Bloomsbury's Outsider

by Sarah Knights

  At lunch one day in New York, Shusheila told Bunny she had been propositioned by a truck driver. Bunny assumed she shared this confidence to encourage him to make a similar proposition. He reasoned that ‘If I tell a woman of a love affair I have enjoyed it is usually because I want her to realise that love affairs are possible with me’.30 And so, three days later, Bunny took Shusheila back to his room where they made love. As he recorded in his journal, a journal created specifically to document the affair, ‘I was so excited by the fact of her taking me as a lover – at the age of 65 – that all my love making was shot through with astonishment’.31 The following day when Mina threw a champagne cocktail party for Bunny, he barely spoke to Shusheila, but ‘all the time the thought of her being my lover and a sense of insane triumph and happiness possessed me. Of the 3½ million women in New York I was the favoured lover of the most lovely.’

  Lunching with Shusheila the next day at his hotel, Bunny heard someone speak his name. It was Priscilla Fairchild, visiting New York and staying in the same hotel. Bunny hadn’t seen her for twenty-five years. She was slender, grey-haired, still handsome and overjoyed to see him. Of course it did his ego a power of good to have his old lover meet the current model, and vice versa. One evening Priscilla went to Bunny’s hotel room where they sat and talked for some time. When Bunny embraced her she smiled and disengaged herself. He thought it just as well, but a year later, when he learned she had died from a heart attack, he was pleased that fortune had thrown them together one last time.

  It was presumably Shusheila who encouraged her husband to throw an ambassadorial dinner in Bunny’s honour. Arthur Lall was as handsome as his wife was beautiful and he impressed Bunny with his way ‘of taking his own importance light heartedly for granted’.32 It was a surreal occasion. Despite the grandiosity of the surroundings and formal attire, dinner turned out to be a buffet which the guests ate on their laps. Bunny became involved in a prickly conversation with Krishna Menon, leader of the Indian Delegation to the UN, who was not as impressed by Bunny’s stories of Savarkar as Bunny imagined he would be. Moreover Bunny was pursued all evening by a woman who insisted his books had inspired her to such an extent that she wished to coalesce with him. But the highpoint of the event was Bunny’s meeting with Carson McCullers, an author he particularly admired and had asked to meet. She looked sickly and crumpled with pain. Bunny’s heart went out to her, and as her hands shook badly, he cut up her food. They established an instant rapport. She wore a green and blue silk kimono, and as they talked Bunny noticed a cockroach dart out of the garment’s folds and run across her lap.

  Bunny returned from the euphoria of New York to the problems he had left behind in England. Angelica either rejected his advances or accommodated them with evident reluctance. ‘What is the point of being tied to a woman who doesn’t love me or want me physically’, Bunny moaned.33 Moreover, Bunny realised he had shot himself in the foot in leaving Chatto. After such a long association, he felt ‘naked & forlorn’.34 Leonard Woolf offered to arbitrate with Ian Parsons, but Bunny perceived this as nepotism, reasoning that even if Leonard succeeded on this occasion, the problem would only arise again.

  Bunny continued to be irritated by the invisible presence of Claude Rogers, who in June 1958 sent Angelica a bouquet of roses, presumably commemorating their particular anniversary. What rankled most was that they were addressed to ‘Miss’ Angelica Garnett, as if she were Bunny’s daughter. When to his horror, one evening at the Cranium, Bunny found himself sitting next to Rogers, he spoke to him ‘just enough to show him I did not want to see him again or to be noticeably cold’.35 Earlier that day, at the Reform Club, Rupert Hart-Davis had advanced towards Bunny, but seeing his expression of horror, had swerved away.

  Bunny was relieved when his agent, Peter Watt, informed him that Longmans would publish both A Net for Venus and his new novel, A Shot in the Dark. Then the Chicago book dealers, Hamill & Barker, wrote to say that they had found a possible purchaser for his Lawrence letters. Shusheila had taken a job in Geneva and planned to spend a couple of days in England en route. Would Bunny meet her from the ship at Plymouth? Things seemed to be looking up. But Bunny found it exhausting driving all the way to Plymouth for what amounted to a single night together. When Shusheila announced she would be staying with friends in Oxfordshire, leaving Bunny to lodge in a hotel, he suspected her old English lover was on the scene. Bunny had to face the hard fact that Shusheila seemed less ardent than she had been in New York. Perhaps she wouldn’t, after all, occupy the gap which Angelica had vacated.

