Bloomsbury's Outsider (27 page)

The book was very well received. In the
Observer
Gerald Gould referred to ‘That queer, special, illuminating vision' of Garnett's ‘which he turns with the calm assurance of genius on to our mere times and places'.
¹⁶
The Times
stated: ‘A journey through the air has never been described with such perfection; to read it is as real as an adventure.'
¹⁷
The
TLS
concluded ‘No writing of to-day has quite the incandescent clearness of Mr Garnett's; it has its own special quality of precision […] and yet it can give warmth and colour to its subject.'
¹⁸
Many of Bunny's friends
wrote in praise of the book. T.E. Lawrence declared that it ‘has pleased me quite beyond what I had thought possible. It is the first account of real flying by a real writer who can really fly.'
¹⁹

After a gap of many months, in January 1931 Bunny resumed contact with Dorothy Edwards, just at the moment when she felt so low that she couldn't ‘see light anywhere'. ‘You give me', she wrote, ‘as nothing else has succeeded in giving me, some kind of feeling that there is a significance in this [her writing], and perhaps even a remote possibility of happiness.'
²⁰
They met in London, and Bunny took her to the cinema to see Charlie Chaplin's
City Lights
. John Hayward, who had dedicated his latest volume,
The Letters of Saint Evremond
, to Bunny, told him, ‘You have an extraordinary capacity for making me happy; ever since I remember meeting you for the first time […] you have exercised it'.
²¹

Bunny realised that if he was going to make Ray happy he would need to devote time exclusively to her. They had both loved Yorkshire since 1927, when they drove to Wharfedale to see the total eclipse of the sun. He later described that first encounter with the Yorkshire Dales as a ‘Revelation', which was to furnish ‘The chief happiness in Ray & my life.'
²²
In the intervening years they spent several happy holidays walking for miles in Yorkshire, far from anywhere with only each other, the wind, rain and sheep for company. If they became lost during a long trudge in bitter sleet and snow, that was part of the fun. Bunny fell in love with the landscape, and Ray told Constance that it was a ‘great joy to
me to walk again in the kind of country I loved as a child & to scramble beside the same kind of clear stream rushing over a stony bed with lovely bare trees on the bank'.
²³
These holidays were the glue which bound Bunny and Ray together, which enabled them to recapture the essence of their love and served as a beacon for future renewal during times apart.

In London, Bunny was overwhelmed with Nonesuch work. Following the Wall Street Crash sales had fallen sharply and Bunny still drew no salary from the business. The Meynells now had a young son, Benedict, and with the Nonesuch in dire financial straits Francis had to take a job elsewhere to support his family. It was left to Bunny to take on the lion's share of work. In September 1931 Leslie Hotson, one of the authors with whom Bunny had been working particularly closely, wrote to thank him for his support. ‘Just now', he wrote, ‘I feel that if the book has any success it will be thanks to you. You have done more to maintain my enthusiasm and faith than I would have believed possible.'
²⁴
The book in question was
Shakespeare Versus Shallow
, which the Nonesuch Press published that year. They had also published Hotson's first book,
The Death of Christopher Marlowe
in 1925. It was this which established his career and reputation as an assiduous but sometimes controversial literary detective.

Castle Bigod
was temporarily shelved, unfinished, as Bunny had feared. He confessed to Constance that he was hoping to write a biography of Pocahontas, the seventeenth-century Native American princess. His desk at Hilton was already covered with volumes of research material. His main concern, however, was just
how to render the psychology of a Native American young woman. After months tied to the Nonesuch desk, he decided the only way to proceed would be to take a sabbatical. Duncan knew of a house to-let in France, in the town of Génainville, Val d'Oise. In November 1931, Bunny and Ray drove there, taking the children.

