Bloomsbury's Outsider (42 page)

In early 1950 Bunny revived the Cranium Club, which had
lapsed as a result of the war. ‘It is very pleasant', he told Mina, ‘to meet some old friends – though going through the list of members I saw that out of 51, thirteen are now dead.'
²¹
Adrian Stephen had died two years previously, but the most recently departed was Charles Prentice, the publisher who had taken Bunny on at Chatto and had been devoted to Ray as much as to him. Prentice died in Kenya after an overdose of barbiturates, having been ill for some months. He had fallen in love with his sister-in-law, Lynn Adamson, with whom he lived for several years, causing opprobrium in some quarters. Bunny had remained loyal, and had last seen Prentice on the eve of his departure for Kenya in 1949. Lynn Adamson gave Bunny Prentice's ring.

Despite Bunny's fears that he would end up on the literary scrap heap, he remained very much in the public eye. The previous year, the publication of
The Novels of Thomas Love Peacock
was marked by a live BBC radio broadcast, in which Bunny entered into a discussion with ‘Dr Richard Garnett', played by the actor Felix Aylmer; a young Welsh actor, Richard Burton, took the role of Shelley. Bunny's short stories,
Purl and Plain
were broadcast by the BBC that year. In January 1950
A Rabbit in the Air
was broadcast on BBC radio and in March ‘New Books and Old' concerned
A Man in the Zoo. Elephant Bill
was published in May, a best-seller, which sold out a fourth impression by Christmas. (Bunny received no royalties, his ghosting all in a day's work at Hart-Davis.) He was also still working as an occasional reader for Jonathan Cape, for whom he was editing
The Essential T.E. Lawrence
.

Having outgrown its cramped offices at Connaught Street, in July 1950 Hart-Davis moved to 36 Soho Square. This had the
benefit of an enormous basement suitable for keeping stock, a ground floor reception room occupied by typists, a large first-floor office for Rupert and smaller offices for production and publicity. In theory Bunny shared Rupert's office, but still the absentee partner, he worked mostly at Hilton. By now Rupert's mistress, Ruth Simon, had been brought in as an editor, and she occupied a cubby hole off Rupert's office and shared with him an apartment at the top of the building.

According to Philip Ziegler:

The atmosphere in the office was as carefree as in the flat above. ‘It was great fun to work there,' Teddy Young remembered, and the word ‘fun' is one which recurs repeatedly in descriptions of the daily routine. A lot of work in fact got done, but there was always time to joke or gossip. The directors took long and usually bibulous lunches and nobody complained if the junior staff from time to time indulged themselves as well.
²²

Bunny's bibulous lunches were confined to mid-week, but he enjoyed his work, obtaining the same sort of pleasure from reading manuscripts that Edward had done. But Bunny remained concerned about the state of Hart-Davis finances, believing that although they anticipated a small profit in this third year of trading, the business required more investment. He had put in all he could, mortgaging not only Hilton but also The Cearne. Just when he persuaded Mina to invest £700, the company had a piece of luck. As Richard Garnett explained, ‘Dr Henry Goverts, a wealthy bibliophile based in Liechtenstein, but with a taste for
all things English, was tempted to invest in a British publisher.'
²³
Hart-Davis fitted the bill.

In June 1950, when Angelica presented her first Memoir Club paper, Frances Partridge noticed that Bunny ‘beamed out upon the rest of the company from within a warm blanket of absorption in his own affairs'. She recalled that afterwards they ‘walked in a body through the hot dark night to Duncan's rooms, passing James [Strachey] standing on his doorstep in a white silk suit. It was as if all London had shrunk to Bloomsbury and was peopled only by those human portents.'
²⁴
Even in its diminished state, the Bloomsbury Group carried on its traditions in its time-worn territory as if little had changed. But changes were taking place, especially in the Garnett household, where Bunny and Angelica tried to negotiate a
modus vivendi
. Angelica was increasingly restless and dissatisfied with life. Bunny understood her need for space, her craving for time to paint, but life with four daughters and a muddy farm always seemed to impinge. In July, when Angelica spent a fortnight in France she wrote to Bunny: ‘We will both turn over a new leaf when I return.'
²⁵

In November Bunny added another fifty acres to his farm, having purchased Kidman's Farm at Hilton. He reported to Mina that he was ‘becoming a farmer as well as all my other occupations', and that ‘the fields, animals, plans of growing crops makes me extremely happy'.
²⁶
Just as he liked to dress the part, don the uniform, carry the immaculately rolled umbrella, he now carried the ‘Farmer and Stockbreeder' diary in his inside
pocket. Here a new name began to appear, against his one or two days each week in London. It was then that he saw Ann Hopkin, his former secretary at the PWE. The affair probably began in April 1951, when Ann wrote to Bunny stating that she was very fond of him.
²⁷
It was Bunny's first defection from Angelica.

