Bloomsbury's Outsider

by Sarah Knights

  It was obvious that Hart-Davis urgently required further investment. In April 1952 Herbert Agar, a wealthy Anglophile American, offered to contribute substantially on condition that Milton Waldman, another American and former chief editorial advisor to the British publisher William Collins, be brought in as joint managing director with Rupert. Bunny greeted this prospect with dismay. Rupert would not make up his mind and retreated to bed with flu. As Philip Ziegler observed, with Rupert ‘It seemed always to be a case of jam tomorrow’.11

  Bunny wrote to Angelica on 10 May to say the investors had dropped out. It was a mixed blessing. He also mentioned that he was to be made CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, the ‘outsider’ now apparently irrevocably within. On 15 July Bunny was awarded the CBE at Buckingham Palace, with Angelica and Richard in attendance. The artists Lawrence Gowing and William Coldstream and the actor Michael Redgrave were also made CBE, along with Bunny’s old friend, Arthur Waley. Dennis Proctor, a fellow Cranium Club member, wrote to congratulate Bunny, but expressed what must have touched a raw nerve: ‘Since you have been my favourite living writer for quarter of a century, I was delighted that your work has at last been recognized by the powers that be. (Perhaps even it might encourage you to give us some more of it?)’12

  In August it was Bunny’s turn for a holiday. He took Ann to Venice, hoping it would help her recover from lingering depression. They were lovers, but this made Bunny yearn all the more for Angelica, and for the passionate love she had once felt for him. He feared that his absence with Ann, far from being a cause of regret, would merely be a liberation & relief to Angelica. While Bunny and Ann travelled through the Dolomites into Italy, Angelica tackled an errant pig, only to find all the goslings had escaped. She wrote to tell Bunny that Lady had given birth to a bull calf; the milk had been TB tested, and that she hoped he was enjoying himself. There were no endearments at the end of the letter.

  At Hilton, Angelica was unstinting in her efforts to provide a happy and fulfilled childhood for the children, creating memorable Christmases and participating in family word-games while, as Richard put it, ‘up to her elbows in domesticity’.13 She cooked delicious meals, encouraging her daughters to learn to cook, usually against a background of the pigs’ potato peelings stewing on the Aga. Somehow she found time to paint, create mosaics and play the violin and piano, but she rarely had time to devote herself properly to anything beyond the domestic sphere. She began to resent the repetitive nature of housework and the muck brought in from the farm.

  Life had changed, and with the expansion of the farm Bunny had changed too. He was putting in more and more hours and despite advertising for a second man, could find nobody to support Harry. The attraction of early mornings and milk pans was beginning to wane. ‘I get awfully tired’, Bunny told Mina, ‘& seem to do nothing only because I do so many little things. It would be so delightful to be able to lie in bed in the morning instead of getting up at 7 o’clock.’14 But farming was a commitment, and just as Prentice had remarked about publishing, a job you have willy-nilly to be in or out of. Bunny always took pride in his strength, in his fitness and stamina, enjoying productive physical labour: digging, building things, planting seeds and pruning trees. But he had forgotten just how relentless farm work was in winter when the weather was bad and daylight short. As a twenty-five-year-old, he had hated dung-carting for Hecks: now aged sixty he was carting dung again. Then there was the tedious bureaucracy, quite contrary to Bunny’s romantic view of farming: filling in forms recording milk yields and percentages of butter-fat. Henrietta Garnett remembers this as a solemn weekend ritual carried out at the dining table, ‘like Gladstone saying his prayers’.15

  At Hart-Davis there was cautious reason for optimism. Teddy Young’s One of Our Submarines proved a best-seller, a thrilling book about his war-time naval career when he escaped from a sunken submarine. But then, against all Bunny’s instincts, Milton Waldman and Herbert Agar joined the board in December 1952. Bunny did not trust Waldman’s judgement: he had reviewed The Sailor’s Return dismissively when first published, and had turned down Gamesmanship while at Collins, not finding it funny. Bunny lunched with him several times in an effort to reach some sort of understanding, but did not succeed.

