Bloomsbury's Outsider

by Sarah Knights

  It was some time, however, before Bunny felt entirely comfortable among Adrian’s friends, many of whom were members of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle which in London centred on Adrian and his sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, but which had largely been forged from members of the elite but secret Cambridge intellectual society, known as the Apostles. The Bloomsbury Group rejected conventional authority or conventional morality, believing personal relationships were paramount, and that in such relationships truth and honesty were more important than exclusivity. It was a close-knit group of people who knew one another very well, and who tended to have intimate relationships with those already in the fold. For this reason, there was a certain amount of recycling.

  In September 1914 the Caroline Club entertained Rupert Brooke, now a Sub-Lieutenant in the RNVR, and admitted five of Adrian’s Bloomsbury friends: John Maynard Keynes, Gerald Shove, Clive Bell, Saxon Sidney-Turner and Duncan Grant. A fortnight later Vanessa Bell and her husband Clive were in attendance, and in November James Strachey’s brother, Lytton, came along. There were more and more people with whom Bunny could take tea, have dinner and visit the Café Royal. According to a young acquaintance, Michael Fordham, Bunny was at this time ‘very beautiful and seemed to me like a god’.3 Suddenly he found himself much in demand.

  But war could not be kept at arm’s length indefinitely. It impinged upon Edward’s income: his employer, the publisher George Duckworth, announced he would publish nothing for three months and could pay only a basic £15 per month. There was no guarantee of Edward receiving any extra for reviewing or of Constance obtaining translation work. In November she and Edward received a circular communication from the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee instructing them to supply the ‘names of those of your household [aged between eighteen and thirty-eight] who are willing to enlist for the War’. Further, the letter stated:

  In order to maintain and reinforce our troops abroad and to complete the new Armies which we hope within a few months to throw into the field, we need all the best the Nation can give us of its youth and strength […]. Every man, therefore, who is eligible, will ask his own conscience whether, in this emergency, it is not his duty to hold himself ready to enlist in the forces of the Crown.4

  The pressure to enlist was mounting, but Bunny either decided against or was discouraged from doing so. The latter seems likely, as in a letter from Edward Thomas to W.H. Hudson, the former reported that he had heard Edward Garnett say that Bunny ‘had been dissuaded from enlisting’.5 For the meantime, conscription remained voluntary and Bunny’s status as a science scholar meant he had bona fide work to occupy him. But as more and more young men enlisted, those that did not became progressively visible exceptions.

  If Bunny needed proof of his growing popularity, it came in December 1914 in the form of an invitation from Lady Ottoline Morrell, the extravagantly dressed and elaborately coiffed grande dame of literary and artistic London, who held court at her weekly salons in Bedford Square. Ottoline knew everyone. According to his diary, Bunny’s first attendance at Ottoline’s began awkwardly. But he soon relaxed sufficiently to perform an Apache dance with the French actress, Valentine Tessier.

  Later that month, Bunny embarked on a weeklong walking tour with Frankie Birrell from Yatton in Somerset to Lockeridge, near Marlborough, in Wiltshire. Their destination was a cottage called ‘The Lacket’, the country residence of Lytton Strachey, who had invited Bunny and Frankie to his Christmas party. Bunny was relieved to be out of London as he had been confined to the laboratory for several weekends. They arrived on 23 December to find Noel and Daphne Olivier, James Strachey and the Bloomsbury artist Duncan Grant already there. As the cottage was too small to accommodate everyone, Bunny and Frankie took rooms, as the season demanded, at the local inn. When, on Boxing Day, Bunny, Noel, Daphne, Frankie, James and Duncan set out for a walk, Noel and James paired off, as did Frankie and Daphne, leaving Bunny and Duncan together. With half an eye on Daphne, with whom Bunny fancied himself in love, he did not register the momentousness of the occasion. Looking back he recognised it as a turning point, a moment which ‘marked an epoch in my life’.6

