Bloomsbury's Outsider by Sarah Knights

Author:Sarah Knights
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

‘You can have two emotions at the same time. One makes the other even more acute.’1

Bunny was engaged in writing a weekly news sheet, circulated to RAF stations to boost morale. He knew that the British RAF strength was considerably inferior to that of Germany, information he had ascertained from Air Commodore Groves. Nevertheless, it was Bunny’s job to maintain the fiction of British superiority and to suppress his instinct to tell the truth.

Fully occupied with war work, Bunny had to stop writing his ‘Books’ page. This he did willingly, feeling he had wasted his best years in journalism. Nevertheless, the New Statesman contains some of his finest writing. The essay format suited him, and his columns are delightful, reflecting his humour, intelligence, scholarship and wide-ranging interests. Reviewing Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933) he began: ‘Looking at the curlews vanishing on strong wings over the moorland, there can have been few men so unimaginative as not to envy them their freedom.’2 It is a typical David Garnett opening, one which appears to bear little relation to the subject, until a few lines in Bunny links the curlew’s freedom with that of the author of Flush in choosing her subject. Another opening:

The snow has come down and there is more to follow in those leaden clouds to the north, but I shall seize the moments of sunshine, put on my coat and muffler, take my stick and step out bravely, for I must see a little life and breathe a little air; I cannot live with books all the time. There is air certainly, arctic air, but there is not much life on the whitened roads. The doctor has visited the village and the treads of his tyres are freshly marked, but everyone else seems to have spent the morning hurrying indoors, and even if I caught sight of a child hurrying along in Wellington boots with a milk-can in his hand I should not have added much to my stock of knowledge.3

This eventually arrives at a review of Pirandello, but not before a lengthy perambulation around the subjects of family stories and those of village life. As his son Richard commented, Bunny’s ‘Books’ pages ‘give a richer impression of the interests of his civilised and well-filled mind than can be found elsewhere, even in his three volumes of autobiography’.4 Bunny’s New Statesman articles are highly personal, reflecting not only his interests and scholarship, but also where he was or what he had been doing around the time of writing. The curlews in the Flush review signify he had been in Yorkshire, the snow in the Pirandello essay that he had been out in Hilton. Writing to Bunny from China in 1936, Julian Bell had commented, ‘I keep in touch with you more than most of my friends, thanks to the Statesman and your habit of writing autobiography in it’.5

Bunny could not know, in September 1939, that he would spend most of the next six years involved in writing propaganda and that he would have no time to write novels.

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