In the meantime, on 5 December he flew to New Mexico, where he lunched with Dorothy Brett, Carrington’s friend and a former Slade ‘crop-head’, now resident in Taos, whom he had not seen for forty years. He found her ‘terrifically alive, very happy, & looks almost exactly like a plucked Christmas Turkey.’ The next day he set off in a car with four professors to drive to the D.H. Lawrence Ranch at San Cristobal, where he ‘felt the ghost of the poor unhappy devil behind every bush.’ He saw Lawrence’s famous ‘indecent’ paintings, which he had seen before in 1928, remarking that they were exactly as he remembered them ‘not in the least indecent but very bad’.23
Bunny delivered his final lecture at Austin, Texas on 17 December. He was exhausted, finding the need for continual superficial cordiality a particular strain. When he viewed the exhibition on the Garnett family at the University Library, he felt ‘like the final exhibit’.24 Then he snatched a few days in New York City, where he dined with Mina Curtiss and George Kirstein and attended the ballet with Lincoln. Afterwards he spent a couple of days with Carson McCullers at her Nyack home. Bunny returned to Hilton on Christmas Eve, where he spent the next night sitting up waiting for a cow to calve.
Bunny had struggled with volume three of his memoirs off and on for four years. It was painful to write, bringing back memories of many lost friends. He felt burdened by the past: 24 March 1960 was the twentieth anniversary of Ray’s death, an event he recorded in his diary. He was also worried about his eldest daughter. While Angelica was away again in France, seventeen-year-old Amaryllis confided to Bunny that she hated her school and was unhappy there. He felt powerless to help her as he could not afford to pay for a private education. ‘I wanted to cry’, he told Angelica, ‘because I love her so much.’25 But it did not take long before Bunny and Angelica agreed to let Amaryllis spend her final school year at Cranbourne Chase, an independent girls’ school in Wiltshire, where she already had a number of friends. When Mina offered to pay the fees, Bunny accepted gratefully. Always the most constant friend, Mina explained that this was a way of showing her gratitude for his earlier declining the Chapelbrook Foundation grant at a difficult time for the Foundation. With one daughter at boarding school, Angelica again tried to persuade Bunny to send the twins away, a proposal which was financially unrealistic and, as far as Bunny was concerned, undesirable.
In the autumn, when Bunny and Angelica stayed with the Partridges at Ham Spray, Frances’s ‘heart-cockles warmed to dear Bunny, rosy under his white thatch and overflowing with geniality’. But she noticed that Angelica ‘radiated a feeling of desperation’.26 In November, when Bunny and Angelica attended Leonard Woolf’s eightieth birthday dinner at the Garrick Club, Bunny spent the night at his Homer Street room, while Angelica stayed in Rosemary Hinchingbrooke’s London house.
In December he received an unexpected fillip. Peter Watt telephoned to say that Bunny had been offered 100 guineas (c. £1,600) to comment on the script of a film, Lawrence of Arabia, which would be produced by Sam Spiegel and directed by David Lean. Bunny spent a couple of days reading the script and having pronounced it awful was surprised to discover that Spiegel had given him the job of re-writing. Bunny was not alone in this role (Robert Bolt accepted the same job) but he could not afford to turn down the £2,000 (£30,600) on offer. After lunching with Spiegel in early January 1961, Bunny knew it would be an uphill struggle, noting, tersely: ‘A dog-fight. Man with hide of a rhinoceros.’27 He also recognised the quality of the competition when, at the end of the month, he saw Bolt’s play The Tiger and the Horse. By February Bunny was in despair, telling Frances Partridge, ‘I am up to my neck in script writing – about which I know less than nothing’. ‘When I have finished the job, there is to be a grand session, I understand, when all the scripts will be cut up with scissors & pasted up like an apotheosis of Heads Bodies & Legs.’ ‘My chief objective’, he added, ‘is to get my Head accepted. But I greatly doubt my success.’28
Bunny worked on the script throughout the spring, but knew it wasn’t his forte. As he had commented to Richard in 1943, ‘I never manage to write plays & don’t know how to’.29 He was unsurprised, therefore, when at the end of May, Spiegel turned the script down, pronouncing Bunny’s work authentic, but stating that Bolt had done a wonderful job. Bunny could have had no idea, throughout the weeks of writing, that he was involved in a crisis between Spiegel and Lean. While Lean was in Jordan making preparations for filming, he remained ignorant that any new scriptwriting was being done or that Bunny was involved beyond commenting on the original script. Bolt assumed he was the sole script writer. When he discovered Bunny’s involvement, he was furious. It was at this point that Bunny was dropped.