  Meanwhile, Bunny’s relationship with Ann had become problematic. After the holiday in Venice, she was finding it difficult to accept she could only play a part-time role in his life. He was fond of her, but from the outset had made it clear that he could be only an intermittent lover. She wanted more and came close to a breakdown, recognising that Bunny’s love for Angelica was overwhelming. Ann acknowledged that it was physical love which Bunny sought from her, and she was right: Bunny had turned to her when the physical side of his marriage began to wane. But he loved Angelica more than he could love any other woman.

  From Paris Angelica wrote: ‘Really Paris is the only place to live in you know, it’s the only place you can do what you like in and enjoy it all at the same time. If one could only live here modestly in some studio & bring the children up to speak French.’16 Angelica recalled her own childhood, when she travelled regularly to Cassis with Vanessa and Duncan, stopping in Paris en route. She longed to provide her daughters with similar experiences, but more, she longed to be free like her mother, to paint and travel at will. Angelica once told Bunny, ‘I’m not at all good at accepting things I don’t like’.17 That was part of the problem. In many respects she was similar to Bunny: as children they were both used to getting their own way. But from the perspective of greater age and experience, having lived through Ray’s death and cared for his sons, Bunny had, to some extent, overcome this selfish instinct. The problem between Bunny and Angelica was that they were at different stages of their lives, with differing expectations and needs.

  In May 1953 Hart-Davis reached a crisis. The new investors, with Rupert’s agreement, demanded a financial reconstruction which involved writing down the ordinary shares to 50 per cent of their value, in order, as Bunny put it, to attract ‘new money purely at the expense of the old shareholders’.18 Bunny sought advice from Leonard Woolf, among others, who counselled against acceding to the proposal. Bunny believed Rupert had betrayed him – going off for a holiday with Ruth at Butts Intake – ‘after arranging the whole plan & pretending to me that it came as a shock to him on his return’.19 Bunny felt particularly wounded because he had struggled to put up his initial capital and had invested more heavily than Rupert. With a smaller shareholding, Rupert stood to lose less, especially as the Board was considering a proposal to increase his salary. When Rupert complained that he could not fund his children’s school fees Bunny replied: ‘I had to borrow money last autumn and winter. My children go to the Council school because I cannot afford to send them elsewhere.’20 According to Richard Garnett, Rupert was not ‘a deceiver and swindler, except in deceiving himself. He had an unfortunate capacity for shutting out what he didn’t want to know.’21

  Bunny eventually realised 75 per cent of his original investment. ‘This means’, he told Mina, ‘that I am free of the incessant compromises & discussions – and that I can now write without being asked to read manuscripts.’22 He felt years younger. Unfortunately, Bunny had only recently handed in the manuscript of his first volume of memoirs to Hart-Davis. He felt unable to withdraw it, as it would mean delaying publication, but realised that it could prove problematic with regard to subsequent volumes. In this respect Rupert behaved like a gentleman, asking Ian Parsons at Chatto & Windus to take it on. This had the additional benefit of returning Bunny to his original publisher without losing face as a result of his defection to what had been his own publishing house. As for the new deal at Hart-Davis, Richard Garnett explained: ‘For three years, from 1953 to 1955, the firm had two managing directors, and they went their separate ways, so separate that there is no mention of Milton Waldman in Rupert’s autobiography.’23 Fortunately Richard had been away at the height of the crisis; he remained at Hart-Davis, where his abilities in both ed
itorial and design had already made him invaluable. Bunny never sought to influence him otherwise.

  Bunny’s relief at leaving Hart-Davis was enhanced by a letter from Mina, telling him her charity, the Chapelbrook Foundation, was to award him a grant of $2,500 in support of his writing. Mina had established the Foundation to provide funds for writers over the age of forty and to enable them to complete work in progress. As one of the first beneficiaries, it seems likely the Foundation was formed with Bunny in mind. Lincoln Kirstein and Bunny’s old friend Archie McLeish were fellow trustees. ‘You mustn’t think of this in terms of a gift’, Mina told Bunny, ‘because all the happiness it gives me to know that you are free to write things that give me such pleasure makes the whole thing an uneven exchange, any debt being on my side.24

