Bloomsbury's Outsider

by Sarah Knights

  The success to which Tim referred was caused by Bunny’s review, three years previously, of his novel They Winter Abroad, written under the pseudonym James Ashton. In January 1936 Bunny received a letter from Tim, asking him to review his latest book, England Have My Bones. Bunny’s review concluded that the book was delightful. ‘Its subject is all the things that he has liked doing; a love of Nature and the instinct for action expressed in one kind of sport after another: salmon-fishing, hunting, shooting, learning to fly, playing darts in pubs, and taming snakes. He writes of them so well, with such appetite, that one shares the thrill of the thing done.’12 Of course it was the thrill of the thing done which Bunny also enjoyed and which attracted him to Tim. A shared love of the outdoors and especially fishing formed the focus of their friendship. By April it was on a firm footing and Tim had stayed at Hilton.

  Bunny was taken first with ‘the size of the man’, but then noticed ‘the brilliant blue, rather bloodshot, unhappy eyes, and the patient voice which usually sounded as though he were very carefully explaining something to a child and which would then split with the sudden realisation of an absurdity, or a shared joke’.13 But Tim was a loner, preferring the companionship of his Irish Setter Brownie and pair of peregrine falcons to that of humankind. Over the years Bunny extended many kindnesses to him, but their relationship was always happiest conducted through correspondence. Their friendship was based on a good-humoured extended game of one-upmanship, each trying to trump the other with superior knowledge of obscure subjects. On matters Irish, folkloric and heraldic Tim was inclined to wield the upper hand.

  It was while fishing in Scotland in June, with his cousin, Dicky Garnett, that Bunny discovered he had unwittingly involved Mina in a situation which caused her grave embarrassment. She had asked Bunny to help obtain an English publisher for her latest book, so he approached Chatto & Windus. They turned it down following a scathing reader’s report, but unfortunately, inadvertently included the report inside Mina’s returned manuscript. Bunny felt responsible for exposing her to this humiliating situation. He obtained an apology from Harold Raymond but it had put him in a difficult position. Mina had, after all, been so generous to Bunny; he would have liked to have been able to reciprocate.

  As both a literary critic and writer Bunny was in a position of some influence. If he failed to get Mina’s book published, he did succeed in negotiating a rapid publishing deal with Chatto & Windus for his old friend H.G. Wells’s The Croquet Player. He also read some stories which Julian Bell had sent him from China. They had been written by Ling Su-Hua, the woman with whom he was in love, and Julian hoped Bunny might be able to help get them published. At Julian’s request, Bunny forwarded them to Vanessa, incidentally mentioning that someone had written to him to say he had seen Duncan in the company of a lovely model. ‘The only face I could fit to the description was Angelica’s’, Bunny commented, asking Vanessa to ‘Give Angelica my warmest love’.14

  That summer Ray was worried again about her health. She had been experiencing pain in her breast and went to see Geoffrey Keynes. He wrote reassuring Bunny that he was sure there was no recurrence of the disease, but nevertheless recommended removing some breast tissue. According to Geoffrey, the double-dose of radium treatment had caused Ray’s breast to become fibrosed, and he confessed that he had seldom seen so much contraction of the skin and muscle. Ray wished she had been told before that the breast tissue would harden. ‘I think now’, she wrote to Bunny, ‘it would be a relief to know what he expects to happen.’ ‘I hate the business’, she added, ‘I’d rather it was some other part of me.’15 With Richard and William at school, Bunny was able to stay at Pond Place and to visit Ray in the nursing home.

  Unfortunately Geoffrey Keynes was forced to revise his earlier opinion. Ray’s breast did contain active growth and he performed a mastectomy. Nevertheless Geoffrey told Bunny that there did not seem any reason for despondency. ‘She has gone on so long now without sign of dissemination that probably all will be well.’16 As Ray had to remain in the nursing home longer than anticipated, Bunny returned to Hilton for the boys’ summer holiday. From there he wrote: ‘Darling Ray’, ‘I love you, darling, progressively’, ‘I seem to love you more & more as time goes on’. His letter ended, ‘I love you, & you know how Richard & William do & I’ve so many kisses to give you’. Bunny tried terribly hard to reassure Ray that he still wanted her, that despite her operation she remained desirable. He sent her ‘a hundred kisses & caresses’ and signed his letter, ‘Your lover Bunny’.

