Bloomsbury's Outsider (49 page)

Angelica was spending more and more time in France. She was there in January 1962, in February and again in May. Bunny wrote to her stating he had been ‘going through such emotions about MOBY DICK'.
⁹
It was not the novel by Herman Melville to which he referred, but a houseboat moored in London, at Cheyne Walk. Bunny thought it a snip at £1,200 (£15,432 today), the perfect solution to Amaryllis's accommodation problems and an ideal London base for himself. It was, however, more like a beached whale than a houseboat, having originally been used in the Dunkirk evacuation and now badly in need of repair.

In a generally buoyant frame of mind, Bunny agreed to go to Alderney at the end of June, to see Tim White, recuperating from heart surgery. Tim's novel
The Once and Future King
had been turned into a highly successful musical,
Camelot
, and as a result he was now both celebrated and wealthy. He had become friendly with the actress Julie Andrews, who starred in the musical, and her then husband, the set-designer Tony Walton. When Bunny met them at Alderney he instantly warmed to them, but as usual he found Tim a strain and was shocked by his emaciated condition.

Later that year, Tim wrote a warm and appreciative letter in which he said that Bunny had been responsible for changing his life. He explained that this occurred late in the 1930s, when he was going through a religious phase. Unaware of Ray's illness,
he had held forth to Bunny on the subject of death and damnation, stating that it was a matter of moral choice whether one ended up in heaven or hell. As he teasingly recalled, ‘Very quietly, you said, ‘I think (pause) the enormous facts of birth and death (pause) are so
tremendous
(long pause) that all these fairy stories or fables about them are (struggle for the right words) are (long struggle) that they
degrade
them'. ‘I am now', Tim announced, ‘an agnostic'.
¹⁰
He signed the letter, ‘your loving TIM'. It was an affectionate tribute, penned fifteen months before his death from coronary heart disease.

In August, Bunny and Angelica went house-hunting in France, focussing on the Lot. Angelica craved distance from Hilton, but it was as though she imagined, or tried to convince herself, that a house in France would supply the fulfilment missing from her life. After viewing a seemingly endless succession of ruined mills, they finally looked around an old
auberge
in the tiny but picturesque village of St Martin-de-Vers, about seventeen miles north-east of Cahors. The house comprised a living room-kitchen, dining room, drawing room, two small bedrooms and a large bedroom; outside a small garden had the benefit of a spring. It belonged to an elderly lady who dismissed any questions about sanitation by pointing to ‘
une chaise percée
' precariously balanced upon boards over the rubbish heap, which, she informed them, was private and – being in the open air – healthy. Bunny was overcome by the building's charm and he and Angelica decided to buy it, a purchase concluded three months later. This common purpose brought him and Angelica unexpectedly close. What Bunny enjoyed most was ‘the freedom
which for some childish reason I find in buying
paté
from a charcuterie instead of sausages from Mr Anderson'.
¹¹

The Familiar Faces
was published by Chatto & Windus in October 1962. It had taken a long while to write and was, Bunny acknowledged, a painful work. The book came at a fertile period for Bloomsbury memoirs. Leonard Woolf had recently published two volumes,
Sowing
(1960) and
Growing
(1961), and Gerald Brenan published
A Life of One's Own
(1962) which he dedicated to Bunny. Once again Bunny's book was the subject of major reviews, mostly positive.
The Times
concluded that Bunny employed ‘all the old skill of pinning a personality to our memory with a single sentence', and that ‘the very tones of those years we knew rings true'. Several critics mentioned that Bunny's trilogy (ending in 1940) was already an important reference point for historians of the period. In the journal
Critical Quarterly
, C.L. Mowat singled out Bunny's autobiography for praise. Referring to the spate of literary memoirs which ‘draw on a whole set of writers and their friends, and have a value for literary history', he rated Bunny's the ‘most delightful and sustained autobiography of this class'.
¹²

