Unreal Food Uneaten

Julian Bell

• The Art of Bloomsbury edited by Richard Shone
  Tate Gallery, 388 pp, £35.00, November 1999, ISBN 1 85437 296 3
• First Friends by Ronald Blythe
  Viking, 157 pp, £25.00, October 1999, ISBN 0 670 88613 0
• Bloomsbury in France by Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird Wright
  Oxford, 430 pp, £25.00, December 1999, ISBN 0 19 511752 2

My grandmother was the painter Vanessa Bell. She died aged 81 when I was eight. I loved my grandmother, but 39 years later I have few memories of her. If, that is, a ‘memory’ is some kind of private mental property. The picture I have of her may be faintly tinted by first-hand experience, but its contours come from public documentation. Through biographies, critical writings and the tourist phenomenon of her home at Charleston, Vanessa has become a cultural commodity, and it’s this commodity I chiefly address if I think of her. Perhaps this is more or less the pattern of memory for anyone growing up in a home with a well-thumbed photo album. Looking over the snapshots of your childhood, it becomes virtually impossible to distinguish the savour of your primary experience from all the parental talkovers that have developed and transmuted the family story. With Vanessa, with Charleston, I’m not sure how to peel away the private colouring from the public lines, and to date I’ve felt no great urge to try.