Bloomsbury's Outsider (26 page)

Bunny later considered
No Love
one of his best books, commenting: ‘The fusion of memories of boyhood and of observations made in manhood is complete and unity is preserved while there hangs about the whole story the indefinable melancholy and hopelessness of life.'
⁴²
In this he was accurate. Unity is partly achieved because the book is set in the years and time-frame of Bunny's own life to-date. His protagonist, Benedict, is therefore all the more plausible because through him Bunny recreated his own experiences of growing up. The book is suffused with the melancholy of hindsight, as the narrator views youth with the nostalgia of one who knows that happiness is elusive. This elusiveness is most poignantly realised in the character of Cynthia Mengs, the Jewish girl from South Africa who enters a disastrous, cold marriage with Simon. She falls in love with Benedict and they snatch five perfect days together in London. She leaves Simon, not for Benedict, but to live with another man. Cynthia was closely based on Mollie Everitt, also Jewish, also living in South Africa, whom Bunny replicated down to the way she wrote her letters and furrowed her brow.

In this, the most personal of Bunny's novels, where he presents such an affectionate portrait of his father (to whom the book
is dedicated), Bunny was also able to introduce a tribute to Geoffrey Keynes in gratitude for his care for Ray. In early middle age, where the story ends, the Benedict–Bunny figure has become a scientist. When Benedict meets Simon again, after many years, he tells him: ‘I'm supposed to be doing cancer research. They really are going to cure it now, you know, with radium needles.'
⁴³
This was the only optimistic note at the end of a book in which no one achieves enduring happiness, where there is ‘No Love'. It was also an expression of hope in relation to Ray.

‘Oh joy, oh blessed world! They were in the sky, riding on the air, and all the groping dirtiness of earth forgotten.'
¹

Although he regularly saw Duncan and Vanessa in London, Bunny had not been to Charleston for five years. When he eventually returned in August 1929, Bunny walked with Duncan on the Downs, read Julian Bell's poems, and was amused by the infectious giggles of ten-year-old Angelica. Afterwards, Bunny received a warm letter from Duncan, saying how pleasant they all found it to see him ‘back in your old haunts'. ‘I do not', Duncan added, ‘mention my own feelings.' He signed the letter ‘love from your devoted Duncan'.
²

Bunny and Ray seemed to have regained something of their former happiness. In the autumn Ray wrote Bunny an affectionate but ambivalent letter, telling him she wanted to ‘love someone so badly – it is like madness.' ‘At this moment', she said, ‘I feel it
is you that I am in love with & must cherish & praise & abandon myself to – & hold by the ear & kiss in the neck & grudge nothing to.' But she worried that the reality of him might instead make her ‘feel mad with irritation' because ‘you won't let me alone to feel a little free'.
³
Ray had the capacity to put a brave face on their marriage, to try to see it from the most flattering angle, but the inequality of their relationship was a perennial problem. Bunny could spread his wings, but at Hilton Ray's remained clipped.

One evening in October when Bunny and Ray were strolling past the Conington Flying Ground near Cambridge, they stopped to watch a plane above. Having enquired whether it was possible to go up in one, they were each given a five minute flight. Initially Bunny worried that he would die of fear, but, as he told T.E. Lawrence ‘there is nothing so exciting in the world: the rushing hedge and soaring up', ‘I am now wanting to go up every day, wanting to fly myself, wanting to have a machine of my own'.
⁴
Bunny could hardly contemplate such extravagance. Not only was he still unable to draw any salary from the Nonesuch Press, but as a result of the Slump his investments had fallen. Maynard Keynes, an astute investor, had suffered losses on his own investments and on those made on behalf of others, including Bunny. In October 1929 the Wall Street Crash presaged even leaner times.

There was, however, cause for cautious optimism. In early November Bunny received an enquiry from the film company ‘British Talking Pictures', about the film rights to
The Sailor's Return
. The company wanted to make what would be one of the
earliest British talkies. Britain was slightly behind the United States in this respect: the first all-talking American film,
Lights of New York
, was released in July 1928. But the first European drama-talkie, Alfred Hitchcock's
Blackmail
, was not premièred until June 1929.
The Sailor's Return
, therefore, would be in the vanguard.