The
TLS
reviewer, however, complained that Bunny's latest volume was too long and too anecdotal. Raymond Mortimer, in the
Sunday Times
gave a generally glowing review, although he thought that Bunny was too ‘occupied with his memories, not with the effect he may make upon his readers'.
¹³
Mortimer explained to Bunny that he thought he ‘seemed to assume in
your readers knowledge they cannot have about persons you discuss': a fair point, particularly if the reader had not read the two previous volumes. As a salve, Mortimer praised the ‘sweetness with which you speak of your friends', as ‘one of the great charms of the book – which makes me love you better than ever'.
¹⁴
His main complaint, however, was the omission of an index, which Bunny presumably planned to append to volume four. Other friends wrote similarly appreciative letters. Jamie Hamilton thought it was time they got together to write about their aeroplane. Francis Meynell found the book moving, especially Bunny's portrait of Vera Meynell. Sylvia Townsend Warner praised the book's ‘warmth and judiciousness and fortitude', telling Bunny, ‘I love you more than ever since this book'.
¹⁵
John Hayward, always generous, told Bunny he had ‘recaptured & fixed for ever in words […] the pleasure & pain of loving people & places & of the emotions they once aroused'.
¹⁶

There was one discordant voice: Mina Curtiss could not understand why Bunny felt the need to reveal that she and Henrietta Bingham were undergoing psychoanalysis in the 1920s. She felt it was not only an error of judgement, but a betrayal of trust. She told Bunny his transgression would not affect their friendship, adding: ‘in all honesty – and as Proust used to say who wants honesty – I can't help saying that
Familiar Faces
seems to me an extremely self-indulgent book'.
¹⁷
Several others drew Bunny's
attention to errors of fact, assuming that as with volumes one and two, he would publish errata in volume four. Diana Mosley, a new fan, wrote to tell him how much she liked all three volumes, but that ‘Mosleyite fascists' did not exist in the 1920s.

Nellie remained as important to Bunny as ever. She was not interested in material possessions, chastising Bunny for bringing her gifts, wanting only his company, conversation and affection. ‘It was so utterly lovely seeing you', she wrote after one visit, ‘You bring a world with you that is different from other worlds'.
¹⁸
In September 1962, soon after returning from France, Bunny received a letter from Nellie expressing a great longing to see him. ‘I want so much to see you', she said, ‘I love you and am so happy to think of you'.
¹⁹
Nellie was ninety, and having been ill the previous year, remained weak. She had been a mainstay in Bunny's life for so long that it was hard to countenance that she might die. He visited her regularly and was delighted to find her mind undimmed. But this letter of 19 September is the last extant letter from Nellie to Bunny. He did go to see her, and in November was with her just a few days before she died on the 13th. Bunny's cousin Rayne had gone to sit with her and was in the next room when Nellie died in the night. Bunny dealt with her possessions, and also with the disposal of her body, which she left to a teaching hospital. He felt Nellie's loss deeply: he had loved her almost as much as his parents, and had known her almost as long as he knew himself.

On 22 December Henrietta married Burgo Partridge, Frances and Ralph Partridge's son and Bunny's nephew by his marriage
to Ray. Henrietta was only seventeen but wildly in love. They made all the wedding arrangements themselves and Frances couldn't help noticing the ‘geniality of Bunny', who, with Nellie still on his mind, ‘began talking about the necessity of leaving one's body to the doctors'.
²⁰

Bunny was working on a translation from the French of Victoria Ocampo's psychological investigation of T.E. Lawrence's character
338171 T.E
.
²¹
This was more to Bunny's taste than the film
Lawrence of Arabia
, which he took Amaryllis to see in January 1963. Although he appreciated the ‘marvellous scenes of deserts & camels in colour', he considered that Peter O'Toole's ‘impersonation of Lawrence was grotesque & the whole thing really an abomination'.
²²
Bunny wrote immediately to Sam Spiegel expressing his gratitude to Spiegel, for not using his script. ‘I am indeed fortunate', he added, ‘for I have come out of the preposterous affair with clean, though not empty hands'.
²³

