JULIAN IN THE EARLY 1930s: a charming, intelligent, and discontented young man. He still kept a good deal of the boyish quality that made David Garnett regard him as something of a puppy—high spirited, alert, and affectionate—and he had never got away from the almost compulsive untidiness of his childhood: his clothes were always in need of repair; he could rarely be bothered to comb his hair, or button his collar or shirt buttons. In scale, in goldenness of aspect, he suggested a disheveled Greek god, Charles Mauron thought, with his generous laughter, large bright eyes, and great height.1
Yet even a Greek god from the Olympus of Bloomsbury must do something with his time; in fact, Julian meant to do a great deal, perhaps too much in too many directions, although his only formal commitment in these years was to the University and the academic community. He had achieved a respectable result in the Tripos, and he was judged worthy of a research studentship by King’s. In the autumn of 1930 he returned to Cambridge. As a research student he would register with the English faculty as a possible doctoral candidate; more importantly, he would be at work on a dissertation which he hoped would lead to his appointment as a Fellow of his College. In July, Lehmann had written: “Hooray for the studentship; I felt sure you would get it. Have you settled anything about a house? A fine lonely spot to write masterpieces in, during the intervals of Pope.”2 His expectation of creative and scholarly activity was shared by Julian: one could easily do both, Pope and poetry. Also, if one wanted, politics and criticism.
Thus, he began with a commitment to the academic community that was hedged about with unstated restrictions and ironies. Keynes was in favor of his securing a Fellowship. Even though Keynes himself was both a man of the world and an academic, there was really no strong Bloomsbury tradition of formal scholarship to urge Julian forward. Most of Bloomsbury’s own sporadic forays into the groves of academe had not been notable. Strachey had tried to obtain a Fellowship at Trinity (with a dissertation on Warren Hastings) and had failed. Roger Fry had been put up for the Slade Professorship of Fine Arts at both Oxford and Cambridge, but it was not until 1933, the year before his death, that he finally became Slade Professor at Cambridge. Of course there was the extraordinary example of Keynes, who managed to be equally at home in Cambridge and the world beyond, but even as he was himself regarded with the very faintest condescension by the rest of Bloomsbury, so he treated most of his academic brethren with a certain sense of distance, particularly as they were likely to act upon his stock market tips with lamentable timing. It followed, then, that if Julian were to become any sort of academic, it would have to be in a special hybrid category—no shades of the combination room about that golden lad—with strong connections to literary and political London, and the most flexible commitment to the disciplines of formal scholarship. (The category is not unfamiliar among the dons of Oxford and Cambridge—especially the former—who often move out and up into the world after having established a place in the University; it is one recognized road to eminence.) At the end of his scholarly endeavors, when perhaps he felt more bitter about it than when he began, Julian gave vent to a diatribe against the method of the academy, although it is hard to believe that he had not held the same views from the first:
There are few human activities more painful to contemplate than scholarship. A parody of the scientific method in its parade of exactitude and vigour, scholarship has neither the excitement nor the justification of scientific research. The additions to human knowledge made by those who meticulously collate, annotate, and demolish their predecessors, are seldom of the slightest importance or interest to anyone. And when the scholars turn from the works of the unreadable obscure . . . to attempt the works of greater writers, the result of their labours is too often a dense sediment of footnotes encumbering the text and a bored suspicion in the reader: the poets are concealed from us by crusty, insensitive and priggish old gentlemen.3
He came back to Cambridge in high spirits. “Pope fascinates and terrifies,” he wrote to Lehmann. “I must read so much, yet there does seem a real chance of doing something and producing some real criticism.”4 He settled down in a version of “a fine lonely spot to write masterpieces in”: a small and pleasant cottage, Martin’s Farm, in Elsworth, a little village about ten miles from the University towards Huntingdon, in sparse, green, slightly rolling country. He had the advantage of being near enough to Cambridge to participate as much as he might like in the literary controversies he had become fond of, to continue to attend meetings of the Apostles, take some part in national political questions as they were felt at the University, and be a rather reluctant treasurer of the Heretics, the lively Cambridge organization for somewhat subversive talks—yet he was still far enough away to be able to work without distraction for days at a time, and to live in close touch with the country and natural life that meant so much to him.5 Elsworth also had the advantage of being comparatively close to the house of his good friend David Garnett, at Hilton, near Huntingdon. Garnett was in a way almost a bridge figure for Bloomsbury, younger than Julian’s mother and aunt, yet older than Julian himself. “He liked to come round,” Garnett recalls, “and we would rehearse, always with fresh appreciation, some of the comic saga of the past”—that is, “the old anecdotes recording the foibles of his family and their friends.” And at Elsworth he could be with Helen in perhaps the most satisfying period of their relationship, when he still set the terms and she appeared to accept them.
It was an existence very much to his liking: the cottage and Cambridge, and driving recklessly back and forth between them. (Garnett is only one of many who remember him as “rash and dangerous driving a car.” He adds, “he had either no sense of fear or else, as I suspect, he liked the sensation, but he was slapdash and easily flustered as well as quick and always quite sure every other driver on the road was in the wrong.”6) He was at the splendid, untested time of youth, before experience bears down, just having finished his formal education, and therefore believing, since no one was telling him what to do, that he could do everything. He reveled in possibility. Even after a year of work, his enthusiasm was uncurbed. To Lehmann, in October 1931 (shortly before the inception of New Signatures), he wrote: “My plans, at present, besides Pope, who sticks, include translating one play each of Corneille, Racine, Moliere and Marivaux, a play to finish, another [play], a novel to write, a set of essays, and a second book of poems of which I seem to have the essentials. Enough for a year or two anyway.”7
His most serious endeavor was working on the text that he hoped would secure him a Fellowship at King’s. What exactly, as a member of Bloomsbury might say, Julian was doing about Pope (“who sticks”) is unclear. He was firmly opposed, as we have seen, to academic scholarship of the collating, annotating, and footnoting sort; at the same time, he had great faith in his own critical judgment—very much in the English tradition of the golden amateur—and it appears that this, “some real criticism,” is what he intended rather than a historical or biographical study. He took issue (in a review published in the New Statesman and Nation in December 1934) with two celebrated views of Pope put forth in the 1920s: “Miss Sitwell’s view of Pope as a romantic over-sensitive and invalid member of the Sitwell family, has always been most dubious. Strachey’s ‘fiendishly clever and spiteful monkey,’ though more plausible, was based on the Victorian view of the facts of Pope’s life.” Yet ultimately, he supported Strachey’s view of Pope. His own interest was centered on the work itself. As he wrote to John Lehmann in an undated letter, “it has the qualities of great poetry . . . produced not by a genius for taking infinite pains—only charlatans and bores take infinite pains—but by a tried and practised genius.”8 In another letter to Lehmann he wrote, “Lytton’s description of Pope always seems to me far and away the best—an appearance of formality on top of the most violent emotions.”9
Part of Julian’s dilemma, one feels, was his unwillingness to take infinite pains, as if somehow they would prove him a bore. He wanted to do everything, and in the academic line that included a critical study of Pope, at which he worked hard through the early 1930s; but he was constantly being distracted from it by other things that he wanted to do, and he was never able to give it the single-minded concentration that was necessary to bring it to a successful conclusion. As he wrote to Lettice Ramsey, his second great love (of whom more later), in February 1932, “I see I shall soon have to be pulling myself together about old Pope—except that I seem to be almost equally good at most of the things I’m interested in—which makes it difficult to stick to any one of them.”10 A month later he wrote: “I’ve turned out my old work on Pope—I must have several bushels of paper and started with squared paper and a dictionary, which seems a silly—and slow—way of analyzing poetry. Still, it’s quite fun.” But what had plagued him from the inception of the project continued to do so. It was fun to invent interpretations for the poems, to work out explications de texte, and have brilliant ideas and theories (as though one were at a meeting of the Apostles), but it was boring (as though one were a charlatan) to set them all down on paper, to find out whether other people had anticipated one’s discoveries, and to do historical research; that is, all the journeyman scholarship that he deplored. “The trouble,” he confessed to Lettice in that spring—the Pope period—“now seems to be that I’m much too ingenious at thinking of explanations, and too lazy to work out strict tests of them.” Yet his interest did not dwindle: six months later he was writing, “There’s such a lot to say about every single line of it.” More and more the project began to take shape in his mind as an edition of the poetry, although obviously that would not secure him a Fellowship at his College. Again one is not certain of what exactly he intended: presumably not a variorum for scholars but perhaps a faithful text, with commentary, for lovers of poetry. In 1934 there was some talk of sending a text, presumably his critical work, to Chatto & Windus, who having published his poems, held an option on his next book. When it came to the point, however, he decided more work must be done, and nothing came into print (except for several book reviews) about Pope from this interest, really an obsession, of his in the 1930s. He did, nevertheless, finish an edition of Pope’s poems consisting of 680 pages of text, 15 of general commentary and 90 of notes on the poems. The Nonesuch Press was to publish this in a series of British poets announced for 1934. Julian protested about what he considered a meager advance of £65 and managed to have it increased to £75, having remarked in the discussion of terms to the head of the press, Francis Meynell: “I shall wait to reply to your opening sentence until I can find something more effective in the way of an insult. What a pity you’re not dealing direct with Pope.” It was tactless of him to be difficult, as David Garnett was a very close friend of Meynell’s, a partner in the press, and no doubt had been instrumental in arranging the publication. The increased check, however, was sent to him when he was in China in 1937, but the book was held up at this point because of the complications of George Macy and the Limited Editions Club of New York acquiring the press. It was reannounced for publication as late as 1949; fourteen poets were published in the series but sadly never Julian’s edition of Pope.11
Thus, the work on Pope, which had been begun as a dissertation topic, became eventually an important, though quite inconclusive, intellectual pursuit. The dissertation itself, which he submitted at the end of 1931, was based on his preliminary researches, and it was not a success; that is, it did not result in his being made a Fellow of King’s. Lehmann wrote to console him:
I hope [not getting the Fellowship] wasn’t a big disappointment: as far as I’d been able to gather from what you’d said, you hadn’t expected it this year at all—I hope this was true. . . . I never thought a don’s life was the life for you, you’re far too interested in what’s going on, and I don’t think it’s going to give you wide enough scope. . . . I’ve felt sometimes since leaving Cambridge that one ought to get half a world away from it—physically and spiritually—for a while, unless one’s one of those rare people who are simply made for dondom. But I see the working for it gives one a raison d’etre—a line that’s thinly held to keep the enemy quiet while the main force concentrates elsewhere.12
His mother wrote him a similarly consoling letter. Although on the part of both Lehmann and herself it was an obvious point to say that it wasn’t the life for him, there was also a fair amount of truth in that appraisal. “I am afraid from the Times that you haven’t got your fellowship & that it will be a disappointment to you. Darling, I am so sorry—but don’t be depressed. I cannot, whatever happens, think you are altogether meant to be a don—Your interests are too wide & I feel that some day you may be glad not to be have been temporarily buried in Cambridge, however attractive the prospect of the moment.”13
But Julian was determined to make another try. A Fellowship at King’s would give him a firm base in the community and an agreeable life while he considered whether to enter into an academic career. The work on Pope remained his prime interest—he was not in the least disheartened by the unfavorable response to his dissertation, and in time came to agree with it: “Re reading my 18 months old dissertation gives me the cold blush all over my sunburn—what idiotic things I did say and think, to be sure.”14 But meanwhile it was necessary to find another topic, and he decided he would do something not in literature, his avowed subject, but along a philosophical line. It was a choice consistent with his ideal of the eighteenth-century gentleman, accomplished in everything, who would do nothing for gain and was untouched by the professionalism of the marketplace. Really, he had only to decide on a philosophical line—ethics, aesthetics, the psychology of creativity—and proceed. The year before, he had considered submitting to the English Board (for the doctorate) a topic on Wittgenstein. But George Rylands had dissuaded him, pointing out that to offer such a topic to the English faculty would be much the same as sending Swinburne’s Dolores to Queen Victoria as a birthday ode.15 So that was abandoned, and he eventually gave up the whole idea, if he had ever entertained it seriously, of working for an advanced degree. What mattered was to win a Fellowship, and for that purpose a dissertation of one or two hundred pages might do. Here he allowed himself to be misled by Apostolic practice. It was an occupational hazard of the Society that one might come to believe that any problem could be dealt with without too much difficulty and with no special qualification beyond the fact of being an Apostle: merely apply the clarity and rationality which a member had by definition—why else was he elected?—and the result was bound to be good. Julian loved the Society; he continued to regard it as the pinnacle of Cambridge intellectualism, and he came in from Elsworth for its Saturday-night gatherings. Over the past three years he had delivered many papers on philosophical themes, and he had had the benefit of rich, full discussion. The thought was inevitable, and irresistible: why should he not take some of his old papers and rework them into a dissertation, or at least make use of some of the ideas that had inspired them? He realized that the competition for the Fellowship would be intense, but he seemed unwilling to acknowledge that more scholarly attainments might weigh with the electors of the College. No doubt there was a strong degree of wishful thinking: the Fellowship more and more appeared as an answer to the question of what he was to do. He needed it; therefore he must have it. He did not intend to commit himself permanently to the academic life, of course, but it would allow him time to discover some viable alternative. The range of possibilities was narrowing. The publication of New Signatures had not materially altered his somewhat equivocal position as a poet. It had brought Auden and Spender conspicuously to the front of a movement to which Julian only tenuously belonged: he was, in the phrase of a later critic, “in but not of.”16 So, in the circumstances, the idea of the Fellowship was more attractive than it might otherwise have been. But he was determined to win it on his own terms, which in effect was to lose it on theirs.
Much of his energies for the next year and a half were given to the new dissertation. His working title was “The Good and All That,” and it disguised a long essay dedicated to the sort of problems the Apostles haggled about over their anchovy paste and toast. It was also influenced by his increasing involvement, appropriate as the 1930s developed, with political questions. When he finished writing in the autumn of 1933, he began to think of it not only as a dissertation to win him a Fellowship but also as a book. To Lettice he wrote, “I’ve decided to send in ‘The Good’ as a dissertation—as it may shock a few of the older electors—and I shall have it finished and typed by Christmas, and ready to try on publishers.” Early the next year it was in the hands of the College’s electors.
The first pages of a carbon of the dissertation to be found in Julian’s papers at King’s gives the flavor of the enterprise (it may be a version of the dissertation he prepared to be submitted to a publisher):
GOOD AND ALL THAT
An essay on a provisional theory of ethics
By JULIAN BELL
An essay submitted as a dissertation to the Fellowship Electors of King’s College, Cambridge, and originally called “Some general considerations on ethical theory, with their application to aesthetics and politics.”