Bunny first fell in love with France when taken by Constance to Montpellier as a child. He felt absolutely at home there. Every day he bought ingredients for the picnic lunch, things which were hard to find in England: croissants, chicory, paté, sausage and inexpensive wine. After one such picnic and a powerful bottle of red, to his horror Bunny discovered that he had lost the manuscripts and typescripts of both
Pocahontas
and
Castle Bigod
. He was driving in an era when a car's trunk was not what we know today as the ‘boot', but a free-standing container strapped onto a luggage-carrying platform. During their picnic, Bunny had un-strapped the trunk in order to extract a letter and had omitted to secure it back in place. It was only when they had travelled some distance that Richard noticed it was missing. They returned to their picnic site, where a bystander reported that the trunk had been picked up by a car which appeared to be trying to catch up with Bunny. Bunny stopped at various Mayoral offices and also left details at the local police station, together with a promise of a financial reward if the trunk and its contents were handed in. By then he feared his sabbatical to write
Pocahontas
was redundant. The next day he learned the trunk had been found, but his delight soon turned to horror when he opened the lid to find both manuscripts missing. It was only then that he remembered that he had repacked them and placed them, wrapped in his dirty shirts, under the driving seat, where they remained all along.

Bunny returned briefly to England to deliver a lecture in Leicester on 12 December. That same day he received a note from Garrow, inviting him to dinner. The dinner never took
place, as on the 13th Garrow died in a flying accident. His machine spun, apparently out of control and crashed. Only two weeks before he had written to Bunny, announcing he had obtained his flying licence. He thanked Bunny for setting the example, explaining he had always wanted to fly, but didn't think he would have started had it not been for Bunny's initiative. Heartbroken, Bunny blamed himself for Garrow's death.

Garrow's funeral took place on 17 December in the village of Ash in Kent. Bunny was accompanied by Francis and Vera Meynell and two of Garrow's girlfriends, Alix Kilroy (later Dame Alix Meynell) and Barbara Mackenzie-Smith. Afterwards Alix wrote to say how much she had appreciated his sympathy, and asked him to let her know if he found out anything about the circumstances of the accident. Bunny felt so responsible that he wrote to Garrow's pilot instructor, asking what he knew. The instructor replied that in his opinion Garrow had tried to spin his plane on a day when the cloud was too low for such a feat. Bunny's haunting remorse was only assuaged by a letter from Garrow's mother, written a month to the day after his death. She wanted to reassure Bunny that she did not begrudge one hour of the pleasure her son obtained from flying. She felt Garrow wasn't ‘cut out for a life spent in sleepy chambers' and asked Bunny not to be sad for him. ‘I feel', she said, ‘he has escaped from so much that he would have had to face had he lived.'
²⁵
Ray could not quite take in the fact of Garrow's death. ‘I can't yet believe', she wrote to Edward, ‘that he won't turn up at Hilton when we get home.'
²⁶

‘It is going on living with the ghosts & memories which is so horribly painful.'
¹

In London, before returning to France, Bunny bumped into thirteen-year-old Angelica Bell. She was very forthcoming, making eyes at him, which caused him to playfully run away, much to her delight. Bunny had hoped to see Duncan but they missed each other at the Nonesuch Press. Duncan had gone down to Hungerford, to visit Lytton Strachey who was ill at Ham Spray.

Back in France, Bunny could not resist the call of Sommeilles. He had not been there since 1915 and was curious to know whether the huts had survived and if any of his old friends remained. When they arrived Bunny found he had ‘walked straight into a familiar piece of land between unfamiliar buildings'. Some huts had survived, now employed as sheds. Georges Leglais appeared, and Bunny reflected that he admired him ‘as much as one can admire a human being who combines honest &
complete courage of every sort'.
²
The visit was extremely moving.

Bunny, Ray and the children returned home at the end of January though
Pocahontas
remained unfinished. In France, Bunny had received encouraging news about Lytton's slowly improving health, so it came as a shock to learn that he had died from stomach cancer on 21 January. Bunny's lingering sadness at the death of two close friends was soon compounded by a nightmarish series of events, ‘the sequence of horror', as Bunny called it, which unfolded during the following weeks.
³
The first of these concerned an artist whom Bunny had befriended in the autumn of 1930. Small, thin and blue-eyed, Frank Weitzel was then twenty-five, a New Zealander of German parentage, who had recently moved to London. He had taken his drawings to the Nonesuch Press, hoping for work. Bunny did not much care for the drawings, but he admired Weitzel's sculptures and commissioned two heads, one of Ray and the other of Richard. Through Bunny's benevolent friendship Weitzel met many influential artists, leading to exhibitions with Epstein and the brothers Paul and John Nash.

