Bloomsbury's Outsider (40 page)

Bunny no longer had either the inclination or need to compartmentalise his life and was so content that even when he encountered Frances Partridge's beautiful young friend Janetta Jackson at a party given by Cyril Connolly, he did not feel the urge to over-amplify his blue-eyed charm, reflecting, ‘Ten years ago it would have been
fatal
to have seen her at all'.
⁷
He kept his London sojourns as brief as possible, hating to be away from Angelica. ‘It seems inconceivable', he wrote to her in October 1946, ‘that I should have parted from you only this morning. Somehow today has seemed like a week.'
⁸

Bunny's social life carried on much as it had done when Ray was alive. This was largely down to Angelica, who seamlessly took hold of the reins of hospitality, making Hilton as welcoming as before. Many of Bunny's old friends wandered back through Hilton's doors as if they had only been momentarily away. Ray's siblings and their families returned: Judy and Dick Rendel, Horace and Rachel Marshall, Tom and Nadine Marshall and Frances and Ralph Partridge. Even Duncan and Vanessa became regular visitors, enchanted by their granddaughters,
tacitly reconciled with Bunny. There were many friends whom Bunny had not seen during the war, including John Hayward, one of the first post-war visitors to Hilton, now much less mobile, having to be carried from the car to the house in an armchair. Charles Prentice re-entered Bunny's life, no longer a publisher, but still a firm friend. Mina and Bunny resumed their transatlantic correspondence which had faltered during the war.

Bunny had not seen Tim White since that fateful holiday at Sheskin Lodge in 1939. He decided that Tim would be a good companion to take grouse-shooting at Ridley Stokoe, where William, still un-discharged, was on leave. Bunny had allowed himself to forget that Tim was not the easiest companion. In the intervening years he had become more selfish and he had not recovered from the death of his beloved Setter, Brownie (‘my wife, mother, mistress & child').
⁹
As the days in Northumberland passed, Bunny's tolerance dwindled. He reported to Richard, ‘There has been a certain amount of wrangling between Tim & me with William silently sitting in judgment on us. I am afraid Tim sometimes makes me very irritable.'
¹⁰
But even William's patience was stretched when Tim commandeered his precious gun. Unable to pot a grouse, Tim complained petulantly that Bunny had taken him, there on false pretences. In fact Bunny had taken him there en route to Butts Intake where, currently homeless, Tim would spend the winter living rent-free.

In 1943 Leonard Woolf had invited Bunny to become his partner in the Hogarth Press. Bunny declined at the time, but having learnt that Leonard was dissolving his partnership with John Lehmann,
he wrote in February 1946 to ask Leonard whether he would consider selling him the Press. He was interested in making the purchase because, as he told Leonard, ‘I am setting up with Rupert Hart-Davis as a publisher and I hope this justifies my asking'.
¹¹
(In the event, the Hogarth Press was acquired by Chatto & Windus.)

Bunny had known Rupert for many years, initially through Edward and Jamie Hamilton, latterly because Rupert was a director of Jonathan Cape. Though not bosom friends, they respected one another. Rupert was fifteen years Bunny's junior, an Old Etonian who had dabbled with a stage career before turning to publishing. Approaching his fortieth year, he retained the moustache he had adopted in the army during the war, which, together with the pipe clamped permanently between his teeth, gave him a rather formidable militaristic air.

Bunny first mooted the idea of a joint publishing venture in 1941, when Rupert was serving in the Coldstream Guards. ‘After the war', Bunny wrote perceptively, ‘there will be a burst of intellectual curiosity of all kinds. Thousands of soldiers will feel they have missed a lot and will turn eagerly to reading books and some of them to writing them.' ‘Of course', he added, ‘I don't really know that I want to be a publisher: what I do know is that I don't want to be a journalist.'
¹²
Rupert replied enthusiastically, telling Bunny his idea was ‘the first thing that has excited me for months'. ‘Between us', he reflected accurately, ‘our literary ‘connection' is considerable, and we have the advantage […] of being really interested in books.'
¹³

