Bloomsbury's Outsider

by Sarah Knights

  It was a difficult matter to confront, for it undermined Bloomsbury’s belief in openness, although this openness was normally directed internally rather than towards a wider world. Bunny allowed the fictional St Clair to ventriloquise his concerns and those of much of Bloomsbury, about having their private lives revealed:

  I have these old fashioned reticences. What I would like to tell my friends – for I conceal nothing – I would frankly dislike to see in print. In spite of all the enlightenment which has burst on us in these latter years, the old fashioned prejudices exist, I do not share them. But perhaps I am still a little afraid of them.13

  Bunny threw himself into the ‘Holroyd Question’, firing off anxious letters to James Strachey and Duncan Grant. James admitted, grudgingly, that he found the biography ‘quite entertaining, and that in spite of the author’s efforts, Lytton’s character does […] begin to come through. And it can’t be doubted that the young man has taken quite an immense amount of trouble.’14 Duncan wrote to Holroyd, stating that he could not ‘help feeling very much averse to having my most private feelings of so long ago openly described’, echoing Bunny’s view that ‘the feelings of the living should be considered’. Although Duncan tried to be reasonable, to ‘take a more objective view’, he quoted Bunny’s opinion that despite changing attitudes, old-fashioned prejudice still prevailed.15

  Anxious about how he would be represented in Holroyd’s second volume, Bunny wrote to James, asking to see it. Having given luncheon, in London, to the Canadian scholar, S.P. Rosenbaum, another chronicler of Bloomsbury, Bunny headed down to Lord’s Wood, in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, the home of James and Alix Strachey. There he stayed up until the early hours reading Holroyd’s manuscript, afterwards noting in his diary ‘ending of 2nd vol – Good’.16 Even so, Bunny had what Frances Partridge described as a ‘heated conversation’ with her on the subject. She could not understand his views in the light of his own published memoirs. Bunny retorted that ‘I’ve made it a rule not to make revelations about people who are still alive, or have relatives alive who would mind’. Frances regretted not raising the question of his own lengthy quotations from Ray’s ‘intensely private and personal letters’.17

  Holroyd honourably took Bloomsbury’s concerns into consideration, writing in more general terms of feelings ‘of great friendship rather than love’. But he refused to accept Bunny’s view that his book would ‘harden people’s reaction against homosexuality’, explaining that ‘if Lytton’s homosexual loves were treated not slyly or sensationally, but with openness and truth, using what was emotionally significant just as one would in describing a heterosexual love, then this would only have the effect of increasing tolerance’.18 It would be another year before Holroyd’s first volume was published, and after this flurry of concern, the furore temporarily died down.

  Bunny’s life was running more smoothly than for some time. Not only had Angelica returned to him, at least at weekends, but Rosemary Peto had adopted the habit of joining him for lunch on Moby Dick. Despite letters protesting that the affair must end as she disliked being disloyal to her partner, Renee Fedden, Rosemary regularly returned for more. Angelica dropped Bunny a note, telling him ‘I love you – and my chief feeling is one of thankfulness that it has been possible for me to come back to you – & gratitude that you have made it so easy’.19 Angelica’s return meant everything for it restored family life to Hilton. As Bunny gleefully informed Sylvia: ‘My daughters arrive today: the garden is full of peas, globe artichokes, spinach, strawberries and raspberries starting. Angelica busy bottling fruit. Hive bursting with honey.’20 It was his idea of paradise.

  In August The Cearne was sold. Bunny had given it to Amaryllis, and although he felt she should be free to do as she wanted, it was a terrible wrench. He spent a miserable couple of days clearing the attics of thousands of books. It was as though he was sweeping the house of memories. Although tenanted since Constance’s death, the house had belonged to him, a symbol of his childhood and his parents’ singular lives. Amaryllis had no childhood memories of The Cearne and had never lived there. Bunny regretted giving it to her, especially as she used the proceeds to buy a house near Angelica. ‘Islington’, Frances Partridge noted dryly, ‘is now Bunny’s idea of hell’.21

  On 11 November he left for his annual lecture tour in the US. Unusually he felt happy to depart: Duncan had recently exuded warmth and intimacy and there was the delightful prospect of Angelica joining him in the New Year. From New York he made his customary pilgrimage to Carson McCullers at Nyack, but this was a saddening experience as she was now bedridden, though working on her autobiography. She died the following September.