Dedicated to Alister Watson to whom in reality I owe everything
Chapters: An Apology, Metaphysics, Right and Wrong, Naturalism, Pleasant, Desired and Balanced Good and Bad, A Working Hypothesis, Choice: A Digression Rational Behaviour, Aesthetics, Politics, A Weltanschaung
Out of deference to the feelings of the electors, Julian had substituted for “The Good and All That” the more decorous title “Some general considerations on ethical theory, with their application to aesthetics and politics.” But the title was almost the only conventionally academic aspect of the dissertation. Julian did not pretend to be a professional or trained philosopher. He operated on the assumption that the electors would prefer to see the quality of mind rather than a display of expertise. He was wrong. He must have known that the dissertation, and the Fellowship it might win, were designed to further scholarly activity, as well as to provide a new member of the College staff. But of course he had no patience with the appearance of scholarship, and declared in his prefatory note: “I have made use of no authorities beyond those mentioned in the text: I have stolen ideas wherever I came across them, usually in conversation, and used them without acknowledgement, since I cannot trace their authors. I am writing first and foremost for those amateurs of philosophy who like myself are more concerned with practice than with refinements of theory. I hope what I have said is true: I am fairly sure it is useful.” Again, as though to make certain that there shall be no doubt of his academic disqualification, he reiterates his amateur status: “I am not a professional philosopher. . . . My claim to be, interested in the theory of ethics is that, in a small way, I am a practising poet and politician. As such, I am commonly confronted with ridiculous arguments based on ethical assertions.” Given the vigor and forthrightness of his style, one might wish that Julian had attempted a new Candide, or a new Gulliver. As he himself was quick to declare, he hadn’t the qualification to write a systematic critique; hence, the somewhat disorganized, arbitrary, and improvisational character of much of the dissertation. His aim is to distinguish between ideas of Good and Bad (or in fact, good and bad ideas) in Art and Life, Politics, Religion, War, Peace—the spectrum of human behavior. In the working out, he allowed himself the pleasure of expounding, in a very lively style, many of his favorite prejudices; Christianity, for example: “Most of the human misery not due to capitalism is due to Christianity, either directly, or through the religious muddle about means and ends. The Christian religion, or the traces of it that remain in the minds of politicians, old gentlemen and the great British public, holds that certain specific actions—for instance, making love to a married woman, or the direct removal of coal from a pit to a miner’s fireplace—are sins.” Yet for all the entertaining hodgepodge of the whole, a dominant theme does emerge. More perhaps than he himself realized, Julian was in full revolt against his Bloomsbury philosophical background and its static conception “of states of mind” as values in themselves, without regard to the effects, or actions, or consequences that might ensue from them. He thought of himself as modernizing a deeply cherished set of values; in fact, he was calling them into question.
In a chapter devoted largely to the ideas of G. E. Moore, he wrote:
Professor Moore is, in a sense, my spiritual grandparent, though I fear he might question my legitimacy. For I was born into, and grew up in a world very largely of his making, the world of “Old Bloomsbury.” And the hard, vigorous lucidity of mind, the orderly beauty of that view of the universe, seems to me to have been very much the reflection in life of the teaching of “Principia Ethica.” And perhaps the society of painters, in particular, may have made familiar and congenial to me the habit of relying, in the last resort, on direct intuitive judgments, and on their apparent application to real, tangibly and indubitably existing entities. Equally, I am familiar with the self-reliant judgment asserted without the faintest regard to the opinions of any but a minute group of friends, or the collected judgments of centuries, if even of those.
Consequently I feel at home with a theory which asserts that there exist certain “states of mind” intrinsically and universally good, good in themselves, good simply, undefinably, self-evidently; which asserts that we perceive states of mind to be good as if we perceived apples to be red, and as if they were good with no more ado about the matter. To anyone of a contemplative turn of mind, averse to moralities of action and strenuous right-doing, to anyone more concerned to enjoy the good life than to reform the bad, to anyone to whom the arts are of the first importance, such a theory naturally recommends itself.
But, alas . . . the belief in universal and absolute good is only too often the second line of defence in priests and tyrants. It is apt to lead to intolerance, interference, misery and error in personal relations, to mistakes, at least, in discussions of aesthetic theory, to Fascism, tyranny and reaction in politics. Julian could not have made any clearer his break with his parents, with the generation of Apostles who had gathered together before the First World War and thought they were discovering values far superior to the didactic moralizations of their Victorian forebears. For a young man of the 1930s, what he might view as the simultaneous authoritarianism and comparative quietism of Bloomsbury philosophy were suspect and unsatisfactory. How in any absolute sense could one be certain of the rightness of one’s values? As a thoroughgoing relativist, he asked why choose this particular set of values, and answered, “Because I choose to choose it,” which, in effect, is a restatement of what he had written in an earlier chapter: “the only ‘ideal’ I feel I am supporting against others is that of the toleration of all ‘ideals.’ ” And yet, “The victory is to whoever shouts loudest and, ultimately, I suppose to whoever shoots straightest.” Here he is caught in a classic paradox of English middle-class liberalism: all have the right to believe as they please, yet it is the enlightened liberal who knows what is best for them to believe. The Victorians had not hesitated to resolve the paradox in favor of “strenuous right-doing” in the public world; Bloomsbury, serenely in possession of its own private values, which were perhaps too rare and special for the commonality, had no wish to proselytize, except, as it were, incidentally, by example. In the end, Julian plumps for the “good” in action: it is better to do something than to do nothing. Writing in a time of “unemployment, economic crisis, nascent fascism, and approaching war,” he rejects the quietism of Bloomsbury for the activism of the 1930s:
We should cultivate all those valued states of mind that are produced by action. . . . For one thing, it is obviously prudent to dive in of your own accord rather than wait to be pushed. For another, action is the most potent of drugs, and battlefields and revolutions are usually fairly good at curing romantic despairs—and other diseases incident to life. For another, intellectuals often turn out to be good men of action, and would probably do so more often if they could keep their minds clear—could become intellectuals rather than emotionals—and if they acquired a hard enough outer shell of cynicism and practical commonsense. . . . What I shall mean by ethics is the study of what are possible arguments about politics, the arts and human behaviour in general.17
One of the readers, as it happened, was Roger Fry, the newly appointed Slade Professor at Cambridge. In February he told Julian that he was reading the dissertation and liked it, with reservations. It does seem a bit dubious that someone so close to Julian should be reading the work, but his reading was far from a total endorsement. At the same time, Julian’s uncle, Leonard Woolf, was reading it as a publisher. He disapproved strongly of the sort of philosophizing it contained, and turned it down.
As a compendium or anthology or grab bag of Julian’s thought in the early 1930s, or even as a period document, “The Good and All That” has considerable interest. But it was clearly not a success, nor did it deserve to be, as an academic dissertation intended to demonstrate its author’s worthiness to receive a College Fellowship. The system at King’s was for the electors to refer the dissertation to two qualified readers, who would make a recommendation which the electors might or might not follow: the final decision was theirs. Julian saw the comments of his readers. Keynes sent him the mimeographed copies of their reports, noting that he had received their permission to do so. One of them, as has already been mentioned, was Roger Fry, a great friend of all the Bells (and all Bloomsbury), and a formative influence upon Julian’s mind. He began his remarks with a disclaimer rather like Julian’s own: “I have not read recent works and I gather from his frank avowal that Mr Bell is in the same state of ignorance.” He did not allow friendship to inhibit criticism. He found that his pupil had not really learned the great Bloomsbury lesson of clarity, particularly in regard to the definition of terms, and he objected to the unsubstantiated attack on Christianity. But in spite of these and other objections, he was more favorable than not, and concluded with an enthusiastic recommendation:
The subject is beset by many difficulties arising out of the vagueness of the terms in common use and I do not think that Mr. Bell has been able to clear them up. . . . In spite of these confusions I think it contains a great deal that is of real value both in the destructive criticism of theories of valuation and in his constructive work. . . . His disposal of Hedonism seems to me one of the best I have ever seen and is to me convincing and I should say the same of his acute criticism of Dr. Moore’s absolutism. . . . On the whole in spite of the defects which I have pointed out I think this is a very praiseworthy and courageous attempt to think out some of the most difficult problems of life. Mr. Bell shows a keen desire to arrive at the truth regardless of his preconceptions and a much more balanced judgment than some of his rather reckless outbursts might suggest. It is eminently the work of a very young mind but one that should develop rapidly. I cannot help thinking that if Mr. Bell were to become a resident Fellow his influence in stimulating and guiding younger men would be of real value to the College.
The other reader, the distinguished philosopher C. D. Broad, a Fellow of Trinity, was not as kind. Like Fry, he too commented on the rather hasty dismissal of Christianity, “a religion for which [Mr. Bell] expresses a contempt which would not appear to be bred from any great familiarity with its doctrines.” Unlike Fry, who had written quite briefly, he provided an exhaustive five-page summary of the thesis and did it the justice, which it could hardly bear, of treating it as a serious piece of philosophical writing. After pointing out a succession of errors, omissions, and inconsistencies, he concluded:
Mr. Bell considers that the work of Dr. Richards and Mr. Empson is a promising beginning of a genuine Aesthetics. (He should learn to spell the name of his fellow-poet, the Kennedy Professor of Latin [A. E. Housman], whom he always loads with a redundant “e.”) . . . He thinks that, in England, there is a good enough chance of securing the blessings of socialism without the evils of civil war to make it worth while to attempt the introduction of socialism by peaceful means. . . . He infers from his principles that existing laws against blasphemy, homosexual practices, and incest should be repealed. . . . He ends by considering rather elaborately the laws against cruelty to animals. . . . Mr. Bell refers with great respect to Prof. Moore, whom he calls his “spiritual grandfather.” It is therefore all the more regrettable that he seems to have wholly ignored the Principle of Organic Unities, which is a most important part of Moore’s ethical theories. . . . Mr. Bell’s theory appears to be supported by faulty arguments and to be very doubtful. . . . Mr. Bell seems to assume that the value or disvalue of an experience will be determined entirely by its qualities and not at all by its relational properties. This seems to me very unlikely. . . . The question of Socialism and Capitalism is not worth discussing so long as those two extremely vague terms remain completely undefined, as they do in Mr. Bell’s dissertation. . . . I have no clear views about the question of cruelty to animals, but I have some very strong prejudices in the opposite direction [Julian was rather brutal about animals in the dissertation] to Mr. Bell’s. . . . It is by no means easy to pass a fair judgment on such a dissertation as this, since it is liable to fall between two stools. Plainly, it must not be judged simply as a contribution to the theory of ethics, and it must not be judged simply as a contribution to aesthetics and current politics. On either ground, taken separately, I should say that it falls definitely below the standard required of a fellowship dissertation. It does not follow that it may not be up to that standard when these two factors are taken jointly into consideration.
It appears to me that Mr. Bell inherits from his father the power of writing an absolutely first-rate political pamphlet, addressed to intelligent men, and moving at a far higher intellectual level than, e.g., the average leading articles in the most “high-brow” weekly reviews, such as the New Statesman. . . . I have tried to show that the ethical analysis is very inadequate; but, so far as it goes, it is clear, consistent, and well argued. . . . Plainly the dissertation cannot claim to be an important original contribution to knowledge. I have tried to explain to the Electors that it is a very intelligent, lively, and well-written politico-ethical pamphlet of a rather special kind. It is for them to decide whether they consider this the kind of dissertation on which they are willing to award a fellowship at King’s.
Broad would have been happier to recommend Julian to the editor of the New Statesman than to the electors of the College. Even Roger Fry, recommending that he be given the Fellowship, did not claim high marks for the dissertation itself. Julian, shortly after submitting it, wrote to Lettice, “I’ve begun, I must confess, to have a quite mad hope—for it will surely be disappointed—that I shall after all get a fellowship.” A mad hope it proved to be: the electors decided against him. His association with Cambridge was at an end. What he had written to Playfair in December 1931 still held true in the spring of 1934: “I must make up my mind what I’m going to do, failing a fellowship or I shall be in the soup.” There was some talk of publishing the dissertation as a book on its own, if he could revise to his uncle Leonard’s satisfaction, but nothing came of that.
He had been leading a poetic, academic, literary-critical, philosophic, political, and romantic existence. It was all very crowded, everything contemporaneous and exciting for that reason, but for the same reason not entirely satisfactory in any of its aspects. He was so talented in so many areas, but almost because of that, he could not make a sufficiently strong mark in one. From the time he began his research studentship until his final rejection by King’s—from 1930 to 1934—he was publishing poetry and book reviews, working on a study and edition of Pope, participating in politics in Sussex and Cambridge, writing his dissertation on ethics, and conducting a full-scale social life, with a generous allotment of time to family, friends, and love affairs. He was capable of being in love and in literature and in politics, simultaneously and passionately yet inconclusively. Whichever direction he turned, there are disquieting similarities; his involvement with women and his involvement with politics seem different aspects of the same experience.
We have already described the rare emotional fulfillment that he found within his family circle; school and university had done very little to disengage him from his family; Pinault was a surrogate father; in a sense, Cambridge was his family writ large. His deepest attachment, unchanged throughout his life, was to his mother: it meant that it was very difficult for him to commit himself fully to other women. To a degree, a kind of emotional reluctance marks all his romantic involvements. He found his mother a perfect confidante. “I told Nessa all about it [whatever it might be] last night,” he wrote; “somehow I find it very consoling to confide in her. Perhaps because she never does anything to shatter my self-confidence or vanity.”18 He particularly enjoyed talking to her or writing to her about his love affairs and other sexual matters, which he did with astonishing frankness. It was almost as though the happenings of his life were authenticated, became real and manageable, only when reported to his mother, who was certainly the only woman, and at times the only person, for whom he had full and absolute respect, and love. He never changed in this regard.
Nor did he change in his need to confide. The pleasure of self-disclosure was very real to him, and his list of confidants, headed by his mother and Eddie Playfair, was not a short one. He did not expect a return of disclosures comparable to his own, although he did rather resent Quentin’s reluctance to tell him exactly what he was doing and with whom. “It’s a ridiculous state of affairs,” he wrote to him in 1931, “when you come to think [and plainly, he wanted Quentin to think as he did] that money and sex, the two most interesting and important subjects, are the things people are shyest about, particularly parents and children.”19 Of course these subjects were not at all taboo between Julian and his parents, whatever might be the situation between himself and Quentin: Julian discussed sex with his mother and money with his father. Clive Bell was convinced that the Crash of 1929 would ruin them all, but although there may have been somewhat less money immediately available to spend, there seemed to be enough for everything to go on as before, and it was assumed, as it had always been assumed, that Julian would have the advantage of a small private income. Clive continued to complain and worry; Julian, however, did not take seriously his contention that the family’s economic difficulties would force him, Julian, to become an advertising-man or a schoolmaster. In his letter to Quentin he was ready to talk not only about sex (“The Apostles and Dr Freud are going into the whole matter of sexual life in the modern world”) but also about money (a brisk discussion of the expectations of the young Bells, based upon what he had been told by their mother). He was determined to be honest about those “two most interesting and important subjects.”
