The appeal took place at Ipswich on 19 May. This time the atmosphere was entirely different. Maynard arrived looking extremely purposeful, clutching a large bag emblazoned with the royal cipher. He demanded their cases be heard as expeditiously as possible, ‘as he had left work of the utmost national importance in order to attend’.26 Philip Morrell also gave evidence on their behalf, and Bunny submitted a letter from the Prefect of the Marne praising his work with the Quakers. They were awarded non-combatant service: they would be soldiers, but would not have to fight. Although Maynard appealed immediately, the response would take several months in coming. Uncertainty and tension prevailed.
In June Lytton Strachey arrived for a weekend. Bunny felt sure that Lytton’s visit was ‘as much to see me as to see any of the others’.27 Initially feeling rather excluded from the tightly-knit triangular ménage, Lytton pondered whether it was ‘their married state that oppressed me?’ ‘But then’, he added, ‘were they married? – Perhaps it was their unmarried state.’ Lytton’s record of the weekend is preserved in an autobiographical fragment in which one particular passage suggests that his relationship with Bunny had hitherto progressed beyond flirtation. ‘Perhaps if I could have lain with Bunny’, he reflected, ‘and then I smiled to think of my romantic visions before coming [to Wissett] – of a recrudescence of that affair, under Duncan’s nose’.28 Certainly Lytton found Bunny most attractive, and his recollections reveal something of the sexual potency which Bunny exuded. As Lytton chattered with Bunny outside, he found himself wanting to ‘take hold of his large brown bare arm. That I knew was beautiful.’ Feeling progressively melancholy, Lytton later walked with Bunny in the dusk: ‘He was so calm and gentle, and his body was so large, with his shirt (with nothing under it) open all the way down – that I longed to throw myself onto him as if he were a feather-bed.’29
Lytton also captured the complexity of Bunny’s character, the mixture of animal-magnetism and shyness, ‘his charming way’, ‘his sympathy’ his ability to amuse, and ‘how shy and distrustful of himself he was in company’. ‘Without any difficulty’, Lytton continued, ‘I stretched out my hand and put it into his breast […]. We came nearer to each other, and with a divine vigour, embraced […]. We kissed a great deal, and I was happy. Physically, as well as mentally, he had assuaged me. That was what was so wonderful about him – he gave neither too little nor too much’.30 This encounter occurred in the context of Lytton’s own confused state: he had fallen in love with the artist Dora Carrington (always known as Carrington), and felt unable to share his feelings with anyone except Bunny, to whom he confided in the garden at Wissett. Like others later on, Lytton turned to Bunny certain of his innate sympathy. Bunny expressed this sympathy in a way in which he knew Lytton would understand. ‘The darling!’ Lytton recalled, ‘How beautifully he had smoothed me down!’31 ‘You are a blessed creature to find in this world’, he wrote to Bunny afterwards.32
Between comforting friends and harvesting blackcurrants, Bunny snatched moments to write, although reading War and Peace he despaired of ever achieving anything satisfactory. On 19 September Bunny wrote to Constance: ‘All has been chaos & confusion.’33 The Board of Agriculture man (Mr Watling, a local farmer) had visited Wissett to assess whether they could be considered to be undertaking work of national importance. He subsequently sent a damaging report refusing to recommend the continuation of their work at Wissett to the Pelham Committee, a committee established to assist the Tribunals in selecting suitable work for the applicants. He concluded that Bunny and Duncan were doing the work of two women, although the farm had been worked by two men, a boy and a woman before the war. ‘The mysterious atmosphere of one of Conrad’s tales has descended on us’, Bunny told Frankie. ‘The whole Pelham Committee & Central Tribunal believe that we were mysterious young men of means who had established themselves in a large country house with ten footmen and two mistresses apiece & spent our time shooting pheasants and entertaining the upper classes with champagne at breakfast […]. The whole thing is typically English isn’t it?’34 But as Bunny informed Constance, a resolution had been found. Vanessa had taken a house at Firle in Sussex, where Bunny and Duncan would work for a local farmer. Ever the optimist he added, ‘I have a thousand plans of course already’.35
Chapter Nine
‘The diary habit has come to life at Charleston.’ (Virginia Woolf)1
Vanessa had taken on the lease of Charleston Farmhouse, an attractive four-square building sitting beneath Firle Beacon on the Sussex Downs. She left Wissett in September 1916, taking the children back to London, while Duncan cleared up the Suffolk house and Bunny set off for Charleston accompanied by Barbara Hiles and Carrington. In his distinctly civilian yellow corduroy coat and breeches, he felt self-conscious on the train to Lewes, surrounded by uniformed men. The three companions decided to walk from Lewes to Charleston, but as dusk fell they turned off to Asheham to seek the hospitality of Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Finding the house in darkness and its inhabitants away, they decided nevertheless to spend the night there. Bunny shinned up a drainpipe, letting himself in through a back window.