The film had been premiered a month previously, at which time A.W. Lawrence charted its inaccuracies in a letter in
The Times
. He also published an article entitled ‘The Fiction and the Fact' in the
Observer
, concluding: “I need only say that I should not have recognised my brother”.
²⁴
Spiegel published a rejoinder in
The New York Times
in which he skilfully shifted the spotlight from questions of historical accuracy to a personal attack on A.W. Lawrence, whom, he suggested, neither wanted family
skeletons rattled nor understood T.E.L.'s narcissistic nature. Spiegel concluded by stating that Lawrence's supporters had profited from selling the film rights, quoting the ‘clean, but not empty hands' comment of one biographer.
²⁵
A few months before the film's release, Bunny had taken part in a BBC television documentary entitled
T.E. Lawrence 1888–1935
. As the documentary's producer Malcolm Brown explained, in endeavouring to portray a real person, they deliberately attempted to produce a counterpoint to the David Lean film.
²⁶

For some time, Bunny's accountant had been pressing him to get rid of the farm at Hilton. It was a drain on resources and Bunny was only too aware that it had placed a strain on his marriage and kept him from writing. It was a hard decision, but in April 1963, while Angelica was in France, Bunny sold his Jersey herd. With Amaryllis pursuing an acting career, Henrietta married and Nerissa at art school in Leeds, only Fanny remained to be settled. But if Bunny hoped that an almost empty nest and no farm would draw Angelica closer or make her feel less tied, he was wrong. Now she usually spent midweek in London where, worried about Duncan, she devoted as much time as she could to him. But there was something to look forward to: Henrietta was expecting a baby, and Bunny rejoiced in the way this would again result in a Marshall-Garnett child. He informed Mina that the baby ‘will be curiously related to my other grandsons as his mother will be their aunt and his father their first cousin once-removed'.
²⁷
The baby
would be Oliver's and Ned's half-cousin on the Garnett side and second cousin on the Marshall.

In July, two young Americans, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, joined Bunny for lunch at Hilton. An historian, Stansky was a graduate of King's College, Cambridge and of Harvard and went on to a distinguished academic career. Abrahams was a poet and novelist, and would become a highly respected literary editor. They were jointly writing a biography of Julian Bell and the poet John Cornford, both of whom lost their lives in the Spanish Civil War.
²⁸
That same month Bunny had tea at the Reform Club with Leon Edel, the great Henry James scholar and biographer. But there was one other biographer, whom Bunny first met that summer of 1963, who would change the face of literary biography and in the process rattle the nerves of the elderly gentlemen of Bloomsbury. The biographer was Michael Holroyd, then embarking on his life of Lytton Strachey.

Bunny's relationship with Holroyd began much as it would continue. The problem with Bunny was that he was ‘on the whole in favour of truth in biography – but not at the expense of the happiness of the living & their security'.
²⁹
Like other Bloomsberries, Bunny was caught between a temperamental desire for openness and an instinctive inclination towards caution, as his reply to Holroyd's request for an interview reveals:

(1) ‘Naturally I will give you any help I can.'

(2) ‘But – as I have experiences of biographers who either impose their own preconceived ideas on their subjects, or
are by nature temperamentally incapable of ever understanding what these subjects were like, I won't make promises.'

(3) ‘Such reservations are really foolish. We had better meet […] and I will try to tell you something about the Lytton I knew.'
³⁰

Having met Holroyd at the Reform Club over tea and buttered toast, Bunny was sufficiently impressed to invite him to read Lytton's letters at Hilton. Indeed he was so amiably disposed that he suggested Holroyd bring his bathing drawers. On 19 June Holroyd spent the day at Hilton and as a result felt he and Bunny had ‘got on very well'.
³¹
Bunny thought Holroyd ‘a charming young man'.
³²

Bunny and Angelica spent August at St Martin-de-Vers. It was an odd time to go away, as Henrietta's baby was overdue. Henrietta was only eighteen, and it might be supposed that it would be comforting to have her parents close by. Frances Partridge, felt ‘considerable agitation' at ‘this seeming desertion'.
³³
On 9 August Bunny and Angelica received a telegram announcing the birth of their grand-daughter, Sophie Vanessa. She had been born by caesarean section two days after Henrietta was rushed into hospital with suspected toxaemia. Bunny felt such anxiety for Henrietta that going for a walk to garner his thoughts, he lost his way. In London, Frances was angry with Bunny and Angelica, writing, tersely, ‘I don't know how much you really want to hear about this agonising week?' although she reassured
them that mother and baby were fine.
³⁴
Burgo told Bunny that Henrietta (‘simply marvellous, patient & brave') was ‘tired but very happy'.
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