Bloomsbury's Outsider (58 page)

‘He remained almost heroically active to the last.'
¹

Bunny worked on his ‘lives' throughout 1978, but as the months passed he had to admit that his eyes were not what they had been. He consulted his optician who confirmed cataracts and booked Bunny into Moorfield Hospital, London, where he had the cataract removed from his right eye on 16 June. As he had to wait a month before being fitted with glasses to correct his sight, he utilised the time visiting friends and family in England. He was delighted to be made Companion of the Royal Society of Literature, alongside Stephen Spender and Philip Larkin.

Bunny spent much of his time at Hilton, now occupied by Richard and Jane. Jane's talent as a stage designer had transformed Hilton Hall into an elegant setting for paintings, pottery, textiles, sculpture and books. Bunny could not quite believe it was the same house he had inhabited. In July it was the backdrop for a
South Bank Show
feature on Bunny. Presented by Melvyn
Bragg, it was a pioneering television arts programme which eventually ran for thirty years. As Kim Evans, the show's producer, explained to Bunny, the programme would tie in with the release of the film
The Sailor's Return
, focussing on Bunny as the author of the original novel, of
Lady into Fox
and the prospective book of memoirs.

Bunny was filmed in Hilton Hall and in the garden, resplendent in an enormous pair of thickly glazed spectacles with his beret perched jauntily on his head. He noted in his diary, ‘Got on well with Melvin Bragg; drank wine all the time'.
²
The careful observer may have noticed that the level of wine in the bottle of red placed on the table between them was able to rise, as well as fall. It was evidently replaced several times during the course of the day's filming.

Returning to Charry in early August, Bunny was relieved to be back. But he thought it was time to have a companion to live with. Earlier in the year, when Quentin's and Olivier's daughter Virginia stayed for two months, he felt a weight had been lifted. It was not that he could not cope alone, but he enjoyed companionship and found Virginia particularly engaging company. They had what she describes as a bond over food, both enjoying cooking, devising menus and marketing.
³

In the meantime there was the usual stream of visitors to keep him occupied. Frankie Birrell's nephew, Hallam Tennyson (the poet's great-grandson) also came to interview Bunny for a BBC radio programme, and in December
Lady into Fox
was BBC Radio 4's
Book at Bedtime
. Bunny had finished his book of memoirs, which Richard had dissuaded him from calling ‘On
the Lips of the Living', instead opting for
Great Friends
. Richard also persuaded his father to have a telephone installed at Charry and to buy a ‘Super-Comtesse', a sort of mobile invalid carriage, as insurance against failing his next medical. In October Bunny had been given a ‘Pi-jaw' on his age by a locum doctor, who only granted him a three-month driving permit. The ‘put-put' lurked, a malevolent presence, signalling what might lie ahead.

Bunny's hoped-for companion arrived on Christmas Day 1978, in the shape of his daughter Fanny. As he told Frances Partridge, ‘We have settled into an absolutely truthful, intimate and amused relationship'.
⁴
In the ensuing months Fanny busied herself by forging a garden for Bunny, driving iron wedges into unforgiving rock. She knew he longed to grow vegetables again, something which would give him enormous pleasure. She completed the garden on Easter Sunday 1979, having planted asparagus, carrots, bay, rhubarb, tomatoes and vines. Bunny planned it all on paper, drawing up planting schedules and purchasing seeds with the same enthusiasm as for his vegetable garden at Wissett Lodge in 1916.

Great Friends
was published by Macmillan in June. It was a handsome book, containing not only Bunny's descriptive ‘Portraits of seventeen writers', but also reproductions of photographs, paintings and sculptures of each. Bunny was present on the front cover, dapper in his Savile Row sky-blue tweed suit. He quoted Samuel Butler on the title page: ‘Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again, / Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.'
⁵
The portraits range from the writers Bunny had known as
a boy, like Galsworthy, Conrad and Edward Thomas, to those of his own generation and social milieu, including Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and T.H. White.