The trio thought nothing of snuggling into the same bed for warmth, Bunny in the middle. Although he and Barbara were lovers, Bunny also fancied himself in love with Carrington. But she was in love with Lytton Strachey and afterwards wrote to Bunny deflecting his declarations of love: ‘I am sorry to be so solidly virtuous’, she said, ‘But I still maintain it is quite impossible to talk seriously, or make love with another person in the same bed’.2 In an ‘autobiographical fragment’ Bunny alleged that he and Carrington later became lovers, but there is no evidence of this, and at different times he furnished conflicting accounts on the subject.3
Barbara and Carrington returned to Lewes, and Bunny settled into a temporary, but solitary existence, at the Ram Inn, at nearby Firle. Alone at Wissett, Duncan was miserable: everything reminded him of Bunny. He was also remorseful, apologising to Bunny for having been selfish during their last days together, presumably because Barbara had been there as well. Bunny was lonely too. ‘The longer I am away from you’, he wrote to Duncan, ‘the more I feel that even temporary absence from you is intolerable.’4
Having assumed their trespass at Asheham remained undetected, Bunny was surprised to receive a letter to the contrary from Carrington. They had been seen by a local resident who reported to the Woolfs that their house had been broken into. According to Carrington, ‘Virginia was in rather a panic as strange people had broken in, eaten all the food and moved the beds!!!!’ ‘Of course’, she added, ‘I knew at once it was a fabrication about the beds being moved.’5 Bunny, whose tenacious adherence to the principle of truth often backfired, compounded the situation by confessing his involvement to Virginia, raking up the dust after it had settled and thus blotting his copybook with her for some time.
From the outset Bunny loved Charleston, but he had little time to execute his plans to cultivate the garden and tend bees, as he began work for Mr Hecks straight away. He soon discovered that working for someone else was entirely different to working for oneself. He was employed pulling mangels, a gruelling and back-breaking job involving hours stooping in muddy fields. Although Hecks was only four years Bunny’s senior, their relations remained formal. Whilst Bunny was clearly a ‘gentleman’, Hecks’s attitude was that of a yeoman farmer towards his labourer. He made it clear that he was ‘anxious to keep the conscientious objector rather quiet’. ‘I am’, Bunny explained, ‘a young man come to learn farming.’6
The arrival of a strong young farm-hand might well have aroused suspicion, especially as there was only a tiny minority of conscientious objectors working in agriculture. Moreover, in Sussex the war was omnipresent, military camps proliferated and gunfire could be heard across the Channel. Families were losing their men-folk to war and anti-conchie feeling was rife. The views of the headmaster of the village school at nearby Fletching were typical: ‘the papers are full of the applications for exemption th
at are coming before the Tribunals and the miserable excuses put forward make one’s blood boil to think Englishmen are so degenerate.’7 Bunny and Duncan kept a low profile, travelling the back lanes from Charleston to work. At the farm they were periodically scrutinized by plain-clothes policemen, checking they were not shirking their labours.
Initially, the triangular bond between Vanessa, Bunny and Duncan held reasonably firm. Bunny became fond of Vanessa’s boys, establishing lifelong friendships with both. He gave Julian a copy of Richard Jefferies’ Bevis for his ninth birthday, containing the map which he had drawn in 1904. Julian’s younger brother, Quentin, when teased by one of the servants about ‘Uncle Bunny’, retorted: ‘Now you know Trissie Bunny isn’t really my uncle quite well’, adding, ‘Do you know what he is? He’s my bosom friend.’8 Quentin later described Bunny at this time as a ‘shy youth but very attractive’; ‘a tall, rather clumsy, but very athletic-looking young man’, referring to ‘the sculptural splendour’ of his body.9 Farm work helped Bunny to achieve this physique, a physique which he took pride in maintaining well into his sixties.
