Clive Bell's love for all things French was often a source of irritation to the British arts establishment. In an epistolary battle with Wyndham Lewis, Bell once wrote that ‘at any given moment the best painter in England is unlikely to be better than a first-rate man in the French second-class’, a sentiment unlikely to win over even the most tolerant of his critics. His wide circle of friends in France, first in Paris, and later in the south, included not only the painters who were also friends with Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry, but writers such as Georges Duhamel and Georges Gabory. Among his closest French friends were Jean Cocteau, who introduced Bell to his own circle, including the musicians known as Les Six, and the painter André Derain. Bell certainly considered Picasso a friend and treated him as such, but always with the understanding that the artist lived within a milieu he could never completely penetrate.

Both of Clive and Vanessa's sons studied in Paris with a private tutor, Henri Pinault, and before he went up to Cambridge Julian had the benefit of introductions to his father's friends, among whom one of the closest was Matisse's son-in-law, the writer Georges Duthuit. Clive was at home in France but never made a home there, as Vanessa did at La Bergère in Cassis. At the end of his life, Clive and his companion Barbara Bagenal regularly joined the many English expatriates on the Côte d’Azur amongst other prominent figures such as Winston Churchill, W. Somerset Maugham and Graham Sutherland.

Darling, my legs have almost given way, and I have turned into the pretty little café Voltaire opposite the Odéon to rest them and drink a glass of vermouth – so you perceive that a letter can be nothing but a parergon. This is a Sunday – la fête des morts – the shops all shut, and all the little parisiennes trotting about in their black frocks – I won't deny, however, that in their very short skirts – that they know how to make not ridiculous – and their long bottines, with just a little gap of stocking showing between the two, I find them extremely seductive.

Clive Bell is better known as a writer on art than on war and peace, yet his opposition to conscription and his activities on behalf of conscientious objectors during the First World War were as important to him at the time as his championing of modernist art – indeed, in some ways they were aspects of the same belief in the inviolable nature of individual liberty. In Peace at Once, his banned pacifist pamphlet, Bell laid out an argument from which he would hardly waver throughout his life: that war was always the worst possible evil. His pacifism was shared by many in his circle in 1915, but by 1939 he was in an isolated minority of absolutists and appeasers. But his forthright conscientious objection to war was always rooted in the broader conception of liberty he articulated in On British Freedom, published by Chatto & Windus in 1923: ‘It is for civilization – for which, by the way, we are supposed to have fought the war – that I am pleading: and though I am aware that liberty alone will not give it us, yet I am certain that no nation can be truly civilized till it possesses a far greater measure of personal freedom than is to be enjoyed in this or any other Anglo-Saxon community’ (86).

Chère Baronne,

I am sending you some grouse to prove that there are things I don't mind killing. For that matter, I don't so much mind killing or being killed Germans, French, Russians or English. What I do mind is watching the collapse of civilization. For the next fifty years noone is going to take much interest in the things for which we care. All the more reason why we should care for them very much so please take me into your confidence about your play. If I may judge from your letters – and why shouldn't I? – you write extremely well. Even your hand-writing is as full of force and character as mine is of sweet inefficiency; all the same mine has one obvious advantage.

Clive Bell got his start as a journalist writing reviews for the Athenaeum, a rather staid holdover from the Victorian era. In the years following the First World War he became a frequent commentator on art for magazines such as Vogue, The New Republic and Vanity Fair, and contributed often to the correspondence columns of national newspapers and other journals. His letters appeared most often, however, in the various iterations of what had begun as the Athenaeum. That magazine was absorbed in 1921 by The Nation, edited since its founding in 1907 by Hugh Massingham. In 1923, a consortium headed by Maynard Keynes bought The Nation & Athenaeum and installed Hubert Henderson as editor, with Leonard Woolf serving as Literary Editor until 1930. In 1931, it merged with The New Statesman, a Fabian weekly previously edited by Clifford Sharp. Desmond MacCarthy was its literary editor from 1920, writing a weekly column under the pseudonym ‘Affable Hawk’. Raymond Mortimer became its literary editor in 1935. The New Statesman and Nation was edited until 1960 by Kingsley Martin. Through all these changes, Clive Bell supplied witty, combative opinions on topics ranging from politics to the price of books. He was as likely to train his sarcasm on a close friend (like Desmond MacCarthy) as on an enemy (like Wyndham Lewis), and he showed no compunction about using what some referred to as Bloomsbury's ‘parish magazine’ to promote the work of his friends. For a wider public, such as the readers of the London Times, Bell could write in more measured tones, and by the end of his life he was taking the trouble to set the record straight when erroneous claims were made about those he had known intimately.

