Bloomsbury's Outsider (53 page)

Afterwards, Bunny received a letter from Angelica beginning ‘Bunny my dear', ‘there is something I want to tell you'. ‘I must tell you', she continued, ‘& feel I should have told you before, which makes it all the more difficult. It is not good news for you of course, as you must guess.'
³³
In New York, in January, while
waiting to join Bunny, Angelica had fallen in love with George Bergen. She had harboured the secret ever since. She could not stop thinking of him and had decided to go to New York for an indefinite period.

Bunny replied that if things did not work out ‘you have got a lot to fall back on – Charleston & Hilton & all of us'.
³⁴
He told Frances Partridge he had been ignorant about the affair, ‘Angelica never suggested that she was in love with George – I knew she had liked him & that he had laid himself out to be charming […] but no more'.
³⁵
He felt particularly hurt as Angelica had seemed so happy in Mexico. Even so the intervening months had not been good. As he told Sylvia with some bitterness: ‘In the early summer Angelica came down to Hilton about once a fortnight – slept in my bed – made love without wanting to – dug up a few weeds in flower beds & disappeared again.'
³⁶

On the eve of her departure, Angelica wrote to Bunny stating ‘you & I should divorce whatever happens'.
³⁷
He was inclined to agree. He could take no more of the comings and goings, her vacillations, her being caught between extremes, her inability to commit to one way of life or another. Emotionally exhausted, he left St Martin on 29 October, staying with Giovanna in Paris on the way home. He was glad to find Henrietta and Sophie at Hilton. Harold and Maggie Hobson rallied round, Duncan invited Bunny to Charleston and Frances Partridge lost little time in asking him to dinner. ‘All that I liked most in his character
came to the fore. He talked of Angelica without any bitterness but with great sadness.'
³⁸

Then Angelica dropped another bombshell. She did not, after all, want a divorce although Bunny had instructed his solicitor to start proceedings. The reason Angelica did not want a divorce had nothing to do with Bunny and everything to do with George. Divorce – with Angelica cited as the guilty party – would reveal her relationship with George to his wife, from whom he was separated but not divorced. This, in turn, would enable his wife to divorce him on grounds of adultery, which might adversely affect his access arrangements to his teenage daughter. Bunny would have to hold fire until George's daughter was of age. ‘I am as keen on divorce as you are', Angelica told him, ‘but we must wait for George's O.K.'
³⁹

Bunny felt that ‘losing the loved one through death is in a way easier to bear than their simply taking themselves off'.
⁴⁰
He tried not to feel sorry for himself and determined that this time separation would be final. It was then that Bunny and Duncan turned to each other for support. At Charleston, the two men read one another's letters from Angelica, both anxious that she was unhappy and might be hurt. It was evident that she was lonely, knowing few people in New York; that George battened on her for money; that she felt cramped in his small flat; that he was incapable of expressing his feelings although capable of verbal cruelty; that he was withdrawn and elusive.

When Duncan had experienced similar drawbacks with George nearly four decades earlier, he had turned to Bunny for
support. Now Duncan consoled Bunny, reminding him that at least he had the comfort of ‘four lovely & devoted daughters'.
⁴¹
They were comfort, indeed, rallying around their father. That Christmas, Bunny was surrounded by family and friends: Henrietta, Sophie, Amaryllis, Nerissa, William, Richard, Jane, Oliver and Ned; on Boxing Day they were joined by Rosemary Peto, Renee Fedden and Renee's daughter Katherine. Fanny arrived for New Year, as did Noel's son, Benedict Richards.

