The Beautiful Illusion

THE FAMILIAR FACES (221 pp.)--David Garnett--Harcourt, Brace & World ($5.75).

When it comes to literary name dropping, English Novelist-Critic David Garnett has practically no peers. At 70, he can look back to a childhood spent in the company of literary lights like Joseph Conrad, Henry James, "Jack" Galsworthy, Ford Madox Ford. His father was a prominent publisher; his mother Constance was the industrious translator who gave a whole generation of English readers the feeling that all the great Russians (Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky) wrote in the same curiously flat style. With such parental credentials, "Bunny" Garnett became almost automatically a charter member of the post-World War I Bloomsbury group, which included Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster. Those earlier friendships he wrote of in the first two volumes of his autobiography--The Golden Echo and Flowers of the Forest. In the present volume he opens, with a necrology--a list of the old familiar faces that disappeared from his world in the 1930s by suicide, bomb, cancer, tetanus, flying, steeplechasing and assorted other agents. The Familiar Faces is their obituary.

It catches convincingly the style and tone of a generation of intellectuals who for a long period were certain that "the forces of intelligence and enlightenment were winning . . . that the dark ages were over." That spirit and that conviction did not survive the Depression, when, says Garnett, suicide became the rage in Bloomsbury. The writer Dorothy Edwards stepped in front of a train; the poetess Cynthia Mengs, who had been "trying to break her neck for years," managed it in a steeplechase; Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey's longtime housekeeper and companion, shot herself and died with "a proud expression on her face." What were they suffering from? An illusion. Author Garnett now thinks, "as beautiful and as foolish as that which underlies Christianity: the belief that men naturally love one another."

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