Some years ago, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams published their study of Julian Bell and John Cornford, Journey to the Frontier: Two Roads o the Spanish Civil War (1966). Now, moved by the way Michael Holroyd and Noel Annan successfully revisited their subjects, Lytton Strachey and Leslie Stephen, respectively, Peter Stansky returns to the subject of Julian Bell. He is able to tell a fuller story: much new material has come to the surface in the past forty years; moreover, many of the people then alive are now safely dead, and the events of their lives can be told more freely. Stansky brings to the story of Julian Bell a lifetime of thought and scholarship that allow him, with great imagination and insight, to probe the intellectual life of the second generation of Bloomsbury. His sympathy for his subject does not dull his critical powers, and Stansky analyzes with great care Bell's poetry, thought, and character.

A number of themes cut through this book: love (this is a book about Bloomsbury, after all), the diffusion of Bloomsbury's values and ideals, and Bell's resistance to those very values. By examining these themes in detail, Stansky is able to give a rounded picture of Bloomsbury's first and second generation as well as open a window into the intellectual life of Britain between the wars. Stansky develops all of these themes in chapters on Bell's Bloomsbury childhood; his education at King's College, Cambridge as an Apostle; Bell's searching for a purpose in life; his teaching in China; and the Spanish Civil War.

Love: Stansky deals sensitively with Bell's emotional and intimate life and his relations with Anthony Blunt, Helen Souter, Lettice Ramsey, and Shuhua Chen. Stansky is able to probe so deeply into these personal matters because, in the Bloomsbury manner, Bell was exceptionally candid in his recounting of them. So detailed is Bell's discussion of his life of love that Stansky finds a certain quality in his revelations, quite different from the earlier Bloomsbury generation, that “suggests that he was involved not so much in a relationship as in a performance” (197). He was his mother's son, and his relationship with Vanessa Bell hovered over all of his other relations, filtering them through a mother's and son's love for one another. It was difficult for Bell to think of marriage because, as he wrote to his mother, “I'm far more devoted to you than I've ever been to a mistress.” And “none of my friends and mistresses can begin to compare with you.” (207) Further, as he wrote to a friend, “Nessa is a sheet anchor for me emotionally” (233). The pursuit of love exhausted him. As he wrote to Lettice Ramsey, “I am so tired of emotions. . . . I'm really and sincerely convinced now that I think friendship is better than love” (209).

The diffusion of Bloomsbury's values: Bell wished to bring the values of his parents and their friends into the 1930s and to show them to be as relevant then as formerly. This comes out clearly in Stansky's discussion of Bell's teaching at Wuhan University in China. Never a conventional teacher, Bell was keen on discussion, advancing lines of argument wherever they might lead. He raised traditional Bloomsbury themes, as suggested by the title of his fellowship dissertation: “The Good and All That.” He brought Bloomsbury figures into his lectures: Lowes Dickenson, Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, and the other usual suspects. He also broadened his syllabus to include Samuel Butler, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, and Proust. He translated Bloomsbury (or more strictly speaking, Cambridge) to China. It was a matter of style as well as substance: informality, a light hand, an easy manner. Initially his students did not know quite what to make of him, but they learned to love him.

Nor was Bell a conventional scholar. His dissertation was an Apostolic-Bloomsbury meditation (dedicated to Alister Watson, another Apostle “to whom in reality I owe everything”). “I am not a professional philosopher,” he wrote. “I am a practicing poet and politician” (125). It turned out to be a statement separating him from Bloomsbury's “static conception ‘of states of mind’ as values in themselves” (125). As he put it: “We should cultivate all those states of mind that are produced by action” (127). His readers were Roger Fry and C. D. Broad. Broad, Stansky wittily remarks, “would have been happier to recommend Julian to the editor of the New Republic than to the electors of the College” (130). Kingsmen found his effort un-Kingsworthy and rejected him. His later writings in China were further attempts by Bell to understand his relation to his family and their friends. He wrote three long essays: “On Roger Fry,” “The Proletariat and Poetry,” and “War and Peace: A Letter to E.M. Forster.” As Fry had examined painting, why, Bell wondered, could one not look at politics, poverty, and war, “with the same detachment, rationality, and scientific curiosity, and emotional control” (233). In these essays Bell sought to push Bloomsbury's values beyond Bloomsbury.

Bell's ambivalence about Bloomsbury's values arose out of every young man's question: what was he to do with his life? He was his mother's son, but he was also his father's son, with a love for the outdoor life, hunting, and fishing—the vita activa not the vita contempliva. His parents' pacifism would not do. Bell needed action, as he had pointed out in his fellowship dissertation. Teaching in China led him to think that “softness,” that is, romantic, sentimental thinking, and vagueness, was the chief Chinese intellectual vice. And this led him to feel (and fear) that there might be a strain of softness in Bloomsbury, perhaps even in himself. His was more than a generational revolt; it was an effort to come to grips not only with his own life's purpose but also with the meaning of the culture in which he had been raised. He came to feel that pacifism was a failure to resist fascism. On returning from China, Bell went to Cambridge and read a paper to the Apostles on the military virtues. His parents and their friends recognized a change in him. Stansky notes, “[h]e wore his Chinese robe like an armor, protecting himself against their love and solicitude” (255). In a view he shared with Gilbert Murray's daughter, Bell regarded liberalism as “political romanticism: it has no innate sense of human baseness, and can only move between illusion and disillusion” (248). Rosalind Murray rejected her father and turned to Rome; Julian Bell rejected his mother and turned to Spain.