Filling in the Bloomsbury puzzle

In March 1923 a large birthday party was held in a studio in Bloomsbury. It is often assumed that the eponymous Group was habitually glum or intense; but there were a lot of parties. The artists were Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and the birthday was David Garnett’s 31st. David (known as Bunny) was a handsome, fair-haired fellow of bisexual charm, beloved by Grant, among others. His second novel, Lady into Fox, inspired and illustrated by his wife, Ray, had been a literary sensation the year before.

There was much energetic dancing, and a floorshow was provided by the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, Maynard Keynes’s wife, and by Harriet Bingham, a new friend of Bunny’s, a recent arrival from a very different world. She was an alluring girl from Kentucky, who brought cocktails and a cake decorated with foxes and sang negro spirituals in a husky southern voice. Bunny and Henrietta were to have a brief affair; by coincidence, both are now the subject of biographies. Both books tell good stories of bad behaviour and fill in corners of the Bloomsbury jigsaw.

The decision to call Bunny Garnett ‘Bloomsbury’s outsider’ is questionable, given the intimate connections explained in Sarah Knight’s thoughtful and carefully researched account. (Less surprising is the photograph of him chosen for the cover (see right), clambering naked up to a window in Provence, muscular and tanned all over apart from white buttocks). Although this book does full justice to Bunny’s long and productive life as the author of over 30 books and an influential man of letters, his private life makes for easier reading. Bunny’s looks in his youth drew both sexes to him; he saw no reason from then on not to enjoy himself as he pleased. The only child of deeply literary parents — his father Edward a publishers’ editor and friend of Conrad and both D.H.