Deceived With Kindness

by Angelica Garnett

  Vanessa imagined that she herself could shoulder the entire situation, but although this was meant well, it was a gesture compounded of arrogance as well as generosity, and showed blindness, if not indifference, to reality. It would be easy to say she failed to recognise the importance of the relationship between father and daughter, but I do not think this was so – she evidently hoped that the one between myself and Clive would be fruitful – but she may not have understood that a daughter longs to be possessed by her father, and this Clive was in no position to do.

  He did, however, show a greater sense of responsibility towards me than Duncan – although my general insecurity prevented me responding to it wholeheartedly. I suffered from reservations which I attributed to his inherent coldness, or to certain innuendoes and implications to sexual subjects, which I found embarrassing. Within certain limits, however, we got on very well, although as I look back on our relationship I regret that, at the time, I did not do his intentions justice.

  Clive had welcomed my arrival in the world with generosity, and had continued to show a warm interest in my existence, even on rare occasions taking Vanessa’s place when she wanted to go away – something Duncan never did. Of course, Nellie or Louie was always there, but as a point of reference, Clive was reliable, calm and good-humoured. When, as a very small child with mumps, appositely and without tears, I said, ‘Oh dear, I’ve fallen out of bed,’ he was delighted at my natural philosophy, and repeated the story at intervals for the next twenty years – a reiteration which irritated and blinded me to the affection that lay behind it. I remember too an occasion when I was rude to him. I was still small, but old enough to know what not to say, yet my tongue, like a lizard’s, seemed to act on its own, and I came out with something now lost in the limbo of the unconscious – some remark met on his side with a blank surprise, a disbelief which showed that he was wounded, although I never heard any more about it.

  On another occasion, having reached the age when Seend no longer seemed the magical place it once had been, I asked Vanessa whether I need go there for Christmas. She referred me to Clive, and with some trepidation I went to see him in his study at No. 50 Gordon Square, where he sat in his cane-backed chair puffing his pipe. Although innocent of all desire to cause pain, I have little doubt that my manner was tactless: young as I was, I did not realise that he was and always would be fond of a place and people that I, with youthful inconsistency, had just rejected. Clive looked at me over his spectacles in silence, and I knew that his feelings were hurt. Diplomatically, however, he promised that, if I went to Seend this year I need not go the next. For me it was a milestone because, even if he did not realise it, it was the first time I had talked to him as an adult, capable of doing something from choice rather than because I was told to.

  If Clive had ever suffered embarrassment from our fictitious relationship, he seemed determined to disregard it now that I was growing up. For him, well-off, living half his life en garçon in London, it was a delight to give me my first oyster or plover’s egg, and introduce me to his cosmopolitan and society friends, with whom we would lunch at the oval mahogany table, sitting long into the afternoon under the influence of still champagne, the remains of purple passion fruit crushed on our plates, our words left floating in the air. Clive enjoyed showing me off. He was also, however, sensitive to my predicament, and knowing that Duncan was incapable of showing an interest in my sexual education, gave me Daphnis and Chloe to read – pastoral and poetic and perfectly adapted to my stage of development. As my French improved he gave me Manon Lescaut, followed by the rather curious choice of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which, as I might have known, was a Bloomsbury favourite. It was thanks to Clive that I became an enthusiastic admirer of Mérimée, enjoying Carmen, Colomba, La Vénus d’Ille, and some of the Lettres à une Inconnue.

  It was only much later that I realised Clive was an unhappy, even a pessimistic man whose gifts had never been fully realised. One has the impression that with his friends – whose standards, though high, were also limited – he had never quite passed the acid test of being ‘first-rate’. Whether this was because his literary achievements were lacking in distinction or his attitude to his love affairs hysterical is hard to say, but as time went on their criticism had its effect, and with some bitterness he recognised its justice. Together with a quick intelligence, his undoubted talents were for the observation of humanity – to which he brought the gift of common sense as well as a certain cynicism – and for the armchair variety of enjoyment, to which the more chairs that could be added, the better. Although Bunny has pointed out that his generosity was founded on selfishness, yet he was a man who preferred to enjoy himself in company, who always welcomed the unexpected guest, and who gave without stint. He loved his friends to exhibit themselves, to be what he expected them to be, and although no doubt this put a burden on them, and tended to limit their intercourse, it was a disarming form of affection: in his presence they could not help responding to his benevolence.

  More than any other member of Bloomsbury, Clive was socially experienced, suave and competent, partly as a result of having money, but also because of his longing to associate with those whose style of life needed money. Unlike Vanessa or Virginia, he was unafraid of the refinement and delicacy of manners natural to the rich, although he did require a certain degree of culture and beauty to go with them. Characteristic of him though this was, however, one sometimes got the impression that his own delicacy was lacking; he so longed to impress by, means of elaborate witticisms, flattery and double entendres that he was embarrassing, and in the end his friends were charmed more by his transparent goodwill than by his eighteenth-century manners.