Michael Holroyd's long anticipated first volume of his Lytton Strachey biography was published in September 1967.
⁴²
James Strachey did not live to see the published book. The biography arrived in the shops shortly after a momentous piece of legislation: the Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalised homosexual acts between men over the age of twenty-one. Although homosexuals no longer feared imprisonment, what remained of Bloomsbury nevertheless anticipated the biography with trepidation. Frances Partridge recognised ‘something impressive about it', though conceding to Bunny that volume two might ‘make us all feel unpleasantly naked & exposed'.
⁴³
But when volume two was published in early 1968 the Bloomsbury survivors generally agreed that it was rather good. Bunny acknowledged that Frances's view was right, that ‘the book has a lot of merit'.
⁴⁴
Two decades later, Michael Holroyd shed an interesting perspective on Bloomsbury's attitude to his book: ‘Let those who feel tempted
to dismiss the Bloomsbury group as a timid self-regarding coterie ask themselves whether, had their own principles come to be tested in such an awkward practical fashion, they would have passed the test with such style and courage.'
⁴⁵

‘I am still in old age a normal male animal.'
¹

When Angelica returned to London in May 1968, seven months after leaving for New York, Bunny could not face seeing her. When he eventually did, he was surprised at how detached he felt. The reason for this detachment was a strikingly beautiful, intelligent, witty and charming American in her late forties. Her name was Magouche Phillips, and Bunny was bowled over when they met as dinner guests of Frances Partridge. Frances could not help noticing Magouche's ‘on-coming response' to Bunny, and that it made him ‘radiant with pleasure'.
²

‘My life has been rather social lately', Bunny told Sylvia in immense understatement.
³
Between March and May he visited the Bells in Sussex, dined with Barbara Ker Seymer and Barbara Roett, Frances Partridge, Tom and Nadine Marshall, Rosemary Peto, Cyril and Deirdre Connolly, Anna Wickham's son Jim
Hepburn and with Harry Moore, over from the US. He lunched with Leonard Woolf at Monk's House, stayed at Charleston with Duncan, travelled to Marlow twice to see Alix Strachey and stayed at Biddesden House, Wiltshire at the invitation of Bryan Guinness, Lord Moyne. He lunched with Morgan Forster in Cambridge, took tea with Geoffrey Keynes, fished the Itchen with his cousin Dicky Garnett, attended Cranium Club meetings and a Royal Literary Fund white-tie dinner, to which he arrived an hour late, having lost his waistcoat. Between times, Bunny entertained his daughters and their guests at Hilton. Frances Partridge observed that he ‘struggles on with extraordinary gallantry. Nine to dinner on Sunday – I don't know how he does it.'
⁴

This renewed vigour was largely due to Magouche. Bunny learned that her first name was really Agnes, and that she had been given the name Magouche by her husband, the artist Arshile Gorky, who committed suicide in 1948 leaving her with two young daughters, and that she had two more daughters by a second marriage which ended in divorce. ‘Felt a new man', Bunny noted in his diary the morning after he and Magouche dined
à deux
at her Chapel Street house in Kensington.
⁵
Magouche was exactly the tonic he needed. Bunny was astonished that she liked him. ‘It is the only weakness', he commented, ‘in a character otherwise of iron strength'.
⁶
With many friends in common, Bunny slipped easily into her world, although he soon realised that the two of them would get on best if he did not make undue demands. He recognised that she was very much her own person and that there were times when she did not want him around.

The
White–Garnett Letters
was published by Jonathan Cape in June 1968 to considerable critical acclaim. It came out a year after Sylvia Townsend Warner's biography of White and many critics considered it a companion to the biography. In contrast to Bunny's recent novels, the
Letters
attracted longer reviews, many concerned with unravelling the mysteries of White's psychology and marvelling at Bunny's capacity to remain friends with him. The
Observer
concluded that ‘The friendship with David Garnett must have been one of the most satisfying things in his [White's] life. Garnett's letters to him are delightful, candid with plenty of self-revelation but no protestations. The contrast which they point with White's emotional immaturity is almost painfully marked.'
⁷
Quentin Bell, in the
New Statesman
, declared it ‘a most enjoyable book'
⁸
, while Philippa Toomey, in
The Times
, said, ‘We can only be grateful to David Garnett for giving us this vivid history of an unlikely friendship'.
⁹
In the
Sunday Telegraph
, Anthony Curtis pronounced it a ‘magical book', stating its beauty resided in ‘the well-matched creative weight and striking power of two extremely different literary types'.
¹⁰

