Bunny was under no illusions about either Dorothy or Lawrence. He loved Dorothy for her independence of thought as much as her writing and he loved her despite her egotism and inclination to look down on people whom she considered intellectually inferior. Bunny believed that Lawrence compensated for his alleged lack of sexual drive and disinclination to have children through another stronger urge, the urge to ‘understand his fellows’, manifested in ‘an immediate and sympathetic response when they needed help’.30 Bunny stated that he never considered himself an intimate friend of Lawrence’s. ‘It seemed more as though I was one of those with whom he wished to keep in touch, or of whom for some reason he approved.’31
That month, Bunny handed Prentice the completed manuscript of No Love. He sent a copy to Edward, to whom he confided that he thought the writing thin and that although it was the longest book he had written, it was a mere synopsis. Unfortunately Prentice’s fears regarding censorship were realised when the printers, R. & R. Clark, wanted passages to be excised on grounds of propriety. They wrote to Bunny assuring him that they were not querying his writing, ‘but in these days when the authorities are exercising their powers so strictly we must, in our own interest, take care that our firm is not brought under their ban’.32 The passages to which they objected included: ‘Benedict and Leah swam together in the estuary and lay naked beside each other in the sun.’
Prentice asked Bunny if he would re-write the offending passages, but Bunny refused, telling him either to find alternative printers or to print the pages with blanks, inserting an ‘Author’s Advertisement’ which Bunny would pen, explaining to his readers why the blanks existed. This was an untenable course of action, to which Prentice would never have agreed. But Bunny was extremely angry, particularly as he did not consider it was the printers’ role to censor his writing. He was so angry that he wrote to Edward, Duncan, Vanessa, Maynard and Lytton, canvassing their advice and support. Lytton thought Bunny’s advertising plan ingenious, although he pointed out that the printers were hardly likely to agree to print an advertisement against themselves. Maynard considered the printers’ behaviour ‘outrageous’, asking Bunny to send him the ‘most dangerous’ passages and suggesting they might ‘invoke Arnold Bennett’, who ‘would probably be very decent about it and carries much influence in the Commercial World’.33
Bunny was relieved when the printers backed down and No Love was eventually printed. He made one minor concession, changing the word ‘bugger’ to ‘b-’, in the sentence ‘Here’s a toast: To Love and Freedom, and b- the Navy’.34 Now able to proceed, Bunny needed an illustration for the title page. He briefly considered asking Duncan, or John Banting, another artist friend, but decided in favour of Ray. Her illustration, however, had to be put on hold as in early March 1929 she discovered small lumps in one of her breasts.
Bunny took her to his old friend Geoffrey Keynes, now assistant surgeon at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. A pioneering general surgeon with a particular interest in breast cancer, he advocated conservative treatment in preference to radical surgery, especially in younger women in whom the cancer was not advanced. He had found that radium treatment, in which hollow needles containing radium chloride were inserted around the tumour, could have dramatically beneficial results. Moreover the treatment was less invasive than radical surgery, and at a time before antibiotics, it was also safer. It was, however, very expensive, in 1928 costing £1,500 (c. £50,000 today) per patient per course of treatment, and as there was no National Health Service the patient had to foot the bill.
Radium treatment was relatively new. Bart’s had introduced it as recently as 1924 and in the intervening four years only forty-two patients were treated by this means. When Geoffrey advised against operating on Ray, she and Bunny accepted his guidance. Radium treatment was not only less invasive than mastectomy, but also, in removing cancer cells from surrounding tissue, more effective at that time than “lumpectomy”. However the treatment was gruelling. The patient’s skin was first punctured with a scalpel around the site of the tumour. Then platinum needles were inserted, each measuring nearly five centimetres; typically thirty-five needles would be employed. It took three people to insert each.35 All this was achieved with only gas and oxygen for anaesthesia. Finally, the protruding needles were covered with gauze and a layer of wool. Ray remained in this uncomfortable state for seven days. When Bunny took her back to Hilton, she felt it ‘was like waking from a nightmare’.36
They endured several anxious weeks before Geoffrey could determine the effectiveness of the treatment. As Bunny informed his mother, the waiting was ‘disturbing & often agonising, & so is ignorance’.37 But at the end of March Ray was able to write to Edward with positive news. Geoffrey said the lumps were diminishing satisfactorily and would disappear altogether in time. Ray felt ‘very pleased and light headed’, for she had not ‘really believed in the cure’, but now didn’t ‘quite believe in the disease’.38 On 26 April she travelled to East Chaldon to recuperate with Theo and Violet Powys.