And indeed, given his temperament, it was easy enough to be honest, or at least forthright, in letters to his mother and friends. What was really much more difficult was to be honest with himself. It is unlikely that Julian ever achieved this ideal state. When it came to the experience of women, then he found that he could not do without them; at the same time, a part of his mind was sufficiently detached to resent the time they demanded, and he felt that his work, his writing, his various intellectual pursuits suffered as a result. He was in many ways, as John Lehmann suspected, a romantic who did his best to conceal the fact from himself and others. He liked to think of himself as cold and hard and calm; actually he was gentle but passionate, and full of a simmering violence. But this was an aspect of himself he feared and disliked and was determined to curb. Set in this context, his admiration for the eighteenth century comes to seem less a literary eccentricity than the expression of psychological unease. When he first fell in love with Helen, he could think of nothing else: he was outrageously happy. That summer, away from her, he was wretched. He was shocked at his vulnerability. As a Bloomsbury intellectual he tended to look askance at the heart, which in a community of talkers, he regarded as a rather “inarticulate beast.”
The same division of thought continued throughout his life. He wanted to discipline himself against emotionalism and felt that writing in neoclassical couplets helped him to do this; later he recognized that the miseries and storms that entered into his affairs were necessary to arouse the dormant creative impulse. As quoted earlier, he wrote to Eddie Playfair that “It seems to be one of the few beneficent arrangements of providence that physical satisfaction restores one’s equilibrium—one’s head grows clear and one’s heart grows cold—the only tolerable state of affairs.” Yet the ideal of clear head and cold heart was in contradiction to the basic elements of his character. Julian thought he loathed violent emotions, but in everything, in politics and in love, he could not avoid them. The relationship with Helen was very happy in its middle phase, less romantic than it had been, less tempestuous than it was to become. There were a few weeks, a few months, when he was first at Elsworth, of the desired “Golden Mean”: he would have been content—as what young man would not?—to have had it indefinitely prolonged. But he recognized that Helen was becoming concerned about the future. While he hesitated and temporized, she grew demanding, difficult, distrustful. She scrutinized his poems for allusions to herself. There were scenes, storms, quarrels, reconciliations. By the spring of 1931 it was clear to them both that they could not go on as they had been: they must either marry or put an end to the relationship. Twice Julian obtained a marriage license, but he went no further.
In a letter postmarked May 2, 1931, he wrote to his mother that he tried to spend most of his week at work on his Fellowship dissertation but that “I devote one day entirely to Helen, the weekend to Cambridge. . . . Helen is in a very bad way. She’s not at all recovered from her illness yet, which makes her very weak, she can’t sleep or eat, she’s overworking for her tripos, and she’s very worried about her future.” She might return home to Dundee.
The possibility of being separated has led me to consider the idea of our marrying. I wish you would let me know what you think. I should be in some way trapped. . . . I shall very probably want to marry someone else later. On the other hand, perhaps it’s foolish, when one’s as much in love as the one [sic], not to take such a risk. The real trouble, I think, is how we should get on together. Certainly there are the most appalling possibilities. We differ and disagree about endless things, and we’ve each got the power of driving the other frantic with rage. . . . I know that I am still very violently in love, though perhaps not very romantically. . . . In a great many ways I should very much like to be married. It would put an end to all the nervous strain of the life I lead, and judging from the past I think we should probably be very happy. On the other hand, I hate losing my freedom. . . . So give me some good advice. You know much better what I’m like than anyone else does, and you’ve seen a good deal of Helen.20
Eddie wrote to him in no uncertain terms about marriage: “It is my firm belief that a marriage with Helen would be fatal to both of you. . . . You must keep yourself free till you are really grown up.”21
Vanessa replied to him at length on May 5 from Rome, where she, Duncan, Quentin, and Angelica had gone for an extended visit.
Well, in this case I think you really dont quite know what you want to do yourself so possibly you may be more ready to listen to my notions than is generally the case. . . . Of course I want you to be happy & I want Helen to be & one tries to do a most difficult thing which is to imagine you both as you’ll be in a few years time & how you’d affect each other & so on. Naturally I have thought a great deal about all this for some time, as you know for we talked about it a little in the winter & I tried very hard to understand clearly her character & temperament from what little I’ve seen of her. So perhaps what I feel at any rate has the advantage of a good deal of conversation, for I felt in spite of your telling me then that you definitely didnt want to marry was that the question would inevitably arise before long. But before telling you as far as I can what I feel about that I think one thing is quite clear—you must whatever happens both get into a normal calm healthy state. . . . Even if this present way of life is unsatisfactory you will get all right as soon as you give it up. . . . Meanwhile why not see a doctor? . . . I really think you had better see someone my dear if you’re having headaches. It’s absurd not to. As for Helen, surely unless she can do the work for her exams without getting ill its nonsense to go in for it. . . . I’m sure she thinks far too much of the importance of work & exams. What do they matter? It’s far more important to keep well. . . . Now as to the marriage question. You know my reputation for being against marriage. But I am not against it always & certainly not against it for you. . . . I quite expect you will find it much the happiest way of life for yourself to marry & have children & live rather a domestic existence. What I am not so sure about is that Helen is the right person for you to marry. I think too that one has to take risks—life would be very dull if one didn’t—& as for the practical part of marriage I suppose that could quite well be arranged. Its the other part, the emotional part that worries me. You see, it seems to me that you, who are only 23, which is really you know still very young, are not a very precocious person. I think that you may & ought to change & grow & develop enormously in the next 5 or 6 years. I think you ought to see life, get to know different kinds of people, be free to change & expand. You have a great deal of Stephen in you & I think are like them in being rather late in developing. You met Helen when you were very young & I suppose rather sore & hurt in your feelings & she gave you what you wanted & still does to a large extent. But I think there can be very little doubt that you will some day fall in love perhaps in rather a different sort of way. If you marry Helen now you will certainly give up doing many things & getting to know many things & people that you might otherwise, because you will be tied to her & will have to lead a much quieter & less adventurous (in every way) existence. This may seem to you an advantage at the moment but I don’t think it would if you were in a perfectly well & normal state. . . . I see that you cannot now bear the idea of making Helen unhappy & I think some way must be arranged by which she wont be. That can be considered & perhaps I can help to suggest something. But my dear if you marry her aren’t you running a risk, too great a one, of making her much more unhappy later? . . . You will perhaps fall in love—& you will quite certainly be fallen in love with. . . . You might at first both find it a relief to be married, not to have to consider proprieties & all the other horrors of your present way of life. . . . My dearest, I hope I’m not being too outspoken & that you wont think I am in any way against Helen. I think she has a quite remarkably nice character & perhaps is in many ways one of the most charming & delightful people you may ever meet. . . . If I say that she does not seem to me to be certainly the right person for you to marry its not so much criticism of her as simply a perception of what seems to me incompatibility. . . . Fundamentally she has a very strong romantic view of marriage & looks on it as a kind of holy state. In fact it is partly my feeling that she would be so much upset if later you took any other view of it that makes me feel uneasy at the idea. . . . But of course I may be wrong about this. I do not really know. . . . If you were both older & had had experience of other people & knew that you wanted each more than you could want any one else then, given her temperament, it might be all right, but as things are I should be very much afraid of that sort of difficulty. I feel I am doing what is always a foolish thing to do, telling you freely what I think & giving advice which cannot be altogether very welcome. But I shant be hurt if you tell me so. Meanwhile whatever you think of what I say, there is no actual hurry. This term must I suppose be got through. . . . If Helen can stay up a fourth year it will I suppose help matters. If she cant I think we must consider what can be done so that she shant be miserable. . . . I suppose mothers always say they only want their children’s good—it sounds familiar—but indeed I dont think its so much that I want your good exactly as that I do terribly want you to be yourself—to have freedom to grow & be whatever you have it in you to be. The one terrible thing seems to me not so much unhappiness—which is inevitable, as being thwarted—stunted, to miss opportunities & not live fully & completely as far as one can. I think if you tie yourself to someone to whom marriage would be a tie, when youre still very young, that may happen. If you do it later it may mean unhappiness, but at least you have had a chance to find things out for yourself & to become yourself. . . . Goodbye my dear—please write to me & tell me if you think there’s any sense in all this or not—& do please do see Ellie or some other doctor & get rid of headaches & general tiredness. . . . Your loving Nessa.
Then a few days later, on May 11, she wrote again:
Since writing to you it has occurred to me that perhaps Helen may feel uneasy if she knows I have written lest I may be in some sense plotting against her—not that she would really think that, but I dont want there to be any suggestion of it. I have talked to her about you & her—some time ago at Charleston I think last summer—& I really said then very much what I say now but it may be as well to repeat it. I’ve therefore written her the enclosed letter, which I leave open for you to read, but if she doesnt know I have written to you on the subject you neednt give it to her. . . . I’m not even sure from your letter whether you have talked to her herself about the question of marriage or whether you have only been considering it yourself.
And then on May 18:
Its such a relief to have letters from you both. . . . I am so glad my dear to know that my letter was a help & not a hindrance—I am sometimes so terrified of giving advice—not perhaps that I did actually give much—but it seems such a responsibility to influence other people in any way. . . . Helen says you are seeing a doctor. Do do so. Its not long now till the end of term. If Helen really doesnt take her exam to heart surely theres no need for her to make herself ill. Once you get away I feel sure everything will calm down & get rational again. . . . I think you & Helen ought to have a calm time together so that you neednt feel hurried & driven, but I’m not sure its not a good thing not to have a little other companionship too, as long as its tactful & sympathetic. . . . Please give Helen my love & thank her very much indeed for writing & tell her I count upon her to be really sensible & not get ill. . . . Do both vegetate a little, emotionally, for a few weeks.22
Vanessa was calm and reasonable to Julian, but in fact there was a lot more activity involving her, Quentin, and Eddie Playfair about the possibility of marriage. They all felt it would be a great mistake. Virginia too seemed to be anxious that the connection should end. On April 24, 1931, she wrote to Quentin that “I must scrape Julian free from his Great Barnacle,” and then a month later she reported to Vanessa that Lytton “had seen Julian and Helen he said, and deplores the Cambridge infection, as I do—but whats to be done? He’s bound to get a Fellowship, and there Helen will sit forever, talking. Lytton said, minute provincialities about exams; and Cambridge parties.”23 On May 16, Quentin wrote to Eddie from Rome: “As usual you emerge from the diplomatic mêlée with flying colours and the gratitude of the entire Bell family. . . . I should like to know how exactly you got round Helen, getting round Helen seems to be your forte, personally I should have found her far too sticky and lumpy an obstacle for any kind of mobility.” It is not clear what Eddie wrote to Julian to dissuade him from marriage. He also wrote to Helen directly, as he reported to Vanessa on May 16, viewing the possible marriage as “quite disastrous. . . . I really hope that absurd couple will give up all such wild plans now. I wrote to Helen too, so as not to seem to be doing things behind her back & told her openly I thought marriage out of the question. . . . I wonder whether Helen will stick to her project of bringing the affair to an end after the summer. I can’t help feeling a little doubtful.”24 In any case, a marriage did not take place. Helen wrote a letter to Vanessa on May 15, confirming the end of the crisis. “We shall both become sane again, I hope, in France and laugh at all the alarms and excursions now—though they had been wretchedly real and hurting while they lasted. . . . I, with vanity and rather to Julian’s scorn, have ceased to both bother about anything except the dress in which I shall go to the King’s Ball—with long gloves, a rather exciting addition.”25 Her plan now was to go to London after her examinations, about which she claimed she didn’t care how she did, to take a secretarial course. Even so, Julian was still very worried about her, and wrote to his mother on May 18, “She’s become absolutely unmanageable, and I think it’s rather a matter of chance whether or not she breaks down before the end of the term.”26
After all this, they were still together, and in the summer they went to Charleston. The situation didn’t sound too good, as Julian wrote to his mother: “Helen and I thought we might possibly ask some one else down to Charleston while we are staying there as a sort of buffer state.”27 They then went to France to visit Charles and Marie Mauron in St. Rémy in Provence, as Julian wished to work on his French. A gifted critic and the translator of E. M. Forster, Mauron and his wife, Marie, were great friends of both the older and younger generations of Bloomsbury, particularly of Roger Fry’s. Mauron was a well-known critic and aesthetician, particularly interested in a psychoanalytical approach to literature. He and Fry were engaged in translating Mallarmé, about whom Mauron wrote quite extensively; Julian would become involved with this project. The Maurons had the peculiar merit, in Julian’s case, of taking him seriously on his own terms, something that did not always happen on home territory. The visit presented some problems. The Maurons were concerned about what the community would think. Roger Fry had told Mauron that Julian and Helen were in a serious relationship. Living in a small French town, Mauron was worried about scandal, the attacks from the “parti religieux qui est puissant.” He proposed two possible solutions: one, that Julian passed his girlfriend off as Mrs. Bell, even though the mail she would receive would have to be addressed accordingly; second, that he say she was just a friend and she slept in her own room. Mauron thought that the latter strategy was the best option.28 They then went on to the Bloomsbury outpost in Cassis, and Quentin wrote to Eddie about their visit: “J and H seem amicable and apathetic, it seems to me that will be almost certain discovered sometime soon. . . . Then there will be devil to pay. No doubt Julian will be called on to make an honest woman of Helen, an impossible feat to one who is not a psychoanalyist, but perhaps various Sotars [sic] will attempt to horsewhip Julian. . . . Helen will go stark staring mad and jump off the Cap-canaille (1305 ft). And we shall all live happily ever after.”29 The affair was still continuing, but in fact it was on the verge of ending.
