Bloomsbury's Outsider (25 page)

Dorothy Edwards was twenty-six and living with her widowed mother near Cardiff. Her outlook on life had been heavily influenced by her father, an ardent socialist and Independent Labour Party leader. Although Dorothy had a degree in Greek and Philosophy, literature was her first love, and she supplemented her mother's meagre pension by writing stories for magazines. When Dorothy met Bunny, as arranged, at the Nonesuch Press, he encountered a dumpy, short, buxom, fresh-complexioned, blue-eyed young woman, ‘eager, ardent, embarrassed, shy'. He could not bring himself to kiss her, perhaps because of the complication of her ‘almost horizontal protruding teeth', but he gave her lunch in his basement, where they sat talking in the half light. He liked her so much that he decided to ask her to become his adopted sister. He explained that he had made this request because he was anxious not to jeopardise their friendship with a love affair. He believed that if they adopted each other it would solidify their relationship without the complication of sex. This explanation was disingenuous, for Bunny did not find Dorothy remotely attractive, comparing her to ‘a young Jersey heifer – a sweet and clean and good creature, but from a sexual point of
view non-existent'.
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Dorothy accepted his offer with enthusiasm, although Ray remained sceptical.

Shortly after meeting Dorothy, Bunny met Colonel T.E. Lawrence for the first time. The two men had been corresponding for over a year, although they had never met, despite Lawrence's friendship with Edward. Bunny first wrote to Lawrence to thank him for his indirect gift of the limited subscribers' edition of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
. Lawrence had hesitated about publishing the book, and eventually opted to produce this lavish limited edition at his own expense, to be sold at thirty guineas. He gave a copy to Edward, who had already subscribed, so Lawrence suggested that Edward give the second copy to Bunny. Bunny's letter was characteristically forthright; he was not going to be in awe of Lawrence, or at least, he was not going to let it appear as though he was. In his first letter (of 5 November 1927) his deferential gratitude was nicely balanced by a reprimand about the subscribers' edition: ‘I should like to say first that I think it was a terrible mistake to publish it in this limited form, and that I think you ought to publish it in a cheap and accessible edition […]. Great books exist for everyone to read: they are not part or property of the author: still less are they the property of a hundred and ten rich men.'
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Lawrence had copied his manuscript of
The Mint
, a revealing record of his life among his fellow air force men, into a small bound volume which he gave to Edward, informing him that he was burning the original manuscript. Bunny read it, afterwards telling Lawrence how grateful he was for being allowed to do so.
The Mint
affected him profoundly, bringing back the horror of institutional life he had experienced at school, ‘this instinct or emotion of a weasel in a steel trap'. Bunny thought it beautifully written, and told Lawrence, ‘Words are your medium, words, not deeds, and not thoughts.
Words
.'
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When Bunny and Lawrence did meet, it was in February 1929, at the Nonesuch Press office. They wandered over to Bunny's basement in Gordon Square, where instead of sitting comfortably in the bed-sitting-room, they perched in the kitchen-cum-bathroom, Bunny on the table by the gas cooker, and Lawrence on the side of the bath. There they talked for almost two hours. Lawrence had recently translated
The Odyssey
, so Bunny asked him which name he would use on the title page. Lawrence replied that he thought of calling it ‘Chapman's Homer', alluding to his father's name, Thomas Robert Chapman. Bunny didn't understand the joke at the time, but later thought it proof that Lawrence was not bothered about his illegitimacy. (It may have been a double joke, alluding to George Chapman whose translation of
The Odyssey
was published in
The Whole Works of Homer
in 1616.) Bunny rashly asserted his belief in Samuel Butler's theory that
The Odyssey
had been written by a woman. Lawrence later gave Bunny a copy of his book, which bore no translator's name, but carried Lawrence's inscription:

T.E.S.
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Who is responsible (under Homer) for all but the appearance of this
Book most regretfully obtrudes it into the Presence of D.G
. WHO KNOWS BETTER. 25.XI.32 Plymouth

