Some Bloomsbury interviews and memories - 20th-century philosophy

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1997 by Wilfred Stone

As I bicycled home that day, I wondered what, under British law, would have been the charge if those had been G. E. Moore's last words. I'm glad I didn't have to find out. (He died of natural causes a year later.)

DAVID AND ANGELICA (BELL) GARNETT

On Apr. 29, 1958, I visited the Garnetts at Hilton Hall, Huntingdon. I had just finished reading the first two volumes of Garnett's autobiography, The Golden Echo (1954) and The Flowers of the Forest (1955), and had dipped into the recently published Aspects of Love (1955) - and had, years before, read Lady into Fox (1922), A Man in the Zoo (1924), and The Sailor's Return (1925) - so I was not entirely unprepared for this visit. The autobiography had described a dedicated hedonist who made (after Blake) a religion of "satisfied desire" and prided himself on being a "libertine" rather than a "rake." He liked to think of himself (thanks, he said, to Darwin) as a "wild animal" and felt least "sin or shame" when he had given vent to his animal impulses and felt a "kinship with the lion" (Flowers 19).

The man I met at Fenstanton Station at 12:43 that late April day appeared to be a most tame and genial lion. Large and lumbering, white-maned, wearing baggy tweeds and a lopsided smile, he greeted me with hearty and good-natured scrutiny. He could have been the county squire looking over a possible tenant, but I felt accepted from the start. It was easy to read in his manner and features the man of the autobiography - open, earthy, and fun loving - and perhaps (to judge from his failure to provide an index to those big volumes) a little given to careless disorder. But that he had a taste for style I had no doubt when he led me to an ancient Rolls-Royce touring car in which we rode the two or so miles to Hilton Hall. He drove with a pococurantist flair, more attentive to me than to oncoming cars, but in due course we turned off, crossed a small ford, and entered the drive to Hilton Hall.

It was (and is(5)) a beautiful place: an old seventeenth-century farmhouse the color of wet straw, with great chimneys at either end and a wrought-iron gate before, all shaded, as I remember, by surrounding trees. Angelica Garnett met us at the door, gave me a shy and gracious welcome, and almost immediately excused herself to attend to children and to lunch. Her youth and beauty were striking - May to David's October - and I was from the first curious about their relationship.

Before this meeting, Angelica Garnett was scarcely more than a name to me. I was new to Bloomsbury - which was not an open book in those days - and I had in any case been paying more attention to Forster than to his milieu. I knew of her half brother Julian, because of his death in the Spanish Civil War and his exchanges with Forster,(6) but how he came to be a half brother, I don't think I could have said - though I had a dim memory of having been told. The vagaries of Bloomsbury's sexual relations had by no means been fully disclosed to me, and I was still picking up a lot of information on the run.