Contents
Cover
About the Author
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Title Page
Preface to the Pimlico Edition
Prologue
1 Vanessa
2 A Child at Charleston
3 Gordon Square
4 With the Bells at Seend
5 Spring in Cassis
6 Langford Grove
7 At Home in Sussex
8 The Woolves
9 Looking up to Julian
10 Child of Two Fathers
11 Bunny’s Victory
12 Nessa’s Death
Epilogue
Index
Copyright
PIMLICO
155
DECEIVED
WITH KINDNESS
Angelica Garnett was born at Charleston, her parents’ home in Sussex, on Christmas Day, 1918. As a young woman she studied acting before turning to painting, drawing, illustration and decoration. In 1942 she married David Garnett, who was twenty-six years her senior (and who died in 1981), and they had four daughters. She now lives in the south of France.
List of Illustrations
Vanessa & Virginia Stephen and Stella Duckworth, 1896
Vanessa Bell, 1929
Duncan Grant, c. 1916
With Vanessa, 1928
Clive and Julian Bell, Duncan and Vanessa, 1932
With Clive, 1925
With Roger Fry, 1928
With Virginia Woolf, 1932 (Lettice Ramsey, Ramsey & Muspratt, Cambridge)
Julian, 1930
David (Bunny) Garnett, 1937 (Lucilla Sherrard)
Myself, 1937 (Sylvia Louise)
Vanessa, 1951
To My Guardian Angel
DECEIVED
WITH KINDNESS
A Bloomsbury Childhood
ANGELICA GARNETT
Preface to the Pimlico Edition
If I ask myself today whether I would write this book in the same way – that is, if given the subject, I would want to say the same things, the answer is Yes – albeit differently. In the ten years since it was published I have had time to see things – above all myself – otherwise, even to grow up a little. I am also less obsessed by the personalities and relationships of my mother, father and husband, less desirous of apportioning the blame, and less mesmerised by the idea of repeating or re-living my childhood. When, a year before my father’s death, at the age of 59, I began writing, I was still wrapped in the caul that had bound me all my life, from which I was only just beginning to divest myself. I by no means clearly saw what I was doing – but only knew that I had to do it. The book was therefore a therapeutic exercise, an effort to save myself from hypocrisy and pretence by creeping out into the open. By the time I had finished it both my parents were dead, but I was terribly conscious of their shadows looking over my shoulder, not accusingly, but shocked and horrified at what, with the best will in the world, they had finally produced.
It is of course the same old story, the one we all live through in different ways, of the relationship with, and separation from, our parents. In my case this was obscured by the fact that the man I married was a near contemporary of my mother and father, as well as their devoted friend and lover, so that, without enough experience to understand what might lie beneath such a situation, I became the focus of an uneasy truce – rather than a war – of which I was however the unconscious but consenting casualty.
But it is not a story of violence or achievement. And perhaps, for modern readers, it is this that is most difficult to understand. Bloomsbury believed in and largely practised intellectual tolerance, but often failed to recognise the power of the emotions or the reasoning of the heart. Fascinating and vital, they hid their feelings behind an apparent detachment that I found at that time repressive and confusing. Separated as I was from them by more than the usual generation gap, their lack of physical warmth and animal spirits had the effect of inhibiting my own, making me either excessively shy and tentative in an effort to seem more grown up than I was, or arrogant and insensitive in my consuming desire to identify with them.
Brought up in the delicious climate of an Ivory Tower, I had no experience with which to counter or compare the unique one of being a spoiled, and apparently much loved child. Many years later, after Vanessa’s death, I remember being assured by Raymond Mortimer that I had been much loved: and of course everyone thought so, including me. But I wonder whether a parent’s love ought not to be tougher and stronger, more concerned with the relationship the child will eventually have with the world it inhabits and the common strengths, failings and emotions of its fellow inhabitants? Alienated by lack of experience, I remained both ignorant and afraid of these things, ill at ease and therefore constantly tempted to pretend.
Accusation and blame, however, are dreary props for the ego. I am convinced that, had I confronted my parents while they were still alive, in spite of any momentary pain and incomprehension, both they and I would have had a happier relationship. I cannot excuse myself for this omission, which I now see so clearly was my business and not theirs. If my marriage was an act of rebellion, it was ill-judged – and, moreover, I knew it at the time but failed to listen to the still, small but terrifying voice within. It was this failure and deadly suppression which coloured my marriage rather than David’s own personality, and it was also necessary to recognise that, together with my resentment, I must discard the self-protective role of eternal victim.
Writing it out, that is to say committing myself to a definite point of view, seemed to hold the promise of exorcism. The effort I had to make to re-live my experience helped me define my attitude and indeed my self, and was, moreover, the only way that remained, given the fact that the other protagonists were all dead. But there were many moments when I wondered whether what I was saying was justifiable. I had known these extraordinary people from a child’s point of view, immeasurably different from that of a contemporary, and I allowed myself to be led by the fascination of the subject beyond these limits into a certain amount of speculation. At the time I felt that this was the only way to avoid simple nostalgia and snobism, the latter not only a trap for the writer but for the public, always liable to over-identify with the members of an élite. Bloomsbury was the matrix from which I sprang, in many ways an extraordinary advantage: but I wished I could have called it by another name, and rechristened its characters, so that they might be seen for their psychological complexities and over-lifesize personalities without the label.
