Bloomsbury's Outsider (19 page)

Meanwhile, Bunny had completed his story and sent it to the publishers Chatto & Windus, reminding them that they had published Ray's
A Ride on a Rocking Horse
. He emphasised that his novel was not a children's book, despite the brevity of the text and inclusion of illustrations. Chatto & Windus considered it too short, requesting an additional story to go with it. But by the end of July, they decided to publish the story alone. Bunny had changed the rather clumsy original title to the more elegant and precisely accurate
Lady into Fox
. Whereas he might have been expected to dedicate his novel to Ray, it is dedicated to Duncan.

Lady into Fox
was published in autumn 1922. It was unusual: an illustrated novel, written for adult readership. Initially it was marketed on the back of Ray's success as a published illustrator, the dust jacket announcing: ‘A rare and sympathetic interpretation is provided by twelve woodcuts, the work of Mrs Garnett, formerly Miss Rachel Marshall, and well known as the illustrator of
A Ride on a Rocking Horse
.' The story concerns Richard Tebrick, whose loving and devoted wife, Sylvia, turns into a fox. Initially she stays at home with her husband, dressed in her Edwardian clothes, but gradually the metamorphosis becomes more complete and she acquires the instincts and behaviour of a vixen. Mr Tebrick realises he must let her follow her instincts, releasing her into the wild, where she meets and mates with a dog fox, producing cubs (one of whom, in honour of Vanessa's and Duncan's daughter, is named
‘Angelica'). Mr Tebrick visits her and the cubs, aware that he cannot protect her any more. Eventually she is pursued by hounds during a fox hunt and comes to grief.

Lady into Fox
was a literary sensation, achieving both critical and popular acclaim. Gerald Gould, in the
Saturday Review
stated it contained ‘not one false note'. Unlike some critics, who speculated about potential symbolism or moral undertones, Gould proclaimed, perceptively: ‘To the truly intellectual, the husband of a lady who has turned into a fox is the husband of a lady who has turned into a fox […]. A work of art is, anyway, its own meaning. And “Lady into Fox” is certainly a work of art.'
¹⁸
The Times Literary Supplement
(
TLS
) declared the book ‘a real morsel of art', in which Bunny's words ‘spread an eighteenth century aroma, an atmosphere where all is sensible and lucid'.
¹⁹
The reviewer in the
Sketch
pondered ‘What does it all mean?
Is
there a meaning?' concluding wrongly that the story was an allegory in which ‘all women are potential vixens'.
²⁰
Later Bunny explained that ‘the style employed and the attitude of the author to the reader, were adopted in order to make this inherently impossible story appear credible'. He admired Defoe and adopted ‘his methods of inducing credulity in the reader. The slight archaism in the style was deliberately chosen because it helped to keep the author and the reader at arms-length.'
²¹
It was only after the book was published that Bunny realised it was a metaphor for what he believed to be the absurdity of fidelity in marriage.

‘My fame increases every day', Bunny wrote to Mina Kirstein in January 1923.
²²
The success of
Lady into Fox
had made him popular in many quarters. Jonathan Cape wanted to publish Bunny's next book, and T. Werner Laurie hoped to re-issue
Dope-Darling
under the Garnett name. Both offers were cordially declined. His new found fame caused Bunny to receive a deluge of letters. Carrington liked the book so much she thought Bunny must have written it especially for her. Bunny received warm praise from Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster. The novelist George Moore pronounced it a ‘masterpiece'. In Farnborough at the RAF School of Photography, the book had been borrowed by ‘room after room' and was handed round ‘from bed to bed', or so T.E. Lawrence reported to Edward.
²³

Soon Bunny had something else to celebrate. On 8 January 1923, at Brunswick Square, and in the big bed in which Ray had been born, she gave birth to a healthy baby son. Two hours later, Ray laid ‘serenely' in bed, the baby beside her, ‘apparently', Bunny told Constance, ‘as well as I ever saw her in my life'. After all Ray's apprehension, and her terrible foreboding that history would repeat itself, she and Bunny had a baby boy, in all respects ‘perfect & complete'.
²⁴

