Bloomsbury's Outsider

by Sarah Knights

  On 22 December Henrietta married Burgo Partridge, Frances and Ralph Partridge’s son and Bunny’s nephew by his marriage to Ray. Henrietta was only seventeen but wildly in love. They made all the wedding arrangements themselves and Frances couldn’t help noticing the ‘geniality of Bunny’, who, with Nellie still on his mind, ‘began talking about the necessity of leaving one’s body to the doctors’.20

  Bunny was working on a translation from the French of Victoria Ocampo’s psychological investigation of T.E. Lawrence’s character 338171 T.E.21 This was more to Bunny’s taste than the film Lawrence of Arabia, which he took Amaryllis to see in January 1963. Although he appreciated the ‘marvellous scenes of deserts & camels in colour’, he considered that Peter O’Toole’s ‘impersonation of Lawrence was grotesque & the whole thing really an abomination’.22 Bunny wrote immediately to Sam Spiegel expressing his gratitude to Spiegel, for not using his script. ‘I am indeed fortunate’, he added, ‘for I have come out of the preposterous affair with clean, though not empty hands’.23

  The film had been premiered a month previously, at which time A.W. Lawrence charted its inaccuracies in a letter in The Times. He also published an article entitled ‘The Fiction and the Fact’ in the Observer, concluding: “I need only say that I should not have recognised my brother”.24 Spiegel published a rejoinder in The New York Times in which he skilfully shifted the spotlight from questions of historical accuracy to a personal attack on A.W. Lawrence, whom, he suggested, neither wanted family skeletons rattled nor understood T.E.L.’s narcissistic nature. Spiegel concluded by stating that Lawrence’s supporters had profited from selling the film rights, quoting the ‘clean, but not empty hands’ comment of one biographer.25 A few months before the film’s release, Bunny had taken part in a BBC television documentary entitled T.E. Lawrence 1888–1935. As the documentary’s producer Malcolm Brown explained, in endeavouring to portray a real person, they deliberately attempted to produce a counterpoint to the David Lean film.26

  For some time, Bunny’s accountant had been pressing him to get rid of the farm at Hilton. It was a drain on resources and Bunny was only too aware that it had placed a strain on his marriage and kept him from writing. It was a hard decision, but in April 1963, while Angelica was in France, Bunny sold his Jersey herd. With Amaryllis pursuing an acting career, Henrietta married and Nerissa at art school in Leeds, only Fanny remained to be settled. But if Bunny hoped that an almost empty nest and no farm would draw Angelica closer or make her feel less tied, he was wrong. Now she usually spent midweek in London where, worried about Duncan, she devoted as much time as she could to him. But there was something to look forward to: Henrietta was expecting a baby, and Bunny rejoiced in the way this would again result in a Marshall-Garnett child. He informed Mina that the baby ‘will be curiously related to my other grandsons as his mother will be their aunt and his father their first cousin once-removed’.27 The baby would be Oliver’s and Ned’s half-cousin on the Garnett side and second cousin on the Marshall.

  In July, two young Americans, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, joined Bunny for lunch at Hilton. An historian, Stansky was a graduate of King’s College, Cambridge and of Harvard and went on to a distinguished academic career. Abrahams was a poet and novelist, and would become a highly respected literary editor. They were jointly writing a biography of Julian Bell and the poet John Cornford, both of whom lost their lives in the Spanish Civil War.28 That same month Bunny had tea at the Reform Club with Leon Edel, the great Henry James scholar and biographer. But there was one other biographer, whom Bunny first met that summer of 1963, who would change the face of literary biography and in the process rattle the nerves of the elderly gentlemen of Bloomsbury. The biographer was Michael Holroyd, then embarking on his life of Lytton Strachey.

  Bunny’s relationship with Holroyd began much as it would continue. The problem with Bunny was that he was ‘on the whole in favour of truth in biography – but not at the expense of the happiness of the living & their security’.29 Like other Bloomsberries, Bunny was caught between a temperamental desire for openness and an instinctive inclination towards caution, as his reply to Holroyd’s request for an interview reveals:

  (1) ‘Naturally I will give you any help I can.’

  (2) ‘But – as I have experiences of biographers who either impose their own preconceived ideas on their subjects, or are by nature temperamentally incapable of ever understanding what these subjects were like, I won’t make promises.’

