FamilyAngelica Garnett grew up within the charmed circle of the Bloomsbury group – her aunt was Virginia Woolf. But her childhood was a tangled web of deceit, which she's still trying to unravel at the age of 91To the outside world, the painter and writer Angelica Garnett must have appeared to have had a charmed childhood. She grew up at Charleston farmhouse in East Sussex with her mother, the painter Vanessa Bell, her brothers, Julian and Quentin, and their father, Clive Bell. She was the cherished baby of a celebrated family, which found itself in the early part of the 20th century at the heart of the influential circle of artists, writers and intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury group.
Then, when Angelica was 17, her mother took her to one side. She told her that her father was not Bell, but the painter Duncan Grant with whom Vanessa had had a love affair. "It was a fact which I had obscurely known for a long while," Garnett wrote in her celebrated memoir Deceived with Kindness. Nonetheless, the effect was devastating. Although she is now 91, Garnett is still to some degree grappling with her mother's revelation – and deception – most recently with a new collection of stories, The Unspoken Truth: A Quartet of Bloomsbury Stories. It is her first work of fiction, but is closer to autobiography.
The characters have been given new names and the stories are written in the third person, but "they're completely truthful, they're all autobiographical and not invented, except perhaps for the little story called The Birthday Party, I mean I've just embroidered it a little bit," she explains. That story describes her last visit to Duncan's bedside, and is heavy with regret: "[She] sat rather rigidly in the rocking chair, unable, for the wrong reasons, to make small talk. His hand was too frail for her to hold, his appearance too remote for risking a hug. Feeling it was for the last time, she wanted to elicit a response, but could only get as far as realising that her stare was too much like a burden for him."
When she first found out the truth about her father, Garnett exulted in her private knowledge, "unable to contain the feeling that, with such a father, I had been marked for a special destiny." But Duncan Grant showed little enthusiasm for his daughter, and as Vanessa had warned her off talking directly to either Duncan or Clive, nothing more was said by anyone. "Although Vanessa comforted herself with the pretence that I had two fathers," Angelica wrote, "in reality ... I had none."
Angelica's eldest brother, Julian, had just been killed in the Spanish civil war. The men in her life were disappearing one by one, and it seems unsurprising in these circumstances that Angelica became strongly attracted to an older man.
David "Bunny" Garnett was a writer and publisher, an old friend of her parents and a married man. A conscientious objector during the first world war, he had lived at Charleston and worked with Duncan on a nearby farm. He had been present on the day Angelica was born, on Christmas Day 1918. Years later, she learned that he had announced his intention to marry her then. Now, in the 1930s, his wife Ray was seriously ill and he began to court the teenage Angelica, impressing her with his man-of-the-world aura. "He was not typical Bloomsbury, and I think he was broader-minded than they were," she says. "One of the things that made me fall in love with him was that he seemed to know about life, you know, and was able to tell me things I couldn't have known otherwise. I think that made him more interesting."
Her parents were appalled, believing that at 48 Bunny was far too old. Duncan even wrote him a letter. But they failed to supply her with the vital information that would have prevented Angelica from marrying him: that Bunny had been Duncan's lover, and had also propositioned and been rejected by Vanessa. It was left to Angelica's aunt, the writer Virginia Woolf, and another of her parents' friends, the economist John Maynard Keynes, to try to warn her: "He sent for me or he had me to tea or something and he tried to talk about it, and warn me that it might not be a very good idea. And I wish I'd listened to him, really, but naturally I couldn't because I was in love with Bunny."
Aged 23 she married Garnett, now a widower, still ignorant of the fact that he had been her father's lover. Neither of her parents was invited to the wedding.
When Vanessa Bell died in 1961, Angelica felt bereft but also liberated. "Even now I sometimes feel as though she might be looking over my shoulder," she wrote more than 20 years later. But Duncan Grant's death in 1978 brought on a breakdown, which began with a terrible headache and ended with the realisation that she had never managed fully to grow up and separate herself from her parents. She had left her unhappy marriage years earlier, and it was now, in her 60s with her four daughters grown up, that she began seriously to gather her thoughts about her childhood.
In the house in the village of Forcalquier in the south of France where she has lived alone since the 1980s, facing out over snowy Alps and surrounded by paintings, she recalls the deep attachment of her parents: "They were very devoted, and that was a lovely thing to grow up with … they constantly come back into my mind and they always have."
White-haired, with piercing pale blue eyes and strong features in a wide oval face, she walks stiffly and talks falteringly. In her writing she is startlingly candid about her own failings, but gives the impression of someone who has mastered her vulnerability to become remarkably self-reliant.
The first story in the new book revisits the moment when Vanessa dropped her bombshell: "She found herself in Maman's arms where she felt much too big ... Her mind wandered and then returned, sucked into a vortex – she suddenly understood: Jamie was her father and not Howard." And it describes her emotional reaction: "Confusion swallowed her. How could it make no difference? It made all the difference in the world! Maman did not want her to talk about it. That was evident. And yet now she knew who her father was, she was to be thought of as someone else's daughter – there was still a mystery. It bound her as she stared beyond the French windows at the apple tree, the grass and the flint walls. She felt encircled, a hopeless beating of wings on glass."
