loss of face.”39
But for all his skill at ragging, and in spite of the advantage of his large size, he did not intend to conform to the stereotype of the Grove House “tough.” In his studies, in his thinking, even in his pranks, he was determined to go his own way, to be markedly individual, even idiosyncratic. This, though he did not say so, may have been a source of unhappiness, for as the official historian points out, “Julian Bell was at school at the wrong time . . . a time when freedom for the unusual boy hardly existed.”40 Yet he managed to survive, more or less on his own terms, and he did not do badly. By December 1923, he was a member of the Junior Literary Historical and Archaeological Society, one of the leading clubs in the school. He attempted, without success, to have Lytton come to the school to give a talk to the Society. Quentin did persuade their mother to accept an invitation from the headmaster to speak to the school, probably in 1925; apparently it was the only lecture she ever gave. Quentin was ill in bed and missed it; Julian was still at the school and presumably heard it, but there is no record of his reaction. Vanessa presented herself as an “idiot and a revolutionary.” She emphasized the importance of form and color in art and that it should be parallel to the point of getting beneath the surface her sister had made in her essay, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” of the previous year.41
Doubtless, Julian—as he was never afraid of discussion, indeed reveled in it—participated fully in meetings dedicated to topics about which he must have heard a great deal at home. He became a member of the Junior Debating Society his first spring at the school. He had proposed the resolution that India should cease to be part of the Empire. “We lost by 8 to 24 but I made several friends owing to this debate.”42 There were four meetings of the Debating Society, for example, on the general topic of “Civilization,” two given to the question “What Is Wrong with Civilization?,” one to “Utopia,” and one to a subject that was to be of much greater interest to Julian towards the end of his life: plans and ideas for a model town. He was house librarian. He participated in theatricals. In 1924 he went to a local meeting of the Independent Labour Party to hear Sidney Webb speak: “I was rather disappointed, having hoped that they would be much more riotous and would sing the ‘Red Flag.’ Still, it was a very good speech, and Mr Webb was most amusing, staring at the ceiling while the choir sang hymns and looking rather like a goat.”43 His greatest accomplishment, which he considered “the best part of my education,” came in 1925 when he won Honourable Mention (actually the second prize) in the J. B. Hodgkin Competition in public speaking. Speeches were delivered to an audience of boys and parents, and heckling was encouraged; this meant that to be successful, one needed not only a talent for declamation but a good deal of poise (nerve) and skill in repartee. In Julian’s first try in the competition—not a success—his subject was “Socialism,” and he declared for a “bloody revolution.” (Shame!) But he triumphed with a speech extolling the virtues of alcoholic liquor. (Hear hear!) This was his reply to a series of temperance talks to which the students had been exposed at regular intervals throughout the term preceding the competition. He secured his honorable mention, the Leightonian felt, for his mock-heroic conclusion drawn from Cromwell, which he addressed directly to the temperance fanatics: “In the words of a great brewer, ‘I beseech you in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken.’ ” In July 1926, when he played Sneer in Sheridan’s The Critic, he received a slightly mixed notice from the Leightonian: “The perfection of the performance was marred by a kind of laziness. His sarcasm was too amiably delivered . . . he deserved praise for his clear and natural elocution.”
On the whole, this is not an uncommon public school history—a diversity of extracurricular activity, a fair performance in the classroom—yet Julian at Leighton Park was truly uncommon, out of the ordinary, a rare bird: a self-declared intellectual with a few intimates (“fellow dims”) to whom he taught the war game; very strong likes and dislikes vehemently expressed; holding forth on Postimpressionist theories; writing essays on Wordsworth and the English naturalists, and the Art of War; reading Shaw, Wells, Belloc, Chesterton, Galsworthy, Kipling, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica; and after the general election of 1922, converting to socialism. When he was in his last year, he was one of four speakers at a public occasion reported in the Reading Observer. He spoke on the present industrial system, announcing that he was “an out and out Socialist. He was nervous and unconvincing and his subject was clearly too difficult for him. There was a good deal of heckling and much laughter. . . . ‘I am out to destroy the industrial system and not to put another one in its place.’ This took away the breath of the audience.”44 In many ways, he was a typical, bright, rather “bolshie” British public school boy, but one can already see many of his interests—as in power and violence, though in the service of some sort of progressive politics.