  Ray returned to Hilton at the end of August. She had spent a month in the nursing home, and now had to be taken into Cambridge every day to see a doctor. By the end of September she was well enough to go to Butts Intake. Bunny bought her a Leica camera, something she had wanted for some time. He knew that if anything could raise her spirits, Yorkshire would.

  Neither he nor Ray had anticipated that the summer would be so fraught. During all this distraction Bunny found that Korda had not kept to the terms of his contract. Bunny had delivered the treatment, but Korda did not get round to reading it within the stipulated time. In fact it was months later, on 28 September that Korda eventually wrote to tell Bunny he thought ‘Castle Bigod’ required further work, but would make a good film. Bunny arranged to see Korda in early October. In the meantime he remained in a state of fizz, hoping the film would go ahead as the money would be useful, particularly given Ray’s nursing home fees. But Bunny’s meeting with Korda left him none the wiser: Korda could not make up his mind.

  Bunny had begun to see more of Duncan and Vanessa. After such a stressful summer, he felt the need to retreat into that old established quasi family of his youth. As he told Julian Bell, ‘I see a fair amount of your family who are the people I am happiest with’. At almost eighteen, Angelica was growing up and Bunny wrote her an avuncular letter, inviting her to have dinner with him and then to go on to the cinema or theatre. They dined on oysters and saw a film.

  That December Bunny was concerned for Stephen Tomlin, who had been admitted to hospital in Bournemouth, suffering from septicaemia following the extraction of a tooth. Bunny worried about him throughout Christmas, anxious for the daily telephone report on his condition. When Tommy died on 5 January 1937, Bunny was heartbroken. In his obituary in The Times, he described Tommy as ‘universally loved’, someone ‘with whom most ordinary people frankly fell in love, irrespective of age or sex’.17

  Six weeks later, while on a fishing expedition in Wales with Tim White, Bunny received a telegram from Ray stating that Edward had died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage at Pond Place. Nellie had been with him. Bunny immediately left for The Cearne where he broke the news to Constance. Edward’s death, on 19 February, came at a time when Bunny felt particularly low, having learned that Korda had decided against ‘Castle Bigod’. Moreover, Bunny hadn’t really recovered from Tommy’s premature death. Edward was sixty-nine; Bunny recognised it was a good way to go, but felt the loss deeply. He had at least seen Edward, four days before his death, just before leaving for Wales.

  Bunny spent the following days backwards and forwards between The Cearne and Pond Place. He registered Edward’s death, dealt with undertakers, and began the depressing process of clearing Edward’s flat and distributing or disposing of his belongings. As he said to John Hayward, ‘The odd thing about a death is just when there’s nothing whatever to be done, one has to start doing things at once’.18 Edward’s body was cremated at Golders Green. Neither Constance nor Nellie attended the funeral, but Bunny took Nellie out to lunch and spent the night afterwards at The Cearne.

  Bunny received dozens of letters of sympathy. Alec Penrose poignantly recollected how companionable and youthful Edward had been. Noel Olivier told Bunny that she had always felt Edward ‘a kind of parent of mine too’.19 Edward left Constance and Bunny his books having already given Richard and William the manuscript of T.E. Lawrence’s The Mint and the Oxford Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Nellie, who remained close to Co
nstance and Bunny, moved into a small flat in north London, and devoted her time to teaching crafts to the women in Holloway Gaol. Constance retained her redoubtable independence. Bunny told Vanessa that his seventy-six-year-old mother was ‘frail & feeble, but an incorrigible character – hasn’t really seen a doctor & has a horror lest I should force her to do so’.20 Bunny knew that her greatest fear was not illness, but that she would have to give up living alone at The Cearne.