In March 1946 Rupert Hart-Davis was formally registered as a Limited Company. Rupert and Bunny were joined by Teddy Young, an outstanding book designer responsible for Penguin Books' first penguin logo of 1935. Initially the three directors met once a week for lunch when they would make plans. Bunny was still tied into the completion of his
Secret History
and Rupert was finishing a life of Hugh Walpole for Macmillan. Although they hoped to get out their first books for the Christmas market, they were hampered by the fact that they could obtain hardly any paper. Paper remained rationed, allocation based on a percentage of a publisher's pre-war usage. As Hart-Davis had not existed before the war, they were assigned a miniscule six tons per annum. Nevertheless, in August 1946 they moved into their offices at 53 Connaught Street, off the Edgware Road. This was adorned with a splendid sign painted by Angelica, a fox on both sides, a loose adaptation of the fox colophon, which Reynolds Stone had designed for the business. They had chosen a fox partly because Bunny was identified with
Lady into Fox
, but also, according to Rupert, ‘because this animal might be said to represent both the author's and the bookseller's traditional view of the publisher'.
¹⁴
Bunny had, of course, set foot in all three camps during his career.

Their premises harked back to the early days of the Nonesuch Press: there was a ground-floor room for secretaries, but most of the business was conducted in the basement, where Rupert occupied a small room at the front and Teddy Young was housed in a larger room at the back. Bunny perched somewhere in between, but he had no desire to be involved in the day-to-day running of the business. Instead, he intended to read manuscripts at Hilton,
coming up to London once a week to attend Director's meetings, establish editorial policy, see authors and comment on manuscripts. As far as possible, he wished to be removed from routine administration and finance. Given his experience as literary editor of the
New Statesman
, Bunny knew he was unsuited to office work.

Bunny and family members put up £10,000 starting capital, one-third of the firm's working capital, worth £259,500 in today's terms.
¹⁵
Of this Bunny invested £5,000, Richard £2,350, Angelica £900 and William £250. In addition Angelica and Richard purchased preference £1 shares amounting to £500 each. Richard recollected that Angelica probably had help from Clive Bell, and that he and William might have been able to contribute as a result of proceeds from the sales of the Oxford
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
and
The Mint
, both legacies from Edward. In June Bunny benefited from the sale of Edward's books, and in October he sold some land to the local council, but £5,000 was a considerable sum to raise and he had to mortgage Hilton Hall to do so.

Rupert invested £3,000 and various friends, including Geoffrey Keynes, Arthur Ransome, Peter Fleming, Eric Linklater and H.E. Bates contributed the rest. Even with a working capital approaching £30,000, the firm was seriously under-funded. None of the three partners had any proper knowledge of finance. According to Rupert's biographer, Philip Ziegler, the company ‘never had the resources that would have allowed him to pay the sort of advances demanded by most established authors, to risk printing large quantities and holding substantial stocks, to spend freely on advertising and promotion'.
¹⁶

In normal circumstances Bunny might have turned to Maynard Keynes for advice. But Maynard, who had suffered ill health for some time, died of a heart attack on 21 April. Bunny was always struck by what he described as Maynard's ‘emotional loyalty', commenting that he ‘never went back on the people to whom he had given his affection or love'.
¹⁷
Bunny had greatly benefited from his astute financial guidance and from his generosity over the years, paying for bees in the First World War, helping to establish Birrell & Garnett, funding Richard's and William's education.

Bunny commemorated Keynes's life by publishing two of his Memoir Club papers, ‘Dr Melchior' and ‘My Early Beliefs'. In his Introduction Bunny explained that the memoirs were printed ‘with the allusions and personal jokes which were immediately understood by the circle to which they were read'. The reader, he felt, was privileged, for ‘He is hearing what was written only for the ears of those to whom the writer could speak entirely without reserve, and who would never mistake his meaning'.
¹⁸
Bunny alluded to an earlier age: with Maynard's death, he recognised that those old Bloomsbury values, the shared humour, understanding, allegiances and beliefs, were passing. Lytton Strachey, Carrington, Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf and now Maynard, were all gone. A few years previously, when Vanessa Bell painted a group portrait of the
Memoir Club
Roger, Lytton and Virginia were represented by portraits on the wall, as
memento mori
.
¹⁹

While Bunny mourned the latest in a line of lost friends, he could not allow himself to dwell on his own age and mortality. If ever it was imperative to live in the present, it was now. In the month that Rupert Hart-Davis was registered as a company, Angelica discovered she was pregnant. Her hands were already full with a two-and-a-half-year-old and a baby of ten months. She and Bunny discussed the implications of her pregnancy and Bunny recorded in his diary, ‘Told her my views'.
²⁰
Bunny's ‘views' centred on his aversion to abortion, at least in terms of his own potential offspring. In a later notebook, in which he sketched out Volume 4 of his memoirs, he recorded: ‘The conception of twins. A[ngelica] with difficulty persuaded to have them.'
²¹