  On 2 January 1915 Bunny received an invitation from Maynard Keynes, requesting ‘the pleasure of the company of Mr Bunny at dinner at the Café Royal at 7.30 pm on Wednesday January 6, before Mrs Clive Bell’s party.’ Bunny was instructed to dress in ‘any clothes, the fancier the better or as you like it’.7 There is no record of whether he dressed as an Indian prince, but he did record that at dinner Maynard placed him between Duncan and Vanessa. There were seventeen to dinner, including Clive Bell, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the critic Desmond MacCarthy and his wife, Molly. Afterwards Bunny found Vanessa’s party most impressive, with ‘dances & songs & Gerald Shove very drunk with roses in his hair’. Overcome with sentiment, Bunny told Maynard he was a dear, to which Maynard replied that he would kiss Bunny if there weren’t so many people present.8 As the party drew to an end, Maynard and Frankie drifted off together and Bunny left with Duncan. To Bunny’s surprise, Duncan declared love. Bunny walked home with him, and spent the night, chastely, in Duncan’s studio, Bunny on the bed, Duncan on the floor clasping Bunny’s dangling hand.

  Duncan was seven years Bunny’s senior. Like many, Bunny discerned something special in Duncan: not only was he exquisitely beautiful, with large eyes shaped like those of a classical sculpture, lovely bone structure and full, sensual lips, but he had a particular warmth and teasing humour which no one could fail to be charmed by. He also had a singular ability to live absolutely in the moment, whether absorbed in the act of painting a picture or in the company of friends. He had fallen in love with Bunny during their Boxing Day walk, and soon afterwards sent Bunny a straightforwardly polite invitation to dinner or tea. But he had chosen not to send another missal, rapidly scribbled in pencil, which read:

  Bunny You don’t realize how much I love you. Why should you? You are happy old creature. I am so glad.

  My heart aches to see you & to tell you I care for you more than you can possibly imagine.

  […] Don’t think I’m complaining, can’t you see I want to be with you? It’s miserable without you.9

  In fact Duncan had first been attracted to Bunny almost two years earlier. In January 1913 he had written to Bunny, inviting him to a party he was hosting jointly with Adrian Stephen. On the back, Bunny later inscribed: ‘Earliest letter inviting me to one of Adrian’s parties.’ So it was Duncan who was responsible for drawing Bunny into Bloomsbury, and it was Duncan who issued that first important invitation.

  In January 1915, after the night at the studio, Duncan wrote asking Bunny whether he was ‘always just simply kind to everyone’, warning him that such kindness ‘is very dangerous for poor people like me’. He told Bunny, ‘You mustn’t go on unless you don’t mind my wanting to see you much oftener than you want to see me’, adding, ‘But, oh! But, oh! […] if you see me again you must be VERY KIND but honest as the DAY.’10 Two days later Bunny recorded in his journal, ‘went to Duncan’s & spent the night there’. This time there was no reticence, Bunny feeling inspired with a passion ‘borne partly of curiosity about this darling strange creature so like an animal & so full of charm’.11

  Two weeks later, Vanessa Bell came to tea at Pond Place. She was thirty-six, thirteen years older than Bunny, but he found her extremely beautiful, tall and striking, with a ‘lovely, sensitive mouth’ and ‘strangely innocent grey-blue eyes’. Later, when Bunny knew her better, he considered her unique for her ease in male company, unselfconscious ribaldry and gay humour.12 Bunny recorded in his diary:

  She was altogether charming & talked to me – I said I had thought the best thing to do would be to be brutal to Duncan but I had found it impossible …… And she said she was glad I had. She was in love with Duncan but couldn’t feel jealous of a man. Duncan always had been in love with a man – Adrian for a long time, Maynard at one time […] She thought we could have nice times together. I said I had been mu
ch more falling in love with her than Duncan & that I was a womanizer.13

  Bunny was still hedging his bets, but so was Vanessa. She knew Duncan was homosexual, but the two of them had a particular bond which she did not want to lose. To keep Duncan close, she needed to be close to his lover, and so a few weeks later, Vanessa took Bunny into her confidence, speaking intimately of her former love affair with Roger Fry. She soon embarked on a charm offensive, telling Bunny she and Duncan often talked of him, and when talking of his looks, ‘decided that we liked looking at you & after all what more can one say of anyone?’14

