Angelica had the advantage of hindsight: she spent much of the 1960s and 1970s trying to make sense of the past and her place within it. Such introspection inevitably involved the ordering of events, exploration of motives and examination of emotions. Moreover memory is not infallible and there are many inaccuracies in Angelica’s narrative, not least that she long remained ignorant of the fact that Bunny and Duncan had been lovers. Bunny had informed her of this in June 1939 three years before their marriage.6 As her brother, Quentin diplomatically stated, ‘To say that this is an honest narrative is not to say that it is accurate’.7
Deceived with Kindness is framed by Angelica discovering the works of Karen Horney, a Neo-Freudian psychoanalyst. Although Angelica did not undergo psychoanalysis, she was heavily influenced by Horney’s books, in particular their emphasis on the effects of parental influence upon the child as experienced by the child at the time. According to Horney, a child’s need for parental approval can be so pronounced that in adulthood it seeks out a partner to resolve the problems experienced in childhood, thus perpetuating the dependent and compliant relationship.
It is obvious why Angelica was attracted to this rationale. But her perspective of her relationship with Bunny contrasts markedly with the evidence of their correspondence during their courtship and early years of marriage. Her memoir is highly subjective, created in response to Duncan’s death, to an ensuing emotional break-down and to the form of self-analysis which Angelica felt most answered her needs. It reflects the vantage point of a particular moment and is the outcome of the cumulative narratives Angelica shaped to explain and rationalise her life.
Once in print, Angelica’s authoritative portrayal of Bunny became enshrined as ‘truth’. In a review of the book in The New York Review of Books, the journalist Janet Malcolm acknowledged Angelica’s severity regarding her parents, but seemed to entirely accept her portrayal of Bunny. If anything, Malcolm wrote about Bunny in even more venomous language than Angelica had done.
Angelica stated she did not ‘understand how incestuous my relationship with Bunny was’.8 Such comments have reverberated through subsequent biographies of Bunny’s friends and contemporaries, where he has become tarnished with the taint of incest and sex-addiction. He is typically described as ‘the libidinous novelist’, ‘the Don Juan’ and ‘a noted connoisseur of feminine charms’.9 Such short-hand is, of course, true – he could be constructed as each of these – but also very much more. In The Neo-Pagans, a group-biography of Rupert Brooke and his circle, Paul Delany referred to Bunny’s ‘epic amorous career’ and implied that Daphne Olivier was the only Olivier sister he was ‘able to ensnare’.10 Dismissive perhaps, but the language of blame and entrapment echoed Angelica’s.
If Angelica saw herself, in hindsight, as a victim, it is extremely unlikely that Bunny’s other women lovers would have cast themselves in this mould. Indeed, the view of Bunny as a predatory womaniser is hardly fair to the women he is alleged to have conquered. Bunny wasn’t keen on the one-night stand. He was interested in women for their intelligence as much as their beauty. According to his daughter Frances Garnett, he ‘actually valued the intellect of a woman – he knew that women could be equally intelligent and equally intellectual.’11 With the exception of a few youthful dalliances, Bunny’s women lovers were characterised by independence, intelligence and education. It is a mistake to assume that Bunny spent his time seeking out innocent virgins. The women he loved chose him as much as he chose them. Moreover, Bunny maintained long friendships with former lovers, and in some cases, the sexual relationship continued for years or even decades.
Today the 1960s is seen as the era of women’s sexual emancipation. In Bunny’s circles women were sexually emancipated many decades earlier. For example, in 1915 when Bunny and Frankie Birrell called on James Strachey, they found the twenty-three-year-old Noel Olivier visiting. As Bunny recorded in his journal, ‘When Noel came in she dropped French letters out of her bag […]. Noel laughed & coloured a little.’12 Noel typifies the independent women of Bunny’s social milieu: she went on to become a consultant paediatrician.
