MEANING IN THE MARGIN: THE LETTERS AND WORKS OF DAVID GARNETT by Ryan Scott Fletcher APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ___________________________________________ Michael Wilson, Chair ___________________________________________ Patricia Michaelson ___________________________________________ Sean Cotter ___________________________________________ Fred Curchack Copyright 2020 Ryan Scott Fletcher All Rights Reserved In memory of Dr. Sandra Mayfield MEANING IN THE MARGIN: THE LETTERS AND WORKS OF DAVID GARNETT by RYAN SCOTT FLETCHER, BA, MA DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HUMANITIES-STUDIES IN LITERATURE THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS December 2020 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A special thanks to my committee chair, Professor Michael Wilson, for his encouragement and sound advice. I also want to thank my committee members, Professor Patricia Michaelson, Professor Sean Cotter, and Professor Fred Curchack, for their continued support throughout the duration of this project. Thank you to Linda Snow, library liaison, and Professor Tim Redman for making me aware of this special collection of letters at The University of Texas at the Harry Ransom Center. September 2020 v MEANING IN THE MARGIN: THE LETTERS AND WORKS OF DAVID GARNETT Ryan Scott Fletcher, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2020 ABSTRACT Supervising Professor: Michael Wilson David Garnett (1892-1981) is mostly known for his minor role as a member in the Bloomsbury Group, meeting in WWI. The Bloomsbury Group is made up of artists, writers, and even a famous economist during the early twentieth century, i.e. Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and John Maynard Keynes. Scholars rarely notice or even mention Garnett’s impact in shaping modernism as a writer, critic, and editor, especially in London. In this dissertation, I utilize Garnett’s personal letters housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas as well as research surrounding the Bloomsbury Group to reveal Garnett’s significant and often underestimated role. Meaning in the Margin posits as an important and resourceful writer of the time. His letters during WWI show a young man in transition, revealing his struggles as a conscientious objector and his developing relationship with the Bloomsbury Group. The letters after WWI highlight a knowledgeable writer and critic in London, expanding a network of his own. Garnett’s novels, Lady into Fox (1922), A Man in the Zoo (1924), The Sailor’s Return (1925), Go She Must! (1927), Beany-Eye (1935), and Aspects of Love (1955), emphasize a concern for the psychological and man’s relationship to the animal. This work concludes Garnett is worthy of attention for scholars due to his letters and literary contributions. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………….……………………………………………………….v ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………...……………………vi INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………....viii CHAPTER 1 BLOOMSBURY’S PUPIL: THE TRANSFORMATION OF DAVID GARNETT…………………………………………………………………………………….…..1 CHAPTER 2 LONDON’S SECRET: DAVID GARNETT’S LIFE AS MENTOR AND EDITOR……………………………………………………………………………………….…43 CHAPTER 3 THE ANIMAL WITHIN: AN ANALYSIS OF DAVID GARNETT’S NOVELS……………………………………………………………………………………....…80 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………123 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………..126 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH………………………………………………………………...…133 CURRICULUM VITAE vii INTRODUCTION MEANING IN THE MARGIN: THE LETTERS AND WORKS OF DAVID GARNETT In March of 1923, many influential artists gathered to celebrate a friend’s birthday in London. The artist Duncan Grant offered his home as a location to celebrate. John Maynard Keynes, the esteemed twentieth-century economist, brought his girlfriend, Lydia Lopokova, a member of the Ballets Russes. They congregated to offer their congratulations for a job well done on a recent literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, which is one of Britain’s oldest. Previous award recipients before 1923 included D.H. Lawrence and Lytton Strachey. Mina Kirstein, who would become a future supporter of American theater and a biographer, accompanied her friend, Henrietta Bingham, a wealthy American, to the party. The two women contributed a large cake that was decorated with an image from the award-winning novel, Lady into Fox. Lydia honored guests with a dance, and Henrietta sang a few African American spirituals. The celebratory night brought artists together from different sides of the Atlantic as well as different media. Worlds collided because of this honored guest, bringing a diverse experience to all who attended. The cake honored the 1922 recipient of the James Tait Black Award, none other than David Garnett (Knights 181). David Garnett (1892-1981), also known as Bunny to friends and family, grew up outside London near Crockham Hill in Kent. He was the only child of Edward and Constance Garnett. Edward was a publisher