  Bunny’s itinerary included additional universities, beginning with Vassar, where he lectured on Bloomsbury. From there he headed to Cornell, speaking about H.G. Wells and tutoring individual students. He met the novelist Alison Lurie, whose then husband, Jonathan Peale Bishop, taught there: it was the beginning of a gentle literary friendship. Having been invited to Cornell by Arthur Mizener, an academic working on a biography of Ford Madox Ford, Bunny was able to give him one of Ford’s letters, which he had discovered lodged in the attic at The Cearne.

  On 20 November Bunny flew to Toronto where he lectured at Massey College at the invitation of S.P. Rosenbaum. His feet barely touched the ground before he was off again, this time to Chicago, where he was met by Frances Hamill, who drove him to her family estate in Illinois. Bunny was particularly taken with her garage door: ‘you press a button in the car & the door opens & you drive in’.22 From there he took a train to Carbondale, where he dined with Harry and Beatrice Moore, before flying to San Francisco en route to lecture at Stanford. On 5 December Bunny arrived at Davis, California. Angelica wrote telling him she felt nothing but admiration for his stamina. With a gap to fill between lecturing at Davis in early December and at Texas in mid-January, Bunny arranged to stay at the D.H. Lawrence Ranch, San Cristobal. Apart from one or two meals with Dorothy Brett, who lived nearby, Bunny remained alone, surrounded by snow, pines and silence. He missed his home and family, writing wistfully to Angelica, ‘How I wish I could put my nose out at Hilton & look for the first primrose’.23

  At the end of December Bunny flew to Los Angeles to meet the film-maker Jean Renoir, who wanted to film Aspects of Love. The project was hampered by financial considerations and both Renoir and Bunny feared the story would need to be modified to suit American casting. For these reasons they agreed the film should be made in France and Italy with English and French actors. Bunny thought the detour to LA worthwhile just to have met Renoir. While there, he dined with his old friend Elsa Lanchester who now resembled an ‘intelligent & kindly Pekinese’. Julie Andrews rang up, but Bunny was out at the time. His chief excitement, however, was the prospect of being with Angelica, to whom he wrote on 4 January 1967, saying how wonderful it was ‘to think that tomorrow you will be in New York – on the same continent’.24

  From New York Angelica wrote telling Bunny she was thoroughly enjoying herself. Duncan’s former lover, George Bergen, had taken her under his wing, and was ‘devoting himself entirely to my entertainment’.25 A week later Angelica and Bunny were reunited at Austin, Texas. Their Mexican holiday was generally successful and Bunny relished showing Angelica the places to which he had travelled two years previously. When they returned to England on 16 February, Bunny had been away for three months.

  After what seemed a honeymoon period things began to cool again. As Bunny told Sylvia, ‘I am alone with William and cook our meals. And when I am not alone with him the house is full at week-ends and I dispense drinks.’26 Bunny wrote Angelica a poem: ‘Summer does not come / Wind breaks branches, cancels the sun / […] Clouds cover you, you are swept away / All warmth cancelled and gone for good.’27 His self-pity did not last, as there was a more pressing cause for concern: Angelica had a lump in her breast. ‘I am to my own surprise not frightfully worried’, she said, ‘So you must try not to be either’.28 It seemed like a cruel r
epetition. Bunny could not sleep for worry, but was a little reassured when Noel Olivier told him that treatment had improved considerably since Ray’s time.

  In August Angelica was admitted to St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, where she underwent two operations, the second the removal of her ovaries to reduce the likelihood of a recurrence of the tumour. As Bunny told Sylvia, ‘I think and hope they have done what ought to have been done when the same thing happened to Ray’.29 Angelica was in hospital for two weeks, and Bunny visited every day for the first, travelling up from Hilton and back again. To Bunny’s consternation, Angelica decided to convalesce at Charleston where Grace Higgens would care for her. It was partly an instinctive desire to return to her childhood home, but it was also a means of evading what she considered to be Bunny’s ‘over-emotionalism’.30 Bunny was distraught and Angelica eventually capitulated to his pleas to look after her. In the event she told Leonard Woolf, Bunny had in fact ‘restrained himself & has fed me deliciously & I have myself improved considerably’.31 She made such progress that on 1 September she left, with Duncan and Nerissa, for St Martin-de-Vers.

