Bloomsbury's Outsider (59 page)

Although Bunny was loved and respected in his lifetime, a very different figure appeared in print after his death. In contrast to the lovable character found in Frances Partridge's published memoirs and diaries, in other quarters Bunny emerged as an unsavoury, predatory male with ‘unnatural' sexual appetites. The book that marked a watershed in his representation was
Deceived with Kindness
, a memoir written by Angelica Garnett,
published in 1984, three years after his death.

Angelica spent seven years writing the memoir, which she said represented ‘an emergence from the dark into the light'.
³
It was written, ostensibly, to unravel the motives behind her parents' deception concerning the identity of her father, whom she believed to be Clive Bell until, aged seventeen, she was disabused of this fact by Vanessa. Although Angelica originally intended the memoir to encompass only her childhood and youth, in the event it contained a chapter chillingly entitled ‘Bunny's Victory', where she portrayed him as a predatory older man, intent on ensnaring an innocent young victim. Whilst acknowledging ‘It is dangerous to talk only of people's secret motives […] because one may so easily be wrong', Angelica stated that Bunny's ‘selfishness and perhaps revenge […] led him to make a victim of an ignorant and unsuspecting girl who was unable to defend herself'.
⁴

It is true Bunny was twenty-six years Angelica's senior, but in
Deceived with Kindness
she depicts him as consciously and strategically exploiting her youth and innocence, in order to exact revenge upon Vanessa for rejecting his advances at the time of the Great War. There is no evidence of any such advance, and even if an advance had been rejected, it was out of character for Bunny to be vengeful in this context: his fifty-year friendship with Mina Curtiss was founded upon her refusal to go to bed with him. The youthful Bunny was inclined to be demonstrative, as Vanessa noted in 1916: ‘He's always very nice to me, and he
likes I think to be demonstrative to everyone he likes, but he's not in love with me.'
⁵

Angelica had the advantage of hindsight: she spent much of the 1960s and 1970s trying to make sense of the past and her place within it. Such introspection inevitably involved the ordering of events, exploration of motives and examination of emotions. Moreover memory is not infallible and there are many inaccuracies in Angelica's narrative, not least that she long remained ignorant of the fact that Bunny and Duncan had been lovers. Bunny had informed her of this in June 1939 three years before their marriage.
⁶
As her brother, Quentin diplomatically stated, ‘To say that this is an honest narrative is not to say that it is accurate'.
⁷

Deceived with Kindness
is framed by Angelica discovering the works of Karen Horney, a Neo-Freudian psychoanalyst. Although Angelica did not undergo psychoanalysis, she was heavily influenced by Horney's books, in particular their emphasis on the effects of parental influence upon the child
as experienced
by the child at the time. According to Horney, a child's need for parental approval can be so pronounced that in adulthood it seeks out a partner to resolve the problems experienced in childhood, thus perpetuating the dependent and compliant relationship.

It is obvious why Angelica was attracted to this rationale. But her perspective of her relationship with Bunny contrasts markedly with the evidence of their correspondence during their courtship and early years of marriage. Her memoir is highly subjective, created in response to Duncan's death, to an ensuing emotional break-down and to the form of self-analysis which Angelica felt most answered her needs. It reflects the vantage point of a particular moment and is the outcome of the cumulative narratives Angelica shaped to explain and rationalise her life.

Once in print, Angelica's authoritative portrayal of Bunny became enshrined as ‘truth'. In a review of the book in
The New York Review of Books
, the journalist Janet Malcolm acknowledged Angelica's severity regarding her parents, but seemed to entirely accept her portrayal of Bunny. If anything, Malcolm wrote about Bunny in even more venomous language than Angelica had done.

Angelica stated she did not ‘understand how incestuous my relationship with Bunny was'.
⁸
Such comments have reverberated through subsequent biographies of Bunny's friends and contemporaries, where he has become tarnished with the taint of incest and sex-addiction. He is typically described as ‘the libidinous novelist', ‘the Don Juan' and ‘a noted connoisseur of feminine charms'.
⁹
Such short-hand is, of course, true – he could be constructed as each of these – but also very much more. In
The Neo-Pagans
, a group-biography of Rupert Brooke and his
circle, Paul Delany referred to Bunny's ‘epic amorous career' and implied that Daphne Olivier was the only Olivier sister he was ‘able to ensnare'.
¹⁰
Dismissive perhaps, but the language of blame and entrapment echoed Angelica's.