‘It is a miracle to recreate yourself when you have been changing for nearly sixty years, and living with yourself all the time.'
¹

In the autumn of 1951 Bunny started writing his autobiography. He had been toying with the idea for several years, thinking he might write something about a single period, perhaps Sommeilles or living at Charleston during the Great War. As far back as 1938 Maynard Keynes had encouraged him to write his memoirs: ‘I am not one of those who have acquaintance with the past, but you are, and you should use it.'
²
Of course Bloomsbury's Memoir Club promoted ‘acquaintance with the past', stirring up a potent mix of nostalgia, introspection, ribaldry and what Bunny summed up as ‘an almost gourmet-like love of the foibles of old and intimate friends'.
³
Bunny
found he could easily recall his past, could view his life ‘as a whole & get an impression of the periods & changes'.
⁴

If he could look back with objectivity, he did not approach the present with such detachment. Ann Hopkin's father had recently died, and Bunny, always a reliable listener and good comforter, provided a level of consolation to which she responded by falling in love. Ann was half Italian and half Welsh, an attractive olive-skinned, dark-haired woman of thirty-two. She had been called to the Bar in 1948 and was now working at Somerset House in the Solicitors' Office of the Inland Revenue. She told Bunny she had already been wounded in love and couldn't bear to be hurt again. He promised not to make her unhappy.

Bunny had also formed an intense friendship with Rosemary Hinchingbrooke, the thirty-six-year-old wife of his neighbour, the Conservative MP Victor Montagu, Viscount Hinchingbrooke. According to Bunny, Rosemary was ‘a big attractive woman with short fair hair which contrasted strikingly with her light brown eyes which were so often expressive of a surprised sincerity'. Their friendship got going one day when he was on his tractor, ploughing. Rosemary drew up in her car, got out, and asked if she might drive the tractor. She climbed up, her skirt pulled up to her thighs. ‘That', Bunny said, ‘was the beginning of my personal friendship with her'. He employed the word ‘personal' to distinguish between her friendship with Angelica, for, as he put it, the ‘friendship with Rosemary was not one but two. Her friendship with me was one thing; that with Angelica was another.'
⁵
Rosemary was a good listener, the recipient of both Bunny's and Angelica's confidences. She was also a keen artist,
often painting with Angelica. Indeed, the two women and their children were in and out of each other's homes. As Henrietta Garnett observed, the Garnetts and Montagus became ‘a kind of clan'.
⁶

Bunny turned sixty in March 1952, an event which passed without celebration. He spent Easter week with Mina Curtiss in Paris, where she had taken an apartment on the prow of the Isle St Louis, with views of both banks of the Seine. During the 1950s Mina travelled from America to France on an almost annual basis, where she undertook research and translated works by Degas, Halévy and Proust. Throughout the 1950s Bunny would spend a week or two with her there most years. Knowing that Bunny was hard up, Mina offered her patronage diplomatically, telling him that as the apartment was paid for, he would need only to fund his passage across the Channel. In Paris Bunny had a taste of the high life to which Mina was accustomed, dining in the best restaurants, entertained by Parisian intellectuals and
haute societé
, engaged in a ceaseless round of exhibitions, dinners and afternoon tea. Invited to tea by Alice B. Toklas, Bunny was particularly taken by her ‘vigorous chestnut moustache'.
⁷

This taste of good living was a momentary respite from difficulties at home. When Bunny returned he found Angelica absent, at Charleston with the children. He wrote telling her, ‘I long to see you darling & feel as though I should never do so again'.
⁸
She returned to Hilton only to leave a fortnight later for a painting holiday with Rosemary. Bunny worried she might not return,
that she was immersed in other relationships and found him old and uninteresting. His letters to her were full of anxiety: ‘Don't do anything you may regret', he urged, ‘Darling I long to see you: will you love me when you come back?'
⁹

Bunny was also worried about Hart-Davis Ltd. Not only had the company experienced a bad spring, but Bunny found his attitude to the business progressively at variance to that of Rupert. Their gentlemanly manner of dealing with contradictory opinions had given way to frayed tempers and loud verbal exchanges. The firm was losing money, economies had to be made: Teddy Young went half-time and then left; standards were subsumed by cheaper type and bindings. Having already agreed to a substantial cut to his expenses allowance, Bunny now agreed to waive his salary for a whole year. Rupert made no such sacrifice.

