BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : Bloomsbury, From a New Perspective : BLOOMSBURY RECALLED by Quentin Bell; Columbia University Press $24.95, 234 pages

Life is short and there are many books. Perhaps I exaggerate, but roughly a third of them seem to be about Bloomsbury, that 20th century utopia of intellect and freedom, an intelligentsia not bound by convention--at least sexual convention. Twirling around the daughters of English historian Leslie Stephen, primarily Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, its lifelong members included such early 20th century London luminaries as biographer Lytton Strachey, economist John Maynard Keynes, art critic Roger Fry, painter Duncan Grant, socialite Ottoline Morrell, writer Vita Sackville West and many others who came and went from their kibbutz-like yet bourgeois British addresses. It seems that the two world wars fueled this communal spirit; rations were shared, people visited from London, beds were shared, etc.

“Bloomsbury Recalled” is written by the son (one of three children) of Vanessa and Clive Bell. Those of us who have been awed by Bloomsbury (and periodically insulted by the offhanded comments about the stupidity and boorishness of most Americans), are led to read yet one more book on the subject by the prospects of 1) more anecdotes and 2) some insight into what it was like to be a child surrounded by these self-absorbed adults.

We know, moral boors that we are, that a price was paid somewhere, and we suspect, perhaps unfairly, that it was paid by the children. Yet in the numerous pictures taken of Quentin, his brother Julian and their sister Angelica Bell their little faces are utterly blank compared with the animation around them; they look overwhelmed and willfully bland well into adulthood.

This is also the tenor of “Bloomsbury Recalled,” detached and slightly overwhelmed. It is organized one chapter per personality, a rubric that is awkward and artificial, since the most interesting thing about these lives is the way they all bore into each other.

And Quentin is not particularly interested in what they do when they are not at Bloomsbury. Anecdotes abound, but little is revealed about the lives of Bloomsbury’s children.

When Quentin was born in 1910, the party was already in full swing. As children and young women, Virginia and Vanessa had both been sexually harassed by their stepbrother Gerald Duckworth, a subject that has been written about elsewhere and that Quentin Bell has been as dismissive of elsewhere as he is in this memoir. Yes, he writes, “Gerald . . . inspected Virginia’s private parts when she was about 5 years old,” but “we may doubt whether he was the first schoolboy to do such a thing,” and Quentin doubts that “copulation took place.” Vanessa went on to marry Clive, and the infidelities on both sides began about two years into the marriage.

Tolerant and even amused by both of them, the child/man Quentin seems unable to forgive only one of the affairs: that between his father, Clive, and his aunt, Virginia Woolf. This carries neatly through all his further judgments of Woolf, to his professional assessments of her work, included here in Appendix I on several of her books. “A Room of One’s Own” was good, he allows, but it is “difficult to measure its effect upon society.” Woolf was, according to Quentin, hypocritically apolitical, and “tended to forget that she had a vote.”

Quentin’s annoyance when people misbehave is mildly interesting, since politeness was probably the glue that gave his childhood homes whatever stability they had (that and money). But it conceals the terrible price of that stability--it’s all OK as long as it’s done behind closed doors:

“It may be that a husband beats his wife (or vice versa) and that, if this be done in private, it is a matter of mutual consent; but to chastise and humiliate your partner in public is, it seems to me, a different matter.”

The proportion here is off, as it is in his analysis of the abuse his mother and aunt suffered as children, but I will not do his work for him. The anecdotes are charming, the lifestyle still wildly appealing, but there is nothing much new here in the neighborhood.