If Angelica saw herself, in hindsight, as a victim, it is extremely unlikely that Bunny's other women lovers would have cast themselves in this mould. Indeed, the view of Bunny as a predatory womaniser is hardly fair to the women he is alleged to have conquered. Bunny wasn't keen on the one-night stand. He was interested in women for their intelligence as much as their beauty. According to his daughter Frances Garnett, he ‘actually valued the intellect of a woman – he knew that women could be equally intelligent and equally intellectual.'
¹¹
With the exception of a few youthful dalliances, Bunny's women lovers were characterised by independence, intelligence and education. It is a mistake to assume that Bunny spent his time seeking out innocent virgins. The women he loved chose him as much as he chose them. Moreover, Bunny maintained long friendships with former lovers, and in some cases, the sexual relationship continued for years or even decades.

Today the 1960s is seen as the era of women's sexual emancipation. In Bunny's circles women were sexually emancipated many decades earlier. For example, in 1915 when Bunny and Frankie Birrell called on James Strachey, they found the twenty-three-year-old Noel Olivier visiting. As Bunny recorded in his journal, ‘When Noel came in she dropped French letters out of
her bag […]. Noel laughed & coloured a little.'
¹²
Noel typifies the independent women of Bunny's social milieu: she went on to become a consultant paediatrician.

With the passage of time Angelica's perspective shifted. In a new preface to the second edition, published in 1995, she no longer perceived her marriage to Bunny as entrapment by him, but as an ‘ill-judged' ‘act of rebellion' on her part against her parents. She even went so far as to say: ‘I must discard the self-protective role of eternal victim.'
¹³
However the damage had been done. After all, with Bunny's three volumes of memoir long out of print (and they ended in 1940 with Ray's death) we only have Angelica's word for it. The reviewer in
The Economist
perceptively described
Deceived with Kindness
as ‘an absorbing though deliberately one-sided and somewhat hostile tale', adding, ‘One hopes that it serves its therapeutic purpose'.
¹⁴

Angelica's version of Bunny not only eclipsed all others, but in tarnishing him, marginalised his published work and diminished his reputation. Only
Lady into Fox
and
Aspects of Love
remain in print. This is a shame, as he was an original writer of courage and distinction. Moreover, as a publisher, literary critic, editor, historian and bookseller, Bunny was an influential and important figure in the twentieth-century British literary landscape. Ironically, during the 1980s and 1990s when British literary biography was at its apogee, Bunny's ground-breaking autobiography was perceived, in some quarters, as evidence of his moral ignominy. At a time when biographers were mining Bunny's memoirs for information about their own subjects, his self-depiction as a
‘libertine' appeared to add credence to Angelica's text. In more recent years, Bunny has appeared in biographical fiction hovering over Angelica's cradle ready to snatch her.

In the 1920s the Nonesuch Press was largely responsible for bringing Restoration drama back into print. Bunny was passionate about Restoration drama; he formed the Caroline Club specifically to read these plays. While Bunny, versed in Restoration literature, could identify the different types of libertine and could distinguish between a libertine and a rake, it was perhaps unrealistic for him to expect his readers to share his scholarly familiarity with the subtleties of seventeenth-century cultural terms and distinctions. Bunny recognised Libertinism as an
intellectual
movement which elevated the pursuit of pleasure. There was more than one kind of libertine: the dissolute and licentious character, and the ‘philosophical libertine', a freethinker. It was with this second, more cerebral version that Bunny identified.

In his autobiography, Bunny deliberately dissociated himself from the ‘dissolute' and ‘licentious', stating: ‘I am not, and had little impulse ever to become, a
rake
: that is a man whose loose life is the result of a reaction against the restraints imposed by his upbringing, or one who has a psychological craving for self-destruction and seeks it in the brothel, or the gutter.'
¹⁵
Bunny stated that in being the ‘lover of very many women', he had always been driven by sensuality and the need to give sexual satisfaction. Moreover, he bravely intimated, as explicitly as he dared, his love for men and women. Even so, his attempt at truth has been misconstrued. The term ‘libertine' has been taken up as shorthand to dismiss Bunny as exactly what he said he was not: a rake. It is interesting that Stephen Spender's autobiography
caused similar revilement. His biographer John Sutherland remarked that Spender's ‘frankness, far from disarming critics, has given some of them ammunition with which to attack him'.
¹⁶

Bunny was not perfect. He espoused honesty but lacked self-awareness. His need for diversion was often destructive. He was cruel to Ray. Perhaps he was selfish in loving Angelica and marrying her. But as an imperfect example of humankind he created courageous stories, wrote beautiful prose, supported his friends, helped other writers, remained true to his convictions and loved his family. It is as though Bunny's literary achievements, all the good that he did and all the love people felt for him have been obscured by the palimpsest of a single, courageously written but ultimately harmful book.

Edward Garnett

Constance and Bunny

The Cearne