Angelica Garnett
Forcalquier, 1994
It is rather ironical that the word ‘power’ denotes two contradictory concepts: power of = capacity and power over = domination. This contradiction, however, is of a peculiar kind. Power = domination results from the paralysis of power = capacity. ‘Power over’ is the perversion of ‘power to’ … Domination is coupled with death, potency with life. Domination springs from impotence and in turn reinforces it, for if an individual can force somebody else to serve him, his own need to be productive is increasingly paralysed.
Masochism is the attempt to get rid of one’s individual self, to escape from freedom, and to look for security by attaching oneself to another person … it can be rationalised as sacrifice, duty or love … often masochistic strivings are so much in conflict with the parts of the personality striving for independence and freedom that they are experienced as painful and tormenting.
Erich Fromm, Man For Himself: An Enquiry into the Psychology of Ethics
Les sentiments pour les progéniteurs, ça fait partie des choses qu’il vaut mieux ne pas chercher trop à tirer au clair.
André Gide, Les Faux-Monnayeurs
Prologue
In 1975 I was living on the north side of London in Islington, a prey to loneliness and regret, following a love affair with someone much younger than myself. My lover had gone abroad, leaving me without news of any kind, and I spent many months of doubt and anxiety before compelling myself to admit that he would never return. My children had by that time left home, and my husband, David Garnett (called Bunny by myself and our friends), from whom I had separated several years earlier, lived in France. Now I found myself alone in one of those tall London houses, with nine empty rooms, not so much unhappy as disorientated.
What else had I ever been, however, in spite of a longing to prove the contrary? I had friends, of course, but I did not feel particularly close to any of them. Either they were friends of my youth with whom the links had become attenuated by time and a change of interests, or they were those of an older generation who were friends of mine mainly because they had known and loved my parents. With them I always felt secure, but also ill at ease, sensing that there was some profound inadequacy in me to which, in their kindness, they did not allude. Our relations were inhibited either because we could not achieve a sufficient intimacy together, or because I imagined that I had nothing to offer our friendship.
An extract from a diary kept at that time indicates my lack of self-confidence, the depth and importance of which I was only just becoming aware.
London 1975
While buying vegetables in the Caledonian Road I looked in a mirror and saw a vagueness, almost a hole, where I myself should have been. Compared with the woman next to me I seemed unsure, tentative, and wispy. Yet I was better looking, better dressed, even in better health. It was not that I was daydreaming, I was simply not present in the same sort of way. I often see something indefinable in the faces of those I meet in shops or public places that reflects my non-being; and then because I smile and am anxious to please they are reassured. It’s obvious after all that I’m not an escaped lunatic.
Preoccupied with myself as I was, I began to be aware of the profound and disturbing emotions I felt for my mother, Vanessa Bell, and my father, Duncan Grant. I was beginning to question their behaviour towards me.
In 1961, when she was eighty-one and I was forty-two, my mother died. Her image and personality had always obsessed me: on the one hand I felt compelled to imitate her, while on the other I resented her dominance. With Duncan I had had a different relationship: light and easy, affectionate and undemanding. I had always adored him and was quite uncritical – in my eyes he could do no wrong. But recently I had become aware of currents beneath the surface, of unsatisfied desires and longings which, partly because I did not know what they meant and partly because Duncan himself seemed so unaware, had become deeply repressed. I found it impossible to talk to him of such things.
Writing my diary proved helpful, for it provided a means of increasing my insight. Then another lifeline was held out to me by a young American called Frank Hallman, who wrote asking for permission to publish an article by my aunt, Virginia Woolf, and subsequently a memoir by Vanessa. At first we carried on a lively correspondence, and later in the summer he arrived in England. He was young, intelligent and sensitive, with a sense of humour. We liked each other immediately, a feeling which on my side was all the warmer because I hoped that here at last was that particular kind of intimacy for which I longed. I did not fall in love, but something in his manner affected me like an elixir; I was both stimulated and warmed by his evident affection. It was a reflection of what he felt for my mother, for whom he had conceived an enormous admiration. He had seen pictures by both her and Duncan in New York, but unlike most people, he had responded more strongly to Vanessa than to Duncan. It was Frank who dropped into my mind the idea that Duncan was not necessarily as attractive to everyone as he appeared to me, and that his imperfections, once realised, might make him both more interesting and more accessible.
Before returning to the States, Frank suggested that I might write a short book about Charleston – the house near Lewes in Sussex where I was born and brought up – and the life we lived there, but I resisted the idea strongly. He evidently imagined sketches of childhood, cameolike portraits of the remarkable people who had surrounded me. But I saw that even to produce these I would be forced into an involvement, from which in fact I had never been free, with the question of my relationship with Duncan and Vanessa. Already I was afraid of the effort it would cost me, of adventuring into the disturbing perspectives of the past.
