Bloomsbury's Outsider

by Sarah Knights

  In early November Bunny went to see Frankie who had been ill for some time. His head was badly swollen and when Bunny saw him, he remained asleep. On 2 December Raymond Mortimer wrote with bad news. After another exploratory operation it seemed certain Frankie had another brain tumour. ‘Yesterday’, Raymond said, ‘there was barely anything left of the Francis we know. He is not afraid of death, but he is afraid of watching himself grow steadily worse.’13 Bunny planned to visit Frankie again, but a few days before the proposed visit, he received a letter from Maynard telling him that Frankie had only a couple of days to live. Maynard advised against visiting, as Frankie had been unconscious for over a week. ‘Dear Bunny’, Maynard ended his letter, ‘I know how devoted you were to him, and he to you.’14 Touchingly, Bunny placed this letter in his 1914–15 journal, where Frankie graced so many of the pages. Frankie died on 2 January 1935. ‘All his life’, Bunny wrote, ‘he had sought next to nothing for himself, done all he could to help others and to be kind.’15

  For Bunny, Frankie was fixed in those carefree days of early adulthood when the two young men thought they could achieve anything. They had been bound together at the Caroline Club, in France among the Quakers and in their bookshop. Despite the imbalance of their love, they had been and remained devoted friends. Frankie’s death seemed the end of an era. Bunny was nearly forty-three; he no longer felt that the future outweighed the past and he began to see himself as middle-aged. Although otherwise physically fit, he had recently suffered recurrent bouts of sciatica. Twelve-year-old Richard had improvised a verse: ‘Aching back, / Knees crack, /With rheumatism & the gout / The old people can’t go out.’16 Bunny assumed he was the subject. His shock of hair remained as thick as ever, but now it began to turn white.

  Disgruntled with his personal life, Bunny was dissatisfied with the New Statesman. He felt unable to write, and craved the space in which to begin a new book. He discussed the situation with Maynard. Always generous where Bunny was concerned, Maynard agreed to support his request for three months’ leave. Consequently, at the end of December 1935 Bunny was temporarily free, his friend Raymond Mortimer taking over his work. Nevertheless, Bunny felt gloomy and irritable, unable to do anything. As Ray told Edward, ‘When he wants to write & can’t it is like a great weight crushing us all’.17

  Bunny did not feel entirely comfortable as a literary critic because he considered criticism inferior to imaginative writing. When William Golding, an aspiring young writer, approached Bunny for guidance about a literary career, he was told that reviewing was not a good job.18 In this respect, Bunny did himself few favours where Kingsley Martin was concerned, particularly when he paraded his negative views on the ‘Books in General’ page with such generalisations as: ‘It is for those deficient in aesthetic sense that the critics really write’19 and ‘The literary critic, in my opinion, is a not very valuable parasite’.20

  The main problem was that Bunny and Kingsley Martin had never hit it off. Despite mutual friends, Bunny avoided him socially, even though in 1934 Martin had moved into a flat above the Nonesuch offices. Bunny recognised that Martin thought him arrogant, while, in turn, Bunny told Constance that the political tone of the New Statesman ‘is one which I execrate: the superior nose out of joint air’.21 Martin’s antipathy to Bunny may also have had something to do with Maynard supporting Bunny as the candidate for the literary editorship while Martin wanted Raymond Mortimer for the post. He may also have disliked what he thought to be Bunny’s mercenary attitude towards the job. Martin considered his writers should be proud to write for the New Statesman and that financial recompense should not be their motivation.

  Despite this mutual antipathy, Bunny was surprised when in March 1935 he received a letter from Raymond Mortimer stating that Martin wanted Mortimer to remain in post as literary editor. Caught in a difficult position, Raymond diplomatically informed Bunny that he had told Martin he assumed Bunny would want to return to the New Statesman, particularly for financial reasons. ‘Naturally’, he added. ‘I don’t want to snatch a job from you.’ Throwing Bunny a line, Mortimer mentioned that he could continue his ‘Books’ page, and ‘it might suit you not to have any editorial work, if you get well enough paid for the other. And my impression is that he [Martin] would go a long way to meet you in this respect.’22

  Bunny felt he should receive compensation for having his salary cut at two weeks’ notice, and wrote to Maynard seeking his support. As Mortimer surmised, Martin did go to some length to meet Bunny (with the impetus of Maynard and the Board behind him), and he agreed to pay Bunny £400 a year to continue the ‘Books’ page, with an initial additional £100 to compensate for loss of salary. Bunny came out of it all rather well: he had a guaranteed income and more leisure to write. He was sanguine about working under Mortimer, believing, rightly as it turned out, that there would be no friction between them.

