Bloomsbury's Outsider (55 page)

Bunny was absorbed in writing a novel, waking in the night with a new idea, which he would scribble down lest he forgot it.
The creative process involved peaks of satisfaction and troughs of despair, and, as usual, he was experimenting with a new genre: It was ‘a picaresque story (which goes on & on from adventure to adventure)', he told Angelica, but ‘the palette knife is needed to scrub out vast areas of inferior Delacroix – lions springing on stallions etc'.
²

In April Bunny was joined by Frances Partridge, the two of them spending their time contentedly searching for flowers. They found five species of orchid. One evening they talked of loneliness: a condition they shared. Frances asked Bunny whether he thought he would ever return to Hilton. In ‘a tremulous voice' he replied, ‘ “The truth is I don't want to. I love the house, but it's too full of ghosts”.'
³

Although Bunny returned to England periodically, Charry gradually took possession of him and he began to feel it was home. Family and friends poured over the threshold, a reminder that though exiled in France, Bunny remained in their hearts. He delighted in visits from the children and grandchildren of old friends. As Henrietta commented, ‘It is indicative of his temperament that many of the younger generation knocked on his door'.
⁴
Sometimes he barely had time to change the sheets before another visitor settled into the spare room. Henrietta described her father at this time as being ‘surprisingly domesticated' and ‘interested in the dailyness of domestic life'.
⁵
He revelled in the
textures of routine: washing laundry, taking lunch outside, mending clothes, marketing in Montcuq, bottling wine, foraging for mushrooms and cooking for guests. He gained a reputation as a splendid host and skilled cook, though, according to Henrietta, while ‘his cooking was delicious, the small kitchen was exceedingly untidy. The mousetraps, baited with a variety of enticing morsels, were ignored. Instead the little field mice who came in from the cold feasted on the debris that was left lying around.'
⁶
Bunny liked to work at a wooden table outside beneath an oak, his favoured place for meals as well. ‘Everything is perfect', he wrote to Angelica, ‘Yet why do I sometimes ask myself: “What are you doing here? What is the point of it?” '
⁷

Bunny's eyesight was not what it had been: dining with Grace Higgens he sprinkled his rhubarb & junket with salt thinking it was sugar. Sometimes he did not notice that his food was not particularly fresh, and this, coupled with a predilection for foraged mushrooms, caused gastric upsets among his guests. Richard recollected one occasion when he deftly removed mouldy cheese which Bunny had placed before a pregnant visitor. Diana and Peter Gunn, staying with Bunny in 1972 were both taken ill in the night and reaching for the only receptacles to hand, were sick into Bunny's saucepans. As he explained indignantly to Frances, ‘The blame was laid on a risotto of guinea fowl with onions, garlic, rice, tomatoes, peppers & some
slices of my preserved cèpes
'.
⁸
Bunny mistakenly assumed all boletes were
cèpes
and therefore safe to eat. But
cèpes
are
boletus edulis
and according to notes in his recipe book, he was picking
boletus erythropus
and
boletus luridus
, both of which cause gastric problems. ‘I am a bit doubtful about these', he wrote later in his recipe book, ‘one made me sick in the night – or I
was
sick.'
⁹

Bunny's latest novel,
A Clean Slate
, was published by Hamish Hamilton that summer. It got off to a good start with positive reviews in
The Times
and
Guardian
. Bunny told Sylvia his novel was ‘very sexy, and I use the word cock a good deal'.
¹⁰
It was banned for indecency in South Africa. The story concerns Lady Billy Tonson, ‘a beautiful extrovert of forty-seven' who falls for David, a schoolboy of seventeen, inducting him in the arts of love.
¹¹
As Bunny pointed out to Frances Partridge, although this bore a superficial resemblance to Angelica's relationship with Ali (as he was now known), most of the book had been written long before Angelica's Moroccan adventure, and the characters were completely different. Bunny was, in fact, experimenting with writing ‘entirely from the woman's point of view'.
¹²

As an attempt to write about sex from the woman's viewpoint,
A Clean Slate
is a somewhat egocentric act of reflected glory. Ironically, the book's main weakness resides in Bunny's unfettered descriptions of sex, some of which are cringingly anatomical. When Billy gives young David a lesson on female genitalia (‘the man in the boat') and sanitises his penis after congress with a prostitute (‘she swabbed his parts thoroughly
[…] and then pressed open the lips of the urethra') it is as though a gynaecologist has run riot in a brothel.
¹³
Perhaps Bunny hoped for the kind of success which Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins enjoyed at this time. It was very much a late 1960s novel.