Bunny admitted that the rebuke always made him feel ‘hot under the collar'.
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Lawrence paid several visits to Hilton and one weekend, when both Dorothy Edwards and the novelist H.E. Bates were staying, Lawrence unexpectedly roared up on his motorbike. Bunny introduced him to his guests as ‘Aircraftman Shaw'. When Lawrence began a discussion on Greek poetry, Dorothy was visibly irritated and more or less turned her back on him. After he had left, Ray asked Dorothy what she thought of Shaw, and Dorothy replied that she thought him ‘very ordinary'. According to Bunny, ‘she seemed to resent a common aircraftman joining in as an equal in a conversation about the Greeks'.
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Bunny was under no illusions about either Dorothy or Lawrence. He loved Dorothy for her independence of thought as much as her writing and he loved her despite her egotism and inclination to look down on people whom she considered intellectually inferior. Bunny believed that Lawrence compensated for his alleged lack of sexual drive and disinclination to have children through another stronger urge, the urge to ‘understand his fellows', manifested in ‘an immediate and sympathetic response when they needed help'.
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Bunny stated that he never considered himself an intimate friend of Lawrence's. ‘It seemed more as though I was one of those with whom he wished to keep
in touch, or of whom for some reason he approved.'
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That month, Bunny handed Prentice the completed manuscript of
No Love
. He sent a copy to Edward, to whom he confided that he thought the writing thin and that although it was the longest book he had written, it was a mere synopsis. Unfortunately Prentice's fears regarding censorship were realised when the printers, R. & R. Clark, wanted passages to be excised on grounds of propriety. They wrote to Bunny assuring him that they were not querying his writing, ‘but in these days when the authorities are exercising their powers so strictly we must, in our own interest, take care that our firm is not brought under their ban'.
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The passages to which they objected included: ‘Benedict and Leah swam together in the estuary and lay naked beside each other in the sun.'

Prentice asked Bunny if he would re-write the offending passages, but Bunny refused, telling him either to find alternative printers or to print the pages with blanks, inserting an ‘Author's Advertisement' which Bunny would pen, explaining to his readers why the blanks existed. This was an untenable course of action, to which Prentice would never have agreed. But Bunny was extremely angry, particularly as he did not consider it was the printers' role to censor his writing. He was so angry that he wrote to Edward, Duncan, Vanessa, Maynard and Lytton, canvassing their advice and support. Lytton thought Bunny's advertising plan ingenious, although he pointed out that the printers were hardly likely to agree to print an advertisement against themselves. Maynard considered the printers' behaviour ‘outrageous', asking Bunny to send him the ‘most dangerous' passages and suggesting they might ‘invoke Arnold Bennett',
who ‘would probably be very decent about it and carries much influence in the Commercial World'.
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Bunny was relieved when the printers backed down and
No Love
was eventually printed. He made one minor concession, changing the word ‘bugger' to ‘b-', in the sentence ‘Here's a toast: To Love and Freedom, and b- the Navy'.
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Now able to proceed, Bunny needed an illustration for the title page. He briefly considered asking Duncan, or John Banting, another artist friend, but decided in favour of Ray. Her illustration, however, had to be put on hold as in early March 1929 she discovered small lumps in one of her breasts.

Bunny took her to his old friend Geoffrey Keynes, now assistant surgeon at St Bartholomew's Hospital. A pioneering general surgeon with a particular interest in breast cancer, he advocated conservative treatment in preference to radical surgery, especially in younger women in whom the cancer was not advanced. He had found that radium treatment, in which hollow needles containing radium chloride were inserted around the tumour, could have dramatically beneficial results. Moreover the treatment was less invasive than radical surgery, and at a time before antibiotics, it was also safer. It was, however, very expensive, in 1928 costing £1,500 (c. £50,000 today) per patient per course of treatment, and as there was no National Health Service the patient had to foot the bill.

Radium treatment was relatively new. Bart's had introduced it as recently as 1924 and in the intervening four years only forty-two patients were treated by this means. When Geoffrey advised against operating on Ray, she and Bunny accepted his guidance.
Radium treatment was not only less invasive than mastectomy, but also, in removing cancer cells from surrounding tissue, more effective at that time than “lumpectomy”. However the treatment was gruelling. The patient's skin was first punctured with a scalpel around the site of the tumour. Then platinum needles were inserted, each measuring nearly five centimetres; typically thirty-five needles would be employed. It took three people to insert each.
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All this was achieved with only gas and oxygen for anaesthesia. Finally, the protruding needles were covered with gauze and a layer of wool. Ray remained in this uncomfortable state for seven days. When Bunny took her back to Hilton, she felt it ‘was like waking from a nightmare'.
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They endured several anxious weeks before Geoffrey could determine the effectiveness of the treatment. As Bunny informed his mother, the waiting was ‘disturbing & often agonising, & so is ignorance'.
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But at the end of March Ray was able to write to Edward with positive news. Geoffrey said the lumps were diminishing satisfactorily and would disappear altogether in time. Ray felt ‘very pleased and light headed', for she had not ‘really believed in the cure', but now didn't ‘quite believe in the disease'.
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On 26 April she travelled to East Chaldon to recuperate with Theo and Violet Powys.

