Bloomsbury's Outsider

by Sarah Knights

  Shortly after leaving Salcombe, Bunny received a letter from Ray, casually informing him that Garrow was taking a week’s holiday and proposed to join her there. Bunny issued an ultimatum: ‘Understand’, he wrote, ‘for this is definitive: If you live with Garrow whether in the same bed or the same house, you never live again with me.’ Bunny tersely suggested that she telegram Garrow to put him off, ‘otherwise I shall understand all is over’.35 Ray tore the letter into fourteen pieces.

  Meanwhile, Bunny took the matter into his own hands. First he wrote to Garrow, stating that ‘it would save a great deal of pain for all parties’ if he did not join Ray. ‘It is idle to pretend’, he added, ‘to being reasonable when one is not’.36 He didn’t send the letter and instead arranged to meet Garrow that evening at his London flat. There Bunny informed him that if he were to join Ray at Salcombe, it would radically alter the Garnetts’ marriage. Bunny wrote to Ray afterwards telling her: ‘when I think of you, of Richard, of William, of everything my happiness is built on, then I am in despair, am dead’.37 Ray replied: ‘you know that I have lived in torture for months because of my feelings about you – & my unhappiness didn’t seem to hinder you at all. I’ve been in despair so often.’ The problem was that Bunny and Ray loved and needed one another, but their expectations were completely different. Ray knew Bunny would go off with someone else again, whenever he chose to do so. ‘What a hypocrite you have been’, she added, asking: ‘Darling Bunny do have sense – do you love me or not.’38

  The problem was Bunny’s double-standards, his assertion that ‘I cannot be other than I am’, while insisting that Ray remained at home, holding the babies and waiting for him to return at weekends.39 Although he always maintained that jealousy was a redundant and unnecessary emotion, he was not immune to it. But it angered Ray that Bunny could be jealous while all the time he insisted that she should not. Bunny may have been particularly jealous because this was not Ray’s first affair. In a letter to Ray of 22 July, Bunny referred to ‘this second affair’40 and in a later letter on the subject of fidelity, he asserted ‘I was jealous of Theo’.41 Was Theo Powys Ray’s lover? Did she have an affair with him, perhaps when she stayed with him at East Chaldon in February 1926, at which time she referred to him as ‘a darling’? Or was he instead a kindly father figure to Ray?

  After the holiday, Ray went into the nursing home, as planned. From Hilton, Bunny wrote her a letter full of muddled emotions: love, anger, remorse for his own behaviour, confusion. His rational self wanted to permit her to ‘Do what you like, love whom you like. Be yourself as I am myself.’ But, he admitted, ‘I can never pretend to offer you equality’. ‘I shall never forget this, or forgive it, I shall never feel again for you the certainty & happiness that the swallow feels: the air will not let it fall & bruise its poor feathers.’42

  Ray had barely recuperated when Bunny took off again for France, this time with Duncan, en route to Cassis, where Vanessa had taken a house.43 From France he wrote exuberantly to Ray, in a shaky hand, as if under the influence of alcohol: ‘Darling’, ‘I want you I want your company as a friend, as a lover, I want you […]. I long to see you, to run my eye over you: to hug you in my arms […]. I am starved of everything I hold dearest being away from you.’44 Absence, or absinthe, had clearly made his heart grow fonder.

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘In all marriages there are disagreements, in which one of the parties has to give way to the other.’1

  In the spring of 1928, Bunny was working on a new novel, No Love, and contributing an introduction for the latest Nonesuch volume, a selection of Joseph Conrad’s Letters which Edward was editing. Bunny was in the unusual position of commenting on his father’s writing, although this he did tentatively. ‘One or two sentences’, he advised, ‘need thinking over.’ ‘Please don’t’, he added, ‘be incensed by this criticism.’2 Bunny found Edward’s selection heart-warming. ‘I love you’, he wrote to his father, ‘I think of you very often; especially lately I have been all through the Conrad letters in revise proof twice & they help me to recreate you as you were at different ages.’3

  Although Ray’s affair with Garrow Tomlin had angered Bunny, it did not affect the friendship between the two men. It seemed perfectly natural for Bunny to spend a weekend away with Tommy and Garrow and the latter’s visits to Hilton continued much as before. But at Easter, when Frances Marshall and Ralph Partridge were staying at Hilton, Frances noticed that Ray had over-powdered her face and that her eyes were red. Conversation turned to whether some people were essentially tragic while others were comic. Ray said, ‘I feel I’m a very tragic character, though I’m not unhappy. I feel like […] some […] mutilated thing.’4

