Bloomsbury's Outsider (15 page)

On 11 November 1918 when the Armistice was announced, Bunny and Duncan took the first train to London, where they found the streets crammed with revellers. At Montague Shearman's Adelphi flat, they joined in the celebrations with a
multitude of friends including Maynard Keynes, Diaghilev, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Ottoline Morrell, Lydia Lopokova and D.H. and Frieda Lawrence. The war over, Bunny considered what he might do. ‘I am distinctly in favour', he announced, ‘of living in London and in such a way as to have a good deal of freedom & independence.'
⁵
Influenced by Vanessa and Duncan, Bunny proposed to become a picture dealer. It did not occur to him that he had neither experience of the commercial world nor any particular expertise in art, having only worked in the science laboratory and on the farm. His parents thought this proposal most unwise and that he would be reduced to ‘forcibly feeding one's friends with pictures'.
⁶

Nevertheless, Bunny pursued the idea. He wondered whether he should have a business partner and concluded that Frankie Birrell, who had worked at the V&A, was the obvious candidate. Frankie – who had no business experience and was hopeless with figures – was delighted with the idea. In a letter studded with emotion, he told Bunny that his main pleasure in life had been the few occasions when the two men had been together since working in France in 1915. He worried, however, about what would happen if they invested everything in the same venture and if his unrequited love for Bunny became intolerable to either of them. ‘I am putting this down on paper now at a distance', Frankie wrote from France, ‘because when I am with you, I know I should be falling too much in love with you to be able to put it clearly.'
⁷

For the time being, Bunny's concerns turned to the impending
birth of Vanessa's baby. He and Duncan gave Vanessa their butter rations and Bunny was a reassuring presence chopping wood for the fires and providing vegetables from the garden. On Christmas Eve he went to fetch the doctor and at 2 o'clock on Christmas Day morning a baby girl was born. ‘It is a queer little creature', he observed, ‘very lovely and full of independent life.' ‘It is a curious emotional experience', Bunny reflected, ‘waiting for someone else's child to be born.'
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Bunny wrote to Lytton Strachey, telling him Vanessa had given birth to a girl. ‘My dearest cowboy', he wrote,

Vanessa was safely delivered of a daughter at two o'clock this morning. […]. It is extremely beautiful & not in the least what one is led to expect – that is to say not a wizened old man from Mr. Yeats, or a sort of skinned rabbit & boiled lobster – it is simply a very small very lovely naked human, with signs of great will power and intelligence […]. Its beauty is the most remarkable thing about it. I think of marrying it: when she is twenty I shall be 46 – will it be scandalous?
⁹

Although the last sentence does seem scandalous, it was a piece of light-hearted whimsy which Lytton (who confessed to being ‘slightly rubbed the wrong way by simple domesticity, babies, & rattles') would have enjoyed.
¹⁰
It was a means of conveying an important piece of ‘family' news without recourse to the usual details of baby's weight and duration of labour. Bunny's
outrageous proposal corresponds exactly in tone to his other letters to his ‘dearest cowboy'. ‘Will it be scandalous?' is gossipy and risqué, a verbal raised eyebrow which Lytton would have relished. It was a piece of Strachey-ese similar in tone to his earlier letter to James Strachey, proposing orgies. Above all it is a
gay
comment, a piece of badinage from one gay man to another, reminiscent of the homosexual poet Brian Howard's alleged remark when confronted with Bryan Guinness's baby son: ‘My dear, it is so
modern
looking.'
¹¹

It was rapidly evident however, that baby Angelica was not thriving and was losing, rather than gaining, weight. Bunny telephoned Noel Olivier, a qualified doctor, who, unable to get away, sent Dr Marie Moralt. It transpired that the local doctor had recommended the baby be fed with orange juice and had prescribed dilute carbolic. Bunny busied himself cycling backwards and forwards to the Lewes chemist, and under a new regime Angelica began to flourish. Bunny stayed on until the end of January 1919, but London and independence beckoned. He took a job at Probsthain's Bookshop on Great Russell Street where he hoped to gain commercial experience.