  (3) ‘Such reservations are really foolish. We had better meet […] and I will try to tell you something about the Lytton I knew.’30

  Having met Holroyd at the Reform Club over tea and buttered toast, Bunny was sufficiently impressed to invite him to read Lytton’s letters at Hilton. Indeed he was so amiably disposed that he suggested Holroyd bring his bathing drawers. On 19 June Holroyd spent the day at Hilton and as a result felt he and Bunny had ‘got on very well’.31 Bunny thought Holroyd ‘a charming young man’.32

  Bunny and Angelica spent August at St Martin-de-Vers. It was an odd time to go away, as Henrietta’s baby was overdue. Henrietta was only eighteen, and it might be supposed that it would be comforting to have her parents close by. Frances Partridge, felt ‘considerable agitation’ at ‘this seeming desertion’.33 On 9 August Bunny and Angelica received a telegram announcing the birth of their grand-daughter, Sophie Vanessa. She had been born by caesarean section two days after Henrietta was rushed into hospital with suspected toxaemia. Bunny felt such anxiety for Henrietta that going for a walk to garner his thoughts, he lost his way. In London, Frances was angry with Bunny and Angelica, writing, tersely, ‘I don’t know how much you really want to hear about this agonising week?’ although she reassured them that mother and baby were fine.34 Burgo told Bunny that Henrietta (‘simply marvellous, patient & brave’) was ‘tired but very happy’.35

  Despite this joyful news and all the hopes pinned on L’Ancienne Auberge, Bunny and Angelica were not getting along. Bunny felt separation inevitable. But on 7 September their problems had to be put aside: they received another telegram, this time stating that Burgo had died. He had suffered an aortic aneurism while Henrietta was in the bath and baby Sophie asleep in her cot. Bunny immediately returned to England to collect his daughter and grand-daughter and bring them to France. Lunching with Frances Partridge, he was unable to express his sorrow for her loss, focussing instead on practical matters, but he wrote afterwards telling Frances he felt ‘such love’ for her, and wished they could have talked more.36

  Henrietta and Sophie spent only nine days in France before Angelica put them on a plane for England. Frances could not understand Bunny’s apparent lack of sympathy, recording in her diary, ‘I feel somehow in spite of all that is endearing in Bunny a certain ruthless selfishness and lack of sensitivity. He simply can’t begin to imagine the nature of the shock Henrietta experienced.’37 Of course Frances also referred to her own pain. But she had responded to Burgo’s death with apparent forbearance, insisting on ‘no funeral, no wake, and no grave’.38 In the circumstances, perhaps Bunny thought it inappropriate to show emotion, or assumed that Frances, who went on holiday to Italy less than a fortnight after Burgo’s death, was stronger than she appeared. But a year later, reading the entries for September 1963 in his ‘Log Book of the Car’, Bunny was ‘shocked to find what we left out: Burgo’s death’.39 Perhaps Bunny was insensitive; perhaps he had simply been intent on removing Henrietta and Sophie from the immediacy of the situation. Perhaps, as the Log Book was kept by both Bunny and Angelica, this sad event fell unrecorded, between them.

  Bunny and Angelica returned to England in October. Their relationship under considerable strain, Bunny half-heartedly considered moving to New York. But it was Angelica who made a move: in December she decided to take a studio in London. Bunny wrote to tell Nerissa, lodging with Quentin and Olivier in Leeds, that it was ‘an enormous & very grand studio’, adding ‘I don’t expect that we shall see much of her in the coming
year’.40 A few days later Fanny was accepted as a pupil at Dartington College. With the exception of William, it appeared Bunny would be left at Hilton, quite alone.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  ‘I have determined not to feel bitter and only to do so when I lie awake in the early hours.’1

  Bunny’s novel, Two by Two, was published in the autumn of 1963.2 Its sub-title, ‘A Story of Survival’, gives the game away: ostensibly about Noah’s Ark and the Flood, it was actually an evolutionary reinterpretation of the Old Testament story, with a bit of Big Bang Theory for good measure. Reviewers were quick to look for a political message, and some found one in the shape of Noah, whom Bunny portrayed as a drunken despot. David Pryce-Jones, in the Sunday Times, congratulated Bunny on his ‘courageous publication’. If he was courageous, it was in disparaging the Biblical version of events.