Bunny and Duncan established an unvarying routine in which they left for work at 7.30, returning at 12.00 for lunch, finishing work at 5.00. Constance, who visited Charleston in late October, observed that Bunny ‘looks a perfect picture of a young farmer – in his velveteen coat & his gaiter & his mild sunburnt face’. In contrast she thought Duncan looked very white.10 At Charleston Bunny established a vegetable garden in which he worked all day on Sundays. Perhaps this gave him the idea to write a gardening manual, based on Alfred Gressent’s Le Potager Moderne. ‘Do you think’, he asked Edward, ‘a publisher would take the sort of little book I propose because I could turn it out very quickly.’11 Bunny thought a condensed version of Gressent would provide the English market with a book for the domestic gardener, and that it would help people to produce twice as much food.
After the mangel harvest, Bunny and Duncan were immediately set to threshing, equally tiring and repetitive work. As Bunny told Constance, ‘I throw a sheaf every second with my prong off the stack to a man who cuts string & pitches it to a man who lets it into the mouth of the machine. Another man on the stack throws the sheaves to me. So we go hour after hour. The wind blows the thick spray from the steam engine over us, the dust grimes our faces & things clog up our eyes.’12 Having expected to learn farming, Bunny was surprised to be allocated the most unskilled manual work, including dung-carting in weather so cold that icicles hung from the horses’ whiskers.
He managed to escape occasionally for a weekend in London or at The Cearne. In February 1917 when Frankie returned briefly from France, he and Bunny were so delighted to see each other that they talked non-stop from five in the afternoon until two in the morning. Bunny had a new admirer, the Bloomsbury mathematician Harry Norton, who seems to have fallen for Bunny just as James and Lytton had, and in his eagerness for Bunny’s affection, followed the same pattern of rebuffed pursuit. ‘There are a thousand questions’, he wrote to Bunny, ‘one would like to know the answer to – when you’re coming – How long you’ll be here – whether you’ll be alone – whether you’ll be nice to me.’ ‘Shall I dare to make love to you?’13
Working steadily at Gressent, Bunny wished he had time to write the novel constantly at the back of his mind. Lytton’s comment that Laurence Sterne had written nothing until he was forty-five was hardly reassuring. But the relentless nature of farm work was beginning to take its toll. For Duncan, the effects were largely physical: he lost weight and felt run-down. Bunny, on the other hand, suffered emotionally, particularly as he felt trapped by the enforced nature of their work, and by being confined with Duncan at Charleston. It was the usual problem: if he and Duncan were going to get along, Bunny required the stimulation of diversions and other love affairs. And so, on a rare foray to London in September 1917, Bunny lost no time in wooing Alix Sargant-Florence, a young woman he had met briefly at the Caroline Club in February 1915. He decided, at that first meeting, that Alix was ‘one of the women for whom I could feel raging passion’.14 The fact that Alix was in love with James Strachey was only a minor inconvenience, as James appeared beyond her reach, himself in love with Noel Olivier.
Alix was striking: nearly six feet tall and stick-thin, she had what Frances Partridge described as a ‘Red Indian profile’, together with bobbed thick dark hair and ‘level grey eyes’.15 She also possessed a first-rate brain, was highly inquisitive and loved an argument. Like Bunny, she had received little in the way of formal education, until she attended Bedales, hardly the most formal of schools. Like Bunny, she had travelled to Russia. Alix had studied art at the Slade, but disliking this experience, read modern languages at Newnham College, Cambridge, completing her studies in 1914. She was Bunny’s exact contemporary, and unusual, even among his circle of independent women, in eschewing any degree of dependency on men.