Great Friends
had come about because Richard (working for Macmillan) recalled how well Bunny had previously written about other writers, including D.H. Lawrence. He gave Alan Maclean various passages to read and the book was commissioned. It was well received and widely reviewed, so much so that
Gay News
focussed on Bunny's memoir of D.H. and Frieda Lawrence, in which he quoted Lawrence's ‘black beetles' letter in full. Characteristically torn between the need for truth and what he perceived as potentially problematic revelations about his own sexuality, Bunny again came close to revealing his bisexuality in print. Post-Holroyd, he could now admit ‘my friends were homosexuals', but in relation to his own sexuality, he accused Lawrence of ‘barking up the wrong tree'. With his children and grandchildren in mind, Bunny could not quite make it through the confessional door, lingering instead on the threshold.

In a review inevitably entitled ‘Bloomsbury Survivor', C.P. Snow singled out Bunny's ‘cheerful impartiality', that even in his late eighties he could ‘still keep his disinterested interest active and fresh'.
⁶
In the
New Statesman
, Jonathan Raban perceptively observed the paradox in Bunny: ‘His pedigree is purest Bloomsbury, but his temperament is much closer to that of Buchan and Kipling.'
⁷
Bunny enjoyed the review, but did not care to be compared to Kipling, an ‘Imperialist'. Raban explained that the similarities were located in what he perceived to be a
shared ‘poetic tenderness and detailed attention to machines, to the outdoors, to the precise naming of landscapes', and that it was ‘as one of the heroes of a kind of exactitude in writing', in which he saw parallels between Kipling's and Bunny's work.
⁸
Raban recognised there was more to Bunny's craft than fantasy and fable alone, that his writing was underpinned by the land on which he had laboured and the earth which he dug.

Bunny planned to spend June in England, but before leaving, Giovanna visited and stayed a night. Fanny tactfully made herself scarce. In England Bunny undertook his usual rounds. Visiting Angelica at Charleston he found her ‘friendly but restrained', pondering ‘Can we ever have been happy & married?'
⁹
Due to return to France on 2 July, Bunny was confined to Hilton for an additional week. A nightmare in which he was attacked by a chow caused him to fall out of bed, leaving him with a black eye and cracked rib. He had never much liked dogs.

Back at Charry Bunny was visited by Rosie Peto and her partner Renee Fedden, and in quick succession by Anna Wickham's son, Jim Hepburn, Geoffrey Keynes's son Stephen, Francis Meynell's son Benedict, and by Dicky Garnett and his younger sister, Anne Lee Mitchell. Bunny's grandson Ned came to help bottle wine. The garden was full of courgettes, beans, leeks, tomatoes, peppers and aubergines, but such abundance did not deter Bunny from frugally resurrecting some ancient cold chicken which he disguised in a curry. He was so ill afterwards that he spent hours on the bathroom floor. His powers of recovery were such that when, a week later, he needed stitches for a wound in his arm, he insisted on receiving no anaesthetic,
to satisfy his curiosity as to whether he could bear the pain.

In May 1980 Bunny received a letter from an American Professor of English, Matthew J. Bruccoli, who was completing a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald and particularly wanted to know whether Bunny could provide information derived from his correspondence with Fitzgerald. Bruccoli continued to say that the only available evidence of their correspondence was Fitzgerald's inscription to Bunny in
Tender is the Night
. He hoped Bunny might still have the book.
¹⁰
Bunny had never even seen it. This was the first he had heard of such an inscription. In fact, Bunny did not much admire Fitzgerald, and was unimpressed when he read
Tender is the Night
back in 1952.

It transpired that the inscription had been quoted by Alan Ross in a 1948
Horizon
article: ‘ “Dear David Garnett' it read, ‘Notice how neatly I stole and adapted your magnificent ending to LADY INTO FOX which I know practically […] by heart” '.
¹¹
Bunny assumed Fitzgerald had sent him the book care of
Horizon
's editor, Cyril Connolly, assuming Connolly would forward it. He was probably right, as the inscribed book remained on Connolly's bookshelves until it was sold at Sotheby's as part of the ‘Cyril Connolly Collection', eventually residing in the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma. A bibliophile, Connolly took great care of his library even if he did not care to whom the contents actually belonged. According to John Sutherland, Connolly misappropriated at least two collector's items from among Stephen Spender's books. Fitzgerald's inscription was a
nice accolade, and Bunny was glad to learn of its existence.