  Chapter Thirty

  ‘To write happily, a writer must love not only the subject but the audience whom he is addressing.’1

  A Shot in the Dark was published in the autumn of 1958. In America it would be published by Little, Brown, having, according to Bunny, been turned down by Harcourt Brace because of references to ‘sapphism’. The story revolves around one of Bunny’s eternal triangles. Robert Harcourt (a dig at the rejecting publisher?) goes to Italy to escape an unhappy love affair with Caroline Stephenson, who is subject to ‘devastating passions for her own sex’.2 There he falls in love with Gemma, the mayor’s daughter, who had once been infatuated with Caroline. Caroline arrives in Italy and takes up with Gemma leaving Robert to conquer his jealousy, although he gets Gemma in the end.

  While there are similarities between Caroline and Angelica, Gemma is modelled on Giovanna, with her ‘thick black eyebrows arched over her large eyes’ and ‘powerful aquiline nose between high cheekbones’. ‘She was not tall, but very slim and high-breasted, with a ridiculously small waist.’3 Robert, ‘strong as a bull’ and almost old enough to be Gemma’s father naturally resembles Bunny. The book is dedicated to Rosemary Hinchingbrooke.

  Part romance, part thriller, the title was inspired by the shot which whispered over Bunny’s head while he took a nocturnal walk in Bertinoro. Thematically, the novel explores the conflicts between the new order and the old: tradition versus progress; religion versus paganism; state versus church – themes which allowed Bunny to vent his distaste for organised religion. Robert perceives that the town’s Christianity is founded upon an earlier pagan cult of Diana. The cathedral’s Madonna altarpiece is a palimpsest, a veiled representation of Diana the huntress, worshipped by the town’s womenfolk from time immemorial. As Robert reflects, ‘From a rationalist standpoint, there was nothing to choose between a belief in natural magic, and a belief in holy relics and the miracles of the Roman Catholic Church’.4

  The reviews were not particularly enthusiastic. There was a stinker in the TLS, and the New Statesman saw little point in the book. John Davenport (an Observer critic and occasional dinner guest at Hilton) in a comment elegantly poised between criticism and praise, stated that the virtuosity of Bunny’s ‘performance would probably shock his early admirers, who enjoyed the restraint of his oblique moralities’.5

  It was a good point. Henceforward and through the 1960s, Bunny’s fiction changed. Partly he was interested in expanding his genres. As he commented, ‘I have never wished to repeat myself which is perhaps why, though my reviews are almost always favourable, I am not a “bestselling author” ’.6 He was also responding to the fact that the restraints of censorship, which had circumscribed his work for decades, were now loosening and he could write more openly about sex. In his eagerness to embrace a more liberal age and to write more explicitly, he failed to realise that he might come across as slightly seedy to a younger generation of readers. Hitherto, one of Bunny’s great strengths was that he found elegant ways to express what could not be stated too boldly. Now, though he still employed verbal economy and textual brevity, Bunny had moved some distance from the restraint of his earlier novels. His messages were no longer oblique but written in Capital Letters.

  Bunny was also overly preoccupied with unravelling his personal life in the pages of his books. He had turned from supple and subtle plotting to convoluted themes of jealousy, love triangles and ulterior motives. Moreo
ver, his adoption of what he supposed to be the current vernacular language of youth made him sound like a relic. If he wanted to appeal to younger readers he would need to revise the blurb on the fly leaf of A Shot in the Dark, which stated that he was born in 1892 and ‘is a farmer as well as an author and includes shooting and fishing among his recreations’. Had Bunny wanted to come across as an old duffer, he could not have expressed it better.