This sense of powerlessness, of being trapped, stayed with her. But she insists it was not the fact that Grant was her father, but rather the dishonesty and pretence and the failure of the adults involved to take responsibility, that damaged her. "Of course it was very important, [but] I think it was still more important that my mother didn't really want me to talk about it. It had to be kept a secret, and I think that was a very bad idea." In her memoir she wrote that her "dream of the perfect father – unrealised – possessed me, and has done so for the rest of my life. My marriage was but a continuation of it, and almost engulfed me."
She found emotional fulfilment as a mother – "infinite pleasure – more than I can put into words" – and believes she succeeded where her own mother failed, in maintaining a warm and close relationship with her daughters Amaryllis, Henrietta, and twins Frances and Nerissa. She was fiercely critical of her own education, believing she had become lazy and spoilt: "When I went to boarding school, for example, it was very difficult to learn anything," she says. "Every time I came to something that was a little bit difficult, and said, 'Oh, Mummy, must I do this?' she always said, 'No you needn't, I'll let you off that', so I never did anything that was at all difficult and I think that was a great mistake and I regret that very much."
As a mother herself, she was determined to do better and equip her daughters properly for lives and careers. But she believes she should have left Bunny much sooner, and that staying with him for their sake was mistaken. Amaryllis died in 1973, and her sad story may feature in a further volume of autobiography: "She was discovered in the Thames, drowned, but nobody knew why she'd fallen in, or whether she'd fallen in, or whether she'd done it herself, or what had happened. She didn't leave any note or anything behind her."
Nerissa died recently from a brain tumour. Frances lives in France, and Henrietta in London.
Garnett still paints, in a bright upstairs studio – mainly still lifes, especially flowers, because it's difficult for her to get out now. But it is as a writer that she has earned highest acclaim. Her prize-winning memoir Deceived with Kindness, published in 1984, cast the Bloomsbury group in a new and unflattering light. She blames her husband for putting her off writing earlier, "Just laziness really on his part … He was a very selfish man who wanted to have everything, who wanted to have what he wanted to have, so much that he just took what he wanted. He never thought of the other person."
Like other children of talented and famous parents, she suffered most of her life from the burden of expectation, and in the new book berates herself for never producing a masterpiece. "I suppose it's a bit crazy," she says, "but one must have some standard, you know, and the higher it is, the better. I mean, of course, it's always impossible to reach it but I think it's essential to have it all the same."
She never really had it out with her parents. Vanessa "wasn't somebody I could talk to very easily about intimate things like that … I'm sure she would have liked to, but I couldn't do it and she for some reason couldn't do it either, so it didn't happen." Duncan Grant, she says, "wasn't much good at being a father … it wasn't his fault. He was just like that, he was just born like that. He didn't have, you know what I mean when I say a fatherly quality. He didn't have that at all. And that was a great pity, but it couldn't be helped."
But she says she was lucky to grow up in Bloomsbury all the same, and is relaxed about the sexually permissive culture in which she was raised: "I think it's inevitable, I mean I've got no moral feelings against it. It may not always work, unfortunately, but I don't think it matters people trying things out. I think this idea that people should experiment with each other is a good idea." (Though she also suggests that there may not have been as much sex as Bloomsbury legend suggests: "Everyone slept in different bedrooms, you know, they didn't hop into each other's beds, and it wasn't promiscuous at all as far as I can tell.")
If she was bitter for a long time about her wasted youth, living into her 90s has perhaps been a consolation. Garnett has outlived her contemporaries to become keeper of the Bloomsbury flame, and her memories remain vivid. Of Virginia Woolf she says: "I was very fond of her and she was a very charming and delightful aunt to have. Most people seem to think she was somebody who was always on the edge of a nervous breakdown, but she wasn't. She was enormous fun." Maynard Keynes she describes as "impressive, I remember him when I was very small in London. I was in the bath and he would come in and throw the bath salts in."
Does she feel she has finally been able to tear herself free from the web of deceit that was spun around her?
"I just think it's a question of growing older and being sensitive and intelligent enough to accept new ideas and new feelings," she says. Unlike many in Bloomsbury circles she never underwent psychoanalysis, but was influenced by reading Jung. She says: "I think most autobiographical books are efforts to understand oneself and what one's done and why one's done it, and all that is part of psychoanalysis. Everyone has a certain difficulty in growing up, even my children, although I've been a good mother. I'm still not grown up in some ways compared with other people I know, so I suppose it has taken rather a long time, but you do what you can and there it is."
The Unspoken Truth: A Quartet of Bloomsbury Stories by Angelica Garnett is published by Chatto & Windus, £15. To order a copy for £14 with free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846
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