During the birth, Bunny sat on the stairs, anxiously reading
Tristram Shandy
. Immediately afterwards, he rushed in to see Ray and their baby, whom he weighed and helped to bathe. In appearance, he considered the baby to have ‘Ray's eyes', but otherwise to be ‘a terrible little Garnett', the upper lip & nose reminding him of Edward. ‘You can't imagine', he enthused to
Constance, ‘how satisfactory this business is, I have never been so pleased with anything as this creature.'
²⁵
According to Sylvia, Bunny looked at the baby suckling at the breast and pondered, ‘it is rather difficult to make out whether he will prefer Keats or Shelley'.
²⁶
Bunny wrote to Mina, asking: ‘Did I tell you that my wife presented me with a most delightful boy […]? He is a very lovely creature with a perfect complexion and I think a rather philosophic disposition. Both he and Ray are in excellent health. I should like you to meet her some day.'
²⁷
This was news to Mina: during six months of ardent friendship, she had no idea Bunny was married, let alone a father-to-be.

Duncan bought Ray an enormous bouquet of roses, and the next day Bunny had lunch with him and Vanessa, Lydia Lopokova and Maynard Keynes, sharing his happiness with his old friends. As for the baby's name: Bruin was a strong possibility. However, Bunny and Ray settled on Richard, after a succession of Garnetts, followed by ‘Duncan' and ‘Carey', a name almost identical to that which Bunny had chosen, a year and a half before, in anticipation of his first-born. Thus Bunny again commemorated his love for Duncan; but if he hoped this would cement a bond between his friend and his son, or draw Duncan into a closer relationship with Ray, he was wrong. Three decades later, Duncan gave Richard and his wife, Jane, a handsome wedding gift. Otherwise, Duncan maintained little more than a distant interest in Bunny's family, continuing to see his
friend on his own terms, mostly away from the domestic arena.

Two weeks after Richard's birth, Bunny confessed to Mina that he was rather tired. This was not a result of sleepless nights with a new baby, but because he had been seeing friend after friend and attending numerous parties. Bunny's pocket diary in the early months of 1923 was studded with engagements and he seemed to see Tommy and Mina on an almost daily basis, as well as dining or breakfasting with Duncan regularly. He was still involved with Thea Fordham with whom in late January he had a tryst at Leith Hill, near Dorking in Surrey, where Edward kept an old-fashioned wooden barrel-shaped caravan. Meanwhile, Bunny wrote to Mina, ‘I love you very very much. I am very very fond of you & shall be so
always
& I feel very much happier from knowing you.'
²⁸

Bunny celebrated his thirty-first birthday, on 9 March 1923, by hosting a party in Duncan's studio behind No. 8 Fitzroy Street. Duncan was present, together with most of Bunny's Bloomsbury friends. Frances Marshall came, as did Tommy, and Mina Kirstein, bringing her friend Henrietta Bingham, the wealthy daughter of an American newspaper proprietor. Mina and Henrietta contributed an enormous cake decorated with a reproduction of one of Ray's woodcuts from
Lady into Fox
. Entertainment was provided by Henrietta, who sang African-American spirituals in her husky Southern voice and by the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, reprising her Covent Garden solo of earlier in the evening. Ray was there too, on one of the rare occasions when she mixed with Bloomsbury
en masse
.

It was around this time that the publisher and book designer Francis Meynell wandered into the bookshop, enquiring whether there was space available for a small publishing venture. As the
basement was vacant, Meynell decided to take it. A few days later Bunny was alone in the shop when someone came in from the landlord's office insisting that Mr Meynell sign the rental agreement immediately, otherwise it would be let to someone else. Masquerading as Meynell's business partner, Bunny duly signed the agreement. In fact Meynell already had a business partner, his girlfriend, Vera Mendel, who provided the £300 working capital to fund the venture. But recognising that Bunny would be an asset, Francis and Vera invited him to become the third partner in the Nonesuch Press. Now publisher as well as novelist and bookseller, Bunny could claim to be involved in every aspect of book production.