  Approaching the subject from a rational and scientific perspective, Bunny stated in the Preface: ‘In this scientific age the story of the Deluge raises many scientific questions. How did the plants fare? What did the herbivorous animals eat until the grass grew again? How did the carnivores manage to wait until their natural prey had obeyed the Divine command to be fruitful and multiply?’3 Bunny’s Ark is surrounded by floating corpses, bloated with gas from the effects of decomposition.

  The book is dedicated to Fanny and Nerissa, who are present in the text in the shape of Fan and Niss, twins who stow themselves away in the Ark disguised as monkeys. Fan maintains that the deluge should not automatically be attributed to God: ‘just because we are ignorant and can’t be bothered to think it out’.4 Instead, she concludes ‘It was because of some big universal change’.5 Fanny Garnett found her presence in her father’s fiction disconcerting because he used ‘anecdotes of things that had happened or things that he valued about us’, and, as a fabulist, embroidered them. She thought it was all part of his disbelief in the afterlife: ‘the only way he could actually continue in any way was either through his children or through his writing’.6

  The critics liked the novel, although now Bunny was often reviewed in a job-lot with other novelists, rather than as the star turn. Simon Raven, in the Observer, was amused by Bunny’s ‘pleasant little joke’;7 The Times commented, tautologically, on the ‘two enchanting girl twins’, praising Bunny’s ‘mixture of rationalism and lyricism’.8 In the Guardian, Anne Duchene described the novel as ‘a wonderfully robust little fantasy in marvellously unstrained prose […]. Not the very best Garnett; but a great refreshment.’9

  Feeling lonely, Bunny tried to persuade Frances Partridge to accompany him to Spain. Since Ralph’s death, she and Bunny had grown closer, partly an outcome of their mutual concerns for Henrietta and Sophie. Frances declined, but Bunny kept to his plan to travel to Malaga to visit Gerald and Gamel Brenan. It was the journey, rather than the arrival, that mattered. He hoped to gain solace from a meandering drive through France, to find happiness in a landscape he loved. Before leaving, he wrote to Angelica, in January 1964, telling her it was not her fault ‘that your feelings for me have come to an end’, but that it was his ‘misfortune that they should have come to an end now’.10

  Bunny planned to spend six weeks away, a fortnight with the Brenans sandwiched between driving through France and touring Spain. But he found the French countryside almost unbearable to countenance, the memories of earlier tours crowding upon him. He returned to Génainville, where he had stayed with Ray and the boys in 1931 and meandered along the same back roads he had travelled with Duncan in 1927. It was as if too many avenues of memory converged: Ray; Duncan; Angelica. ‘Sometimes’, he wrote to Angelica, ‘the country is so beautiful in its melancholy contours & spinneys & little streams that I feel I could be happy looking at nothing but nature all my life. But if so why this letter? Why try to communicate?’11 Bunny wrote to Angelica almost every day. He hated being lonely and instinctively turned to her, his letters full of love, sadness and remorse. ‘The thing is’, he said, ‘however much I try to avoid it, I love you & shall find it impossible to live wholly without you’.12

  Angelica was businesslike in her replies, abandoning their mutual nickname, ‘Catt’, addressing him as ‘Bunny’, and signing off ‘Angelica’. Having shed some of the ties which bound, at Charleston Angelica still felt engulfed by an ‘awful recognition of the past’ in which she could ‘no longer feel my own identity; my eyes get full of the colours & patterns I see there, which I long to dissociate myself from – the result is […] absolute misery’.13 It was not only family life at Hilton which oppressed Angelica. Her mother, her childhood, her memories were all part of the mix.

