Carrington's Letters

by Dora Carrington

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Anne Chisholm

  List of Illustrations

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Editor’s Note

  Introduction

  Part One

  Growing Up: 1893–1915

  1912

  1913

  1914

  1915

  Part Two

  Building Love: 1916–1923

  1916

  1917

  1918

  1919

  1920

  1921

  1922

  1923

  Part Three

  The Erosion of Happiness: 1924–1932

  1924

  1925

  1926

  1927

  1928

  1929

  1930

  1931

  1932

  Postscript

  Picture Section

  Note on Sources

  Acknowledgements

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ‘Your letters are a great pleasure. I lap them down with breakfast and they do me more good than tonics, blood capsules or iron jelloids’

  Lytton Strachey

  Dora Carrington was considered an outsider to Bloomsbury, but she lived right at its heart. Known only by her surname, she was the star of her year at the Slade School of Fine Art, but never achieved the fame her early career promised. For over a decade she was the companion of homosexual writer Lytton Strachey, and killed herself, stricken without him, when he died in 1932. She was also a prolific and exuberant correspondent.

  Carrington was not consciously a pioneer or a feminist, but in her determination to live life according to her own nature – especially in relation to her work, her passionate friendships and her fluid attitude to sex, gender and sexuality – she fought battles that remain familiar and urgent today. She was friends with the greatest minds of the day and her correspondence stars a roster of fascinating characters – Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Rosamund Lehmann and Maynard Keynes to name but a few.

  Carrington’s Letters introduces the maverick artist and compelling personality to a new generation for the first time with fresh correspondence never before published. Unmediated, passionate, startlingly honest and very playful, reading Carrington’s letters is like having her whisper in your ear and embrace you gleefully.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dora Carrington was born in 1893 in Hereford. At seventeen she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, part of an extraordinary generation of painters including Mark Gertler and Paul and John Nash. She painted her friends, her house, her animals, her furniture and designed jackets for books published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. She was the long-time companion of writer Lytton Strachey, though in 1921 she married Ralph Partridge, who joined her and Lytton in a largely harmonious ménage à trois. In 1932, after the death of Strachey from cancer, she committed suicide, aged thirty-eight.

  Anne Chisholm is a biographer and critic who has also worked in journalism and publishing. She has written biographies of Nancy Cunard, which won the Silver PEN Prize for non-fiction, Lord Beaverbrook (with Michael Davie) which was runner-up for the Hawthornden Prize and, most recently, of the diarist and Bloomsbury insider Frances Partridge which was shortlisted for the Marsh Biography Award. She is former chair and now vice president of the Royal Society of Literature.

  ALSO BY ANNE CHISHOLM

  Frances Partridge: The Biography

  Beaverbrook: A Life (with Michael Davie)

  Rumer Godden: A Storyteller’s Life

  Faces of Hiroshima: A Report

  Nancy Cunard

  Philosophers of the Earth

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Letters and drawings

  See Note on Sources for information about archives, collections and libraries.

  Here ‘Hard at work drawing a rival “short hair”’

