Bloomsbury's Outsider (8 page)

On 5 August Lawrence and Frieda set off to travel to Italy, their first destination Mayrhofen, over the border in Austria. On
the 22nd Lawrence informed Edward, ‘Bunny is here – we are fearfully happy together.'
¹²
According to Lawrence's later, fictionalised version of events,
Mr Noon
(published posthumously in 1934), Bunny appeared wearing ‘a homespun jacket and flannel trousers and an old hat and a rag of a tie'.
¹³
Instead of staying with Lawrence and Frieda, he took a room across the road, as he was expecting Harold to join him. Now an engineering student at King's College, London, Harold was good looking, tall, thin and muscular, and according to Bunny, full of nervous energy.

On 26 August the four of them set off to trek as far as Sterzing. In the hot sunshine, Harold and Bunny stopped to bathe in the icy mountain streams. While Bunny and Lawrence sought alpine flowers for Bunny's collection, Harold and Frieda slipped into a hay-hut where they had sex. As Lawrence's biographer John Worthen explained, Frieda ‘wanted Hobson, he wanted her – and it was a certain way of proving that she might be walking in Italy with Lawrence, but was still decidedly her own woman'.
¹⁴
Although Bunny had taught Harold the facts of life in long-ago Limspfield, Harold had evidently eclipsed Bunny in that department, at least for now. On the third day, ten kilometres from Sterzing, Bunny and Harold parted company from Lawrence and Frieda to catch a train home.

In January 1913, Bunny wrote to James Strachey expressing remorse for having been a ‘beastly person just recently', adding,
‘It is something wrong with my nerves'.
¹⁵
Lawrence, who thought Bunny sounded ‘a bit unhooked' in his letters at this time, commented to Edward, ‘manhood comes hard to him evidently', suggesting that Bunny needed to break away from his mother (a veiled reference to Lawrence's anxiety about Bunny's mixing with homosexuals).
¹⁶
Bunny's labile state stemmed partly from his yearning for what might have been had he been educated at Cambridge; partly it was frustration at dividing his life between the science laboratory and that coterie of friends with whom he felt he was in his natural environment. Mostly he yearned to find someone with whom to fall in love.

In May 1913 Bunny found her. She was Ruth Baynes, Godwin's younger sister. Like Godwin, Ruth was tall and powerfully built, but unlike him, she was shy and retiring. By June Bunny had become a regular visitor at Bethnal Green, where she lived with Godwin and Rosalind, now married. ‘I like her very much', Bunny informed Edward. ‘She is quiet and rather dignified and amusingly like Godwin sometimes.'
¹⁷
As an only child, Bunny often sought a shared intimacy between people who were connected to each other through family or friendship. It was as though he endeavoured to appropriate that kinship to create an extended family for himself. First Godwin had been the focus of Bunny's youthful adoration; then Bunny wanted Rosalind; now he had Ruth. This is made explicit in the last verse of ‘To Ruth', a poem in which Bunny celebrated his love:

Was it old Godwin who with spiderly arts
Bound us together with those blessed bars
And, playing Vulcan to your Venus and my Mars,
Snared in intimacy our unconscious hearts?

Bunny was always welcome at Bethnal Green, where he found the light hearted atmosphere most agreeable. But Godwin was part of the attraction, and as an example of masculinity, he exerted a powerful influence upon Bunny. Now twenty-one, and relatively inexperienced, Bunny looked up to thirty-one-year-old Godwin, who, the previous year had written passionate love letters to Brynhild Olivier, undeterred by the fact of her engagement to Hugh Popham or of his own engagement to Rosalind. In one letter he stated: ‘I am not disturbed when I think of Rosalind and then of you, I see you both so clearly and know I can be faithful to both. One cannot put a padlock to one's heart and give it to one woman.'
¹⁸
A few years later, these words could have been written by Bunny.

In the summer of 1913 Bunny gained his Associateship at Imperial College. Realising he had only one more year of study, he decided to try for a scholarship. There was no requirement to sit an exam but he would need to shine at interview and to be supported by the recommendations of his professors. In preparation, Bunny spent long hours in the Natural History Museum, where he met John Ramsbottom, Keeper of Botany, who became something of a mentor to Bunny, sharing his knowledge with him and allowing him to use the library's collection of slides. It was particularly helpful that Ramsbottom had a special interest in fungi, a subject which formed part of Bunny's syllabus.

