Bloomsbury's Outsider

by Sarah Knights

  Bunny and Andreé did not have an affair, but his inability to dissimulate and self-indulgent assumption that Ray would want vicariously to share his every experience, damaged his marriage. He could never understand that the characteristic Bloomsbury way of articulating, analysing, sharing, scrutinising and being open about personal relationships was not appropriate for Ray. She wanted to be happy, she wanted Bunny to love her, and she hoped he loved her exclusively; but she did not want to know about any other claims on his affections, real or imagined.

  Ray also wanted to be taken into account; it was ironic that at the very time when she, above all people, deserved a holiday, Bunny should abandon her and go on vacation himself. It was another example of that selfishness manifest since his childhood, whereby he rarely did anything he didn’t want to do and conversely usually achieved what he wanted. The vacation was also an example of his need for compartments, his urge to prevent the domestic sphere from merging with his wider social circles. While he welcomed friends to socialise with his wife at Hilton, he rarely transported Ray into the external life he shared with them.

  As Bunny told Lytton, ‘France was delightful. For a month I recaptured my twentieth year.’6 That was exactly what Bunny wanted: he wanted his family and all the happiness it brought him but also to be able to access a different world, in which he could return to a carefree youthful existence. In one of his earliest letters to Ray he told her, his tongue only slightly in his cheek, that what he wanted in life was ‘Freedom’, ‘Unbounded Admiration’, ‘Universal success with women’ and ‘Eternal Youth’.7 These were neither realistic long-term choices nor the most appropriate to a happy marriage, but they did reflect his boundless enthusiasm for living life to the full. Bunny lived very much in the day (though he liked to have something appealing on the horizon) and he liked to be in love because every new love affair provided a fresh affirmation that life had not become stagnant or moribund, but could offer new experiences and be eternally renewed.

  That autumn, Bunny heard from his American publisher that ‘Puss’ had been turned down. He knew the decision was fair, conceding it ‘a meaningless story badly done’.8 But this was a blow: the first time he had suffered a rejection of his work. To compound matters, he felt directionless: even as Bunny worried about putting food in his children’s mouths, he could not settle to work. Instead he whiled away his time remodelling the garden or playing badminton, joined in both enterprises by Tommy’s brother, Garrow Tomlin, who was spending more and more time at Hilton. Edward advised Bunny that the only way forward was ‘to seclude yourself & go on day after day at it more or less all day’.9 But his advice fell on deaf ears: Bunny allowed himself to be endlessly distracted, attending numerous parties, including one where he saw Picasso talking to the film star Douglas Fairbanks.

  There were parties and parties: those of Bloomsbury tended to be more intellectual, with ‘good talk’ a priority. But there was dancing too, Lydia accompanying Maynard dancing the ‘Keynes-Keynes’ or everyone pushing back the furniture and dancing to gramophone records. Fancy-dress parties were favoured, Bunny and Geoffrey Keynes on one occasion encased in the rear and front of a dappled horse, like a pantomime pony. Light-hearted plays were performed on topical themes, usually with one member of Bloomsbury impersonating another. At one party, hosted by Bunny, Tommy came dressed as a fortune-teller, remaining unrecognised by his friends as he read their palms in an insalubriously shady alcove (the toilet in Duncan’s studio). Bunny later acknowledged that the main aim was ‘to get the young woman whose eyes answered one’s own downstairs in an empty room among the hats and coats’.10 It was as though he had not progressed beyond youth.

  As if Bunny did not have sufficient opportunity to socialise, he and Tommy established a dining club, for the purpose of good conversation among select friends. They called it the Cranium Club, after Thomas Love Peacock’s Mr Cranium, the brainy character with the enormous domed head, in Headlong Hall. The club met monthly, initially at the Verdi Restaurant on Wardour Street, later at the Reform Club. New members had to be proposed by two existing members, and then not be blackballed, which guaranteed nepotistic exclusivity. The list of members reveals just how much Bunny’s influence prevailed. In 1929, four years after the club’s formation, members included Frankie Birrell, Bunny’s brother-in-law Tom Marshall, Garrow Tomlin, Gerald Brenan, Duncan Grant, Raymond Mortimer, Alec Penrose, Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster, Charles Prentice, Lytton Strachey, James Strachey, Adrian Stephen, Maynard Keynes and Ralph Wright. It was all highly informal, but as Bunny’s son Richard commented (having become a member in 1950) ‘We were a distinguished lot.’ ‘It was an occasion to talk on equal terms with Stephen Spender or Isaiah Berlin or hear Christopher Strachey talking about computers when they had barely been invented.’11 The club was very private, with no publicity. There were no papers or presentations, it was simply an occasion for people to meet, dine and converse. It is also interesting, looking at that list of members, to note that Bunny was probably the only person on it who had not attended public school. But he had now indubitably joined the literary and artistic elite and was no longer an ‘outsider’.