  Here 4 April 1914, to John Nash, boat race

  Here 29 January 1917, to Lytton Strachey, Lytton by the fire

  Here June 1916, to Lytton Strachey, pugs

  Here 1916, to Mark Gertler, self-portrait

  Here 1917, to Noel Carrington, gum tree of debt

  Here 1917, to Noel Carrington, Carrington as a Cossack

  Here 10 August 1917, to Lytton Strachey, Carrington dressed as a page

  Here 19 October 1917, to Lytton Strachey, Tidmarsh Mill

  Here 9 November 1917, to Lytton Strachey, puppet dance

  Here 20 October 1917, to Lytton Strachey, Tidmarsh Mill

  Here 7 November 1918, to Lytton Strachey, Lytton’s scarf

  Here 19 November 1918, to Lytton Strachey, Carrington in bed with flu

  Here 20 January 1920, to Lytton Strachey, the four-poster bed

  Here 15 July 1921, to Noel Carrington, Ralph in a striped jersey

  Here 7 August 1921, to Gerald Brenan, Alix Strachey playing chess

  Here 15 February 1922, to Lytton Strachey, Carrington’s cat throne

  Here 14 June 1922, to Gerald Brenan, Carrington’s tombstone

  Here Ham Spray house in the rain, letterhead

  Here 1925, to Frances Marshall, owls

  Here January 1927, to Julia Strachey, Carrington in bed

  Here August 1927, to Julia Strachey, Carrington exploding

  Here 17 August 1927, to Julia Strachey, a cat dressed up

  Here 24 October 1927, to Lytton Strachey, horses and centaur

  Here February 1928, Valentine

  Here Summer 1928, to Poppet John, girl with a cat

  Here Summer 1928, to Poppet John, girl and a tree

  Here August 1928 to Poppet John, girl and an umbrella

  Here March 1929, to Sebastian Sprott, cat with bandaged paw

  Here March or April 1929, to Julia Strachey, Carrington under a beech tree

  Here 6 November 1929, to Lytton Strachey, trees in the rain

  Here 3 December 1929, to Lytton Strachey, a cat in the sunshine

  Here 31 December 1930, to Lytton Strachey, Carrington eating like a cat

  Plate sections

  Unless otherwise mentioned, all paintings and drawings are by Carrington.

  1. Self-portrait, aged seventeen, 1910 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

  2. Drawings of her two brothers, Noel and Teddy Carrington, c. 1915 and 1912 (© Cecil Higgins collection; courtesy of Bloomsbury Workshop)

  3. Carrington by Mark Gertler, c. 1912 (© Bridgeman Images)

  4. Mark Gertler, 1912 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

  5. Christine Kuhlenthal, 1919 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

  6. The Cropheads: Carrington, Barbara Hiles (later Bagenal) and Dorothy Brett

  7. Slade School picnic, 1912. Front row from the left: Carrington, Barbara Hiles, Richard Nevinson and Mark Gertler (both © Tate Images)

  8. Tidmarsh Mill, 1918 (© Private Collection)

  9. At Garsington, 1920: Michael Llewellyn Davies, Ottoline Morrell’s daughter Julian, Carrington and Ralph Partridge (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

  10. Lytton Strachey reading, 1916 (© Bridgeman Images)

  11. Ralph Partridge in 1919 and 1920 (both © Private Collections)

  12. Ralph, 1920 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

  13. Carrington and Gerald Brenan, August 1921 (© Tate Images)

  14. Portrait of Gerald Brenan, 1921 (© National Gallery, London)

  15. Portrait of Annie Stiles, Carrington’s cook-housekeeper at Tidmarsh, 1921 (courtesy of Bloomsbury Workshop)

  16. Paint
ed tiles, mid-1920s (courtesy of Bloomsbury Workshop)

  17. Painted cabinet, also mid-1920s (© Portsmouth City Museum and Art Gallery)

  18. Tulips in a Staffordshire jug, 1924 (© Bridgeman Images)

  19. Cactus, c. 1924

  20. Larrau in the Snow, 1922 (both courtesy of Bloomsbury Workshop)

  21. Mrs Box, the farmer’s wife and Carrington’s landlady at Welcombe, near Bude in Devon, c.1919 (© Bridgeman Images)

  22. Henrietta Bingham, 1924 (© Chatsworth)

  23. Henrietta with Stephen Tomalin, at Ham Spray, 1924 (© Private Collection)

  24. Portrait of Julia Strachey, 1928 (© Tate Images)

  25. Possibly Julia Strachey, c. 1928 (courtesy of Bloomsbury Workshop)

  26. Portrait of Stephen Tomalin by John Banting, 1925 (© Private Collection)

  27. Bernard (Beakus) Penrose, at Ham Spray, 1929 (© Getty Images)

  28. The trompe l’oeil window at Biddeston, painted for Bryan and Diana Guinness, 1929 (© Private Collection)

  For Alison, Paloma and Tabitha

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Any posthumous portrait of an individual, whether by an editor or a biographer, depends on the material available, which can never be complete. Around two thousand of the letters written by Dora Carrington between 1911 and 1932 have survived; many more have not, including all those to her family apart from her brother Noel, to her husband Ralph Partridge, to two significant lovers, Henrietta Bingham and Bernard (Beakus) Penrose, and all but a handful to her close and life-long female friends, Barbara Bagenal and Alix Strachey. The three most complete surviving letter series are the 155 or so written to Mark Gertler, over 500 written to Lytton Strachey and 434 to Gerald Brenan, which therefore form the core of any selection.

