Bloomsbury's Outsider (33 page)

‘The only thing which matters is to live according to one's own nature & to refuse absolutely to be what one is not.'
¹

In April 1937 Bunny was asked to edit the letters of T.E. Lawrence. This would provide vital income, if not on the scale he dreamed of earning from films. It would involve painstaking work and as Bunny was to discover, would draw upon all his resources of charm and diplomacy. The
Letters
were commissioned by the Trustees of Lawrence's estate, headed by his younger brother, Arnold (A.W.) Lawrence. Some work had already been done by E.M. Forster, who originally accepted the commission, but illness and fear of libel made him decide to withdraw. The
Letters
were to be published by Jonathan Cape, for whom Bunny now also worked as a reader, in this respect having stepped into Edward's shoes.

Unusually, all matters concerning the letters had to go through the Trustees' solicitor, rather than the publisher. But Cape reassured Bunny that they would shoulder all the risk regarding any
action for libel. Such reassurance came with strings: Cape would have the final word about what was included in the book. The Trustees' lawyer would also have jurisdiction on the matter. Bunny was thus subject to two sets of scrutiny on his work. He would not be paid an advance, instead receiving £50 for expenses, together with one-third of net income from sales.

Many of the letters had already been collected by the Lawrence Trustees. After Lawrence's death, A.W. published a request asking those who had kept his brother's letters to allow the Trustees to make copies. Some sent originals; others sent transcripts, reluctant to lend such precious items. But there were still a number of letters whose owners would not relinquish them in any shape or form. Charlotte Shaw, George Bernard Shaw's wife, was chief among this fiercely protective few.

Forster had started to put the letters into subject order, but Bunny decided they would only work chronologically, and that way he could add explanatory footnotes and write introductions to each section, outlining the historical context and background events. In total he included nearly 600 letters to 146 correspondents. As Bunny made clear in the Preface, ‘My dilemma has been to avoid repetition, which becomes wearisome, without mutilating too many letters – which becomes exasperating'. To this end he stated that he had ‘omitted many passages where Lawrence simply was repeating what he had already written elsewhere'.
²
This was not strictly true, and certainly where Lawrence's letters to Bunny were concerned, Bunny cut what he considered sensitive passages. Thus in a letter referring to the Graves/Riding/Phibbs imbroglio Bunny circled passages,
against which he inserted the word ‘omit'. In the published
Letters
, Bunny excised the whole affair, even though it had occasioned colourful correspondence between him and Lawrence. No doubt Bunny wanted to protect those involved and wished to avoid libel; doubtless he chose to cast a protective veil over his own participation in an embarrassing event. In so doing, that arch opponent of the censor had become the censor himself.

Bunny worked closely with A.W. Lawrence, who proved invaluable in providing introductions to sergeants major and other people outside Bunny's milieu. Fortunately Bunny and A.W. got on well and became firm friends. An early duty was to meet with Lawrence's mother, ‘a fierce old white-haired creature' ‘who knows her son was a saint'.
³
Bunny was rather nervous at the prospect, but disconcertingly found himself spending the interview thinking back to Christmas 1914, when Lytton Strachey had read from his naughty story ‘Ermyntrude and Esmerelda'. For Mrs Lawrence lived at Lytton's former residence, The Lackett.

Bunny was soon immersed in Lawrence material. He told Maynard that he thought ‘T.E.', as he called him, would have been a ‘fine subject for a Pirandello play: the character moulded differently to suit the needs of all his friends & even, as a hero, the world at large'.
⁴
Bunny discovered far more about T.E. than he could conceivably have done during his life. But he could not help feeling sorry for Lawrence, believing that as he ‘did not strive to satisfy the sexual appetite', he missed out on ‘love and desire and all the range of tenderness between them […], the ecstasies and contentments of physical intimacy' and ‘the sharp
joys and alarms of parenthood'.
⁵
Of course, the absence of such appetites and emotions was inconceivable to Bunny, for they were central not only to his happiness, but to his identity.

