Carrington's Letters

by Dora Carrington

  Tell me a great many things when you write, what you read, what you do all day & how you are in health.

  You can now give up all your other correspondents & devote yourself entirely to me & Ralph. Because I don’t mind telling you in confidence although I’ve never exactly heard it with my own ears, that everyone, but we, find your letters very LONG & TEDIOUS. Rumour has it so.

  Annie has gone to the pantomime so I must go and grill the turkey’s legs in the kitchen for Ralph & Lytton’s supper. Annie is becoming a perfect cook & now I hardly ever put hand to brush, or nose to saucepan.

  Bless you Gerald dear & write back to me soon please. I send my love & wishes for a Happy New Year.

  1) Tell me if you would like the Nation & N.S. weekly.

  2) If you want any books to read.

  3) If you keep well.

  Yr Kunak

  With the Great Row of 1922 now behind them, and the Tidmarsh ménage intact, Carrington was able to joke with Gerald about his letters. But although the affair with Valentine was over, Ralph was now openly pursuing romance in London, and Carrington had no intention of discouraging Gerald’s devotion.

  1923

  To Gerald Brenan

  The Mill House

  [1 January 1923]

  Kunak,

  Write please to me soon. Now that is all over, and we are free again, are we so chicken-spirited that we have no affections left?

  I tell you Ralph has completely altered. I told him both times I wrote to you, and asked him if he would like to read my letters to you. He never bothered to, and then simply laughed at me when I said I had posted them two days later. Is all this to have a Tchekhov ending? ‘That after months of self denial, and anguish, when they could write they found all desire had vanished.’ Or you may be ill? Or perhaps on a ship bound to Buenos Aires, or the West Indies? I send you all my love for this New Year. Lately, perhaps because I have nothing of you now, I have been living in a ghostly world of memories. I can’t help being very fond. I am now so grateful that I had the little of you that I did have. It might have been even less. Here is a book on El Greco. I don’t know if you have one on him already. He is almost my favourite artist. I am reading Hogg’s life of Shelley now by myself in the evenings.fn160 Please, unless you feel disinclined write to me, or Ralph soon, if that (disinclined) I can wait. My dear, I wish I could see you again soon. I send all the love you want, and my best wishes for your work.

  Your loving Doric

  To Gerald Brenan

  Tidmarsh-in-the-snow

  Sunday, 14 January 1923

  Your last letter was perhaps the best you have ever written. I take it as an honour that I should be a Fanny Brawne … I read Keats’ letters last night. They gave me a pleasure I cannot describe, one of great affection for a dead human. Now I sit over a grilling red fire. Lytton reads Dante in an exquisite first edition which he has just bought, in the big chair, Ralph is absent in the library typing for his Master, outside a cold wind howls & the ground is white with snow […]

  I am rather feeble mentally & otherwise, so you must forgive this sluggish letter.

  I always write to you in this moment of my life it seems – is it symbolic or merely an excuse for writing badly. No, it is because there are only two idle days in every month with me!

  I have little to tell you. Last week I went up to London & saw my mother. It makes me very sad every time I see her. I see a doom – a vision of myself perhaps at the age of 70 – she had an awful time in Spain with my eldest brother. He has married a young Irish lady who leads a gay life, riding, balls at Gibraltar, combined with a most sluttish life on their farm in the stables & mud. My poor mother was forced to cook, clean & darn for them & then was continually cursed by her exquisite Irish daughter in law because she couldn’t pay them more than 2½ guineas a week! & because she couldn’t lend them any more money!