That fall, Helen did go forward with her plan to take a secretarial course in London. Julian remained in Cambridge, and this apparently meant the end of their affair. John Lehmann, now in London himself as the manager of the Hogarth Press, wrote to Julian: “I saw Helen one night, and had a long talk with her. It worried me a lot. I don’t believe it’s really any good that you should see much of one another for a while. I think it certainly upsets her, and clearly it must be a final break for both your sakes.”30 Julian felt it took him a year to recover, but whatever regrets he might have felt, they did not prevent him from continuing his amorous life. He wrote to Lettice Ramsey in early 1933 that “I’ve had a reconciliation with Helen, which is highly comic and rather interesting historically.” He took an almost excessive interest in her marriage to Christopher Morris, a fellow Kingsman, which he thought he had helped bring about. He even looked out for a house in which they might live. Two years older than Julian, Morris had become a Fellow of the College in History in 1930. They knew one another, as the College was a fairly small community, but weren’t particularly close. Keynes told Julian about the announcement of the engagement in the Times in December 1933. Joking on the College’s reputation for homosexuality, Julian commented in a letter to Lettice Ramsey that “King’s will begin to get rather bothered if all its fellows go on like this.” Much later, in a letter to Peter Lucas in 1936, he remarked: “I think he’s [Christopher is] happy. . . . I hope so, having done such a blatant match-make. Still though I did try my best to bring them together, I’m not responsible for their marrying. And in the state that Helen was in, I should do the same again. Actually, I think they get on well. . . . He’s a v. nice character.”31
So the break with Helen had taken place; for the next few months he was unattached, which proved more trying than he had anticipated. Then, in the autumn of 1931, he began a relationship with Lettice Ramsey. She was older than both Julian and Helen, and a good deal more worldly: on the face of it he could look forward, in theory if not in practice, to a calm, stable, undemanding love such as he imagined he wanted. It was understood that they would love within limits and without expectations: that was the “Golden Mean.” In a sense he was now introduced into a more mature world than his undergraduate circle. And although Lettice’s friends perhaps were not as self-conscious about their sexual freedom (and Vanessa and Virginia in actual practice led rather circumscribed lives), they appeared to be more committed to “free love” than the Bloomsbury group. Julian, perhaps a libertine in theory, in fact became rather jealous of Lettice’s practice of sexual freedom. As time passed, he had relationships with some of Lettice’s friends, the one with Antoinette Pirie being quite serious. Lettice Baker, born in 1898, had gone to the well-known progressive public school Bedales and then to Newnham College, where she studied psychology. She worked for a while in London in vocational guidance before returning to Cambridge for a job at the Psychological Library. In 1925 she married Frank Ramsey, a Fellow of King’s, five years her junior (Julian would be ten years younger than she). It was a rather whirlwind romance. She and Frank had met in November 1924, first seeing one another, appropriately, at a talk on philosophy in G. E. Moore’s rooms in Trinity. Frank had just embarked upon his sexual life, having lost his virginity a few months before to a prostitute in Vienna. At their first dinner together, Frank asked Lettice to go to bed with him; she declined as being too soon, but the next week they did enthusiastically. They felt they were in love by December. She also had another lover at the time, whom she continued to see until Frank proposed to her. They married at the St. Pancras Registry office in London on August 25, 1925.32
Frank was a brilliant mathematician, philosopher, and economist, a Trinity undergraduate and only the second non-Kingsman to be made a Fellow of the College. He was both an influence upon and influenced by Wittgenstein. He was born into a Cambridge academic family, his father a Fellow of Magdalene. His younger brother, Michael, would go on to be Archbishop of Canterbury, although Frank himself as well as Lettice were firm atheists and were rather scornful of Michael’s religiosity. They had an open marriage, and their correspondence suggests the sort of ambiance that Julian would enter some years later with Lettice. But for all his sophistication, Frank found “free love” a little more difficult to handle than he expected. Among his papers at King’s are the extraordinary letters the Ramseys sent to one another in 1927 and 1928. In a letter of August 1, 1927, he wrote in detail about an affair he was having, yet “I feel ours is fundamentally such a stable, calm, and happy relationship. I believe someday I shall be able to achieve calm happiness with E. too, but at the moment it is so exhausting. . . . You wrote her the most charming letter, darling. . . . I think of you a lot, darling, with great affection. . . . I feel I love you very much so I do E. but it doesn’t destroy my love for you.” But despite their protestations of love for one another, one suspects that the affair she started with the Irish writer Liam O’Flaherty, a few years older than she, while visiting her family in Dublin was some sort of revenge. She reported to Frank that although they had only met eight days before, they had already been to bed together three times. “Darling, do these accounts pain you? I long to get a letter from you. You’ve not the least cause for real worry, love.” Her affair in fact deeply bothered Frank, as Julian too would be disturbed by her behavior later, although he unlike Frank wouldn’t become obsessed over the question of who might be the father of a child. (The Ramseys already had two daughters.) On January 10, 1928, she wrote to him: “It does not seem to me that a light affair which brings a lot of temporary happiness is wrong or in any way permanently upsetting to us—you & me. Do you remember that I always said that if your affair with E. had been less serious I should not have found it so hard to bear? . . . Our life together is the most important.”33
She was writing to Julian in December 1931 in a similar way, though they were probably not lovers yet, in this case about the young King’s College philosophy don Richard Braithwaite, with whom she was having an affair. He had married in 1925, but his wife had died in 1928. He would marry again—not Lettice—in 1932.
He is very jealous physically—though he is really far more unfaithful than I am only in a different form. However, its all too complicated, Julian dear, to write about. . . . I suppose what I want—if I am not married to Richard—is to remain on intimate terms with him but to do as I like without hurting him—consequently upsetting myself. Richard hurt can be a most dangerous animal & Richard jealous & disliking himself for being so is worse. . . . Could we spend weekend of Jan 1st together? . . . I think I really believe I have decided not to go to bed with you. . . . [Yet she wrote,] My dear, I think it would be a splendid arrangement for me to have an affair with you while R. had one with Moya & then both to end simultaneously & for R. & me to settle down to a quiet married life.”34
Through King’s, Julian and Lettice may well have met before the tragically young death of Frank Ramsey in 1930—although wives, with exceptions such as Topsy Lucas and later Helen Morris, might not have seen that much of the undergraduates in their husbands’ colleges (even if, as in Jacob’s Room, they had them to Sunday lunch). In fact, Julian originally had planned to dedicate his poem about Wittgenstein to Ramsey rather than to Braithwaite. He would have known both quite well, as they were Fellows of King’s and fellow Apostles. It would appear that shortly after this letter Julian and Lettice became lovers. He wrote to her on the following January 12 that she had left her purse behind when she had visited him. “I feel a little tempted to invent pretty speeches about your leaving your purse with me and I my heart, etc in the manner of Mr Pope. . . . I’ve never spent a happier two days.” Yet the next month she returned to the question of whether she should marry Richard. She wrote on February 14:
What a fool I was not to be perfectly content with being happy with you—which I am so eternally, darling. . . . I felt very obsessed by R. Now I feel much happier in a complicated sort of way. . . . Yesterday R. changed his mind about not wanting to go to bed with me and did. The effect on me is a kind of release. I think I can be more fatalistic & not worry about R. I see myself approaching a relation of friendship only with him with much more equanimity. . . . I may not have explained myself at all—the danger of undressing on paper & partial nakedness is often worse than complete undress. . . . I do like being in love with you & it will be Thursday fairly soon.
On March 25 she wrote to him:
I felt rather bad about Wednesday evening but I felt it was time I saw Richard (did you have an amicable dinner—yes?) I was delighted that you took it so calmly (But I have to confess that my worse nature was a little peaked [sic] that you weren’t a bit jealous!) So tiresome is my nature that I to some extent always want what I have not got e.g. I should like to be an intellectual & interested in abstract ideas. I should like to be a good talker. I should like to be married to Richard. When I am with him part of me wants to be with you. I’d like to roll you both into one. But then probably what I like best about both of you would be incompatible! Or go wrong somehow.
As seemed to be usual with Julian, the antiromantic vied with the romantic, as he wrote to her on August 5: “My dear, I’ve thought and dreamt a great deal about you lately, tho’ I’ve not written. Having been so determinedly anti-romantic, I didn’t realise until we parted how thoroughly I cared for you. Also how much I remember of your look and taste and touch.” He generally now signed his letters, “Your lover Julian.” Apparently, Richard and Lettice ceased being lovers, as Julian wrote to John Lehmann in an undated letter: “Thank God Richard Braithwaite has more or less made up his mind and Lettice and I are to be allowed to have our affair in peace.”
That same year, in 1932, Lettice embarked on her own distinguished career as a photographer, particularly of portraits. She established a firm, Ramsey & Muspratt, with Helen Muspratt, who had had a successful photography practice in Swanage but had now moved to Cambridge. Lettice had the contacts, and Muspratt, the know-how. Quite quickly, the firm became renowned for its portraits of the Cambridge elite. (In 1937 they opened an office in Oxford, when Muspratt moved there.) In April 1932 Lettice was hoping to photograph all the Fellows of King’s, as Julian remarked to his mother, “in an album—what a collection.”35
In March 1932 he had written to Lettice, “Nessa congratulated us on having such a satisfactory relationship.” Lettice might have welcomed a rather less considered, more spendthrift passion than he was prepared to give. She was determined to preserve her own freedom of action. He was working a good deal of the time in the cottage in Elsworth as well as at Charleston, and he wrote to her often in Cambridge. His letters tended to be more bulletins than romantic missives. When she complained gently, he replied, “My dear, whatever you say, I really cant break out on paper.” That was the point of danger, of course—to break out. A few months later he wrote to her, “I as far as I am reasonable, am consciously trying to keep my balance in a torrent—fortunately of conflicting emotions.” He found it odd that she was not afraid, as he was, of losing control: “you seem both imperious to and respectful of romanticism—which I dread as a vice.” In fact, he had fallen deeply in love again, and the “Golden Mean” or the “Latin-sensual view of amour” did not make any provision for this. The conflict of emotions was essentially what it had been in his relationship with Helen: on the one hand, a commitment to love; on the other, a determination to remain free. The next year, away from Cambridge a good deal, spending more time in London and at Charleston, he was prey to fits of jealousy and depression. The virtue of his relationship with Lettice as he had envisioned it was the measure of freedom it allowed them both. But it had been his freedom, not hers, that he had been principally concerned with. Lettice, now, was sufficiently impervious to romanticism to insist on terms of her own; ironically, she had adopted his original position. She offered him a love that was not completely demanding, and asked of him confidence and affection which he could have given, albeit with a certain lack of grace. Theoretically, he ought to have found this perfect, but he did not. For all his rationality, Julian could not accept the idea that Lettice should be as free as he wished to be himself. Nor was he untrammeled enough to offer her a full alternative commitment. Early on in their relationship, it was clear that she would feel herself to be sexually free, as she had asserted in her marriage and in her involvement with Richard Braithwaite.
It’s a great pity [he wrote quite late in their relationship, in January 1934] we should be the sort of people we are—able to feel seriously, but with our feelings so arranged that we make each other miserable. I sometimes think we reflect the world at large—the way in which it seems that all that is needed is a small, simple change, but really all the devils of the abysses have to be let loose to make it, and suffering and destruction which seem out of all proportion to the cause. I can’t think why I shouldn’t give in, knowing what I do about your feeling for me and mine for you. But I couldn’t make myself do it—I should break something inside if I did. The worst of being a rather easy-going character is that if you do get your mind made up you can’t change it back again. No doubt it comes of taking too external and dramatic a view of oneself, and of my military fixation. So that I see everything in terms of a struggle and victory and defeat, and get an obstinate “no surrender” feeling. But there it is—I’m like that, and now it’s too late for me to change.
A month later, when he was waiting for word about his Fellowship, he concocted a fantasy in which, he wrote to her on February 10, he would “come back to Cambridge with a definite life that could be shared with you, and sane enough and settled enough in my own mind not to be jealous or suspicious, but to value you properly for being the sort of person you are, without having to think about myself.” Two days before, he had written:
For one reason or another, life seems to improve a bit. I’m not as happy as I have been, principally because I’m not living with you and my life has grown more involved with you than I had thought. It’s not so much that I’ve ceased to be self-sufficient as that I’ve grown to need a particular atmosphere of sanity and happiness that you make, and that I’ve come to depend enormously on having you to talk to about things as they happen. But I feel that we’ve managed to build something sufficiently permanent to stand a separation of this kind—after all its not so frightfully long before I shall see you again. But I’ve begun, I must confess, to have a quite mad hope—for it will surely be disappointed—that I shall after all get a fellowship and come back and live where I can see you as often as I want to. With a great deal of love my dearest your Julian.
And he wrote a few days later:
I shall only say that now looking back I think the two years we lived together [something of an exaggeration] were as near perfect happiness as human beings could expect. . . . [Yet] I feel that if I could have some very mild affair with someone I just rather liked I should stop being bothered about my prestige and all that and we could reconstruct a better relation. For clearly you will sooner or later want something better than a lover you see every other week-end. Of course, as you said, my day-dream now is to come back to Cambridge, because I don’t feel in the least if things had ended between us (by which I mean not everything, but anything) or would end in any foreseeable future: I feel as if we had just begun to learn how really to lead a good life together, and as if we ought to go on with its future developments—not a gradual drifting and dying away, but taking on new things and developing new possibilities. . . . with a very great deal of love Julian.
As he grew older—but it must be remembered that he was only twenty-one to twenty-six in the years that are being considered here—he thought that he was becoming increasingly dispassionate about love in his life, and he more nearly achieved the “Latin-sensual view” he had aimed at from the beginning. Yet he rather regretted the romantic excitements of the past. “I should like to be eighteen again,” he wrote to Lettice some time later, when he was twenty-six, “and feel I had everything to learn and everything mattered. . . . You say I was deliberately unromantic and so on, but I find it difficult to remember unromantically. But then I suppose one always improves the past.”
To a degree he deceived himself, and he was profoundly upset, despite his claim to understand, by Lettice’s involvements and desire to go to bed with others. At a later point she was sleeping with an undergraduate of whom she was very fond. She felt that she was more in love with him than he with her; for him it was just a very pleasant experience. She wrote a revealing letter to Julian about this episode.
I can only wish that I thought friendship was better than love. It would be more convenient, if one were willing to be satisfied with friendship, but I must be in love & if you are in love with someone who values your friendship & is a good friend but not in love, it is often painful & frustrating. My John I find a most satisfactory & interesting person but he is not in love with me, alas. He is going to be my lodger next term. I’ve got myself licensed for university lodgings which I think is rather good! Now don’t write to your friends saying “Ha! Ha! Have you heard L is to be a lodging house keeper!” because I don’t want any general gossip about it. It’s quite a good joke but keep it to yourself!
And in early 1934, Julian was not best pleased when she took up with the poet Harry Kemp, even though he was in London. Three years younger than Julian, Kemp had been educated at the new public school, Stowe, and had been an undergraduate at Clare. At this point he was (briefly) a member of the Communist Party. Kemp is now best remembered for his association with Laura (Riding) Jackson, the American poet and sometime lover of Robert Graves. In February Julian was having dreams about the affair, as he wrote to Lettice:
I suddenly noticed that he [Harry] was almost in tears. I felt suddenly sorry for him. . . . I heard him say something like “we must get this settled.” I turned round and saw him and Lettice standing up clasped in each others arms. I came back and said something like “Yes, you must now make a definite choice.” . . . Then Lettice said, I think smiling, and in a plain, commonsense voice “I choose Clive.” This I assumed to be myself. Then I suddenly realised how miserable Harry must be, if he had been feeling depressed before, and I put my hands over my face and began to sob a little, and to consider if I could tolerate their affair. But I could not make up my mind to this, and then the dream changed, or I woke or half-woke.