Bunny found himself spending most of his time in London. It was a convenient base from which to interview many of the Lawrence correspondents, and for his work as a reader for Cape, which involved weekly luncheon meetings. He was also now an occasional reader for Chatto and still wrote his ‘Books' page for the
New Statesman
. Bunny no longer lodged with Bar, instead taking up H.G. Wells's offer of his mews flat at Hanover Terrace, known as ‘Mr Mumford's room' after a former incumbent. This became Bunny's London base, though he also stayed with various friends. One night at Geoffrey Keynes's, just before midnight the telephone rang, calling Geoffrey to Bart's to perform an appendectomy. Geoffrey took Bunny along, introducing him as Dr Garnett. Bunny scrubbed in, donned surgical robes and entered the theatre. Ever the scientist, he found the whole thing fascinating. Having only dissected dead animals, he was intrigued by the business of operating on living flesh.

When in September 1937 Bunny snatched a weekend at Charleston, he found two roses in a vase in his room. He assumed Angelica had left them there, and writing to thank her, introduced a cautionary note: ‘We shall meet in Nessa's studio & she will say we are flirting outrageously which I hope isn't true, as whatever you do, I simply show my feelings which are too strong for me to hide […] but I'm afraid that's as far as it will go.'
⁶
While Bunny wrote Angelica chatty avuncular letters, which most often ended by his sending her a ‘warm hug', he could not mistake the
increasingly demonstrative tone of her letters to him, nor could he ignore her exuberantly affectionate behaviour in his presence. A few years before, when Angelica was fifteen or sixteen, she had curled up on Bunny's lap, carelessly circling his neck with her arm and resting her cheek against his. Vanessa had looked on with amusement, but Bunny realised that Angelica was growing up, and had started to view him in a less childish light.

Angelica asked Bunny to take her to London Zoo, ‘I love it & would especially with you. Or let's go to the seaside or ask me to come and spend a day at St Ives.'
⁷
Instead, Bunny invited her to dine with him in London. She turned him down, as she had accepted Virginia Woolf's invitation to the opera, and felt she could not refuse her aunt; ‘as I'm not so frightened of you', she replied to Bunny, ‘can I dare ask you if another day would do[?]'
⁸
Judging by Bunny's pocket diary, it would seem they did not have their dinner, but instead Angelica went, with Duncan, to Hilton for the weekend of 11 and 12 December. Richard and William were at home. On the Sunday Bunny, Richard, William, Duncan and Angelica walked to a nearby village. The next day Bunny took Angelica and the boys to Cambridge to catch an early train to London, where Richard and William returned to school. What Ray did that weekend, or what she thought, is unrecorded.

Bunny and Angelica were partly drawn together through shared grief. They had both suffered major bereavement in recent months. Bunny had lost his father and Tommy; Angelica had lost her adored brother; Julian had also been an important part of Bunny's life for more than twenty years. From Angelica's point of view, she had known Bunny since earliest childhood: he
was familiar, trusted, part of the fabric of her family. She did not need to make the same effort as she would with someone new or her own age: the repertoire of jokes, teasing, mutual friends and shared history was already in place. Of course, Bunny could have tried more actively to discourage Angelica. He might have toned down his expressions of affection; he might have invited Duncan to Hilton alone; he might have stopped treating Angelica like the sophisticated young woman she wanted to be.

But Bunny was flattered; he worried about aging: surely Angelica's evident attraction to him was proof that he remained desirable? Moreover, Angelica was extremely beautiful. With her well-defined regular features, generous cupid-bow mouth, large grey eyes shaped like those of a classical sculpture and perfect amalgamation of Vanessa's and Duncan's best features, she was irresistible. It wasn't only Angelica's looks which appealed. She was intelligent, although her intelligence was formed more by the Bloomsbury love of good talk and intellectual discussion, than any more formal schooling. At school she had been allowed to drop subjects which failed to interest her, so her education was largely restricted to art, English literature, music and French in which she was already well versed.