Tests for the Feeble-Minded

Sir—Not long ago I was dining at the house of a famous “mad doctor”—“alienist” is the genteeler word—in company with half a dozen specialists, “mentals” for the most part, all eminent in that profession, any two members of which are to have power over the liberty and manhood of the poor.

The Bloomsbury Group historian S. P. Rosenbaum commented in 2007 that Clive Bell's reputation had long been underestimated, noting how influential was his first book, Art (1914), and calling it the ‘first of Bloomsbury's manifestos’ (217). My biography, Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism (2021), has gone some way to establishing how significant Bell was in the early twentieth century both as an art critic and as an outspoken defender of the values of individual liberty. Rosenbaum lamented that not only was there no collected edition of Bell's writings but also no volume of his ‘lively correspondence’ (ibid.). Having relied heavily on that correspondence to write Bell's biography, I knew that he was, indeed, a lively, witty, opinionated and usually very well-informed letter writer. At a private view of Vanessa Bell's 1934 solo exhibition at Lefevre, for example, Clive observed Margot Asquith cautioning his wife against ‘hot backgrounds’ in her paintings – ‘backgrounds should always be grey, my Dear’. On the same occasion, when the somewhat deaf Ethel Smyth was introduced to Charles Laughton, she asked him his name, telling the famous actor that he looked ‘uncommonly like Charles Laughton’ (27). The absurdities of life in situations serious and trivial often struck Bell. During the First World War, he wrote sarcastically to the New Statesman that the government should invest in establishing private bullrings to breed draught animals for the Front, and to amuse the upper classes. After all, he said, it had been agreed already that ‘Art, literature, science, education – all the things that don't really matter – must go’ (68). His letters afford us glimpses of the famous – James Joyce in Paris in 1921 – and the not-yet famous – Ian Fleming in Venice in 1931 – observed in Bell's sometimes acerbic, often insouciant and usually entertaining style.

After making this selection from Bell's letters, I decided to arrange them in eight categories to provide a sharper view of his varied interests and passions than would emerge from a strictly chronological sequence. Although this results in returning to the early twentieth century at the start of each section, the arrangement affords a more coherent perspective than strict chronology would allow, enabling us to see how Bell's thinking might change on a particular subject (politics, for example), or how it remained the same: his belief that war can only ever make the world worse than it is never budged.

Thoby Stephen, Clive Bell's best friend at Trinity College, Cambridge, kept photographs on his mantelpiece of his beautiful sisters, Virginia and Vanessa. When they attended the May Ball in 1900, the sisters would have had the opportunity to meet the friend whom their brother had described to Virginia as ‘a sort of mixture between Shelley and a sporting country squire’ (Hussey 9). Two years later, Thoby invited Clive to visit his family in the New Forest, where the Stephens had rented a house. Soon afterwards, Clive visited the sisters at their home on Hyde Park Gate in London, and when the siblings travelled in Europe in 1904 it was natural that they stopped in Paris on their way home so that Thoby could see his friend Clive, who was living there.

Clive and Virginia shared the agony of watching Thoby die after his doctors had misdiagnosed as malaria the typhoid he had contracted in Greece in 1906. Vanessa, who by then had twice rejected Clive's marriage proposals, lay ill in the Stephens’ house at Gordon Square, suffering from the same disease that killed her brother. To Virginia's amazement, her sister agreed to marry Clive on the day their brother was interred. She experienced the marriage – which necessitated her and her younger brother, Adrian, looking for a new home – as a second bereavement. Her relations with Clive would never be straightforward, refracted as they were through her intense intimacy with her sister: he was both conduit and threat to that relationship.