  In June Ray set off at short notice, taking Richard and William with her to La Bergère, Vanessa’s house at Cassis. Duncan had only recently written to Bunny, presciently as it happened, telling him that the house was available for rent during the summer. Shortly after Ray’s departure, Bunny wrote to her from Hilton, saying he was all right and progressing with No Love. ‘I think it unlikely’, he added, ‘that I shall see Norah this month’.5 Norah was Norah McGuinness, a thirty-six-year-old artist, married to the poet Geoffrey Phibbs (also known as Geoffrey Taylor). Bunny had met her earlier in the year when she brought some drawings to the Nonesuch office hoping to find work as an illustrator. She was beautiful, with large dark grey eyes, bobbed wavy brown hair, serious cheekbones and a generous smile. According to a paper Bunny wrote many years later for the Memoir Club, he had become sexually obsessed with Norah. It was this obsession which caused Ray to flee to France.

  ‘Darling Ray’, Bunny wrote, ‘you ask me to write to you & tell you what I am feeling quite honestly.’ He told her he was unhappy without her, that he wanted her badly ‘in every way’; missed her, could not bear to be separate from her. And then with his usual misplaced candour, he undid any good he might have done, stating that he felt ‘wretched’ about Norah.

  I don’t love her as I love you – how could I when she is almost a stranger to me – but I like her very much, I am quite charmed by her. She is headover heels in love with me, and what’s to be done. It is a hopeless business […]. All human emotions are wrong; mine particularly. I am in love with you, depend upon you, but I cannot bear not seeing her, & want her to amuse me. I often wish I were an eunuch: it would simplify things: too much I dare say for my happiness.6

  Ray responded in the way she knew would hurt most: with silence. Bunny wrote remonstrating with her for her lack of communication. ‘You might reflect’, he chided, ‘that I’m extremely lonely & continually tormenting myself.’7 He had in fact been enjoying a sociable time with the Meynells at their new house in Essex. Garrow was a fellow guest, and they spent their time basking naked and wrestling in the sun. Bunny informed Ray that he had easily thrown his adversary. ‘Just now’, he crowed, ‘I am in rather splendid condition.’8

  In Ray’s absence Bunny had time to reflect, again acknowledging his hypocritical treatment of her. ‘Honesty is the only way: & if I’m honest I say that I need you desperately, that I cannot share you with anyone. And then I have not the character or the desire even to be faithful myself.’9 ‘You say’, Ray countered, ‘you must love others & I must not – & you don’t know what I object to. I suppose really I feel very much the same as you. I am too unhappy living with you when you are longing always for someone else. I’m miserable because I can’t satisfy you in any way.’ ‘Sometimes’, she remarked pointedly, ‘people can forget other longings when they love one another & trust one another.’ ‘Of course’, she added, ‘I love you & want your fidelity. I think of you as the one solid thing in life.’ But Ray knew this was an illusion, for at the back of her mind she feared that ‘bye & by [sic] you will find someone free to go with you & you with them & you will be gone’.10

  Bunny justified his double-standards in evolutionary terms: ‘For you to be jealous of my loves is as if you were jealous of my reading books & bursting into tears over their pa
ges. For me to [be] jealous of you is selfish but the wisdom of preservation.’11 It did not seem to occur to him that such wisdom might not have been a uniquely masculine attribute. Ray’s response was appropriately sarcastic: ‘What it is to be a man.’12

  With Ray out of reach, Bunny characteristically came to find her more appealing than ever. ‘Every now & then’, he said, ‘I take out your photograph from my pocket-book & gaze at your bottom & your lovely legs, & the reflection of your face & your breasts.’13 ‘Soon’, he told her, ‘we shall be together again, and a pair of happy lovers I think, as we have so often been in the past.’ Bunny proposed joining her at Cassis, announcing he would arrive on 12 July. She told him not to come, but when William became ill with diarrhoea, changed her mind, feeling the return journey would be easier with another adult pair of hands. ‘I expect’, Ray remarked caustically, ‘we shall hate one another when we meet as much as we do now.’14 Bunny spent ten days at Cassis before returning with Ray and the children to England. There is no record of the nature of their reunion, but less than a month later, Ray was in East Chaldon, staying with Theo and Violet Powys.

