Bloomsbury's Outsider (7 page)

Bunny was still hankering after Ursula Cox whom he had come to know when, together with the Ertels' adopted daughter Lenotchka, she had visited the Oliviers in 1910. Bunny's ardour was further inflamed by rumours that now in Moscow, Ursula was in love with the Ertels' adopted son, Kirik Levin. When Bunny announced that he wanted to spend his Easter vacation in Moscow, his parents somehow managed to fund the trip.

Bunny found a room in the apartment block where Ursula and her mother lodged with the Ertels. He was taken to a supper
party where he encountered his competitor, Kirik Levin and realised he was no threat. Bunny's letters to Constance were filled with long talks with Mme Ertel, visits to the opera, excursions to estates, expeditions to horse shows and tours of the Kremlin. ‘Oh this is a divine city!' ‘What a jumble this place is – what a mixture of riches & poverty – of luxury & disease & misery – of civilization and of Barbarism – and of order & anarchy. It has the best and the worst of everything in the world.'
²¹
His letters were full of everything except Ursula.

Bunny had said nothing to Ursula about his feelings and thought she was unaware of the reason for his visit. Outside on a wintry evening after a party, when Bunny eventually confessed love, Ursula gently replied that she was not in love with him. He felt the rejection strongly, although writing to Connie he assumed a brave face: ‘I can't tell you anything about my feelings […]. Because I don't want to tell anyone how I feel & because whenever one sets anything on paper it becomes false & exaggerated […]. So all I can say is that I am very lucky & happy in seeing Ursula at all and that I don't regret having come to Moscow in the least.'
²²
Bunny returned to London in time to begin the new term on 25 April, having resolved to throw himself into his work. He did well that term, easily passing the end of year exams and coming second in the first class, though scrutinising the results list, he automatically searched for his name in the second class, and not finding it, assumed he had failed.

Bunny was tall for a man of his generation – nearly six foot – good looking – but as photographs reveal, he still had a full, rather chubby face and a figure as yet un-moderated by both the
vanity and vigorous exercise of years to come. Bunny looked young for his nineteen years and it was perhaps this boyish gaucheness which brought out a little more than the maternal instinct in Antonia Almgren, a thirty-one-year-old woman who sought refuge from an unhappy marriage that summer, at The Cearne.

Tony Almgren was ‘thin and a little worn by her experiences, with huge dark eyes and a slight peculiarity in speech – a difficulty in pronouncing her r's, which being overcome gave them too much emphasis'.
²³
When Bunny flew off his bicycle, cracking an elbow and spraining a wrist in the process, Tony was at hand to provide relief in the form of vibratory massage, which involved her leaning across him in order to manipulate his elbow. As Bunny remarked, healing one kind of inflammation only gave rise to another. After several physiotherapy sessions, he took the pragmatic step and plucked up courage to ask whether he could become her lover. Permission was granted, on condition that he obtained contraceptives. These he procured, naturally enough, from a ‘bicycle tyre and hot water bottle shop'.
²⁴
And so began Bunny's first sexual relationship. It was not a love affair, for he never felt love for Tony, recognising that she did not love him. Nevertheless, while a dutiful college student during the week, Bunny found it gratifying to think of his weekends as the lover of a married woman. Gradually he saw her less often, and then not at all. He thought that Constance, perhaps, had nudged Tony towards him. Afterwards he vowed never to become involved in a sexual relationship unless he was in love. Bunny thought it curious, at the time, that his uncle, Arthur Garnett, a friend and
confidant of Tony's, said he thought Bunny had ‘managed very well to break off with her'.
²⁵

Some time in 1911, dressed as an Indian prince, Bunny attended a fancy-dress party in aid of Women's Suffrage at Crosby Hall, Chelsea. Although there were several people there whom he knew, including Maitland Radford, Godwin Baynes and the Olivier girls, he felt ill at ease. He recognised that the party consisted of ‘one big family' whose ‘members can gossip with each other until outside contacts are made, or shyness has worn off'. In contrast, he observed, the only child ‘walks awkwardly across the slippery floor, simply because he is too embarrassed to stand still any longer'.
²⁶
Bunny attempted conversation with lantern-jawed Adrian Stephen, whose sister Virginia, standing next to him, rushed across the room to greet a friend. Bunny was transfixed when James Strachey and his sister Marjorie danced a
pas-de-deux
down the centre of the hall. It was all so exotic and unfamiliar. Bunny's old friends were beginning to pair off, but not with him. The gauche science student did pluck up courage to dance with a shy young woman with wide spaced brown eyes, dark hair and an olive complexion. He was rather taken with her, but it would be ten years before he encountered her again.

