Bloomsbury's Outsider (45 page)

Above all,
Aspects of Love
is a bold exposition on male virility, specifically Bunny's. As he told Ralph Partridge, ‘When I was thirty I believed the physical relations of people of 40 & upwards
must have grown pretty feeble & that at 50 or 60 it was the vanity which led them to pretend they had any physical desires'.
²⁴
But in this novella Bunny could inform the reader otherwise, from the female point of view: ‘George is not a satyr because he is sixty-four', Rose declares, telling Alexis that Sir George ‘makes love perfectly. Even better than you did.'
²⁵

While the novel is ostensibly a hedonistic celebration of inter-generational love, a sense of piquant, proleptical inevitability overshadows the narrative. Sir George must acknowledge that most of his life is behind him, but the past was ‘a world only of yesterday which he could scarcely believe had vanished'.
²⁶
As time passes and Sir George lives progressively in the past, the generation gap is no longer a triumph of experience over youth: it cannot be breached. Rose sadly acknowledges that she is no longer the flame that ignites, but ‘only the embers on the fire'.
²⁷
When Sir George dies, his credo ‘Set down the wine and the dice / and perish the thought of tomorrow', can only apply to those of a younger generation, left behind.
²⁸
Consequently, this most personal of all Bunny's novels, is profoundly moving in the context of his life, specifically in terms of the age gap between him and Angelica and of his own sense of transience in her life. As the novel's dedicatee, Angelica is literally as well as metaphorically present in the text. As Paul Levy observed, ‘When one realizes that David Garnett was present at Angelica Bell's birth, one can appreciate fully the delicacy of the tribute offered so
publicly – and courageously'.
²⁹
The book was hailed critically as Bunny's triumphant return to fiction.
The Times
proclaimed it ‘a pagan hymn written in praise of physical passion and the delights that go with it'.

Both
Aspects of Love
and the long awaited
The Flowers of the Forest
were published in the autumn of 1955. They sold well, although as Bunny's editor, Norah Smallwood, commented about his autobiography, ‘I'm afraid you are right in thinking that in some cases the book is being used as a means of having [a go] at one or two of the Bloomsbury giants'.
³⁰
The reviews were generally positive, many commenting on Bunny's frankness, but some swiped at what they perceived as Bloomsbury's ‘elitism'. ‘I would not mind being attacked myself', Bunny told Angelica, ‘but the hatred of Lytton, Maynard, Roger, Vanessa, Duncan, Clive, is really extraordinary. The book seems to have stirred up a wasp's nest.'
³¹
The review that stung the most was Harold Nicolson's in the
Observer
. Nicolson, a long-time acquaintance, slated what he considered Bunny's inconsistency:

At one moment we feel like we have got to know and like this cuddly young man with his soft eyes and sensitive mouth. At the next moment we are faced by a skilled and handsome labourer who with his tremendous biceps can heave logs or turnips without rest […] and who spends his leisure hours tumbling lassies in the bracken […]. We are never quite sure by the end whether to regard Mr Garnett
as a selfless idealist, as a somewhat guiless hedonist […] or as the artist-egoist.
³²

Nicolson missed the point: Bunny was all these things. If there was one reason why his autobiography succeeded it was in his skilful self-depiction as someone in the process of development, a combination of personae nuanced by age, circumstance and mood. Perhaps Bunny exaggerated when he told Geoffrey Keynes that the reviewers had given the book ‘a pasting on moral grounds',
³³
but Bunny laid himself open to criticism in his bluntness about loving many women, and in his jubilant passages celebrating his love for Duncan Grant.