While Bunny was in France Weitzel lived at Hilton Hall, afterwards lodging in the village, where he used the carpenter-cum-undertaker's workshop as a studio. One evening, Bunny was summoned to Frank's lodgings, where he found him in agony and unable to open his mouth. Bunny called the doctor, who recognised that Frank had lockjaw and was suffering from tetanus. As Bunny told Edward, it was ‘a terrible thing to see'.
⁴
He carried him to the car, and drove him straight to hospital, but within
twenty-four hours Frank was dead. Bunny arranged his burial and notified his sister, in Australia.

On the day Frank died, Ray had a consultation with Geoffrey Keynes. She had discovered another lump on a different part of her breast. Geoffrey proposed to use the radium needles again, and told Bunny there was every hope that the treatment would be successful. This time he generously waived his fee, Bunny paying only for the nursing home and anaesthetist. The children were sent to The Cearne while Ray endured another gruelling round of radium, afterwards recuperating at her sister Judy's home, at Rye in Sussex. From there she wrote to Bunny, ‘Oh if only this is a success – Darling Bunny I love you, please go on loving me.'
⁵
Preoccupied with her recovery, Ray forgot that she was writing to Bunny on his fortieth birthday.

Two days later, on 11 March, Bunny was in London, staying in the room he now rented in Frances Marshall's and Ralph Partridge's flat on Great James Street. The telephone rang; it was the Ham Spray gardener, who told them Carrington had shot herself, was gravely wounded but still alive. Ralph called Carrington's local doctor, and then Bunny drove them to Ham Spray at breakneck speed. They found Carrington in her bedroom lying on the floor in a pool of blood. She had not been able to face life without Lytton. Carrington died, and afterwards Bunny looked at her ‘when the nurses had turned her into a tidy corpse'. He thought she looked a ‘hard, proud woman'.
⁶

Bunny suddenly felt careworn. 1932 seemed aeons away from those carefree years of the 1920s. Looking back, Bunny called it ‘that strange paradisial decade'. ‘During it', he wrote to Francis
Meynell, ‘all that we did was good – including the work that we did together … Fortified with the illusion that love and not hate would rule the world in future, we did our best to make up for the losses of the war.'
⁷
The 1920s had indeed been a gilded decade for Bunny, bringing him fame, critical appreciation, respect among his peers and a degree of financial security. But in 1932 he could take none of these for granted. For the first time he found writing difficult; he appeared to have chosen a subject which could not be constrained by his rigorous economy of words; the Nonesuch Press had become more a liability than an adventure in publishing; Bunny no longer had any guaranteed income; Ray's illness cast a shadow of uncertainty over his family; his friends seemed to be dying around him. At this stage in his life paradise seemed irrevocably lost. When, in March, Richard broke his arm, Geoffrey Keynes commented: ‘Your disasters come in droves, my poor Bunny.'
⁸

Richard was nine years old and it was time for Bunny to consider his education. Bunny was a devoted father. He was the kind of father who delighted in activities with his sons, ringing birds, teaching the boys to fish, boating, swimming, building things, skating on the Fens. The previous year he had given Richard a printing press for his eighth birthday, instilling in him a lifelong love of printing, typography and design. ‘We are going to print books', Bunny informed Constance, predicting, accurately as it happened, that Richard ‘will be the world's champion proof corrector when he's older'.
⁹

Towards the end of Ray's convalescence, Bunny had driven
her to view several prospective schools. They settled on Beacon Hill School, which had been founded in 1927 by Bertrand Russell and his wife Dora. It was located on the South Downs, near Petersfield, an area familiar to Bunny from his youthful visits to Edward Thomas at Steep and to Noel Olivier at Bedales. Like Bedales, it was progressive, though comparatively small. Beacon Hill was a fee-paying school, run on extremely liberal lines. No pupil was expected to attend lessons, although most did. This education did Richard, and later William, no harm. They came from a highly informal, un-regimented family background in which they were valued as interesting individuals in their own right, and where they addressed their parents as ‘Ray' and ‘Bunny'. Bunny sent Richard there because he assumed he would be taught mathematics by Bertie Russell. But by the time Richard was a pupil, Russell had lost interest in both the school and his wife. It was therefore left to Dora to run the school, and it was her influence, rather than her husband's, which prevailed. The school was co-educational, and the prospectus promised ‘complete frankness on anatomical and physiological facts of sex, marriage, parenthood and bodily functions'.
¹⁰
All these factors converged on Richard's first day at school: breastfeeding her baby, Dora Russell handed her new pupil a mug of breast milk.