  At Casa Brenan, Bunny enjoyed reminiscing with Gerald, but Gerald’s affability soon waned and Bunny was glad to leave. Loneliness engulfed him. Even the possibility of meeting Henrietta in Madrid was too much: he couldn’t countenance ‘another week on a lonely pilgrimage in this part of Spain’. ‘To tell the truth’, Bunny wrote to Angelica, ‘I am still in despair about my life. I find it too boring to live alone. And pointless to live without intimacy & love.’14

  During Bunny’s absence Angelica lived at her Fulham Road studio, venturing to Hilton for an occasional weekend. With William the sole occupant, Hilton Hall was cold, untidy, empty and sad. It must have been difficult for him, living alone in a house replete with memories, a palimpsest of family life, first with Ray and Richard, later with Angelica and his sisters. Believing ‘the sooner we left it’, ‘all the better’, Angelica tried to raise the subject with Will. ‘I simply lacked courage however to talk about the future or his ideas about life’, she told Bunny. ‘I think one must wait for the right moment or he will simply shut up like an oyster.’15 While Angelica endeavoured to negotiate a diminution of family life, to map an independent existence, Bunny continued to hope that some compromise could be reached. ‘Can’t we manage to have a bit of everything?’ he asked. ‘Some months at Hilton, some in France.’16 ‘The trouble is’, Angelica replied, ‘I am happy here – I don’t want to start a full family life again. I suppose it’s as selfish as hell – but I’ve had my whack of it.’17 For seventeen-year-old Fanny, away at college, Angelica’s move to London came as a surprise and a shock; it was settled during her absence, and she returned to a fait accompli.

  Frances Partridge was saddened by the sudden recognition that Bunny and Angelica were ‘two quite disconnected people’. Visiting Hilton, at the end of May, she observed Angelica’s ‘grey eyes looking at him very coolly now’, concluding, ‘I would be frightened if I were him’.18 She noticed Bunny’s ‘slightly bewildered loneliness because of Angelica’s withdrawal, and his kindness and sweetness to his children’. ‘Angelica hates this house’, she concluded. ‘No love for poor old Hilton from her now.’19 Suddenly comprehending the situation, Jane Garnett wept with shock.

  Bunny turned to Rosemary Hinchingbrooke for comfort, believing, perhaps, that she might furnish the intimacy he craved, as she had left her husband (reverting to her maiden name, ‘Peto’). As far as she was concerned, it was one thing to be intimate with Bunny and Angelica as individuals when they were a couple, but the dynamic had changed. She urged him to ‘find someone who will be glad to give you everything you want & need’.20 Bunny wasn’t sure anyone would want a man of seventy-two. Anyway, all he wanted was Angelica.

  He recognised that Angelica had been torn for a long time, between family on one side and freedom on the other. ‘Perhaps’, he conceded, ‘any attempt to reconcile them is a mistake.’21 Therein lay the rub. Angelica acknowledged she found it ‘difficult to decide between two opposite extremes’.22 Caught between them, she felt trapped. Nevertheless, Bunny hoped that a planned holiday at L’Ancienne Auberge might bind them again, but with William and Fanny in tow and various guests added to the mix, the holiday was hardly conducive. The atmosphere was not improved by the arrival of a telegram bringing bad news about Clive Bell’s health, nor a subsequent letter announcing his death on 18 September. Neither Bunny nor Angelica returned for the funeral.
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  After alighting briefly in England on 23 October Bunny flew to the United States, for a lecture tour of the Universities of Southern Illinois, Davis, California and Austin, Texas. He would also participate in a D.H. Lawrence symposium at Taos. He hoped to spend Christmas in Mexico and planned to stay in the US until January. Arriving in New York he dined with Shusheila Lall, spent a day with George Kirstein and went to see Carson McCullers at Nyack. At Carbondale, Southern Illinois, Bunny’s itinerary was punishing, classes starting at eight in the morning and continuing until 9 o’clock at night. His T.E. Lawrence lecture was well attended, but Bunny found it irritating that the audience was interested in Lawrence because they had seen the film. He also found it difficult to gauge his audience: ‘One class burst into rounds of applause when I finished. Others sometimes looked baffled.’23

  Angelica was disappointed to find her legacy from Clive Bell tied up in trust, so she would not be able to spend capital on a new studio. She found her rented studio too cramped to accommodate the children: ‘If it wasn’t that we all have to live in one room’, she complained, ‘I should love having them, but as it is I cannot help finding it rather bitter that they have so far taken up about 3 months of this year here when I had hoped to prove to myself that I could work’.24 She was not, however, entirely open with Bunny, as she was, in fact, in the throes of house-hunting, and had gone as far as to commission a surveyor’s report on a property in Islington.