Encapsulating the period of the Great War to the early 1920s, this volume celebrated Bunny's Bloomsbury friendships. Here Bunny described Duncan as ‘a genius', ‘the most original man I have ever known'. Most importantly, he stated that Duncan's friendship was ‘a great piece of good luck', for ‘it came at a time when I might have succeeded in my ambition of becoming a purely conventional person'. As a result of Duncan's friendship ‘I became and for the rest of my life have remained in what I take to be the true meaning of the word, a
libertine
: that is a man whose sexual life is free of the restraints imposed by religion and conventional morality'.
³⁴

In stating that Duncan saved him from becoming a conventional person, Bunny alluded to the kind of love which remained illegal in Britain until the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. Moreover
he employed the term ‘libertine' as a euphemism for someone whose sexual choices were neither constrained by marriage nor confined to one gender. Bunny was extremely brave to place his homosexuality on the page. He did so at a time when the censor prevailed, when not only authors, but their publishers and printers, could be prosecuted and even imprisoned. It is hardly surprising that Bunny's friends were nervous about volume two. They, of course, understood what he meant by the term ‘libertine'.

Much of this volume had been rehearsed at the Memoir Club, but in taking these recollections from the inner sanctum of Bloomsbury, and placing them before the public, Bunny laid himself open to the scrutiny of an unfamiliar audience. With one exception there was no immediate precedent for such confessional autobiography, and even his fellow Bloomsberries kept their personal lives close to their chests. Certainly Clive Bell's,
Old Friends: Personal Recollections
, published the following year, by-passed the personal in favour of the general. But there was one notable autobiography which preceded Bunny's, an autobiography ground-breaking in its startlingly honest approach to sexual matters: Stephen Spender's
World Within World
, published in 1951, four years before
The Flowers of the Forest
.
³⁵

Both men believed in expressing ‘truth' and although Spender's propensity for ‘truth' was more politically motivated and altruistic, their ideas on matters of sexuality were not dissimilar. ‘I believe obstinately', wrote Spender, ‘that, if I am able to write with truth about what has happened to me, this can help others who have lived through the same sort of thing. In this belief I have risked being indiscreet, and I have written occasionally of
experiences which seem strange to me myself, and which I have not seen discussed elsewhere.'
³⁶
For Spender, writing with ‘truth' meant he revealed his homosexuality in the same text in which he recalled his courtship and marriage. For Bunny, it meant he labelled himself a ‘libertine' while exalting Duncan Grant; he described himself as a womaniser, while recounting his courtship and marriage to Ray. In implicitly advocating that sexuality was not fixed, but a continuum, that it was the person who mattered, rather than gender, Bunny and Spender not only challenged established ideas of ‘normal' sexual behaviour, but also challenged the censor, as Bunny had done so often in the past. Seen together, Spender's autobiography and Bunny's volume two established a new kind of life-writing which, in foregrounding sexuality and in its unprecedented degree of honesty, foreshadowed Michael Holroyd's seminal biography of Lytton Strachey, published a decade later.

Where censorship was concerned, the 1950s were no less prudish than the 1920s. Vladimir Nabokov's
Lolita
, published in France in 1955 was banned in England the following year, despite critical plaudits in the British press. It was not until 1959 that Weidenfeld & Nicolson published the book in Britain, following a landmark trial which relaxed the British obscenity laws, opening the door for the subsequent ‘Lady Chatterley' trial and eventual publication of D.H. Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover
. In this context, Spender, Bunny (and their publishers) displayed considerable courage. But seventeen years Spender's senior, and recently awarded the CBE, Bunny was an elder statesman of British literature. Taking risks in fiction was one thing, but it was another matter to display what might have been considered an
unconventional personal life. In accepting the CBE in 1952, Bunny did something his father would have abhorred. But if, by so doing, Bunny appeared to have joined the establishment, it was short-lived. He could not escape his natural inclination towards non-conformity. He might have said he was genetically predisposed that way.

‘Constance was at all times I believe singularly free from jealousy of any sort – and I am lucky to have inherited from her a certain natural immunity to this painful & unbearable passion.'
¹

Bunny was back in the limelight. He had written a successful novel and the second volume of his autobiography was selling well.
The Golden Echo
and
The Flowers of the Forest
were featured on the BBC radio programme
Talking of Books
, and on the back of his resurgence as a novelist, Chatto & Windus reissued
Go She Must!

