Bloomsbury's Outsider (2 page)

Her bravery and fortitude in undertaking this expedition cannot be exaggerated. Not only was she a woman travelling great distances alone, to a remote country (and on potentially subversive business) but she had a weak constitution. Throughout her childhood tuberculosis of the hip confined Constance to long periods in bed. She suffered from migraine and was extremely short-sighted. Though physically frail, she was emotionally and
intellectually robust, and like her grandfather, Peter Black, something of a pioneer. As she hoped, her Russian expedition enhanced her strengths as a translator, leading Joseph Conrad to conclude: ‘Turgeniev for me is Constance Garnett and Constance Garnett
is
Turgeniev.'
¹⁵

Later, Constance questioned how she had the heart to leave Bunny for almost two months at that young age. While she was away he would take out her photograph from the drawer, murmuring, as he kissed it, “My mummy gone Russ”.
¹⁶
But he was always proud of her work and influence, and told her, during the Great War: ‘You have probably had more effect on the minds of every-body under thirty in England than any three living men. On their attitude, their morals, their sympathies […]. I think [Dostoevsky's]
The Idiot
has probably done more to alter the morals of my generation than the war or anything that happens to them in the war.'
¹⁷

Constance coped with travelling, propelled by ‘a passionate longing for adventure', but passion, in the sexual sense, had fallen from her marriage after Bunny was born.
¹⁸
Constance seems to have accepted that her libido would not return and that, as her doctor informed her, she must ‘expect to feel middle-aged'.
¹⁹
A few weeks after Bunny's birth, running for a train, she experienced what was probably a prolapsed uterus. She was told to rest and prescribed an internal ‘support'. Feeling that ‘one
side of my passion seems to have died away', she worried that Edward would doubt her love. In an astonishingly compassionate and understanding letter, she effectively released him from the ties of conventional faithfulness: ‘I want to make you happy without clogging you and hampering you as women always do. I know and see quite clearly that in many ways we must get more separate as time passes but that need never touch the innermost core of love which will always remain with us.'
²⁰

If physical passion no longer bound them, Edward and Constance were united in their affection for both Bunny and The Cearne, the isolated and idiosyncratic house they created. With the aid of a bequest from Constance's father, The Cearne was designed by Edward's brother-in-law, Harrison Cowlishaw, an architect working in the Arts & Crafts tradition. Edward and Constance independently viewed potential sites, and to their surprise found they both selected the same spot. They were attracted to a rather remote and inaccessible plot near the village of Limpsfield, on the Surrey-Kent border, offering a magnificent view to south and west. Shielded by woodland, it also provided privacy and solitude. Bunny later recalled visiting the site, carried aloft on Stepniak's shoulders, from where he saw the building's great rafters, bare against the sky.

The Cearne was constructed in an L-shape, with immensely thick walls, heavy, hinged wooden doors and enormous inglenook fireplaces. D.H. Lawrence perspicaciously described it as ‘one of those new, ancient cottages',
²¹
and perceived ‘something
unexpected and individualised' about it.
²²
Although in ethos it complied with Arts and Crafts traditions of simplicity in design and integrity in materials, it didn't quite fit the Arts and Crafts mould. It was too simple in style, too medieval, too cold and too uncompromisingly stark. It had the benefit of an upstairs bathroom (though the water closet was housed outside the back door), but generally lacked in comfort, causing Edward and his guests to draw their chairs deep into the inglenook to warm themselves against ever-present draughts. Bunny adored The Cearne: ‘How I love the place! I love every twig, every stone, everything', he later eulogised. ‘How well the place fits me!' ‘Coming home is like slipping on an old pair of downtrodden slippers.' He roamed the surrounding countryside which became an extension of the house itself: ‘There is nothing I don't know when I'm at home about the place, it is all absolutely familiar. I know the surface of the ground, the stones the roots, even the molehills. When I go into the wood I know all the trees.'
²³

As a boy, Bunny was solitary but not lonely, spending hours contentedly wandering the countryside, absorbed in flora and fauna. Even so he was conscious that he and his parents were ‘outsiders', set apart from the villagers and from village life. Instead, the Garnetts both attracted and were absorbed into a growing community of like-minded free-thinkers, which gradually drifted into the neighbourhood and whom Bunny later labelled ‘the Limpsfield intelligentsia'.
²⁴
Among this remarkable group were John Atkinson Hobson, the radical social theorist
and economist, his wife, Florence, a campaigner for women's rights, and Edward Pease, secretary of the Fabian Society. The community also attracted Constance's circle of Russian exiles, who settled nearby at what was to become known as ‘Dostoevsky Corner'.