On the 7 April 1961 Clive Bell telephoned to Hilton to say that Vanessa, ill with bronchitis, was dying. Angelica rushed down to Charleston, but Vanessa died just before she arrived. She was buried, without ceremony, in Firle churchyard with Duncan, Angelica, Quentin and Grace Higgens the only mourners. Vanessa had never really been reconciled to her daughter’s marriage to Bunny, although she loved their four girls. Nevertheless, she had been one of the central figures in Bunny’s life. If Angelica spent subsequent years exploring and analysing her relationship with Vanessa, she could at least reflect that her mother had loved her deeply. In the days following Vanessa’s death, Angelica went backwards and forwards to Charleston, sorting matters relating to her mother’s estate. Between times, she stayed in London at her parents’ pied-à-terre in Percy Street. Bunny looked after the girls and cooked meals, a task he enjoyed though it kept him from writing. Grateful for his support, Angelica wrote: ‘Darling Catt’, ‘how you do step into the breach! It’s wonderful of you.’30
Chapter Thirty-One
‘Bunny loved beauty, and as his daughters were undeniably beautiful, that was enough for him.’1
Bunny had reached a stage in his life where he was revered as much for what he remembered as for what he wrote. He was a repository of information about the writers of his parents’ generation, as well as of those of his own. He also had impeccable literary credentials as the son of both Edward and Constance Garnett. In February 1961, Bunny was interviewed by the BBC for a radio programme, Portrait of Frieda Lawrence, and in the summer Carolyn Heilbrun’s The Garnett Family was published.
Heilbrun was a young American academic who had earlier written a doctoral thesis on the Garnett family, and who went on to forge a distinguished career as a feminist and literary scholar. Her book placed the Garnetts among an ‘intellectual aristocracy’, which Heilbrun considered a ‘peculiarly English phenomenon’ originating at the beginning of the nineteenth century when ‘families of intellectual distinction […] began to intermarry’. She thought Bunny’s second marriage ‘a case in point’.2 With the exception of this second marriage, linking Bunny via Vanessa Bell to Virginia Woolf and Sir Leslie Stephen, the Garnetts remained singularly free from the intermarriage to which Heilbrun referred. Bunny’s inclusion is largely confined to an epilogue, but he was favourably impressed overall, and thought Constance particularly well drawn.
Bunny had been drumming up business for Hamill & Barker who proposed to visit Britain in the summer. Frances Hamill wrote telling him they had high hopes of Mrs Partridge, had received a friendly letter from James Strachey, and wondered whether T.H. White might part with any manuscripts. They had also written to Bunny soon after Vanessa’s death, in what seemed undue haste, enquiring whether they could look at her papers while in England. In the event they purchased manuscripts from James and Marjorie Strachey and books from Pat Holtby. Bunny received 10 per cent of the sale price, amounting to £111.00 (c. £1,698 today). The money was very welcome: he still had outstanding mortgage repayments on The Cearne (now occupied by a tenant), a hangover from the Hart-Davis years.
Now in their late fifties, Frances Hamill and Margery Barker became well known for their acquisition of Bloomsbury papers, beginning in 1957 with the purchase of twenty-five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries from Leonard
Woolf.3 They were absolutely tenacious in pursuit of rare books and manuscripts, a tenacity softened by an elaborately courteous manner, persuasive charm and plenty of money. If Hamill & Barker were major players in the exodus of literary manuscripts from Britain to the US, then Bunny certainly had a supporting role.
That autumn he was working on volume three, reading his letters from Ray, pondering how to write about her death. When he discussed this with Frances Partridge, she noticed tears welling up in his eyes. Bunny was also reminded of those difficult final months by the arrival of a visitor: Herbert Herlitschka telephoned, asking to come to Hilton. Bunny did not refuse, but was relieved when the visit ended.
