Bloomsbury's Outsider (20 page)

Bunny was exceptionally busy. Not only was he running the bookshop, but he was engrossed in the Nonesuch, writing occasional pieces for Vogue, contributing a story to Robert Graves's
The Winter Owl
, reviewing for the
Nation
and revising his latest novel,
A Man in the Zoo
. He had also started to write a ‘London Literary Letter' for the
Louisville Courier-Journal
, a newspaper owned by Henrietta Bingham's millionaire father, Robert Worth ‘Judge' Bingham, in which Bunny shamelessly plugged his friends' books and Nonesuch publications. In a few short months
he had become a father, a literary sensation and a publisher. Now he was a journalist, too. Consequently he felt swamped and irritable, firing off a grumpy letter to Mina: ‘Really how foolish it is the way you write to me with incessant complaints about my behaviour […]. I should have thought it might occur to you […] that
I am busy
.' ‘I am not', he added pompously, ‘an idle young man dancing attendance on women'.
³⁵
But he was dancing attendance on one particular young woman: Henrietta Bingham. Bunny commemorated their affair by commissioning Henrietta's other lover – Tommy – to sculpt her head.

Nearly thirty years later, when Mina re-read her early correspondence with Bunny, she concluded: ‘What a bore I must have been, always wanting reassurance, always wanting to be told the exact amount of love you felt for me.' ‘But then', she added, insightfully, ‘I decided that you were pretty silly to have expected me – inexperienced, un-sophisticated, bookish, romantic young idiot that I was […] to know how to behave in a love-affair with a married man.'
³⁶
In August 1923, Bunny tried to rid himself of this particular complication, informing Mina that ‘the two people for whom I care most in the world are Duncan and Ray. You also know that I love you very much, but not as much as I love them.' ‘I can't help hurting you', he added, echoing his earlier comment to Ray.
³⁷

There was one other person whom Bunny loved unconditionally, and whom he felt never made undue demands: Thea. Their relationship continued much as it had, with assignations in the countryside or occasional dinners followed by sex. But in the summer of 1923 Thea went to Paris, and when she returned she
wrote Bunny a typically cryptic letter: ‘Once a red rose in my heart, blossomed & blossomed for so long it would have died – but before it died a white one flowered by it & they both flower together.'
³⁸
The red rose was Bunny; the white rose Brian Rhys, the poet who endeavoured to find Bunny a French publisher. Concerned that Brian would usurp him in Thea's affections, Bunny had scribbled a desultory note on one of her letters: ‘TF had been seeing Brian Rhys in Paris.'
³⁹
That October Thea wrote to Bunny telling him she didn't want to see him for a while. She explained: ‘I do feel something particular towards you', but added that those feelings did not ‘fit with my love for Brian.'
⁴⁰

While Thea vanished from Bunny's life, so did Mina and Henrietta, who returned to America. Although Bunny missed his American friends, there was compensation. Henrietta had left Bunny in charge not only of her car, but of her chauffeur, ostensibly on the condition that Bunny would sell the vehicle for her. Leaving Ray and Richard with Mam, Bunny enjoyed several excursions with friends including Duncan, Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova. He spent a weekend motoring with Harold Hobson, and another walking with a new friend, Alec Penrose, whom he had met when Penrose tutored Mina's younger brothers in London that summer. Bunny described Alec as an ‘elegant, charming and wholly delightful dilettante', and as ‘a passionate character', but ‘full of fear'.
⁴¹
Although his brother Roland was
a well-known artist and British ‘Surrealist', Alec eschewed modern art, in favour of the preservation of a traditional ‘English' aesthetic. Now Alec joined Duncan, Frankie and Tommy as one of Bunny's coterie of intimate male friends.

‘I do have the devil's own luck don't I?' Bunny wrote to Mina in October.
⁴²
He had just received another literary award: the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, amounting to £144. Based at the University of Edinburgh, the prize had been established in 1919 and has been likened to the Booker Prize.
⁴³
Two prizes were awarded annually, one for the best work of fiction, the other for the best biography. That year Percy Lubbock won the biography prize for
Earlham
. D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster and Walter de la Mare were among others who won the fiction prize in the 1920s, while A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan and Jonathan Franzen are more recent winners. Bunny was particularly glad to be in the company of Lytton Strachey, who won the biography prize the previous year.