She wrote to him on April 13: “What you are, in fact, asking me to do is to stop seeing Harry, start again with you—not necessarily as lovers—while you in the mean time are in love with Tony [Antoinette Pirie, to be introduced shortly]. . . . You don’t seem to find it incompatible to be fond of us both. Nor is it incompatible for me to be exceedingly fond of you & want your company very much & at the same time wish to go to bed with Harry occasionally.” He replied on April 18:
I don’t really think there’s any point in my seeing you until your affair with Kemp—at any rate—is finally done with and over. To be perfectly brutal and frank, I don’t think your offer—intimate friendship—good enough. Certainly its not worth my while as long as I am upset and made miserable by you. As far as I am concerned friendship means something calm, stable and reliable. Well, six months beating on a stone wall isn’t a very good preparation. How can I help it if you have made me feel more hostile than intimate? You haven’t given me a great deal of intimacy since last summer. Besides, friendship’s not our thing at all. If I want intimacy and friendship its easier for me to get it from Kathleen [Raine]or Phyllis [Lintott] or Barbara [Rothschild]—or Eddy or Quentin or Nessa—who don’t hurt me and who do try and understand and who will give something back. No, if we are going to see each other at all, we’ve got to construct more than a friendship. Quite apart from not liking playing second fiddle to anyone (and certainly not to Kemp) I don’t much want simply another friend. It’s much simpler for me to go free, as I’ve done with a good many old friends. You see, I dont feel simply friendly. I feel either hostile or a good deal more. I havent just died down and died down—I still care about you in some of the ways I have cared in the past. But I’m utterly sick of being the one who feels most, the one who cares and fusses and bothers. So as far as I’m concerned if you mean by “intimate friendship” the sort of thing I mean the best and simplest thing is to break for good.
So you see it now depends very much on you what happens. If, when you’re done with Kemp, you still care enough about our affair to want to reconstruct it as some sort of love affair (By which I dont mean necessarily copulation but [some] sort of serious and valuable emotion) then I think we shall still succeed both in saving a great deal that has been very good, and in starting something new growing. . . . And since I’ve started being brutal, do take some advice. You’re probably getting on badly with Harry out of bed for rather the same reason that you got on badly with me in bed, that you don’t try to understand other people and you wont take the initiative and control your behaviour. You expect things to happen right, and they dont you just accept it that they dont. When I’m feeling angry with you, I think that you expect to have everything your own way without giving anything. I know you’ll say that you gave me far more than I had any right to expect. But you see you made sacrifices without even trying to take advantage of them. Certainly last September, possibly last January, you could have reconstructed our affair by an effort of will. Instead of which, you left me to beat on that stone wall of yours. I think you did something of the sort with Richard. And I can’t help believing that unless Harry’s an unusually unpleasant young man you’re spoiling things now for rather the same reason. Which is perhaps a pity, tho’ I daresay you’d better either stick to casual affairs or marry. Anyway, don’t get involved again with anyone sensitive who has serious emotions, unless you don’t mind causing a devil of a lot of misery. I hope you will go on writing to me—if you feel theres any hope or point in doing so.
In his next letter he wrote:
Wish you hadn’t stonewalled so successfully these last six months. . . . The situation is simply this. At present you can still hurt and upset me, and I waste time and energy resenting you and the past. This is a state of mind of which I’ve had enough. . . . As soon as I stop feeling hostile, jealous, injured in my vanity and so on—and consequently stop wanting to hurt you—I hope we shall be able to start seeing each other again. I really think this is sense. I know its also selfish, but I intend to be selfish. When shall I stop feeling hostile? I dont know. Two or three months, a year—I got over Helen in about a year.
As to Harry—if you hadn’t been able to begin again with him, I should have felt definitely guilty and responsible. But since you have, and since you seem to think it may go on indefinitely, I can’t help feeling that you’re asking an unreasonable amount when you say you want us both. After all, you’ve got a generally very satisfactory life—in most ways much better than mine. You have your job, the [Communist] party, your friends, your children, your lover. Surely you wont be as depressed when term starts and Harry is back in Cambridge. . . . I had no chance to try and persuade you against going to bed with Harry, or to tell you that it would make me miserable. However—that’s spilt milk now. And as soon as I stop minding it we can see what we can make of a new affair (or friendship, or whatever you care to call it)—if you still want to and if I do.
And then a final letter in this series:
I’m very sorry indeed about the last two letters I wrote to you. I think they will have made you miserable and I’ve seen that fundamentally that’s not what I want. I’ll give you anything I can give and you take: any sort of friendship, intimacy, love if possible that we can feel for each other. I expect I shall go on having my bad moments about you, but that’s no reason really why you should be unhappy. So enjoy yourself with Harry as much as you can, and good luck to you. . . . I’ve changed my mind in this way partly because I find London with a hell of lot of work a pretty effective drug, partly because I’m very happy myself—more than I’ve ever been before—and I feel it’s too mean and spiteful to nurse a grievance. . . . I don’t want to think of you as being miserable over me. . . . So, my dear, if you will treat me as your most intimate friend (and pull down your stonewall, even if it hurts me) that’s what I want to be and what I think I am.
Let us return to the early 1930s when Julian was becoming increasingly involved with politics. In the autumn of 1931 he was alone at Charleston, intending to “rush through” his dissertation on Pope. But the coming general election absorbed the greater part of his attention: he set enthusiastically to work to help create some sort of Labour organization in his area of Sussex. As the 1930s moved forward, it is not surprising that he became increasingly involved with politics, particularly as those close to him, such as Lettice and John Lehmann, moved more to the Left. “My life’s absorbed by politics now,” he wrote to John Lehmann. “I spent about 14 hours yesterday canvassing, and drove 200 miles, which has left me pretty tired. . . . Most of the Labour workers—a lot of my fellow-canvassers are unemployed dockers—are thoroughly sensible, intelligent, very nice. . . . I believe if one troubled one could get a strong pacifist party, or even get men to strike against a threatened war.” Unemployment; opposition to war: these were dominant political themes of the early 1930s, and Julian’s interest in them was shared by his fellow poets. Politics was even reflected in an undated poem of the time, entitled “Nonsense.” Its last lines read: “Starve and grow cold without, / And ask the reason why / The guns are in the garden, / And battle’s in the sky.”36 But the closer he came to practical politics, the more impatient he became with poetry. “The only thing I’m sure of,” he told Lehmann in another letter, “gift and talent aren’t enough to save us. . . . We may have to take a hand in the politicians’ dogfight if we’re to have enough leisure and freedom to work at all.” In the first burst of enthusiasm, he was tempted to turn to politics altogether. “There’s action and excitement. I seem to get on well with people and say the right sort of thing. I’ve a notion I could get at a country village meeting rather more effectively than most of these people. They keep on missing the point through not seeing how countrymen feel, and not knowing what conditions really are. (This may be just my imagination.) I suspect a Cambridge education . . . has its uses.”
Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Julian Bell. Tea at Charleston. Taken by Lettice Ramsey. By permission of her daughter, Jane Burch.
Lettice Ramsay, Charleston. Taken by Vanessa Bell. ©Tate, London, 2010.
Julian at Charleston. Taken by Lettice Ramsey. By permission of her daughter, Jane Burch.
Working even at the village level of politics in a general election campaign was exhilarating, and Julian allowed his enthusiasm to delude him that Labour would not do too badly: in fact, in the general election the number of Labour MPs in the south of England went down from thirty-five to five. “What a state the world has got itself into,” he wrote to Lehmann, “general elections, financial crisis. . . . I feel we should all go out into the streets and agitate for a 75% cut, at least, in armaments expenditure.” Lehmann took a bleak view of the aftermath of the election. “I’m all for you being more political,” he told Julian, “if you’ve found you have some gifts that way, whether you do it by articles or by talking. Some of us must make a stand against the old gang and shake off the clutch of the drowning before they pull us down.” Julian was less pessimistic. Although he shared the disgust and disillusionment felt by the intelligent young of the Labour Party when Ramsey MacDonald, prime minister of the Labour government, chose to remain as prime minister of the National government, he believed that the party would survive the “betrayal of 1931,” and in the next few months he spent much of his time in attempts to rebuild the local organization.
His first political activism had been local when in 1930 he was involved in organizing a branch of the Labour Party in Firle, and he planned to be active on behalf of the party in the nearby villages. He found it unexpectedly difficult to recruit new members from among the farm laborers. They were terrified of losing their jobs and therefore reluctant to declare themselves openly. This was not so unreasonable a fear in the 1930s, a time when jobs were scarce, poverty widespread, and landowners for the most part Tories, although Julian felt that it was not based on “anything more than a general nervousness—I’ve not yet been told of anything specific.” In 1932, he made the center of his operations the little village of Glynde, a few miles from Charleston. (It was to come into international prominence in the summer of 1934 on the inauguration of an annual season of opera at the nearby country house, Glyndebourne.) In February, at a meeting in Glynde at which eight people were present, he was made secretary of the local Labour organization. “The people are nice,” he wrote to Lettice, “and seem ready to treat me as an ordinary human being—tho I’m still horribly shy of them.” Four days later he was able to report that he had succeeded in winning over the local publican, which was a great coup. He also got into a fight with the greatest landlord of the area, Lord Gage, who was also the owner of Charleston, from whom Julian’s mother rented. In a letter to Lettice postmarked January 20, 1932, he wrote: “It’s been a most exciting day, for local politics have been getting almost too much for me. My notion of writing to Lord Gage has produced a muddled, but quite satisfactory, letter from him, but also a visit to my friend Swain the shepherd, which has frightened him out of his wits, and scared me a good deal for it would be too bloody to get him turned out of his job.” He entered into a correspondence with Lord Gage, accusing him of victimizing his tenants because of their political beliefs, an accusation that his Lordship vehemently denied.37 He continued to pursue his local organizing. In March he reported that the “meeting was a great success—the membership increased. Everyone seeming very friendly and cheerful.” Yet enthusiasm for politics on this level was difficult to sustain: “I’m rather ‘on the shrink’ over my various commitments to an active life,” he reported, and “Local politics have been getting almost too much for me.”
His strongest commitments continued to be given to an intellectual life—although he was “thoroughly distrustful” of his abilities to lead one—to Cambridge, to Pope, to poetry, to philosophy, to political theory. The experience of practical politics, canvassing, gingering up the small Labour group in Glynde, would not issue any practical result: it was fairly clear that he hadn’t time or temperament to become a figure in local politics, or to get himself adopted as a candidate for Parliament in a constituency. But it had been instructive: “I shall anyway be able to feel practical and effectively revolutionary at Cambridge,” he wrote to Lettice. His satire “Arms and the Man” was published in New Signatures that winter. We have already described it at some length in a literary context: here we would note only how directly it deals with poverty and unemployment, with disarmament and pacifism; in short, with the significant political themes of the 1930s. The problem of poverty was a more or less obligatory and formal concern for him. He would never respond to it with the intellectual excitement and imaginative identification that he brought to the problem of war. From the war games of early childhood until his death in the battle of Brunete, war was in many ways the abiding concern of his life, suppressed as it might have been at times. In the early 1930s he adopted a strongly antiwar position: the folly of 1914–1918 must not be allowed to recur. In this he was at one with his generation. Then, as the threat of Hitler became increasingly serious, his attitude changed, and was crystallized with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Again he was like many of his generation. This was a crucial moment in the history of the 1930s, when young men on the Left abandoned their antiwar position, and some among them crossed the frontier into Spain. In the late 1920s, when Julian had been an undergraduate, “no one” at the universities had seemed to care very much about politics; then, as it were overnight, with the coming of the new decade, the situation was reversed, and “everyone” was political, arranged on a spectrum from Left of center to furthest Left. On February 9, 1933, when the Oxford Union passed a resolution “That this House in no circumstances will fight for King and Country,” it was expressing largely a political rather than a pacifist objection to war. The members of the Union had not gone over in a body to conscientious objection. But the resolution was dramatic enough to attract national and even international notice, and it suggested that Oxford was seething with political activity and disaffection. In fact, this was more the case at Cambridge. Student leaders like John Cornford went about their political business very seriously. The old “extraordinary douceur de vivre” of a few years back was quite gone, and Julian felt at times that he was the only non-Communist remaining in Cambridge, so quickly and completely had the atmosphere changed. Of course, there were still plenty of “ordinary” Cambridge undergraduates as well as “hearties” on the Right, but it was those on the Left who set the dominant tone. Conflicting political beliefs too intensely adhered to almost brought about the cessation of the Apostles, some of whom had gone communist—either publicly or in cases such as Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, close friends of Julian’s, secretly. Quite a few of the leading intellectual lights at Cambridge belonged to the Communist Party. Julian particularly regretted this; so too did Keynes, whose biographer records: “He could not but observe the tendency towards Communism among the young at Cambridge, and most markedly among the choice spirits, those whom thirty years before he would have wished to consider for membership in ‘the Society.’ He attributed it to a recrudescence of the strain of Puritanism in our blood, the zest to adopt a painful solution because of its painfulness. But he found it depressing.”38 Politics came first, and social life, from the rarefied level of Apostolic Saturday evenings to the more ordinary level of the sherry or dinner party, disintegrated. Julian regretted the lost douceur de vivre; at the same time, he approved of the change in the political temperature. Although he never committed himself very far in a Marxist, and certainly not in a communist direction, he did participate to some extent in Left-wing activities in Cambridge itself, most particularly in 1933, the last year when he would be there with any regularity and when the course of political thought, spurred on by the advent of Hitler, was veering leftwards almost at a dizzying rate, as reflected in a letter to Lettice postmarked September 23:
I’ve really changed a good deal in your direction since I knew you—for instance, I’m becoming a good deal more sympathetic to science and scientists than I used to be which is certainly a thoroughly good thing. I supposed its considering communism that has brought home to me the way in which you are reasonable by instinct. . . . The odd way in which you seem both impervious to and respectful of romanticism—which I dread as a vice. For instance, I believe you really are most [word missing] about things like intimacy and affection (and copulation; I’m talking about love now). As far as I know you’ve never fallen helplessly in love with someone you don’t know, or hardly know—as I have done, and suppose shall do.
November saw the climax of these activities, and if one were in search of a date to establish when many of the younger people at Cambridge turned Left, a good choice would be Saturday, November 11, 1933. On that day, under the leadership of John Cornford and his friends, a variety of organizations ranging from pacifists to Communists joined forces, in a manner that suggests the later Popular Front, and staged a massive antiwar demonstration in Cambridge. Julian was enthusiastically in the midst of it. His attitude in these matters reveals a fine, parochial inconsistency: he was willing to support causes in Cambridge that he would not support nationally; he would repudiate the activities of the extreme Left in the world at large at the same time that he was participating in its activities at his University. (In this respect he was not untypical.)
