David
Garnett was the son of Edward Garnett, an influential publisher's
reader and Constant Garnett, a translator who did a great deal to
popularise the Russian classics in England. He first met members of
the Bloomsbury group in 1910, but was not a regular member until
1914 when he met Duncan Grant.
Like most of
the members of the Bloomsbury group, Garnett was a pacifist. In
order to be exempted from military service during World War I, he
and Duncan Grant moved to Wissett in the Suffolk countryside to
become farm labourers. Although they were at first refused exemption
by a tribunal, they appealed and were eventually recognised as
conscientious objectors.
After the
war, Garnett operated a bookshop in Soho.
In 1922 he
met both Sylvia Townsend Warner and T. F. Powys in East Chaldon and
the three formed firm friendships.
In 1923 he married Rachel (Ray) Alice Marshall, a
book illustrator, and
sister of the last surviving member of the Bloomsbury group,
Frances
Partridge. He and Ray had two sons.
Garnett
enjoyed success with his first novel Lady into Fox (1922),
which won two literary prizes, and its follow-up A Man in the Zoo
(1924).
In 1925 Garnett published his third novel
The Sailor's
Return
which was, and still is, the name of the public house in East
Chaldon and where the novel is set - but in
the mid-19th century.
It was subsequently made into a ballet and then a film during the
1970s.
Garnett went on to write many more novels and
short stories and also edited the letters of T.E.Lawrence,
Dora
Carrington,
and the novels of Thomas Love Peacock. Later in life he produced
three autobiographical volumes: The Golden Echo (1953),
The Flowers of the Forest (1955), and The Familiar Faces
(1962).
The Sailor's Return, East Chaldon (as it is today)
A contemporary review of Garnett’s
The Sailor's Return
from TIME magazine, Dec. 21, 1925:
'There
is an indefinable quality in David Garnett's genius. No one
explained the charm of Lady into Fox; no one will quite
explain The Sailor's Return. The story is simple enough. In
the late '50's a plain and hearty British sailor returns to England
with his wife—the daughter of an African king—and their baby. They
establish themselves in a village pub. The sailor tends bar; the
alien princess is his cheerful helpmate. The village reaction
results in tragedy. The baby is consigned, through friendly sailor
hands, to Africa, perhaps to become a prince again—his mother never
knows. The new proprietors of the pub permit her to become the
drudge-of-all-work in her old home. Just that. But as David Garnett
tells it your laughter and, almost, your tears are tribute.'
Garnett’s first book was a fantasy; accordingly, critics and
reviewers categorized him as a writer of fantasies, but the label
persisted long after he ceased to work in this vein. More
deserving of critical attention, because it is a permanent feature
of Garnett's novels, is the clarity of his prose style. Yet his
reputation as stylist and fantasy writer blinded readers to the
social implications of his work…. Garnett's work is more
substantial than this narrow appreciation assumes. For in his
third novel, The Sailor's Return (1925), he brought his
verbal craftsmanship into the service of exposing an intolerable
system of racial and sexual discrimination and, particularly, the
general view of Englishmen toward non-Europeans, especially toward
non-European women.
The strength of The Sailor's Return is two-fold: the reader
is convinced not only of the villagers' unavoidable assault but also
of the utter worthlessness of the cause they defend. Garnett
accomplished this by depicting two cultures simultaneously for which
he conducted much scholarly research and preparation.
Garnett was not unique in treating this general topic, for
opposition to cultural imperialism had been widely recognized in
Forster's A Passage to India published a year earlier and, by
those who have read it, in Leonard Woolf's The Village in the
Jungle. Like every member of Bloomsbury, Garnett had rejected
the values of Victorian colonialism, but only he sought new
standards for a different approach to what was then known as the
Dark Continent.
This aspect is often overlooked by the literary taxonomists who
place David Garnett's novels on a shelf labelled "Fantasy" (or
perhaps in an attic trunk marked "Whimsical Fantasy Popular After
World War I"). The falseness of these tags is apparent when the
reader encounters The Sailor's Return. There Garnett has
undertaken weighty research, shaped his material into an artful
plot, and questioned the racial and sexual caste systems of Western
Europe, many years before it was fashionable to do so.
THE
SAILOR'S RETURN by David Garnett
with an
Introduction by J. Lawrence Mitchell
A. E. Coppard
David Garnett
Alyse Gregory
H.A. Manhood Littleton
Powys Llewelyn Powys
T.F. Powys
Forrest Reid Sylvia Townsend
Warner Gamel Woolsey
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