Bloomsbury's Outsider

by Sarah Knights

  Both men believed in expressing ‘truth’ and although Spender’s propensity for ‘truth’ was more politically motivated and altruistic, their ideas on matters of sexuality were not dissimilar. ‘I believe obstinately’, wrote Spender, ‘that, if I am able to write with truth about what has happened to me, this can help others who have lived through the same sort of thing. In this belief I have risked being indiscreet, and I have written occasionally of experiences which seem strange to me myself, and which I have not seen discussed elsewhere.’36 For Spender, writing with ‘truth’ meant he revealed his homosexuality in the same text in which he recalled his courtship and marriage. For Bunny, it meant he labelled himself a ‘libertine’ while exalting Duncan Grant; he described himself as a womaniser, while recounting his courtship and marriage to Ray. In implicitly advocating that sexuality was not fixed, but a continuum, that it was the person who mattered, rather than gender, Bunny and Spender not only challenged established ideas of ‘normal’ sexual behaviour, but also challenged the censor, as Bunny had done so often in the past. Seen together, Spender’s autobiography and Bunny’s volume two established a new kind of life-writing which, in foregrounding sexuality and in its unprecedented degree of honesty, foreshadowed Michael Holroyd’s seminal biography of Lytton Strachey, published a decade later.

  Where censorship was concerned, the 1950s were no less prudish than the 1920s. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, published in France in 1955 was banned in England the following year, despite critical plaudits in the British press. It was not until 1959 that Weidenfeld & Nicolson published the book in Britain, following a landmark trial which relaxed the British obscenity laws, opening the door for the subsequent ‘Lady Chatterley’ trial and eventual publication of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In this context, Spender, Bunny (and their publishers) displayed considerable courage. But seventeen years Spender’s senior, and recently awarded the CBE, Bunny was an elder statesman of British literature. Taking risks in fiction was one thing, but it was another matter to display what might have been considered an unconventional personal life. In accepting the CBE in 1952, Bunny did something his father would have abhorred. But if, by so doing, Bunny appeared to have joined the establishment, it was short-lived. He could not escape his natural inclination towards non-conformity. He might have said he was genetically predisposed that way.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  ‘Constance was at all times I believe singularly free from jealousy of any sort – and I am lucky to have inherited from her a certain natural immunity to this painful & unbearable passion.’1

  Bunny was back in the limelight. He had written a successful novel and the second volume of his autobiography was selling well. The Golden Echo and The Flowers of the Forest were featured on the BBC radio programme Talking of Books, and on the back of his resurgence as a novelist, Chatto & Windus reissued Go She Must!

  Bunny approached the New Year full of good resolutions. He wanted to focus on writing and as a gesture in that direction stopped farming pigs. Even so, he spent the night of 1 January 1956 in the cow shed, waiting for a Jersey to calve. Ann Montagu, Rosemary Hinchingbrooke’s nineteen-year-old daughter, sat up with him, so Bunny named the calf in her honour. Bunny named all his cows after the women in his life. It did not seem to occur to him that there was something rather disconcerting in using his pocket diary to note ‘Rosemary blew up’ and ‘Inseminate Amaryllis’. Quentin Bell’s assertion that Bunny was a ‘prize bull in a herd of cows’ was not far off the mark.2

  Early in 1956 Vanessa wrote to Bunny to tell him that ‘a rather strange female called Mrs Holtby who lives in Cornwall’, an admirer of Virginia Woolf, wanted to know whether he would allow her to take a cast of Tommy’s bust of Virginia.3 They dined together in London, and afterwards Patricia Holtby, a little dazzled by Bunny’s literary eminence, wrote to say that she liked him very much. She was tall and thin with very short fair hair, married to Harold, a doctor, and had two children. Bunny thought her ‘a rather splendid, wild creature’.4 They dined together on her occasional forays to London, but Pat soon deflated any expectation of a love affair, explaining that she was a lesbian.