  While it might be assumed that Frankie Birrell preceded Duncan into Bunny’s bed, this seems unlikely, as Bunny’s diary records no more than the kiss in the taxi. Bunny knew Frankie was in love with him, but felt unable to reciprocate. He later rationalised his relationship with Frankie as ‘sentimental love on his part and a flattered readiness to experiment on mine’.15 Or, as he explained, Frankie ‘was physically attracted by me, but I was unable to respond, and during our friendship […] I was quite incapable of returning his early “falling in love with me”.16 But for several years Frankie would continue to send Bunny highly emotional letters to which Bunny could not reply in the same tone. Even so, he loved Frankie with a combination of amused affection and fraternal protectiveness. When Frankie’s mother died in March 1915, it was Bunny who comforted him, tenderly kissing his tear-swollen eyes, before endeavouring to buoy him up with gossip. Frankie occupied a special place in Bunny’s heart, and Bunny worried that he would be hurt with Duncan on the scene. Bunny noted in his journal, that when Frankie found out about the relationship, he ‘prophesied unhappiness for all of us’.17

  Beneath the darkening shadow of war, friendships intensified and the London social whirl gained an electric momentum. There were countless parties, some given on the eve of departure by those who had enlisted, like Maitland Radford (in the RAMC). Bloomsbury dinner parties were followed variously by dancing, puppet shows, masquerades, charades and impromptu revues. At one party the artist Barbara Hiles’s fervent dancing gave Bunny a swollen black eye. It was as though everyone was grabbing at life, ignorant of what lay around the corner. Bunny had finally attained his wish ‘not for one friend, or sweetheart even, but a whole roomful’. One evening Daphne and Noel Olivier invited him back and they chatted to him while he had a bath, and he chatted to them while they bathed, and he felt it was ‘jolly sitting with them naked & unashamed’.18 A few days later, in Daphne’s bed, he admired her beautiful body. ‘I never want to see a man again & speak to one’, he concluded, adding ‘How sick I am of all this dull sodomitical twaddle!’19

  Bunny’s desire for fountains of love did not go down well with Duncan who responded with emotional outbursts. Bunny decided to keep away for a few days, returning to Pond Place, where he received a note from Duncan, promising to stop being jealous. ‘All I want to say my angel is that I’m not going to be selfish & spoil your life, I really want you to do what you want. Be happy & love as many people as are worth it & remember that this is my real point of view.’20

  Duncan’s possessive behaviour was unusual. His affairs with Lytton, Maynard, Adrian and James had all been relatively short lived, following the same pattern of a period of intensity cooling gradually into affectionate friendship. Moreover Duncan did not appreciate anyone behaving possessively over him. But despite his protestations to the contrary, he wanted an exclusivity which Bunny could not provide. The underlying cause of Duncan’s possessiveness was an inability to cope with Bunny’s relationships with women. Had Bunny wanted other men, it might have mattered less; Duncan may perhaps have felt less threatened. But Bunny made it clear that he could only love Duncan in the context of being free to love women as well.

  Bunny saw Frankie almost every day, enjoyed weekends with Duncan and still found time to rendezvous with Ruth Baynes in the country. After one of Ottoline’s parties one evening, Bunny was strolling past Harrods with Lytton Strachey, when Lytton turned and kissed him on the lips in full view of the street. Bunny dashed into a taxi, a prudent measure at a time when homosexuals were hounded and routinely harassed by the police. He reflected that it was less a matter of his ‘minding being kissed’, than of ‘disliking being kissed in the street by a bearded man’.21 In fact Bunny was ready for any number of new experiences. Depressed about college work, he sought consolation with a prostitute, ‘Rose Dolces’, who assured him that she was fresh from the country, had a series of connections with married men, and rarely went on the streets.

  In February 1915 Duncan moved temporarily to Eleanors, a farmhouse at West Wittering, near Chichester in West Sussex, which Vanessa had taken as an escape from London. When Bunny joined Duncan there towards the end of the month, the two men were blissfully happy, on one occasion raiding the cellar of the artist Henry Tonks’s adjacent studio, drinking wine in the sunlight, and fighting ‘drunkenly & lustfully’, before enjoying ‘the sweet lassitude of sleeping in each other’s arms’.22 But in London Bunny found himself in a situation reminiscent of that which he had experienced with James Strachey in 1912. This time it was James’s older brother Lytton who endeavoured to court Bunny, bombarding him with invitations. Although Bunny enjoyed Lytton’s clever, witty and risqué conversation, he kept a distance, which Lytton did not fail to notice, writing: ‘It sometimes occurs to me that my persistent invitations may be too much for you; but at other times I fancy that you are very indulgent […] in spite of your not writing to me.’23