  Bunny was also delighted when in July 1953 Richard brought his girlfriend, Jane Dickins, to Hilton. She was a stage designer and Bunny found her ‘extremely pretty: indeed a lovely creature’, admiring her ‘exquisite figure’, and ‘violet blue eyes’. ‘She comes’, Bunny informed Mina, ‘from a family of Professors: her father is Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge and her grandfather is old Sir Herbert Grierson […] the editor of Donne’.25 Bunny immediately put Jane at her ease when he told her that it was her grandfather who had given him the James Tait Black Memorial prize for Lady into Fox. Coming from what she described as ‘a more conventional background’, to Jane Dickins, Hilton Hall ‘seemed wonderful and free’.26

  In August 1953 Bunny and Angelica achieved the impossible: they went on holiday together to the French Riviera. William was in tow, and the three of them joined Harold Hobson and his wife Maggie on a boating holiday. It was a carefree break, Bunny and Angelica feeling closer than they had for some time. Back home, Bunny found a letter waiting from Ann, desperate to see him. As Bunny told Angelica, ‘The dreadful thing is that when I see her I like her very much – in fact more than that. But when I don’t see her, I don’t want to see her ever again.’27 Nevertheless, he carried his own key to her house.

  That autumn Bunny travelled down to Mappowder in Dorset to visit Theo Powys, who was dying. Theo reminisced about Tommy and Ray and thanked Bunny for all he had done for him. Bunny had been a stalwart friend. He helped Theo to become a published author, lobbied for his civil pension and in 1925 had written an appreciation of him in The Borzoi. There he commented: ‘To Powys death is the only thing which will not fail him, until then he knows he is at the mercy of life.’28

  Professionally, it was an exciting time: with the exception of editorial and propaganda work, Bunny had not produced a book in two decades. On 16 November his first volume of autobiography, The Golden Echo, was launched at a party at Chatto & Windus. Raymond Mortimer told Bunny that his new book ‘makes me think of you more admiringly and affectionately than ever. You have never written better, I think indeed never so well; and you so treat the remarkable persons and circumstances of your childhood and boyhood that one’s sense of yourself becomes overwhelming.’29 In a subsequent letter, Raymond could not resist pointing out a few inaccuracies: ‘though I don’t pretend to know better than you how to spell your dog’s name, the German philosopher had a Z in the middle of his name – Nietzsche’.30 In his Sunday Times review Mortimer hailed The Golden Echo as the ‘most absorbing and best written’ of all Bunny’s books31, while The Times pronounced it ‘entrancing’.32 Time magazine commissioned a photograph of a dapper, be-suited Bunny with his Siamese cat perched on his shoulder. But some reviews located Bunny’s autobiographical life in a former age. The Listener invited the reader to see how Bunny’s world ‘looks as a detached historical phenomenon’,33 while James Stern, in The New York Times Book Review, placed him in ‘the last decade of Europe’s Golden Age’.34

  The Golden Echo covers Bunny’s life to the beginning of the First World War. He took the book’s title from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem of the same name, which celebrates the loveliness and everlastingness of youth, whilst recognising, in its companion poem, The Leaden Echo, that ‘nothing can be done / To keep at bay / Age and age’s evils’.35 In his ‘Intimations of Mortality By Way Of Preface’, Bunny explained that he had no belief in God, but that what can survive, after death, is the written word, and what does survive are permutations of ancestral genes, so one ‘may be given a few moments of vicarious existence’ in one’s descendants.36 The Golden Echo wonderfully evokes childhood and youth, capturing the textures of time and place and the people who formed the fabric of Bunny’s young life. It is an almost painterly portrait of a bygone era, of trams and gaslight, roads devoid of cars, of writers long dead, like Conrad, Lawrence and Galsworthy. As Sylvia Townsend Warner perceptively commented, ‘children do live in the suburbs of their parents’ lives’.37

  Eddy Sackville-West wrote enthusiastically, recognising ‘in every paragraph the tone of voice of my old friend, B.G.’ adding that he looked forward to volume two, ‘but I imagine that a certain amount of evasion – so foreign to your nature – will be inevitable’.38 Here he alluded to Bunny’s love-life during the First World War. Already writing volume two, Bunny told Mina: ‘The rocks & shoals are immense: I shall have to be extremely adroit if I am to succeed in saying anything worth saying.’39 Duncan told Bunny how much he enjoyed volume one, while confessing that he was a little nervous about the next volume.