  When in February Bunny embarked on volume three of his memoirs he was hampered by tiredness and depression. Henrietta described his rages at this time, which ‘could sometimes be quite terrifying. His eyes would bulge and his face would grow brick red and his jowls purple and he would roar at us like a wild beast. But he never laid a finger on us.’5 Nerissa recounted one such outburst to Leonard Woolf, telling him that their kitten, Apollo, ‘does as you say follow one about like a dog, which in this family is a bad thing. For, when Bunny stamps around the house in a bad mood […] Apollo, following him gets under his feet and then — “Miaaowwwwow!” “Oh, get out of my way you blessed animal!”6 Olivier Bell thought that she and her husband Quentin were boring compared to Bunny and Angelica, who ‘were emotional all the time and had such dramatic emotional feelings’. ‘Angelica and Bunny were always having desperate emotional rows; you’d go into a room and find them standing facing each other.’7

  The underlying problem was Angelica’s coldness. Bunny depended on her love and with the bedrock of her love unstable, he found it hard to write or summon up much enthusiasm for anything. Although Ann, Rosemary, Giovanna and Pat intermittently massaged his ego, it was Angelica’s love he craved. But Angelica felt imprisoned by Bunny’s need for her, by domesticity and Hilton Hall. Daring to look outwards she told Leonard: ‘I begin to envisage a time when one may begin to expand a little.’8 She had taken to disappearing mysteriously to London, or more locally from Hilton for the day.

  Bunny’s doldrums were lifted by news that he had been elected an Honorary Fellow of Imperial College and that Aspects of Love had been in the best seller list for six weeks. As a result he could decline any further grant from the Chapelbrook Foundation. ‘I hope now the dog is no longer lame’, he wrote to Mina, ‘you don’t regret enabling him to get over the stile’.9 He was even more delighted when Richard and Jane’s first child, Oliver, was born in March 1956. He adored his grandson, noting the baby’s ‘great capacity for wonder – like Keats when he got to Scotland’.10 Despite these pleasures, Bunny could not come up with any ideas for a new novel, turning instead to that old chestnut Castle Bigod, now optimistically re-named Seek No Further, which he worked on, in a desultory manner, before abandoning it again.

  Shortly after his sixty-fourth birthday in March 1956, Bunny stayed with the Partridges at Ham Spray, delighting Frances who commented that the ‘visit has been a great success: what one wants a meeting with an old friend to be like, with plenty of easy talk and warmth circulating’.11 But at Hilton things were distinctly chilly. Despite a successful midsummer party in which the Garnetts exhibited a united front, Angelica needed to get away. In July Bunny noted in his diary that Angelica was in London ‘on mysterious private affair’.12 She had gone to see an artist friend who had stayed at Hilton for a weekend in June. His name was Claude Rogers, and Angelica had known him from the time when in 1938 she studied art at the Euston Road School, which he co-founded in 1937.

  At forty-seven, Rogers was ten years Angelica’s senior, now a lecturer at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, although he lived in Suffolk part of the week with his wife Elsie and their children. He was short, rotund and bespectacled, with dark curly hair. He and Angelica were lovers, and now it was Bunny’s turn to remain at Hilton while Angelica went up to London every Tuesday or Thursday to be with Claude. Henrietta, then eleven, sensed something amiss, dreading the ‘clank of Angelica’s footsteps’ on the hall’s stone floor, aware her mother was wearing her smart London shoes and would be away ‘making merry’.13 Bunny knew who Angelica was with, for in his pocket diary his notes of her expeditions to London are invariably embellished with the letters ‘CP’, an oddly thin and rather pointless camouflage of ‘CR’.

  On 4 August Bunny noted in his diary, ‘Talk with Angelica, confessed love for CP; said I would help if
I could, felt mixture of pity & tenderness for her’.14 Despite such bravado, the next day at the Hobsons’, Bunny had to turn away in order to obscure the tears welling up in his eyes, when the folk song ‘O Waly Waly’ played on the record player:

  O, love is handsome and love is fine,

  And love’s a jewel while it is new,

  But when it is old, it groweth cold,

  And fades away like the morning dew.