For instance, at the beginning of 1933, a friend in London asked him to support the British Anti-War Council: “We hope very much that you’ll be able to give your name.” Julian refused; he felt that the organization was dominated by Communists. His friend replied tartly, “I rather suspected that for party reasons you’d be unable to oppose war.” Yet he was not at all reluctant to work for Cambridge organizations that had precisely the same aims, and with no fewer Communists at their head. He and Lettice were active in arranging a “No More War” exhibit, which was put on display in Cambridge early in November. It was an assemblage of photographs, documents, and posters that followed the preparations leading to the First World War. It contrasted the idealizations of propaganda with the realities of battle, touched on the disillusionment of the war’s aftermath, and concluded with a prophetic look at preparations for the next war. Concurrently, a jingoist film, Our Fighting Navy, was scheduled for a local cinema, and Julian and Lettice were part of an antiwar group who went to protest against the showing. A crowd of “hearties,” out to get those they considered effete and cowardly, gathered in the street to “rag the cads,” and there was a brawl. “Quite a decent amount of fighting,” Julian reported to his brother, and although the antiwar group got the worst of it, “the reactionaries smashed up some of the cinema, and the management lost their nerve and took the film off,” so the protest had achieved its purpose. But the climactic event was the great antiwar demonstration of November II. Armistice Day itself, since the inauguration of Earl Haig’s Poppy Fund, had become the occasion of pranks and parades intended to raise money for the fund. The Socialist Society and the Student Christian Movement joined forces to make the day more meaningful. There was to be a three-mile march through the town to the Cambridge war memorial, where a wreath would be placed bearing the inscription, “To the victims of the Great War, from those who are determined to prevent similar crimes of imperialism.” The words “of imperialism” were removed by order of the police, who felt “they were not conducive to maintaining the public peace.” Even so, the day was tumultuous. Hundreds of students joined the procession through the town; among them, rather more conspicuous than most, was Julian. Nothing would please him more than to be a soldier for peace, and he had prepared for the demonstration with military efficiency. His beaten-up Morris car, in which he had terrified his friends and deeply worried his mother as he drove it along the roads of Cambridgeshire, he now attempted to transform into a military vehicle. “I tried to use the Morris as an armoured car (stript of everything breakable),” he wrote to Quentin. The armor of the car was mattresses, and his navigator was Guy Burgess, at that point a research student at Trinity. They entered the line of march, and as they moved slowly and conspicuously along, they were a tempting target for tomatoes, and got well pelted. But they made a couple of good charges at the enemy—“hearties” again, attempting to break up the parade—before they were ordered out by the police. Julian merely changed his tactics, driving round through a circuitous route and rejoining the march towards its head. His letter to Quentin concludes: “There was one good fight, which I missed, when they stole our banner and gave a man a concession [sic], until the police used their batons. However, we managed to beat them in the end, and get our wreath on the War Memorial. Now we’re having newspaper news [?] all round and doing leaflets and pamphlets and so on. . . . There’s no real fascism here yet—only toughs and Tories. I’m going to learn ju-jitsu. . . . The whole world, private and public, seems to be upside down. I feel rather like going Bolshy.”39
He also coauthored a pamphlet about the antiwar movement in Cambridge with, of all people, Harry Kemp, no matter what his feelings were about him as a fellow lover of Lettice’s. The text was written on behalf of various organizations, “the Student Christian Movement and other Christian groups, the League of Nations Union, Radicals, members of the Labour Party, the I.L.P. [Independent Labour Party] and the Communists . . . an united front against war.” It pointed out that “The fight of students in England must be directed against the war plans of the National Government, against war preparations in the universities, against the banning of free criticism of the O.T.C. [Officer Training Corp], and the suppression of the October Club by the authorities in Oxford, against the victimisation of individual students.”40
All this was tremendously exciting, and Julian loved being in the thick of things. It appealed to the romantic and violent aspect of his character—how much fun it was to be using the Morris as a sort of battering ram—and he exulted quite unthinkingly in what he felt. But almost at once the curb was applied: it was not enough to feel; one must also think, clearly and rationally; one must understand. Thus, it was an effort as much at clarification for himself as to communicate to others that he wrote, less than a month after the excitements of Armistice Day, a remarkable letter to the New Statesman and Nation, in which he described the political situation at Cambridge:
In the Cambridge that I first knew, in 1929 and 1930, the central subject of ordinary intelligent conversation was poetry. As far as I can remember we hardly ever talked or thought about politics. For one thing, we almost all of us had implicit confidence in Maynard Keynes’s rosy prophecies of continually increasing capitalist prosperity. Only the secondary problems, such as birth control, seemed to need the intervention of intellectuals. By the end of 1933, we have arrived at a situation in which almost the only subject of discussion is contemporary politics, and in which a very large majority of the more intelligent undergraduates are Communists, or almost Communists. As far as an interest in literature continues it has very largely changed its character, and become an ally of Communism under the influence of Mr Auden’s Oxford Group. Indeed, it might, with some plausibility, be argued that Communism in England is at present very largely a literary phenomenon—an attempt of a second “post-war generation” to escape from the Waste Land.
Certainly it would be a mistake to take it too seriously, or to neglect the very large element of rather neurotic personal Salvationism in our brand of Communism. It is only too easy to point to the remarkable resemblances between Communism and Buchmanism, the way in which both are used to satisfy the need of some individuals for communion with a group, and the need for some outlet for enthusiasm. Our generation seems to be repeating the experience of Rupert Brooke’s, the appearance of a need for “the moral equivalent of war” among a large number of the members of the leisured and educated classes. And Communism provides the activity, the sense of common effort, and something of the hysteria of war.
But this is only one side of the picture. If Communism makes many of its converts among the “emotionals,” it appeals almost as strongly to minds a great deal harder. It is not so much that we are all Socialists now as that we are all Marxists now. The burning questions for us are questions of tactics and method, and of our own place in a Socialist State and a Socialist revolution. It would be difficult to find anyone of any intellectual pretensions who would not accept the general Marxist analysis of the present crises. There is a general feeling, which perhaps has something to do with the prevalent hysterical enthusiasm, that we are personally and individually involved in the crisis, and that our business is rather to find the least evil course of action that will solve our immediate problems than to argue about rival Utopias.41
The enthusiasm he felt in November waned quickly. What Julian thrived on was a mixture of high principles and the conversation of intimate friends—the Apostolic formula—and he found not enough of either in any particular political movement. The following January he attended a conference of Socialist Societies in London. “A thoroughly bad show,” he wrote Lettice,
all details and reports, no real debate on principles and too large for effective discussion. I dare say I shall go and hunger-march as an unemployed student—more likely not. It made me ill and livid and depressed—the sillier sort of communists, particularly the rather scrawny, provincial university ones, are not over-sympathetic. I can’t get clearly fixed in my own attitude—I don’t like either side, but probably one’s got to choose sides. . . . I’m coming to believe that there is just a possibility of a civil war, and without its being too destructive—tho’ its bound to be pretty beastly, and all the things one has cared for in the world will get smashed in the process. I do get annoyed with optimists and enthusiasts and people who get mystical about “the workers” as if having a simple situation and a beastly life were really any advantage.
His feelings about communism were compounded of admiration and suspicion. While he was ready to declare “We are all Marxists now,” he considered communism a “dismal religion” and did not enjoy reading Das Kapital, if indeed he ever got through it—not that not reading it was any bar to being a good communist. But he felt the Marxian analysis to be scientific, and clear, and rational: values he had been trained to rate highly. A Cambridge graduate wrote to the New Statesman after Julian’s letter was published there to ask in what sense it was accurate to describe undergraduates as “all Marxists now.” He answered that they accepted the Marxist explanation for the appalling state in which the world found itself, bankrupt and threatened by war; that the financial slump had resulted, not from the machinations of wicked bankers and financiers but from the nature of capitalism itself; and that the major cause of war was the contest for new markets between rival imperialisms. “It’s really cheering,” a friend on the far Left wrote to him after reading these public letters, “to see you coming out in a shirt dyed a deeper tint of red at last. I’d been expecting it for a long time: ever since, in fact, you said to me that you saw no point in being a Social-Democrat outside one’s own country.” But Julian was not likely to become a communicant of the “dismal religion.” He was prepared to accept the Marxist analysis; it did not follow that he must accept the communist solution. He was extremely distrustful of commitment for the wrong reason—that is, to become a communist romantically, in a swirl of emotion and muddled thought. Analysis proved that his own way of life, the Bloomsbury way, which he valued dearly and which was based on capitalism, was doomed to disappear. Yet he had no wish to accelerate its disappearance. His position was rather like St. Augustine’s before conversion: “Make me chaste, Lord, but not yet.” Keynesian theories and the pragmatic experiments of Roosevelt’s New Deal might temporarily patch up the fabric. “It looks as if capitalism was going to weather this slump,” he wrote to Lehmann, “even if the Americans do get themselves socialized by mistake. Personally, I shan’t be sorry to have a few more years on an independent income of sorts—largely consisting of gambling gains on the New York stock exchange at present. At least until I finish Pope and get a job.” This was the candid, unromantic, hardheaded side of himself that he enjoyed exhibiting; at the same time, he was troubled by his lack of involvement: “I feel envious of groups and communities and horrified at the isolation of human beings.” When black moods of this sort came upon him, he was unquestionably drawn to the Communist Party, and in a set of prose reflections that he wrote at about this time (but never published)—“To My Bourgeois Friends in the Communist Party”—he conceded: “No doubt there are emotional satisfactions; the beloved group; fools gold and ignis fatuus of enthusiasm and flags, and the satisfactions of war—a war of attrition under second-rate generals. And no doubt there is an argument—even apart from Marx there is an argument—and no doubt there is righteous indignation against poverty. And finally, and most importantly, you are in an infernal tangle: you can’t deal with your own emotions nor with the world outside you.” But he also recognized that the bourgeois communist, unless capable of an absolute commitment, would “always be out of the beloved group, rather suspect and irretrievably different”; so the search for an alternative position of his own to which he could commit himself without reservation continued—but inconclusively. “I can’t, can’t get clear about politics,” he wrote to Lehmann in the spring of 1934. “Again, there’s an emotional contradiction, or set of contradictions. I’m Left by tradition, and I’m an intellectual of the governing classes by tradition, and I can neither quite make up my mind to trying to get an economically intelligent Roosevelt ‘Social Fascism,’ nor give way to ‘the Party’ with its fanatical war mentality.”42
He had had an interesting exchange with John Cornford, the leading young Communist in Cambridge, who would also die in Spain. Younger than Julian, he was very much the next generation, the political activist rather than of the sort, such as Julian, who moved to an extent from aestheticism to activism. The exchange appeared in Student Vanguard, a Communist publication founded by students at the London School of Economics, where John had studied before coming to Trinity College, Cambridge. In the December 1933 issue he wrote a sweeping attack on modern writers—Yeats, Pound, Lawrence, Eliot, Proust, Rilke, Mann—for not being sufficiently willing to be renegades against their class, for not recognizing that it is impossible for the artist to be impartial. In the next issue, of January 1934, Julian replied, disagreeing that those attacked by Cornford are “static” writers in contrast to “dynamic” writers who have committed themselves to revolution, such as Ernest Toller and Louis Aragon. For Julian, “dynamic” is a term that could just as much be applied to fascist writers. He accuses Cornford of demanding that artists, whether a bourgeois like Auden or a proletarian like Lawrence, extract themselves from the “historical process.” He questions whether one can be both an artist and a revolutionary, although he also reveals how he himself is moving to the Left.
It is certainly desirable that anyone with abilities for doing so should take part in the revolutionary movement, but it is highly improbable that anyone who does so will have time and energy enough to carry out a literary revolution at the same moment. For if poetry and imaginative literature are to be directly used in the struggle, and there is no very good reason that they should be—the most far-reaching reforms are necessary—reforms which practically amount to a return to classicism and the development of a new plain style. . . . What is needed at the moment is clear thinking and the clearing away of muddles—an intellectual counter-attack by the scientifically-minded on the mistakes and deceits of fascism and reaction. An appeal to emotion and “dynamic” revolutionary feelings is simply opening the way to intellectual fascism.
Cornford replied to “Comrade Bell,” a salutation that probably didn’t particularly please Julian. He points out that he did not use the term “static.” He does, however, somewhat misstate Julian’s argument. He does not deny that artists are shaped by their class, and he does feel that their writing might form part of the class struggle. Where they disagree is that for Julian that participation is coincidental, not central to art, while for Cornford it is the essential point, and to take an active role in the struggle writers must break from their old ways. In his view, the only solution is a working-class literature. He sees some young poets (unnamed) as groping towards this development. “The inherent contradiction of this position of a revolutionary literature written for the bourgeois intelligentsia daily hastens the process of differentiation between two literatures, the disintegrating tradition of the bourgeoisie, or the gathering strength of revolutionary art.”43
Julian was very much at loose ends at this time, not having found a real career, living in London and loving in Cambridge. There was some talk of going into advertising, or perhaps something connected with the League of Nations that would involve making speeches against war. In a way, it was a crisis in his life; it was quite unclear what direction he would take. Three years before, he thought that he would never live in London. He wrote to his good friend and King’s contemporary Harold Barger at the end of 1929 while visiting his family in Gordon Square:
I shall do my very best not to be in London again until next winter, if not for the rest of my life. . . . The truth of the matter is, I’m a complete exile and outsider here & don’t fit into the life. I’m bad at doing everything from dressing to dancing. I’m made slightly ill and very miserable by lack of exercise, and become so wretched I take no trouble to put matters right. I don’t in the least know what I shall do when I have to make a living here. I suppose in rooms of ones own, with a properly organized life, people to see and someone to sleep with it might be just endurable. After all, I remind myself, Cambridge was pretty bloody to begin with. Still, it was never so ghastly as this, and matters did seem to improve there.44
Despite his doubts and perhaps as he couldn’t think of an alternative, by the end of 1933 he had taken a room in Taviton Street in Bloomsbury. So rather reluctantly that was now his base, as in a rather desultory fashion he looked for some sort of employment, perhaps in advertising, films, or teaching in a girls’ school. He also was considering learning how to fly, preferably a military airplane. And then, as we shall see, he concentrated on the possibility of teaching abroad, most likely in the Far East, a not unfamiliar pattern for literary Englishmen of his sort. As he mentioned to Quentin at this time, which perhaps brought the idea to his attention, “The present professor of English at Canton has been found at Hong Kong, without his head, but in a trunk. So there may be a vacancy. I hope not too soon, for I want to try out London first.”45 He was writing, becoming in some sense a journeyman of letters, some projects being achieved, others not. He was twenty-six; he had no definite place in life, in society, and he was not at all sure, now that he had not been made a Fellow of King’s, of what he wanted to do. He felt his poetic commitment was not strong enough for him to be a poet; he now saw himself, sadly, as someone who merely happened to write poems. In a letter to his mother, in which he remarked that at the moment all his young women seemed to have left him, he added that it was not this that was making him unhappy but “the trouble of finding some serious occupation. I don’t seem able to write poetry—that’s obviously not going to be a reliable thing for me; I seem to have been able to at moments only, not all through my life.”
John Lehmann, who had given up his job with the Hogarth Press to write, and was spending much of his time in Vienna, suggested: “Why not travel for a bit, or do something entirely different—a foreign correspondent say—before you make up your mind?” But in Julian’s present irresolute state he was not capable of the decisiveness such a gesture would have required, even if it had appealed to him. His family was in London, as were many of his close friends—Eddie Playfair was a civil servant in the Treasury—and he had no reason to linger in Cambridge. A new thought was that he might try to become a lecturer at the University of London: “It sounds a heavenly job,” he wrote to Lettice, “decently short hours and amusing work. Unfortunately I’ve no notion of their having a vacancy.” Nor is there any indication that he ever pursued such a position. He found that the various odd bits of journalism that came his way were enough, with his small private income, to support him and allow him to lead, if not a satisfactory life at least an interesting one.
