by Gillian Gill
With Vanessa frantic with anxiety, Bunny, a practical chap with a solid science background, had the happy idea of calling in a woman expert in the person of his old friend Noël Olivier. The two had known each other in the old neo-pagan days (he had slept with her sister Daphne) and Noël, a member of a notable generation of Newnhamites, was now in practice as a doctor. Unable to come down to Sussex herself, Dr. Olivier dispatched her colleague Dr. Marie Moralt to Charleston, and despite stalwart opposition from the local man, who had no use for women doctors, Moralt put the baby on cow’s milk and “Grey’s Powders.” Within days the Bell baby was feeding greedily from a bottle and putting on nine ounces a day.
How much of this nutritional drama in Sussex reached the ears of the Woolfs in Richmond is unclear. Regina Marler, in her volume of Vanessa Bell’s letters, includes no letters between the sisters in the first months of 1919, and Virginia Woolf’s diary contains no account of her baby niece’s perilous first months. It is possible that Vanessa and Duncan did not want news of their problem to spread through the Bloomsbury community. Certainly, it was not until March 4 that Virginia Woolf had recovered enough from her flu and the extraction of her abscessed tooth to get over from Asheham to see for herself how things were going with Vanessa and the baby. She and Leonard now owned a reliable car, but having had a couple of accidents, Virginia did not drive. Instead she bicycled the eight miles in cold, driving rain, an escapade that must have reduced Leonard to a quivering heap of anger and anxiety.
Woolf records in her diary that she found the situation at Charleston an odd mixture of chaos and calm. Vanessa’s domestic service had been reduced to a man of all work, a governess for the boys, and a “sharp Jewish-looking cook,” and the cook took to her bed as soon as Woolf arrived. It was Duncan, therefore, who went upstairs to make up a bed for Virginia, and between them, Vanessa and Duncan and Bunny got dinner on the table and heated water on the hearth for diaper washing and hot-water bottles. None of this sounds especially heroic. A ratio of six able-bodied adults to one small baby, two boys quite old enough to lend a hand, and one guest happy to help might surely be considered adequate, even in an old farmhouse without electricity or plumbing or running water. Virginia’s reaction is, as usual, to praise how marvelously her sister manages.
Vanessa may have been less than delighted to see her sister arrive. Woolf says she was able to have only about a half an hour with Vanessa, who stayed behind the door of the baby’s room, and it seems Woolf’s only glimpse of Angelica came when the baby was being changed before the fire in the kitchen. Only at the end of her diary entry does Virginia, as if reluctantly, describe her niece, but what she says speaks volumes: “She is a wistful, patient, contemplative little creature, examining the fire very meditatively, with a resigned expression & very large blue eyes. I suppose not much larger than a big hare, though perfectly formed—legs, thighs, fingers, toes—both fingers and toes very long & sensitive.”
Woolf could see how weak Angelica still was at eleven weeks, such a contrast to her brother Julian who, at the same age, had let howls of outrage ring through the house when he didn’t get enough to eat.
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The birth of Angelica Bell is one of the most scandalous events in the history of Bloomsbury, though not because she almost died from malnutrition and male medical malpractice. Bunny Garnett was in the farmhouse when Vanessa went into labor, and after the birth he and Duncan went upstairs together to congratulate the mother and take a first look at the newborn. That same evening, Bunny Garnett wrote of her to Lytton Strachey: “Its beauty is the remarkable thing about it. I think of marrying it; when she is twenty, I shall be 46—will it be scandalous?”
Well, scandalous it duly became, and though his biographer Sarah Knights has recently mounted a stalwart defense of Garnett as a writer, editor, publisher, husband, family man, and lover of women, it still seems hard to condone a young man who looks down at his male lover’s offspring in a shoebox and imagines, even as a joke, having “it” in his bed instead of “its” father twenty years on.
