Name Drops in the Ocean

THE FLOWERS OF THE FOREST (252 pp.)--David Garneff--Harcourf, Brace ($4.50)

An autobiographer is lucky if his subject is a fascinating fellow. David Garnett, Britain's eminent, aging (64) novelist and critic, has accomplished the next best thing by having a lot of fascinating pals. In The Golden Echo, the first volume of his autobiography (TIME, May 24, 1954), Garnett told of his childhood among such literary greats as Joseph Conrad, who taught him how to sail (on the lawn), Henry James, who had him to tea, and "Jack" Galsworthy. Now Garnett has moved into another part of his private forest of first names. There are among others, Aldous (Huxley), Maynard (Lord Keynes), Virginia (Woolf), Morgan (E. M. Forster), Lytton (Strachey) and Rupert (Brooke).

These were the most brilliant flowers of Bloomsbury, the domain of London's intelligentsia that clusters around the British Museum--where Garnett's grandfather was an official--and whose hothouse air Constance (Garnett's mother, translator of War and Peace) breathed into her son. In the present volume Garnett, whom his friends all called "Bunny", tells about World War I, but this is a war reminiscence of a special kind. For Bloomsbury's Bunny was a conscientious objector. In 1914 Rupert, who was soon to write

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England . . .

invited Bunny to join his outfit--the Royal Naval Division. Instead, Pacifist Bunny plumped for a corner of an English field and ended up in Surrey digging turnips and forking dung for a farmer.

Thus The Flowers of the Forest is interesting on two counts: first for its skilled anecdotes of men of genius, and second for its implicit psychological portrait of a pacifist. Unlike those whose lot is but to do and die, the pacifist has to reason why. Hence his reminiscences tend to be much wittier than old soldiers' tales.

The Hard Seat. One of the book's more remarkable episodes concerns Author Lytton Strachey, like Garnett a pacifist. Summoned before a tribunal that was examining conscientious objectors for good faith, Strachey appeared, surrounded by his family and padded against the reality of hard benches with a private, pale blue air cushion. Asked the tribunal's spokesman: "What would you do, Mr. Strachey, if you saw an Uhlan attempting to rape your sister?" Whereupon, as Garnett tells it, "Lytton looked at his sisters in turn, as though trying to visualize the scene, and gravely replied in his high voice : 'I should try to interpose my own body.' "

As for Bunny himself, before he drew his turnip-digging assignment in Surrey, he went off to France with a Quaker unit to rebuild a shattered French town. As a member of the most intelligent group in what was the most intelligent middle class in the English-speaking world, he saw war as a ghastly muddle. Many of his fire-eating friends despised him, including one who wrote: "Have Rupert and Nurse Cavell died in vain? I spew you out of my mouth." But many also lived to share his views in the '20s and '30s, when pacifism became fashionable. Ironically, Garnett himself turned his back on it. In World War II he served as an intelligence officer in the R.A.F., and wrote War in the Air, an account of British battles in the early days of the war.

Conscience in the Crowd. Garnett candidly tells the ambiguity of the pacifist position, but his constant mea non culpa brings to mind Cyril Connolly's remark to the effect that generals may die happy, but that he never saw a pacifist without a guilty look in his eye.

Guilty or not, Bunny grew healthy on his pacifist war work, and Armistice night found him celebrating in Trafalgar Square. Even in the vast crowd he found a name to drop. It was Lady Mond,* with whom he proceeded to dance in the streets. At a party that night D. H. Lawrence scraped the frosting off the Armistice. With "sombre joy, [Lawrence made] fierce prophesies [that] Europe is done for; England most of all the countries . . . Very soon war will break out again and overwhelm you."

But for the dropped names, which together comprise a roll of the liberal intelligentsia of Georgian England, this might be a frivolous book. Yet in sum it gives an offbeat portrait of a period as important as Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That. For harsher times were approaching, that were to overwhelm the cultivated world of the Garnetts--times of ideological wars in which the flowers that spring in Bloomsbury have nothing to do with the case.

* Wife of the Cabinet Minister who inspired T. S. Eliot's dream of heaven:

I shall not want Capital in Heaven

For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond.

We two shall lie together, lapt

In a five per cent. Exchequer Bond.

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