Bunny persisted with the notion of becoming a picture dealer despite lingering doubts and parental opposition. He would rely on the advice of Vanessa, Duncan and Roger Fry, who would recommend up-and-coming artists. He would also have a monopoly of selling Duncan's work. Bunny assured his mother: ‘Vanessa is extremely level headed and quite disinterested […]. If she thought this scheme were likely to fail & involve me in
continual horrors she would not encourage me in it.'
¹²
With no capital of his own, Bunny tried to raise funds from his friends. On Armistice night, Harry Norton agreed to help, but in the cold light of January changed his mind. He thought the whole endeavour too risky and that Bunny was not a ‘very suitable person to run it'.
¹³
He also believed the venture could only succeed if Bunny went into partnership with an experienced dealer, apparently disqualifying Frankie. Furthermore, Percy Moore Turner, the owner of the Independent Gallery in London where Duncan exhibited, was not pleased at the prospect of one of his artists being poached. Confronted with such obstacles Bunny decided it would be more pragmatic to run a bookshop.

‘What I don't want to do', he informed Constance, ‘is to embark hastily on something which however good in itself will completely sidetrack my life for several years'. Characteristically, Bunny did not want to be confined to one quarter, but needed to be able to scurry off in other directions at will. He thought a bookshop would at least enable him to retain some vestigial freedom, although, as he told Connie, ‘I don't think it will be a roaring success ever!'
¹⁴

A new love was on the horizon and Bunny was ready to be distracted. In the middle of January when he spent the weekend with his parents and Nellie at The Cearne, they received a visit from Rayne Garnett, the twenty-year-old daughter of Edward's brother Robert. Bunny had not seen her since she was a young child. Rayne, who worked as a gardener for the Duchess of
Marlborough at Crowhurst in East Sussex, arrived clad in her gardener's garb of corduroy coat, breeches and gaiters. Disconcertingly, she confined her conversation almost exclusively to matters of pruning. Initially Bunny found both her directness & her facts rather off-putting, but nevertheless he sat up to talk with her when the others had gone to bed, and in consequence lay awake all night believing he had fallen in love. He found Rayne beautiful, similar in appearance to Rosalind Thornycroft, although more comely of figure, rather like one of Renoir's portraits of women. Still seeking plurality in his relationships, Bunny believed Rayne could offer everything he wanted and that he would find in her ‘a sister, a lover, and so on'.
¹⁵
Courtship did not proceed smoothly. Bunny adopted a man of the world attitude, lecturing his cousin on the merits of both promiscuity and contraception. Although Rayne eventually capitulated and they became lovers, this was against stern parental opposition. Her father forbade her to visit Pond Place, fearing she would be tainted by the fact of Edward's and Nellie's cohabitation and by Bunny's contamination too.

Bookshop plans were hampered by Frankie's absence in France concluding his work for the Quakers. Bunny was so hard up that Maynard had taken pity upon him, buying him a smart suit, so that at least he might look the part of a businessman. Carrington also came to Bunny's sartorial rescue, sending him a parcel of clothes which had belonged to her brother Teddy, who had died in the war.

Bunny felt his life had reached a watershed, with the doors of Charleston closing and an uncertain future stretching ahead. He noticed that Duncan's feelings had changed. Although Bunny
continued to receive letters and invitations from him, and on occasion they had sex, the warmth they once shared had dimmed. As Bunny reflected: ‘Duncan is kindness itself & I think is rather worried about me & afraid I may be unhappy.'
¹⁶
Yet Bunny still clung to Charleston, spending weekends there and tending his bees. He foolishly orchestrated a situation in which he manoeuvred Rayne into the position of gardener-in-residence at Charleston, as if endeavouring to unite these two strands of his life, to bring his girlfriend into the extended Charleston family. Vanessa and Duncan were not Rayne's natural allies. Vanessa disparagingly described her as ‘like a wooden figure out of Noah's Ark or an over-sized doll who has been on a farm'.
¹⁷
Duncan was disarmed by Rayne's eagerness to talk about Bunny, finding her openness embarrassing and misplaced. But, expressing a fear which Bunny found it hard to suppress, Duncan predicted that Bunny might ‘get rather bored with her society when she becomes more & more dependent on yours'.
¹⁸

