Bunny and Mina travelled in an enormous chauffeur-driven Buick and stayed at the most expensive hotels. Uncomfortable with such extravagance, Bunny was relieved when in one town they found the best hotel closed, having to accept second-best. They spent a couple of days as guests of Baron Philippe de Rothschild and his wife Pauline at Château Mouton-Rothschild, touring the vineyards and consuming vintage wine at every meal. Although Mina was generosity itself, Bunny was discomfited by her patronage, particularly as he thought everyone regarded him as her lover, which he was not.
Bunny felt guilty at leaving Angelica to cope at Hilton. ‘I long to be close to you’, he wrote to her, ‘Shall I ever succeed in being? Darling, I don’t ask anything.’2 He wrote again in a similarly anxious vein, ‘Darling Catt, I love you far too much. But please tell me that you can be happy in some ways.’3 He promised change. He would reduce the number of pigs; spend less on the farm and work harder at writing. ‘You see I can write and it is idiotic that I should so easily be dismayed & distracted.’4
Angelica had heard all this before. It was easy for Bunny to make promises in France away from the farm, but he had only recently spoken of buying another field. It wasn’t only the farm which Angelica found oppressive. She hated domestic chores, complaining that the children were undisciplined and unhelpful. At thirty, William was a kindly and dutiful older brother who often released Bunny and Angelica from childcare. But he also came in for criticism: ‘William also is somehow just like another bigger child it seems to me. He does everything required on the farm […] but he is extraordinarily unwilling to take responsibility and seems to expect meals to appear as though by magic. I feel more than ever that he ought to make some effort to take life by the horns.’5 Bunny replied, melodramatically, that he wanted to love Angelica ‘with love that liberates & does not strangle & hold you down like the wet ploughland’.6
When Bunny told Angelica he had visited George Sand’s château, she seized the opportunity to explain how far she felt life had shifted from her expectations. ‘Your letter about George Sand’s château arrived […]. How near one feels to all those people […]. Just think of the dinner party with Turgenev & Pauline & Flaubert all together […]! That is the sort of life we ought to be leading instead of being isolated by our hard work.’ ‘Hasn’t your holiday’, she reasoned, ‘made you see that in many ways its such a terrible waste of time for you to do anything except write – you have only one life and there is only one of you with your gifts and delightful though other occupations may be they have no importance beside this.’7 Angelica had married a writer: in France he was writing a novel, the first for many years. She feared that when he returned to Hilton, he would be tethered to the farm, in the process tethering her, too.
Meanwhile, nervous of prosecution, Chatto & Windus delayed the publication of Bunny’s second volume of memoirs. The firm’s solicitor had identified a number of potentially libellous points, particularly regarding Betty May’s heroin addiction. Only the previous year Sylvia Townsend Warner had been required to modify a passage in The Flint Anchor, in which one man declared love for another. Bunny refused to delete the offending passages and instead set about tracing Betty May. He placed an advertisement in The Times seeking the author of Tiger Woman, Betty May’s autobiography. Within four days the Daily Express discovered her whereabouts, and after a passage of thirty-five years, Bunny and Betty May were reunited in a pub at Chatham. He found her ‘most charming; not much changed – white hair, very alive’.8 Betty gladly signed a letter endorsing what Bunny had written, but it was not long before she wrote to him asking for money. He sent her a five pound note: ‘I just hated asking you’, Betty wrote, ‘but I went out & bought some nice things to wear.’9
Bunny carried out what he called ‘a last séance’ with Duncan and Vanessa to double-check they had no objections to their inclusion in volume two. He read them the passages in which they appeared, afterwards feeling reassured and happy, because Vanessa laughed at his jokes, and Duncan seemed genuinely pleased by what he heard and exuded warmth towards Bunny. It came as a surprise, therefore, when Bunny received an anxious letter from Vanessa, who had heard from Leonard Woolf that he might have quoted from one or two of her letters without reading the passages to her.
