Julian Bell
Julian Heward Bell ( born February 4, 1908 in London, † July 18, 1937 in Brunete near Madrid ) was a British painter, art critic and poet.
Life
Julian Bell was the eldest son of Arthur Clive Howard Bell (1881-1964) and Vanessa Stephen (1879-1961), and the nephew of Virginia Woolf. The writer Quentin Bell was his younger brother, the painter and writer Angelica Garnett was his half-sister. Along with his siblings, he grew up in the legendary Bloomsbury group of artists.
Julian Bell studied at Leighton Park School and at King's College, Cambridge. There he was under the influence of his friend Anthony Blunt (1907-1983) to the Communists; both were members of Marxist infiltrated the secret society " Cambridge Apostles ". After studying Bell worked toward a college scholarship, but without success.
In 1935, the young poet traveled to China to teach at Wuhan University in Hubei Province English literature. In Wuhan, the womanizer began an affair with the writer Ling Shuhua (1900-1990), the wife of his dean, who was also a student Bells.
In the early summer of 1937, Julian Bell traveled to Spain, where he, like many other British and American intellectuals criticized the passive attitude of his country to the threat of fascism in Europe and Asia. As a compromise with the pacifist attitude of his mother and the pacifism of the Bloomsbury Group, he did not join the International Brigades as a combatant, but as a driver of a vehicle of the British Medical Spanish Medical Aid unit. Half of this unit came at the Battle of Brunete killed. Bell was, when he helped repair a lying under fire road and refused to take cover, hit by shrapnel that penetrated deep into the chest. He was taken to the hospital at that time serving as the palace of the Escorial, where he died 6 hours later. His last words were: "I always wanted a mistress and an opportunity to go to war. Now I have had both,"