With the bookshop on hold, Bunny resolved the only way to independence was to write, and to do so with an eye to popular success: ‘With a thousand pounds in the bank one can do what one likes.'
¹⁹
He still saw something of Betty May and it was she who gave him an idea for the subject of a book, a ‘sevenpenny shocker', which, he informed Edward, ‘has no merit, form, style, or anything else', but which Bunny had dashed off in sixteen days. ‘It's not simply for the servants' hall', he explained, ‘but for
the young who are ready to accept anything which they think is life.' ‘Of course', he added, ‘I will spare the name of Garnett the infamy of being on the title page.' Coming from a family where servants' halls were non-existent, it is ironic that Bunny's views about class were still somewhat shaped by this kind of stratification. But his was largely an intellectual snobbery defined in terms of taste and the kinds of books people read, rather than their social background.

Bunny called his seven-penny shocker “Dope-Darling”. The story is about Roy, a medical student who is in love with his childhood friend, Beatrice, a qualified doctor. Roy has his eyes opened when he encounters a young night-club singer, Claire, who tells him things ‘that no girl Roy had ever met would have said'.
²⁰
Claire is a drug-addict who bears a striking resemblance to Betty May, with a nod to Lillian Shelley. Roy abandons Beatrice and marries Claire, mistakenly believing he can cure her of her addiction. She remains unstable and attempts suicide.

The story is cinematic in its use of melodrama, a verbal narrative resembling the flickering black and white silent films in the picture-houses of the time. Moreover it can also be read, alongside Sax Romer's novel
Dope
and D.W. Griffith's film
Broken Blossoms
(both 1919), against a background of a prevailing preoccupation with the ready availability of drugs, in which fears about the ‘fairer sex' being seduced into a sub-culture of drugs were the focus of sensationalist newspaper headlines.

Much of this anxiety was fuelled by concerns about the growing independence of women and the blurring of boundaries between the young working women who smoked cigarettes
and drank in bars and the
demi monde
of singers, actresses and prostitutes who smoked cigarettes and
worked
in bars. Bunny did not approach his subject from a moralistic or paternalistic viewpoint, but in satirising media headlines, he highlighted the plight of real women like Betty May who came up from the countryside to an unfamiliar urban world where they could easily be exploited by unscrupulous men. Bunny's
Dope-Darling
, however sensational, is closer in intention to Arthur Ransome's
Bohemia in London
(1907), where Ransome comments that artists' models (like Betty May) could provide ‘rich material for novelists': ‘Some have stories that read like penny novelettes.'
²¹

Edward took the manuscript to the publisher T. Werner Laurie, who commented that he doubted it would be a bestseller, but offered to pay the author £15 on account of a 1½d per copy royalty, and to risk publishing it. By late July 1919 the proofs had been set up and the covers printed. Unfortunately the covers had to be printed a second time with the name ‘Leda Burke' substituted for that of David Garnett. The advance publicity announced that
Dope-Darling
‘is a page torn from real life, by someone who has watched a similar tragedy from the inside'.
²²
The Times
, however, declared that the story ‘revolts the reader without convincing him',
²³
and the Irish Independent observed that although there was ‘a romance interwoven with the more sordid side of the story' ‘it is not a particularly elevating one'.
²⁴

Bunny's first published novel was timely: he had been sacked by Probsthains. He had not much enjoyed working there, but it had provided valuable experience. Bunny's abridgement of Gressent,
The Kitchen Garden and its Management
had also finally been published. He had condensed an enormous text into a pocket-sized book only slightly larger than a seed packet.
²⁵
A
proto
‘Dig for Victory', the little book encouraged the British public to cultivate globe artichokes among other comparative exotica.

Bunny was beginning to find Rayne dull. ‘She certainly seems to me a very nice creature', he persuaded himself in his diary, ‘but though I am always glad to see her I can imagine greater excitement: it is the sort of pleasure one would get if one had a nice daughter'.
²⁶
For all Bunny's relief at being involved with a straightforward young woman, she could not live up to Duncan. According to Rayne, writing many years later, Bunny let her down gently. She recognised, in retrospect, that she was ‘too young and innocent, too ignorant and above all, too unintellectual and undeveloped to hold his affection permanently'.
²⁷
But they remained friends and enjoyed one another's company over the years.