For his part, Clive was as smitten with Virginia as he was with Vanessa. When she shared with him the early drafts of her first novel – called ‘Melymbrosia’ at the time – he was both flattered and awestruck, and gave her honest critique. When the Bells’ first child, Julian, was born, Clive and Virginia embarked on a flirtation that caused deep pain to Vanessa. When Virginia was courted by Leonard Woolf, Clive's jealousy gave rise to bitter recriminations in letters to his friends. But Clive and Virginia remained always close, a closeness that sometimes led to exasperation, irritation and malice. They both loved gossip; they were both deeply pacifist; they shared the pain of Thoby's death.

Clive Bell's life changed in Paris in 1904. He had gone there with half-hearted intentions to conduct research for a Cambridge fellowship dissertation for which he had been awarded a scholarship, but he abandoned that when he found that the life led by artists and their models in Parisian cafés was far more to his liking. It was not until 1910, however, when he happened to meet Roger Fry on the railway platform at Cambridge that Bell's career found its true path as a tireless champion of modern art. By giving popular expression to the ideas of ‘significant form’ and ‘aesthetic emotion’, Bell would forever be associated with the upheavals caused in English cultural life by post-impressionist painting. When the Russian Ballet returned to London after the First World War, with sets and costumes designed by Picasso and André Derain, Bell was again at the forefront of explaining this radical new art to the public.

Throughout his life, Bell entered into controversies about the arts with gusto. Although in many ways his literary tastes tended more towards the eighteenth century, Bell remained committed to an ideal of aesthetic liberty, convinced and dedicated to convincing others that a society's freedom could be measured by its tolerance for unfamiliar art.

Dear Cornford,

Would you be willing to accept, vicariously, a word of thanks for Mrs. Cornford's poems. It was by accident that I lighted on the little volume at Denny's in the Strand, my fortunate curiosity made me turn over a page or two and then of course I bought it. I can't think of the modern poetry that has interested me so much. What one feels, I think, is that it expresses, or rather suggests, such a remarkable and attractive mind. I don't mean to depreciate the art; the simple musical effects are delightful; and the Chinese poems, which I take to be experimental unless they are very early, are the best of their kind that I know. But it is the half-intimacy one gets with a curious, whimsical character that excites and moves.

In March 1910, Lytton Strachey asked his young cousin Duncan Grant if he had heard that ‘the Bloomsbury set’ (Hussey 75) had gone to Studland, on the Dorset coast, because Virginia Stephen had had a breakdown. The phrase had not yet acquired its infamous connotations, but it would not be very long before ‘the Bloomsbury Group’, often shortened to just ‘Bloomsbury’, would implicate both Strachey and Grant, as well as Vanessa and Clive Bell, Virginia Woolf and several others in their circle of friends as members of an influential clique that has been fiercely admired and equally fiercely attacked for over 100 years now.

The origins of ‘Bloomsbury’ lay in Cambridge University, but the group was named for the London neighbourhood where the four Stephen siblings – Thoby, Vanessa, Virginia and Adrian – lived from 1904, following the death of their father, Sir Leslie Stephen. Wishing to keep his Cambridge friendships alive, Thoby was ‘at home’ on Thursday evenings in 1905 at 46 Gordon Square. It was there, too, that Thoby died, aged twenty-six, following a family trip to Greece in 1906 where he contracted typhoid. As Thoby – whom his friends called ‘The Goth’, apparently on account of his solid appearance – lay dying, his best friend, Clive Bell, kept vigil with Virginia, who was at once appreciative of his company and deeply sceptical about his intention of marrying her sister. Once married, Clive and Vanessa took over Number 46 for themselves, while Virginia and Adrian moved to lodgings nearby. ‘Bloomsbury’ continued to flourish, a centre for that group of friends whom Virginia Woolf later dubbed ‘Old Bloomsbury’ – thirteen people who also happened to constitute the ‘Memoir Club’ that was created by Molly MacCarthy in 1920 as a way to encourage her husband, Desmond, to write. The Memoir Club itself persisted into the early 1960s.