  Having spent the best part of two years based largely in London, Bunny found himself again restructuring his life, returning to the pattern of his Nonesuch years, going backwards and forwards between Hilton and London. He had also given up flying. Jamie Hamilton had crashed Pocahontas three times, and although he remained unscathed, the plane required expensive repairs and he and Bunny decided to sell it. Bunny never flew an aeroplane again. Having vacated the literary editor’s desk and given up flying, it only remained for Bunny to extricate himself from Bar. ‘The trouble is’, he informed her, ‘though we love one another, I can’t give enough.’ He told Bar how happy she had made him, but that ‘the framework of my life is set. I have a wife & sons whom I must support & spend a lot of my time with & consider; I also have a feeling of duty about writing’. ‘Darling’, he ended, ‘perhaps we must part.’23

  As if to underline his dedication to his family and return to village life, Bunny threw himself into preparations for King George V’s Silver Jubilee. Richard and William sported fancy dresses as the Lion and the Unicorn, and Ray created a magnificent tubular flag in the form of a red fish with silver spots and blue fins, which flew from an immense bamboo pole in the garden. In the afternoon children’s sports were followed by a bonfire and Bunny was moved by the sight of the whole village holding hands & dancing around it. That summer he finished building a swimming pool at Hilton, a modest plunge pool into which various small children contrived to fall fully clothed, and in which William learnt to swim.

  Despite the advantageous arrangements with the New Statesman and Chatto & Windus, Bunny was broke. It was partly a legacy of renting Endsleigh Street, but mainly a result of paying for Pocahontas’s repairs. When Bunny received two enquiries about filming his books on the same day, he allowed himself to hope that the situation might be resolved. W.B. Lipscomb, the script writer for the film Clive of India, was interested in dramatising A Man in the Zoo, and the actress Elsa Lanchester (whom Bunny had known for a couple of years) wanted to buy the film rights to Pocahontas. Given his previous experience of the film industry, he recognised, rightly, that the offers were pipe dreams. Ironically, at this time a group of friends were making a home movie of The Sailor’s Return. Produced by Cecil Beaton and John Sutro, and filmed at Ashcombe, Beaton’s house, it starred Beaton as Targett, Lady Caroline Paget as a rather pale Tulip and John Betjeman as the clergyman. It was never intended for commercial release, Bunny never made a penny from it, and it was abandoned without sound track.

  That summer of 1935 Bunny was writing an account of his experience with the Quakers in France, for inclusion in Julian Bell’s forthcoming anthology We Did Not Fight, a collection of memoirs by conscientious objectors. Bunny produced a fine and moving tribute to the resilience and determination of the French, but he felt it would have been better written by Frankie, who had spent so much longer in France than he had. Although Bunny could look back and clearly explain his reasons for being a conscientious objector, looking forward he began to feel very differently. In the early 1930s he remained anti-war, and as recently as March 1934 had referred to the futility of war in his ‘Book
s’ column. To some extent he may have still been toeing Kingsley Martin’s ‘no-more-war’ line. But like many other former conchies, Bunny’s views began to change in the light of developments in Europe.

  By the mid-1930s many in Britain believed war inevitable. Bunny’s page of 18 July 1936 certainly opened in uncompromising style. ‘Hell is all around us’ he began, comparing Dante’s ‘apocalyptic vision’ with Mussolini’s treatment of the Ethiopians.24 That Christmas, instead of his customary joyful rumination upon tradition, Bunny began his page with an explosively ironical ‘Peace on earth! Goodwill among men!’ asking whether there would be ‘a clean patch of sand, on which no blood has dribbled, in which we can bury our ostrich heads over Christmas’.25 Bunny’s awareness of Hitler’s actions had taken a practical turn as early as 1934, when he and Ray provided a temporary home at Endsleigh Street for a German girl ‘turned out of her country because of a Jewish grandmother’.26