Having moved into The Cearne in February 1896, Constance and Edward filled the interstices of their marriage in different ways. Constance was fulfilled in her role as a mother and by her work as a translator. But Edward, who spent much of the week in London, needed more: he required someone to supply the physical love which Constance no longer gave. He had fallen in love with the artist, Ellen Maurice ‘Nellie' Heath, who, by 1899, had become his mistress (though they did not live together until 1914). While this label reflects Nellie's social position, it does not adequately represent the place she occupied in the hearts of Bunny, Constance and Edward. Constance seems to have positively encouraged the association – Nellie later told a friend that it was she who first mentioned the possibility of a relationship with Edward.

Nellie, who had been raised in France by her widowed father, Richard Heath, a devout Christian Socialist, came to England to study painting under Walter Sickert. Bunny said of her: ‘The first impression was of extraordinary softness, a softness physically expressed at that time in velvet blouses and velveteen skirts; a softness of speech and a gentleness of manner and disposition.' He added that the softness was underpinned by ‘an iron willpower', a necessity given Nellie's social position as Edward's lover.
²⁵
Bunny's cousin Rayne Nickalls recalled receiving a warning from her father, Robert, about Edward and Nellie living
together ‘in open defiance of the conventions'; ‘people talked and he would not like me to be mixed up in anything of that kind'.
²⁶

Bunny loved Nellie almost as much as his parents. He was troubled neither by the way his parents conducted their lives, nor by the disapproval that their lifestyle sometimes elicited. He never felt, as he might have done, that Constance had been betrayed in any way by his father or by Nellie. For Bunny, the triumvirate of Connie, Edward and Nellie exemplified conjugal contentment, familial warmth and fulfilled creativity. It was a pattern he would continue to seek as an adult, with variable success.

‘Perhaps I am exceptional in feeling the horror of institutional life so strongly.'
¹

In December 1895 Constance and Edward had a terrible shock: Stepniak had been killed by a train. Perhaps he hadn't heard the engine's approach, as he had learnt to block out sound in prison. Constance had barely recovered from this loss when Edward became seriously ill with typhoid. She nursed him until he eventually recovered, but meanwhile Bunny was sent to his uncle and aunt, Ernest and Minnie Black, in Brighton. There he found the atmosphere very different from that of The Cearne. Sitting one morning upon his chamber-pot, the four-year-old was accosted by Uncle Ernest who protested that such a position was unmanly, instructing Bunny to either stand up or to kneel before it. Bunny did what he was asked, but even at that age, contemptuous of convention, he considered his uncle a fool.

Bunny was a bright child, composing his first story aged three, about a little horse which became lost and was found by a big
horse which carried it home in its mouth. Already sharp-eyed and inquisitive, Bunny ran to Constance excited that their neighbour's sow had twelve piglets, ‘ “And how could there be room inside her for all of them?” ' he enquired, having evidently absorbed the rudimentary facts of life.
²
He learned to read aged four, but with reluctance, determined that once he had mastered reading, he would never do it again. His writing at that age, both as script and narrative, was already assured, although unpunctuated. ‘Dear Grannie', he wrote to Narney, ‘Will you come down to see me on Saturday Mother is coming to London tomorrow and will tell you your train.'
³

Narney had given Bunny a fine wooden rocking horse, which he called Chopper. He and Constance composed a poem about Chopper which opens a delightful window into the nursery world they shared, revealing that pleasure in words and composition was part of their relationship.

When Daddy-Dumdy-Dee is cross

And Mum's at work or ill

I saddle Chopper my good horse

And ride off to Leith Hill.

We trot along the roads so fast

That people cry as we go past

‘I never saw a horse go faster,

I wonder who's that Gee-gee's master.'

‘I'm David Garnett, Chopper's master!