While Bunny gallivanted about with his friends, Ray was less mobile, feeling trapped at The Cearne with baby Richard. She wrote complaining to Bunny that it was hard looking after a baby with no help and in ‘another person's house', which ‘doubles the trouble'.
⁴⁴
She informed him she would be going to East Chaldon the following week, for Ray had met Theo Powys and his wife Violet on one of their rare sorties to London. Meanwhile, Bunny discussed the possibility of moving to East Chaldon with Tommy, but decided against the idea. Ray had not been party to this discussion.

‘I never much enjoy writing itself but the wonderful thing is to go about living in two worlds: a real double life.'
¹

In January 1924 Bunny and Ray took a holiday, travelling in Spain where their destination was remote Yegen in Grenada, where they were guests of Gerald Brenan. It was a timely vacation, for Ray's nomadic existence had contributed to a growing sense of dislocation from Bunny. With nothing to distract them, except donkeys and magnificent scenery, they could focus entirely on each other. The break was such a positive experience that they planned to rent Gerald's house later in the year when he returned to England.

Meanwhile, Edward had read the manuscript of
A Man in the Zoo
, which he returned to Bunny with several pages of comments. Bunny admired his father's critical acumen and had praised his book,
Friday Nights
, published the previous year, telling Edward, ‘No one in the world has your gifts […] you never miss the smallest individual flavour'.
²
Edward was renowned for his incisive
thoroughness with authors, but Bunny hadn't bargained for quite how thorough his father would be in dissecting his own work. Edward wrote page after page, underlining points, rewriting dialogue, indicating areas where he thought narrative tension or tone might be improved. ‘In “L into F” he wrote, ‘it was the
emotional integrity
of the man's mood that enabled one to stand the close detailed texture of the style […]. Here, I think, you should try to introduce little (quiet) shafts of satire at various points – & thus relieve the rather
wearing
monotony of the love narrative.'
³

Bunny knew Edward was a hard taskmaster, but Bunny wasn't one of his authors, and he gave his father his manuscripts to read as a mark of respect as much as for critical analysis. This created a tension in their relationship. Hitherto Bunny had been very much his own person, forging a career, or careers, without recourse to parental advice. But now he was working in the very field in which his father's critical faculties were so finely honed. Bunny needed to strike a balance between following his own creative instincts and appearing to respect, rather than reject, his father's counsel.

A Man in the Zoo
did not have quite the critical success of
Lady into Fox
, although it sold extremely well. The signed, limited subscribers' edition was oversubscribed, and the ordinary edition was re-printed three times in the first couple of months. Once again the book was enhanced by Ray's exquisite woodcuts, although again Bunny failed to dedicate it to her, dedicating it instead to Henrietta Bingham and Mina Kirstein. Reviewers mainly perceived the book as a fantasy engaging with
metamorphosis in the style of
Lady into Fox
. Instead it was a more philosophical and scientific enquiry into the nature of man as a species and whether a hierarchy of species exists with man at the apex. There is also a dig at what was to become Bunny's
bête noire
: organised religion. And so the plot spins on an argument, during a visit to London Zoo, between a young Scotsman, John Cromartie, and his girlfriend, Josephine Lacket, on the nature of love. Cromartie believes that Josephine's Christian ethos in loving all men is incompatible with fully loving one man. He storms off and volunteers himself as an exhibit in the ape house, on the premise that the species
Homo sapiens
is missing from the zoo.