That same day, Bunny found himself embroiled in a bizarre coda to his affair with Norah McGuinness. On Norah’s recommendation Geoffrey Phibbs unexpectedly turned up at Hilton. Despite an apparent reconciliation with Norah, Phibbs had been drawn again into Laura Riding’s ménage. Assuming she had lost him for good, Norah fled to Paris. But Phibbs wanted shot of the whole nightmare and turned to Bunny as a giver of good advice. Two telegrams arrived at Hilton, one from Nancy Nicholoson, the other from Robert Graves, written in the hand of Mr Hardy, the Hilton postmaster, ‘C/O Garnett’, but addressed to Phibbs. Both demanded Phibbs’s immediate return.39 Robert Graves also telephoned Bunny, threatening to kill Phibbs.
While Bunny and Phibbs were having supper, Graves arrived unexpectedly and in an agitated state. Laura Riding had sent Graves to retrieve Phibbs, as he had some slight acquaintance with Bunny, presumably from 1923 when Bunny contributed a story to Graves’s publication, The Winter Owl. Phibbs was persuaded to return with Graves and there Bunny assumed the matter would end. However, the next day Phibbs was back again at Hilton, in a much shaken condition. Phibbs had refused to move back to Hammersmith and so Laura Riding drank Lysol and jumped from a window, according to Phibbs killing herself in the process. In this last respect he was mistaken, Riding had a broken pelvis and crushed vertebrae from which she made a complete recovery. All Bunny could do was to take Phibbs’s mind off it all with a tour of Cambridge colleges.
No Love was published in the spring of 1929. It was well received, The Times rhapsodising over ‘the beautiful precision of some of the scenes, the unobtrusive, detached humour which is peculiar to Mr Garnett’.40 H.E. Bates thought it Bunny’s best book to date, and one in which he had finally found his own voice. Not only had Bunny found his voice, but he articulated it in his own tone, rather than one that looked back to the eighteenth century or towards George Moore. Perhaps he achieved this because the novel was autobiographical, shaped by memories of his youth. It contains some of Bunny’s most beautiful writing about the natural world, as if the hedgerows and meadows of his boyhood had been translated exactly onto the page.
The story concerns two families inhabiting a tidal island near Bosham in Kent. The Lydiates consist of Roger, a farmer, his wife Alice and Benedict, their son. Roger is based on Edward, with a touch of the adult Bunny; Alice is reminiscent of both Connie and Ray but not directly based upon either; Benedict is Bunny as a young man. The second family, the Kelties, comprises Eustace, an admiral, his wife who is not graced with a first name, and Simon, their son.
The Lydiates live in genteel poverty in a crumbling farmhouse, Tinder Hall, an amalgam of Hilton Hall and The Cearne. The Kelties live in a brand new Tudor-bethan extravaganza, ‘The Jumblies’, complete with billiard room. Although the ghastly name nods at the Marshalls’ country house, ‘Tweenways’, this house was based upon the much derided ‘Pendicle’, the home of Bunny’s childhood playmates, Michael and Nicholas Pease. Thus Bunny polarised the old and new, natur
e versus development and art against consumerism.