  Shortly after Christmas 1925 Bunny wrote to Edward, declaring, ‘I have at last got my feet on solid rock’. He had conceived a novel, ‘all of which stands clear in my mind like a lovely scene in the early morning: the elms with rooks cawing, the fields still soaked with dew, the first sounds of men moving about … all in early summer.’ ‘My difficulty now’, he added, ‘is only to find the right words … to mix my paints & lay them on with clear strokes.’12 But as the months passed, Bunny struggled with the novel, Go She Must! In June 1926 he wrote despairingly to Prentice: ‘I hate my heroine & do nothing […]. Most of the book is filthily badly written. I don’t even know the heroine’s name.’13 A few weeks later, he handed Prentice the manuscript, seeking his opinion on one particular episode in which Bunny had ‘introduced a scene of copulation’.14

  This cannot have been good news for Prentice, as at this time, publishers and even printers could be prosecuted for anything the official censor deemed obscene. But Bunny abhorred censorship and continually nudged at the censor’s margin. In Lady into Fox he had mocked the idea of fidelity in marriage but escaped the censor by means of ingenious metaphor: making the heroine metamorphose into an animal and commit adultery with a dog fox. The reader was being asked to consider whether animals could be adulterers. It was, as Bunny said, a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of fidelity in marriage.

  In Go She Must! the central character, Anne Dunnock, is the daughter of a rector in the fenland village of Dry Coulter (Hilton). She feels friendless and unfulfilled until she meets an artist, Richard Sotheby, to whom she is drawn as he promises freedom in the form of Paris. Anne follows Richard to Paris, where he lives with two friends, Gerald Grandison and Gerald’s mistress, Ginette. Anne assumes Richard is in love with Ginette; in fact he is in love with Gerald. Given the censor’s watchful eye, Bunny could not be overt about Gerald’s bisexuality and Richard’s homosexuality, but it is implicit as Gerald explains to Anne, ‘ “there has been a great deal between Richard and me” ’, adding, ‘ “You see, Richard was very fond of me; he cares about nobody else” ’.15 This particular sentence caused Bunny much concern. He wrote to Prentice explaining that he felt it essential to the book, although recognising that it was one of his narrative’s ‘chief improprieties’.16

  Gerald falls in love with Anne, abandoning both Richard and Ginette for her. The Richard–Gerald–Ginette trio echoes that of Bunny, Duncan and Vanessa, and there is one scene in particular which is a direct homage to Duncan Grant, for it replicates that first night he and Bunny spent together, when Bunny slept in Duncan’s bed in his studio and Duncan lay on the floor. In the novel, Anne occupies Bunny’s position on the bed and Gerald lies on the floor. ‘For a long while Anne went on stroking his hair, and when at last they fell asleep he was still grasping her hand in both of his and holding it to his lips.’17<
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  Go She Must! embraces several themes to which Bunny returned, including his belief in the fluidity of sexuality, that it is the person to whom one is attracted, not their gender: ‘ “Why on earth will you persist in regarding Ginette as a woman?” ’ Gerald demands, ‘ “Ginette is Ginette, just as I am Gerald and you are Richard” ’.18 Bunny’s dislike of organised religion filters through the figure of Anne’s father, the increasingly deranged Reverend Dunnock, whom Bunny places outside normal society, which he represents as the natural world of ploughmen and village life. The vicar refuses to give the ploughmen a donation on ‘Plough Monday’19 because he can’t understand any tradition beyond that of the ritual of church. However, he experiences an epiphany after his wife’s death, when he tells himself that she has gone to Heaven and is surprised ‘that the words with which he comforted others held no consolation for him’.20 The Reverend Dunnock’s religiosity recedes as he becomes increasingly like his namesake, the diminutive brown-and-grey bird which creeps nervously in the margins of gardens. He feeds the birds, and eventually removes all the windows in the vicarage so they can fly freely in and out. As his home becomes theirs, he merges with them, and they perch upon him as if he were St Francis of Assisi. The vicar thus finds redemption in the natural world, and calling his birds ‘angels’ turns from Christianity to pantheism. It is another metamorphosis.

