Bloomsbury's Outsider

by Sarah Knights

  Bunny could not possibly afford such a trip, but an old friend came to the rescue. Mina Kirstein had married Henry Tomlinson Curtiss in 1926, but after only one happy year together, he died. Mina was now what Bunny called a rich widow, but she had always been fiercely independent, and for some years had been Professor of English at Smith College, Massachusetts. She lived at Chapelbrook, Ashfield, Massachusetts and had an apartment in New York City. Mina offered to pay Bunny’s passage and all expenses and to accompany him, along with her brother Lincoln Kirstein, on a tour of Native American sites in Virginia. Bunny was not certain the trip would help, but, as he told Constance, ‘it will be better to have gone than for the visit to be relegated to the grand list of might have beens’.13

  Bunny embarked in early July. He spent much of the voyage sea-sick, but approaching New York, was impressed by the skyscrapers, which he thought looked like ‘religious relics of a strange Stonehenge pyramid civilization’.14 He wrote to Ray from New York, describing the city as ‘a jumble of slum & magnificence & everywhere these vast brick shafts rise’.15 In New York, Bunny was entertained by Mina and her brother Lincoln, now twenty-five. Bunny had not seen him since he was a schoolboy tutored in London by Alec Penrose. Lincoln was a talented, handsome bisexual Harvard graduate; he would go on to found the New York City Ballet, which he directed for more than forty years. He had, as Bunny described, ‘the authority and the very rare charm which comes from complete intellectual detachment’.16 Bunny enjoyed meeting his hosts’ circle of friends, which included Dorothy Parker and the poet Archibald McLeish.

  After what seemed an all too-short time in New York, Bunny, Mina and Lincoln began their tour. They were joined by Taylor Harden, a journalist from Virginia who was passionate about fox hunting and had a talent for obtaining moonshine whiskey in this prohibition era. They set off in two cars, Taylor and Bunny in one, Mina and Lincoln in the other. Their expedition covered an enormous amount of ground. They were based for some time at Williamsburg, from where they explored Jamestown Island and saw the ruins of Pocahontas’s father’s house. The reality was rather different to Bunny’s imagined descriptions of the terrain. He deleted quantities of text, despair turning to happiness as the narrative became grounded in the solidity of place.

  Mina considered the whole tour fantastic, although she noted that Bunny omitted ‘certain ironic aspects’ of it in his autobiography. ‘Suffice it to say’, she commented, ‘our historical interests were discrepant.’ According to Mina, Bunny was not interested in any events post-1617, the year of Pocahontas’s death, nor was he able to feign a polite interest in his guides’ knowledge of American history. ‘It soon became obvious that as Lincoln’s and my interest in Pocahontas dwindled rather sharply it would be wiser for the four of us not to change driving partners each day as we had planned.’ This left Bunny paired with Taylor Harden, who took him on a tour of various hospitable relatives, all of whom plied them with ‘white mule’. Bunny arrived at Mina’s hotel room one evening, ‘in spirits as high as the emanating aroma of whiskey’. ‘ “Now, my dear”, he said, “you may tell me about this Mr Jefferson of yours” ’.17

  From Chapelbrook, Bunny mentioned casually, in a letter to Ray, that a very attractive woman, Priscilla Fairchild, was with them. Priscilla worked for Time Magazine, was intelligent, witty and beautiful, with level grey eyes. Bunny fell for her when they climbed Pony Mountain, the steep rock behind Mina’s house. Bunny gave her the nickname ‘Puss’ and as he told Mina, her ‘claws dug very deep into me’.18 Before returning to England, Bunny spent a few days in New York at Mina’s Manhattan apartment, from where he wrote to Ray, telling her how much he liked Priscilla, adding ‘Darling I love you with all my heart & soul’.19