This was not the only contentious literary matter in which Bunny was involved. The New Statesman had invited him to review Richard Aldington’s Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry (1955), heralding his review on the front page with the legend ‘DAVID GARNETT on Aldington’s Lawrence’. In January 1955 Bunny spent two full days reading the biography carefully. He concluded that Aldington was ‘a disappointed man, full of hatreds and jealousies’, and that he had written the book ‘to cause a scandal and so make a lot of money’. What Bunny found most objectionable was Aldington’s revelation of Lawrence’s illegitimacy, which he considered shameful as Lawrence’s mother was still alive. Bunny’s review vigorously defended Lawrence against Aldington’s character assassination and the ‘sneer on almost every page’.10 Ironically, Aldington had written to Bunny about the biography in 1950, when Bunny responded with good advice, suggesting Aldington should stay on the right side of Lawrence’s mother, should listen to A.W. Lawrence and refrain from treating T.E.L. as a victim. This advice had apparently fallen on deaf ears.
Aldington naively hoped his book would be reviewed by impartial critics, and that A.W. Lawrence, Bunny, Basil Liddell Hart and Robert Graves, among others, would be disbarred from the job.11 His hopes were in vain, as they all either opposed the book or mounted a concerted defence of T.E.L. Bunny, Liddell Hart and A.W. Lawrence briefly considered publishing a booklet refuting Aldington, but it was not a financially feasible proposition.
In April 1955, twelve-year-old Amaryllis was dispatched to stay with a family in Rouen for two months to learn French. Bunny felt apprehensive about leaving Amaryllis in France, but it was part of the education which Angelica believed vital and liberating for her daughters. Bunny missed his eldest daughter, and when, a month later, marital relations suffered a further decline, he decided to visit Amaryllis. On the day of departure he issued a spur of the moment invitation to Ann Hopkin, asking whether she would like to spend a few days with him at the end of the break. She was delighted, although she knew it was a last minute invitation.
Bunny took Amaryllis on a nostalgic tour of Duclair and Jumièges, places he visited with his mother, aged fifteen. He delighted in his daughter’s sudden bursts of enthusiasm and spontaneous demonstrations of affection. But when he left, she clung to him, in an agonising parting. Bunny couldn’t bear to see Amaryllis unhappy. He spent a restless night in a hotel room beneath a clock tower, the clock chiming every half hour, five minutes ahead of a neighbouring clock. Afterwards he wrote to Angelica, ‘I haven’t felt life so empty & worthless for the last fifteen years’.12 Only Ann’s arrival at Dieppe lifted his spirits.
Having completed his French novel, Aspects of Love, Bunny wrote to thank Mina, saying he owed the book entirely to her. She had supported him with the Chapelbrook grant, had enabled him to write and research in France, and had supplied the original anecdote around which Bunny wove his story. It was a story which she had heard from the poet Alexis Leger,13 about a young couple alone in a château, who heard the ghostly sound of steps descending from the attic, and on investigating, found only a single green slipper on the stair. Bunny toyed with the idea of naming the book ‘Un Souvenir Leger’ in homage to its perpetrator, but settled instead on calling his young man Alexis, although the phrase: ‘Ce sera un souvenir léger pour toi’ (it will be a slight memory for you) is a leitmotif in the text.
Bunny composed Aspects of Love concurrently with his second volume of autobiography, The Flowers of the Forest. It is as if the process of harnessing and sorting his memories conjured forth a parallel and even more personal book in which, in the guise of fiction, Bunny elaborated upon his emotional life and presented a manifesto of his beliefs. Thus Aspects of Love might stand as an extended fo
otnote to his memoirs. It was hardly surprising that Angelica encouraged him to scrap his novel, for she not only encountered herself within its pages at different stages of her life, but also saw herself portrayed from the vantage point of Bunny’s particular rationale of love and marriage.
The book propounds Bunny’s credo of free love, his ideal of hierarchical passionate love with marriage as the apogee, an apogee only attained in the context of freedom to take other lovers. Bunny’s aim was to illustrate ‘that the conventional attitude to age is all nonsense’,14 or, as he put it to Mina, ‘I found myself in the middle of the fascinating subject of the attraction that men of 60 have for women of 20–30’, ‘on which’, he added, ‘I am qualified to write if only because of my marriage to Angelica’.15 It was not only Angelica who ‘qualified’ Bunny on this account: Giovanna and Ann were half Bunny’s age, and both provided inspiration for characters in the book.