In his autobiography Bunny described their relationship as ‘half friendship, half love-affair’.16 On his side, at least, it was more: he completely fell for Alix. She was initially put off from having a physical relationship with him, for he took her to Pond Place, where the squalor of his room so disgusted her that she refused to go there again. When entertaining his lovers in London, Bunny was forced to choose between the squalid room at Pond Place and Duncan’s flea-infested studio in Fitzroy Street, where on one occasion Bunny killed thirty-six bugs. Perhaps for this reason, Alix preferred Bunny to join her at her mother’s country house, Lord’s Wood, near Marlow, in Buckinghamshire. In response to Alix’s first such invitation, Bunny drafted an emotional letter, attempting to explain his feelings for Duncan, and where she would fit into the scheme of things. Mostly it reveals Bunny’s confused state of mind. It reads:
Duncan is very much in love with me, & if I don’t say I am in love with him it is not because I feel less for him than he does for me. I love him & am absolutely dependent on his love. I have never been so happy in my life as in his society. It is the thing of the first importance – the air I breathe – But in spite of that I am starved don’t laugh at me – it’s ridiculous I know. I am starved partly by the war, as everybody is – & partly because none of the things I secondarily want are present.
I want something else […]. I have hunted for it of course – but there are not many people on the cards to supply it – or anxious to. Another man couldn’t – & most women are absolutely impossible […]. But of course none of the things I’ve said are really what prepossess me in your favour. You do that partly [by] your looks, partly because I can tell you the truth, chiefly I think because you are the reverse of what is called feminine.17
Did Bunny mean he was attracted by Alix’s androgynous appearance? Or did he mean that he appreciated her forthright intellectualism? Bunny and Alix’s love affair, if it could be so called, fell quickly into a pattern where she would arrange to meet Bunny and then change her mind. The chief problem was James, for she would drop everything in order to be with him. Alix liked Bunny as a lover but wanted little more; however, her periodic hesitations and retreats fuelled Bunny’s ardour, so that when they were together he was inclined to be too intense, whereas she wanted a light-hearted love affair, free from expectations. She told Bunny she wanted something ‘cheerful, cheerful, cheerful – & perhaps mildly exciting – & not in the least absorbing – &, if anything, a joke; but nice’.18 In December 1917 she invited Bunny to Tidmarsh Mill, the home of Lytton Strachey and Carrington. It was not the warmest invitation, as Alix was clearly at a loose end with James otherwise engaged and was absolutely blunt about this fact. Bunny joined her there, a few days before Christmas, but, as he commented wryly in his journal, this was after she had ‘thrown me over twice and changed back at the last minute’.19
Now passionately in love with Alix, Bunny was ready to jump when she summoned him. This level of uncertainty was terrible for Duncan, who needed time to prepare himself emotionally for Bunny’s absences, and was anyway paralysed with jealousy. Bel
ieving Bunny was keeping things from him, Duncan took to prying into Bunny’s letters, and even prised open a locked drawer in which they were kept. Alix, in turn, embellished her letters to Bunny with remarks designed to taunt Duncan, which only intensified his jealousy.
While Bunny believed his relationship with Alix enhanced his love for Duncan, Duncan could only perceive Alix as a rival. His periodic outbursts and prolonged bouts of jealousy tested Bunny’s patience to such an extent that on one occasion he lost control and hit Duncan. And so their relationship adopted a pattern where Duncan’s jealous outbursts were followed by contrition and remorse and Bunny’s absences with Alix resulted in tender reconciliations. But these periods of calm could not be sustained. In late December they embarked on an even more elaborate pas de deux when almost simultaneously the two men began to confide in separate journals, confidences nevertheless designed to be secretly read by each other. Read together, these journals not only reveal their relationship from both points of view, but also form, as they were designed to, a silent dialogue between the two men, where emotions were batted back and forth like a ball across a table. But Bunny was also scratching away in another journal, one which he kept secret from Duncan.20
In January 1918 Bunny recorded (in the more public of his two diaries) that Duncan ‘seemed to make demands on my strength. He had a definite attitude of expectation, he would thrust forward the whole time his relation to me. I wanted to have nothing expected of me.’21 The situation was becoming intolerable. Now, whenever Bunny planned to see Alix, Duncan became hysterical, on one occasion threatening suicide. While Bunny felt restless and tired and could see no way out, Duncan could not find a way through his jealousy. Vanessa wrote to Maynard, telling him ‘there have been such storms within for the last month or two’, adding, ‘I don’t think one can go on indefinitely with such constantly recurring crises’.22 Bunny also turned to Maynard, whom he knew understood Duncan better than most. He had tried to talk to Vanessa, but thought that ‘women don’t understand & can’t understand the relation between two men’.23 The situation existed partly because Duncan could not understand the relation between a man and a woman.
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