Bunny was whisked away to Wembley in the Rolls-Royce sent to collect him. There he met representatives of the company, including Sergei Nolbandov, a Russian film editor, and Berthold Viertel, the Austrian screen writer and director. He was promised untold riches: £1,000–£2,000 for the film rights and an additional thirty pounds a week as an advisor during filming. But there was one detail that had to be settled: the question of Tulip, the novel's African heroine. Mr Woodhouse, a young American whose manner, according to Bunny, ‘suggested that he had been boiled on Sunday, carved on Monday and served up cold on Tuesday' went over and over the same ground, objecting to the colour of Tulip's skin.
⁵
The issue seemed irresolvable and Bunny recognised, correctly as it happened, that the film was unlikely to be made.

For Christmas 1929, Duncan sent Bunny
foie gras
from Fortnum & Mason and invited him, Ray and the children to Angelica's eleventh birthday party in London. He confided a new love affair to Bunny, inviting him to Charleston to meet his lover, George Bergen. ‘I had rather you did not tell anyone', he said.
⁶
Bunny continued to go to the cinema and dine with Duncan, but their relationship had changed subtly, Bunny now assuming the role of confidante and advisor. In January 1930 Bunny spent a
weekend with Duncan and George, sitting to them both for his portrait. George was twenty-seven, a handsome American Russian-Jewish artist. Bunny warmed to him, and enjoyed his visit enormously, the three men dancing to gramophone records. Duncan was besotted with George, and the younger man had the power to raise or dampen his spirits at will. Throughout their turbulent relationship, Bunny was a constant support, providing an understanding ear and affectionate friendship. ‘Darling Bunny', Duncan wrote, ‘It does me the greatest good in the world to see you from time to time.'
⁷
‘You are the only person', he said, ‘I can talk freely to about my feelings.'
⁸

Julian Bell, now a Cambridge undergraduate, ran with the beagles and was glad of a hot bath at Hilton afterwards. Bunny was very fond of Julian, enjoying his uproarious humour and incessant urge to rehearse anecdotes about family and friends. Sometimes Julian came to Hilton with Vanessa and Angelica, and on one occasion he brought the Woolfs over for tea. Virginia played with Richard and William, pursuing them into the bushes on her hands and knees, growling that she was a ‘she-wolf'. Bunny was impressed by Julian's poems, and it was on his recommendation that Chatto & Windus published
Winter Movement
, Julian Bell's first volume of poetry, that year.

In early June Bunny received devastating news: Thea Fordham had committed suicide. She had carefully positioned herself on a railway line to ensure a tidy death. Her brother Michael had the distressing task of identifying her body, of sadly surveying ‘the beauty of her severed legs'.
⁹
Bunny was consumed by grief.
‘I loved her & understood her', he told Edward. ‘I feel as though part of myself had been killed.' Bunny knew that Thea had been unhappy the previous year; she wouldn't see any of her old friends. He blamed her husband, Brian Rhys, but acknowledged that Thea had ‘a complicated life & character'.
¹⁰

In July the magazine
Everyman
featured the first of a series of articles revealing the working methods of leading English writers.
¹¹
Bunny was the subject, photographed in his room at Hilton, seated at his paper-strewn desk, with books floor-to-ceiling on the shelves behind. Asked whether his characters were taken from life, he said they were not, curious given his recent portrayals of Edward and Alec in
No Love
. He explained that his books were conceived as a whole, each a product of a few ideas which played off each other and then combined into the complete story. He confessed that good weather was distracting, the allure of the garden too strong to resist.

The weather must have been fine that summer, for Bunny could not concentrate on his new book,
Castle Bigod
. His financial problems persisted, causing him to request another advance from Prentice. ‘It is a gloomy request', he admitted, for it ‘always makes me think the book won't get finished or won't sell.'
¹²
Bunny's lack of funds was partly caused by his absorption in a new and expensive pastime. Since that first exhilarating brief flight in 1929, Bunny had been consumed with a passion for flying and had been taking flying lessons for the best part of a year, latterly at Marshalls' Flying School, Cambridge. Throughout his training Bunny recorded his experiences in a diary, later
published as
A Rabbit in the Air
(1932). His first flight above the clouds affected him profoundly: ‘The scene was wonderful', ‘a plain of white where nothing stirred, where no living creature would ever set his foot, because it was really Heaven.'
¹³
On 22 July 1930 Bunny made his first solo flight.