The story works on the principle that animals are social beings which should not live in solitary confinement. Moreover, in a zoo where there is no privacy, love cannot flourish, as it is an essentially private emotion. Cromartie is badly mauled by a neighbouring orang-utan and is taken to hospital. When he recovers he discovers the ape house has become a man house, the orang-utan replaced by an African-American man. When Cromartie informs the zoo authorities that he and Josephine want to marry and live together in his cage, the authorities insist he is released. Hand in hand, he and Josephine disappear into Regent's Park. ‘Nobody looked at them, nobody noticed them. The crowd was chiefly composed of couples like themselves.'
⁴

The
Evening Standard
's critic thought that Bunny had established for himself a genre in which he told ‘a preposterous story in a perfectly convincing fashion';
⁵
the
Scotsman
concurred, stating that Mr Garnett had created his own ‘stylistic convention' in which he led the reader willingly to enter into the ‘suspension of
disbelief'.
⁶
Leonard Woolf, in the
Nation
commended Bunny for moving beyond the ‘
tour de force
' of his first novel, to produce a second in which his own voice could be discerned.
⁷
In the
New Statesman
, Raymond Mortimer, henceforward Bunny's most loyal reviewer, predicted that Mr Garnett ‘will take his place in the textbooks of the future as one of the fixed stars of twentieth-century English literature'.
⁸
The reviews were generally positive, but, as often with second novels, anxious about which direction Bunny would take in his next book.

The Northern Whig, published in Belfast, announced that the success of Mr Garnett's first two novels ‘will break up one of the most interesting partnerships in London'. Mr Garnett would be leaving Birrell & Garnett, to devote more time to writing, and ‘His present plan is for Mrs Garnett and himself to take a house in Spain'.
⁹
Bunny was able to leave the shop to focus on writing because Chatto & Windus, under the benevolent guidance of Charles Prentice, offered guaranteed terms for Bunny's next three books. Bunny was also fortunate in finding a purchaser for his share of the business, which was bought by Graham Pollard, a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate at Oxford who would become one of the most respected bibliographers in the business. The shop, which never made much money, was eventually sold to Quaritch in 1939.

Bunny's plan to move with Ray to Spain had to be abandoned because Ray was pregnant. She informed Bunny that if she was to have another child, they would need to have a proper home
where they could live together as a family. ‘You must', Bunny agreed, ‘have a settled home in England, in the country & you must have it at once'. He also promised that he would not ‘have love affairs with women without talking to you about it at the time & I will try not to have any at all if I can help it'. ‘I don't know', he added, ‘how not to hurt you […]. I want your love, & depend on your love. There is nothing else in my life that I value at all – but I am a selfish pig.'
¹⁰
Whilst Bunny behaved like a selfish pig in London, Ray made a base of sorts at East Chaldon, where Bunny visited her and Richard at weekends, bringing with him a succession of friends including Tommy's brother, Garrow Tomlin.

In September 1924 Bunny wrote to Sylvia Townsend Warner: ‘Such excitements, my dear, have been happening to me. It's not a person, but a – no, not an animal – but a house that I have fallen in love with this time. And I feel as I did when I was twenty, that it was irretrievable, irrevocable – that if I cannot live in that house I shall never live in another.'
¹¹
The property had been advertised in
Country Life
and Bunny had wasted no time in viewing it. He had fallen in love with Hilton Hall, a handsome, mellow, weathered red-brick, three-storey, seventeenth-century house in a small village some dozen miles from Cambridge. ‘There is a staircase of oak', he told Sylvia, ‘carved beams, a wide hall, splendid dining-room and drawing-room. Six bedrooms. A bath, hot and cold water, two wcs, a convenient kitchen with a good range.' It was well-appointed outside too, with two acres of orchard, a tennis court and a seventeenth-century square dove house, itself large enough to accommodate
a human, rather than avian family.

Bunny was desperate to buy the house; Ray, who had seen and admired it, was more cautious, partly because she worried that Bunny would ‘fall out of love with it'. He wrote to Ray, now at The Cearne, demanding that she made up her mind regarding the purchase. ‘What an absurdity', she replied, ‘here we are only 26 miles apart settling such an important thing as whether I shall spend ½ my capital on a house by a note from you demanding yes or no by return.'
¹²
The asking price was £2,000 (c. £60,000 today). Ray's offer of £1,600 was accepted.