  Bunny took part in a BBC radio broadcast about Virginia Woolf and in a BBC television panel game, Take It or Leave It, a literary quiz chaired by Robert Robinson. In respect of the latter, Bunny confessed to appearing much to his disadvantage, hindered, no doubt, by his habit of punctuating his sentences with long pauses in search of an appropriate word. On 17 September he set off for St Martin-de-Vers where he coincided with Angelica and Nerissa for just a week, before they left. Alone, he devoted much of his time to collecting sloes and mushrooms. In early October his solitude was interrupted by Alison Lurie who stopped for a couple of days, as arranged. They got on well, ‘in a charming professional way’, talking about their families, writers and writing.32

  Afterwards, Bunny received a letter from Angelica beginning ‘Bunny my dear’, ‘there is something I want to tell you’. ‘I must tell you’, she continued, ‘& feel I should have told you before, which makes it all the more difficult. It is not good news for you of course, as you must guess.’33 In New York, in January, while waiting to join Bunny, Angelica had fallen in love with George Bergen. She had harboured the secret ever since. She could not stop thinking of him and had decided to go to New York for an indefinite period.

  Bunny replied that if things did not work out ‘you have got a lot to fall back on – Charleston & Hilton & all of us’.34 He told Frances Partridge he had been ignorant about the affair, ‘Angelica never suggested that she was in love with George – I knew she had liked him & that he had laid himself out to be charming […] but no more’.35 He felt particularly hurt as Angelica had seemed so happy in Mexico. Even so the intervening months had not been good. As he told Sylvia with some bitterness: ‘In the early summer Angelica came down to Hilton about once a fortnight – slept in my bed – made love without wanting to – dug up a few weeds in flower beds & disappeared again.’36

  On the eve of her departure, Angelica wrote to Bunny stating ‘you & I should divorce whatever happens’.37 He was inclined to agree. He could take no more of the comings and goings, her vacillations, her being caught between extremes, her inability to commit to one way of life or another. Emotionally exhausted, he left St Martin on 29 October, staying with Giovanna in Paris on the way home. He was glad to find Henrietta and Sophie at Hilton. Harold and Maggie Hobson rallied round, Duncan invited Bunny to Charleston and Frances Partridge lost little time in asking him to dinner. ‘All that I liked most in his character came to the fore. He talked of Angelica without any bitterness but with great sadness.’38

  Then Angelica dropped another bombshell. She did not, after all, want a divorce although Bunny had instructed his solicitor to start proceedings. The reason Angelica did not want a divorce had nothing to do with Bunny and everything to do with George. Divorce – with Angelica cited as the guilty party – would reveal her relationship with George to his wife, from whom he was separated but not divorced. This, in turn, would enable his wife to divorce him on grounds of adultery, which might adversely affect his access arrangements to his teenage daughter. Bunny would have to hold fire until George’s daughter was of age. ‘I am as keen on divorce as you are’, Angelica told him, ‘but we must wait for George’s O.K.’39

  Bunny felt that ‘losing the loved one through death is in a way easier to bear than their simply taking themselves off’.40 He tried not to feel sorry for himself and determined that this time separation would be final. It was then that Bunny and Duncan turned to each other for support. At Charleston, the two men read one another’s letters from Angelica, both anxious that she was unhappy and might be hurt. It was evident that she was lonely, knowing few people in New York; that George battened on her for money; that she felt cramped in his small flat; that he was incapable of expressing his feelings although capable of verbal cruelty; that he was withdrawn and elusive.

  When Duncan had experienced similar drawbacks with George nearly four decades earlier, he had turned to Bunny for support. Now Duncan consoled Bunny, reminding him that at least he had the comfort of ‘four lovely & devoted daughters’.41 They were comfort, indeed, rallying around their father. That Christmas, Bunny was surrounded by family and friends: Henrietta, Sophie, Amaryllis, Nerissa, William, Richard, Jane, Oliver and Ned; on Boxing Day they were joined by Rosemary Peto, Renee Fedden and Renee’s daughter Katherine. Fanny arrived for New Year, as did Noel’s son, Benedict Richards.