In October, Bunny was visited by Alan Maclean his publisher at Macmillan, who hoped to persuade Bunny to accept an invitation to be the guest of honour at a literary luncheon hosted by the formidable bookseller Christina Foyle. The occasion would coincide with Bunny's eightieth birthday the following March, and mark the publication of his novel
The Sons of the Falcon
. It was ironic that living in France, Bunny seemed to be more in demand than ever. In November he learned from his agent, Hilary Rubinstein, that Bernard Smith, the American script editor and film producer, wanted to make a film of
Lady into Fox
with Patrick Garland as scriptwriter and director. The problem was that Smith wanted Bunny to grant him a free option for twelve months to buy time to finance and set up the film. Bunny evidently agreed to this proposal, as almost a year later
The Times
‘Diary' announced that Patrick Garland would direct the film of
Lady into Fox
and had finished the screenplay. Given the fate of so many films of his books (including the Renoir proposal) Bunny did not hold out much hope.

As part of the fanfare for
The Sons of the Falcon
and Bunny's eightieth birthday, Ruth Hall interviewed him for an
Observer
colour supplement spread. He told Angelica, ‘She makes me out to be an aged Casanova with a sugary disposition', adding, ‘My own fault I suppose'.
¹⁴
On 5 March
The Sons of the Falcon
featured on the BBC Radio programme
In View
, and on the 8th the Foyle's
Literary Luncheon took place at the Dorchester. Twenty-five tables accommodated nearly three-hundred guests, the VIPs exhibited at a long table, like a Last Supper, with paying guests seated at smaller tables below. Bunny was joined at the top table by Harold Macmillan, Rosamond Lehmann and Christina Foyle, together with his choice of friends and family including Richard and Jane, the Hobsons, H.E. Bates, Francis Meynell, Stephen Spender and Bryan Guinness.

Macmillan delivered the opening address to which Bunny responded self-deprecatingly by thanking him for his compliments, even though he did not agree with them all. Bunny said he still hoped to improve as a writer: he was a slow developer. His speech dwelt upon the key people in his life, in particular his parents, Frankie Birrell, Francis Meynell, Duncan and Vanessa. He finished by reading a poem on the subject of his own mortality. If not the most uplifting reflection on eighty years, it was characteristically rational.

William could not attend as Linda gave birth that day to Bunny's fifth grandchild, Romany. But most of those dear to Bunny who had missed the literary luncheon were present that evening at a birthday party hosted by Magouche. The throng included Duncan, Angelica, Henrietta, Sophie, Nerissa and Fanny; Quentin, Olivier and their three children; Frances Partridge, Richard, Jane, Ned and Oliver. William arrived beaming with happiness. Bunny was absolutely in the bosom of his family and it had been a long while since it had gathered around him like this.

The Sons of the Falcon
was a resounding critical success. The
Financial Times
commented ‘David Garnett has never been predictable. He has produced a large and varied
oeuvre
, and
The Sons of the Falcon
is a new departure […]. It is first and foremost
a “rattling good yarn”.'
¹⁵
The
Sunday Times
considered it ‘admirably written and immensely readable', and that Bunny displayed ‘that gift of empathy with a distant, and to most of us unimaginable, way of living that is worth a hundred times more than the most painstaking historical reconstruction'.
¹⁶
The
Guardian
called it ‘A high piece of old-fashioned melodrama […]. Fierce, scarlet, unforgettable stuff.'
¹⁷

Set in the Caucasus in the 1860s, the novel was inspired by a story Bunny had been told in 1920, concerning a family icon which worked miracles. When the family split, the icon was retained by one branch though coveted by the other. During an annual pilgrimage when the icon was paraded, the subordinate branch laid ambush to claim it. Hearing of this, the head of the family thrust his sword through the belly of his youngest child, afterwards concealing the icon in the corpse.

