Bloomsbury's Outsider (9 page)

For Bunny's generation the idea of war was no more than an abstract: in Britain there was no
memory
of conflict, except that of the Boer War, fought in distant lands. Moreover participation in the war was widely opposed and many people questioned Britain's involvement. Even so, the atmosphere in London rapidly changed. When Bunny gave a dinner party at Pond Place for the newly married Lawrences, one of his guests called down to Frieda, bidding her farewell in German. A few days later Bunny received the first of a succession of visits from plain-clothes policemen enquiring how many Germans lived in the flat.

But life went on, and Bunny remained determined to extract every ounce of pleasure from it. To which end, in September 1914 he and Frankie Birrell established the Caroline Club. Its name was doubly appropriate as it was formed primarily for the reading of Restoration drama, much of it written in the Carolingian period, and meetings were held (every Tuesday) at the Pophams' home, 5 Caroline Place. Restoration drama had been out of fashion since the late 18th century, but its bawdy wit provided a wonderful antidote to wartime concerns. The club's members were drawn from Bunny's and Frankie's now largely overlapping circle of friends. The Olivier sisters and James Strachey were soon joined by Adrian Stephen, whom Bunny had first met at Crosby Hall. Their friendship had been consolidated in early 1913 when Bunny received an invitation from Adrian to take tea at Brunswick Square. Bunny had since attended Adrian's poker parties held in the big first-floor drawing room. As Bunny's limited and rather shabby wardrobe did not lend itself to such occasions, he wore evening dress, his only smart attire. He thought it would make him seem sophisticated,
as if he had come from an elegant dinner party.

It was some time, however, before Bunny felt entirely comfortable among Adrian's friends, many of whom were members of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle which in London centred on Adrian and his sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, but which had largely been forged from members of the elite but secret Cambridge intellectual society, known as the Apostles. The Bloomsbury Group rejected conventional authority or conventional morality, believing personal relationships were paramount, and that in such relationships truth and honesty were more important than exclusivity. It was a close-knit group of people who knew one another very well, and who tended to have intimate relationships with those already in the fold. For this reason, there was a certain amount of recycling.

In September 1914 the Caroline Club entertained Rupert Brooke, now a Sub-Lieutenant in the RNVR, and admitted five of Adrian's Bloomsbury friends: John Maynard Keynes, Gerald Shove, Clive Bell, Saxon Sidney-Turner and Duncan Grant. A fortnight later Vanessa Bell and her husband Clive were in attendance, and in November James Strachey's brother, Lytton, came along. There were more and more people with whom Bunny could take tea, have dinner and visit the Café Royal. According to a young acquaintance, Michael Fordham, Bunny was at this time ‘very beautiful and seemed to me like a god'.
³
Suddenly he found himself much in demand.

But war could not be kept at arm's length indefinitely. It impinged upon Edward's income: his employer, the publisher
George Duckworth, announced he would publish nothing for three months and could pay only a basic £15 per month. There was no guarantee of Edward receiving any extra for reviewing or of Constance obtaining translation work. In November she and Edward received a circular communication from the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee instructing them to supply the ‘names of those of your household [aged between eighteen and thirty-eight] who are willing to enlist for the War'. Further, the letter stated:

In order to maintain and reinforce our troops abroad and to complete the new Armies which we hope within a few months to throw into the field, we need all the best the Nation can give us of its youth and strength […]. Every man, therefore, who is eligible, will ask his own conscience whether, in this emergency, it is not his duty to hold himself ready to enlist in the forces of the Crown.
⁴

The pressure to enlist was mounting, but Bunny either decided against or was discouraged from doing so. The latter seems likely, as in a letter from Edward Thomas to W.H. Hudson, the former reported that he had heard Edward Garnett say that Bunny ‘had been dissuaded from enlisting'.
⁵
For the meantime, conscription remained voluntary and Bunny's status as a science scholar meant he had
bona fide
work to occupy him. But as more and
more young men enlisted, those that did not became progressively visible exceptions.

If Bunny needed proof of his growing popularity, it came in December 1914 in the form of an invitation from Lady Ottoline Morrell, the extravagantly dressed and elaborately coiffed
grande dame
of literary and artistic London, who held court at her weekly salons in Bedford Square. Ottoline knew
everyone
. According to his diary, Bunny's first attendance at Ottoline's began awkwardly. But he soon relaxed sufficiently to perform an Apache dance with the French actress, Valentine Tessier.

