In 1972, the Observer encountered one of a near-extinct species: Bloomsbury Group survivor writer David ‘Bunny’ Garnett, nearly perishing in the process, thanks to Garnett’s hair-raising driving. ‘“You drive with great imagination,” I said faintly,’ journalist Ruth Hall reported when Garnett collected her for an overnight stay at his cobwebby, dead-fly-infested French farmhouse.
It’s a funny, affectionate portrait of a man who ‘retains an incredible “niceness” – there is no other word for it’. Beret-clad Garnett, then 80, was an attentive if eccentric host, frying potatoes, stoking the fire and plying Hall with walnut cake and a bespoke hotwater bottle fashioned from a beer bottle. He was modestly embarrassed to be interviewed, offering an alternative: ‘I’ve prepared a List of the Best and Worst Things in Life. Would you like me to read it?’
But Hall had plenty of questions: ‘What was Virginia Woolf like?’ (malicious: nicknamed The Goat). ‘Why had he quarrelled with DH Lawrence?’ (Lawrence tried to persuade him to dump his Bloomsbury friends) ‘Was everyone madly queer?’ (‘Some of them were actually bisexual,’ Garnett protested.)
The only child of an ‘unusually liberal-minded’ couple (his mother translated Tolstoy and befriended various Russian revolutionaries), Garnett was among the youngest of the Bloomsberries and his blue-eyed beauty endeared him to the group as much as his intellect (he was an Imperial College researcher in his youth: ‘I was very interested in the sexual lives of fungi,’ he said). The sexual lives of humans, freely expressed and unshackled from Victorian morality, were equally compelling. Inspired by Lytton Strachey (he offered Hall Strachey’s account of a tryst they shared a bedtime reading), Garnett declared himself a lifelong ‘libertine’, and became the lover of ‘an enormous amount’ of women.
‘There was a feeling of complete freedom,’ he said of that time. Even so, Garnett resisted the idea of Bloomsbury as a philosophical or intellectual unity: ‘What held us together was friendship.’ And that Best and Worst Things list? Worst: ‘the death of someone close’ (so many of his friends had died by suicide); best included ‘unexpected visitors’.