The novel follows the lives of the two sons, as they come together and diverge from young childhood to early middle age. It touches less on incidents in the lives of Bunny (Benedict) and Edward (Roger) but draws heavily on their characters, beliefs and the environments in which they lived. Benedict and Simon, for instance, bathe, sail and sleep outdoors like the Neo-Pagans; Roger has a wicker day-bed on the porch of Tinder Hall, where he spends his evenings drinking red wine, just as Edward did at The Cearne. Bunny acknowledged that the character of Simon was loosely based on Alec Penrose, for like Alec, Simon was prone to nightmares and fears. ‘He had such warmth’, Bunny later wrote of Alec, ‘such charm & such a deep love of beautiful things – and was so twisted around inside.’41
Bunny later considered No Love one of his best books, commenting: ‘The fusion of memories of boyhood and of observations made in manhood is complete and unity is preserved while there hangs about the whole story the indefinable melancholy and hopelessness of life.’42 In this he was accurate. Unity is partly achieved because the book is set in the years and time-frame of Bunny’s own life to-date. His protagonist, Benedict, is therefore all the more plausible because through him Bunny recreated his own experiences of growing up. The book is suffused with the melancholy of hindsight, as the narrator views youth with the nostalgia of one who knows that happiness is elusive. This elusiveness is most poignantly realised in the character of Cynthia Mengs, the Jewish girl from South Africa who enters a disastrous, cold marriage with Simon. She falls in love with Benedict and they snatch five perfect days together in London. She leaves Simon, not for Benedict, but to live with another man. Cynthia was closely based on Mollie Everitt, also Jewish, also living in South Africa, whom Bunny replicated down to the way she wrote her letters and furrowed her brow.
In this, the most personal of Bunny’s novels, where he presents such an affectionate portrait of his father (to whom the book is dedicated), Bunny was also able to introduce a tribute to Geoffrey Keynes in gratitude for his care for Ray. In early middle age, where the story ends, the Benedict–Bunny figure has become a scientist. When Benedict meets Simon again, after many years, he tells him: ‘I’m supposed to be doing cancer research. They really are going to cure it now, you know, with radium needles.’43 This was the only optimistic note at the end of a book in which no one achieves enduring happiness, where there is ‘No Love’. It was also an expression of hope in relation to Ray.
Chapter Sixteen
‘Oh joy, oh blessed world! They were in the sky, riding on the air, and all the groping dirtiness of earth forgotten.’1
Although he regularly saw Duncan and Vanessa in London, Bunny had not been to Charleston for five years. When he eventually returned in August 1929, Bunny walked with Duncan on the Downs, read Julian Bell’s poems, and was amused by the infectious giggles of ten-year-old Angelica. Afterwards, Bunny received a warm letter from Duncan, saying how pleasant they all found it to see him ‘back in your old haunts’. ‘I do not’, Duncan added, ‘mention my own feelings.’ He signed the letter ‘love from your devoted Duncan’.2
Bunny and Ray seemed to have regained something of their former happiness. In the autumn Ray wrote Bunny an affectionate but ambivalent letter, telling him she wanted to ‘love someone so badly – it is like madness.’ ‘At this moment’, she said, ‘I feel it is you that I am in love with & must cherish & praise & abandon myself to – & hold by the ear & kiss in the neck & grudge nothing to.’ But she worried that the reality of him might instead make her ‘feel mad with irritation’ because ‘you won’t let me alone to feel a little free’.3 Ray had the capacity to put a brave face on their marriage, to try to see it from the most flattering angle, but the inequality of their relationship was a perennial problem. Bunny could spread his wings, but at Hilton Ray’s remained clipped.
One evening in October when Bunny and Ray were strolling past the Conington Flying Ground near Cambridge, they stopped to watch a plane above. Having enquired whether it was possible to go up in one, they were each given a five minute flight. Initially Bunny worried that he would die of fear, but, as he told T.E. Lawrence ‘there is nothing so exciting in the world: the rushing hedge and soaring up’, ‘I am now wanting to go up every day, wanting to fly myself, wanting to have a machine of my own’.4 Bunny could hardly contemplate such extravagance. Not only was he still unable to draw any salary from the Nonesuch Press, but as a result of the Slump his investments had fallen. Maynard Keynes, an astute investor, had suffered losses on his own investments and on those made on behalf of others, including Bunny. In October 1929 the Wall Street Crash presaged even leaner times.
There was, however, cause for cautious optimism. In early November Bunny received an enquiry from the film company ‘British Talking Pictures’, about the film rights to The Sailor’s Return. The company wanted to make what would be one of the earliest British talkies. Britain was slightly behind the United States in this respect: the first all-talking American film, Lights of New York, was released in July 1928. But the first European drama-talkie, Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail, was not premièred until June 1929. The Sailor’s Return, therefore, would be in the vanguard.