He did reviews for the New Statesman; he worked on his proposed edition of Pope, and also an edition of Mallarmé in translation, continuing the work that Roger Fry had started with Charles Mauron and that Julian had helped finish after Fry’s death in 1934. He had already, with Mauron, published a translation of Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre in the Cambridge Review.46 Fry’s translations of twenty-five poems by Mallarmé, with the commentaries by Mauron, including the French texts, finally appeared in June 1936, when Julian was already in China. It had a very brief editorial note by Mauron and Julian; he had translated nine of the twenty-seven commentaries, while the others had been translated previously by Fry. The project had taken a very long time to finish. Fry had written most of his translations by 1920 but continued to tinker with them until 1933, when devastatingly, his suitcase containing the manuscript was stolen in a Paris railroad station. Shortly thereafter with Mauron he reconstructed many of the translations and also incorporated commentaries that Mauron had written. After Fry’s death, Mauron wrote to Julian suggesting that Julian work with him to complete the project: “You know that the Mallarmé planned by Roger and me was almost finished. The translation of the poems is almost completed and we finished it with the help of your suggestions. . . . I would be very happy if you agreed to help me finish this book. It seems that Roger has worked so much on the poems that he would be very happy to see them finally published.”47 Mallarmé is notoriously difficult to translate, and Fry’s tended too much towards the literal. Mauron mentions in his introduction that Fry had told him that Julian in fact had made suggestions of certain turns of phrase.48 Julian had volunteered to see the project through, but actually getting the book published required complicated correspondence with Margery Fry, Roger’s eminent sister, who eventually subsidized its printing. For months, Julian doggedly and loyally pursued publishers: Faber & Faber, the Cresset Press, Cambridge University Press, the Nonesuch (which suggested Hogarth—a logical choice, but somehow it wasn’t part of the loop). It was finally published by Chatto & Windus.
He wrote poems, and drafts of essays. But all this activity, though it kept him occupied and distracted, was too marginal and haphazard to satisfy him that he had embarked on a career. His discontent deepened: the important work of the generation was being done by others. One of the poems he wrote in this period is the lightly ironic “Cambridge Revisited”:
Down by the bridge the lovers walk,
Above the leaves there rolls the talk
Of lighted rooms. Across the lawn
Clare’s greyness prophesies the dawn.
River and grass and classic weight,
As if the Fellows meditate
Socratically, the masculine
Beauty of th’ athletic line,
Squared brow or pediment, and look
For Greek ghosts out of Rupert Brooke.
Grey stone, slow river, heavy trees,
I once had my share of these;
But now, within the central wood,
I neglect the wise and good:
And London smoke, and middle age,
Open on a grimier page.
The irony is double-edged, turned as much against Julian in his nostalgic “middle age” as against the meditative dons. But there is no comic overemphasis in the final line: “a grimier page” does go directly to the point of what Julian felt about London. He wrote to Lehmann, “I’m being more or less miserable here: poverty & chastity and the other horrors of large towns.”49 The first complaint, poverty, needn’t be taken too seriously; the second was somewhat realer now that he was living in London. As he wrote to his brother in early 1934: “I hate chastity, and I only see Lettice at weekends. I wish I had your or Clive’s techniques and accomplishments.”50
Although he was now spending more time in London, his emotional life was still Cambridge-based. He was becoming increasingly involved with Lettice’s friends, the Marxist/scientific circle centered on the great crystallographer J. D. Bernal. Bernal’s own personal life was famously complicated, and he lived both with his wife, Eileen, who became very close to Julian, as well as Margaret Gardiner, with whom he had a son, Martin. Another close friend of Lettice’s was the biologist Antoinette Pirie, who became very well known for her work on the biochemistry of the eye. She was Julian’s fourth serious affair, but he was also sleeping with others. (Their correspondence hasn’t, as far as I know, survived.) Born in 1905, she had been to Newnham as an undergraduate and had a doctorate as well. She was married to an equally distinguished biologist, Norman “Bill” Pirie, with whom she had two children. Domesticity did not seem to preclude a complicated love life for these liberated young women, not that they were exempt from emotional travails. Writing to Lettice from China in May 1936, Julian remarked: “I hear from Tony that you, she and Eileen are spending the summer holiday together. I shall be amused to hear how you get on. Very well, I expect, but it is a slightly comic situation somehow. The nuns of Medenham, so to speak. I suppose you’ll end up by having your young men down.” The previous May he was writing to his mother about Tony: “She’s much happier and less nervous now, and no longer gets into panics about her husband which is the greatest relief. Indeed, things have never gone so well—if only I would see rather more of her.” In his next letter, he remarked about her, “If there’s ever any danger of your being presented with a daughter-in-law I shall send you a long letter by air mail before doing anything.”51 Over the next two years, she replaced Lettice as the most important woman in his life, but even then his commitment had its limitations. On the boat to China he wrote to his mother, on October 13, 1935, “I’ve found I’m far more in love with Tony than I had supposed.” But three days later, while wondering whether he would find a Chinese mistress, he remarked: “Do you really like Tony? She’s the best of my young women so far, but I don’t know that she’s your daughter-in-law. . . . They [his young women] have been an odd lot. But then Bloomsbury doesn’t produce enough daughters, so what’s one to do?”52
Lettice was still extremely important to him, it would appear, as a sometime lover but also very much as a confidant. In the letters he wrote to her one has a picture of his life in the summer and fall of 1934 in its personal dimension. The first of the series is postmarked June 19, 1934, and it begins with his statement about taking a teaching job in China. “Still, it might be just as well, if it weren’t for Tony, who I think I keep reasonably happy, and who perhaps doesn’t care unduly—at least I feel I probably care at least as much as she does, and that there’s no particular disaster impending there.” Some months later, on October 19, 1934, Lettice wrote to him:
I wish I agreed with you that friendship is better than love. I want to be in love with someone & unfortunately it seems to matter whether that person is in love with me. Being in love with someone who is not in love with you is bad for one’s pride—I suppose that is why it hurts. John Burton [the undergraduate photographer living in her house] is very friendly & we get on extremely well & he is good company & I like going to bed with him but, alas, he is not in love with me, & I am with him. This does not make the situation intolerable but difficult at times.
Despite the frankness of their letters, Julian’s apparently still have some reticences. He wrote in November: “Would you do something perfectly angelic for me—steal some French letters—only a few—from the clinic. At least, I say steal, but I think I could to send a cheque to the Cambridge clinic for services rendered. But I do dislike the business of buying the things, and every now and then there are situations in which they are essential. And talking of such matters, I’ll give you five—ten—twenty guesses as to who I’ve been to bed with recently. Someone you know, but I feel sure wont guess. But this is really for you alone.” He kept reporting to Lettice on his relations with Tony. In March 1935 he wrote to her: “God only knows how it will end—divorce and marriage as like as not. If I were braver, or stupider, that’s what I should try for. Certainly Tony’s very much the sort of person I want to marry—but I dont want to marry anyone, really. . . . I’m pretty bored with neat sex—I should like some war for a change. Of course, human beings—you, and Tony—are quite another matter, and infinitely preferable to all other attractions.” In April he and Tony went to France together. “It seems to have made Tony far happier and less nerve-racked and more generally sensible.” The idea of marrying Tony was still in the air. He wrote to Lettice in June:
She’s obviously going to stay married to Bill. . . . We get on admirably together—I’ve never known anyone quite so honest, so ready to put all her cards on the table. She’s interesting to talk to as well—perhaps I’ve still a rather exaggerated respect for the intelligence of anyone who does an experimental science, but at least she has both the curiosity about the world and the sort of directness of mind one hopes for in a scientist. Altogether I suppose I’m rather more serious about her myself than I should be. Particularly since she’s physically entrancing. If only I were younger—as young as I was with Helen. But unfortunately I’m not. So that I begin to get a little bored by the minor details of a very amusing life. . . . There’s no longer the same world-shattering importance about romantic love and romantic passions that there used to be nor indeed about most emotions and experiences. . . . So, I should like to be eighteen again, I think, and feel I had everything to learn and everything mattered.”
This was very much a between period in his love life, in his professional life, and in his life in London, in view of his comparative discomfort there. The “horrors of large towns” were real to him: he had been unhappy in Paris, and he was unhappy in London; in both cases unhappiness sent him to writing poems. There was some talk that he might succeed David Garnett as literary editor of the New Statesman should Garnett leave, but Garnett didn’t think he would get on with the editor, Kingsley Martin.53 Leonard raised the possibility of his doing some writing for the New Fabian Research Bureau, but nothing seemed to come of that. He went to some meetings of socialist students at Marx House on Clerkenwell Green in London and found them very boring. Nevertheless, he appeared as cheerful and as exuberant as ever. That was one side of it. The depression came out in the poetry—which, for the first time, was autobiographical and personal and pervasively melancholy—and sometimes in moody, confessional letters. These tended to be exaggerated, as he himself saw: once, having written in a black mood to Lettice, he drew back and concluded, “Really I lead, I suppose, an unusually sheltered and happy life, and all my miseries are vicarious.” But that also was an exaggeration.
One poem concludes:
The world will slowly make us tame,
And events as they pass provide Some
object to the game.
These lines might serve as the epigraph for the period in Julian’s life which we are now describing: from the winter, when he came to London, to the summer of 1935, when he went out to China. He allowed himself to appear tamed: he did his various odd jobs, talked politics with friends, alternated between London and Charleston and Cassis, had affairs, and published a few poems and book reviews. That was the surface. His interior life of ideas and feelings was much more turbulent and eventful. Unable to commit himself to his own satisfaction to poetry, or to politics, or to love, he engaged in a kind of strategic retreat, a withdrawal to regather his forces, while he waited for events to provide “Some object to the game.”
In politics—indeed, in all aspects of his life—he became a party of one. He wanted to be, as his grandfather Sir Leslie Stephen had proposed a young man should be, “a partisan of the ideas struggling to remould the ancient order and raise the aspirations of mankind,”54 but he would have to be so in his own fashion. “For my own part,” he wrote, “I am proposing to turn myself into a man of action, cultivate my tastes for war and intrigue, conceivably even for town-planning and machines, and, generally for organizing things and run ning the world. As for poetry, I shall write it more for my own satisfaction, to please my friends or flatter a mistress, and not bother about ‘the public.’ ” The quotation is taken from “To My Friends in the Communist Party,” one of several essays he wrote during his London period but never published. Titles of this sort were very fashionable. The sequel to New Signatures, New Country (1933), in which Julian did not appear—nor Empson nor Eberhart—included “Letter to a Young Revolutionary” by Day Lewis; “Letter to the Intelligentsia” by Charles Madge; and Auden’s “A Communist to Others.” Julian had earlier written “To My Bourgeois Friends in the Communist Party.” It was the great age of the open letter and the manifesto. But the most remarkable example was Auden’s “Letter to a Wound” in The Orators.
In the autumn of 1933 he had been resolutely antiwar; now his attitude underwent a series of significant modifications. David Garnett, looking about for things for him to do, had arranged for him to edit a book of memoirs by British conscientious objectors during the First World War. Cobden-Sanderson, the publisher, would pay him £20 and a 5 percent royalty after the expenses were met. The book, We Did Not Fight, published in 1935, consisted of eighteen short autobiographical essays; a poem by Siegfried Sassoon; a foreword by Canon “Dick” Sheppard, the leader of the Peace Pledge Union; and an introduction by the editor. Among the contributors were Garnett himself; Bertrand Russell; Julian’s uncle, Adrian Stephen; Sir Norman Angell; Harry Pollitt, the foremost British Communist; and James Maxton, the leader of the Independent Labour Party. The discordant note in the collection was Julian’s introduction, which dealt with questions of war and peace in a paradoxical way that must have given his elders to pause. He imagined himself to be modernizing pacifism; actually, he was making one of the first steps towards resolving a crucial dilemma of the 1930s: how to oppose both war and Hitler. He was aware of the immense pacifist sentiment abroad at the time he was writing—1934—and he cited the evidence of the Oxford Resolution and the Peace Pledge Union, maintaining that the sixteen thousand conscientious objectors of 1914–1918 had now become the twelve million signers of the Peace Ballot of 1934. But he added quite sensibly that when it came to the test, probably very few of those twelve million would prove to be absolute pacifists—nor did he think this regrettable. While he had only praise for the courage of being conscientious objectors during the First World War and commended pacifists for the independence of their thought, he doubted whether absolute pacifism was appropriate to the situation of the 1930s: “I do not think there is likely to be much chance of the absolutist conscientious objector again becoming an important figure in a campaign of war resistance.” From his stance of the unsentimental realist, he looked coldly at the individual gesture, no matter how sincerely inspired, that gained no practical result. He felt that the modern pacifist who genuinely wished to oppose war must do so actively rather than in the traditional passive style. The solution was not as in the past to opt out of a society committed to war—that contest of rival imperialisms—but to try to change society. “The most active and ardent war resisters—at least among my own generation, those of military age—are more likely to take the line of revolutionary action than conscientious objection.” By a kind of semantic sleight of hand he blurred the distinctions between war resistance and pacifism, conjuring up a movement that conformed to his own prescription: practical, potentially revolutionary, determined “to bring down, by hook or by crook, any government and any governing class that dares to make war.” In the last sentence of the introduction he completed his modernization of pacifism with a militant paradox that reveals how far he had traveled from the attitudes of his parents and their friends: “I believe that the war resistance movements of my generation will in the end succeed in putting down war,” he declared “—by force if necessary.”55
This was relatively restrained. As the editor of a collection of memoirs by pacifists of the older generation, he had had to proceed diplomatically. But in an unpublished paper which he wrote at this time, “The Labour Party and War,” he took a much stronger antipacifist line: “It is not any more virtuous to hate being killed than to wish to die on the field of battle. . . . It needs courage to say ‘I am a Socialist, and I am willing to fight for the peace of Europe.’ ” He felt certain that the conjunction of German nationalism and English pacifism was leading to war. Accordingly, he objected to the propacifist policies of the Labour Party. “So long as the English people remain content to support either Beaverbrook or the Pacifist in the policy of irresponsible isolation there can be no lasting peace. . . . The [Labour] party must once and for all discard negative Pacifism and preach the Positive Pacifism of Pooled Security, Disarmament, and the National control and International inspection of armament firms.”
He was writing in Taviton Street, ostensibly to the Labour Party, or to his Bourgeois Communist Friends, but actually to himself. It was a time of withdrawal, while he waited for events, whatever they might be: manuscripts piled up but were not sent out; he made no effort to translate his ideas into action. In February of that year Leonard Woolf arranged for him to talk with an official of the Labour Party, and the notion was put forward that Julian might have a half-time job drafting party propaganda leaflets; but nothing came of it.
Though he argued for peace and proposed a variety of practical ways to maintain it, war was what fascinated him: civil war, that is, the revolution for socialism; and international war, the struggle against fascism. In 1934 he believed in the possibility of one or the other, or both; in the event of either it would be impossible to stand aside as his elders had done. He had already declared his intention of turning himself into “a man of action.” The difficulty was that he was also an intellectual, a poet and a son of Bloomsbury. He could not deceive himself that war was a “good”: however much it might fascinate him, scruples, doubts, and hesitations intervened.
