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Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama.
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- - - - SAVE ME, ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER! An Interview with Paul Collins About Lady Into Fox,
BY TOMMY THORNHILL - - - - Q: How did you come across Lady Into Fox? Collins: I was looking through old copies of the Times Literary Supplement from the 1920s, and I kept coming across references to David Garnett and to Lady Into Fox as this extraordinary debut. It was obvious that reviewers assumed that readers knew about this book and that it had been really well-regarded. And, of course, I had never heard of it. [Laughter] I mean, E.M. Forster refers to the book in Aspects of the Novel, and in Brideshead Revisited one of the characters is reading it... how is it that everyone knew this book, and it's a title I've never heard of in my life? So, I finally tracked it down, read it, and I was just floored by it. It got me to wondering, first, was it still in print? And then, were his other books in print? And... none of them were in print in the U.S. He put out at least a dozen books and they all seemed to drop out of print by the 1960s. I really couldn't figure out why. It was one of those things that was part of the culture for decades and vanished for no apparent reason. Q: And he edited T.E. Lawrence's letters. Collins: Garnett did hang out with Lawrence. In his autobiography he talks about flying biplanes with him—but they weren't really close friends. But you also get the feeling that Lawrence didn't have any close friends. Q: Infamously so. Collins: So I suppose Garnett was as close to him as anyone was. Q: Garnett lived in such a literary world: he came into the Bloomsbury group in the early teens, his father and grandfather were both literary men and his mother was Constance Garnett, the early translator of Russian literature such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gogol. Collins: Yeah, and when he was seventeen, Ford Madox Ford told his mother he'd tutor the boy: "Send David to me for a few years, Connie, and I will teach him to write like Flaubert." Garnett came from this extraordinarily bookish family, and he did indeed follow in their footsteps. After a few years of being the center of attention as an author, he decided to step out of the limelight and stick to editing and publishing. He put quite some effort into Nonesuch Press. [Note by Tommy: This was where I had expected Collins to have first encountered Garnett. Nonesuch Press followed a policy of publishing only books that had been out-of-print or that only existed in inadequate editions or translations, designed the books it published on its own small press, and had production done by selected commercial firms.] The weird thing about him is that Garnett outlived almost all of his contemporaries because Lady Into Fox came out when he was twenty-six. He made his name comparatively young and then stuck around for another sixty years. [Collins shuffles through files on his end of the phone.] You know, I came across this article from the New York Times, I believe from 1954. Ahh, here it is: Yesterday They Wrote Best Sellers. It's basically a "where are they now?" piece. One of the first people they mention is David Garnett: "David Garnett, son and grandson of eminent literary men, who is now 58. If he never consolidated the reputation Lady Into Fox earned him in 1922 it may be because he dissipated his remarkable talents over a wide area. First, he studied botany for five years and discovered a new species of mushroom, then he became a bookseller and interested in the Nonesuch Press. This is all very well but a man whose novel had won the Hawthorden and Tait-Black prizes might be expected to stick to novel writing... His recreation is flying and he lives in Huntingdonshire—a country gentleman, which has always been the ideal life of the British writer." Even in the fifties, people were already wondering what had happened to him. Though not too long after that he put out Aspects of Love and his Bloomsbury memoirs. So he did have stuff he was working on, but for a long time nobody had heard from him. Q: Lady Into Fox is dedicated to the painter Duncan Grant, and he was Garnett's lover? Collins: Yes. And David's wife, R.A. Garnett, actually did the drawings for the book. Quite a triangle. Q: Was that open? Collins: It does seem that everyone knew. Q: And then his second wife, Angelica, was Duncan Grant's daughter? Collins: Right. I think a lot of people thought that was really strange. She was also Virginia Woolf's niece. Q: Was there a scandal surrounding that marriage? Collins: Well, they seemed to have a pretty good relationship. Her cousin wrote a memoir a while back about Bloomsbury [Bloomsbury Recalled, by Quentin Bell], and there doesn't seem to be any rancor in it towards Garnett. I don't know if it affected his career. Lady Into Fox went into a number of translations, and they even made a ballet out of it. I have a yearbook for English ballet from 1945 that has pictures of the costumes from Lady Into Fox. There's a picture of Silvia with little fox ears; it looks like a kid's Halloween costume, but with tights. Q: Do you think that is how Andrew Lloyd Webber encountered Garnett and decided to do Aspects of Love? Collins: I don't know. It's quite possible that he might have simply been aware of Garnett's work, as one would have been growing up forty or fifty years ago. A number of Garnett's works were reissued again in the early sixties, maybe because of his autobiography's coming out then. But that was his last real burst, and then he went out of print over here. Even Andrew Lloyd Webber couldn't bring him back.
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