  Bunny and Frankie spent a weekend, that spring, with D.H. and Frieda Lawrence at Greatham, East Hampshire. Lawrence evidently found Bunny so changed by his Bloomsbury friends that he wrote to Ottoline suggesting there was ‘something wrong’ with Bunny. ‘Is he also’, Lawrence asked, ‘like Keynes and Grant [?]’ He said they made him dream ‘of a beetle that bites like a scorpion’, a beetle, moreover, which he was able to kill.24 According to John Worthen, Lawrence’s biographer, Lawrence’s feeling of revulsion arose because he ‘knew this feeling, which was why he found it so disturbing. It was a revelation to him of the way in which he himself might be homosexual, and did not want to be.’25 Lawrence wrote to Bunny the same day, imploring him to break free of his homosexual friends:

  It is foolish of you to say that it doesn’t matter either way – the men loving men. It doesn’t matter in the public way. But it matters so much, David, to the man himself […] that it is like a blow of triumphant decay, when I meet Birrell or the others. I simply can’t bear it […]. Why is there this horrible sense of frowstiness, so repulsive, as if it came from deep inward dirt – a sort of sewer – deep in men like K[eynes] and B[irrell] and D[uncan] G[rant].

  […] Now David, in the name of everything that is called love, leave this set and stop this blasphemy against love.26

  The letter came as a shock to Bunny, for he had written to Edward about the weekend, commenting on Lawrence’s good spirits. Eleanor Farjeon, staying in a cottage nearby, recalled a light-hearted weekend, with cricket and croquet.27 But Bunny stood his ground with Lawrence regarding the ‘men loving men’ question. Consequently, in Lawrence’s eyes the vigorously masculine Bunny whom he had loved in Germany, was no more. Now he was David and beyond redemption. After this, Bunny saw Lawrence only once more, by accident, on the evening of Armistice Day. But he wrote and told him how much he admired Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and received a warm letter in reply. Bunny later reflected that Lawrence ‘could charm every human creature who attracted or interested him and at first meeting almost every fresh separate person did attract him. He did, however, use up his human attachments rather fast.’28

  In May Vanessa wrote to Roger Fry, stating she felt ‘happier about Duncan and Bunny because I see that Bunny really does care a good deal for him’. Refuting Fry’s contention that she might have feelings for Bunny herself, Vanessa explained that ‘he likes I think to be demonstrative to everyone he likes, but he’s not in love with me.’29 Although Bunny and Duncan had latterly been very happy
together, Duncan’s jealousy periodically resurfaced. He conceived a notion that Bunny was in love with Maria Nhys, a young woman in Ottoline’s employ. Leaving the Morrells’ Bedford Square house one afternoon, Bunny was confronted by Duncan rushing towards him white-faced and apparently unable to speak. Duncan seemed so unhinged that Bunny feared he was out of his mind. A few weeks later, after an evening at Ottoline’s, Bunny went back to Maynard’s Gower Street rooms, where, the worse for whisky, he kissed Maynard in bed. Hovering suspiciously on the threshold, Duncan witnessed the event and became extremely agitated. The situation was compounded by Duncan’s prolonged absences at Wittering, where he had too long to speculate about what Bunny was doing and with whom.

  Bunny was always ready for an adventure, and when, one evening at the Café Royal, he was given the nod by a lovely young artists’ model, he quickly acceded to her request to obtain cocaine from a chemist. Betty May was extremely pretty with an olive complexion, and deep-violet-blue eyes set wide apart. She was only five feet tall, but with her fierce and feisty disposition, was known as ‘Tiger Woman’. Bunny assumed she was eighteen, but at twenty-two, she was only one year younger than him. At Pond Place he lit a fire, they undressed, and in order to show willing, Bunny took some cocaine. Under the influence, Betty started a row, to which Bunny responded angrily, telling her that he did not regard her as a prostitute, ‘but as a human being full of lust like myself’.30 Later they talked, and Bunny, who had decided to reform her, insisted that Betty give up drugs, which she promised to do. The next morning, according to Bunny’s journal, Betty was ‘full of love’ for him, so he gave her ten shillings. And so began a relationship in which Bunny furnished Betty with occasional hand-outs for the next sixty years.