  Bunny dedicated Go She Must! to Stephen Tomlin: it would not have been the kindest of titles to dedicate to Ray. The scene of copulation to which Bunny referred seems to have been excised, presumably replaced with the more chaste bed and floor sleeping arrangements. But the covert references to homosexuality and the overt depiction of an independent young and single woman would have had far greater potency for readers in the 1920s than they do today. Moreover, such themes were extremely ‘modern’, part of a general movement among British authors to attain the same principles of free expression that could be found in France. It was no accident that the book’s heroine acquired both personal and sexual freedom in Paris.

  Although the novel was generally well received, some of those closest to Bunny expressed reservations, largely because they detected the taint of George Moore. Sylvia Townsend Warner felt there were ‘little early Moore inflections, which muffle your outline’,21 and Edward confessed to feeling prejudiced against the book because of Bunny’s ‘absorption of the George Moore method of telling a story’.22 Bunny’s penchant for Moore’s novels was well known among his friends, who tolerated it up to a point. One evening at the Cranium, Gerald Brenan fled after hearing too much of Bunny ‘invoking the merits of George Moore whom I detest’.23

  As a novelist, journalist and publisher, Bunny was a major player in the London literary scene of the 1920s. He was also beginning to exercise influence over other writers’ careers. His work for the Nonesuch Press introduced new editors and authors to the world of books, not least John Hayward and Geoffrey Keynes, both of whom went on to have distinguished literary careers. But Bunny was also in a position to make recommendations to other publishers. In Chatto & Windus, and especially in Charles Prentice, Bunny found a publisher who was not only willing to consider new talent, but had an innate facility to discern it. After the First World War, Chatto & Windus had one of the strongest stables of new authors in Britain. Bunny had already persuaded Prentice to publish T.F. Powys, and now he did the same with Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, which, he informed Prentice, would be a ‘sure-fire success’.24 Bunny’s renown was such that the newspapers celebrated both Theo Powys and Sylvia as the ‘discoveries’ of Mr David Garnett. He was so well known that he appeared on the wireless in the series Walks through London, where celebrated writers described the district they knew best. Bunny’s subject was Bloomsbury, and according to the Radio Times, ‘Mr David Garnett […] holds the franchise of the district’.25

  In the autumn of 1926, Bunny sent a parcel of books to a young woman called Mollie Everitt, in London for two months, from South Africa. She was Vera Meynell’s younger sister, married to a man named Clem who remained in Johannesburg. Mollie suffered from blinding headaches, and, like Thea, wasn’t particularly happy or fulfilled. She was a keen horsewoman, and Bunny put her, as Cynthia Mengs, in his next book, No Love, where he described her as ‘very beautiful, with broad cheekbones, a delicate, straight nose, a pucker in her forehead, and a tired, drooping mouth’.26 Bunny took her to the theatre and to the ballet. They became lovers, Duncan lending them his studio for their assignations. On 20 November Mollie returned to South Africa, leaving Bunny distraught. He felt he should have stopped her from going as he was certain she was only returning to unhappiness. On the day of her departure Bunny wrote a brief memoir of their last days together, describing her extreme sadness at leaving. At the bottom of the page, in pencil, and in Bunny’s later hand, he scribbled, ‘I saw Molly’s death announced in The Times in 1943’.27 She was killed in a steeplechase. In his autobiography, still disguising her as ‘Cynthia Mengs’, he reflected that Mollie ‘had been trying to break her neck for years’.28

  At Christmas, Bunny and Ray were joined by Garrow Tomlin and they all decamped to Alec and Bertha Penrose’s house in the neighbouring village, Fenstanton. Lionel Penrose was there, and Gerald Brenan too, who pronounced that ‘Bunny was at his best’, enlivening all their ‘very gay parties’.29 Bunny loved Christmas, feeling it epitomised all that was best about domesticity and family. He loved the food, the traditions, the holly, the carol singers and the wonderful gifts Edward invariably bestowed on them all. Contrary to appearances, Bunny was miserable that Christmas. Although he and Mollie had known each other for only a short time, he could not stop thinking about her, attempting several drafts of a letter begging her to return, proposing to leave Ray and the children. The letters remained unsent.