‘Work and love – they are curiously intermingled & neither can be complete without the other.'
¹

Looking back upon his time at university, Bunny recognised that he ‘longed not for one friend, or sweetheart even, but a whole roomful who would provide a feast of intellect, a flow of soul, fountains of love. Of course at twenty I believed that I wanted love […] But I didn't. I wanted what I might have had if I had been educated at Cambridge and which I missed at South Kensington. To live among a lot of people who are open and intimate with each other.'
²

As the Neo-Pagan companions of Bunny's youth grew up, they were absorbed into the social circle Bunny had encountered at Crosby Hall, where Bloomsbury and Cambridge merged with Hampstead and Limpsfield. James Strachey embodied this amalgamation: he was a member of the Bloomsbury Group and a Cambridge Apostle, in love with Rupert Brooke but loved by Noel Olivier. Five years Bunny's senior, James was studious
looking and bespectacled, the youngest of the ten Strachey siblings. He would later translate Freud's published work into English, but at this time he was assistant editor of the
Spectator
. At Crosby Hall, Bunny had looked shyly upon the Stracheys and Stephens, and it would be a while before he felt comfortable in their presence. But in March 1912 James Strachey began to court twenty-year-old Bunny, showering him with invitations to the theatre, concerts, parties, dinners and the country; some were accepted, others politely declined or evaded with excuses of headaches or over-work.

Bunny came across variously as boyishly exuberant, shy, charming, affectionate and demonstrative. It was a fetching mix. But he had no idea of how attractive others found him. In James's company, he readily adopted the characteristic and contagious ‘Strachey voice', with its arch expressions of sexual innuendo, without realising the implications of such mannerisms. ‘I want you to tell me things', he wrote to James in Strachey-ese, ‘And later on we must have some orgies. Yes orgies – with Noel and so on.'
³
Quite apart from the fact that Bunny knew such a proposal was preposterous (Noel was studying medicine at the London School of Medicine for Women and was not the type to indulge in orgies), he seemed not to comprehend the impact he had on people and sometimes unwittingly conveyed the wrong message. James told Rupert that he was enjoying ‘the usual mild flirtation with Bunny'.
⁴
Perhaps Bunny was uncertain what message he wanted to convey as his feelings for Godwin Baynes, though unacknowledged, were clearly more than platonic.

Bunny was fond of James, but felt the need to proceed cautiously, as James was obviously interested in him in a way which Bunny found confusing. On the one hand he delighted in James's company, but on the other he periodically retreated from it. Having already missed a trip to the theatre with James, Bunny could not refuse a weekend with him in Surrey. Writing afterwards, Bunny admitted: ‘I was very stupid all the time but it is a mood which has almost become a habit with me.'
⁵
The stupidity might have been a matter of high spirits, for which Bunny was becoming well known. Equally it may have arisen from confusion about his sexuality or embarrassment over James's expectations. Having had neither the advantage of a public school or a Cambridge education, Bunny did not come from a male-oriented background where homosexual relationships were relatively common. It was difficult for him to acquire the casual familiarity and easy intimacy of this coterie, to become one of those people who ‘are open and intimate with each other', which he yearned to be. But Rupert Brooke and James Strachey opened windows onto an appealing fraternal Cambridge world of intellectual camaraderie quite different to that of Imperial College, a world, moreover, of clear sexual undertones for those who knew the code.