Later that month, Bunny embarked on a weeklong walking tour with Frankie Birrell from Yatton in Somerset to Lockeridge, near Marlborough, in Wiltshire. Their destination was a cottage called ‘The Lacket', the country residence of Lytton Strachey, who had invited Bunny and Frankie to his Christmas party. Bunny was relieved to be out of London as he had been confined to the laboratory for several weekends. They arrived on 23 December to find Noel and Daphne Olivier, James Strachey and the Bloomsbury artist Duncan Grant already there. As the cottage was too small to accommodate everyone, Bunny and Frankie took rooms, as the season demanded, at the local inn. When, on Boxing Day, Bunny, Noel, Daphne, Frankie, James and Duncan set out for a walk, Noel and James paired off, as did Frankie and Daphne, leaving Bunny and Duncan together. With half an eye on Daphne, with whom Bunny fancied himself in love, he did not register the momentousness of the occasion. Looking back he recognised it as a turning point, a moment which ‘marked an epoch in my life'.
⁶

On 2 January 1915 Bunny received an invitation from Maynard Keynes, requesting ‘the pleasure of the company of
Mr Bunny at dinner at the Café Royal at 7.30 pm on Wednesday January 6, before Mrs Clive Bell's party.' Bunny was instructed to dress in ‘any clothes, the fancier the better or as you like it'.
⁷
There is no record of whether he dressed as an Indian prince, but he did record that at dinner Maynard placed him between Duncan and Vanessa. There were seventeen to dinner, including Clive Bell, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the critic Desmond MacCarthy and his wife, Molly. Afterwards Bunny found Vanessa's party most impressive, with ‘dances & songs & Gerald Shove very drunk with roses in his hair'. Overcome with sentiment, Bunny told Maynard he was a dear, to which Maynard replied that he would kiss Bunny if there weren't so many people present.
⁸
As the party drew to an end, Maynard and Frankie drifted off together and Bunny left with Duncan. To Bunny's surprise, Duncan declared love. Bunny walked home with him, and spent the night, chastely, in Duncan's studio, Bunny on the bed, Duncan on the floor clasping Bunny's dangling hand.

Duncan was seven years Bunny's senior. Like many, Bunny discerned something special in Duncan: not only was he exquisitely beautiful, with large eyes shaped like those of a classical sculpture, lovely bone structure and full, sensual lips, but he had a particular warmth and teasing humour which no one could fail to be charmed by. He also had a singular ability to live absolutely in the moment, whether absorbed in the act of painting a picture or in the company of friends. He had fallen in love with Bunny during their Boxing Day walk, and soon afterwards sent Bunny a straightforwardly polite invitation to dinner or tea. But he had
chosen not to send another missal, rapidly scribbled in pencil, which read:

Bunny You don't realize how much I love you. Why should you? You are happy old creature. I am so glad.

My heart aches to see you & to tell you I care for you more than you can possibly imagine.

[…] Don't think I'm complaining, can't you see I want to be with you? It's
miserable
without you.
⁹

In fact Duncan had first been attracted to Bunny almost two years earlier. In January 1913 he had written to Bunny, inviting him to a party he was hosting jointly with Adrian Stephen. On the back, Bunny later inscribed: ‘Earliest letter inviting me to one of Adrian's parties.' So it was Duncan who was responsible for drawing Bunny into Bloomsbury, and it was Duncan who issued that first important invitation.

In January 1915, after the night at the studio, Duncan wrote asking Bunny whether he was ‘always just simply kind to everyone', warning him that such kindness ‘is very dangerous for poor people like me'. He told Bunny, ‘You mustn't go on unless you don't mind my wanting to see you much oftener than you want to see me', adding, ‘But, oh! But, oh! […] if you see me again you must be VERY KIND but honest as the DAY.'
¹⁰
Two days later Bunny recorded in his journal, ‘went to Duncan's & spent
the night there'. This time there was no reticence, Bunny feeling inspired with a passion ‘borne partly of curiosity about this darling strange creature so like an animal & so full of charm'.
¹¹

