More Simple than Love

...When H. G. Wells wondered how Clive, whom he disliked, could have such a beautiful daughter, Garnett was unable "to reveal the well-kept secret that her father was Duncan Grant," the homosexual painter...

...Thus Joseph Conrad's "relationship with Constance [whose Russian friends he disliked] was . . . a little like that of a well-behaved, well-bred dog in the presence of the household cat...

...In Great Friends, this shrinks to: "[Tim] explained to me what unhappiness [sadism] caused him...

...His father was Edward Garnett, one of the great editors of all time, who discovered and nurtured some of the finest writers of the late 19th century and early 20th...

...Great Friends can be read pleasurably on three levels: with the accent on great, as stories about great writers...

...After heading for a career in biology and botany, Garnett switched to writing and bookselling...

...Still, what we have here is striking portraits of 17 writers: Conrad, W. H. Hudson, Ford Madox Ford, Edward Thomas, Galsworthy, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, J. M. Keynes, Lytton Strachey, George Moore, Arthur Waley, H. G. Wells, T. E. Lawrence, H. E. Bates, T. H. White, and Carson McCullers, the only writer from his recent period whom Garnett chose to include...

...Carrington's husband, Ralph Partridge, "took over the vegetable garden, the greenhouse, the orchard and the bees...

...T. E. Lawrence taking Garnett on an enthusiastic motor-boat ride...

...Garnett's literary judgments are sometimes off, as when he sets George Moore above Hardy, declares that H. E. Bates' "short stories rank with those of any writer of our time," or tells Carson McCullers that she is the best writer America has produced since Henry James...

...Or this, about the "natural aristocrat" George Moore: "His hands gave him away...

...But when describing the appearances, idiosyncrasies, behavior—in short, the personalities—of his subjects, Garnett almost never fails...

...Garnett has this love, too, as in the delightful way he tells of Ford Madox Ford's making an ass of himself in a self-dramatizing scene in which Ford compares himself to the poor old horse of a Westmorland folk song he sings for David, and complains of the world's cruelty toward an old man...

...Yet one cannot say about Waley that his work resembled that of a man mending shoes in the kitchen while he watches pots simmering on the stove...

...and with the accent on both words, as an expression of the infectious enthusiasm of someone who sees life as a great adventure shared with great friends, and who, at 88, still knows how to savor and enjoy it...

...And Lady Ottoline Morrell confided in her memoirs that Bunny was "an odd rather loutish figure with a habit, which had perhaps been formed by peering into microscopes, of waggling his head and poking it towards one, and staring very intendy into one's face without any expression on his countenance...

...There are no condescending superficialities here of the kind Garnett permitted himself, for example, in a memorial to Nancy Cu-nard that he contributed to a book edited by Hugh Ford, where he casually remarked: "I went to a party in her rooms in the Eiffel Tower at which Ezra Pound and Alistair Crowley and other horrors were present...

...Young David—Bunny to his friends—was in an excellent position from his earliest days to meet famous authors...

...Thus he recognizes that Conrad's interest is "that of the engineer studying fatigue in metals, or the effects of corrosion—the point at which the interior molecular structure can stand no more: the wire breaks, the girder snaps...

...as Virginia Woolf wrote in a letter to Bunny: "Oh Lord how does any one pretend to be a biographer...

...Or this shrewd generalization: "The great writer is like a child that has not been taught that some things must not be said, or even observed...

...Her growls were convincing...

...Garnett is also a charming evoker of scenes: the absurd UN party at which he meets Carson McCullers ("Her complexion was that of some overcooked grey vegetable tinged with poison...

...Instead, we get things such as this about W. H. Hudson's years of poverty: "Those years marked him, I believe, as the beasts in the zoo are sometimes marked where they have rubbed without avail for years against the bars...

...I realized the enjoyment which the poor are offered by the spectacle of the imbecilities of the rich —of the endless 'copy' they provide to their servants...

...Mi-na Curtiss, in her graceful Other People's Letters, quotes a missive from David Garnett: "I shall not say anything to you about love...

...weekends at Ham Spray, the rustic paradise that Carrington maintained for her beloved Lytton Strach-ey...

...Clearly, the first and fuller version is more dramatic and suggestive, even if "unnatural" may not be the mot juste in that context...

...When a sadist falls in love with a normal person he must either be false, or tell the truth—and whichever he does he repels his beloved...

...Or this telling detail about the great translator Arthur Waley, who "cannot ever have been a poor man": "Strange to say, Arthur mended his own shoes...

...Several observers have commented on a curious trait of Garnett's...

...actually the result of an almost gourmetlike love of the foibles of old and intimate friends...

...it is simply, irrepressibly, there...

...the funeral of George Moore, where, among a few obscure mourners such as Moore's cook and maid, Garnett and Prime Minister Ramsay Mac-Donald listened to a drunken minister garble the service...

...Garnett—Constance—translated most of the major 19th-century Russian writers and was a patroness to important Russian emigres living in or passing through London...

...Whichever line he followed, he revolted the object of his love and disgusted himself...

...Even if she has been dismissed by Vladimir Nabokov ("a translation should be diamond, not Garnett"), she was, like her husband, most welcoming to literary figures, and among Bunny's earliest memories are wonderful nautical games improvised by Joseph Conrad...