The Neo-Pagans were growing up. In 1912 Brynhild Olivier was the first to break away when she married the art historian Hugh Popham. Bunny felt it was time that he fell in love, but could not decide with whom. His gaze alighted upon Godwin's fiancée, Rosalind Thornycroft. While Godwin was in Dresden, Bunny planned to take Rosalind on an expedition up the Severn. His hopes were thwarted when they were joined by that earlier
object of his unrequited love, Ursula Cox and by Theodore Williams, a Jamaican friend of the Oliviers. Bunny's diary is full of the colour of sinking boats, high jinks and camaraderie, all nuanced with the shade of nostalgia. ‘When? when shall it ever be again?' he asked rhetorically. ‘Oh how I love those three companions.'
⁶
It was as though Bunny wanted to escape adolescence but at the same time could not quite make the leap into adulthood.

That summer Bunny travelled to Munich to attend a course of botanical lectures. He had arranged to meet Harold Hobson there, but pending Harold's arrival, Bunny was alone, although he attended a fancy dress party, in the now obligatory guise of an Indian prince. He was delighted to receive a letter from D.H. Lawrence, inviting him to Icking, some sixteen miles south of Munich, where Lawrence was living with Frieda Weekley. Bunny looked forward to meeting Lawrence as he was one of Edward's authors, and both Lawrence and Frieda had stayed with Edward at The Cearne in Bunny's absence. Lawrence had earlier written to Edward: ‘We should
love
to see David […]. Send him to see us here.'
⁷
He also wrote to Bunny, explaining ‘I am living with a lady who is not my wife, but who goes as my wife down here in Bavaria'. He assumed Bunny would find him easy to recognise at the railway station, because ‘I look frightfully English, and so I guess do you, so there is no need for either of us to carry the Union Jack for recognition'.
⁸

On 24 July Bunny arrived and was met at the station by a man with ‘the most beautiful, lovely, blue eyes.' Bunny described Lawrence as ‘slight in build, with a weak, narrow chest and shoulders', but with a ‘fair height', and light movements which ‘gave him a sort of grace'. In the crowded station, Bunny, who always liked to compare people to animals, thought him ‘a mongrel terrier among a crowd of Pomeranians and Alsatians, English to the bone'. He was charmed by Lawrence's sparkling eyes, which, he felt, seemed to invite him to join in some fun: ‘I could no more hold out against it than a well-behaved spaniel can resist the mongrel terrier's invitation to slip off poaching.'
⁹
The two men hit it off immediately.

This was a difficult time for Lawrence as Frieda desperately missed her children in England. Her estranged husband would not let her see them, and as a result Lawrence felt vulnerable, fearing Frieda would leave him. On top of this, his manuscript, ‘Paul Morel' had just been rejected. Bunny's arrival, therefore, was a welcome diversion, and he certainly cheered them up. He told Edward: ‘Lawrence & Frieda are delicious. They fight & swear the whole time & their position is so tragic that they can't help laughing when they realise it.' He thought Frieda ‘a heroic figure – I mean she belongs to the heroic ages', while of Lawrence Bunny remarked: ‘well you know what Lawrence is. He is so much a genius that it makes one distrust him – He is quite uncanny.'
¹⁰
As Bunny would later discover, this was a prescient observation.

While Bunny thought Lawrence a mongrel terrier, his host considered him an ‘adorable' ‘lucky dog', telling Edward that
Bunny was ‘awfully like you, in a thousand ways – his walk, his touch of mischief and wickedness, and nice things besides […]. We are awfully fond of him.' Bunny had changed physically in recent months, shedding the puppy fat and developing a more athletic physique. Like Edward, he was a strong swimmer, and Lawrence admired his strength and gusto. ‘You should see him swim the Isar', he wrote to Edward:

He simply smashes his way through the water, while F[rieda] sits on the bank bursting with admiration, and I am green with envy. By Jove, I reckon his parents have done joyously well for this young man. Oh but you should see him dance Mordkin passion dances, with great orange and yellow and red and dark green scarves of F's, and his legs and arms bare; while I sit on the sofa and do the music, and burst with laughter, and F. stands out on the balcony in the dark, scared. Such a prancing whirl of legs and arms and raving colours you never saw: and F. shrieks when he brandishes the murderous knife in my music-making face; and somebody calls in German from below: ‘Go and trample somewhere else,' and at last he falls panting. Oh the delightful Bunny!
¹¹

Bunny had evidently been inspired by Mikhail Mordkin, a dancer with the Ballets Russes, which took London by storm in 1911.