Did Duncan know what Bunny had written to Lytton? That is possible, for the two men seem to have had few secrets from each other. Could Garnett have possibly predicted that a few lines hastily dashed off by oil lamp one night would cast a shadow over his long, productive, and successful life? Obviously not. What percentage of the letters even the Bloomsberries wrote in 1918 survive? Did Garnett remember what he had written? He claimed later that he did not, and his denial is plausible. Who among us has not been reminded of some stupid thing we said or wrote in the heat of the moment many years ago, and forgot? Did Garnett for twenty years nurture plans to take revenge on Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, as Angelica Bell Garnett sought to convince the world in her best-selling, prize-winning memoir Deceived with Kindness? Probably not. As Sarah Knights amply documents, between the two world wars David Garnett was a very busy man, with books to write, businesses to run, a sick wife and two sons to provide for, and a farm to manage. When did he have time to brood and plot?
But if David Garnett was neither a man armed with a reliable crystal ball nor a man set on a twenty-year seduction strategy, his notorious message to Lytton was nonetheless a calculated act of revenge and a first salvo in a long campaign. With World War I over, with Duncan already on the hunt for his next grande passion, and with Vanessa finally free to show just how much she disliked the old one, Bunny knew his time at Charleston was nearing its end and was already trying to secure his own position in London. He had seen and heard enough of Lytton Strachey to know that the man specialized in gossip and had almost a fetish about his correspondence. So Bunny, intelligently, supplied the Bloomsbury rumor mill with a hot item and made himself a player, not a victim.
And the fact is that, some twenty years later, David Garnett did, as he had predicted, become not just Angelica Bell’s lover but her husband, and the father of her four children. By becoming the son-in-law of Vanessa and Clive and Duncan, he moved into the heart of the Bloomsbury group, which still had a kind of cachet after the war, and he used it for his purposes. Luck played its part in Garnett’s triumph—notably the death of his friend Julian Bell in 1937, which brought him back into the Charleston set, and the death of his wife, which left him free to marry—but he also played a savvy game. When the teenage Angelica jumped into his lap, he treated her as a woman, not a child. When she confided in him, he listened. He patiently groomed her until, after a few years of coy flirtation, in another moment famous in Bloomsbury history, they at last became lovers in H. G. Wells’s back room.
Bloomsbury watched Bunny Garnett’s seduction of Angelica Bell with appalled fascination. Duncan, motivated more by sexual jealousy than paternal concern, actually tried to warn Bunny off Angelica. In response, Bunny remarked that it was a bit late in the day for Duncan to play the Victorian paterfamilias, and he then walked off. Vanessa, who knew that Angelica had to take a lover sooner or later, seems to have decided, with a twisted reasoning all her own, that Bunny was at least a known quantity and that his wealth of sexual expertise would make initiation pleasurable for her daughter. Quentin Bell, still reeling from the death of his older brother, thought the affair a joke and went on vacation with the couple.
But when it became clear that Bunny intended to marry Angelica, not just sleep with her, Bloomsbury was horrified. Leonard Woolf and Maynard Keynes both took Angelica aside and tried to persuade her that marriage to David Garnett was a bad idea. They probably pointed out that the man was a known serial philanderer whose affairs had caused his adoring wife, Rachel Marshall Garnett, great anguish for the last ten or more years of her tragically short life. Garnett’s farm near Cambridge was a place he loved to return to on weekends to work off the flab and entertain his friends, but as his wife, Angelica, like Rachel, would find living there very lonely and cold and very hard work. But Angelica knew all this already, so she ignored the advice.
The one thing the kindly old men of Bloomsbury could not bring themselves to do
was tell Angelica that, to their certain knowledge, at the time of her conception and birth, the man she was about to marry had been her father’s lover for over two years and had also lusted after her mother. These were things that Vanessa could not bring herself to tell her daughter, and they were the things, Angelica tells us in her memoir, that would have prevented her from marrying David Garnett.
Why were Maynard and Leonard silent about these things despite the clear danger they saw facing a young woman they loved? Angelica has an answer. Vanessa was determined that her daughter should not know, and both men yielded to her indomitable will. “They recognised in [Vanessa] a force that was more full-blooded and more intransigent than their own, an emotional power that had to be reckoned with even though it was seldom expressed directly. If Vanessa adopted them with all the strength of her nature as a sort of extended family, she required from them an allegiance, almost an obedience.”