He was uncommon enough to be remembered. Writing of him more than thirty-five years after he had gone from Leighton Park School, his French master, T. C. Elliott, recalled him as
Very untidy, careless of his appearance, interested in ideas in a much more evident way than his schoolfellows. I think he did not scruple to indicate that they were not quite up to his level. By this I don’t mean that he was a snob, but the Bloomsbury atmosphere was not really the best preparation for the rough & tumble of a boarding school. He certainly came in for a good deal of teasing. He defended himself with a caustic, but not unkindly tongue, and I should think he was not on the whole very happy. I don’t think he found many kindred spirits among boys or Staff.45
But however much Julian disliked his school, and however much his masters there were aware of it, the truth of the matter, as Elliott suggests, is that he was unprepared for any public school, that somewhat primitive form of life which the English upper-middle and upper classes seem to think essential for their sons. He wrote home that he was counting the days until term was over. Julian himself, in the same memoir in which he wrote of being “pretty permanently terrorised and cowed,” admitted that “Leighton Park . . . probably was no worse than most schools,” although he regretted not having gone to College at Eton, as many of his friends at Cambridge had done. Such a rigorous mental training, had he been qualified for it, might have served him better. “The actual education was poor tho’ I got a smattering of Latin, a taste of sciences from chemistry, and kept my French.” Nevertheless, it prepared him for university. He passed his exams at Leighton Park, received a distinction in history, and did well enough that he was excused from the so-called “previous,” the preliminary examination at Cambridge. Julian came from so unusual a home that one feels safe in saying no public school would have been satisfac-tory—unless he had been in revolt against the freedom, unconventionality, and seductive atmosphere of his home environment and longed to become a businessman, a barrister, a colonial administrator, a civil servant—any of the professions for which the public schools serve as a first rung.
In fact, Julian loved his home life with almost an unhealthy adoration. Given that, no school could provide anything to equal the intellectual and artistic stimulation, the sheer pleasure, of continual discussions, serious and frivolous, with Clive and Vanessa Bell, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and David Garnett. In the alternations between Charleston (and Gordon Square) and Leighton Park, the advantage would always be with the former. Home, for so many budding intellectuals the crucial battlefield of adolescence, for Julian was the great good place, the source of all those ideas that had, as John Lehmann says, “the authority of graven tablets of the law: the tablets of Bloomsbury.”46 There is a measure of irony, then, that he should have been thought more unusual, unpredictable, uncommon, at school than at home, for it seems not to have occurred to the elders of Bloomsbury, themselves usually so alert in such matters, that his, conceivably, was the sensibility of an artist; that he might, one way or another, prove to be an artist himself. Not that he gave evidence of precocity in these respects: “It must have been in my early years at L.P.S. that I dropped my own efforts as a painter encouraged of course by family.” And his contributions to the New Bulletin were exuberant and charming but in themselves do not count as “first flights.” (From a high-handed, affectionate parody of Mrs. Woolf’s manner: “But then things were like that, she thought. The children had just run upstairs with the scuffle of a pack of hounds, and her freed mind floated gently, like a goldfish basking in the autumn sunshine, amid the pale, starlike blooms of the waterlilies. The new refrigerator would cost thirty pounds, she thought.”) So there was no evident reason to anticipate a burst of creative activity. Yet it seems odd that the possibility should not even have been entertained.
On Saturday, August 2, 1924, at Monk’s House, Virginia Woolf, while she was in the midst of writing Mrs Dalloway, noted in her diary:
Julian has just been & gone, a tall young man who, inveterately believing myself to be young as I do, seems to me like a younger brother: anyhow we sit and chatter, as easily as can be. It’s all so much the same—his school continues Thoby’s school. He tells me about boys & masters as Thoby used to. It interests me just in the same way. He’s a sensitive, very quick witted, rather combative boy; full of Wells, & discoveries, & the future of the world. And, being of my own blood, easily understood—going to be very tall, and go to the Bar, I daresay.47
Julian was not yet eighteen when he left Leighton Park, and it was decided that he should have another year of preparation before going off to the University. Clive had an ideal of making his son a man of the world, a feat plainly outside the scope of any English public school. A season in Paris was indicated: where better to achieve the result? As a Francophile and man of the world himself, Clive was frequently in Paris, spoke the language perfectly, and had a large number of friends in French literary and artistic circles. Among them was a nephew of the painter Renoir, who was teaching at one of the great lycées of Paris, Louis le Grand. Renoir recommended that Julian be sent to his colleague Pinault, who would take one or two young men each year for intensive study. It seemed an ideal solution: accordingly, from the autumn of 1926 until the summer of 1927 he was in Paris, living with the Pinaults in their flat at 96 Boulevard Port Royal (at the corner