The Paris Review - Woolf's Letter to a Young Poet
theparisreview.org“Woolf’s blunt criticism of Julian’s poem, her dig that it might be mere youthful experiment, the leavening (yet peremptory) dollop of praise, and the call to chores all typify the complexity of their relationship. The following year, after Julian’s first book of poems came out, Virginia declared, ‘He is no poet.’ She once described her relationship to him as ‘half sister, half mother, and half (but arithmetic denies this) the mocking stirring contemporary friend.’ Though she frequently expressed criticism of his writing, she ultimately published one of his books at the Hogarth Press.”
Electric Love
Julian BellJulian Bell - Electric Love
Julian Bell (poem)
JULIAN BELL
Shining bright
But kept in the dark
By Burgess, Philby, Blunt and MacLean,
At Trinity Cambridge he cast his spell
The Bloomsbury boy
Julian Bell.
When others warned
Of gathering clouds
He shouted “can’t you see the rain”
And soon it poured down from the sky
On Guernica
From a German plane.
Apostles* joined
The Soviets
With covert operations and
Young Julian
To Spain he went,
His cause - Spanish Republican.
His family
Fretting for their son
Said “why not join the ambulance corps”?
A safer course of action then,
Than hand to hand
In Civil war.
And wearing the socks
of Virginia Wolf
He drove across the sad terrain
Where Franco’s boot boys
marched along to “Long live death”
Their mad refrain.
In Civil wars
there are no laws
And no brotherly decency
And soon the tragic news it came
On valve set
short wave frequency.
The last post of Julian Bell
His ambulance bombed
By Spanish shell
On foreign soil
There spread a stain
Across Europe and then, the World
Blunt loved him physically, they say,
And Burgess secretly,
He swayed,
With Whisky bottle
In his coat
He wept silently in the rain.
Philby galvernised his soul
And bit his lip
As did MacLean
And ten years after World War Two
Brit’s holidayed
in Franco’s Spain.
In a deserted village church
Foresaken by true Christian souls
Neath stormy skies
A lonely bell
Rings poor Julian’s
Final toll.
S Burgess
* The Apostles were an elite club, taken over by the left wing intelligensia of Cambridge university in the 1930’s.
“Everyday, functional photos are items to look through, rather than at. The physical mismatch with what they purport to represent can be disturbing. I have to reel in my distaste, when scanning a pizza menu, at the actual reds, yellows, greens and browns of the still lives it portrays. Craigie Horsefield's own pictures reaffirm the customary wisdom of art photography, that color and definition are qualities to hold at bay.”
—Julian Bell, “At the National Gallery,” London Review of Books, 3 January 2013, page 22. An example of the work of Craigie Horsefield is posted above.
“You - this is the point - canot determine how I go about my looking. And hence painting, insofar as it is not mechanical transmission, is not communication. Insofar as painting involves the painter as an agent working with materials of complex composition, the specific meanings and intentions on which communication depends are deflected, turned into something other. And that something other - the actual residue of pigment - is indeterminate in meaning, just as a stone is. It has ‘meaning’, insofar as we open our eyes to it and allow them to wander and gaze in fascination; but that ‘meaning’ is not an idea or an emotion, not a specific, unequivocal message. What we see is what we get: a product, not a process, lies on the wall.”
—Julian Bell, What is Painting?: Representation and Modern Art