  In early September Ray wrote to Edward, asking if she could come and see him. ‘I am very unhappy’, she explained, ‘and should like to talk to you because I think you’d be sympathetic to both Bunny & me.’15 Edward was very fond of Ray and felt much sympathy for her. Even though he was a great tease, he always teased Ray in a kindly way, as evinced by a poem which Ray sent him, ostensibly from Richard:

  Has anybody seen my grandada

  A saucy man is he

  If you find my grandada

  Tease him as he Teases me.16

  Ray found it an enormous relief to confide in Edward. He was not disloyal to Bunny, on the contrary he tried to reassure Ray about the strength of his son’s love, but he provided a sympathetic ear at a time when she was most in need of one. For Bunny had taken rooms in Hampstead where he was living with Norah McGuinness.

  Bunny had visited Norah in Ireland in early September, and while there, he met her husband Geoffrey Phibbs, who had written to Bunny suggesting they meet. Ironically, the situation may have been convenient for Phibbs, as he had come under the spell of the poet Laura Riding, Robert Graves’s mistress, with whom he had recently started to live in Hammersmith in a ménage à quatre with Graves and his wife Nancy Nicholson.

  At twenty-eight, Phibbs was charming and rather shy. Bunny could not help but like him.

  Ray threatened to leave Bunny but she was not in a position to do so. She was financially dependent upon him, and even though she continued to work as an illustrator, such work was sporadic and had to accommodate the children. Moreover, in an unequal society, divorcées were stigmatised. Adultery remained the only acceptable grounds for divorce and although Bunny had committed adultery, it was a messy business proving it. Ray would not have wished to cite his lovers, and Bunny would not have enjoyed spending a night in a hotel with a paid prostitute in order to be ‘caught in the act’.

  When she needed to get away, Ray left the children at Hilton with Mrs Thorpe, who helped in the house. In London she stayed in Bunny’s basement flat, at 37 Gordon Square, two cramped rooms rented from Vanessa, who lived above. Despite their proximity, the two women had little contact, Vanessa reporting to Bunny: ‘your mysterious wife haunts the basement & I sometimes see her flitting like a bat round the square.’17 On one occasion, Bunny saw Ray pass on the Tube and he thought she saw him, too.

  Bunny continued to insist that he loved Ray passionately while protesting that he could not ‘escape the blind folly of loving Norah’.18 ‘My love for Norah’, he informed Ray, ‘does not conflict any more with my love for you than my love for Tommy conflicts with my love for Lytton, or Duncan.’19 Ray responded with silence. It was the only weapon she had and she deployed it well. Within a month of moving in with Norah, Bunny was yearning for Ray. He returned to Hilton on 13 November and, by early December, Ray was again basking in his uxorious warmth.

  The cost of financing a Hampstead flat, Bloomsbury basement and Hilton Hall had left Bunny very short. He could not draw upon his Nonesuch salary as they had cash-flow problems. In December he turned to Prentice for an advance on No Love. Prentice agreed, but wary of both the censor and Bunny’s tendency to stretch the boundaries of literary propriety, Prentice wanted assurances that Bunny was not writing another Well of Loneliness (Radclyffe Hall’s recently banned ‘lesbian’ novel). Bunny reassured Prentice that the book was ‘entirely heterosexual’, although it contained ‘a good deal of love – including adultery’.20 That year Sir Archibald Bodkin, the Director of Public Prosecutions, had banned James Joyce’s Ulysses on grounds of alleged gross indecency. The Nonesuch Press responded by issuing a prospectus entitled Bodkin Permitting.

  In November Bunny wrote a fan letter to another author, Dorothy Edwards, whose short stories, Rhapsody (1927), he admired. ‘Who and what are you?’ he asked her.21 She replied, ‘As to who & what I am. I think if this is a mystery it is that I am Welsh.’22 The two writers arranged to meet in January 1929, when Dorothy would pay one of her infrequent visits to London. She told him that he would recognise her, because she would be wearing a grey cloak ‘and a slightly provincial air’.23