of Boulevard Montparnasse). It was an interesting place to be, a perfectly respectable boulevard on the Left Bank, near the Observatory and above the Luxembourg Gardens. At the same time, it was close to the Latin Quarter, ideally situated for Julian to venture, experimentally, into la vie de Bohème if he had so wished—but he did not, or did not dare; it came to the same thing. Although he went to the Sorbonne as a student, he took no exams, “followed lectures, steadily less attentively, and presently spent much time walking the streets.” Apart from this, he did not seem to participate much in Parisian life, nor, according to his own account, did he acquire the social graces that his father expected him to learn in Paris. That was not his style, then or afterwards. He was in many ways a casual country child, and never totally acquired a city polish. His aunt testifies to this: “He was entirely unself conscious: I doubt if he ever looked in the glass, or thought a moment about his clothes, or his appearance. Nessa used to mend his breeches. He was always patched, or in need of patching.”48
What he enjoyed most in Paris were his discussions and arguments with Pinault (“one of the nicest human beings I ever knew”), from whom he learned a considerable amount about French literature, art, and politics. He had read Corneille, Racine, and Molière; now, along with much else, he added two particular favorites of Pinault’s: Voltaire, who destroyed whatever was left of the religiosity of “downstairs” or Leighton Park, and Anatole France. Pinault was a lively, genial, and very charming radical of the old French school. A countryman come to the capital and a onetime German teacher, he was now secretary of Louis le Grand but still had time to demonstrate in Left-wing causes and vent his antagonism to the Church in the classic tradition of French anticlerical republicanism. Pinault “called himself a communist,” but this seems to have been more a radical stance than an actuality: “there was nothing of the modern party line about him.” He had a fondness for the painters Delacroix and Courbet and introduced their work in the Louvre to Julian, who hitherto had only looked at the Impressionists in the Luxembourg. And Pinault reinforced Julian’s theoretical socialism, adding to it a more romantic continental idea of revolution than he might have acquired at home in England.
At the same time, Julian was reading a great deal on his own—Rimbaud, Heredia, Mallarmé—“generally discovering Parnassians and symbolists and moderns.” He made “first efforts at Proust and Gide.” He “developed a passion for Giraudoux.” Indeed, his reading among the modern French appears much more adventurous and advanced than anything he had thus far done in English. There, except for the works of Bloomsbury, he had not yet gone beyond the Edwardians. But the crucial influence of that year’s reading in Paris was Maupassant, who “provided to a large extent,” Julian wrote, “an introduction to ‘life’—I had no experience at first hand. But I became familiar with, and instinctively accepted, a Latin-sensual view of amour which, though I have modified it, I think I still keep in essentials, and have found works.” That, of course, was written a decade later, when theory had been translated into practice. In Paris, as at Charleston, he was still leading a sheltered existence in which anything and everything could be read about and thought about and talked about (those splendid discussions!), but none of the economic realities (he wanted his mother to check with Keynes about what was likely to happen to the franc) or the sexual realities of the world were actually experienced. “Experience” apart, however, it was a time of great intellectual value, in reading and ideas, and left Julian with a command of bad French, which he spoke with great gusto. Matured and enriched, he rejoined his family in the summer; Renoir’s recommendation had been well given.
In one respect had Paris fallen short of expectation: even after his prolonged exposure to it, Julian had not been transformed into the man of the world his father would have liked him to be, a man of his own style, so to speak. But it should be emphasized that neither then nor later did Julian wish to be so transformed. There was a duality in Clive that found a parallel in the ambivalence of Julian’s feelings towards him. On the one hand, worldliness and suavity of Clive’s sort did not seem to Julian particularly admirable or a model to emulate. On the other hand, Clive in his aspect of country squire greatly attracted him. It was there, in the natural world of birds and dogs, fields, woods, streams, and the changing seasons, and in the masculine pursuits of the countryside, shooting, fishing, beagling—all very plain and foursquare—that father and son were closest to each other in spirit. And it was this world that Julian would evoke in his earliest poetry.
In Paris he became a poet.
For all the intellectual excitement and stimulation, the pleasures of discussion and argument with “old Pinault,” he was unhappy in Paris and tired of the city—despite his time in London, he felt it was his “first experience of a large town”—and, pining for the country, he reacted to the capital of civilization to which his father had sent him in a way that he characterized as “fiercely naturalist.” In his memoir, written ten years later when the poetic impulse had spent itself (or been thwarted), he gave only a sentence to the event, one of the most significant of his life in making him a poet, concluding, “this unhappiness, sending me to watch all the gulls and sparrows of Paris, sent me also to writing my first poems: pure nature descriptions.”49 Perhaps it also helped that he was able to see lots of birds while joining his family in Cassis for two weeks in April.