Two weeks later, Vanessa Bell came to tea at Pond Place. She was thirty-six, thirteen years older than Bunny, but he found her extremely beautiful, tall and striking, with a ‘lovely, sensitive mouth' and ‘strangely innocent grey-blue eyes'. Later, when Bunny knew her better, he considered her unique for her ease in male company, unselfconscious ribaldry and gay humour.
¹²
Bunny recorded in his diary:

She was altogether charming & talked to me – I said I had thought the best thing to do would be to be brutal to Duncan but I had found it impossible …… And she said she was glad I had. She was in love with Duncan but couldn't feel jealous of a man. Duncan always had been in love with a man – Adrian for a long time, Maynard at one time […] She thought we could have nice times together. I said I had been much more falling in love with her than Duncan & that I was a womanizer.
¹³

Bunny was still hedging his bets, but so was Vanessa. She knew Duncan was homosexual, but the two of them had a particular bond which she did not want to lose. To keep Duncan close, she needed to be close to his lover, and so a few weeks later, Vanessa took Bunny into her confidence, speaking intimately of her former love affair with Roger Fry. She soon embarked on a
charm offensive, telling Bunny she and Duncan often talked of him, and when talking of his looks, ‘decided that we liked looking at you & after all what more can one say of anyone?'
¹⁴

While it might be assumed that Frankie Birrell preceded Duncan into Bunny's bed, this seems unlikely, as Bunny's diary records no more than the kiss in the taxi. Bunny knew Frankie was in love with him, but felt unable to reciprocate. He later rationalised his relationship with Frankie as ‘sentimental love on his part and a flattered readiness to experiment on mine'.
¹⁵
Or, as he explained, Frankie ‘was physically attracted by me, but I was unable to respond, and during our friendship […] I was quite incapable of returning his early “falling in love with me”.
¹⁶
But for several years Frankie would continue to send Bunny highly emotional letters to which Bunny could not reply in the same tone. Even so, he loved Frankie with a combination of amused affection and fraternal protectiveness. When Frankie's mother died in March 1915, it was Bunny who comforted him, tenderly kissing his tear-swollen eyes, before endeavouring to buoy him up with gossip. Frankie occupied a special place in Bunny's heart, and Bunny worried that he would be hurt with Duncan on the scene. Bunny noted in his journal, that when Frankie found out about the relationship, he ‘prophesied unhappiness for all of us'.
¹⁷

Beneath the darkening shadow of war, friendships intensified and the London social whirl gained an electric momentum.
There were countless parties, some given on the eve of departure by those who had enlisted, like Maitland Radford (in the RAMC). Bloomsbury dinner parties were followed variously by dancing, puppet shows, masquerades, charades and impromptu revues. At one party the artist Barbara Hiles's fervent dancing gave Bunny a swollen black eye. It was as though everyone was grabbing at life, ignorant of what lay around the corner. Bunny had finally attained his wish ‘not for one friend, or sweetheart even, but a whole roomful'. One evening Daphne and Noel Olivier invited him back and they chatted to him while he had a bath, and he chatted to them while they bathed, and he felt it was ‘jolly sitting with them naked & unashamed'.
¹⁸
A few days later, in Daphne's bed, he admired her beautiful body. ‘I never want to see a man again & speak to one', he concluded, adding ‘How sick I am of all this dull sodomitical twaddle!'
¹⁹

Bunny's desire for fountains of love did not go down well with Duncan who responded with emotional outbursts. Bunny decided to keep away for a few days, returning to Pond Place, where he received a note from Duncan, promising to stop being jealous. ‘All I want to say my angel is that I'm not going to be selfish & spoil your life, I really want you to do what you want. Be happy & love as many people as are worth it & remember that this is my
real
point of view.'
²⁰

Duncan's possessive behaviour was unusual. His affairs with Lytton, Maynard, Adrian and James had all been relatively short lived, following the same pattern of a period of intensity cooling
gradually into affectionate friendship. Moreover Duncan did not appreciate anyone behaving possessively over him. But despite his protestations to the contrary, he wanted an exclusivity which Bunny could not provide. The underlying cause of Duncan's possessiveness was an inability to cope with Bunny's relationships with women. Had Bunny wanted other men, it might have mattered less; Duncan may perhaps have felt less threatened. But Bunny made it clear that he could only love Duncan in the context of being free to love women as well.