Reviewed by Simon
Sarah Knights claims that she wrote her biography of David Garnett partly to restore his reputation – not as a writer, but as a person. His wife’s memoir Deceived With Kindness had painted him as a libertine who took advantage of her youth – perhaps one of the reasons that it is so seldom quoted in Bloomsbury’s Outsider – and Knights felt that was an injustice. Well, her book is exhaustive, fascinating, and… does nothing whatever to dispel Garnett’s libertine reputation.
As she quotes, Bunny (for such David was known by everybody, since he wore a rabbit-skin cap in his youth in imitation of Randolph Caldecott’s illustration of Baby Bunting) ‘maintained “the rule should be roughly that physical details be omitted” and that biographers “should not go into other people’s love affairs”.’ I got to the end of this enormous biography feeling exhausted at how many love affairs Garnett had, and filled with sympathy for his long-suffering first wife. This was my chief response, but I should set the scene first, for those not au fait with Garnett’s work and life. I should add that Garnett was a significant figure in my doctoral thesis; it’s an interesting experience, to read the biography of a writer whose work one knows well.
Garnett sprung to fame in 1922 as the author of Lady Into Fox, an extremely popular novella about a lady who (yes) turns into a fox. He was already connected with notoriety, being the son of the noted editor Edward Garnett, and hanging out with the Bloomsbury Group – albeit, as the title suggests, lingering on the outskirts of it. He did more than linger with Duncan Grant, having a lengthy affair with him (before, years later, marrying his daughter… who eventually left him for another man who’d had an affair with her father. Oh, Bloomsbury.) As always with biographies of any member of this crowd, much is learned about all the other figures – for, of course, their lives and careers intermingled.
Knights writes of Lady Into Fox that ‘it was only after the book was published that Bunny realised it was a metaphor for what he believed to be the absurdity of fidelity in marriage.’ (Later in the biography, she correctly quotes that the ‘subject was a reductio ad absurdum of marital fidelity’, which places the emphasis rather differently.) His own marriage was one where fidelity never seemed to trouble him particularly – certainly not his own fidelity, anyway. He married outside of the Bloomsbury Group, Rachel ‘Ray’ Marshall, despite discouragement from friends. And then he treated her appallingly, constantly having affairs and living away from her, even while she was dying of cancer. When she dared to have an affair herself, he was filled with rage, and wrote such things as:
For you to be jealous of my loves is as if you were jealous of my reading books & bursting into tears over their pages. For me to [be] jealous of you is selfish but the wisdom of preservation.
Perhaps one should read a biography impartially, but it is difficult not to rail against Garnett’s hypocrisy and cruelty while reading this section of the book. And the biography seems more less equally divided between Garnett’s dalliances with women (and, earlier, men) and his writing career – which were the two main forces in his life, of course. It is done very engagingly, and I don’t intend this as any criticism of the biography – but Knights herself must have rolled her eyes a touch at yet another conquest to write about, however much Garnett considered them not to be conquests. Unsurprisingly, I found those sections about Garnett’s writing far more interesting, and this book does a very good job at gathering reviews, noting the evolution of Garnett’s fiction, and generally setting his books in the literary and cultural landscape. Some of the novels get only brief mentions, but he wrote so many that it is to be expected.
While Knights is a very able writer, and tells the tale of Garnett winningly, there is an inevitable question attached to a 632 page biography: could it have been a 300 page biography? And I think it not only could have been, but perhaps should have been. There is a fashion for extremely long biographies, and there is a researcher’s temptation to put in everything discovered. Knights may have judiciously left out some of the things she learned, but there were many incidents and references that could have been left out. ‘One evening, at the Cave of the Golden Calf, Bunny lost three pounds at poker, a sum which he could ill afford.’ It’s a sentence picked at random, and obviously, alone, would make no noticeable difference to the length of the book – but it’s the sort of detail that appears a few times on every page and could have been left out. It’s also not entirely clear which reader of a biography of David Garnett would need to be given such introductions as ‘The Bloomsbury Group rejected conventional authority or conventional morality’, or told that conscientious objectors weren’t cowards, but such moments of superfluous elucidation are perhaps legacies of the PhD thesis Bloomsbury’s Outsider originally was, as are occasional returns to the theme of ‘outsider’.
These are minor quibbles. I think the book might have made more sense with a cull that left more focus on his writing than his affairs, but it certainly doesn’t affect the fact that this is an engrossing and very capable biography. David Garnett might be judged by some not to be worthy of a biography at all, but I consider him a hitherto too overlooked a member of the Bloomsbury Group, and one whose impact on the reading public of the interwar years was far greater than many of those whose names are now better known.
Simon is one of the Shiny New Books editors, and wishes this biography had been published while he was still building the bibliography to his doctorate.
Sarah Knights, Bloomsbury’s Outsider (Bloomsbury: London, 2015), 978-1448215454, 632pp., paperback.
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