'A Genteel Form of Suicide': Julian Bell's Chinese Journey

Abstract

In ‘The Leaning Tower’, Virginia Woolf points out that the Oxbridge male writers sit upon a tower of ‘middle-class birth and expensive education’, but this tower tended to lean in the 1930s—young men were forced to be interested in politics and stopped discussing ‘aesthetic emotions and personal relations’. Her nephew, Julian Bell (1908–?1937), was just a ‘member’ of this leaning-tower group who moved away from values, positions, and aesthetic focus of the earlier generation. Julian Bell was labelled an English poet, activist, journalist, teacher, and Cambridge Apostle. He shifted from a liberal pacifist position to being a man of action during his years of teaching at the National University of Wuhan from 1935 to 1937. He took part in the Spanish Civil War as an ambulance driver on the Republican side, and died at the age of twenty-nine when his ambulance was hit by bombs from the planes of the Nationalists. Before setting out for China in 1935, Julian Bell commented in a letter to a friend: ‘My own feeling about China, is that it’s about all I’m fit for now: a genteel form of suicide.’ We need to pay attention to the irony of what Bell meant culturally and personally by ‘suicide’. Culturally, this could be an example of upper-class English racism towards China, while personally, Bell might have considered this journey as a chance to ‘kill’ his old self, to break with the past, and to discover a new direction in life. Growing up in an elite circle of distinctive intellectuals, artists, and writers, Bell was overwhelmed by his family’s success and their expectations of him. He was constantly bothered by an identity problem: who was he among all the famous and successful Bloomsbury members? As the representative figure of the second generation of the Bloomsbury Group, Julian Bell was both an ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ to the group. The