I’m getting rather obsessed about war [he wrote to Lehmann], with a very ambivalent attitude. All my instincts make me want to be a soldier; all my intelligence is against it. I have rather nightmares of “the masses” trying a rising or a civil war and getting beaten—being wasted on impossible attacks by civilian enthusiasts, or crowds being machine-gunned by aeroplanes in the streets. . . . No doubt it’s better for one’s soul to fight than surrender, but otherwise—. . . One feels that a battlefield’s a nicer place to die than a torture chamber, but probably there’s not really so much difference, and at least fewer people suffer from the terror than would in a war. Oh, I don’t know—personally I’d be for war every time, however hopeless. But that’s only a personal feeling.56
In spite of his ambivalent attitude, he allowed his fascination with war to go unchecked, and it was characteristic of him that having admitted the possibility, or rather inevitability, of war, he should next address himself to the problem of how it ought to be conducted. It was as though the “war game” which had begun when he was a child at Wissett was now to be played with the utmost calculation, sophistication, and inventiveness. It was a game for one player, however: as in other aspects of his life at this time, here he was a party of one.
Although he did a few reviews of military books for the New Statesman in the early months of 1935, his most ambitious efforts, two long essays, “Military Considerations of Socialist Policy” and a study of Michael Collins’s guerrilla tactics in the Irish rebellion, were not published. He was very taken with the idea of trying to think out a successful guerilla war. Ironically, considering what was to come, he proposed to Quentin in February 1935 that they might visit Spain, which he saw as a likely locale for such a war.
I’ve written an article for Left Review on Collins, as a trial balloon for my plan of campaign. Shouldn’t think the oafs will take it tho’: too sensible for them. What a world. The capitalists can’t pay one dividends, and the communists can’t win wars. . . . I have a good mind to visit [Spain] this autumn or summer if I can finish my books and find people to meet. Would there be any chance of your going? I might put in a walk with a mistress first, and then we could see some bulls and see if we couldn’t get into touch with some active and reasonable socialists. After all, it’s a big country, with a shaky govt, guerilla traditions, violent habits—anyway I suppose this is pure fantasy.57
The reviews, written to be read by the public at large, are more straightforward and less venturesome than the essays, yet they are not without point. Perhaps the most interesting review is of the volume devoted to the German March Offensive of 1918 in The Official History of the War. Critical of the stalemate strategy that kept the armies in the trenches, he remarked that “the generals were quite right in thinking that they could avoid losing a decisive battle, but it was, of course, a peculiarly clumsy way of winning a war.” And he went on to advance a favorite theory, that “the only leaders who showed any obvious brilliance were the civilian soldiers, untrained in classic doctrine, acting in open theatres, and unprovided with limitless reserves: Lawrence, Trotsky and Collins.” His conclusion has precisely the note of calculation and sophistication indigenous to the war game: “It will be interesting to see if the present British and German armies, apparently small, highly trained and reasonably mobile, are capable of revising the classic tradition sufficiently to avoid another disastrous and uninteresting deadlock. No doubt it will not be too long before we are allowed to make the experiment.”58
He had an almost obsessive interest in Michael Collins, and for a time even considered writing his biography. But chiefly he wished to discover what could be learned from his career: how a guerrilla war might best be waged in England, if it had to be waged, to achieve some sort of socialist government. It was a goal that mattered to him, albeit in a rather abstract way; but it is hard to resist the impression that he was most deeply engaged by the phenomenon of guerrilla war in itself, about which his ideas were well in advance of most military thinking of the time. A long sketch, in very rough form, survives of some lessons that Julian felt could be gleaned from the campaigns of Collins, beginning with the creation of a private army—in this case socialist, to be led (secretly) by heads of the Labour Party and staffed by middle-class intellectuals and a few token workers. The effect, for all its air of practicality, is oddly surrealistic, as in much of the writing of the period: a wealth of realistic detail is called upon to substantiate a romantic fantasy. It is the tone of Auden’s “Leave for Cape Wrath tonight!” Similarly, there is a period fascination with violence: “Prisoners could be mutilated to prevent further active service: this should be made to appear a reprisal.” And again, “Prisoners are an important source of information: it may be necessary to use torture to extract it”—though he felt constrained to add, “The revolutionaries will on the whole profit by a humane war.” Events taking place at the time that he was writing appeared to confirm his hypotheses. The February fighting in Vienna, the attack on the working-class tenement the Karl Marx House, proved (to his mind) the need for a private army if there was to be any kind of effective socialist resistance. He did not waver from this position: a year later he was writing to Lehmann, who was in Vienna, to ask if he knew of any socialist paper, “legal or illegal,” that might consider publishing his article on Collins. He was convinced that the workers could learn from it “certain military methods and principles which would make all the difference” if they were going to fight again, and he hoped that they would. In his poem “Vienna” he deplored “The useless firing and the weary ends / Of comrades . . . / Who fought well, but too late.” And he asked,
Can we, from that fate
Wring to some foresight,
Or will the same lost fight
Mark too our ends?
He answered by indirection:
War is a game for the whole mind,
An art of will and eye . . .
Of not too much caring;
A game for their playing
Who fall in love with death,
Doubt, and seeping fear
There is an admirable candor about this: it was easy enough, given his longstanding fascination with war, to describe it as “a game for the whole mind”; it was more difficult to acknowledge that it was also “A game for their playing / Who fall in love with death.” The self-confidence and zest with which he recommended the formation of a private army and, in the event of an international war, the resisting of towns, industries, and communications, are somewhat misleading. One gets a more accurate picture of his state of mind from a long letter he wrote to Lehmann at precisely this time:
I don’t mind war as killing, nor as pain, nor utterly as destruction. But it means turning our minds and feelings downwards, growing hard (well, no harm, perhaps) but also savage and stupid and revengeful. You know, the Russians haven’t escaped: spies and suspicion and tyranny, and no jobs if your “class origins” aren’t above suspicion. That’s war—far more than the battlefields, even, tho’ I think I shall live to see the people who talk about “the masses” in peace using those same masses like Haig and Wilson [another First World War British general], until you’ve knocked the heart out of them. For it’s clear that “revolution” is a dream of the nineteenth century: now we shall just have civil war, to the last dregs of modern invention. . . . I want to . . . leave the human race free to sit down to think for a bit. It’s just another “trahison des clercs” to go into the struggle, whipping up enthusiasm and leading it to war. . . . If there must be violence, there must. But let’s be thoroughly cold-blooded and unenthusiastic about it. . . . As you’ll see, I’m not yet clear, and pretty near despair either way. I believe one of the differences in our points of view comes from the circumstances of our private lives. I don’t know at all, but I fancy you don’t hit back when you’re hurt. I do. When one has seen the extent of human beastliness in oneself as well as outside one hesitates to let loose devils. There’s nothing in the world fouler than enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of a fighting group, not even jealousy or suspicion, not even open-eyed causing of misery.59
He was getting himself into a state of some ambiguity about how far Left he was willing to go. He was evolving his own ideas about the current political situation, and their possible solution by some sort of military action, although he recognized its dangers. He had a rather odd mix of ideas, a combination of an almost adolescent fascination with war, reflecting his love of war games, with a steely cast of mind, quite realistic but not totally attractive. He was divided between his older, more liberal ideas and the new sort of realism represented by the communists, particularly as so many of those he knew were moving further to the Left or actually joining the party. But as someone steeped in Bloomsbury sophistication, the enthusiasms of the far Left were deeply uncongenial. On August 10, 1933, he had written to John Lehmann with some exaggeration about the situation in Cambridge: “Everyone except Antony B. and myself is a communist here [of course, in retrospect this was deeply ironic, as Blunt was more communist than anyone else he knew, except for Burgess and Maclean!]. Even Lettice is going to Russia this summer. Not me . . . looking round factories isn’t my idea of a holiday, and I find most communists pretty tiresome.” And in December he wrote again to John, “I’m sorely tempted to join the party, but really it’s too silly and too bad at its job.” Yet later in the year he wrote to his brother, “I find it may be difficult not to be carried away by my feelings and join the communists—all my friends seem to have.”60 He went to Anti-War and Socialist League meetings in London, yet found them dispiriting and ineffectual. And yet his views were changing, if slowly, under his growing interest in military questions. Quite some time later, in February 1935, he wrote to Lettice: “Nothing has ever really cured me of my militarist daydreams, and I hope I shall spend at least a part of my life—even the last part—on battlefields.” His growing interest in military matters is vividly indicated in a review of two books by the two leading British military thinkers of the day, General Fuller and Captain Liddell Hart. The review, however, is primarily devoted to his own ideas about the military, the importance of tank forces and intelligent soldiers to run them.61
He had been disappointed by the reception of Winter Movement; he had not been one of the conspicuously admired contributors to New Signatures. Judged by his own extremely high expectations for himself—one must be distinguished, as were one’s father and mother, aunt and uncle, and their friends—he saw himself as a failure as a poet. (And of course just at this time he had failed at Cambridge.) His solution was to be a poet “at moments only” and to withdraw from the literary game. When New Country appeared, to which he had not contributed, he wrote to John Lehmann, who had, “ ‘I hear dreadful things of New Country, which I’ve asked Bunny for to review.” Lehmann’s reply was ironic and diplomatic, but quite inaccurate in its prophetic aspect: “Amusing that you’ve got New Country to review. Yes, it’s a pretty good mess, & a tombstone for us all, I should think. Don’t be too nasty, I quail, I quake.” But Garnett had already given the book to someone else to review, and so Julian was unable to put an end publicly to his involvement—however tenuous it had been—with Thirties Poetry. Paradoxically, once he had committed himself to being a poet “at moments only,” the poetic impulse revived. He wrote a good deal: from the work of this period he eventually selected thirty-three poems from a larger number for his second book, Work for the Winter. It was published by the Hogarth Press in the spring of 1936, when he had been in China almost a year and was truly “out” of the literary game. The poems are markedly different from those he had written in the past. The campaign for the heroic couplet has been abandoned—neither the “Epistle to Braithwaite” nor “Arms and the Man” are reprinted—and there is no attempt to maintain the impersonality of the early nature-descriptive pieces.
There is, as Lehmann wrote to him, a “new directness and simplicity.” Almost without exception, the poems are drawn from his own experience; they reflect the uncertainties and regrets of his time in London—which is at once their virtue and defect. They have less poetic than autobiographical interest. (Perhaps it should be said that Julian’s claims as a poet are based most firmly upon his early poems. In spite of its occasional successes, Work for the Winter is the traditional disappointing second book: tentative, pointing towards a new direction not yet firmly discerned. But it is not at all a dead end.) Uncertainties and regrets: the elegiac tone prevails throughout.
Shall we not often remember
That summer, flowers, garden,
Shock and flock of white blossoms
—How white snow will thicken the branches—
Dotted and golden in green, in deep green
dancing and burning . . .
But now take stronger tools,
Axe, fire, plough.
Metal sheathed in despairs, winter is fast
come on us.
This is from the title poem, “Work for the Winter,” included in the section “Political Poems.” It is followed by a section of “London Poems”:
So I shall never in verse put down
The wringing horror of this town,
A vision hard to repeat Of a long unhappy street . . .
No help now: this town could do
With some poison gas and a bomb or two.
—“London I”
I want—I don’t want—the not wanting
Leaves the need, but stops the acting,
Nothing worth the winning or saving,
And the narrow life contracting.
—“London II”
Then a section of nine “Love Poems.” The collection was dedicated to “A.P.,” Antoinette Pirie, the woman he was most in love with when he was putting together the collection.
Regret, shake hands, and the dry kiss
Grating too sharply at the past
Snaps short what yet remains of this,
Briefly acknowledged for our last.
—“Coming to an End”
Is this an end
Or is there yet
Waste time to spend,
More to forget?
Is this an end
Of the facile rhyme;
Mistress and friend
How runs the time?
Is this an end
Or must I still
Spiral descend
The westward hill?
—“Finale”
From the section called “Constructions”:
Drive on, sharp wings, and cry above
Not contemplating life or love,
Or war or death: a winter flight
Impartial to our human plight . . .
What useless dream, a hope to wring
Comfort from a migrant wing:
Human or beast, between us set
The incommunicable net.
Parallel, yet separate,
The languages we mistranslate,
And knowledge seems no less absurd
If of a mistress, or a bird.
—“The Redshanks”
His poem “Autobiography” is one of the most impressive examples of his new directness and simplicity. It is an intensely personal poem based upon a crucial conflict in his life that he would never satisfactorily resolve: his emotional commitment to the past against his intellectual commitment to the future, which would almost certainly mean, he thought, the end of all that he valued most. For all his pride in the poem as a poem, he also knew that it was a document, and it was only after he had left Taviton Street, left London, left Charleston, that he was able to make it public. He was reluctant to show the poem even to his mother. It had been written by early 1934, and submitted rashly to Lehmann that spring, and reclaimed, unpublished, in September. More than a year later, on October 13, 1935, from China, he wrote to his mother: “Also, dearest, I’ve found out how much our relationship matters to me. And we both know it. I feel about it rather like Donne going religious after his profane mistresses, except that I can love you without having to believe nonsense. I’ve tried to say a little about you—and about you and Roger [Fry] together—in one of my new poems, the ‘Autobiography.’ It’s not enough nearly, but it’s the only time I’ve come at all near putting it down.”
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I stay myself—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:
And, not among such honoured, marbled, names,
That cavalry ruffian, Hodson of Hodson’s Horse,
Who helped take Delhi, murdered the Moguls;
At least a soldiering brigand: there were worse,
Who built a country house from iron and coal:
Hard-bitten capitalists, if on the whole
They kept the general average of their class.
And then, not breeding but environment,
Leisure without great wealth; people intent
To follow mind, feeling and sense
Where they might lead, and, for the world, content
To let it run along its toppling course.
Humane, just, sensible; with no pretence
To fame, success, or meddling with that world.
And one, my best, with such a calm of mind,
And, I have thought, with clear experience
Of what is felt of waste, confusion, pain,
Faced with a strong good sense, stubborn and plain;
Patient and sensitive, cynic and kind.
The sensuous mind within preoccupied
By lucid vision of form and colour and space,
The careful hand and eye, and where resides
An intellectual landscape’s living face,
Oh certitude of mind and sense, and where
Native I love, and feel accustomed air.
And then the passage of those country years,
A war-time boyhood; 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.
Whatever comes since then, that life appears
Central and certain and undoubted good,
As the known qualities of clay or wood
Live in the finger’s ends, as tool or gun
Come easily to hand as they have done.
Whatever games there now remain to play
Of love or war, of ruin or revolt,
I cannot quite admit that world’s decay
Or undespairing wish it on its way.
For here was good, built though it was, no doubt,
On poverty I could not live without,
Yet none the less, good certain and secure,
And even though I see it not endure,
And though it sinks within the rising tide,
What can for me replace it good or sure?