and Constance was a famous translator of Russian novels and stories. Garnett grew up to study science, but WWI would interrupt his plans. As a conscientious objector in the war, Garnett began to write. After the war, he along with Francis Birrell and viii Francis Meynell opened the Nonesuch Press. In all, Garnett authored twenty novels and two collections of short stories. He also wrote a three-volume autobiography during the late 1950s. He went on to edit and work for The New Statesman and Chatto during the 1920s through the 1940s, writing reviews and reading manuscripts. Eventually, he became a publisher along with Rupert Hart-Davis and Teddy Young (Knights 384-386). Sadly, David Garnett’s name remains lost to many. No one has heard of him except for a select few, mostly those who are familiar with some of his closest friends. He may be regarded from time to time, as will be shown and discussed, but there’s nothing of note. His contributions to the literary world have mostly gone unnoticed, without much more than mentions in a few scholarly texts, which discuss another author’s work at great length. Even with such a prolific career and numerous important relationships in and outside London, Garnett continues to be largely forgotten by the general public and only peripherally accepted by some scholars as a Bloomsbury Group member; the Bloomsbury Group was a collection of artists and writers in the early twentieth century, including members like Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes. Most scholarship on the Bloomsbury Group has focused more on writers that have made their way into the canon. However, Garnett’s books, his impact on others, his unique experience in the war, have all been omitted or circumvented by other writers and important figures. A possible answer to this conundrum might be that the art and literature of WWI was rife with experimental artists and a few only subsequently have gained some attention. This dissertation in turn hopes to highlight David Garnett and bring him into focus for other ix Bloomsbury scholars. I will analyze his letters, currently housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and his novels. For too long scholars have misplaced David Garnett and spent too much time on what is popular and already being explored. David Garnett, looming in the background, deserves attention for his work and impact on the literary world. This dissertation will give him a place amongst his peers. I first began my research with David Garnett in 2012 after looking for archival information in regard to Bloomsbury Group members, particularly Virginia Woolf. This path led me to question what other archival information existed for other Bloomsbury Group members, like Garnett and even Vita Sackville-West. I had heard of David Garnett, but I knew little about his professional and personal life, even after working on a master’s thesis about Virginia Woolf at the University of Central Oklahoma and studying the Bloomsbury Group extensively at the University of Texas at Dallas. After some time working with local librarians at UTD, I located Garnett’s archival information at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. I was very fortunate since most British authors’ letters remain in London. Not David Garnett’s, though. His collection is housed at the University of Texas; this put me in a special situation since I reside within driving distance. I made plans to visit over the summer. Surprisingly, upon my arrival, I discovered the Harry Ransom Center possesses seventeen boxes of uncatalogued letters to and from David Garnett throughout his life. Each green or gray colored box contains anywhere from five to seven folders. Each folder has numerous letters, anywhere from twenty to forty on average. The letters themselves had not yet been catalogued by the HRC other than a little guessing on a few dates, mostly the year if x known. I was only allowed to carry a camera, a few sheets of paper, and a pencil into the archival room. This would be a time-consuming endeavor. First, I decided to look at the war years, 1914- 1918, since they interested me the most at the time. The library only allowed me to have one box at a time. As I opened the first folders, important names started to fly off the pages. How could this be? So many recognizable names in history and literature appeared, and the letters have not been published or even seen by more than a few scholars. Many of the letters, however, are hard to transcribe due to not only Garnett’s handwriting, but his companions’ as well. So, the first few days I visited, I mostly took pictures of the letters so that I could transcribe them at home and not waste time in the library. I would return to the HRC many times. After spending several weekends and some holiday time in-between semesters visiting, I realized there was much to be explored. I was reading a story in parts, Garnett’s life story. Since the letters were uncatalogued at the time, some organizing had to be done. Many of the images I had taken at random at first, hoping to gain some insight.