Since Vanessa’s death, Duncan had lived on in the country at Charleston. I often went down to see him, making the two-and-a-half-hour journey by car, assuming, much in the way small children do, that I should always be welcome. Undemonstrative though he was, Duncan never made me feel otherwise, and in that place and in his presence I had the sensation, a false one as it turned out, of being a whole and integrated person. Probably because it was not a genuine feeling, I could seldom if ever paint when I was at Charleston, an inability made all the more painful by the familiar sight of the works of art all over the house. In consequence I took more and more to gardening. I loved the walled garden with its ancient apple trees and cottage flowers, but I never felt satisfied with my weeding and pruning, and was pursued by a spectre of perfection which was both unattainable and unnecessary; added to my other feelings, it made me both grumpy and taciturn. Every day I saw Duncan slowly ageing in front of his easel, dedicated to his painting and responding happily to a host of faithful admirers, while I, rigid with suppressed love and a misery in which there was more than a tinge of jealousy, suffered from his obvious lack of interest in my life.
He was by now very old and, unable to live alone, was looked after devotedly by the poet Paul Roche, a friend of long standing, who filled the house with his grown-up children and their companions. Like a circle of butterflies they fluttered round Duncan, sometimes delighting in him, sometimes ignoring him, while he, confined to a wheel-chair, looked on them all from a distance. Provided he could continue to paint, which he was at the time doing very well, he preferred to remain detached, apparently unconcerned with what went on around him; although an occasional spark of life showed he was not as oblivious as he seemed. He lived, more than anyone I have ever known, in the present, whereas I had one foot buried in the past and, even though I didn’t live at Charleston, found it difficult to accept the youthful invasion. Like a rapid current, it swept past me to occupy spaces which I had regarded as particularly my own.
Mistakenly, I clung to a certain authority there which Paul quite naturally resented, a situation which led to a sharp correspondence between us. In my diary I tried to sort out some of my emotions.
London 1975
Perhaps it’s Paul’s letter that has depressed me. He looks after Duncan in the most extraordinarily competent way, which, even had I the necessary physical strength, I could not do. And I think that Duncan is happy in that masculine menage which comprises the very young, the middle-aged and the very old. Paul’s son, T., is a miracle of gentleness and good humour; but I can’t help shrinking when they talk, as they often do, as though Duncan himself were absent, when there he is sitting at his table smiling the smile of a Taoist poet. It is shocking to think he may actually enjoy this kind of indelicacy.
Paul’s letter makes it clear not only that he thinks of himself as Duncan’s son, but that Duncan thinks of him as the son he always wished to have. I feel murderously jealous, as though I had been given a blow in the face, although when I think of Duncan longing for a son I feel a lot of sympathy for him. It is baffling that it has taken me all these years to realise how much I resent his neglect of me, divesting himself of all responsibility, as though I were an object rather than a human being. It didn’t seem like this in my childhood, when I was on the whole far happier with him than with Vanessa, because he had no axe to grind and never exercised emotional blackmail.
It has taken Paul’s letter to make me aware of Duncan’s feelings, and although I feel extraordinarily th
ick-headed not to have realised them earlier, I am glad to think that I now know Duncan better. If anything it increases my love for him. His great age makes it difficult to know what he thinks of me; it is obvious he confuses me with Vanessa – he calls me by her name, and although I know this is common in old people, I suffer a small shock every time he does it. I get the impression he cares little for me or my life, but I have to admit that I have not made it easy for him to do so.
To become aware of my jealousy of Paul was an advance, in the tangled web of repressed emotion in which I was then living.
Shortly afterwards Paul, as he sometimes did, carried Duncan off to his own house in Aldermaston where, besides other conveniences, the comfort and warmth were greater than at Charleston. This gave me an opportunity to return there alone – a visit I needed to make not only because I had begun to explore, however tentatively, my disaffection with the past, but for the purely practical reason that the house was falling into disrepair. I was worried about the future of Charleston, full as it was of paintings, decorations and objects of every kind – a testimony to the life we had lived there – and I wanted to find a way of preserving it. It had been obvious for some time that the work should be undertaken as soon as possible, but my reluctance to disturb Duncan had made it difficult to know how to begin.
I was therefore able to take advantage of Duncan’s and Paul’s absence to make a tour of inspection in the company of the agent and his assistant, hoping that they might persuade our landlord to repair the outside fabric. In spite of their friendliness, I discerned in their eyes a gleam of disbelief and a determination to disregard all but the solid and tangible, of which admittedly there was very little. They were visibly unmoved by the charm of the decorations, and indeed as we went round it the house seemed to shed all its qualities, like so many petals falling from a flower, to reveal the mark of damp on the walls, the holes in the roof, the plaster coming away from the wallpaper, the exposed laths filled with woodworm, etc. The imperceptible shrugs of the two men, their loaded silences, the way the agent said, ‘I’m no connoisseur but …’, my feeling that I seemed to be doing the wrong thing in showing them round, added up to something unpleasant like a drop that gathers at the end of one’s nose …
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