With the passage of time Angelica’s perspective shifted. In a new preface to the second edition, published in 1995, she no longer perceived her marriage to Bunny as entrapment by him, but as an ‘ill-judged’ ‘act of rebellion’ on her part against her parents. She even went so far as to say: ‘I must discard the self-protective role of eternal victim.’13 However the damage had been done. After all, with Bunny’s three volumes of memoir long out of print (and they ended in 1940 with Ray’s death) we only have Angelica’s word for it. The reviewer in The Economist perceptively described Deceived with Kindness as ‘an absorbing though deliberately one-sided and somewhat hostile tale’, adding, ‘One hopes that it serves its therapeutic purpose’.14
Angelica’s version of Bunny not only eclipsed all others, but in tarnishing him, marginalised his published work and diminished his reputation. Only Lady into Fox and Aspects of Love remain in print. This is a shame, as he was an original writer of courage and distinction. Moreover, as a publisher, literary critic, editor, historian and bookseller, Bunny was an influential and important figure in the twentieth-century British literary landscape. Ironically, during the 1980s and 1990s when British literary biography was at its apogee, Bunny’s ground-breaking autobiography was perceived, in some quarters, as evidence of his moral ignominy. At a time when biographers were mining Bunny’s memoirs for information about their own subjects, his self-depiction as a ‘libertine’ appeared to add credence to Angelica’s text. In more recent years, Bunny has appeared in biographical fiction hovering over Angelica’s cradle ready to snatch her.
In the 1920s the Nonesuch Press was largely responsible for bringing Restoration drama back into print. Bunny was passionate about Restoration drama; he formed the Caroline Club specifically to read these plays. While Bunny, versed in Restoration literature, could identify the different types of libertine and could distinguish between a libertine and a rake, it was perhaps unrealistic for him to expect his readers to share his scholarly familiarity with the subtleties of seventeenth-century cultural terms and distinctions. Bunny recognised Libertinism as an intellectual movement which elevated the pursuit of pleasure. There was more than one kind of libertine: the dissolute and licentious character, and the ‘philosophical libertine’, a freethinker. It was with this second, more cerebral version that Bunny identified.
In his autobiography, Bunny deliberately dissociated himself from the ‘dissolute’ and ‘licentious’, stating: ‘I am not, and had little impulse ever to become, a rake: that is a man whose loose life is the result of a reaction against the restraints imposed by his upbringing, or one who has a psychological craving for self-destruction and seeks it in the brothel, or the gutter.’15 Bunny stated that in being the ‘lover of very many women’, he had always been driven by sensuality and the need to give sexual satisfaction. Moreover, he bravely intimated, as explicitly as he dared, his love for men and women. Even so, his attempt at truth has been misconstrued. The term ‘libertine’ has been taken up as shorthand to dismiss Bunny as exactly what he said he was not: a rake. It is interesting that Stephen Spender’s autobiography caused similar revilement. His biographer John Sutherland remarked that Spender’s ‘frankness, far from disarming critics, has given some of them ammunition with which to attack him’.16
Bunny was not perfect. He espoused honesty but lacked self-awareness. His need for diversion was often destructive. He was cruel to Ray. Perhaps he was selfish in loving Angelica and marrying her. But as an imperfect example of humankind he created courageous stories, wrote beautiful prose, supported his friends, helped other writers, remained true to his convictions and loved his family. It is as though Bunny’s literary achievements, all the good that he did and all the love people felt for him have been obscured by the palimpsest of a single, courageously written but ultimately harmful book.
Photographs
Edward Garnett
/>
Constance and Bunny
The Cearne
Bunny as a boy, in The Cearne porch
Nellie Heath
Sommeilles Equipe 1915, Frankie Birrell seated middle row, second left; Bunny front right
Duncan Grant, c.1918, Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) © Tate, London 2015
Photograph of Angelica and Vanessa Bell, 1928, artist unknown © Tate, London 2015
Ray
Hilton Hall, 1920s
Bunny and Stephen Tomlin, 1920s
DG climbing into a window, La Bergère, Cassis, 1920s
The writer in his study, 1930
Richard, c.1928
William, Bunny and cat in back garden, Hilton Hall, 1929
Ray, Yorkshire, 1939
Bunny, T. H. White and peregrine falcons, 1939
Angelica at Butts Intake, 1940
Bunny and babies, 1946
Henrietta
Amaryllis
Fanny and Nerissa
Angelica and Bunny in the 1960s
* * *
Picture credits: all courtesy of the Estate of David Garnett and Tate Gallery Archives.