Bunny was among a small and elite group of amateur aviators. Flying was replete with glamour and adventure, as epitomised by Charles Lindberg, who had achieved the first solo non-stop crossing of the Atlantic in 1927. Although Bunny's readers might have wondered why he styled himself a rabbit (in sport it refers to a duffer or beginner)
A Rabbit in the Air
furnished a vicarious means of achieving what for most was unachievable. As
The Times
review stated: ‘40 years ago the experience which Mr Garnett records existed only in the imagination.'
¹⁴

Flying had diverted Bunny's energies from London and for the time being at least, this absorbing pastime had taken the place of a mistress. But his and Ray's happiness was dented again, when Ray discovered she was pregnant. Against all their instincts, Bunny and Ray agreed to follow Geoffrey Keynes's advice, and in September 1930 Ray had an abortion. Geoffrey was concerned that hormonal changes during pregnancy might cause Ray's cancer to return. Although abortion was then illegal, it was permitted if deemed necessary to save life. The surgeon cost fifty guineas, an unwanted additional expense in straitened times. But Bunny cared less for the expense than for ‘the miserable waste of emotions & ten days of Ray's life at least'.
¹⁵

In December Bunny sent Prentice the completed manuscript of his latest book. It was not
Castle Bigod
but a novella which Bunny called variously ‘Man & Locust', ‘Wings over Asia', ‘Storm of Locusts' and ‘Living Rain', eventually settling upon the more lyrical
The Grasshoppers Come
, even though the insects in the book were locusts. On Boxing Day Bunny wrote again to Prentice, thanking him for his generous terms, including an advance on royalties from the book. Prentice was always the most open-handed publisher where Bunny was concerned.

The Grasshoppers Come
is quite unlike anything Bunny had previously written. He always endeavoured to try a new genre, to find a new form and not to repeat any potentially winning formula. He acknowledged that his first two novels had been works of fantasy, but it irritated him that he continued to be seen as a fabulist. If Bunny was influenced by other authors, it was the lyrical descriptions of W.H. Hudson and Edward Thomas which he admired, together with the straightforward narrative style of those eighteenth century authors he favoured, particularly Richardson, Sterne and Defoe.

The Grasshoppers Come
is a powerful psychological novel, exploring the inner life of a working-class airman, marooned in the Gobi Desert. The story begins with Mrs Beanlands, a rich widow, and her gold-digger lover, Wilmot Shap, embarking on an attempt to break the world record for a long-distance flight. The journey is to be taken in a custom-built monoplane, and the plane is to be flown by Jimmy Wreaks, a heavily scarred one-eyed man with a broken nose. Wreaks is one of Bunny's most convincing characters, a man aware that his social position distances him from his employers, and that his appearance distances him from mankind in general.

The first part of the book describes the endless voyage; like Wreaks's passengers floating above the clouds, the reader is lulled into a false sense of tranquillity. But the plane crashes; Wreaks is
wounded, and is temporarily unable to walk; meanwhile Mrs Beanlands and Shap set off in search of civilisation. Wreaks is left to fend for himself in a barren, rock-strewn, dry-river valley. After several days, during which he dispassionately calculates the remaining length of his life, salvation appears in the shape of a swarm of locusts, some of which Wreaks cooks and eats. But nature, the bountiful provider, is also the mighty enemy. The locusts return in such torrential quantities that Wreaks almost drowns in them. Attempting to thwart this new enemy, he turns on the plane's propellers. His satisfaction at the demise of the insects soon turns to despair, when the petrol in the fuselage ignites, and the plane, Wreaks's only form of shelter, is consumed by flames. A Chinese scientist and aeronaut has been following the swarms, and seeing the burning wreck, rescues Wreaks. Typically, Bunny does not end on an optimistic note, but with a disquisition on the life-cycle of the locust, a creature which occupies a particular evolutionary niche.