  Bunny rehearsed volume two at the Memoir Club, reading what Frances Partridge considered an admirable paper, ‘partly about his relations with Duncan, Lytton, Frankie Birrell & Clive’ ‘and partly some unpublishable episodes illustrating his attitude to sex’.40 Bunny approached the meeting with some trepidation, as he wanted to ensure that Duncan, Clive and Vanessa approved of what he said about them. He found it went down surprisingly well. Frances advised him to cut nothing, although Clive was worried about the sexual references, stating: ‘If you think you can publish things of that kind today my dear Bunny […]’41

  Mina advised Bunny to keep his sex life out of the text, an impossible undertaking for a man with the double-handicap of a compulsion to speak the truth and an overriding libido. He informed her he had introduced his sex life ‘where it arises naturally as one of the results of my visit to Lytton’s cottage at Christmas’, referring to the time when he fell in love with Duncan Grant in 1914.42 By and large, Bunny was careful to consult those who appeared in his memoirs, although his idea about what constituted matters of a sensitive nature might diverge from that of his friends.

  In March 1954 Bunny and Angelica threw a party at Hilton in joint celebration of Bunny’s sixty-second birthday and Richard and Jane’s engagement.43 Frances Partridge observed there were quite a lot of ‘good grey heads and white ones too hinting at the last volume of Proust’,

  Angelica’s four little girls, wearing their party dresses and highly excited, revolved among us with dishes of caviare and smoked salmon. Looking down one saw an angelic face looking up enquiringly from waist level, munching hard. There was music: William and Angelica played an oboe sonata: Leslie Hotson sang American songs; the little girls played solemnly on recorders. Duncan and Morgan greeted each other like survivors on the same raft.44

  In September Angelica returned to Paris, this time staying with a new friend, the Italian artist Giovanna Madonia, to whom Angelica and Bunny had been introduced by Rosemary Hinchingbrooke. Earlier that year she had been involved in a love affair with the American poet Robert Lowell. According to Bunny, Giovanna was ‘extraordinarily beautiful with a classic beauty – very brown & thin’.45 Like Rosemary, Giovanna’s friendship was not one but two, as she maintained separate friendships with Bunny and Angelica, while remaining friends with them as a couple. From their Paris hotel Angelica wrote to Bunny, ‘The great virtue is that the bed is soft & comfortable and as we both sleep without kicking we can manage very well’.46 Bunny replied provocatively: ‘It occurred to me last night that you & I are behaving over Giovanna rather as Shelley & Mary behaved over Emilia Viviani […]. I wish Giovanna would inspire me to write something as wo
nderful as Epipsychidion!’47

  Bunny’s moral code had often mirrored those lines in Shelley’s autobiographical poem: ‘I never was attached to that great sect, / Whose doctrine is, that each one should select / Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, / And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend / To cold oblivion.’ It was the beautiful Emilia Viviani who inspired Shelley to write these lines. Shelley sought a triangular relationship with Emilia and his wife Mary, much as Bunny and Angelica were involved in some form of triangle with Giovanna. As Bunny wrote volume two of his autobiography and as he penned a casual ‘Note on Sexual Life’, Epipsychidion was much on his mind. ‘Sexual love is’, he recorded, ‘apart from anything else, an infallible means of judging character. When one has been a woman’s lover the veils of illusion are torn down – one sees her naked – and loves her forever.’48

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  ‘Truth and wit are felt by many to be rather shocking virtues which should appear in public only if they are decently veiled.’1

  With the exception of an occasional short story and the ill-fated Castle Bigod, Bunny had written no fiction in twenty years. His autobiography had eased him back into the habit of writing and he began a short story which soon took on a momentum of its own. Bunny could not leave it and became intrigued by the characters, wanting to let them develop further. He soon found himself writing a novel. The story was set in France, so when, in the autumn of 1954, Mina invited him to join her there, it seemed the perfect opportunity to position his characters in an authentic landscape.