I shout and gallop on the faster […]
⁴

In October 1897 Constance wrote to her father-in-law: ‘The great household event is David's going to school', and that this ‘so far has been a great success. He likes it & is reported as good & intelligent.'
⁵
The school was at Limpsfield and there five-year-old Bunny was immediately broken of writing with his left hand. It was also there that Bunny began a lifelong friendship with a handsome little daredevil, Harold Hobson, J. A. and Florence Hobson's son. According to Bunny the friendship was cemented when he took Harold to a nearby field to watch a pair of geldings mate.

The ‘great household event' did not last. As Bunny's initial enthusiasm rapidly diminished, Constance decided to teach him herself, though immersed in translation she often left him to study alone. Nellie's brother, Carl Heath, was drafted in as tutor, and Bunny was joined in his lessons by Harold Hobson and his sister Mabel, and by the four daughters of Sydney and Margaret Olivier, who had recently settled nearby. (Olivier had returned from the post of colonial secretary of British Honduras and would later become Governor of Jamaica.) Sydney Olivier believed in imperial reform and had written
Fabian Essays on Socialism
(1889); he and Margaret fitted perfectly into the political and intellectual community around The Cearne.

The Olivier sisters were ideal companions for Bunny. These beautiful, intelligent and untamed girls loved the outdoors, were experts at cricket, champion hut-builders and practised tree-climbers. According to Bunny, ‘coming to the row of beech-trees that divided Limpsfield Common from the High Chart, one would see them in white jerseys and dark blue knickers, frocks or skirts discarded, high above one's head'.
⁶
Margery, the eldest,
was tall, brown-eyed and brown haired, impulsive, but with an underlying vulnerability. Brynhild was a great beauty, with fairer hair than the others, and ‘starry eyes that flashed and sparkled'.
⁷
Daphne was dark and rather dreamy. It was with Noel, his exact contemporary, a pretty girl with a serious expression and steely determination, that Bunny had a particular bond, for they shared a fascination with wildlife, collecting animal skeletons, stuffing birds and skinning rabbits together.

This circle of playmates was occasionally joined by Edward and Marjorie Pease's sons, Nicholas and Michael. The boys were never part of the inner circle of Oliviers and Hobsons and did not inspire Bunny's loyalty. His tepid feelings might be explained by a passage in his draft autobiography, scored through and with the word ‘OMIT' added, where Bunny recounts walking, one day, near The Cearne, with Michael Pease. On seeing Nellie with Edward, Pease denounced them to Bunny as ‘immoral persons'.

Edward delighted in Bunny's friends, writing plays for the children to perform. In ‘Robin Hood', with a cast comprising the Olivier girls, Harold and Mabel Hobson, and Bunny's cousin, Speedwell Black, nine-year-old Bunny was padded out and topped with a bald pate, as Friar Tuck. The play was performed at The Cearne before an audience which included George Bernard Shaw and the writer E.V. Lucas.

As an only child, Bunny enjoyed the avuncular friendships of his parents' circle, including Constance's Russian émigrés and Edward's stable of writers, first among them, Joseph Conrad. One windy day at The Cearne, Conrad made Bunny a sailing boat, tying a sheet for a sail to the top corners of the
clothes-prop. Conrad sat in a linen basket, steering the ‘boat' and issuing orders to Bunny to take in the sail. A frequent guest at The Cearne, Conrad was particularly fond of Bunny, signing off his letters to him ‘Your affectionate friend'. For Christmas one year he sent him three volumes of James Fenimore Cooper's
Leather-Stocking-Tales
with an accompanying note: ‘I read them at your age […] and I trust that you, of a much later generation, shall find in these pages much at least of the charm which delighted me then and has not evaporated even to this day.'
⁸

For a time Ford Madox Hueffer and his wife Elsie rented a cottage near The Cearne. On one occasion Bunny went with them to visit Stephen Crane, accompanied by Henry James riding a bicycle. It was with W.H. Hudson that Bunny had a particular affinity, for both were absorbed in the natural world, and Hudson admired Bunny's youthful skills as a naturalist. The tall man and young boy went on excursions together, once crouching uncomfortably in a gorse hedge, where Hudson mimicked birdsong and called the birds towards them. Hudson gave Bunny books, including his own
British Birds
, which Bunny always treasured, although he was less keen on J.M. Barrie's
Little White Bird
, which he had the effrontery to return to his benefactor.