...The only criticism I can make is to say that it is almost indecent to prove how much you have been loved and what a delightful person you are...

...Great or not, Garnett observed acutely, and expresses his observations well...

...These re-edited versions, charming as they are, may in some cases have been excessively shortened...

...Or: "Like Conrad [Galsworthy] wore a rimless eyeglass, which he put in his right eye when surprised by something that had been said and [he] wanted to listen seriously...

...with the accent on friends, as studies in the many forms of friendship...

...Thus he used his eyeglass more as though it were a hearing-aid...

...I think the game may have been all the more thrilling because tinged with a touch of fear...

...Socrates admitted, at the end of the Lysis, to "have not as yet been able to discover what we mean by a friend...

...He had found himself in the dilemma of either being sincere and cruel, or false and unnatural...

...Yet knowing so many famous writers so soon, and having at the same time started out with an interest in natural science and a healthy skepticism about literature, may have helped Garnett to remain levelheaded in his assessments: "I either enjoyed a book a man wrote, or I did not...

...You make me happy...

...I myself would like to think that Garnett was being a camera—practicing a kind of dissolve or wipe by way of leading into his next shot, say, a close-up...

...Take the following episode concerning T. H. White as it appears in the Preface to The White/Garnett Letters: "Tim explained that the sadist cannot be happy unless he has proved the love felt for him by acts of cruelty...

...He was 35, and had yet to write his most important novels...

...To be able to write this to a woman you want to make love to, but who won't let you because you are married, is proof of a considerable talent for friendship...

...It had been Tim's fate to destroy every passionate love he had inspired...

...This seems to me to be one of those times when the usual ironic aporia enwraps a genuine uncertainty...

...He cooked his food, ate it, translated his books and mended his shoes in one room...

...The strange intrigues, manias, and, above all, gossip of Bloomsbury can all be found here—gossip that Garnett calls, not malicious as other chroniclers do, but "inspired...

...Again, here is Virginia Woolf playing with David's two sons who had been alerted that "the Woolves are coming": "I saw the little boys scrambling away among some willow bushes and then returning to bait Virginia, who was pursuing them on all fours, growling that she was a she-wolf...

...There was just the faintest possibility that she might not be like the foster-mother of Romulus and Remus, but an actual werewolf...

...Great Friends is a selection of sketches, almost as pictorial as they are graphic, of the great and near-great writers David Garnett knew as a boy, a man, a veteran...

...But, I think, Garnett is not stressing his delightfulness...

...Later still, he became literary editor of the New Statesman, with a stable of writers of his own...

...Anyone with those hands would have been hurried to the guillotine at once...

...For many of these portraits have the quality of home movies: incidents, often of a trivial but revealing nature, reported in fetchingly mundane detail, with very little editing or editorializing...

...Rushing in where sages fear to tread, I venture that friendship, like love and hate, presupposes a certain talent, which is in turn related to a capacity for happiness, one of whose major ingredients is the ability to enjoy other people for what they are rather than for what they can give to you...

...At other times, though, he is hearteningly perceptive about literary matters...

...He is now 88, but still going great guns, although most of these pieces are reworkings of material published earlier, a lot of it in three autobiographical volumes I have just promised myself to read as soon as I can lay my hands on them...

...It's much more simple than that...

...This last should remind you of the eccentric affairs of Bloomsbury, of which David was one of the youngest members, eventually taking as his second wife Angelica, the daughter of Clive and Vanessa Bell...

...One may, of course, quarrel with some aspects of the book, the most likely objection being the very one Garnett himself made to Sir Sydney Cockerell's The Best of Friends (as quoted in Wilfrid Blunt's Cockerel...

...In My Lives, Sir Francis Meynell recollects David's "habit of punctuating his conversation not by movement of the eyes but by quick turnings of his head...

...Or take this insight into the plebeian D. H. Lawrence's gift for mimicry: "The slightest affectation of manner, of social pretense, was seized on mercilessly...

...Meanwhile he had himself become a noteworthy fictionist, producing a string of novels, novellas and fables, the best of which (Lady Into Fox, The Man in the Zoo, The Sailor's Return, and a couple of others), now undeservedly neglected, should spring back into popularity with the next change in fashion...

...He was to play an important part in two remarkable publishing enterprises: Francis Meynell's Nonesuch Press and, later, the house of Rupert Hart-Davis...

...But I felt no more awe or respect than I did for a blackbird because I loved its song, or contempt than I did for a jay because it screeched...

...Somehow, even when trying to convey the simultaneous multiplicity of Woolfs narrative strands, the use of domestic imagery is inappropriate for this supremely un-housewifely woman and writer...

...I am happy when I am with you and when I am not, I think about you and that makes me happy...

...This is manifestly better than David's attempt at epitomizing Virginia's fiction: "Woolfs work resembles that of a woman who is mending clothes in the kitchen while she watches pots simmering on the stove and tells a story to the children around her knee without forgetting that there is a home-made cake in the oven which, judging from the smell, will soon be ready to come out...

...When Ralph went to live in London with Frances Marshall, Carrington felt betrayed by a partner in the vegetable garden bed as much as in the matrimonial...

...Intimacy —sexual intimacy—is impossible...

...Most of the famous men and women in Great Friends are observed freshly, tellingly and with an engaging avoidance of awe, whitewashing, patroniza-tion, censoriousness, envy—or any other pitfall...