  Bunny’s initial reasonableness soon gave way to feelings towards Rogers of loathing and anger. He worried their friends would find out, that it would be difficult to present a unified front, that the children would be hurt. He was particularly concerned about the possibility of local gossip, for sometimes Rogers met Angelica in Cambridge. As always, Bunny was torn between the need for civilised behaviour and his instinctive jealousy. By and large he behaved honourably, perhaps recalling his promise to Angelica of 1941: ‘you can trust me to behave as you would wish if you fall in love with someone else’.15

  Bunny turned to Pat Holtby for support, explaining he was unhappy though skirting the reason. She chastised him for being evasive, but she was intelligent and insightful and without knowing that Angelica had been unfaithful, could diagnose the fundamental flaw in the Garnetts’ marriage: that Angelica felt resentful. As Pat told Bunny: ‘It didn’t matter when supreme love made it all feasible, but perhaps the bottom fell out of that when you were unfaithful […]. So the resentment gathers.’ Pat wisely advised Bunny that Angelica needed ‘to admire you again – not pity you’. She also warned him: ‘you could make two mistakes – to ask for pity […] or to rush to the ego-massaging embraces of another’. ‘Sixty four’, she added, ‘may be a difficult age, but thirty eight is too’.16

  When, at the end of August, Rogers left for a fortnight in Holland, Angelica was so upset that Bunny thought she would leave him. Instead, she had time to think, and told Bunny that her feelings for Rogers were less certain. Bunny hoped that the Italian holiday he and Angelica planned would strengthen their relationship and diminish Angelica’s feelings for his rival.

  The five-week holiday in the autumn of 1956 was mostly successful, although tensions surfaced. Initially they stayed with Giovanna at her family estate at Bertinoro, between Forli and Cesena in Emilia-Romagna. There they had the bizarre experience of being shot at by an invisible person while walking across fields in the dark, the bullet whispering overhead. It was the hunting season, but this was an odd time of day to hunt. Bunny and Angelica moved on from Bertinoro, driving from place to place and visiting art galleries. They returned via France, where they dropped in on Angelica’s former drama teacher, Michel St Denis and were then dazzled by luxury at Château Mouton, where they stayed with Pauline and Philippe de Rothschild.

  Angelica’s affair spurred Bunny to write a new novel which he called ‘the jealousy one’.17 Entitled A Net for Venus, the book analysed the destructive nature of jealousy. Bunny was trying to work through his own feelings regarding Angelica, but it was a bit close to home. As he told Mina, the subject of his story was ‘the old triangle – husband, wife, lover’.18 With typical candour he gave his draft to Angelica to read, and she responded unfavourably. It was one thing to be celebrated as the heroine of Aspects of Love, another to be flaunted as an adulteress.

  On 13 January 1957 Bunny noted in his diary: ‘Angelica told me painful things in afternoon: Future in doubt.’19 He could not sleep, relying on pills, and felt devastated. To compound matters, his farm manager, Harry, was in hospital. As Bunny told Frances Partridge, ‘After diminishing my farming interest & vowing to leave all the work to Harry […], I have suddenly found myself precipitated back onto the tractor & the muck-heap’.20 He also had the children to look after and dinner to cook, as Angelica had gone to Newcastle to stay with Quentin and Olivier.

  Exhausted by farm work, Bunny’s emotional state continued to spiral downwards. Baling straw, he noted in his diary ‘Baler luckily broke down before I did’.21 On the same page he recorded that his American editor, John McCallum of Harcourt Brace, had rejected A Net for Venus. His manuscript was, meanwhile, lodged at Chatto & Windus, but Bunny became impatient waiting for a verdict. He complained that his editor, Ian Parsons, ‘doesn’t reply, or read what I send him for over a month & I think that I deserve more courteous and efficient treatment. I have been with them for thirty five years […] have taken other authors to them, they have never lost money on any of my books, and I think I am ill-used, and won’t stand it’.22 Bunny posted a testy letter to Parsons, stating he would not trouble him again. This crossed in the post with a letter from Parsons, rejecting the book. For the first time in his writing career Bunny was without a publisher. At a Memoir Club meeting, Julia Strachey noticed that he was completely absorbed in his own thoughts and seemed absolutely withdrawn.

  Bunny had remained in touch with Barbara Ker-Seymer in the twenty or so years since their affair. Now she was living with her lover, the American sculptor Barbara Roett, on Homer Street, Marylebone. The two ‘Bars’ as they were known, had a room to let, and Bunny took it. It was useful for attending Cranium and Memoir Club meetings, and it enabled Bunny to see Ann Hopkin without having to stay with her. Their sexual relationship had fizzled out, but they remained friends.