  Edward’s death left a large gap in Bunny’s life. There were no more lunches at the Commercio, no convivial evenings at Pond Place, no letters to be written to Edward or letters to be received from him. With his father’s death, part of the fabric of Bunny’s life crumbled away. As the years passed he still found himself thinking ‘I wish I could talk to Edward about that’.21

  In April Bunny’s three year contract with Chatto & Windus came to an end. Charles Prentice had left the firm in 1934, so Bunny now dealt with Harold Raymond or Ian Parsons. Raymond wrote to tell Bunny that his unearned balance was £760, ‘but there is still Castle Bigod plus a book of short stories due under the contract, and these two should, with any luck, square the balance’.22 Bunny still had not delivered ‘Castle Bigod’ and he struggled with it into the autumn. ‘I don’t know’, he told Ian Parsons, ‘whether, short of a miracle, Castle Bigod will ever be written’.23 Both Raymond and Parsons were good editors, largely sympathetic towards Bunny. But Prentice had been so much more. He had been both a loyal friend and vital to Bunny’s sense of worth as a writer, for he had a particular talent for injecting optimism in his authors and always responded with encouragement even to Bunny’s most gloomy missives about a current book. Prentice’s kindly and gentle support had formed the perfect counterpoint to Edward’s more forthright criticism. With Prentice gone and Edward dead, Bunny had lost the two people whose opinions he most respected.

  At this time Bunny turned to his friends, Francis Meynell, John Hayward, Geoffrey Keynes and especially Duncan and Vanessa. In April he accompanied Duncan to see eighteen-year-old Angelica on the stage, for she now attended drama school in London. At Charleston, Bunny had a long talk with Maynard, who overwhelmed him with his kindness, offering to pay the boys’ school fees, an offer which Bunny could not afford to decline. Julian Bell was back in England, preparing to join an ambulance unit in Spain. Bunny tried to persuade him to forgo the Spanish Civil War in order to prepare for what he believed to be inevitable war with Germany, but Julian left for Spain on 8 June. Bunny wrote shortly afterwards to Vanessa, trying to reassure her that she should not worry. Vanessa replied that Bunny was ‘one of the few people who understand what one feels & talks to me sensibly’.24

  Six weeks later Julian’s ambulance was hit by a shell on the Madrid front. Julian was dead. Bunny thought his death inevitable, the outcome of a ‘temperamental love of danger and absence of caution’.25 When Vanessa had gained sufficient strength to think ahead, she asked Bunny to write a memoir of Julian, for inclusion in a proposed anthology of his essays and letters. ‘I think’, she said, ‘you are the only person I could stand doing it.’26 Bunny accepted the task, but worried lest the combined grief of recent months should make whatever he wrote ring false. ‘I want to see you very much’, he wrote, adding that he would ‘love to be at Charleston’: ‘I belong to you in some way.’27

  Bunny received a letter from Angelica, addressed to ‘Dearest, Darling Bunny’, sending him fourteen kisses, and then ‘some more hugs & XXXXXXXX’.28 Bunny replied asking whether Angelica would give him a real hug rather than a paper one when they saw each other. Vanessa had noticed Angelica’s secrecy where Bunny was concerned. Usually she would let Vanessa read any letters she received, but she squirreled Bunny’s away. Vanessa told Bunny that Angelica was writing him ‘a love letter of the most passionate description’. ‘I only hope’ she teased, ‘you remember you’re a married man.’29

  Chapter Twenty-One

  ‘The only thing which matters is to live according to one’s own nature & to refuse absolutely to be what one is not.’1

  In April 1937 Bunny was asked to edit the letters of T.E. Lawrence. This would provide vital income, if not on the scale he dreamed of earning from films. It would involve painstaking work and as Bunny was to discover, would draw upon all his resources of charm and diplomacy. The Letters were commissioned by the Trustees of Lawrence’s estate, headed by his younger brother, Arnold (A.W.) Lawrence. Some work had already been done by E.M. Forster, who originally accepted the commission, but illness and fear of libel made him decide to withdraw. The Letters were to be published by Jonathan Cape, for whom Bunny now also worked as a reader, in this respect having stepped into Edward’s shoes.

  Unusually, all matters concerning the letters had to go through the Trustees’ solicitor, rather than the publisher. But Cape reassured Bunny that they would shoulder all the risk regarding any action for libel. Such reassurance came with strings: Cape would have the final word about what was included in the book. The Trustees’ lawyer would also have jurisdiction on the matter. Bunny was thus subject to two sets of scrutiny on his work. He would not be paid an advance, instead receiving £50 for expenses, together with one-third of net income from sales.

  Many of the letters had already been collected by the Lawrence Trustees. After Lawrence’s death, A.W. published a request asking those who had kept his brother’s letters to allow the Trustees to make copies. Some sent originals; others sent transcripts, reluctant to lend such precious items. But there were still a number of letters whose owners would not relinquish them in any shape or form. Charlotte Shaw, George Bernard Shaw’s wife, was chief among this fiercely protective few.