At Hilton, the balance had shifted. Now it was often Bunny who remained at home in charge of domestic arrangements, while Angelica stayed in London at Percy Street. Frances Partridge had become a frequent guest following Ralph’s death from a heart attack the previous year. Always an astute and close observer, she provides an interesting picture of life at Hilton, conveying an alarming decline in housekeeping, even by regular Garnett standards. She described Hilton as a ‘ramshackle, bohemian, improvised, beautiful house full of beautiful things neglected, tattered and thick with cobwebs. Music in confusion and disarray, rolls of dust under the bed, bathroom like a junk-shop, the basin leaning out of the wall, furniture propped on books, stains, cracks everywhere, no bulbs in the lights, a smeared single coat of paint on the walls of my room, not enough blankets on the bed.’ At the same time she remained impressed by ‘delicious meals, plenty to drink’, and ‘very warm, lovely civilization’.4 As Bunny recorded in his autobiography, ‘Places explain people. They become impregnated with the spirit of those who have lived and been happy in them.’5 It was as though the disharmony between Bunny and Angelica had been absorbed in the fabric of their house.
Amaryllis left her new school prematurely to train as an actress at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Although acting was hardly a stable occupation, Bunny did not discourage her, believing he could not ‘save her from mistakes & can only provide at best a shoulder for her to weep on’.6 Henrietta, on the other hand, had been sent to a coaching establishment which she hated. When she came home in a hysterical state, protesting that she only wanted to be happy, Bunny agreed she could go to Dartington College to study drama and art. Henrietta later considered ‘it rather strange of him not to have bothered about our education. I don’t just mean that he sent us to stiflingly inadequate schools, but that he never evinced any interest whatsoever in our lessons […]. For if we learned anything at all, it was because we had free rein to read anything we liked from his extensive library.’7
Bunny was inordinately proud of his daughters. In January 1962 he wrote to Sylvia Townsend Warner, lovingly describing their individual characteristics: eighteen-year-old Amaryllis was the apple of his eye; ‘the most sensitive, intelligent, lovely, understanding creature’. Henrietta was ‘stunningly good-looking. A whizzer.’ Nerissa was ‘very gentle, liable to be embarrassingly unselfish’. Fanny he described as ‘defiant, greedy, clumsy, honest as it is possible to be – and with a head on her shoulders’.8 For Bunny, the 1960s was his daughters’ decade. Having enjoyed the swinging twenties, thirties and forties, the sixties offered little that Bunny had not experienced. The women in his life had been sexually liberated decades before. Now seventy, he could watch his daughters from the sidelines, appreciating their beauty and giving them freedom to do as they pleased with whom they pleased.
Angelica was spending more and more time in France. She was there in January 1962, in February and again in May. Bunny wrote to her stating he had been ‘going through such emotions about MOBY DICK’.9 It was not the novel by Herman Melville to which he referred, but a houseboat moored in London, at Cheyne Walk. Bunny thought it a snip at £1,200 (£15,432 today), the perfect solution to Amaryllis’s accommodation problems and an ideal London base for himself. It was, however, more like a beached whale than a houseboat, having originally been used in the Dunkirk evacuation and now badly in need of repair.
In a generally buoyant frame of mind, Bunny agreed to go to Alderney at the end of June, to see Tim White, recuperating from heart surgery. Tim’s novel The Once and Future King had been turned into a highly successful musical, Camelot, and as a result he was now both celebrated and wealthy. He had become friendly with the actress Julie Andrews, who starred in the musical, and her then husband, the set-designer Tony Walton. When Bunny met them at Alderney he instantly warmed to them, but as usual he found Tim a strain and was shocked by his emaciated condition.
Later that year, Tim wrote a warm and appreciative letter in which he said that Bunny had been responsible for changing his life. He explained that this occurred late in the 1930s, when he was going through a religious phase. Unaware of Ray’s illness, he had held forth to Bunny on the subject of death and damnation, stating that it was a matter of moral choice whether one ended up in heaven or hell. As he teasingly recalled, ‘Very quietly, you said, ‘I think (pause) the enormous facts of birth and death (pause) are so tremendous (long pause) that all these fairy stories or fables about them are (struggle for the right words) are (long struggle) that they degrade them’. ‘I am now’, Tim announced, ‘an agnostic’.10 He signed the letter, ‘your loving TIM’. It was an affectionate tribute, penned fifteen months before his death from coronary heart disease.