With Julian Bell dead on a battleground in Spain, there was one person who, in the period 1938 to 1940 when Bunny and Angelica were having their affair, might have felt not just authorized but impelled to use her eyewitness testimony and her narrative skills to convey to Angelica the complex web of emotions and memories that bound her mother, Vanessa, her father, Duncan, and her lover, Bunny. That person was Virginia Woolf, who cared very much for Angelica and, though she had learned to have smooth professional relations as a publisher with David Garnett, had clear memories of how both she and Vanessa had hated and resented him back in 1918.
But as Britain lurched toward war with Germany, Virginia was in a troubled state of mind. She feared that her biography of Roger Fry would flop and that her new novel Between the Acts would never get finished. She was reading Freud and diving deep into her memories of Hyde Park Gate. The memory of Gerald lifting her onto the hall table at Talland House and fingering her genitals had come back to her. By 1940, the so-called phony war was over, and everything pointed to a swift German victory. Through her brother Adrian Stephen, now a prominent psychiatrist, Virginia and Leonard secured a prescription that would allow them to commit suicide before the Gestapo came for them.
Living at Monk’s House since her London home had been destroyed by German bombers, and seeing little of her sister and her family, Virginia had been kept from knowledge of the Angelica-Bunny affair. When she finally got wind of it, she was extremely upset. At the first opportunity, she took her niece aside and asked Angelica if she intended to marry Bunny. Angelica said she did not, which was possibly true at the time. By early 1941, however, Virginia Woolf was dead, drowned. And it was then, as the bombs rained down on London, that Angelica finally yielded to Bunny, became his wife, and retreated to the safety of his farm.
The marriage of Angelica and Bunny was not a happy one, but it lasted for over twenty years. In 1955, hard up for money as always, David Garnett published a slimy apologia pro matrimonio suo in the form of a novel, which he titled Aspects of Love. The novel’s dedication to “Angelica Vanessa Garnett” (from whom Garnett was then estranged) made it clear to Bloomsbury aficionados that Aspects of Love was a roman à clef. Garnett, however, who was strenuously erasing any record of his love affair with Duncan Grant from the annals of his life, changed the sex and the age of the characters in his book so as to eliminate even the tiniest taste of homosexuality.
In the novel, Garnett splits himself into two protagonists, young Alexis and his rich uncle George, two well-born studs who are irresistible to women. Both Alexis and George have sex with Rose, a talented actor at the beginning of what will be a successful career, but it is the older man, George, who carries Rose off. Uncle George finally marries Rose and gives her one child, a girl, Jenny. Twenty years on—the very time frame Garnett had envisaged in his letter to Lytton—forty-something Alexis has been invited into the home of Rose and George and becomes a friend of Jenny’s. Though barely a teenager, Jenny falls madly in love with Alexis and begs him to possess her. Angelica Bell, let it be noted, was about eighteen when she and Garnett first became involved, and about twenty-two when they first had sex, but in Garnett’s novel, the young girl becomes the seducer and the middle-aged man the seduced. Alexis nobly pushes Jenny away and tells her they must wait until she is older—and then goes off to sleep with another of Uncle George’s hotties.
By narrative magic, Duncan Grant has been metamorphosed into the highly sexed artist Rose, the mother, not the father, of Jenny, and then, in a cameo, into Uncle George in extreme old age. Take that, Duncan, you old goat, one imagines Garnett saying to himself as he dashed off his novel. Take that for reducing me to tears back in February 1919 when I returned to Charleston from London to find another young man already, literally, in my bed. Aspects of Love, with its setting in a French chateau, a delicious villa in the Midi, and a chic apartment on Île Saint-Louis, is a slickly produced piece of high-class heterosexual soft porn. The scene when Jenny, in a diaphanous nightgown, throws herself at Alexis is especially troubling. A lot of people in England, however, loved the book, and Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose wives were getting progressively younger, acquired the rights and in 1989 launched it as his latest hit musical, with a hit ballad—“Love Changes Everything.”
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Had Vanessa Bell’s third child been a boy, the awkward truth about his paternity could have been easily finessed. Like Julian and Quentin, Bell son number three would have found his place in the Bloomsbury constellation as he grew up. He would have learned, as if by osmosis, that Duncan, not Clive, had sired him, and been more pleased than sorry. Discovering that one is not the son of the unlikable man you call Father is a romantic trope for young men, as André Gide was remarking around that time in his great novel Les faux-monnayeurs. Bell son number three would have been cognizant of the status and material advantages accruing to him as a Bell, while feeling pride that he was a mixture of the more distinguished Stephens and Grants. But Vanessa’s third child was a girl, and that changed everything.