Bunny continued to participate in Neo-Pagan camps, but the idyll was beginning to fade. They were growing up, some had even married; allegiances, once collective and innocent, now became individualised and intimate. The Garden of Eden had finally given way to the Garden of Earthly Delights. If the Neo-Pagan summer was drawing towards a close (or if Bunny had outgrown it), an exciting new prospect beckoned. Bunny discovered Bohemia, and he was taken there by the poet Anna Wickham. The Garnetts had moved, the previous autumn, from Grove Place to Downshire Hill in Hampstead, where Anna Wickham was a close neighbour. At twenty-nine, she was eight years older than Bunny, married with two sons and at this time trying to forge ahead as a poet against extreme opposition from her husband, who at one point incarcerated her in a private asylum.

Anna was tall and striking, with beautiful eyes and a forthright expressive countenance. Bunny felt sympathy for her predicament and read and admired her poems. Moreover, as Jennifer Vaughan Jones, Anna Wickham's biographer commented: ‘Anna's story had all the elements that he was highly susceptible to: a beautiful woman, an evil conspiracy, the chance to rescue, and the chance to be admired.'
¹⁹
If Anna did not altogether discourage Bunny from becoming infatuated, her life was too complicated to allow for an affair with an exuberant young man. But she found Bohemia an escape from her stultifying marriage and introduced Bunny to the delights of the Café Royal. There he found a potent mix of people from the worlds of politics, literature, music, art and sport rubbing shoulders with the
models, actresses, night-club singers, drug dealers and others of the
demi-monde
. It was a place where respectability was a dubious virtue and it seemed a thousand miles from microscopes and labs. If Imperial College ruled Bunny's days, then the Café Royal conquered his nights. They were different worlds.

Located on Regent Street, the Café Royal was dominated by a famously ornate saloon resplendent with gilt caryatids, red plush banquettes, marble tables and a sawdust floor. At this time, many artists' models congregated there. Some were fresh from the country, hoping to catch the eye of an Epstein or Augustus John; some were well-established and regularly employed; others were of uncertain status, relying on casual prostitution to fund cocaine habits. Nearby, the Cave of the Golden Calf was the nightclub of choice for those moving on in the early hours. Here the entertainment was provided by Lillian Shelley (known as ‘Shelley'), a vivacious and pretty woman with glossy curly hair. One evening, at the Cave of the Golden Calf, Bunny lost three pounds at poker, a sum which he could ill afford. Afterwards Shelley invited him over, ‘her breast heaving, her eyes blazing'. As Bunny recorded in his diary:

She welcomed me & made me sit by her and held my knee all the time. Presently she said:

“Garnett – get me a liqueur brandy – don't let them see.” I spent my last shilling on it – and then drank half of it – so people should think it was mine so that wild creature shouldn't get any more drunk. Finally I succeeded in getting her to go home.
²⁰

If Bunny was gallant, he was still naïve. But his capacity to fill every minute and to live life at an extraordinary pace was now manifest. He could burn the midnight oil in Bohemia and work hard in college all day.

In December 1913, in the course of a college fieldtrip to Silchester Common, Hampshire, Bunny found a minute species of mushroom nestling in the moss under gorse, which he did not recognise, or at least he found it unrecognisable in such a diminutive form. He took it to John Ramsbottom, who reported in the Journal of Botany that the fungus was a new species, ‘distinguished from its allies by the exceptionally small size of the apothecia.'
²¹
The fungus was officially named
Discinella minutissima
(Ramsb.et Garn.) and its discovery remained an achievement of which Bunny was justifiably proud.

W.H. Hudson wrote teasingly to Edward that he hoped Bunny would not confine himself to mushrooms and toadstools and disappear into obscure reaches of academia. But already, aged twenty-one, Bunny was not someone who would confine himself to anything restrictive, professionally or personally. He enjoyed college because he was interested in his work, but also because there was a lot going on outside it. Bunny could never be confined to one kind of life; he needed variety. The Limpsfield intelligentsia, the Neo-Pagans and now Bohemia, were all examples of Bunny's attraction to experiencing life away from the mainstream. He had such a capacity for experience that he wanted it in as many forms as possible. When in July 1914 Bunny was awarded the Marshall Scholarship, his dual life twixt college and Bohemia was consolidated for another year.