In August, Bunny and Angelica went house-hunting in France, focussing on the Lot. Angelica craved distance from Hilton, but it was as though she imagined, or tried to convince herself, that a house in France would supply the fulfilment missing from her life. After viewing a seemingly endless succession of ruined mills, they finally looked around an old auberge in the tiny but picturesque village of St Martin-de-Vers, about seventeen miles north-east of Cahors. The house comprised a living room-kitchen, dining room, drawing room, two small bedrooms and a large bedroom; outside a small garden had the benefit of a spring. It belonged to an elderly lady who dismissed any questions about sanitation by pointing to ‘une chaise percée’ precariously balanced upon boards over the rubbish heap, which, she informed them, was private and – being in the open air – healthy. Bunny was overcome by the building’s charm and he and Angelica decided to buy it, a purchase concluded three months later. This common purpose brought him and Angelica unexpectedly close. What Bunny enjoyed most was ‘the freedom which for some childish reason I find in buying paté from a charcuterie instead of sausages from Mr Anderson’.11
The Familiar Faces was published by Chatto & Windus in October 1962. It had taken a long while to write and was, Bunny acknowledged, a painful work. The book came at a fertile period for Bloomsbury memoirs. Leonard Woolf had recently published two volumes, Sowing (1960) and Growing (1961), and Gerald Brenan published A Life of One’s Own (1962) which he dedicated to Bunny. Once again Bunny’s book was the subject of major reviews, mostly positive. The Times concluded that Bunny employed ‘all the old skill of pinning a personality to our memory with a single sentence’, and that ‘the very tones of those years we knew rings true’. Several critics mentioned that Bunny’s trilogy (ending in 1940) was already an important reference point for historians of the period. In the journal Critical Quarterly, C.L. Mowat singled out Bunny’s autobiography for praise. Referring to the spate of literary memoirs which ‘draw on a whole set of writers and their friends, and have a value for literary history’, he rated Bunny’s the ‘most delightful and sustained autobiography of this class’.12
The TLS reviewer, however, complained that Bunny’s latest volume was too long and too anecdotal. Raymond Mortimer, in the Sunday Times gave a generally glowing review, although he thought that Bunny was too ‘occupied with his memories, not with the effect he may make upon his readers’.13 Mortimer explained to Bunny that he thought he ‘seemed to assume in your readers knowledge they cannot have about persons you discuss’: a fair point, particularly if the reader had not read the two previous volumes. As a salve, Mortimer praised the ‘s
weetness with which you speak of your friends’, as ‘one of the great charms of the book – which makes me love you better than ever’.14 His main complaint, however, was the omission of an index, which Bunny presumably planned to append to volume four. Other friends wrote similarly appreciative letters. Jamie Hamilton thought it was time they got together to write about their aeroplane. Francis Meynell found the book moving, especially Bunny’s portrait of Vera Meynell. Sylvia Townsend Warner praised the book’s ‘warmth and judiciousness and fortitude’, telling Bunny, ‘I love you more than ever since this book’.15 John Hayward, always generous, told Bunny he had ‘recaptured & fixed for ever in words […] the pleasure & pain of loving people & places & of the emotions they once aroused’.16
There was one discordant voice: Mina Curtiss could not understand why Bunny felt the need to reveal that she and Henrietta Bingham were undergoing psychoanalysis in the 1920s. She felt it was not only an error of judgement, but a betrayal of trust. She told Bunny his transgression would not affect their friendship, adding: ‘in all honesty – and as Proust used to say who wants honesty – I can’t help saying that Familiar Faces seems to me an extremely self-indulgent book’.17 Several others drew Bunny’s attention to errors of fact, assuming that as with volumes one and two, he would publish errata in volume four. Diana Mosley, a new fan, wrote to tell him how much she liked all three volumes, but that ‘Mosleyite fascists’ did not exist in the 1920s.
Nellie remained as important to Bunny as ever. She was not interested in material possessions, chastising Bunny for bringing her gifts, wanting only his company, conversation and affection. ‘It was so utterly lovely seeing you’, she wrote after one visit, ‘You bring a world with you that is different from other worlds’.18 In September 1962, soon after returning from France, Bunny received a letter from Nellie expressing a great longing to see him. ‘I want so much to see you’, she said, ‘I love you and am so happy to think of you’.19 Nellie was ninety, and having been ill the previous year, remained weak. She had been a mainstay in Bunny’s life for so long that it was hard to countenance that she might die. He visited her regularly and was delighted to find her mind undimmed. But this letter of 19 September is the last extant letter from Nellie to Bunny. He did go to see her, and in November was with her just a few days before she died on the 13th. Bunny’s cousin Rayne had gone to sit with her and was in the next room when Nellie died in the night. Bunny dealt with her possessions, and also with the disposal of her body, which she left to a teaching hospital. He felt Nellie’s loss deeply: he had loved her almost as much as his parents, and had known her almost as long as he knew himself.
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