  Although there is inevitably considerable overlap between my choices and David Garnett’s published in 1970, I made my initial choices without reference to his and have included as much as possible that is different and new. Letters unavailable to or unused by him include a number to John Nash, Christine Kuhlenthal, Noel Carrington, Peter Lucas, Poppet John and Roger Senhouse.

  My aim has been to provide a clear, lively and readable account of Carrington’s doings and feelings in her own words, to unclutter the text and to allow her to tell her own story without too much editorial interjection but with context and guidance.

  I decided from the outset that her idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation would distract and annoy the reader, so I have corrected her constant errors (which suggest mild dyslexia: ‘minute’ was always ‘minuet’, for example), inserted missing words and cleaned up her peculiar punctuation. She was in the habit of using frequent ampersands and sprinkling her pages with ellipses almost at random; I have removed most of these.

  It was impossible to reproduce all the charming drawings she included in letters, and to alert the reader to a missing drawing seemed pointless. She often made visual puns out of names – so Waley was often a fish, and Henry Lamb usually a sheep and the Partridges small round birds; she added drawings to letters when she wanted to amuse, as when writing to Lytton Strachey, though not when she was deep in a tricky emotional relationship, as with Mark Gertler or Gerald Brenan.

  All cuts in letters are marked with ellipses between square brackets. When an address or a date is missing, and they often are, I have tried to make an educated guess of my own or followed David Garnett’s edition.

  INTRODUCTION

  It is eighty-five years since the death by suicide of Dora Carrington, artist and companion of Lytton Strachey. She was thirty-eight, and left behind her a small number of unfashionable paintings and a sad story of a great but unfulfilled love. Luckily, she also left behind her a great number of letters, which captivated, amused and moved the recipients at the time and which, re-read today, bring her out of the shadows and show her as she really was: one of the most original and emotionally courageous women of her time in her pursuit of love, art and the art of living.

  My own discovery of Carrington’s story began some ten years ago when I was writing the biography of Frances Partridge, who took up with Carrington’s husband, Ralph. Carrington was the lynchpin of one of Bloomsbury’s two celebrated ménages à trois: at Charleston in Sussex Vanessa Bell lived with her husband Clive but loved Duncan Grant, while at Ham Spray in Berkshire Carrington lived with Ralph but loved Lytton Strachey. Both husbands were heterosexual; the two other men were both almost exclusively gay. As I investigated the emotional ramifications of the Ham Spray situation, although my focus was on Frances, I kept finding my attention being drawn to Carrington, not least when I read her letters, which were irresistibly open, fresh and moving. I came to realise that she was not, as has been the narrative for so long, one of the minor characters of Bloomsbury, but one of the most interesting and surprising.

  Bloomsbury remains interesting to us today not just because we admire the work of its artists and writers, but because of the way they lived their lives. They disregarded social rules, acknowledging and accepting homosexuality and bisexuality and regarding sexual freedom and friendship as just as important for human happiness as marriage and parenthood. Carrington, who grew up uncomfortable with being female, who was attractive to men but increasingly attracted by women, who never wanted children and who deeply loved a homosexual man, was at the heart of these experiments in living pioneered by Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf acknowledged this when she wrote in 1925 that ‘Lytton’s way of life, in so far as it is unconventional, is so by the desire and determination of Carrington.’

  Although this unconventionality came naturally to Carrington, it would be a mistake to think it was easy for her. As her letters constantly show, she found her own nature difficult to understand and accept; her efforts to do so are strikingly relevant today, when gender boundaries are being explored and questioned. And the perennial struggle facing female artists – of how to balance their creative and their personal lives – remains as hard to solve now as it was then, as Carrington reveals in her letters.

  As companion to a more famous man, Carrington, like many women before and since, lived in his shadow. Unmarried and from a modest middle-class background, her position in the social and sexual hierarchy after she openly began to share Lytton Strachey’s life in 1917 was always ambiguous – both central and insecure. She herself compounded this impression by building her life around his needs and wants, always putting him first. Doing so perhaps answered a fundamental need of her own. Even before she met him she wrote to a female friend: ‘It must be contentment to so arrange your life that only one person matters.’