Buoyed up by encouraging reviews, Bunny embarked on a month's holiday with Magouche. It was wonderful for him to have a travelling companion again and they adored travelling together. Magouche said that it was Bunny who taught her about France, showing her churches, driving, as he always preferred, along quiet back roads.
¹¹
He found her a delightful companion
and cheerfully adventurous. By Lake Geneva, they trespassed in a private garden where they swam in privacy while a gardener clipped the other side of the hedge. In early July they arrived at Avane, near Siena, where they stayed with Magouche's daughter, Maro, and her husband, the artist Matthew Spender, Stephen Spender's son. Bunny thought their villa an earthly paradise. He liked Matthew, finding him ‘intelligent, practical, & easily moved to enthusiasm by ideas'. Maro he found beautiful and with a great sense of humour. After an evening of wine and grappa Bunny awoke feeling thirty years younger. He also felt the urge to start writing again, a sure sign of contentment.

‘I feel more & more', Bunny wrote from Hilton to Angelica in December, ‘that living here with William & spending energy in weekend parties & the middle of the week in London is an impossible life extravagant of money & energy'.
¹²
Hilton was an old house which needed to be nourished, to resound in the clatter of footsteps on the hall's stone floor, to the sound of feet climbing the irregular wooden stair. Now Hilton reverberated in a silence which only heightened its air of abandonment and decay. Frances Partridge noted that the house was imbued with sadness, its structure ‘crumbling around Bunny'.
¹³

From Morocco where she was painting with Duncan, Angelica replied: ‘To tell the truth – not to be repeated please – I have grown fond of a boy here whom I intend to bring back with me.' ‘My relationship with him', she explained, ‘is half lover half filial-maternal.'
¹⁴
His name was Abdel-Ali Taïtaï, and according to Angelica, he was aged eighteen. Bunny's response was to
scribble dismissively in his diary: ‘Letter from Angelica: Moorish boy lover.'
¹⁵
He could be relatively blasé because he was free from resurging concerns about his position in Angelica's life, restored to happiness by Magouche. A few diary pages later Bunny recorded a ‘
Wish
' for 1969: ‘as full an emotional & sex life as in '68'.
¹⁶
It had been a good seventy-sixth year.

In January 1969 when Bunny attended Duncan's eighty-fourth birthday dinner, he was surprised to see ‘the odious Holroyd' had been invited.
¹⁷
He was also surprised when Jamie Hamilton, a fellow guest, enquired whether he intended to marry Magouche. Bunny replied that it would be bigamy. ‘But what extraordinary people the conventional people are', he exclaimed to Angelica, ‘I think only half witted people could think of marrying unless they are having children'.
¹⁸

The chief event in Bunny's working life was that he had been asked by Michael Howard of Jonathan Cape to select and edit Carrington's letters and diaries for publication. Cape would pay an advance of £1,000 and £250 towards the cost of copying and typing the material. It was a job which Bunny could not afford to turn down, although it didn't occur to him that without the ‘odious' Holroyd's biography of Lytton Strachey, this particular book would never have been mooted. Bunny's first task was to track down the letters. Those lodged at the University of Texas were not a problem because Frances Partridge held the copyright, so Bunny could work from photocopies of the originals. Carrington's brother Noel was a great help, and Michael Howard took a strong personal
interest in the project. Julia Strachey, Barbara Bagenal, Alix Strachey and Rosamond Lehmann, among others, had retained their letters and Bunny was able to read the originals, or transcripts. Some letters had been lost or destroyed. But there was, anyway, a vast amount of material, and Bunny approached it with relish, telling Angelica: ‘May as well make the best of things & embark on every adventure while possible.'
¹⁹
He found the process moving and amusing by turns. Carrington's letters to Lytton he thought ‘amazing – so frank & improper & devoted to him'.
²⁰
But he worried that they were ‘full – almost too full – of jokes about buggery which will shock a lot of people'.
²¹

Frances commented that for his age Bunny was ‘a model of energy, activity and enthusiasm', and ‘in a handsome suit of blue check, steps about as briskly as a young man'.
²²
He told her ‘Sex begins at fifty'.
²³
He was happy, but Angelica's return in March caused mixed feelings. He was pleased to see her, but not with Taïtaï in tow. Bunny met the young man on April Fools' Day, noting in his diary ‘Taiti – bored – why get involved?'
²⁴
Who was bored is unclear.