Acknowledgements
First of all, my thanks go to the late Richard Garnett for his unstinting encouragement, for sharing his formidable knowledge and for allowing me unrestricted access to his father’s papers at Hilton Hall (these now reside at Northwestern University). Although Richard read this book in draft, my only regret is that he didn’t live to see it published. I am also grateful to Jane Garnett for her warm hospitality and her valuable insights into the family environment at Hilton.
Henrietta Garnett has been extremely generous in giving me access to the papers of Duncan Grant and those papers of David Garnett in her keeping. I am grateful for her illuminating conversation, her kind hospitality and unceasing encouragement and enthusiasm.
I am indebted to the late Angelica Garnett for allowing me to read her correspondence with David Garnett which is in the Archives of King’s College, Cambridge. This was particularly generous given that she would inevitably feature in my account of his life. I am grateful for her kindness in allowing me to interview her and for her hospitality.
For granting interviews, allowing me to read letters in their possession (or both) I particularly thank Anne Olivier Bell, Frances Garnett, Michael Holroyd, Stephen Keynes, Virginia Nicholson, Joan O’Donovan, the late Magouche Fielding and the late Hilary Rubinstein.
I am also grateful to the following for help in various ways: Elizabeth Belsey, Emily Bingham, Monika Buchell, Anne Chisholm, Jan Dalley, Phil Davies, Richard Denyer, Larry Edgerton, Claire Flay-Petty, Susan Fox, Edward Garnett, Oliver Garnett, Jonathan and Nicky Gathorne-Hardy, Janet Gill, Crauford and Nancy Goodwin, Olga Grlic, John Harriss, Diana Hopkins, Claire and Geoffrey Kiddy, Mr and Mrs J. Kirkwood, Nicola Lacey, Andrew Lambirth, Jawaid Luqmani, Catherine MacGowan, David Marshall, Marina Martin, Stephen Massil, David McKitterick, Neil McWilliam, J. Lawrence Mitchell, Judy Moore, Paul Morrison, Tom Morrison, Amanda O’Shea, Bill Rau, Anthony Rudolph, Elaine Shaughnessy, Ceinwen Sinclair, John Smart, Matthew Spender, Peter Stansky, Tilli Tansey, Ann Thwaite, the Lord Walpole, Norma Watt and Denis and Hazel Wilkinson. Thanks also to John Sutherland for responding so promptly to a last minute query.
I have been greatly assisted by archivists and librarians, first among them, Patricia McGuire, the Archivist at King’s College Cambridge, who has been unstintingly kind and helpful during the years of my research. I also extend grateful thanks to the archivists and librarians of the following institutions: the HRHRC at Austin, Texas (Richard Workman, Jean Cannon and Kurt Johnson); the Berg Collection, New York Public Library (Isaac Gewirtz and Anne Garner); the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Colin Harris); the British Library Manuscript Rooms and Sound Archives; the University of Delaware (Iris Snyder); Imperial College Archives (Anne Barrett and Catherine Harpham); Princeton University Library (Margaret Sherry); Jean Rose of Random House Group for permission to consult publishing records at the University of Reading Library; the University of Reading Library; Smith College Archives; the University of Sussex Library (Dorothy Sheridan); Tate Gallery Archives; the University of East Anglia Special Collections Library (Bridget Gillies); Ulster Museum (Martyn Anglesea); Wellcome Library (Richard Aspin and Sharon Messenger; with particular thanks to Sir Mark Walport for facilitating access to as yet un-catalogued material there).
Although I have been fortunate in the wealth and breadth of primary material, I am immensely grateful to those biographers and historians whose work I have consulted. In particular, Frances Spalding’s biographies of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant have been invaluable. Richard Garnett’s biography of his grandmother, Constance Garnett, saved me much time in researching David Garnett’s forebears. Edward Garnett’s biographer, Helen Smith, has been both a great ally and generous source of information.
This book began life as a doctoral thesis. I am indebted to the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council which made my doctoral research possible through the provision of a scholarship. I am grateful to my examiners, Frances Spalding and Giles Foden, for their invaluable constructive criticism. At the University of East Anglia, I owe an immeasurable debt to Jon Cook whose guidance and scholarship considerably enhanced my work.
I would also like to thank my agent Maggie Hanbury and, at Bloomsbury, Stephanie Duncan and Miranda Vaughan Jones. I have benefited enormously from their expertise and enthusiasm for the book.
