Bloomsbury's Outsider (51 page)

Bunny could do little but focus on his teaching. At Davis, California, he was asked to go over to Berkeley to examine D.H. Lawrence's
Sons and Lovers
manuscript, where he was fascinated to discover that Edward had deleted passages on ninety-three pages, ‘not because of improprieties but simply because the book was far too long'.
²⁹
His teaching complete, and
before participating in the Lawrence symposium, Bunny visited the Lawrence Ranch, accompanied by Harry Moore, his host and friend at Carbondale, by David Chambers, the brother of Jessie Chambers, Lawrence's first love, and by his current hosts, Professor E.W. Tedlock and Warren Roberts.

If anything could raise Bunny's spirits, it was the wonder of spending Christmas travelling in Mexico with E.W. Tedlock's son, Dennis, an extremely knowledgeable guide, later a distinguished authority on Mayan literature and culture. Bunny found him an ideal companion. They journeyed by bus to Mexico City which Bunny considered like ‘a city in the United States with all its faults but not its amenities'. But Oaxaca and Puebla were altogether different, the latter ‘a most delightful heavenly city, brilliantly illuminated, full of masses of gay people & crowded markets'.
³⁰
From Oaxaca they visited the magnificent Mesoamerican stepped pyramids of the Sun and Moon, climbing to the top of the former to enjoy the glorious view. Bunny hoped that one day he would be able to visit Mexico with Angelica. ‘Do you think there is still a chance of my doing so?' he asked her.
³¹
On 6 January 1965 he flew to Texas to deliver his final lecture. Then he spent a week in New York, where he dined with Mina Curtiss and Lincoln Kirstein and with Duncan's former lover, George Bergen. Returning to London on 15 January, he found his family delighted to see him and Angelica unusually affectionate.

Frances Partridge commented that Bunny was ‘magnificent – brave as a lion, full of interesting news of America'. She also noticed that he and Angelica ‘seem to have re-entered an area of
mutual warmth and affection most delightful to witness'.
³²
To some extent Angelica had overcome that feeling of being trapped between opposite extremes. She had reached a decision regarding not living with Bunny and stuck to it. Even so, she was not immune to guilt. She was forty-six, the very age Bunny had been when she fell in love with him; he was seventy-three. She was not impervious to his concerns about being left alone in old age. She did not want to return to Hilton, but felt she could at least commit to holidays with Bunny.

So, on 18 March Bunny and Angelica embarked on a two-month vacation, driving through France and Italy to Greece. But having lived mainly separately since the previous October, the enforced closeness of travelling together served only to re-activate the fault lines in their relationship. During the first week Bunny's pocket diary is peppered with phrases such as ‘Decided on divorce' and ‘Despair'. In France they collected Angelica's friend, Marriott Lefevre, who would spend three weeks travelling with them. Thus it was difficult for Bunny and Angelica to either vent their frustration or nurture intimacy.

At Andritsaena in Greece, Bunny awoke from a nightmare in which he was travelling by sea to India with Rupert Hart-Davis, to find an earthquake in progress. Bunny and Angelica held hands and were joined in their room by Marriott and an elderly lady, lost in the black-out. Bunny irritated Angelica with his detached curiosity, but the next day, in Bassae, where many houses were in ruins, he was overcome by the devastation. Seeing how people's lives had been changed overnight, he reflected on the state of his marriage, deciding divorce was the only solution.

After Marriott's departure on 15 April, the atmosphere
improved. Bunny and Angelica rendezvoused with Frances Partridge and her friend Eardley Knollys at Orta, in Italy, where they had a delightful time, ‘reading, talking, eating, going for a walk & botanising', the latter something which Frances and Bunny would progressively enjoy together.
³³
Frances noticed that Bunny and Angelica ‘left the bath strikingly dirty', as they had ‘evidently been roughing it'.
³⁴
Given Bunny's Spartan tendencies, they had lodged in cheap hotels. Even so, he spent much of the holiday mired in what he called his ‘imbecile obsession about money'.
³⁵

By the end of the holiday everything seemed more positive and Angelica even told Bunny she would return to Hilton,
pro tem
. But she didn't, instead buying the Islington house. Dining with Bunny in June, Frances Partridge's ‘heart contracted', hearing ‘his sad and quavering voice saying how he hated the idea of living in London, that it tired him dashing up and down and he got melancholy and lonely at Hilton with no one but William'.
³⁶
With the family axis shifting from Hilton to London, the structure of Bunny's life crumbled. There was no work to take him to the capital, no purpose other than to see Angelica, who did not want to see him.