In June he made his annual pilgrimage to England where he visited Angelica, took tea with Barbara Bagenal and saw his children and grandchildren. But as he wrote to Mina Curtiss, ‘I am 88 and beginning to depend on other people to do things like changing the wheel of a car.'
¹²
He decided that the time had come to have a companion. Fanny had been with him for much of the previous year, and it was a great comfort to know that she had bought a cottage nearby, but he did not want her to feel tied. He had recently experienced bouts of dizziness and wanted to have someone on hand in case these returned. He composed an advertisement entitled ‘WOMAN WANTED', stipulating the candidate should be well educated, healthy, middle or upper class, not religious, dog-free, independent, have work to occupy her, should speak French, drive a car and have no lover or children on the scene.

Bunny's agent, Hilary Rubinstein, knew just such a woman, and on 23 July Joan O'Donovan arrived for a preliminary meeting. She was a writer, at one time the lover of the writer Frank O'Connor (whose real name was Michael O'Donovan), with whom she had a son. (She changed her name to O'Donovan by deed poll.) As Bunny told Frances, ‘She is sixty-five, has a cap of grey hair' and ‘eats and drinks everything and likes cooking'.
¹³
Having agreed that Joan would arrive in October for a trial period until Christmas, Bunny quickly found that they got on well and shared similar tastes. While Joan tapped away on her electric typewriter, Bunny sorted through his correspondence with Sylvia Townsend Warner (his letters to her having been
returned after her death). He was thinking of editing the correspondence for publication, though he told Frances that his letters ‘will want a good deal of pruning as I find to my surprise that I wrote to her freely about Angelica. They are not discreditable but private.' ‘There is too little privacy nowadays', he lamented, adding, ‘There soon will be not one of my friends or acquaintances whose biography has not been written'.
¹⁴
Joan left for Christmas, as arranged, although she would return in the New Year. Expecting a lonely Christmas, Bunny was surprised and delighted when Henrietta arrived on Christmas Eve.

In January 1981 he worked on his selection of Sylvia's letters; Joan returned, and they continued harmoniously as before. On the 29th Bunny cooked a particularly good dinner for Meg and Bysshe Elstob: stuffed eggs followed by roast pork and red cabbage with apple; baked pears for pudding. Bunny noted in his diary that the following day was like a ‘fine spring day'.
¹⁵
He bought eighty litres of wine which he set aside to bottle later. That was the final entry in his diary, the last words he wrote. The following day he had a stroke and was left more or less paralysed. Joan called Henrietta, who came straight away. She was soon joined by Richard, William, Nerissa, Sophie and her fiancé, Wenzel Gelpke. Fanny did not come. Henrietta commented that when she saw Bunny at Christmas, she noticed he had aged, and had a ‘faraway look in his eyes'. He told her how much he loved her and of his hopes for Sophie. ‘He spoke of all the people whom he loved. It was a kind of requiem.'
¹⁶

Joan told Richard that Bunny had initially reacted to being
incapacitated with ‘violent fury'. Richard sat up with his father, talking late – ‘a sort of farewell'.
¹⁷
While the others remained, Richard returned to a publishing deadline in London. On 17 February Bunny had another stroke, ‘decided that this sort of life was not for him', and died, a few weeks short of his eighty-ninth birthday.
¹⁸
According to his wishes, his body was removed to the School of Anatomy in Bordeaux. As he earlier remarked to Frances: ‘no funeral, no black ties, no cold feet, no horrors'.
¹⁹
Bunny had so loved the physical world around him that he could not contend with the concept of any kind of afterlife, except that of his books and those who lived on to carry his genes. The last letter he received was from Rosemary Peto. ‘Darling Bunny', she wrote, ‘Thank you for your existence'.
²⁰

Bunny had an immense capacity for friendship. Frances Partridge described him as a ‘first-rate-friend', ‘staunch, warm and appreciative'.
¹
His brother-in-law Quentin Bell wrote, ‘In a friendship which lasted for sixty-five years I do not remember that we ever had a real quarrel'.
²
His childhood friend, Harold Hobson, moved to the village of Hilton simply to live close by. Both Sylvia Townsend Warner and Mina Curtiss were lifelong friends, his correspondence with each spanning half a century.