Bunny did not set out to find himself a young girl. He was not a lascivious or predatory older man, but Angelica's youthful exuberance was appealing. Youth promised health and vigour, the very attributes which were diminished in Ray. For the last two years Bunny's relationship with Ray had been compromised by the uncertainties of her health. She could no longer perform some physical activities, like rowing, as the radium treatment had weakened the muscles in her right arm, and her pectoral muscles had also weakened following her mastectomy. But it was not only the physical effects of her cancer which were corrosive:
the psychological aspects of the disease, the ever present fear of its return, remained unspoken between Bunny and Ray. As he later wrote in his autobiography: ‘all the time the fear was there in both of us and just as the diseased cells crept slowly back and multiplied after being checked by radiation or carved out by the knife, so fear grew in her and terrified her'.
⁹

Angelica was like a fresh canvas: there was no history of deceit, no unhealed wounds and no recriminations. It was the freshness of her untroubled life which appealed, a freshness which momentarily seemed to blow all his cares away. Although their relationship had been conducted largely by correspondence, in February 1938 Bunny suggested to Angelica that ‘we might get in the habit of meeting when we're in London'.
¹⁰

Bunny asked Duncan how he would feel if he (Bunny) ‘became
too
fond of Angelica'. Duncan reflected that

Nessa & I had often remarked about A's affection for Bunny & we had even joked to A about her frequent letters from Bunny, I took the whole matter as rather a joke & it was not until Nessa asked me if I thought there was anything serious in A's feelings (& remarked how she refused to read Bunny's letter when it arrived till after breakfast which she thought indicative of a certain excitement & anticipation) that I began to consider the whole thing seriously.
¹¹

While Duncan pondered whether it might be better if Angelica fell in love with someone her own age, Vanessa seemed more sanguine. In typical Bloomsbury fashion she was content to keep everything circulating within the Bloomsbury family, remarking to Duncan ‘that in any case A must fall in love with someone very soon & that perhaps Bunny was not a bad person to start on.' A few days later Vanessa had evidently thought more upon the matter, because in an unusually Victorian manner she told Duncan to ask Bunny about ‘his intentions'. And so Duncan trumped Bunny's question with another: ‘By the way what are your intentions regarding my daughter?' He used the word ‘intentions' wryly, amused by its old-fashioned tone.

Bunny countered prickly by demanding what Duncan had meant by using the word ‘intentions'. Annoyed by Bunny's ‘excessively emotional condition', Duncan became angry. In turn, Bunny accused him of behaving like a Victorian father which made Duncan more enraged. Duncan reflected that the episode had given rise to ‘all sorts of unnecessary emotions', asking himself, in his diary, whether he was jealous, but failing to mention of whom. They had fallen into that same pattern of behaviour which had proved so destructive at Charleston during the Great War. Duncan worried about the ‘uncontrolled self ignorance of B when he falls in love'.
¹²
It was a difficult situation: for Duncan knew Bunny all too well in the very way he feared Angelica might come to know him, too.

Bunny immediately wrote to Vanessa, telling her about his talk with Duncan. ‘My love for Angelica', he explained, ‘is made up of every sort of love; it is mixed up with my love of you & Duncan & the past; but it is extremely strong & sincere & I think
unselfish as far as love can be unselfish.' But he made clear that he had scruples and that he and Angelica were not lovers: ‘If she were five years older, or had had a love affair, we should almost certainly have been lovers long ago', he said, adding ‘I shan't try to seduce Angelica.' He told Vanessa that she and Duncan needed to recognise that Angelica was no longer a child and deserved to be treated as an adult.
¹³
A few days later Bunny wrote again to Vanessa, to clarify what he had said about being ‘unselfish': ‘What I meant was I should never hurt her if I could help it & that I accept the fact that I shall be hurt myself.'
¹⁴
This was the first time he considered that he might be the recipient as well as the perpetrator of pain. Bunny then appealed to the Bloomsbury insularity to which Vanessa was prone, reasoning with her that he at least was a safe bet, for Angelica might otherwise fall in love ‘with someone who feels ill at ease with all of you & profoundly hates & despises all the things you care about'.
¹⁵

Vanessa wrote Bunny a surprisingly placatory letter in which she stated: ‘I must tell you that I really feel only so glad when I see how happy & alive she is with you. I agree with you in thinking you can have an intimate relationship which will be happy for you both – & even if there are risks involved when aren't there? […] I want her happiness more than almost anything & I'm simply very grateful to you for giving her so much.'
¹⁶
Vanessa thus gave Bunny her blessing over Angelica, just as she had given him her blessing over Duncan many years before.