One of the aspects that makes certain books so desirable is their connections. Here is a small selection of volumes linking David Garnett with a few of his friends, a brief window on his life and those around him. These connections are various, but all fascinating, with larger stories lying behind the sometimes brief inscriptions, bringing us just a little closer to the characters mentioned.
We have referred to David Garnett (1892-1981) previously on these pages, he was the son of the publisher’s reader and literary critic Edward Garnett (1868-1937) his mother being translator Constance Garnett (1862-1946). David was a notable author, sometime bookseller and director of the Nonesuch Press. Perhaps his best remembered book is “Lady into Fox” of 1923, this being his second published work following the pseudonymous “Dope Darling” of 1919. Although he later wrote “Aspects of Love” in 1956 that was made into a musical by Andrew Lloyd-Webber and had a more recent revival due to this. He also edited a seminal edition of the “The Letters of T.E. Lawrence”, published in 1938 just three years after T.E.’s death. This remains an invaluable resource for all students of TE. Garnett was an endlessly fascinating and well connected character in his own right.
The earliest of our featured books is David Garnett’s third, “Man in the Zoo” of 1924, this particular copy is presented to David Garnett’s great friend Stephen “Tommy” Tomlin (1901-1937), a now well-regarded artist and with David a founder member of the Cranium Dining Club and connected with the so-called Bloomsbury Group.
The next volume is David’s fourth book “The Sailor’s Return” of 1926 and here is a very personal dedication to a family friend Cecily Hey, nee Tatlock. Cecily was present at the marriage of David to Rachel “Ray” Marshall and indeed cared for Ray in her final illness at Hilton Hall. Ray illustrated with wood-engravings a number of David’s volumes. To further the connections Ray had a brief fling with Garrow Tomlin, Stephen Tomlin’s brother. The inscription by Cecily refers us to a further character, a friend of David, Aldous Huxley, being given the nickname “Antic Hey” after the 1923 Huxley comic novel “Antic Hay”.
Our third volume is “The Grasshoppers Come” of 1931, David’s ninth book in print, here presented and so inscribed to T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) who needs no further introduction, with his own connections to so many literary figures. TE was to write of “The Grasshoppers Come”: “The book pleased me quite beyond what I had thought possible. It is the first account of real flying by a real writer who can really fly: and it gave me a very great sense of long distance, and of that incommunicable cradle-dandling which is a cockpit in flight.” This volume is listed, with the inscription, in the catalogue of the Clouds Hill library, printed in “T.E. Lawrence by His Friends” published in 1937, however it does not contain the Clouds Hill bookplate, placed in the books when they were sold, so may one of the volumes retained by A.W. Lawrence.
Our final, but by no means least featured volume is the second of David’s autobiographical works “The Flowers of the Forest” of 1955. It is presented, “with love” to David’s lifelong friend, the artist Duncan Grant (1885-1978). “Bunny” was David’s pet name, apparently dating back to a time when, as a young child he had a rabbit skin cap. This is a volume in which Grant features a good deal. Grant was the sometime lover of David, had a daughter Angelica (1918-2012) with Vanessa Bell. Angelica was later to marry David Garnett as his second wife. On Angelica’s birth, David was to write to Lytton Strachey on the subject of the new baby: “Its beauty is the most remarkable thing about it. I think of marrying it: when she is twenty I shall be 46 – will it be scandalous.” Well marry her he did in 1942, when she was 24, following Ray’s death in 1940. Of her real father, Angelica was to write: “(Grant) was a homosexual with bisexual leanings”. It was not until 1937, when eighteen, that Angelica believed her biological father was Clive Bell, Vanessa’s husband, rather than Grant, although the reality was apparently an open secret within the Bloomsbury Group. Connections hardly become more complex than these!
So here is a small number of volumes intimately linking a number of interesting connected people. They are a tactile, tangible, intimate object projecting us into the past, a memory in paper.