  Bunny returned to England on 22 August. He felt rejuvenated. Pocahontas was finished and Prentice read it with approval. There was another light on the horizon, one which might add lustre to Bunny’s coffers. Ellis Roberts was vacating his position as literary editor of the New Statesman and Nation. Harold Nicolson, the diplomatist who wrote for the Evening Standard, was interested in the position, and so, too was Bunny. Maynard Keynes, who had been closely identified with the Nation before its 1931 merger with the New Statesman and remained on the company’s board, promised Bunny that he would have a word with the editor, Kingsley Martin. As Bunny later said, ‘No man (not even his brother Geoffrey) had ever been kinder or more generous to me than Maynard Keynes’.20

  Bunny was unsure whether journalism was his métier. He told Constance that he had ‘done something stupid’ in applying for the job. ‘If I don’t get it – well & good’ was hardly enthusiastic.21 He worried it would be a waste of life, but conceded that a regular salary would be useful. Initially Bunny was guaranteed the ‘Books in General’ page, there being some delay deciding about the literary editorship as a whole. But on 11 November Kingsley Martin informed Bunny that he had been appointed literary editor, in the first instance for six months. The appointment would begin on 1 January 1933 at a salary of £500 per annum.

  Soon after learning he had obtained the post, Bunny received a letter from Harriet Roberts, Ellis Roberts’s wife, inviting him to dine so that she might warn him about his new job. ‘I don’t mean’, she added mysteriously, ‘that we could tell you the whole truth about Kingsley Martin’s character.’22 Bunny wrote again to Connie, reporting that he had got the job and felt gloomy in consequence, anxious that he would be incapable of doing it justice.

  Bunny was also worried about his American publisher, Brewer & Warren, which was in financial difficulties. This was a blow given that Pocahontas was due to be published in Britain in January 1933 and in America shortly afterwards. Brewer & Warren had also promised a sizeable advance, and Bunny feared that a new publisher might be less generous. He was therefore relieved to learn, after several anxious weeks, that Harcourt Brace would take him on exactly the same terms. Bunny’s prospects had improved dramatically. Not only was he soon to embark on a new job with a regular salary, but the Book Society had chosen Pocahontas as their January book, guaranteeing increased sales and publicity. Bunny also received a fillip from his old friend Bertie Farjeon, who declared that Bunny wrote ‘better English than anybody now alive’, adding, ‘I have never mentioned this trifling fact to you, but should like to do so now’.23

  On 30 December The Times announced that ‘Mr David Garnett has been appointed literary editor of the New Statesman and Nation as from the New Year’. He intended to review under the pseudonym ‘Mercury Patten’ in homage to an ancestor on his mother’s side.24 There was to be another major change in Bunny’s life: Ray insisted that they live in London together. She did not want to risk his finding another woman with whom he would spend the better part of the week; neither did she want to remain lonely at Hilton. And so they arranged to rent a flat at 3 Endsleigh Street, adjacent to Taviton Street, around the corner from Gordon Square. Bunny and Ray were returning to Bloomsbury and would be living only a stone’s throw from the house where they had fallen in love.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘Journalism I am absolutely unfitted for.’1

  Pocahontas was published in Britain in January 1933. Bunny’s pleasure at the relatively large print run was tempered by nerves about the book’s reception. It was quite unlike anything he had written, but then as he told Constance, ‘I don’t repeat myself’.2 He need not have worried: Pocahontas was widely and well reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic. In the New Statesman, Ellis Roberts magnanimously praised his successor’s ‘fine imaginative piece of historic fiction’ and the ‘exquisite detail and noble intention’ with which he portrayed ‘a young woman who slowly moves away from her customary world of savagery; yet moves away from it with an acute remembrance of the fine things of her tribal life’. The New York Herald Tribune singled out Bunny’s ‘almost perfect prose’, declaring it ‘an exquisite book’. Unable to resist an old chestnut, Week End Review limply captioned its column ‘Lady into Wife’, but concluded that Bunny had writte
n his historical novel ‘just about as well as it could be done’.