Does unhappiness, absence from a landscape passionately loved, force a poet into being? Before Julian comes to Paris, there is no mention of poetry—no serious attempts at writing it, not even of reading it. Yet now, in an almost unpremeditated way, he discovers that he is a poet—interestingly enough, something Bloomsbury had not produced before. (T. S. Eliot was a friend of the Bells—Clive admired him most among modern poets—and a close friend also of Virginia and Leonard Woolf who published The Waste Land at the Hogarth Press; but he came into their lives, or they into his, at the end of the war, when he was already a “formed” poet. Eliot’s connections and affiliations with Bloomsbury were social and literary, rather than spiritual and philosophical, and it would be misleading, even by proximity, to describe him as a Bloomsbury poet.) These first poems of Julian’s, his “nature descriptions,” are not at all the usual juvenilia of the period, mere Georgian echoes. Nor is the nature he describes in them what he observed in Paris: the flowering parterres and espaliered hedges of the Luxembourg Gardens; the artful wilderness of the Bois. In spite of the titles he affixed to these poems, “Vendémiaire,” “Brumaire,” “Frimaire,” “Pluviose” (the names of months in the French revolutionary calendar), they are descriptions, as exact and truthful, as “fiercely naturalist” as he could make them, of the countryside he knew best and vividly evoked in absence: the Sussex Downs, the landscapes of southeast England. With some trepidation he sent the poems to his mother. “I trust to you to show them to no-one on any account, as I do not want to be laughed at over them.”50
He recalled how in winter, “wreathing white misty fogs” from off the sea drift across the land, hiding “the pale sun’s sky,” and how
On moonless nights, when the whole sky is dark,
There comes a sudden rush of intense black,
Then, terrified, the sheep
Break hurdles and escape.
And from the air comes the full cry of hounds,
Mixed with the rushing noise of a high wind,
As, from the coast, the geese
Sweep inland, clamourous.
—“Brumaire”
In “Frimaire,” describing a pheasant shoot in autumn, there is a deliberate absence of emotion, but what the eye sees and the ear hears are set down with impressive conviction.
. . . Far-heard the tapping, distant and gentle,
Through the wet, quiet wood, of
The beaters’ sticks. A throbbing, whirring rustle,
A pheasant high above.
Grey timid rabbits come forward, hop along,
The beaters’ line draws in.
Sudden tumult of pheasants rising strong.
The thudding guns begin.
Pale, ghostly woodcock, pointed wings wandering
Through the trees, in and out.
Wild sudden excitement, beaters calling
And long, random-wild shot.
And the pheasants hit in their rocket flight
Come awkwardly tumbling down.
Blue-white, bead-green and black on gold-bronze bright,
Feminine mottled brown.
John Lehmann, who has written with great sensitivity of Julian and his poetry (they were to become friends and fellow-poets at Cambridge) in his volume of autobiography, The Whispering Gallery, sees in these early poems “an attempt to let the countryside, the moods of wind and weather and life outside the cultivated human pale, speak for themselves without any interference of the poet’s moralizing thoughts.”51 The result, as the quotations we have given bear out, was a highly original and authentic poetry, too quiet-voiced and unassertive ever to call much attention to itself, and closer in its affinities to painting than to other nature poetry. That image in “Frimaire”—“Pale, ghostly woodcock, pointed wings wandering / Through the trees, in and out”—reads like a transmutation into words of a detail from a Chinese painting. And the final stanza’s determination to see things exactly as they are, its meticulous notations of color (“Blue-white, bead-green . . . black on gold-bronze”), call to mind similar notations, a comparable purity of vision, in passages within the journal of Delacroix and the letters of van Gogh.
One does not wish to make excessive claims for this poetry, although it is of a sort easier to underrate than to overpraise. The fact is indisputable: during his year in Paris, and his first two years in Cambridge, Julian was truly a poet. Thereafter he was a poet intermittently, at widening intervals, until, towards the end of his life, he wrote very few poems. Among the older generation of Bloomsbury only David Garnett appears to have recognized this quality: “Julian was first of all a poet,” he wrote in 1938, “hard thinking never made him a thinker; but his poems are exact, clear, and perfectly expressive. In his poetry he has escaped from all his turmoil. He is the poet I like best of his generation.”52 There were, also, in his poetry close affinities with his mother’s paintings and those of Duncan Grant’s. And as we shall see, Virginia had mixed feelings about his poetry. Although to a degree she wished to be supportive, she was also, as she was self-aware, unable to suppress a sense of rivalry. But that was in the future.