  Forster had started to put the letters into subject order, but Bunny decided they would only work chronologically, and that way he could add explanatory footnotes and write introductions to each section, outlining the historical context and background events. In total he included nearly 600 letters to 146 correspondents. As Bunny made clear in the Preface, ‘My dilemma has been to avoid repetition, which becomes wearisome, without mutilating too many letters – which becomes exasperating’. To this end he stated that he had ‘omitted many passages where Lawrence simply was repeating what he had already written elsewhere’.2 This was not strictly true, and certainly where Lawrence’s letters to Bunny were concerned, Bunny cut what he considered sensitive passages. Thus in a letter referring to the Graves/Riding/Phibbs imbroglio Bunny circled passages, against which he inserted the word ‘omit’. In the published Letters, Bunny excised the whole affair, even though it had occasioned colourful correspondence between him and Lawrence. No doubt Bunny wanted to protect those involved and wished to avoid libel; doubtless he chose to cast a protective veil over his own participation in an embarrassing event. In so doing, that arch opponent of the censor had become the censor himself.

  Bunny worked closely with A.W. Lawrence, who proved invaluable in providing introductions to sergeants major and other people outside Bunny’s milieu. Fortunately Bunny and A.W. got on well and became firm friends. An early duty was to meet with Lawrence’s mother, ‘a fierce old white-haired creature’ ‘who knows her son was a saint’.3 Bunny was rather nervous at the prospect, but disconcertingly found himself spending the interview thinking back to Christmas 1914, when Lytton Strachey had read from his naughty story ‘Ermyntrude and Esmerelda’. For Mrs Lawrence lived at Lytton’s former residence, The Lackett.

  Bunny was soon immersed in Lawrence material. He told Maynard that he thought ‘T.E.’, as he called him, would have been a ‘fine subject for a Pirandello play: the character moulded differently to suit the needs of all his friends & even, as a hero, the world at large’.4 Bunny discovered far more about T.E. than he could conceivably have done during his life. But he could not help feeling sorry for Lawrence, believing that as he ‘did not strive to satisfy the sexual appetite’, he missed out on ‘love and desire and all the range of tenderness between them […], the ecstasies and contentments of physical intimacy’ and ‘th
e sharp joys and alarms of parenthood’.5 Of course, the absence of such appetites and emotions was inconceivable to Bunny, for they were central not only to his happiness, but to his identity.

  Bunny found himself spending most of his time in London. It was a convenient base from which to interview many of the Lawrence correspondents, and for his work as a reader for Cape, which involved weekly luncheon meetings. He was also now an occasional reader for Chatto and still wrote his ‘Books’ page for the New Statesman. Bunny no longer lodged with Bar, instead taking up H.G. Wells’s offer of his mews flat at Hanover Terrace, known as ‘Mr Mumford’s room’ after a former incumbent. This became Bunny’s London base, though he also stayed with various friends. One night at Geoffrey Keynes’s, just before midnight the telephone rang, calling Geoffrey to Bart’s to perform an appendectomy. Geoffrey took Bunny along, introducing him as Dr Garnett. Bunny scrubbed in, donned surgical robes and entered the theatre. Ever the scientist, he found the whole thing fascinating. Having only dissected dead animals, he was intrigued by the business of operating on living flesh.

  When in September 1937 Bunny snatched a weekend at Charleston, he found two roses in a vase in his room. He assumed Angelica had left them there, and writing to thank her, introduced a cautionary note: ‘We shall meet in Nessa’s studio & she will say we are flirting outrageously which I hope isn’t true, as whatever you do, I simply show my feelings which are too strong for me to hide […] but I’m afraid that’s as far as it will go.’6 While Bunny wrote Angelica chatty avuncular letters, which most often ended by his sending her a ‘warm hug’, he could not mistake the increasingly demonstrative tone of her letters to him, nor could he ignore her exuberantly affectionate behaviour in his presence. A few years before, when Angelica was fifteen or sixteen, she had curled up on Bunny’s lap, carelessly circling his neck with her arm and resting her cheek against his. Vanessa had looked on with amusement, but Bunny realised that Angelica was growing up, and had started to view him in a less childish light.