At Hilton, with only William for company, Bunny was working on an edition of his correspondence with Tim White, who had died the previous year. He was also writing a preface for an edition of Tim's American diary, to be published by Putnam.
³⁷
As Bunny told Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘I find that almost all my remarks about Tim are rather disobliging. And I begin to feel as irritated as if he were actually in the house.' ‘Both Ray & I loved Tim', he explained, ‘& he certainly was remarkable. But somehow he always got things wrong.'
³⁸

Henrietta Garnett described Bunny as ‘one of the most generous people I have ever known'.
³⁹
At this time he had little to be generous with, running Hilton, L'Ancienne Auberge and Moby Dick while contributing to the support of all four daughters. Nevertheless, when Angelica's former drama teacher, Michel St Denis, fell on hard times, having suffered ill health, Bunny arranged to pay him £5 a month. He also established modest trust funds for Harry and Rosemary, his former farm workers, and for Betty May.

Late in the summer Bunny and Angelica took their – now regular – holiday at St Martin-de-Vers. Bunny stayed on afterwards, returning to a novel he had abandoned because he could not develop a story-line. Nevertheless, he remained absorbed by the characters, ‘And so I write about them although I haven't anything to say – except there is this bunch of people'. Bunny had also embarked on a fourth volume of memoirs, but it was not a propitious time to be looking back to the years immediately following Ray's death, when he and Angelica had been united in love.

Bunny received a luncheon invitation from Angela Derville, the daughter of his old friend Alec Penrose, who lived with her French husband, Joe, a short distance away at the Château de Charry, near Montcuq. Bunny arrived on 24 October resplendent in a new beret which he thought made him look French. He
was charmed by Angela and Joe. ‘They will be a great help to us I feel sure', he told Angelica, adding, ‘I suppose you are busy with your Château in St Peter's Street'.
⁴⁰
Angelica was, indeed, busy overseeing alterations and repairs. Bunny found solitude strange: with no one to occupy the present, he found himself going over and over the past.

Angelica tried to spend weekends with Bunny at Hilton and to maintain a semblance of family life, but by January 1966 the situation had again become untenable. Bunny found her uncommunicative and unapproachable, always scraping away at her violin. He could not understand why she bothered to come back at weekends, as she had nothing to say. Angelica evidently felt as hopeless as Bunny, asking ‘is it any good going on as we are? Ought we not to divorce or separate?' ‘I always felt', she added, ‘that it would be cruel abandonment if I left you; but I see now that this is probably conceited and that it's perhaps crueller to stay in this way, only half and half.'
⁴¹
Bunny reluctantly agreed. ‘The agony', he told Angelica, ‘will be the thousands of little things.' ‘When you married me I didn't think it would last for more than ten years. But you aren't too old to find someone with whom you can blossom.'
⁴²
‘There are moments', Angelica told Bunny, ‘when I feel terrified of a lonely future – I don't seem to be a very attractive woman.'
⁴³
‘Our whole trouble', Bunny replied, ‘is that I find you too attractive & that is the reason for our parting'.
⁴⁴

Frances Partridge could not help but be moved by Bunny's ‘sad face and trembling hand', reflecting that at his age ‘how cruel to be left suddenly without support'. Reading aloud Henry King's poem on the death of his wife, Bunny almost broke down. Frances thought it ‘expressed almost too poignantly his sadness at the loss of his own'.
⁴⁵
‘Meanwhile', she observed, ‘he valiantly takes on the cooking and housekeeping.' When Sylvia Townsend Warner arrived for a weekend at Hilton, she was shocked to see Bunny so changed. ‘He is still riddled with shock', she recorded in her diary, ‘and talks slower than ever, and though we were all gay at dinner there was a sensation of how well we were keeping it up.'
⁴⁶

The ensuing months were an agony of indecision. Should they separate? Should they divorce? Was divorce too final? Should they merely live apart? Having settled on divorce, Bunny panicked. ‘I want you to think over what we are doing', he wrote to Angelica. ‘It means amputation – your never coming back to Hilton where there is so much that we share. It has arisen because our bodies have grown different ways, but it is madness to let them dictate our whole lives.'
⁴⁷
Rosemary advised Angelica against divorce and William, protective of Bunny, also tried to steer her away from the idea. But Angelica began to remove her possessions from Hilton: paintings which had long graced the walls, rugs from the floor, the silver Duncan and Vanessa gave her as a wedding gift.