  Michael Holroyd’s long anticipated first volume of his Lytton Strachey biography was published in September 1967.42 James Strachey did not live to see the published book. The biography arrived in the shops shortly after a momentous piece of legislation: the Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalised homosexual acts between men over the age of twenty-one. Although homosexuals no longer feared imprisonment, what remained of Bloomsbury nevertheless anticipated the biography with trepidation. Frances Partridge recognised ‘something impressive about it’, though conceding to Bunny that volume two might ‘make us all feel unpleasantly naked & exposed’.43 But when volume two was published in early 1968 the Bloomsbury survivors generally agreed that it was rather good. Bunny acknowledged that Frances’s view was right, that ‘the book has a lot of merit’.44 Two decades later, Michael Holroyd shed an interesting perspective on Bloomsbury’s attitude to his book: ‘Let those who feel tempted to dismiss the Bloomsbury group as a timid self-regarding coterie ask themselves whether, had their own principles come to be tested in such an awkward practical fashion, they would have passed the test with such style and courage.’45

  Part Five

  Magouche

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  ‘I am still in old age a normal male animal.’1

  When Angelica returned to London in May 1968, seven months after leaving for New York, Bunny could not face seeing her. When he eventually did, he was surprised at how detached he felt. The reason for this detachment was a strikingly beautiful, intelligent, witty and charming American in her late forties. Her name was Magouche Phillips, and Bunny was bowled over when they met as dinner guests of Frances Partridge. Frances could not help noticing Magouche’s ‘on-coming response’ to Bunny, and that it made him ‘radiant with pleasure’.2

  ‘My life has been rather social lately’, Bunny told Sylvia in immense understatement.3 Between March and May he visited the Bells in Sussex, dined with Barbara Ker Seymer and Barbara Roett, Frances Partridge, Tom and Nadine Marshall, Rosemary Peto, Cyril and Deirdre Connolly, Anna Wickham’s son Jim Hepburn and with Harry Moore, over from the US. He lunched with Leonard Woolf at Monk’s House, stayed at Charleston with Duncan, travelled to Marlow twice to see Alix Strachey and stayed at Biddesden House, Wiltshire at the invitation of Bryan Guinness, Lord Moyne. He lunched with Morgan Forster in Cambridge, took tea with Geoffrey Keynes, fished the Itchen with his cousin Dicky Garnett, attended Cranium Club meetings and a Royal Literary Fund white-tie dinner, to which he arrived an hour late, having lost his waistcoat. Betw
een times, Bunny entertained his daughters and their guests at Hilton. Frances Partridge observed that he ‘struggles on with extraordinary gallantry. Nine to dinner on Sunday – I don’t know how he does it.’4

  This renewed vigour was largely due to Magouche. Bunny learned that her first name was really Agnes, and that she had been given the name Magouche by her husband, the artist Arshile Gorky, who committed suicide in 1948 leaving her with two young daughters, and that she had two more daughters by a second marriage which ended in divorce. ‘Felt a new man’, Bunny noted in his diary the morning after he and Magouche dined à deux at her Chapel Street house in Kensington.5 Magouche was exactly the tonic he needed. Bunny was astonished that she liked him. ‘It is the only weakness’, he commented, ‘in a character otherwise of iron strength’.6 With many friends in common, Bunny slipped easily into her world, although he soon realised that the two of them would get on best if he did not make undue demands. He recognised that she was very much her own person and that there were times when she did not want him around.

  The White–Garnett Letters was published by Jonathan Cape in June 1968 to considerable critical acclaim. It came out a year after Sylvia Townsend Warner’s biography of White and many critics considered it a companion to the biography. In contrast to Bunny’s recent novels, the Letters attracted longer reviews, many concerned with unravelling the mysteries of White’s psychology and marvelling at Bunny’s capacity to remain friends with him. The Observer concluded that ‘The friendship with David Garnett must have been one of the most satisfying things in his [White’s] life. Garnett’s letters to him are delightful, candid with plenty of self-revelation but no protestations. The contrast which they point with White’s emotional immaturity is almost painfully marked.’7 Quentin Bell, in the New Statesman, declared it ‘a most enjoyable book’8, while Philippa Toomey, in The Times, said, ‘We can only be grateful to David Garnett for giving us this vivid history of an unlikely friendship’.9 In the Sunday Telegraph, Anthony Curtis pronounced it a ‘magical book’, stating its beauty resided in ‘the well-matched creative weight and striking power of two extremely different literary types’.10