  The book revolves around the legend of Pocahontas,3 the daughter of Powhatan, a Native American chief in the Tidewater area of Eastern Virginia. It takes place in the early years of the seventeenth century, when John Smith and other English colonists settled there. Bunny charts Pocahontas growing up in her own culture, while observing the alien culture of the English colonists around her. As a young woman, she is captured and held hostage by the English. Her father allegedly fails to deliver part of the ransom, so Pocahontas, who by now has learnt to speak English, is baptised a Christian and chooses to remain with her captors. She meets and marries an Englishman, John Rolfe, with whom she lives on his tobacco plantation for two years. They have a son and then Rolfe takes Pocahontas to England where she encounters and is encountered by a very different world. A year later, she becomes ill and dies on the point of returning to Virginia.

  Bunny emphasised the rigorous nature of his research and the difficult task of ‘calling my characters from their graves’. ‘Such a reconstruction’, he explained, ‘in my hands at all events, is inevitably a work of fiction […]. My ambition has been two-fold: to draw an accurate historical picture and to make it a work of art.’4 Bunny’s version of the life of Pocahontas is part biography, part fiction. It is not his best book because it was difficult to adhere to facts and to chronological events while creating a work of imagination. The book is overburdened with the technical detail he employed to convey an authentic sense of a particular Native American culture, and its cast of characters is often two-dimensional. But he does achieve something very characteristic with his heroine: he makes her sensual. T.E. Lawrence told Bunny that he admired the book’s ‘build, mastery and vigour’, but added, accurately, ‘I found little of yourself in it’.5 Bunny dedicated the book to Frances Partridge, who had helped with the research.

  Pocahontas was an odd subject for Bunny to choose. Although the Pocahontas story is a potent myth, in printed form it had largely gone into abeyance by the time Bunny wrote the book. Most of the books written about her were published in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, or later in the twentieth century, particularly around the time of the eponymous Disney film of 1995. Nowhere did Bunny articulate his reasons for this choice of subject, but as a boy he had loved James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, so thoughtfully given him by Joseph Conrad. While The Last of the Mohicans (1826) is the most famous of the series, all the books centre on the figure of Natty Bumppo, a white boy who grows up among Native Americans and absorbs and acquires their ways. It was a potent image for a solitary boy with a highly developed imagination, running wild in the Kent countryside. Moreover Bunny appreciated other cultures and learnt young to question ideologies of British empire and supremacy.

  With Pocahontas off his hands Bunny had to consider his role as a journalist. He was dreading his editorial debut, but scribbling down initial ideas he decided to get rid of what he considered the rather gloomy ‘English high horse contributions’ by using more American writers. He listed the names of potential contributors, a list reflecting his strong Bloomsbury allegiances and his recent American tour: Julian Bell, Dorothy Parker, Archie McLeish, Lincoln Kirstein, Gerald Brenan, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and Julia Strachey. Ever the loyal friend he also included Ralph Wright, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Dorothy Edwards.6

  On 7 January, Bunny’s first ‘Books in General’ page was published above the name ‘Mercury Patten’. He soon dispensed with the pseudonym, realising it debarred any personal authority in writing about authors he knew. Kingsley Martin hoped that Bunny would inject new vigour to the arts-section of the paper, which had hitherto been a poor relation to the lively political front half. Bunny certainly succeeded in this respect, transforming the back section and elevating it to a level it had not previously attained. The preceding four literary editors, even the brilliant critic, Desmond MacCarthy, maintained a stasis: ‘they were not originators, they all worked within a certain convention, a set of rules’.7 Bunny enjoyed giving young writers a foot on the ladder, whether as authors or reviewers, although he chastised Julian Bell for making sweeping generalisations: ‘I think it is untrue and unjust to accuse bad poets of being fakers’, he said, pointing out that ‘These poets […] are writing from the fullness of their hearts’.8