  Angelica was bored. She suggested moving to France or Italy and putting the girls in boarding school. Bunny would not entertain such a proposal. He was proud of his daughters’ beauty and high spirits and could not bear to think of them corralled. The children were often described as ‘Amazons’, an appendage particularly applicable to the twins, who shot and fished and fought as well as any boys. Bunny could not understand why Angelica was so unhappy. She ‘has 4 lovely children’, he told his diary, ‘a house she loves, no money worries – & is quite miserable’.7 In October, when he went to Geneva for a week to visit Shusheila, she was full of her own preoccupations, talking insensitively of her mysterious English lover. On leaving, Bunny asked himself: ‘Goodbye to Shusheila? Forever?’8

  On 11 March 1959, two days after Bunny’s sixty-seventh birthday, Jane Garnett gave birth to a second son, Edward Alexander. ‘I feel rather excited’, Bunny noted ‘at having two grandsons.’9 That day, he had lunch with Sylvia Townsend Warner. It was the first time they had seen one another for nearly thirty years. There had been a break in their correspondence between 1932 and 1955, which both Richard Garnett and William Maxwell (the editor of Sylvia’s Letters) believe had something to do with her lover, the poet Valentine Ackland. Sylvia found Bunny hardly changed, though a little deaf. When they talked about Charles Prentice, the years slipped away.

  In Bunny’s pocket diary references to letters from ‘CP’ and observations that Angelica returned from London variously ‘full of life & power’, ‘intensely preoccupied with her own affairs’ and ‘jubilant’, suggest that her affair with Claude Rogers had been revived sometime in 1958.10 The following spring there was a crisis. After her return from London one evening, Bunny slept in the spare room, but in the early hours he confronted Angelica, stating that he could not continue without warmth or tenderness. A few days later when Angelica took the girls to Butts Intake, Bunny wrote explaining that he could not ‘live in enemy territory in the arctic circle’.11 Angelica replied:

  When I seem coldest I am often only clinging to a rock […] to prevent myself going down […]. For the first time I’ve really understood (late though it may seem at the age of 40) that to love well one must be free. But do please understand that it’s not exactly from you that I am struggling to free myself – it may seem so at times but I think that its just the first time in my life that I’ve ever felt truly free – it’s a kind of growing up at last simply. Where it concerns our relationship I simply ask you to be patient with me […] but if you can for a time ask nothing and leave me alone I shall perhaps feel free to love you much more in every way than I have done. You are precious to me and I don’t want to hurt you – I’m ashamed of the way I have done so in the past.12

  Bunny replied, bitterly: ‘Time’s winged chariot hurrying near. By the time you have decided that you love me & want to hold me in your arms I shall be ashes.’13

  A Net for Venus was finally published in June 1959. It is a story about Venetia, a beautiful woman in her late thirties, who has a love affair with a younger man (improbably named Carlo Marx) while married to Toby, an attractive older man and war-hero. Bunny must have cheered when he read the book’s review in the TLS, which completely understood what he was trying to achieve: ‘He shows us […] a jealous husband of impeccable dignity and virtue condoning his wife’s infidelity and thereby regaining her love.’14 Bunny had written a wish-fulfilment novel.

  It is not surprising Angelica hated it. Some passages are far too close for comfort: ‘Must she [Venetia/Angelica] always belong to someone who expected love, as she had belonged during the first nineteen years of her life to her mother [Vanessa]? Then it had been out of the maternal frying-pan into the fire of Toby’s [Bunny’s] love.’15 Bunny reproduced aspects of Angelica’s affair with Claude Rogers, having Venetia arrive home covered with bits of grass, just as Angelica had on one occasion after a tryst. ‘For many years Toby [Bunny] had concealed nothing from Venetia [Angelica]: now it came to him as a shock to realize that he must conceal almost everything. He must try to hide his jealousy, his loathing for Carlo [Rogers], the murderous feeling in his heart, and the pity he felt for her because of her choice of such an unworthy lover.’16 And so on.

  The reviews were more positive than for A Shot in the Dark, although several reviewers upbraided Bunny for sloppiness and inconsistency and the Listener was not far off the mark in concluding that ‘it leaves one with a sense of disappointment, and at moments it even gives one a curious feeling of embarrassment’.17 Essentially, A Net for Venus is a vengeful book, and if Bunny thought that by writing it he would emerge triumphant from his jealousy over Claude Rogers, he was wrong. On 24 June Bunny wrote in his diary: ‘Will there be roses [for Angelica] from CP, OBE?’ The answer, unfortunately, was ‘YES’.18 It was a thorny annual event.

