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PARTISAN R.£VIEW
Kindness,
Quentin's memories of the past are similarly sober and sobering.
The descriptions of childhood in Bloomsbury and Charleston rarely
included other children or other relatives. Vanessa despised the Bell in–
laws, there were no Stephen grandparents; cousins and other relatives were
missing. Servants took the place of playmates. Quentin and Julian played
together, but their schooling was erratic and they seem to have had very
little
children's
experience. The children called their parents and other
adults by their first names - a minor detail that conveys the tone of delib–
erately anti-Victorian manners of the pre-World War I period. (Similarly,
Keynes, in letters of the period to Strachey and others, referred to the new
monarch and his wife as "George" and "Mary" and speculated about their
sex life.) Long after babyhood, the children were encouraged to go around
naked and were frequently photographed in the garden or on the terrace,
among the grownups who were all dressed. But when "Bunny Garnett"
(b.
1892) wanted to marry Angelica (b. 1918), the child of his former lover,
. Vanessa found that she could not summon the sufficient degree of
Bloomsbury tolerance.
Quentin Bell is now eighty-six. Clive Bell is dead, as are Vanessa,
Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Keynes, Forster, the Woolfs, and all the rest.
Only he and Angelica and their families are still among us.
At the outset of his book, Quentin compares himself to "those figures
upon the margin of a canvas pointing inwards toward the main subject of
the picture." If that puts one too much in mind of massive altar pieces in
holy places, it is perhaps also the sign of Quentin's own vitality, that his
observations are not swallowed up in the concentration on the center of the
picture, and that he still believes in the usefulness of his
own
perceptions.
SONYA RUDIKOFF
A Polish Iconoclast
ALEKSANDER WAT: LIFE AND ART OF AN ICONOCLAST. By
Tomas Venclova.
Yale University Press.
$35.00.
What we know today about the political turbulence of Polish twen–
tieth- century history is largely shaped by Aleksander Wat's extraordinary
oral memoir,
My
Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual,
one of the
most spellbinding documents of testimony to have emerged from the his–
torical wreckage of our times. The project of taping the reminiscences of