To be nearer to Imperial College, the Garnetts moved to a modest maisonette at Pond Place, off the Fulham Road, in Bohemian Chelsea. At this time a young man entered Bunny's life who would become one of his closest friends. Bunny met Francis Birrell (known as Frankie) at a party given by the Pophams and did not immediately take to him. In contrast, Frankie instantly fell for Bunny, trailing behind him like a devoted dog. Three years Bunny's senior, Frankie worked in the textiles department of the Victoria & Albert Museum. He was the son of the politician and essayist Augustine Birrell, and had been educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge. Frankie was small, tousled-haired and bespectacled, with a face like an impish schoolboy. He was loved by everyone for his keen intelligence and quick wit, his tendency to exaggeration, enormous enthusiasm and a stoicism which belied his myopic gaze and small frame. It only took a second meeting for Bunny to be charmed.

According to Bunny's journal, it was after drinking large quantities of the potent Sutton's cocktail (six parts gin, 3 parts Curacao, 2 parts brandy, 1 part orange bitters) that, his ‘relations' with Frankie began. On leaving a nightclub, he and Frankie took a taxi to Chelsea, where Frankie lived at Elm Park Gardens, around the corner from Pond Place. In the taxi Bunny put his arm around his friend's shoulders and began kissing him. ‘I kissed him & held him in my arms all the way home & then went off saying goodbye rather coldly lest the policeman should hear.' As a result of this rather mixed-message, Frankie rushed off to Hugh Popham to whom he declared his love for Bunny. As Bunny recorded in his journal: ‘Hugh immediately told Bryn who assured Francis […] that it had been like that with me & Godwin & she knew absolutely certainly that I should never
never copulate with him.'
²²
It is interesting that Bunny felt the need to record this reported conversation in his private journal, as if he was trying to prove something to himself. Perhaps he needed reassurance that he did not have homosexual feelings for either Godwin or Frankie. It was as though he could not resolve his own conflicted sexuality.

Such confusion was not unusual. Although James and Frankie were at home with their sexualities, others of Bunny's generation and class shared his feelings of confusion, while adding to the confusion by adopting the demonstrative and flamboyant language then in vogue among some homosexuals. In 1913 or 1914 the Neo-Pagans were briefly joined by Vernon Mottram, a former grammar-school boy some ten years Bunny's senior, who had gained a scholarship to study science at Cambridge, later enjoying a distinguished career as a physiologist and nutritionist. It is difficult to gauge, from his few surviving letters to Bunny, whether his affection for his friend was as profoundly loving in reality as expressed on the written page. ‘My dearly beloved Bunny', one letter began, ‘Know of a soft corner in my heart kept swept & garnished for you if you ever want to occupy it'.
²³

Many years later, in an unpublished autobiography written for his sons, Mottram described a thread running through his life, ‘the experience of sex by a person who is ambivalent'. He said that as a schoolboy he had fallen in love with another boy, explaining that at school he had been ‘restricted to boys', ‘and, of course, it became much more striking at Cambridge'.
²⁴
But he
emphasised that while many people of his acquaintance had ‘professed homosexuality' most went on to marry. Mottram turned to psychoanalysis to remedy his ‘ambivalence'.

Such ‘ambivalence' might also have been fuelled by fear of discovery and arrest as homosexual acts were illegal in England until 1967, hence Bunny's cold goodbye to Frankie, ‘lest the policeman should hear'. Unlike Mottram, Bunny would not need to seek a ‘cure' for homosexuality. The more homosexuals he came to know the more he realised that it was the individual to whom he was attracted, irrespective of gender.

‘Since liberty, Nature for all has designed,
A pox on the fool who to one is confined.'
¹

At what would be his final Neo-Pagan camp, in Cornwall in August 1914, Bunny was blissfully unaware of the momentous events unfolding in Europe, barely registering the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June. On 4 August Britain declared war on Germany. Assuming Bunny would face pressure to enlist, Constance urged him to begin medical training as an alternative to fighting. Again and again she encouraged him to opt for non-combatant service, asserting that this was not the cowardly option: ‘They say the ambulance work is quite as dangerous, so you need not feel you are shirking.'
²
Bunny considered training as a bacteriologist and joining Rupert Brooke's friend, Geoffrey Keynes, in the Royal Army Medical Corps. But Bunny had recently become acquainted with Geoffrey's brother, John Maynard Keynes, who assured him that
the war would last no longer than a year or eighteen months, on which basis he returned to college in October 1914 for his scholarship year.