  In mid-August the Chicago book dealers Frances Hamill and Margery Barker came to Hilton. Bunny fed them handsomely and arranged with them the sale of a large quantity of material on a commission basis. He was looking after the twins as Angelica and Amaryllis were with Giovanna in Venice and Henrietta, like Amaryllis before, was billeted in France. Bunny enjoyed being alone with the twins, noticing that Fanny, with her dancing eyes and impudent smile, resembled her uncle, Julian Bell. They were to have accompanied William to Ridley Stokoe, but Bunny stayed behind with Nerissa who had stabbed herself in the leg with a hayfork while leaping from an oat stack. Bunny relished physical labour on the farm, ‘the pleasure’, as he wrote to Angelica, provocatively, ‘of feeling one’s belly taut and muscular’. She replied: ‘Giovanna is divine; very loving & affectionate.’19

  In October Bunny received an invitation to participate in a symposium on D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce at the University of Southern Illinois, where he would also deliver a series of lectures on English Literature and art. As the University of Texas was mounting a small exhibition on the Garnett family, Bunny arranged to lecture there as well. This was a time when American Anglophilia was at its height and American universities and libraries were acquiring large quantities of modern English literary archives. Young American academics, establishing their careers by researching twentieth-century English literature, were seeking first-hand testimony. Many of the writers whom Bunny had known – D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf – were the objects of this focus. As both a successful British writer and the repository of first-hand knowledge, Bunny was an attractive proposition in American academe. He had not so much danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales, but he had performed a Mordkin dance before D.H. Lawrence.

  Bunny arrived in New York on 5 November 1959 and flew to Carbondale, Illinois, where he was met by the Lawrence scholar Harry T. Moore and the British diplomat and writer Sir Richard Rees. The following day he attended a cocktail party hosted by Moore, where one of the guests announced she had never read any of Bunny’s books ‘ “but I like Mr Garnett. I like his face. I like that tie. I feel crazy about him.” ’20 Bunny was surprised to be left mainly to his own devices, installed in an apartment in a new block surrounded by car parks. He found the tiny local supermarket entirely inadequate and that he could only purchase sliced bread.

  Bunny was resourceful and an excellent cook but he felt like a fish out of water. Southern Illinois was very different from New York, and Southern Illinois mores far removed from the worlds of Mina Curtiss and Lincoln Kirstein. Bunny was shocked by the prevailing racism, telling Angelica that white girls couldn’t share rooms with black girls and that at nearby Carterville, black people were disbarred from living in t
he town. Taking the bull by the horns, Bunny gave an unscheduled lecture on Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey, in which a white woman and black man have a love affair and resulting child. He found himself shaking throughout.

  Bunny lectured to enthusiastic audiences on ‘Virginia Woolf & Bloomsbury’, Forster, Galsworthy and H.G. Wells, Moll Cutpurse, the Omega Workshop and the two Post-Impressionist exhibitions. On 16 November he delivered the first symposium paper to an audience of over one thousand people, to wild applause. Afterwards Lionel Trilling made ‘a most dramatic & subtle speech’, but Bunny was bored by long-winded discussions on Christian symbolism and ‘Freudian poppycock of all sorts’. He was enormously relieved to have pulled it off and hoped word would circulate in US universities that he was ‘good value & eager to meet students’.21 Bunny found lecturing invigorating, but as the days passed and his lectures fell in the evenings, he became exhausted, especially given the amount of preparation involved.

  Bunny spent the day after Thanksgiving in Chicago with Frances Hamill and Marjorie Barker, who were ‘full of astoundingly good or hopeful news’ which he anticipated would produce a ‘nest egg’.22 This hatched into an offer, from the University of Texas, of $17,500 for some of his manuscripts. Moreover, Hamill & Barker had a proposition for Bunny: would he be prepared to act as a broker or intermediary for the sale of British literary manuscripts in the US? They proposed paying Bunny 10 per cent of the purchase price for an outright purchase or 6 per cent of the sale price for material on consignment. Bunny was being asked to tout for business among his friends. He received this business offer just before Christmas and must have felt all his Christmases had come at once.