  Despite general speculation regarding the prospect of war, in 1935 life went on, and Bunny hadn’t quite achieved a clean break from Bar. He still saw her, though more rarely, and they managed ‘to make each other happy & miserable by turns’.27 Bunny tried to focus on Ray and his family, but he couldn’t resist an invitation, in September, to Charleston for Angelica’s birthday party. She was nearly seventeen, and as her birthday fell on Christmas day, allowed to celebrate it at any time of the year she chose. When Bunny, Duncan and Vanessa dined with Maynard and Lydia at Tilton, that weekend, they were joined by T.S. Eliot and the Woolfs. Vanessa commented that Bunny and Tom Eliot ‘made a very good couple, one slow in the American and the other in the English style – and both keeping us in roars of laughter’.28

  But at Hilton, that autumn Bunny identified what was, for him, an unusual malaise: he was bored. ‘Ray, my mother, even the children, this place, my work, the time of year, my friends & my lack of friends, money, my own character – all bore me.’29 London was no longer the centre of his working life, and although he still had his column, it did not provide the clubbable diversions of the literary editorship. Bunny now had to discipline himself to write, but writing was always more appealing woven into a tapestry of other, more colourful, activities.

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘Tomorrow will fall again

  But he whom we carry to the grave

  Will never more return.’1

  Beany-Eye was published in October 1935. The story is narrated by a nine-year-old boy; his father and mother are the central characters, together with the eponymous ‘Beany-eye’, referred to by his given-name, Joe. It is a heroic tale in which the hero is the father, a figure palpably based on Edward Garnett. The mother, a translator of Russian classics, is obviously Constance, and the boy narrator Bunny. The house at the centre of the tale is The Cearne, and Beany-eye/Joe is based upon Bill Hedgecock, a labourer who had at one time been employed by Edward.

  On 6 February 1901 Olive Garnett recorded in her diary: ‘Edward came to dinner and gave us a long account in the style of “Lord Jim” of his exciting adventures with poor Bill who went mad at The Cearne and had to be taken to the infirmary as a criminal lunatic.’2 It was this episode which formed the nucleus of Bunny’s novel. Beany-Eye is an utterly convincing account of an outcast in an uncomprehending society, a helpless soul whose life spirals out of control.

  Joe is homeless. Unable to rein in his temper he is regarded with suspicion and imprisoned. On his release, the father takes pity on him, and allows him to live in his barn, employing him as a casual labourer. Resolving that Joe would best be served if he could be set up as a hawker, the father puts up stock, a donkey and dray. But Joe does not understand this act of kindness or the independence expected of him. He destroys his working stock, defaces his benefactor’s property, and becomes paranoid and progressively unhinged. In a highly filmic scene worthy of both Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, Joe lays siege to the family, endeavouring to hack his way into their house with an axe. With great courage and immeasurable patience, the father finally manages to entice Joe away. Joe is placed in an asylum, where under sympathetic treatment he eventually becomes stable enough to leave. The father takes him to Liverpool, paying for his passage to a new life in Canada.

  ‘Why’, Bunny asked, ‘are there so few madmen in literature?’3 He set himself the challenge of rendering the inner life of someone who becomes insane, portraying both the confusion of the condition as experienced by Joe, and the fear of those witnessing his breakdown. It is a highly sympathetic portrayal of vulnerability, in which Bunny conveys the inherent dignity of Joe’s suffering. When he assembles an armoury of knives, scythes and other weapons, and places them in a semi-circle with the blades outwards, it was ‘proof that Joe had been mad for some time, for he could hardly believe that a sane man had been making preparations for going insane’.4 Bunny posited the question about where precisely the line could be drawn between sanity and madness. He knew, from his friendships with Thea, Dorothy and Tommy that mental illness was not easily categorised and not always visible.