Bunny approached the New Year full of good resolutions. He wanted to focus on writing and as a gesture in that direction stopped farming pigs. Even so, he spent the night of 1 January 1956 in the cow shed, waiting for a Jersey to calve. Ann Montagu, Rosemary Hinchingbrooke's nineteen-year-old daughter, sat up with him, so Bunny named the calf in her honour. Bunny named all his cows after the women in his life. It did not seem to occur to him that there was something rather disconcerting in using his
pocket diary to note ‘Rosemary blew up' and ‘Inseminate Amaryllis'. Quentin Bell's assertion that Bunny was a ‘prize bull in a herd of cows' was not far off the mark.
²

Early in 1956 Vanessa wrote to Bunny to tell him that ‘a rather strange female called Mrs Holtby who lives in Cornwall', an admirer of Virginia Woolf, wanted to know whether he would allow her to take a cast of Tommy's bust of Virginia.
³
They dined together in London, and afterwards Patricia Holtby, a little dazzled by Bunny's literary eminence, wrote to say that she liked him very much. She was tall and thin with very short fair hair, married to Harold, a doctor, and had two children. Bunny thought her ‘a rather splendid, wild creature'.
⁴
They dined together on her occasional forays to London, but Pat soon deflated any expectation of a love affair, explaining that she was a lesbian.

When in February Bunny embarked on volume three of his memoirs he was hampered by tiredness and depression. Henrietta described his rages at this time, which ‘could sometimes be quite terrifying. His eyes would bulge and his face would grow brick red and his jowls purple and he would roar at us like a wild beast. But he never laid a finger on us.'
⁵
Nerissa recounted one such outburst to Leonard Woolf, telling him that their kitten, Apollo, ‘does as you say follow one about like a dog, which in this family is a bad thing. For, when Bunny stamps around the house in a bad mood […] Apollo, following him gets under his feet and then — “Miaaowwwwow!” “Oh, get out of my way you blessed
animal!”
⁶
Olivier Bell thought that she and her husband Quentin were boring compared to Bunny and Angelica, who ‘were emotional all the time and had such dramatic emotional feelings'. ‘Angelica and Bunny were always having desperate emotional rows; you'd go into a room and find them standing facing each other.'
⁷

The underlying problem was Angelica's coldness. Bunny depended on her love and with the bedrock of her love unstable, he found it hard to write or summon up much enthusiasm for anything. Although Ann, Rosemary, Giovanna and Pat intermittently massaged his ego, it was Angelica's love he craved. But Angelica felt imprisoned by Bunny's need for her, by domesticity and Hilton Hall. Daring to look outwards she told Leonard: ‘I begin to envisage a time when one may begin to expand a little.'
⁸
She had taken to disappearing mysteriously to London, or more locally from Hilton for the day.

Bunny's doldrums were lifted by news that he had been elected an Honorary Fellow of Imperial College and that
Aspects of Love
had been in the best seller list for six weeks. As a result he could decline any further grant from the Chapelbrook Foundation. ‘I hope now the dog is no longer lame', he wrote to Mina, ‘you don't regret enabling him to get over the stile'.
⁹
He was even more delighted when Richard and Jane's first child, Oliver, was born in March 1956. He adored his grandson, noting the baby's ‘great capacity for wonder – like Keats when he got to Scotland'.
¹⁰
Despite these pleasures, Bunny could not come up with any ideas for a new novel, turning instead to that old chestnut
Castle Bigod
, now optimistically re-named
Seek No Further
, which he worked on, in a desultory manner, before abandoning it again.

Shortly after his sixty-fourth birthday in March 1956, Bunny stayed with the Partridges at Ham Spray, delighting Frances who commented that the ‘visit has been a great success: what one wants a meeting with an old friend to be like, with plenty of easy talk and warmth circulating'.
¹¹
But at Hilton things were distinctly chilly. Despite a successful midsummer party in which the Garnetts exhibited a united front, Angelica needed to get away. In July Bunny noted in his diary that Angelica was in London ‘on mysterious private affair'.
¹²
She had gone to see an artist friend who had stayed at Hilton for a weekend in June. His name was Claude Rogers, and Angelica had known him from the time when in 1938 she studied art at the Euston Road School, which he co-founded in 1937.