Bunny believed he could afford this gesture as he anticipated receiving payment for the rights to
A Man in the Zoo
, again the subject of a putative film. Mina had introduced Bunny to ‘an old beau', ‘one of the few intelligent Hollywood producers', a man of ‘excellent taste' who had been educated in England.
¹⁰
This was presumably John Houseman, with whom Mina had been in love at one time, and with whom she worked at the Mercury Theatre in the 1930s. By 1953, however, the treatment was in the hands of Howard Koch, a left-wing scriptwriter blacklisted by Hollywood and resident in London. Whether the payment was down to Houseman, Koch or someone in between, it was not forthcoming in 1952 when Bunny needed it badly.

It was obvious that Hart-Davis urgently required further investment. In April 1952 Herbert Agar, a wealthy Anglophile
American, offered to contribute substantially on condition that Milton Waldman, another American and former chief editorial advisor to the British publisher William Collins, be brought in as joint managing director with Rupert. Bunny greeted this prospect with dismay. Rupert would not make up his mind and retreated to bed with flu. As Philip Ziegler observed, with Rupert ‘It seemed always to be a case of jam tomorrow'.
¹¹

Bunny wrote to Angelica on 10 May to say the investors had dropped out. It was a mixed blessing. He also mentioned that he was to be made CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List, the ‘outsider' now apparently irrevocably within. On 15 July Bunny was awarded the CBE at Buckingham Palace, with Angelica and Richard in attendance. The artists Lawrence Gowing and William Coldstream and the actor Michael Redgrave were also made CBE, along with Bunny's old friend, Arthur Waley. Dennis Proctor, a fellow Cranium Club member, wrote to congratulate Bunny, but expressed what must have touched a raw nerve: ‘Since you have been my favourite living writer for quarter of a century, I was delighted that your work has at last been recognized by the powers that be. (Perhaps even it might encourage you to give us some more of it?)'
¹²

In August it was Bunny's turn for a holiday. He took Ann to Venice, hoping it would help her recover from lingering depression. They were lovers, but this made Bunny yearn all the more for Angelica, and for the passionate love she had once felt for him. He feared that his absence with Ann, far from being a cause of regret, would merely be a liberation & relief to Angelica. While Bunny and Ann travelled through the Dolomites into
Italy, Angelica tackled an errant pig, only to find all the goslings had escaped. She wrote to tell Bunny that Lady had given birth to a bull calf; the milk had been TB tested, and that she hoped he was enjoying himself. There were no endearments at the end of the letter.

At Hilton, Angelica was unstinting in her efforts to provide a happy and fulfilled childhood for the children, creating memorable Christmases and participating in family word-games while, as Richard put it, ‘up to her elbows in domesticity'.
¹³
She cooked delicious meals, encouraging her daughters to learn to cook, usually against a background of the pigs' potato peelings stewing on the Aga. Somehow she found time to paint, create mosaics and play the violin and piano, but she rarely had time to devote herself properly to anything beyond the domestic sphere. She began to resent the repetitive nature of housework and the muck brought in from the farm.

Life had changed, and with the expansion of the farm Bunny had changed too. He was putting in more and more hours and despite advertising for a second man, could find nobody to support Harry. The attraction of early mornings and milk pans was beginning to wane. ‘I get awfully tired', Bunny told Mina, ‘& seem to do nothing only because I do so many little things. It would be so delightful to be able to lie in bed in the morning instead of getting up at 7 o'clock.'
¹⁴
But farming was a commitment, and just as Prentice had remarked about publishing, a job you have willy-nilly to be in or out of. Bunny always took pride in his strength, in his fitness and stamina, enjoying productive physical labour: digging, building things, planting seeds and
pruning trees. But he had forgotten just how relentless farm work was in winter when the weather was bad and daylight short. As a twenty-five-year-old, he had hated dung-carting for Hecks: now aged sixty he was carting dung again. Then there was the tedious bureaucracy, quite contrary to Bunny's romantic view of farming: filling in forms recording milk yields and percentages of butter-fat. Henrietta Garnett remembers this as a solemn weekend ritual carried out at the dining table, ‘like Gladstone saying his prayers'.
¹⁵