That ‘Old Bloomsbury’ nucleus, only a few of whom actually lived in Bloomsbury, found itself invited before the First World War to the grand literary and artistic salon of Lady Ottoline Morrell in Bedford Square. The introduction of Roger Fry to the group in 1910 ensured that Bloomsbury would always be associated with radical innovations in visual art.

No country compared to France, in Clive Bell's estimation, but, in common with most of his peers, he also travelled widely in other European countries. Unlike most of those in the inner circle of Bloomsbury, he also visited the United States, giving lectures there in 1950 and 1952, and even once took a cruise to Africa. Early in his marriage, Bell went on holidays to Italy with both Vanessa and Virginia, trips that ended in tears and a sudden return home for Virginia after quarrelling with her brother-in-law. Wherever he was – Berlin, Venice, Rome or at sea – Bell sent letters home to Vanessa, Virginia, Mary Hutchinson and, later, Frances Partridge, with detailed accounts of his daily activities and highly opinionated descriptions of the local inhabitants.

My dear Lytton,

Such splashing and dashing, grunting and squealing, cursing, swearing, and complaining is labouring our large, cool room, as Vanessa washes Virginia's hair with icy water, that it will be a miracle if I can collect my thoughts and write a letter at all. I am coiled up too in the most comfortable position, and writing with a fountain pen almost spent. How we got here I scarcely know, but I am disposed to attribute our comparative success to my genius for organization and the extreme good temper and sense of my travelling companions. The second-class carriages were all full of evil-smelling Italian holiday-makers who were going either to a naval review at Spezia or a motor race at Bologna. Italy in autumn is doubtless the most beautiful country in the world, and would, I daresay, be almost perfect if it were ruled by some decent people like the English or French or even by the Germans. I suspect it was better when the Austrians were here; but the modern Italian with his nasty southern democracy and incompetent, practical, mind is a creature altogether odious. I find I can converse with him pretty freely. I walk on the heights of the Fortezza and contemplate the lovely Tuscan hills, thinking, not without a smile, of the Landseer-like crags in the Highlands, their blatant, obvious picturesqueness, and their absurd banalité.

For most of his life, with whomever he travelled, and wherever he had been, Clive Bell's first concern upon returning to London was to have dinner as soon as possible with Vanessa, Duncan, Julian, Quentin, and Angelica, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, or as many of them as could be gathered together. Bell had many domiciles, but in a certain sense no ‘home’; he tended to make himself at home wherever he was. He lived, of course, at 46 then 50 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, and after 1939 full-time at Charleston, yet his was in many ways a peripatetic life, with Vanessa Bell at its centre. His ‘letters home’ to the important women in his life – Vanessa, Virginia, Mary Hutchinson, Frances Partridge – were full of the gossip in which they all reveled, but they usually contained also detailed accounts of his opinions, movements and social life. When Vanessa began to travel regularly to Cassis in the south of France, that, too, became another home for Clive.

During the First World War, home for Clive Bell was Lady Ottoline Morrell's Garsington Manor, which she and her MP husband, Philip, opened to conscientious objectors who could satisfy the requirement of doing ‘work of national importance’ by working its lands. Garsington became a hub for different generations of thinkers, artists, writers, politicians – Bertrand Russell, Siegfried Sassoon, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Mark Gertler, Dorothy Brett, the Asquiths, Aldous Huxley, and many others. Some came only for weekends; others were more permanent residents, like Fredegond and Gerald Shove.

His own family home, Cleeve House in the village of Seend in Wiltshire, was a peculiar kind of horror for Clive Bell, devoid as it was of any interest in art and culture. But he always loved the countryside in which he had grown up, and where he learned to hunt and shoot. That rural upbringing served him in good stead at Charleston, too. When Vanessa died in 1961, Bell continued to live at Charleston with Duncan Grant, until old age took its toll.

Dearest Virginia,

Everything is going on all right. Vanessa went down and sat in the sun today from about 11.30 to 4.0.