  There were in Clive two men, and both were at least a century out of date: one was the man about town, the dilettante, and the writer; the other, the squire, the countryman, and the sportsman. In the latter role he was, I think, more genuinely at ease, since his knowledge, skill and love of country life dated from childhood. In neither character did he quite fit into the world as it was, and one of the things that one loved him for was his refusal to recognise this, his ability to transform his surroundings either into the haunt of a sybarite or into the property of a landed gentleman.

  At Charleston, where he had no property, he walked about the country as though he owned it, and the shepherd, the gamekeeper, the gardener and their wives were devoted to him. If this assumption irritated Vanessa, she got her own back not only by a certain coolness but also by her ability to suggest that she might, at any time, act in such a way as to leave Clive gasping, conscious of how precarious his hold on her world was. In actual fact, however, a balance was always maintained: although Clive loved to feel on the brink, Vanessa never pushed him over.

  In later life, his feeling for Vanessa was principally one of admiration that she could continue her professional life, her painting, without sacrificing her personal relationships. He never tired of her beauty and he appreciated her love for her children and her gift for organisation. He loved her for a depth which, when added to her tenderness and humour (even when not addressed to himself), gave her a distinction and mystery he never found elsewhere. In her youth, the mixture of a not unbarbed gaiety, a gentle and sometimes inspired irony, had been irresistible. Clive was not only a man of the world but a little boy, and much of Vanessa’s charm lay in her ability to be discreetly maternal. If on her side this sentiment evaporated rather quickly, it was partly that it was impossible to continue loving a little boy as selfish as Clive, one who had never learned self-restraint, especially in sexual matters, and therefore lacked a sense of proportion. Neither had he, in spite of his knowledge and love of painting, any understanding of what it meant to be an artist: to him it was a mystery which he both loved and feared, because in Vanessa it was indissolubly linked to her femininity, her almost goddess-like capacity – as in the Vénus d’Ille – to love and to crush.

  It was not only that Clive admired Vanessa’s instinct for going her own way, he w
as also too lazy, perhaps too conscious of his own shortcomings, to stop her. He preferred her to shoulder the psychological problems of family life at the price of relinquishing his authority. It was perhaps his awareness of what was essentially an emotional failure that created in him a cold centre, a sterility which, for all his sociability and outward warmth, he could not completely conceal. And yet, though Clive suffered, his bitterness was addressed only to himself, never to her. For him she remained the only woman in whose house he could live with some semblance of contentment.

  Between Clive and Duncan there was not the faintest shadow of jealousy – indeed it seems absurd to mention such a thing – and although this was no doubt largely because Duncan was a homosexual and that there was therefore no masculine rivalry, they also had a deep affection and understanding for each other. Clive, while he teased Duncan mercilessly for giving himself the airs of a colonel or major of some long-forgotten regiment, or for his almost uncritical catholicity of taste in art, or for any of his other idiosyncrasies, never patronised him, was always generous and never inconsiderate. It would have been only too easy for him to treat Duncan as an escaped lunatic or an enfant terrible, but this he never did. His respect for Duncan’s personality was always evident, even if never directly spoken of. On his side, Duncan understood Clive and appreciated his sophistication, his erudition and the scope of his reading, which would often form the topic of their conversation. Neither had Duncan any prejudice against Clive’s upper-class friends, with whom on occasion he was delighted to mix. He knew enough about them to enjoy Clive’s reports of the latest intrigues and scandals, which often arrived at Charleston by letter, part of Clive’s enormous correspondence. Often, Duncan’s lightness of touch, and willingness to risk an original opinion, did more to cheer Clive than anything else. If Clive was the tinder, Duncan was the match, illuminating corners that would otherwise have been forgotten.

  11

  Bunny’s Victory

  My relations with my husband David Garnett had begun flirtatiously in 1936 or ’37, when I was still at the London Theatre Studio, and had gathered in intensity until, in 1938, it had become a courtship – though not a love affair – about which I had very ambivalent feelings. I had known him all my life and had been to stay at Hilton Hall, his house in Huntingdonshire, where I met his wife, Ray, a sister of Frances Partridge, and her two small sons, Richard and William. Ray was quiet and still, very gentle; sitting before the open fireplace she asked me friendly questions, but as she always remained in the country I never got to know her well.

  Bunny began to take me out to restaurants and theatres, for picnics in the country or to see his mother in her woodland cottage. He told me long stories to which I listened with hungry avidity: through them I caught glimpses of a vigorous mentality as well as of a life full, it seemed, of adventure – a life I longed to have experienced myself. In a continuous saga he exposed his own personality – or that part of it which he felt would create the best impression. I could hardly have been more gullible, I whereas he, though appearing guileless, was certainly not without skill. He talked about his past – so very much longer than my own – and presented me with a youthful Corydon, unsophisticated, rash, adventurous and innocent, who attracted such people as D. H. Lawrence, Edward Thomas, H. G. Wells, and other writers whom, through him, I came to love. When he told me about his attempt to rescue the Indian political leader Savarkar from prison, I immediately saw him as another Rudolph Rassendyll, albeit without the aristocratic overtones. His visit to Russia as a boy of twelve, when he learnt the language by spending long days with the shepherds on the steppe, and his association with the revolutionary emigrés such as Prince Kropotkin and Sergei Stepniak, were incidents which seemed to connect me by a direct line with the world of the Russian novelists that I was just beginning to know. The fact that, when young, Bunny never had a penny in his pocket, went everywhere on foot or on bicycle, and was an only child, gave him the aura of the fool in the fairy story who always wins the princess in the end, either by fair means or foul.