Bunny was whisked away to Wembley in the Rolls-Royce sent to collect him. There he met representatives of the company, including Sergei Nolbandov, a Russian film editor, and Berthold Viertel, the Austrian screen writer and director. He was promised untold riches: £1,000–£2,000 for the film rights and an additional thirty pounds a week as an advisor during filming. But there was one detail that had to be settled: the question of Tulip, the novel’s African heroine. Mr Woodhouse, a young American whose manner, according to Bunny, ‘suggested that he had been boiled on Sunday, carved on Monday and served up cold on Tuesday’ went over and over the same ground, objecting to the colour of Tulip’s skin.5 The issue seemed irresolvable and Bunny recognised, correctly as it happened, that the film was unlikely to be made.
For Christmas 1929, Duncan sent Bunny foie gras from Fortnum & Mason and invited him, Ray and the children to Angelica’s eleventh birthday party in London. He confided a new love affair to Bunny, inviting him to Charleston to meet his lover, George Bergen. ‘I had rather you did not tell anyone’, he said.6 Bunny continued to go to the cinema and dine with Duncan, but their relationship had changed subtly, Bunny now assuming the role of confidante and advisor. In January 1930 Bunny spent a weekend with Duncan and George, sitting to them both for his portrait. George was twenty-seven, a handsome American Russian-Jewish artist. Bunny warmed to him, and enjoyed his visit enormously, the three men dancing to gramophone records. Duncan was besotted with George, and the younger man had the power to raise or dampen his spirits at will. Throughout their turbulent relationship, Bunny was a constant support, providing an understanding ear and affectionate friendship. ‘Darling Bunny’, Duncan wrote, ‘It does me the greatest good in the world to see you from time to time.’7 ‘You are the only person’, he said, ‘I can talk freely to about my feelings.’8
Julian Bell, now a Cambridge undergraduate, ran with the beagles and was glad of a hot bath at Hilton afterwards. Bunny was very fond of Julian, enjoying his uproarious humour and incessant urge to rehearse anecdotes about family and friends. Sometimes Julian came to Hilton with Vanessa and Angelica, and on one occasion he brought the Woolfs over for tea. Virginia played with Richard and William, pursuing them into the bushes on her hands and knees, growling that she was a ‘she-wolf’. Bunny was impressed by Julian’s poems, and it was on his recommendation that Chatto & Windus published Winter Movement, Julian Bell’s first volume of poetry, that year.
In early June Bunny received devastating news: Thea Fordham had committed suicide. She had carefully positioned herself on a railway line to ensure a tidy death. Her brother Michael had the distressing task of identifying her body, of sadly surveying ‘the beauty of her severed legs’.9 Bunny was consumed by grief. ‘I loved her & understood her’, he told Edward. ‘I feel as
though part of myself had been killed.’ Bunny knew that Thea had been unhappy the previous year; she wouldn’t see any of her old friends. He blamed her husband, Brian Rhys, but acknowledged that Thea had ‘a complicated life & character’.10
In July the magazine Everyman featured the first of a series of articles revealing the working methods of leading English writers.11 Bunny was the subject, photographed in his room at Hilton, seated at his paper-strewn desk, with books floor-to-ceiling on the shelves behind. Asked whether his characters were taken from life, he said they were not, curious given his recent portrayals of Edward and Alec in No Love. He explained that his books were conceived as a whole, each a product of a few ideas which played off each other and then combined into the complete story. He confessed that good weather was distracting, the allure of the garden too strong to resist.
The weather must have been fine that summer, for Bunny could not concentrate on his new book, Castle Bigod. His financial problems persisted, causing him to request another advance from Prentice. ‘It is a gloomy request’, he admitted, for it ‘always makes me think the book won’t get finished or won’t sell.’12 Bunny’s lack of funds was partly caused by his absorption in a new and expensive pastime. Since that first exhilarating brief flight in 1929, Bunny had been consumed with a passion for flying and had been taking flying lessons for the best part of a year, latterly at Marshalls’ Flying School, Cambridge. Throughout his training Bunny recorded his experiences in a diary, later published as A Rabbit in the Air (1932). His first flight above the clouds affected him profoundly: ‘The scene was wonderful’, ‘a plain of white where nothing stirred, where no living creature would ever set his foot, because it was really Heaven.’13 On 22 July 1930 Bunny made his first solo flight.
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