Francis Meynell was a year older than Bunny, already well established in the world of printing and publishing, having founded the Pelican Press in 1916. He was a socialist and like Bunny, a former conscientious objector. The two men had much in common, not least literary mothers, as Francis's mother was the poet Alice Meynell. According to Bunny, Vera was ‘lean, very beautiful, and insolently sure of her outstanding intelligence'. As Bunny got to know her, he was disturbed by her open disdain for those she loved, and noticed that her affectionate treatment of him was sometimes mingled with a ‘tinge of contempt'.
²⁹
She and Francis had chosen the title ‘Nonesuch Press' because they liked a device in a tapestry in Nonesuch Palace, which they thought would make a strong visual image for the venture, and they commissioned the illustrator Stephen Gooden to translate it into a colophon for their business. The Nonesuch ethos was simple: they wanted to produce beautiful books, in limited editions, for people who wanted to read them, rather than simply to own them. They were also interested in bringing back into
print books which had literary or intrinsic artistic merit. They were thus largely responsible for the resurgence of interest in Restoration literature and drama, and with Geoffrey Keynes – surgeon, scholar and bibliophile – as one of their main editors, they reignited interest in the poet William Blake.

The three partners did not want to produce books which were unduly expensive. On the contrary, by out-sourcing their printing, rather than becoming laboriously involved in typesetting, they could produce exquisite limited editions at relatively affordable prices. As Francis explained: ‘Our stock-in-trade has been the theory that mechanical means could be made to serve fine ends; that the machine in printing was a controllable tool. Therefore we set out to be mobilisers of other people's resources; to be designers, specifiers; rather than manufacturers; architects of books rather than builders.'
³⁰

From the outset, Birrell & Garnett and the Nonesuch Press had a symbiotic relationship. The bookshop provided a convivial atmosphere and its stock of second hand and rare books furnished a library-like repository for the Nonesuch editors. Both scholars in their own right, Bunny's bookshop partners also contributed to Nonesuch publications: Frankie as a translator of Plato's
Symposium
(1924), and Ralph as translator of Lamartine's
Fraziella
(1929). Bunny, who led a rather frenetic existence as a partner in two separate ventures within the same small building, ‘was readily available to
all
his partners, both upstairs and down in the cellar'.
³¹
The three
publishing partners got on well, partly because they all enjoyed what they were doing: Francis Meynell designing books, Vera organising everything, and Bunny exercising his literary judgement and writing the prospectuses. None of them particularly relished the more mundane administrative tasks, but it was typical of the
joie de vivre
they brought to the enterprise that they would circumvent boredom by throwing ‘invoice bees' in which they invited their friends to write invoices between drinks. In May 1923 the first three books were published, including John Donne's
Love Poems
, which sold out within the year. In most years they produced between eight and twelve books, and throughout the 1920s the business was very successful and much respected within its sector.

That summer of 1923, Bunny attended the Derby Day races with Mina, Henrietta and Tommy, where they were joined by an American attorney, Christopher L. Ward, for whom Bunny inscribed a copy of
Lady into Fox
. The following year, Ward sent Bunny his latest book,
Gentleman into Goose
. This affectionate parody was published by T. Werner Laurie, who perhaps enjoyed a gentle retaliation for Bunny's refusal to allow him to republish
Dope-Darling
. (Some twelve years later the National Fur Company embarked on an advertising campaign under the banner ‘Lady into Mink', which rather missed the point of the original, proclaiming ‘our little mink will find a fit monument in the fair figure of his possessor, and for such glory he might well be content to die'.
³²
) Meanwhile,
Lady into Fox
was published in the US by Alfred A. Knopf, and was being translated into French by Jane Bussy, Lytton Strachey's half-French niece. She found the translation problematic: how to convey the archaic Defoe-inspired tone? How to
communicate the concept of fox hunting to the French, who didn't hunt foxes? And thus, how to render words like ‘blooding' and ‘smeared'? The task of finding a French publisher for this translation was in the hands of the poet Brian Rhys, a friend of Thea Fordham's, who was then working for J.M. Dent et fils in Paris.

In early July, Bunny wrote to Constance, ‘Here is a
secret
. Please do not tell
a single
soul
.'
³³
He was to be awarded the Hawthornden Prize of £100 for
Lady into Fox
. On 11 July Bunny attended the award ceremony. According to the
Evening Standard
, ‘There was a diaphanous assembly in the dimness of the Aeolian Hall yesterday afternoon to see Mr G.K. Chesterton hand the Hawthornden prize to Mr David Garnett, the boyish-looking author of “Lady into Fox” '.
³⁴
The prize was (and still is) awarded annually to an English writer for the ‘best work of imaginative fiction'. The panel does not invite submissions and in some years no awards have been made. Other writers who received the prize in the 1920s included Sean O'Casey, Vita Sackville-West, Henry Williamson and Siegfried Sassoon, while recent winners have included William Fiennes and Hilary Mantel.