Finally I thank my son Rafael and husband Tony Barnett for their forbearance during this long project. They have tolerated my physical and mental absences and lived with David Garnett, on occasions, almost as closely as I have. Tony has not only accompanied me on research trips, but has been a constant and loving support. I thank him for all this, and for applying his intellectual scrutiny to every word I have written.
Needless to say any inaccuracies or mistakes are my own.
For permission to quote David Garnett, Constance Garnett, Edward Garnett and Nellie Heath I am indebted to the Estate of David Garnett. I am also indebted to Julian Bell and the Estate of Angelica Bell for permission to quote from her published writing and unpublished letters and to Henrietta Garnett for giving me permission to quote Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Burgo Partridge.
For other permissions to quote I gratefully acknowledge: Peter Ackroyd; Virginia Allen (Noel Olivier); Victoria Bacon (Edward Hyams); the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation; Betty May courtesy of a family member who wishes not to be named; Anne Chisholm; the Estate of John Dreyfus; the Financial Times; the Executors of the Estate of Michael Fordham; Guardian News & Media Ltd (Guardian and Observer); Adrian Goodman (Ottoline Morrell); Alastair Hamilton (Hamish Hamilton); Duff Hart-Davis (Rupert Hart-Davis); Anne Harvey (Eleanor Farjeon and Herbert Farjeon); David Higham Associates Ltd (the Estates of John Lehmann and T. H. White); Michael Holroyd; Lawrence James c/o the Andrew Lownie Literary Agency; Professor Simon Keynes (Geoffrey Keynes); Paul Levy; Desmond MacCarthy (Desmond MacCarthy); Susie Medley (Francis Birrell); the Executors of the Estate of Alix Meynell; the Executors of the Estate of Francis Meynell; Paul Morrison and Tom Morrison (Barbara Mackenzie-Smith); the New Statesman; News Syndication (The Times, Sunday Times and The Times Literary Supplement); Mark Norton (H.T.J. Norton); Dr Henry Oakeley (John Hayward); Janetta Parlade; the Arthur Ransome Literary Estate; Professor Stephen Rhys (Theadora Fordham); Andrew Roberts c/o Capel & Land Ltd; the Lord Sackville (Edward Sackville-West); the Earl of Sandwich (Rosemary Peto); the Scotsman Publications Ltd; the Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust (A.W. Lawrence and T.E. Lawrence); the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College (Mina Curtiss); the Spectator; the Estate of Adrian Stephen; the Estate of James Stern, c/o Imrie & Dervis; the Society of Authors as the Literary Representatives of the Estate of Julian Bell; the Society of Authors as the Literary Representatives of the Estate of Quentin Bell; the Society of Authors as agents of the Strachey Trust (Alix Strachey, James Strachey and Lytton Strachey); Tanya Stobbs (Sylvia Townsend Warner); T
elegraph Media Group Limited (Sunday Telegraph); the University of Sussex and the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Leonard Woolf; Mrs R. Vellender (Edward Thomas); Caroline White (Rayne Garnett/Nickalls); John Worthen c/o the Andrew Lownie Literary Agency; Philip Ziegler (for Rupert Hart-Davis: Man of Letters, Chatto & Windus, 2004) c/o The Random House Group and United Agents.
Quotes from Olive Garnett’s Diaries are property of Caroline White, Tabb House, 7 Church Street, Padstow, Cornwall; extract from John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour by Robert Skidelsky reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop [www.petersfraserdunlop.com] on behalf of Robert Skidelsky; the information in the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee Circular is re-used under the terms of the Open Government Licence; Judith Mackrell Bloomsbury Ballerina © Judith Mackrell 2008, the Orion Publishing Group, London; Jonathan Raban © Jonathan Raban c/o Aitken Alexander Associates; unpublished writings of J.M. Keynes copyright The Provost and Scholars of King’s College Cambridge 2015; the quotes from Gerald Brenan are reproduced by permission of the Estate of Gerald Brenan c/o The Hanbury Agency Ltd, 28 Moreton Street, London SW1V 2PE. All rights reserved: As I Please by George Orwell (Copyright © George Orwell, 1944) reprinted by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell; copyright © Frances Partridge, reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN; World Within World copyright © 1951 by Stephen Spender, reprinted by kind permission of the Estate of Stephen Spender.
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