  Work at the Nonesuch Press became more demanding when in 1927 Vera left for six months to edit Vogue. Unbeknown to Bunny, changes were also afoot in his writing life. Alfred Knopf wrote to Harold Raymond, Prentice’s colleague at Chatto & Windus, in February 1927, pleased that Go She Must! had sold well in America, but questioning whether his publishing arrangement with Bunny should continue. He felt the three-year contract had not been particularly satisfactory as Bunny had produced relatively few books. Bunny had been extremely fortunate in the agreement which provided the financial security which enabled him to write his last three books. Had he been able to deliver his novels more rapidly the arrangement might have been more to his publishers’ advantage, and they might have allowed it to continue. The agreement, therefore, was not renewed and as a result, like many writers, Bunny would need to turn his hand to other ways of earning a living. His salary from the Nonesuch, while useful, was insufficient to provide for Bunny’s family and lifestyle. It was, anyway, unusual for authors to support themselves from their novels alone. Many turned to journalism, like Aldous Huxley’s fictional poet in Those Barren Leaves (1925), who earns his living as editor of the ‘Rabbit Fanciers’ Gazette’.

  One unusual journalistic opportunity arose in the spring of 1927, when Lydia Lopokova turned to Bunny for help in writing twelve articles about Russian cookery for the Evening News. They decided to collaborate, dividing the fee of seven guineas per article between them. Lopokova’s biographer, Judith Mackrell, described the resulting articles as ‘the best prose she had ever written – hurtlingly ungrammatical, brilliantly biased and delivering an exuberant snub to anyone in Cambridge and Bloomsbury who had ever made her feel like a babbling, badly behaved intruder’.30 Bunny always enjoyed Lydia’s English usage: when he asked her what she missed most in London he was tickled when she replied, ‘ “A very low taste Bunny, sunflower seeds” ’.31 He adored her idiom and would have much enjoyed polishing it until it sparkled in print.

  That summer, Ray and Bunny went with the children to a cottage at Salcombe Regis, near Sidmouth in Devon. Bunny wrote to his parents, telling them about the children and the sea, and also that Ray was soon to have an operation. She requ
ired stitches, which should have been put in when William was born in 1925. Bunny left Salcombe before the end of the holiday, as work commitments called him away, but Ray and the children stayed on. The ensuing correspondence between Bunny and Ray charted a crisis in their marriage. For once the cause was not Bunny’s infidelity, although this was a contributing factor. The crisis had arisen because Ray was having an affair.

  Ray’s pocket diaries for 1926 and 1927 are not confessional journals, but records of appointments. Many pages are empty, but some are littered with the single letter ‘G’.

  The initial stood for Garrow Tomlin. Bunny had known Garrow since 1923, when the two men rapidly became close friends. Garrow was a frequent visitor at Hilton, where Bunny described him as ‘always full of boyish enthusiasms’.32 He was twenty-five, training for the Bar, Francis Meynell’s chief male friend and also, of course, Tommy’s brother. In appearance the two siblings could not have been more different: unlike the diminutive Tommy, Garrow was tall, long legged, fair haired and muscular, quite similar in appearance to Bunny. Like Bunny, he enjoyed outdoor pursuits, especially bathing, walking and camping. Like Bunny he was also extremely attractive to women, and enjoyed attracting as many of them as possible. Unlike Bunny, he did not believe in marriage. He warned one lover, Alix Kilroy,33 that he was polygamous, and that if she became dependent on him he would be horrible to her. Looking back at their relationship, she observed ‘it is clear that he had no intention of entering into any single-partner relationship. He probably intended from the first to get me into bed; according to his code, it was a pleasant and natural part of friendship, and not for one partner only.’34 Bunny and Garrow may have shared the same code, but Bunny certainly did not want to share his wife.