  The effects of this partly self-imposed secondary status have become her legacy. From time to time Carrington has been reconsidered: in the late 1960s Michael Holroyd’s biography of Lytton Strachey brought her to the fore, and led to the publication in 1970 of the first selection of Carrington’s letters by David Garnett, himself a part of Bloomsbury and an early admirer of hers. The letters were praised for their vitality and charm, but Garnett’s presentation emphasised her position as what he called ‘an appendage’ to Bloomsbury in general and Lytton Strachey in particular. He was mildly patronising about her art, her intellectual limitations and her social standing. According to him, the society hostesses who invited the great writer to their soirees and weekends would no more have included Carrington ‘than his housekeeper or his cook’.

  Although she never stopped working at her painting, she became, after her promising start at the Slade, increasingly reluctant to submit her work for exhibition and sold very few paintings in her lifetime. Her artistic reputation suffered; she did not have a solo show until a small exhibition was mounted in 1970 to coincide with Garnett’s edition of her letters. Then in 1989 the American academic Gretchen Gerzina turned her doctoral thesis on Carrington as a painter, into a well-researched full biography. The book discussed her as a serious artist for the first time, someone whose work deserved as much consideration as her personal life. But because her art was not in tune stylisti
cally with the better-known Bloomsbury painters Roger Fry, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, who were heavily influenced by the French post-Impressionists, notably Cézanne and Matisse, she continued to be underrated by scholars and curators. Even though she was described by Sir John Rothenstein, Director of the Tate Gallery from 1938 to 1964, as ‘the most neglected serious painter of her time’ she was only represented by one small painting, a portrait of E. M. Forster, in Tate Britain’s major exhibition The Art of Bloomsbury in 2000. The curator of that exhibition, Richard Shone, considered her ‘aesthetic temperament was fundamentally different’ from Fry, Grant and Bell and that her work was closer in style to that of her Slade contemporaries the Nash brothers, Mark Gertler and Stanley Spencer. He also wrote that he would gladly exchange all Carrington’s paintings for just one of her letters.

  The only comprehensive exhibition of her work, at the Barbican in London in 1995, coincided with the release of the feature film Carrington, based on Michael Holroyd’s biography of Strachey and written and directed by Christopher Hampton. This show included most of her major paintings as well as examples of her work as a decorative artist such as bookplates, book covers and tiles, it also showed some short home movies filmed at Ham Spray evoking her surroundings and way of life, swimming in the river and riding her pony on the lawn. The year before Jane Hill had published the one substantial illustrated monograph on her work. All this raised her profile, and drew attention to her, but the film, though intelligent and moving, was in some ways misleading, even diminishing. The story it told was of Carrington’s devoted and ultimately tragic love for Lytton, and was structured entirely around her unsuccessful sexual relationships with three other men. Her success in running the household at Ham Spray, her many platonic but intense friendships with both sexes and her passionate physical love for one woman in particular were simply ignored. The film has helped to consolidate an oversimplified and inaccurate image which a fresh look at her letters will help to correct.

  In the many photographs that Bloomsbury took of itself (the camera was one of its favourite toys) Carrington usually appears uncomfortable with being the focus of attention. Often, she drops her head or turns away from the camera. Nevertheless, for those around her she was always a vital, attractive presence, with a style and demeanour all her own. She would appear shy and diffident, with her light, breathless voice and pigeon-toed posture like a little girl’s, her thick blonde bob shielding her face and hanging over her keen blue eyes; but she was never insignificant. She struck several writers powerfully enough to find her way into their novels. She can be recognised, not always flatteringly, in books by Aldous Huxley, Gilbert Cannan, Wyndham Lewis and D. H. Lawrence, and the encounters prompting these fictional representations are to be found in her letters. For all her apparent diffidence, Carrington attracted and kept attention. Her friend Julia Strachey, Lytton’s niece, wrote of her as ‘so glowing with sympathetic magnetism and droll ideas for them all that there wasn’t a person of her vast acquaintance who did not get the impression that she was their very best friend. There wasn’t a lover, or a servant or a cat that did not preen him or herself on being the most favoured of the lot.’

 
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