  Beany-Eye sold steadily: an exciting tale wrapped in some of Bunny’s most perfect prose. His narrative of madness and fear is thrown into sharp relief by lyrical descriptions of the countryside, where hazel-wands are twisted into withy bonds and life is ordered by the slowly shifting seasons. Bunny inscribed Edward’s copy of the book ‘with love and gratitude’. Olive later considered it ‘a finer tribute to Edward’s courage and humanity than any of his more formal obituaries’.5

  Early in 1936 Edward was offered a more public form of tribute: the University of Manchester wished to award him an honorary degree. Constance feared he would reject it, especially given his earlier response to her own Civil List pension. Bunny urged Edward to accept, explaining that in honouring him, all the writers he had championed and encouraged would also be honoured. Edward was adamant that he did not want the degree. He wrote to decline it explaining that he would feel burdened by it, that he considered himself an ‘outsider, a solitary person unacademic in essence’.6 This almost caused a breach between Edward and Bunny. They exchanged numerous letters on the subject and Edward, the literary lion, finally pulled rank on his cub, aiming a devastating swipe by accusing Bunny of being an insider. ‘By your Lady into Fox’, he said, ‘you jumped right into a large circle of literary friends’. ‘I prefer to be plain Edward Garnett, & why you should not understand this & not let me remain freely & simply myself discloses a rift in spirit between us.’7 In many respects Bunny and Edward were alike: both fiercely proud, both quick to anger. But Bunny loved his father so much that he apologised though he still believed Edward was wrong.

  Bunny and Ray had taken on the lease of a tiny cottage in Swaledale. They could get away together easily now, for Richard and William were weekly boarders at the Beltane School in Wimbledon, another progressive school. The Yorkshire cottage was known variously as Butts Intake and Duke Mary’s, the latter after a former inhabitant, Mary, the daughter of Marmaduke Metcalfe. A tough and hardy shepherdess, she had, according to legend, given birth to one of her children out on the moor. The remote cottage was approached by a green track branching from a steep lane. It had no electricity, sanitation or running water, but commanded a magnificent view up Swaledale to Gunnerside and the hills beyond.

  Bunny had come tantalisingly close to signing a deal with Charles Laughton for the film rights to Pocahontas. Laughton was attracted to the role of John Smith, as he had been the previous year to that of Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty. Bunny had known Laughton and his wife Elsa Lanchester for a couple of years, dining with them or attending star-studded parties at their house in Gordon Square. On one occasion he dined with them at Boulestin’s together with the movie mogul Sam Goldwyn and his wife Frances Howard. Goldwyn was well known as the perpetrator of such ‘Goldwynisms’ as ‘I want to go where the hand of man has never set foot’. Bunny thought him ‘crassly ignorant even of ordinary words’, and found Mrs Goldwyn ‘cold as outer space’. “Is it unborn lamb they
are serving us?” she demanded to know.8 Afterwards they went on to see some short plays by Noël Coward, and then to the Embassy Club, where Goldwyn filled them with champagne.

  It was presumably through Laughton that Bunny met the producer and director Alexander Korda. By now Bunny knew not to count chickens where film rights were concerned, but in March 1936 he had an interview with Korda which resulted in a commission to write a synopsis or treatment for which he would receive £300 (c. £11,100 today). The subject was that perennial white elephant, ‘Castle Bigod’. If the treatment was acceptable Korda would notify Bunny within three weeks of submission, and pay him a further £1,700 (c. £62,900) for the motion picture rights. Bunny felt rather daunted and tried not to think about the huge sums dangled before him. On 14 March, a touch sycophantically, he devoted his ‘Books’ page to a glowing review of Korda’s film Things to Come.

  Like many others, Bunny was preoccupied with the growing certainty of a major European war. It was now a matter of when, not if. Writing to Julian Bell in March 1936, he said he would probably join the auxiliary air force and ‘prepare to burn or be burned’.9 His resolve to enlist in this war was as profound as his conscientious objection to the previous one. ‘I am no longer a Conchy’, he told Julian, ‘for I think we are back in the dark ages and that ethics depend on the time in which one is living. Pacifism seems so foreign to the present environment as the Cats Home would have been in the time of Nero.’10

  In the spring of 1936 Bunny embarked on a friendship which would prove rewarding and frustrating by turns. It all began when he took delivery of a 30lb salmon. It was the biggest, at the time, that the writer T.H. White had ever caught, and it arrived by train at St Ives, near Hilton. The accompanying note explained he had sent it because Bunny was responsible for ‘the biggest success I have ever made’.11 Tim White’s magnanimity came with a caveat: Bunny was instructed to remove the guts, stuff the cavity with nettles and salt, surround the fish with more nettles, wrap it in greaseproof paper and to dispatch the tail end to a friend of Tim’s at Stowe. This set the pattern for a friendship which on Tim’s side often had strings attached.