The story fascinated Bunny, who tried to imagine a culture in which a man could kill his child to save a religious symbol. The book was also coloured by Bunny's recollections of Ray's tales of her travels in the Caucasus in 1913. ‘The Caucasians are picturesque people' she had written to her brother Tom, ‘they have killed and robbed several people […] already this season'.
¹⁸
The novel's gestation was comparatively rapid, written almost entirely
during the winter of 1970–71. For the first time, Bunny, who usually wrote relatively short novels, composed on an epic scale. As the
Guardian
's critic observed: ‘The narrative thunders along at a fantastic rate.'
¹⁹

Bunny's career was undergoing something of a renaissance. Chatto & Windus re-issued
Beany-eye
and
The Grasshoppers Come
in a combined volume.
The Times
republished Bunny's
The Appendix
, first published in the
New Statesman
in 1938. Ian Parsons was curious as to when volume four of Bunny's memoirs might appear. Bunny remained under contract to produce it and in anticipation Chatto had reprinted
The Golden Echo
the previous year.

Bunny encountered persistent problems with this volume. It was conceived in four parts: the war; the Rupert Hart-Davis years; farming at Hilton; the years since his separation from Angelica. Bunny proposed to ‘deal with the first of these in some detail' but would ‘say little about the second, because it is impossible for fear of libel to tell the truth and hateful to rake it up. Nor shall I say much about my experience as a farmer.'
²⁰
The canvas was rather limited. Bunny told Sylvia: ‘Everyone tells me to write a fourth volume of my memoirs. But nothing is interesting except truth, and truth can be painful […]. If I attempted a book a large part of it, all bitterness, hatred and unforgiveness would have to be left out and a very expurgated version of my heart produced […]. I could not say that by farming I slowly lost Angelica and arrested the growth of William.'
²¹
Despite several attempts, Bunny could not progress beyond the end of the war.

After ten weeks in England, Bunny returned to Charry where he shooed away the peacocks which had flown over from the Château. When a few days later Bunny was joined by Rosemary Peto, she recorded in his visitors' book: ‘Memorable peacock and octopus stew.'
²²
Bunny asked whether she would accompany him on a longer touring holiday in France. She gently declined, though acknowledging: ‘I am so fond of you & we still have such a strong physical passion.'
²³
But Bunny rarely wanted for company. In August he was joined by Henrietta and Sophie, and by William, Linda and their ‘Peregrine Wind Quintet'. Ann Hopkin arrived accompanied by her husband Robin Boyd. Henrietta cooked for the assembled multitude, and Bunny felt very close to her. A few weeks later Frances Partridge came, bringing the music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor, whom Bunny initially took against, but discussing George Moore, they discovered they liked one another after all. Frances was ‘full of admiration for Bunny's determination, philosophy and appetite for life'.
²⁴
He remained redoubtable. Fishing with his cousin Dicky Garnett in Wales during a gale, he thought nothing of climbing a tree to retrieve his tangled line.

That autumn Bunny anticipated an impending visit from Angelica with mixed feelings. She was coming to finalise the sale of L'Ancienne Auberge, and had written to Bunny telling him he was ‘necessary' to her and their daughters. For Bunny, this statement represented a lifeline to which he clung, hoping it signified that all was not lost between them. ‘You know my dear', he
replied, ‘my arms are always open. Only I have no claims on you.'
²⁵
When Angelica sent a telegram saying she would arrive accompanied by the art historian Richard Shone, Bunny's hopes were dashed. It was not that he anticipated any resumption of their former relationship, but he had hoped to be able to talk, as he would say ‘intimately', especially about their daughters. Bunny wrote a note which, on arrival, he handed to Shone, asking him to make himself scarce. In the circumstances, Shone did the honourable thing and left. Bunny was particularly aggrieved to discover that he was only ‘necessary' to Angelica ‘to take part in digging up the most painful parts of the past'.
²⁶
He could understand well enough psychoanalytical shorthand, but he had little time for it, believing instead ‘that as a metaphor from mining, we imagine what is buried is worth dragging up – whereas perhaps it is best buried'.
²⁷