The story concerns four main characters, all wound up in the kind of triple helix in which Bunny was prone to involve himself. It is an interlocking of lovers of different ages, youth in love with age, youth turning into age and then falling in love with youth. As far back as 1918, Bunny had toyed with the idea of writing a story on ‘the psychology of a boy of nineteen who is very much upset and shocked because the girl he has sentimental & vague feelings towards falls in love with a much older and more interesting man’.16 The plot remains essentially the same, although Alexis, the boy, is seventeen rather than nineteen. So Alexis falls in love with Rose (mid-twenties) who falls in love with Alexis’s uncle, Sir George Dillingham (sixty-four); Sir George falls in love with Rose, but has a mistress, Giulietta (mid-twenties) who loves Sir George, but is in love with someone of her own age. Rose marries Sir George, and they have a child, Jenny (who attains the age of fourteen at the end of the book). Rose takes a younger lover; as Jenny matures, she falls in love with Alexis (now circa 40); Alexis loves Jenny, but cannot love her passionately as she is too young, so after Sir George dies, Alexis goes off with Giulietta leaving the door open for his return to Jenny when she grows up.
Even reduced to such a schematic synopsis, it is evident that Aspects of Love might equally be called ‘Aspects of Bunny’. There he is: gauche youth (Alexis) and elder statesman (Sir George, a poet), with ‘his silver hair, wild rose complexion, and blue eyes’.17 Angelica is there too, as Rose, the beautiful young actress who becomes even more beautiful approaching middle-age; although Amaryllis was a model for Jenny, as Jenny moves from childhood through puberty, she is recognisably Angelica at the same stage. Giulietta is based on Giovanna Madonia, ‘small and slim and brown with black hair falling onto her shoulders, an aquiline nose, and black eyes gleaming through beautifully cut narrow eyelids’.18 Bunny also drew upon his relationship with Ann Hopkin, reflecting in scribbled notes of preliminary ideas, ‘The young actress from the Old Vic: Can draw on Ann & DG’.19 Bunny’s travels with Mina (the apartment on the Isle St Louis in Paris, Château Mouton-Rothschild and George Sand’s château) were all brought into the book, as was Bunny’s holiday with Ann in Venice.
It is a deeply personal book, coloured by events from Bunny’s life. Sir George finds it difficult to contemplate returning to the house where his wife had died in the spring of 1940, ‘it was painful to see the place again; it would be unendurable to be continuously reminded of the past’.20 Of course this mirrors Bunny’s feelings over Hilton and Ray, but was he writing that particular passage at the time when in May 1955 he told Angelica, ‘I haven’t felt life so empty & worthless for the last fifteen years’?21 Bunny also deployed his text to settle old scores. When Rose and Sir George are worried about the nature of the relationship between middle-aged Alexis and their adolescent daughter, Rose says to Alexis: ‘By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask what footing you are on with my daughter?’22 Rose and Sir George have morphed into Vanessa and Duncan, 1938. Even Rupert Hart-Davis comes in for a pasting: he is the ‘big man with ugly ears’ who bankrupts Sir George; the latter tells Rose, ‘I thought I knew him quite well, and all the time every word of this friend and business associate was calculated. Every word was inspired by an ulterior motive.’23
Above all, Aspects of Love is a bold exposition on male virility, specifically Bunny’s. As he told Ralph Partridge, ‘When I was thirty I believed the physical relations of people of 40 & upwards must have grown pretty feeble & that at 50 or 60 it was the vanity which led them to pretend they had any physical desires’.24 But in this novella Bunny could inform the reader otherwise, from the female point of view: ‘George is not a satyr because he is sixty-four’, Rose declares, telling Alexis that Sir George ‘makes love perfectly. Even better than you did.’25
While the novel is ostensibly a hedonistic celebration of inter-generational love, a sense of piquant, proleptical inevitability overshadows the narrative. Sir George must acknowledge that most of his life is behind him, but the past was ‘a world only of yesterday which he could scarcely believe had vanished’.26 As time passes and Sir George lives progressively in the past, the generation gap is no longer a triumph of experience over youth: it cannot be breached. Rose sadly acknowledges that she is no longer the flame that ignites, but ‘only the embers on the fire’.27 When Sir George dies, his credo ‘Set down the wine and the dice / and perish the thought of tomorrow’, can only apply to those of a younger generation, left behind.28 Consequently, this most personal of all Bunny’s novels, is profoundly moving in the context of his life, specifically in terms of the age gap between him and Angelica and of his own sense of transience in her life. As the novel’s dedicatee, Angelica is literally as well as metaphorically present in the text. As Paul Levy observed, ‘When one realizes that David Garnett was present at Angelica Bell’s birth, one can appreciate fully the delicacy of the tribute offered so publicly – and courageously’.29 The book was hailed critically as Bunny’s triumphant return to fiction. The Times proclaimed it ‘a pagan hymn written in praise of physical passion and the delights that go with it’.