As things would turn out, Garnett’s objections to the fiction of Clive Bell’s paternity were well founded. The initial lie seemed as harmless as it was expedient, but the lie would become a seventeen-year exercise in deception and hypocrisy, in which Vanessa required all who loved her to play parts. Making a happy and safe life for the daughter she loved, keeping her away from men like Jem Stephen, Jack Hills, and George Duckworth, became a primary goal for Vanessa Bell. She set out to create for her daughter a fairy-tale world in which, unlike the girls at Hyde Park Gate, she would be loved, valued, doted upon, indulged, and vigilantly kept from harm. And, given that so many of the males she surrounded herself with were homosexual, Vanessa Bell felt sure that Angelica would grow up safe. Roger Fry, born in 1866, was the least predatory of men, and he died when Angelica was sixteen. Of course, there was Clive, who was certainly predatory, and his mistresses got younger as he grew older, but Vanessa Bell was confident that she could manage her husband.
In practice, keeping her daughter safe and happy meant spoiling Angelica—telling her how pretty she was, how artistic, how delicious—while curbing her freedom and exerting constant control. By the age of five Angelica was already, she tells us in her memoir, aware that, whereas her brothers were given a long leash, permitted to take risks and make mistakes, she was petted and watched and caged. Even as she describes idyllic moments from her life at Charleston, Bell Garnett makes disquieting references to her fear of falling ill since illness gave “all kinds of people besides Vanessa disconcerting and intimate access to my body.” On the next page she describes a photograph in which she is held in the arms of “a Madonna-like Vanessa, whose long straight fingers are too apt to find their way into every crevice of my body.”
Vanessa was insistent that Angelica know nothing about the free-loving life Vanessa herself had lived between thirty and forty, and, remarkably, she had the power to keep other tongues from wagging. Since 1908, Bloomsbury had prided itself on its refusal of sexual restraint and its happy freedom to, for example, point to “semen” on a
lady’s dress, but none of the people who lived through those libertine times with Vanessa—not her former lover Roger, not her husband, Clive, not her sons, who had lived in the farmhouse where Duncan and Bunny fucked and fought—felt authorized to speak of them to Angelica. As the girl grew up, Charleston ceased to be a place where Clive, Duncan, and Maynard could openly conduct their amours. Duncan and Vanessa had separate rooms and were never seen to embrace. “Pas devant les enfants,” Vanessa would murmur if her guests threatened to revert to the old vocabulary of “cunt” and “catamite” and “buggery,” and Angelica would be sent off with a governess or a friend.
Vanessa Bell had once championed women’s right to sexual freedom, but she found it impossible to talk to her daughter about sex and refused to allow anyone else to do so. It was only when seventeen-year-old Angelica was about to leave for London to attend drama school that, on her older brother Julian’s insistence, she was sent to a woman doctor charged by Vanessa with supplying the information about sex and reproduction. The doctor was astonished to find this child of Bloomsbury so totally uninformed.
To summarize, no one in the Charleston set that clustered around Vanessa Bell felt authorized, as it were, to include Angelica in the Bloomsbury group as they had included her two brothers. David Garnett did include her, and that, I think, is why she married him. At forty-six Garnett was still a very attractive man, but the secret of his appeal to Angelica Bell was that he was the first to see her as a mature woman and treat her as an adult.
Angelica Bell did not learn the truth of her parentage until she was eighteen. In an agony of grief over the death in Spain of her son Julian, Vanessa Bell let the truth slip out almost by accident. Angelica received the information in silence, apparently unmoved. She agreed to her mother’s request that she not “upset” Duncan or Clive—Vanessa could not bear for people to be “upset”—by revealing that she knew the truth, and she kept that agreement to the end of both men’s lives. But beneath a surface serenity she modeled on her mother’s, Angelica Bell was very upset indeed. She felt that her world had been undermined, turned upside-down. Some six years later, as David Garnett’s wife and the mother of his child, her mental disarray only intensified when, she claims, she finally learned that Bunny and Duncan, to Vanessa’s knowledge and with her consent, had been lovers at the time of her birth.