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PARTISAN REVIEW
who have become the doyens in many academic departments. "That is a
tragedy that has befallen your universities," a journalist from down under
told me not long ago. "Only your mainstream journali sts could help rec–
tify this situation," he went on, "but I keep observing that they're part of
this culture...." What is to be done?
EDITH KURZWEIL
A Child of Bloomsbury
BLOOMSBURY RECALLED. By Quentin Bell.
Columbia University
Press. $24.95
Disputes about who began the Bloomsbury Group may not be easily
settled, but there is one, indisputable relation to it, that of Quentin Bell,
the author of this book who was
born
into Bloomsbury, as was his sister,
Angelica. This special "birthright" privilege enhances their recollections
with an intimacy and filiation not equalled by the comments of observers.
The famous early twentieth-century avant-garde circle, named for a
London district, usually includes Virginia and Leonard Woolf, John
Maynard Keynes, the economist, Duncan Grant, the painter, Clive Bell
and Roger Fry, theorists of the new art,
T.
S. Eliot, the American poet,
Lady Ottoline Morrell, the flamboyant society bohemian, and, centrally
positioned, the painter, mother, lover, Vanessa Bell. As with other circles,
like The Souls or The Coterie, or even more recently , the "New York
intellectuals," size and membership were fluid and disputed.
Bloomsbury was the form Bohemianism took in London before and
after World War I, but the "new life" established in those streets and
squares near the British Museum, and in the Sussex outpost, Charleston,
was swallowed up in World War II. Cultural changes Bloomsbury inau–
gurated can be traced in ideas about personal freedom in social relations,
individual literary and intellectual originality, and even in the decision of
Leonard and Virginia Woolf to found their own publishing house, the
Hogarth Press. Social tolerance, new social movements, new music, new
design, and new thought of every kind were associated wi th Bloomsbury.
Bertrand Russell was close to them, G. E. Moore had been a mentor for
some of the young men at Cambridge, others knew Wittgenstein and
D. H. Lawrence. The Woolfs' Hogarth Press published
T.
S. Eliot's early
poems and
The Waste Lmd.