  Dorothy Edwards was twenty-six and living with her widowed mother near Cardiff. Her outlook on life had been heavily influenced by her father, an ardent socialist and Independent Labour Party leader. Although Dorothy had a degree in Greek and Philosophy, literature was her first love, and she supplemented her mother’s meagre pension by writing stories for magazines. When Dorothy met Bunny, as arranged, at the Nonesuch Press, he encountered a dumpy, short, buxom, fresh-complexioned, blue-eyed young woman, ‘eager, ardent, embarrassed, shy’. He could not bring himself to kiss her, perhaps because of the complication of her ‘almost horizontal protruding teeth’, but he gave her lunch in his basement, where they sat talking in the half light. He liked her so much that he decided to ask her to become his adopted sister. He explained that he had made this request because he was anxious not to jeopardise their friendship with a love affair. He believed that if they adopted each other it would solidify their relationship without the complication of sex. This explanation was disingenuous, for Bunny did not find Dorothy remotely attractive, comparing her to ‘a young Jersey heifer – a sweet and clean and good creature, but from a sexual point of view non-existent’.24 Dorothy accepted his offer with enthusiasm, although Ray remained sceptical.

  Shortly after meeting Dorothy, Bunny met Colonel T.E. Lawrence for the first time. The two men had been corresponding for over a year, although they had never met, despite Lawrence’s friendship with Edward. Bunny first wrote to Lawrence to thank him for his indirect gift of the limited subscribers’ edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence had hesitated about publishing the book, and eventually opted to produce this lavish limited edition at his own expense, to be sold at thirty guineas. He gave a copy to Edward, who had already subscribed, so Lawrence suggested that Edward give the second copy to Bunny. Bunny’s letter was characteristically forthright; he was not going to be in awe of Lawrence, or at least, he was not going to let it appear as though he was. In his first letter (of 5 November 1927) his deferential gratitude was nicely balanced by a reprimand about the subscribers’ edition: ‘I should like to say first that I think it was a terrible mistake to publish it in this limited form, and that I think you ought to publish it in a cheap and accessible edition […]. Great books exist for everyone to read: they are not part or property of the author: still less are they the property of a hundred and ten rich men.’25

  Lawrence had copied his manuscript of The Mint, a revealing record of his life among his fellow air force men, into a small bound volume which he gave to Edward, informing him that he was burning the original manuscript. Bunny read it, afterwards telling Lawrence how grateful he was for being allowed to do so. The Mint affected him profoundly, bringing back the horror of institutional life he had experienced at school, ‘
this instinct or emotion of a weasel in a steel trap’. Bunny thought it beautifully written, and told Lawrence, ‘Words are your medium, words, not deeds, and not thoughts. Words.’26

  When Bunny and Lawrence did meet, it was in February 1929, at the Nonesuch Press office. They wandered over to Bunny’s basement in Gordon Square, where instead of sitting comfortably in the bed-sitting-room, they perched in the kitchen-cum-bathroom, Bunny on the table by the gas cooker, and Lawrence on the side of the bath. There they talked for almost two hours. Lawrence had recently translated The Odyssey, so Bunny asked him which name he would use on the title page. Lawrence replied that he thought of calling it ‘Chapman’s Homer’, alluding to his father’s name, Thomas Robert Chapman. Bunny didn’t understand the joke at the time, but later thought it proof that Lawrence was not bothered about his illegitimacy. (It may have been a double joke, alluding to George Chapman whose translation of The Odyssey was published in The Whole Works of Homer in 1616.) Bunny rashly asserted his belief in Samuel Butler’s theory that The Odyssey had been written by a woman. Lawrence later gave Bunny a copy of his book, which bore no translator’s name, but carried Lawrence’s inscription:

  T.E.S.27

  Who is responsible (under Homer) for all but the appearance of this Book most regretfully obtrudes it into the Presence of D.G. WHO KNOWS BETTER. 25.XI.32 Plymouth

  Bunny admitted that the rebuke always made him feel ‘hot under the collar’.28

  Lawrence paid several visits to Hilton and one weekend, when both Dorothy Edwards and the novelist H.E. Bates were staying, Lawrence unexpectedly roared up on his motorbike. Bunny introduced him to his guests as ‘Aircraftman Shaw’. When Lawrence began a discussion on Greek poetry, Dorothy was visibly irritated and more or less turned her back on him. After he had left, Ray asked Dorothy what she thought of Shaw, and Dorothy replied that she thought him ‘very ordinary’. According to Bunny, ‘she seemed to resent a common aircraftman joining in as an equal in a conversation about the Greeks’.29