  Bunny was himself a relatively kind critic. If he had to review a badly written book, he would always find something if not to praise, then at least to encourage as a source for potential improvement (though he found it difficult to be kind in his review of Jessie Conrad’s demeaning memoir of her husband). Bunny’s columns reveal his extensive reading and wide knowledge. As his son Richard commented, ‘His journalism was, like his after-dinner conversation, unhurried’.9 Although he had his favourite types of book, especially those on country matters, he could write a scholarly article on almost any subject. He delighted in dictionaries of every kind, and was not averse to checking their accuracy, on one occasion berating a French–English dictionary for not adequately acknowledging the distinctions between ‘les scaroles et les endives’.10 As a reviewer, he was loyal to his friends – Virginia Woolf, H.E. Bates, H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, Leslie Hotson, D.H. Lawrence, T.E. Lawrence and Geoffrey Keynes – were all reviewed more than once. But Bunny did not, by any means, prioritise his own coterie of writers, nor did he refrain from teasing, if it suited. He used Arthur Ransome’s Coot Club as a vehicle for a double-tease, questioning the higher morality of Ransome’s children, and asking whether in his next book one of them could steal the novelist Hugh Walpole’s clothes while he bathed in Derwentwater.

  He reviewed all sorts of writers and all types of book and could not resist the occasional foray into something highly technical, including a volume on aviation which (joking at his own expense) he declared ‘all the more exciting for being a record of facts provided with pages of tabulated statistics’.11 While this particular book may not have been to every reader’s taste, it was this sheer variety which made Bunny’s page so exciting. He was never predictable in his choice of books. Bunny’s innovation was to weave a brilliantly crafted and discursive essay around the book or books he had chosen. Sometimes he would launch straight into the review, at others the book in question seemed no more than a hook on which to hang a scholarly disquisition or discursive cogitation. Occasionally there were no books at all, but a lively reverie on an apparently trivial subject.

  In mid-January 1933 Bunny and Ray moved into the Endsleigh Street flat. Richard had returned to school and William would attend a local school. They had also invited Dorothy Edwards to lodge rent free in the attic, in the hope that away from her mother, she would be able to write. Now resident in London for five or more days each week, Bunny threw himself into the clubbable existence he had hitherto enjoyed on a more limited scale. He had licence to do so, as the convivial lunch was an important aspect of his role as literary editor. Although he and Ray sometimes dined with friends or family, Bunny was always on the go, and he often spent both day and evening away from Endsleigh Street. He could join Edward and his cronies for lunch at the Commercio; go to the theatre or cinema with Duncan; dine with Edward and Nellie at Pond Place; nip down to The Cearne to see Constance or pop over to Ham Spray for a weekend with newlyweds Frances and Ralph Partridge who had made it their home. Ray was sometimes included (although unlike Bunny, she was not a witness at her sister Frances’s marriage on 2 March) but the largely masculine world of journalism was Bunny’s exclusive territory.

  As a distinguished literary figure, Bunny needed a portrait photograph for publicity purposes. On 3 April he made an appointment with Barbara Ker-Seymer, a talented, professional photographer who had a studio above Asprey’s, the jewellers on Bond Street. The resulting photograph reveals a highly-groomed version of Bunny, in a good three-piece suit, handkerchief in breast pocket, hair marshalled into place, a cigar drooping loosely between his fingers. This was the London Bunny, professional, clubbable, celebrated.
Another contemporary photograph, shows Bunny at Hilton, in shirt-sleeves and braces, hair wavy and tousled, skin bronzed, muscles flexed digging out a swimming pool. This was the country Bunny, the man who could not resist the lure of the outdoors, who enjoyed strenuous physical exercise and liked to feel the wind in his hair and the sun on his skin. Would he be able to relinquish this version of himself? Would he tire of London living? Would he need the diversion of a regular change of terrain? Would he be able to forgo the opportunity to escape from one world to another? It was not only journalism which unnerved him, but the prospect of the changes in lifestyle which a full-time London job entailed.

  One evening at Pond Place, Bunny and Edward were joined by Sean O’Faolain, the publisher’s reader Rupert Hart-Davis and publisher Jamie (Hamish) Hamilton. The conversation was generally about literature, but Bunny and Jamie, ‘quietly Philistine in a corner’, discovered a mutual interest in flying.12 A German Klemm aeroplane was on the market and Bunny and Jamie decided to buy it. In May 1933 it was duly purchased for £180 (c £6,650 today). They believed it to be second-hand, but eventually discovered they were the latest in a long series of owners.