From Angelica's perspective, if the pregnancy went smoothly, by Christmas she would be the mother of four children, the eldest three years old. It wasn't the kind of life she had envisaged. She had assumed she would be able to enjoy a life similar to her mother's, with painting and creativity at the fore. Times, however, were very different in 1946 to the 1920s, when Angelica was a child and Vanessa benefited from servants, especially the stalwart Grace Higgens. Although Bunny employed a part-time home-help, after the Second World War it was difficult to obtain live-in staff; to a large extent war-work had liberated women from domestic service. Anyway, Bunny could not afford a full-time nanny or housekeeper. The pregnancy went ahead, but Angelica spent much of that summer concerned about how she would manage.

In the autumn Bunny handed over his completed
Secret History
. He was enormously relieved, feeling he was no longer torn
between this Herculean endeavour and the demands of a new publishing venture. According to the historian Andrew Roberts, the
Secret History of PWE
remains ‘the most important document we have concerning the multifarious activities of this vital branch of Britain's wartime propaganda arm'. It did not, however, see the light of day for more than fifty years, remaining unpublished (as intended) during Bunny's lifetime. Lodged in the Cabinet Office, Bunny's manuscript was disinterred in the summer of 1952 by someone in the Information Research Department, who declared it a ‘
chronique scandaleuse
'. As Roberts observed, ‘David Garnett was always likely to have been an odd choice for bureaucrats to make if they wanted a safe banal official history written, let alone a white-wash'.
²²

On 21 November 1946, Angelica gave birth to twins, each weighing a little over seven pounds. Although Bunny and Angelica had hoped for a boy they were delighted with the baby girls, who they named Frances and Nerissa. Bunny felt immensely proud of them, and as he told Frances Partridge, he had fallen ‘madly in love with their whimpering charm'.
²³
Meanwhile, Amaryllis and Henrietta were at Charleston, being cared for by Vanessa, who wrote acerbically to Jane Bussy: ‘you can imagine that the news of two and both female was not received with unmixed joy in this house, though apparently the father at least was quite content'.
²⁴

William, however, had been a great cause of anxiety. Now twenty-one, he had laboured in the Durham mine long after the
end of war and his application for release had been refused. When his appeal against this decision was turned down, in October, accompanied by Daniel Hopkin, MP, Bunny went in person, to canvas Ness Edwards, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Labour & National Service. Hopkin was the father of Ann Hopkin, Bunny's former secretary at the PWE, and it was his influence which led to William's eventual release. Bunny received the good news the day after the twins' birth: William would be free by the end of the year and would join Richard (who had been discharged in September) at King's College, Cambridge.

Having returned to Gordon Square for the twins' birth, it was from there a few days later that the babies were rushed to Great Ormond Street Hospital, owing to sudden and dramatic weight loss. They both had pyloric stenosis, a narrowing of the passage between the stomach and small bowel, which prohibits the passage of milk into the bowel, causing dehydration and malnutrition. After several anxious days when Bunny felt that ‘Nothing matters suddenly but to keep them alive', their condition stabilised.
²⁵

Throughout Angelica's pregnancy Bunny had also been preoccupied with Constance's health as she had become perceptibly weaker. He and Nellie took turns to look after her, Nellie staying at The Cearne for extended periods. In November George Barnes, Director of the Third Programme at the BBC, wrote to ask Bunny whether Constance could be persuaded to join in a discussion on translation, to be broadcast early the following year. Bunny knew she was too frail to participate, but he raised the subject one evening, noting down his mother's
comments, so they could be discussed by those who did take part. Constance did not live to hear the broadcast: she died on 17 December 1946, two days short of her eighty-fifth birthday. Poignantly and in retrospect, Bunny scribbled in his pocket diary against 13 December: ‘Last talk with CG.'
²⁶
Bunny attended the cremation on the 19th, taking Nellie with him. Afterwards he buried his mother's ashes under a walnut tree at The Cearne. With Constance's parting an era had come to a close. H.G. Wells had died in the summer, and now there were very few remaining of Bunny's parents' pioneering generation. Constance had lived to hear of the birth of her twin granddaughters, and although she had not seen them, she died knowing that her beloved son was happy and fulfilled.