  He never disguised the fact that he had had many love affairs, though he left out those which might have touched me more nearly. As a child of Bloomsbury I took all this for granted, just as I felt it perfectly natural for him to make love to me while at home he had a wife and children. As it was he who took the initiative, I felt it was more his affair than mine – no other attitude occurred to me. I was already in the grip of a personality a hundred times more powerful than my own, in which I put far too much trust for the good of either of us. The accounts of his amorous exploits caused me no pangs of jealousy; his experience with the novelist Dorothy Edwards and his love affair with the artist’s model Betty May – the tiger woman – were, for me, sealed in a past that was long over, packed away like a trunk in the attic. But as he opened it to take out a piece of crumpled brocade, with his slow speech, his evident strength of feeling and natural warmth, he had an unerring sense of the dramatic. He sat broad-shouldered in the lamplight, on his face a lop-sided smile; his blue eyes looking straight at and through me, deprived me of the ability to see that, under an urbane and charming exterior, Bunny was a bulldozer.

  However intimately connected with Vanessa and Duncan, Bunny came from an entirely different background (although no doubt his grandfather, Richard Garnett, Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, knew Leslie Stephen). Bunny’s parents, however, had no thought of being stars in the literary firmament, but belonged to its very core. They were less creative than professional, his mother a translator, his father a publisher’s reader, both remarkable and highly intelligent people. They were hard working, frugal, blind to visual pleasures and indifferent to luxury. Edward Garnett, it is true, liked good wine, but Constance cared nothing for good food or any of the sensuous elements of life. In childhood she had suffered from a severe illness, had read a great deal, and eventually became one of the earliest women students at Cambridge. Later she taught herself Russian, and during her long life translated most of the Russian novelists. On at least one occasion she had smuggled information out of Russia and had befriended some of its political exiles: several settled near her in the woods overlooking the Sussex Weald, where she and Edward had built themselves a house. Here Constance worked and gardened for much of the time in solitude. Half-blind by the time I knew her, she nevertheless grew gentians in her garden, kneeling on the earth in order to see them, her face shaded by an old-fashioned sunbonnet.

  Bunny, c. 1954

  Inside, the house was redolent of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The doors were of solid oak, with latches of ornamental wrought iron; the fireplaces were solidly constructed of hideous red brick; and everywhere there were gate-legged tables and woolwork embroidery. The floor was covered with slippery rugs or mats, and piles of ancient magazines stood in corners or disputed the black oak shelves with books of all shapes and sizes. The effect was of clutter and a disregard for visual harmony that I found painful. The lack of light and colour was oppressive, but Constance herself was delightful – guileless, bright, almost boyish, interested in everything in spite of her considerable age. She was also limpid and innocent, without arrière pensée. In spite of her acute mind and wide reading, she had no knowledge of the world and little of human nature: she was another example of a virginal temperament, although quite unworried by it.

  One day early in our relationship Bunny invited Duncan and myself for the week-end to Hilton. As we drew up outside in his car, he turned round in his seat and surprised me with a long, sexy kiss, which Duncan in the back can hardly have avoided noticing. Bunny, although he had talked to me much of his years at Charleston in 1916–18, had been less than explicit about his love affair with Duncan – he was indeed never completely open about it. Neither had he told me that when I was born he had boasted that one day he would marry me. His kiss, though primarily addressed to me, was an unmistakeable warning to Duncan of his intentions, which it was a pity that Duncan ignored: Bunny, however, knew instinctive
ly that he would. The place chosen was also significant, being within sight of the window from which Ray, at that moment, might be watching for our arrival.

  She was already ill and Bunny was even then worried about her health. She had been operated on for cancer, and during the year 1938–39 her slow deterioration was always at the back and often in the front of his mind. His imaginative understanding of physical pain increased his distress, as did his guilt at the failure of their marriage, and the recognition that Ray had been, to a large extent, the victim of his own egotism. His appeal for sympathy as a repentant husband added to his attraction: he offered me a role in a tragic adult situation in which I had no responsibility. Ray was hardly real to me, and, although she was an object of genuine sympathy, I could not fail to realise that my youth and vitality were, in contrast, a strong attraction for Bunny.

  The progress of our love affair was slow compared with Bunny’s usual style with women; but he remained patient and tactful. There were many outings in London, some week-ends at Charleston, usually with the family, although on one occasion when we very much hoped to be alone, Vanessa and Duncan turned up at the last minute with the obvious intention of supervising us. Eventually I gave way to Bunny’s insistence and lost my virginity, appropriately enough, in H. G. Wells’s spare bedroom.