Julian Bell

It's an old book, it's a new book; it's the same book, it's a different book. Each of these statements is true. The 1966 Journey to the Frontier: Julian Bell and John Cornford: Their Lives and the 1930s has now become Julian Bell: From Bloomsbury to the Spanish Civil War, Cornford making only a few brief appearances. The original authors, William Abrahams and Peter Stansky, are given as the present authors, though Abrahams died in 1998. But since the trajectory charted (Charleston, Cambridge, London, China, Spain) as well as much of the text of the Bell sections of the 1966 text occur again here, either intact or with only minor adjustments, the book is in fact a shared endeavor, as indeed the authors shared a life together. The joint authorship on the title page affirms this.

Yet this is a new book and one that follows in important ways from Stansky's 1996 On or About December 1910, especially if one takes its subtitle, Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World, as guide. Julian was born into that world in 1908 (although it is Quentin who was born in 1910) and family intimacies, affinities, and friendships emerge more clearly now than they did in 1966. This is especially true for the extraordinary relationship of Julian and his mother, Vanessa Bell. The letters between them, many only now available, carry an intensity that I don't think I've ever encountered in any published family correspondence. Virginia Woolf's comment in her diary the month after Julian's death sums up that relationship: "Julian had some queer power over her—the lover as well as the son. He told her he could never love another woman as he loved her." The letters between them, quoted at some length, bear this out and deepen our understanding of Vanessa and also of Virginia, particularly the bond between the sisters. Certainly some of the account of these relationships was in the earlier volume, but here it is complicated by materials later published or still in archives.

There is also a "now everything can be told" quality to Stansky's narrative. We learn names of lovers, of sexual doings, of who slept with whom. But this is not offered as gossip, as biographical filler, rather as the necessary material for understanding this curious, restless, talented, unfinished but always developing avatar/namesake of the also unfinished Julian Thoby Stephen. The relationship with Anthony Blunt, for example, in the Young Apostle section, nicely complicates our understanding of Cambridge in the early 1930s. Bell's subsequent heterosexual relationships, especially as these, too, are recounted in his letters to his mother, are also part of the Bloomsbury novel that begins to emerge. The narrative of his nearly two years in China closely follows 1966 but it is considerably enlarged and deepened by a much fuller accounting of his relationship with Shuhua Chen, the wife of the Dean of Wuhan University where Bell was teaching. In the earlier book, she is identified only as "K" and so there is nothing of her connections to Bloomsbury after Julian's death. Much of the material here is available in fascinating detail in Patricia Laurence's massive, encyclopedic Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China (2003), but there the emphasis is at least as much on Ling Shuhua, as Laurence calls her, as on Bell and, of course, on the much broader Bloomsbury/China interaction.

Stansky is also very good at showing Bell resisting as well as being a direct exemplar of Bloomsbury ideas, ideals, and habits, and also as one who breaks from these. This complex give and take is certainly present in 1966 but in the revised version Bell's inconsistencies and uncertainties mingled with his opinions and beliefs, which sometimes don't last much beyond their emphatic articulation, frame the narrative and are grounded in the density of the personal details in the letters and diaries that give them a wonderful specificity. His...