Both Aspects of Love and the long awaited The Flowers of the Forest were published in the autumn of 1955. They sold well, although as Bunny’s editor, Norah Smallwood, commented about his autobiography, ‘I’m afraid you are right in thinking that in some cases the book is being used as a means of having [a go] at one or two of the Bloomsbury giants’.30 The reviews were generally positive, many commenting on Bunny’s frankness, but some swiped at what they perceived as Bloomsbury’s ‘elitism’. ‘I would not mind being attacked myself’, Bunny told Angelica, ‘but the hatred of Lytton, Maynard, Roger, Vanessa, Duncan, Clive, is really extraordinary. The book seems to have stirred up a wasp’s nest.’31 The review that stung the most was Harold Nicolson’s in the Observer. Nicolson, a long-time acquaintance, slated what he considered Bunny’s inconsistency:
At one moment we feel like we have got to know and like this cuddly young man with his soft eyes and sensitive mouth. At the next moment we are faced by a skilled and handsome labourer who with his tremendous biceps can heave logs or turnips without rest […] and who spends his leisure hours tumbling lassies in the bracken […]. We are never quite sure by the end whether to regard Mr Garnett as a selfless idealist, as a somewhat guiless hedonist […] or as the artist-egoist.32
Nicolson missed the point: Bunny was all these things. If there was one reason why his autobiography succeeded it was in his skilful self-depiction as someone in the process of development, a combination of personae nuanced by age, circumstance and mood. Perhaps Bunny exaggerated when he told Geoffrey Keynes that the reviewers had given the book ‘a pasting on moral grounds’,33 but Bunny laid himself open to criticism in his bluntness about loving many women, and in his jubilant passages celebrating his love for Duncan Grant.
Encapsulating the period of the Great War to the early 1920s, this volume celebrated Bunny’s Bloomsbury friendships. Here Bunny described Duncan as ‘a genius’, ‘the most original man I have ever known’. Most importantly, he stated that Duncan’s friendship w
as ‘a great piece of good luck’, for ‘it came at a time when I might have succeeded in my ambition of becoming a purely conventional person’. As a result of Duncan’s friendship ‘I became and for the rest of my life have remained in what I take to be the true meaning of the word, a libertine: that is a man whose sexual life is free of the restraints imposed by religion and conventional morality’.34
In stating that Duncan saved him from becoming a conventional person, Bunny alluded to the kind of love which remained illegal in Britain until the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. Moreover he employed the term ‘libertine’ as a euphemism for someone whose sexual choices were neither constrained by marriage nor confined to one gender. Bunny was extremely brave to place his homosexuality on the page. He did so at a time when the censor prevailed, when not only authors, but their publishers and printers, could be prosecuted and even imprisoned. It is hardly surprising that Bunny’s friends were nervous about volume two. They, of course, understood what he meant by the term ‘libertine’.
Much of this volume had been rehearsed at the Memoir Club, but in taking these recollections from the inner sanctum of Bloomsbury, and placing them before the public, Bunny laid himself open to the scrutiny of an unfamiliar audience. With one exception there was no immediate precedent for such confessional autobiography, and even his fellow Bloomsberries kept their personal lives close to their chests. Certainly Clive Bell’s, Old Friends: Personal Recollections, published the following year, by-passed the personal in favour of the general. But there was one notable autobiography which preceded Bunny’s, an autobiography ground-breaking in its startlingly honest approach to sexual matters: Stephen Spender’s World Within World, published in 1951, four years before The Flowers of the Forest.35
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