Angelica spent much time discussing the situation with Rosemary Peto, who was undergoing psychoanalysis with Michael Fordham.
⁴⁸
Under Rosie's influence, Angelica began a
process of self-analysis, trying to understand her motives, past and present. Temperamentally attracted to explanations which shielded her of responsibility (her parents' ‘deception' regarding her father; Bunny's ‘victory' in taking her from her parents), she suddenly had what she described as a ‘flash of truth', a realisation that the sexual difficulties between her and Bunny were ‘all on
my
side' and that, as she told Bunny, ‘I was using sex as a weapon against you & was not, as I had been assuming, a
victim
of bad sex relations, but the
originator
of them'. Whilst this bombshell might have given Bunny cause for hope, it was only momentary, for Angelica then announced that sex with Bunny would still be difficult, because, early in their marriage ‘I was in love with you as a father-substitute, never having enjoyed a full parental relation with a real father. Now that I have fully realised the character of this love, there is mere vacuity instead of sexual desire.'
⁴⁹

Then Angelica dropped another bombshell. ‘I have arrived', she told Bunny, ‘at a new point of view, and I hope you can bear a little more analysis from me.' She now wondered whether ‘clinging to the theory of the father substitute' was an ‘effort to produce something behind which to hide', that in fact she had ‘until now failed to grow up'. Better still, ‘if I could grow up', she suggested, ‘I might be able to cope with all the difficulties and in all important ways with our relationship'. She added that ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush'.
⁵⁰

Bunny thought that ‘Five months of solitude and heart-searching' had made Angelica even more beautiful.
⁵¹
After their
reconciliation Frances Partridge noted with pleasure that they appeared ‘to be as sweetly happy and united as anyone could wish'.
⁵²
As Bunny wrote to Sylvia, ‘there may be more surprises in store – probably painful ones. But I am feeling very happy.'
⁵³
For years he had clung to every shred of hope Angelica offered. Now that she seemed to have resolved her own conflicted feelings, could there be lasting harmony between them?

‘History repeats itself.'
¹

In the spring of 1966 Bunny finally completed a novel which had occupied him, on and off, for eight years. He called it
Ulterior Motives
, and was delighted that it was accepted by his former American publisher, Harcourt Brace.
²
All the more so when Hiram Haydn, his US editor, complemented Bunny for being ‘so graceful & tough minded, so wise & sometimes so ferocious. It is a great blend & I am proud to be your publisher.'
³

It was a ferocious book, for it had begun as a revenge novel, aimed at Rupert Hart-Davis. Bunny's preliminary notes stated it was about a ‘man with a compulsion to deceive and swindle – RHD', ‘the man who always has an ulterior motive'.
⁴
By the time Bunny completed the novel he had moved some distance from his own ulterior motives, although Rollo Kitson, the single
unsympathetic character in an otherwise agreeable cast, resembles Rupert physically, if drawn in an unflattering light. His face was ‘enormous and exactly the colour of underdone cold beef and the short hairs of his moustache and the eyelashes and eyebrows were the colour of yellow oatstraw'.
⁵
Bunny portrayed Kitson as an unscrupulous businessman battening financially on his subordinate business partner.

Set in France and Geneva, the novel concerns an Anglo-French family headed by St Clair de Beaumont, a writer, loosely based on Angelica's former tutor, Michel St Denis. Like St Denis, the fictional St Clair de Beaumont broadcast to the French during the Second World War, encouraging his countrymen to stand fast against their German oppressors. St Clair has two daughters, Pasionara and Alamein, and a son Winston who is strongly attracted to the bluff Captain Kitson. St Clair's nephew, Amadeo, is in love with Alamein, but when Kitson latches onto the family, he endeavours not only to wrench Alamein from Amadeo, but also, for personal gain, to exploit St Clair's wealth and Amadeo's talent as an inventor.