A few weeks ago, I went to see Aspects of Love in London, a West End revival of this Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Originally it opened in 1989 and I would have seen it soon afterwards. It was the beginning of the singing and acting career of Michael Ball and he played the young romantic lead, Alex. Thirty something years later he plays the paterfamilias George, around whom the story revolves. This is a beautiful production and I still enjoyed the lyrical music. Also, interestingly, the opera singer Danielle de Niese (she of Glyndebourne fame) sings one of the main parts. I’m not sure how much she has ventured into musical theatre previously, but her enthusiasm was tangible. She was having a ball. (Sorry, no pun intended.)
Inevitably, all this sent me to my bookshelves looking for the book. Yes, there is a book from which this musical emanated; several people I’ve spoken to have been surprised about that. David Garnett (always called Bunny by his friends) was a critic and publisher as well as a novelist. He died in 1981 and it makes me wonder what he would have made of the work of Lloyd Webber, Don Black and Trevor Nunn if he had lived a few years longer and had been able to see his words translated onto the stage.
Garnett was part of the Bloomsbury Set but possibly not the most famous name. Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Clive Bell are probably better-known characters, all focussed on Bloomsbury in London and then Charleston in Sussex. If you haven’t visited the latter, then do put it on your list. It is a fascinating place, with the studio (my favourite room) looking as if the artist has just stepped outside for a short while, probably for a cigarette. In real life Garnett wondered if he might one day marry the newborn daughter of his lover Duncan Grant. 24 years later he did indeed do just that by marrying Angelica Bell. Angelica was brought up understanding that Clive Bell was her father, only to be told years later that she was in fact the child of Duncan Grant, who had been the lover of her eventual husband, David Garnett. A tangled web indeed. All this makes for a slightly awkward episode and maybe not the only one. Uncomfortably, the whole Phillip Schofield debacle comes to mind.
The novella that David Garnett wrote is set in Paris and the south of France. It evokes the feeling of heat and the smells of the south. The traditions of rural France are there in abundance, together with the elderly retainers looking after the house and garden, and the tennis court dug up to grow vegetables. I enjoyed the strong sense of place being described. The story involves a sometime poet George, his emotionally unstable nephew Alexis, (abbreviated to Alex in the musical) Rose, an actress searching for success and on the edge of the story, Giulietta, an Italian artist. There are romantic and emotional entanglements as lovers come together, break apart, exchange partners and return to each other. The ‘aspects of love’ in the book reflect the cultural and moral freedoms of the Bloomsbury set. There is a total disregard for social convention and a Bohemian disdain for what others may think. Dorothy Parker, the American wit and satirist, wrote that the Bloomsbury set ‘lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.’ Sometimes the romances had even more than three sides. It struck me, writing this, that the Richard Curtis film ‘Love Actually’ also covers many aspects of love but in an approach that is both far safer and more saccharine in tone.
The novel was written in 1955 and set in 1947 at a time when it might have been seen as rather scandalous to the general public. Focussing on what had recently been occupied France, maybe this story was a reaction to the war, a hedonistic response to the fear, the horror and the privations. Post war times must have been rather fevered and overheated and the narrative in this book runs up to the year 1964 when sexual emancipation was definitely on the agenda.
Some reviews that I have read suggest that the melodrama is very overdone at times and I would agree that there is one particular incident with a gun that truly requires you to suspend disbelief but the passion is there and on the whole is convincingly written. It is however exceedingly narcissistic and from a 21st century point of view it is full of kitsch and on occasions slightly voyeuristic. In many ways it illustrates how much society has changed since the middle of the last century and this book is very much a product of its time. However, I was happy to revisit this book and for it to take up a day of my reading.