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new reflections is that they provide not the familiar admiring and cele–
bratory reports about life in Bloomsbury which others have offered, not
an appraisal of Bloomsbury's value, influence, contribution or signifi–
cance, which has occupied scholars, but, as it were, a child's- eye view -
what it was like to be the child of those parents, the observer of their
friends, those "giants in the earth."
E. M. Forster was one whom the young Quentin observed, and Roger
Fry, "the best of teachers" and Vanessa's lover. Leonard Woolf, married to
Quentin's aunt when Quentin was two years old, was strict, kindly, avun–
cular, less easy-going than the Charleston family, more intellectual and less
aesthetic. A child could perceive this in the difference between the wild
gardens at Charleston and the more rigorously tended gardens at the
Woolfs' house nearby. And a child could sense the cordial enmity between
Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell. It was David ("Bunny") Garnett who
introduced the young Quentin to the world of nature, making biology the
only science he understood.
Quentin's sister, Angelica, was actually a half-sister. Her father was
Duncan Grant, a homosexual but very devoted nevertheless to Vanessa and
her household. Garnett, one of his many lovers, later married Angelica.
Clive Bell was devoted to the household in
his
way, and liked to constitute
a paternal presence for Angelica. This must be one of the reasons why the
Bells did not divorce. Bloomsbury's famous "tolerance" made certain feel–
ings difficult, however. During Quentin's childhood, Clive had always been
a "holiday father": "We liked him when we saw him, but I cannot say we
missed him when he was away." Like the others - Roger Fry, Duncan
Grant, Maynard Keynes - Clive did something to educate him, but exerted
little or no authority. Later, Quentin was disturbed by the extreme con–
servatism growing out of Clive Bell's defense of "civilization," which led
to a sympathy with fascism and Nazism. These views became even more
intense after World War II, when Clive persisted in denouncing Attlee as a
Jew, thus eviscerating Quentin's already attenuated filial feelings.
Quentin Bell has written with loyalty and candor about the
Bloomsbury figures who peopled his world from birth to manhood, when
he left to go to the North of England and became a potter. One can imag–
ine the tremendous power of these figures in the life of the vulnerable Bell
children. Some were benign, like Keynes taking the young Quentin to the
opera and to see the sights of London, or explaining the Peace Conference
and the problem of German reparations. Other less benign effects grew
out of the indifference inevitably produced by preoccupations of the
"elders and betters," and the "comfort of being so well loved" by Vanessa
that brought with it "the pains of being so fearfully adored." Although
written with less tourtured animus than Angelica's memoir,
Deceive with
