A Precocious Pair In The 1930s

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31262, 7 January 1967, Page 4

A Precocious Pair In The 1930s

Journey to the Frontier: Julian Bell and John Coruford their lives and the 19305. By Peter Stansky and William Abrahams. Constable. With illustrations, notes and sources and index. 430 pp.

After carefully reading this book from end to end this reviewer still cannot fathom why the authors chose to devote more than 400 substantial pages to the glorification of the book’s two chief characters—the two heroes, one could say. Granted, they were both “Intellectual” rebels who wrote poetry according to their tenets. Granted, both died fighting against the fascists in the Spanish civil war—so did 541 other British members of the International Brigade of liberal, socialist and communist persuasions, and it seems to the reviewer that some other two of them could have had just as much Claim to biographies as these two. These remarks are not intended as a condemnation of the book as a review of the rethinking among British intellectuals that disturbed Britain from early in the First World War and rose to dedicated fierceness as Mussolini, Hitler and Franco came over the horizon. That was the time when Oxford University students thought fit to startle, even horrify, the country by deciding under no circumstances to fight for king and country, and when Cambridge, caught up in the same seething argument, found its young men forsaking poetry for politics or reorientating poetry to politics, with a resultant swing to the left or to communism. The unemployment and poverty of the World Depression aggravated the leftward progress. As a history of those turbulent and distressing times the painstaking researches of this book are a worthwhile study. But for this writer the book leaves unanswered the question he asked at the outset —why put Julian Bell and John Cornford on a pedestal? The authors—Stansky, a graduate of Yale, King’s College, Cambridge, and Harvard, and Abrahams, a graduate of Harvard—say in their prologue: “Although our book was begun as a general consideration of the art and behaviour of English intellectuals in that far-off decade (the ’twenties merging into the ’thirties), it became, by a process of particularisation, a study of its representative and most remarkable young men: Julian Bell and John Cornford.” It seems to this writer that their main claim to being remarkable is that they were the sons of remarkable parents (whose philosophies they foreswore). Bell was the son of art critic Clive Bell and the painter Vanessa Bell, nephew of the writer Virginia Woolf and grandson of Sir Leslie Stephen, all stalwarts of the pacifist Bloomsbury Group. At the age of 29, he was killed in Spain in July, 1937, while driving an ambulance for the Loyalist Forces. Coraford was the son of the classicist Professor F. M. Cornford and the poetess Francis Cornford, and a great grandson of Charles Darwin.

He was killed, probably on his 21st birthday, December 27, 1936, while fighting for the Spanish Loyalist Forces. After their deaths both were commemorated by memorial publications of their selected poetry and prose, though both had for some years more or less regarded their experiments in writing as of far less importance than their activities for a cause.

It has to be remembered that the ferment in the minds of these two young men was set furiously working in their early adolescence. Brilliant they were for their ages, no doubt, but it seems to this writer that they were teenage problems rather than teenage prodigies when they presumed to criticise older established poets such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Robert Graves and Rupert Brooke, their parents and any-one-else they had the arrogance to disagree with. (Brooke had been a valued friend of Francis Comford, and John’s second name was Rupert.) The joint authors of this dual biography are sometimes mildly critical, but in general they seem to approve and applaud the unnormal thoughts and actions of this precocious pair whose idea of sex life was apparently based on free love with no responsibility. At the age of 17 Cornford (Stowe, London School of Economics, Cambridge) was living with his first love, a Communist older than he. They parted and he entered a second unmarried arrangement with another Commu-

nist, a teacher, to whom he remained devoted and faithful to the end of his short life. Cornford’s Communist fervour increased with time, and this writer must confess that he is more impressed with him as a man of character (even misdirected character) than he is with Bell.

Bell (Leighton Park and Cambridge), a staunch Labour Party supporter, never seems to have outgrown his adolescent mental mix-ups. Like a ram rampant, he proceeds from seduction to seduction, regarding them as normally as he would taking a daily bath. Though the authors name Cornford’s two mistresses, they spare Bell’s the publicity, merely identifying them by progressing through the alphabet. By the time he left China after a brief professorship in English literature at Wuhan University he had got as far as the letter M. He had no scruples about the nationality or marital status of his victims. They satisfied him as long as they provided him with “bed and conversation”, but once emotion intruded he tired of one and took on another. This reviewer thinks he was more menacing to society than most delinquents. Psychologists will certainly find something unusual in Bell’s extraordinaiy attachment to his mother, Vanessa Bell. Either verbally or by letter, he discussed everything with her, even his sexual adventures and exploits in the most intimate detail. His itch to distribute this information extended to many of his friends and to some of his ex-mistresses.