That same day, Bunny found himself embroiled in a bizarre coda to his affair with Norah McGuinness. On Norah's recommendation Geoffrey Phibbs unexpectedly turned up at Hilton.
Despite an apparent reconciliation with Norah, Phibbs had been drawn again into Laura Riding's
ménage
. Assuming she had lost him for good, Norah fled to Paris. But Phibbs wanted shot of the whole nightmare and turned to Bunny as a giver of good advice. Two telegrams arrived at Hilton, one from Nancy Nicholoson, the other from Robert Graves, written in the hand of Mr Hardy, the Hilton postmaster, ‘C/O Garnett', but addressed to Phibbs. Both demanded Phibbs's immediate return.
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Robert Graves also telephoned Bunny, threatening to kill Phibbs.

While Bunny and Phibbs were having supper, Graves arrived unexpectedly and in an agitated state. Laura Riding had sent Graves to retrieve Phibbs, as he had some slight acquaintance with Bunny, presumably from 1923 when Bunny contributed a story to Graves's publication,
The Winter Owl
. Phibbs was persuaded to return with Graves and there Bunny assumed the matter would end. However, the next day Phibbs was back again at Hilton, in a much shaken condition. Phibbs had refused to move back to Hammersmith and so Laura Riding drank
Lysol
and jumped from a window, according to Phibbs killing herself in the process. In this last respect he was mistaken, Riding had a broken pelvis and crushed vertebrae from which she made a complete recovery. All Bunny could do was to take Phibbs's mind off it all with a tour of Cambridge colleges.

No Love
was published in the spring of 1929. It was well received,
The Times
rhapsodising over ‘the beautiful precision of some of the scenes, the unobtrusive, detached humour which is peculiar to Mr Garnett'.
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H.E. Bates thought it Bunny's best
book to date, and one in which he had finally found his own voice. Not only had Bunny found his voice, but he articulated it in his own tone, rather than one that looked back to the eighteenth century or towards George Moore. Perhaps he achieved this because the novel was autobiographical, shaped by memories of his youth. It contains some of Bunny's most beautiful writing about the natural world, as if the hedgerows and meadows of his boyhood had been translated exactly onto the page.

The story concerns two families inhabiting a tidal island near Bosham in Kent. The Lydiates consist of Roger, a farmer, his wife Alice and Benedict, their son. Roger is based on Edward, with a touch of the adult Bunny; Alice is reminiscent of both Connie and Ray but not directly based upon either; Benedict is Bunny as a young man. The second family, the Kelties, comprises Eustace, an admiral, his wife who is not graced with a first name, and Simon, their son.

The Lydiates live in genteel poverty in a crumbling farmhouse, Tinder Hall, an amalgam of Hilton Hall and The Cearne. The Kelties live in a brand new Tudor-bethan extravaganza, ‘The Jumblies', complete with billiard room. Although the ghastly name nods at the Marshalls' country house, ‘Tweenways', this house was based upon the much derided ‘Pendicle', the home of Bunny's childhood playmates, Michael and Nicholas Pease. Thus Bunny polarised the old and new, nature versus development and art against consumerism.

The novel follows the lives of the two sons, as they come together and diverge from young childhood to early middle age. It touches less on incidents in the lives of Bunny (Benedict) and Edward (Roger) but draws heavily on their characters, beliefs and the environments in which they lived. Benedict and Simon, for instance, bathe, sail and sleep outdoors like the Neo-Pagans;
Roger has a wicker day-bed on the porch of Tinder Hall, where he spends his evenings drinking red wine, just as Edward did at The Cearne. Bunny acknowledged that the character of Simon was loosely based on Alec Penrose, for like Alec, Simon was prone to nightmares and fears. ‘He had such warmth', Bunny later wrote of Alec, ‘such charm & such a deep love of beautiful things – and was so twisted around inside.'
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