  Angelica oscillated between chilly detachment and warm demonstrations of affection, leading Bunny to feel alternate extremes of misery and optimism. On the rare occasions when he and Angelica made love Bunny assumed she was being charitable. In July 1957, having dined alone in London and feeling unhappy, Bunny wrote her a desperate letter. The following day, at an exhibition at the Slade, Bunny narrowly avoided Claude Rogers. Back at Hilton, he handed Angelica his letter, which led to a painful row. Their relationship under duress, it was not the best moment to embark on a family holiday with Quentin and Olivier Bell and their young children Julian and Virginia.23

  On arriving at Asolo, in northern Italy, they found Quentin and Olivier already established in the rented house. It was too small to accommodate everyone, so William, Amaryllis and Henrietta would sleep in rooms elsewhere in the town. Although it was perfectly reasonable that Bunny’s older children should make way for the Bells’ infants, Bunny was furious. Quite why he should have been so angry and inflexible is difficult to determine, except perhaps in the context of his current vulnerabilities about Angelica. Quentin thought Bunny’s determined adoption of the role of père-de-famille embraced his family as well as Bunny’s.24 Bunny became progressively grumpy and isolated, his irascibility culminating at the end of a day-trip to Venice. William was driving with Bunny in the passenger seat. At the turning for Asolo, which Olivier and Will recognised, Bunny insisted Will drive straight on, barking ‘straight on’ repeatedly. William drove on and on in the wrong direction, Bunny refusing to acknowledge or apologise for his mistake.25

  Bunny had planned to focus on his new novel during the holiday, but found it impossible to do so. Once again Mina Curtiss came to his aid, inviting Bunny to work on his book at Chapelbrook. With customary diplomacy, she played down her payment for his passage in the guise of giving him space and solitude to write. Arriving on 2 November 1957, Bunny soon fell into a routine where he woke early, bathed, breakfasted, took a walk and then worked all day until dinner. When he climbed Pony Mountain, he could not help thinking about Priscilla Fairchild, with whom he had ascended the hill all those years before.

  In mid-November, Bunny went to Harvard, accompanied by his old friend, the poet Archibald McLeish, now Professor of Rhetoric. Having been asked to give an after-dinner speech on D.H. Lawrence, Bunny came armed with a batch of Lawrence letters inherited from Edward, which he hoped the university library might be willing to purchase. As they did not offer what Bunny considered a fair price, he came away with the manuscripts still under his arm.

  On 28 November Bunny spent Thanksgiving at the Massachusetts home of George Kirstein, Mina’s younger brother, the publisher and owner of the Nation magazine. The next day he went to New York, where he
stayed at the Beekman Tower Hotel on East Forty-nine and First Street. Mina was also in New York, and although her apartment was too small to accommodate Bunny, they dined together every evening. They also dined with Mina’s brother, Lincoln Kirstein, who had recently suffered a nervous breakdown. Apprehensive about how he would find his old friend, Bunny was relieved that Lincoln appeared happy, eager to reminisce about Stephen Tomlin and old times.

  On another evening Bunny collected Mina, ‘stupendous in a huge mink coat, a string of vast pearls & the largest diamond ring ever seen’.26 They dined at the Plaza before attending a performance of Lincoln’s New York City Ballet conducted by Stravinsky in celebration of his seventy-fifth birthday. The kind of high life Bunny enjoyed with Mina in France seemed even more dazzling in New York. Bunny wrote to Angelica, telling her he longed for her, wished she was with him. She replied affectionately, saying she longed to be with Bunny, that he must have faith in his novel, and sending hugs. Writing again to Angelica, Bunny casually mentioned that Shusheila Lall had come to his hotel room on his first morning there, ‘& we sat & talked for an hour or so’.27

  Bunny had first met Shusheila in 1950 when she arrived in London, estranged from her husband. At the time Bunny considered her ‘the most intelligent woman I have met for a long long time & of (Siamese) cat-like delicacy’.28 She was a year older than Angelica, exquisitely beautiful, with long dark hair, pale skin, large expressive eyes and a lovely figure clothed in an elegant sari. She told Bunny, at the time, that she felt a foreigner everywhere, and perhaps this, together with her wavering marriage, caused the deep melancholy which often cast its shadow upon her.29 Bunny had seen Shusheila once or twice since, when she alighted in London. Now she was living in New York, having achieved some sort of reconciliation with her husband Arthur Lall, India’s Ambassador to the United Nations.