  They run their farm very badly, spend the money as soon as they get it, cheat & lie to their customers. I spent a dreary morning with my mother listening to her sad experiences. The only thing she enjoyed was the journey to the ship. She loved the ship-cooking. The rough sea & the Anglo Indians returning from Bombay!! She was quite sorry when the ship reached Portsmouth. – She bought me a good earthenware bowl with holes in the bottom for chestnuts & a good earthenware dish. I bought a scarlet jersey at a sale & an infinitely respectable coat & shirt, so respectable you wouldn’t recognise me if you saw me walking down Yegen in it! This is because next Thursday I go to a grand wedding in London. My most exquisite friend this Phyllis Boyd, by name, is going to marry a French man Henri de Janze of Normandy & I go to the function & elbow the duchesses out of the front pews. Phyllis writes me very good letters, very upper class and immoral, but full of character & she has a very special character. She will live in Normandy & perhaps I shall go and stay with her. She is a direct descendant of Mrs Jordanfn161 on her mother & father’s side as they were cousins and she looks it. I have known her since she was 17, a scraggy little girl at the Slade. It’s rather fascinating to have seen a Rake’s progress in real life and now I shall see the finish of her, carried off by a Norman Vicount or Viscount. – I can’t spell some times very well as perhaps you notice – I wish you could have seen Phyllis. She gave one a standard of beauty that few women have ever attained. Then she is clever also, in a curious way, reads 18 cent. French literature, Tchekhov & very up to date scientific & medical books. But she is too rich & immoral to have insight or sympathy into many people’s lives. Now we are going to read Troilus & Cressida, so you must be put away.

  Wednesday, 12 o’ck

  You have been away into your grave for three days now and much water has flowed under our mill as well as under London Bridge.

  On Monday morning the wife of John, the man that works at the mill died. All Sunday she lay a-dying & John, refused to speak to her, on Monday morning they rushed up to the mill & begged him to go back to the cottage as she was dying, ‘canna come, must see to this hay n the waggon.’ The old cronies were staggered, they went across the fields to the cottage, in a few hours she was dead […] John never speaks to anyone. And all the neighbours shake their heads. I stay indoors, so that I am not forced into either camp. Once a week I visit the old miller’s man Dan, who lies in bed with his toe rotting off & we discuss ‘life’ & old times, & other very boring topics. He never gets worse or better & I’ve now become a ‘lady visitor’ & I suppose I shall remain one until he dies. And that’s all the news in Tidmarsh […]

  On Monday at 11.40 I set sail for London & stayed with the mysterious Hon. Dorothy Brett who you don’t know in Hampstead. Now she really is a queer character.

  We talked over the stove in her studio, as only females can talk. Then I looked at her pictures which weren’t very good. Then we walked to Finchley Road & took my poor mother out to tea in Oxford Street. Afterwards I went to Liberty’s & bought some silks at a sale. (If only you had sent me a pattern I would easily have matched your silk. Do send it & then I’ll get it for you.) I bought a pretty handkerchief for myself & one for Lytton & Ralph. In the evening I had dinner with them [Lytton & Ralph] & Boris Anrep in Hampstead. They have a charming house, only beautiful in its china & arrangement. Talked to them & the consumptive sister in law who lives ill in the bed up stairs. I have a great affection for this lovely sick creature. To look at her is to fall in love.

  I rather enjoyed this escape from my husband & the freedom of being alone with my friends and companions again.

  Grrr was it a pity to change? To be so cowardly of facing the hardship of loneliness & poverty … ?

  Who can tell … Freedom perhaps would have lost that sweetness that I find in it now.

  Went with Brett on Tuesday morning & looked at some Degas at the [illegible] Galleries. I wasn’t very impressed. But they were all very slight efforts. Went to the National Gallery & paid homage to my Bellini and Poussin again & examined other Poussins, Constable, Crome, & Gainsbrough very carefully. Had lunch with Ralph & MacIv
er & an old Slade female friend of mine who unfortunately has developed Brights disease & a mental madness, so it was rather a painful reunion, than pleasurable. I can’t bear to see what was once as lovely as Juno, strong & virile, now a wreck of nerves & aged – She used to sing to me in the fields at Hurstsbourne – what songs! I shall never hear her sing again and her beauty will be seen no more.fn162 Went with her after lunch to the wedding of my beautiful Phyllis Boyd.

  It was in a Catholic church and Priests with Robes & a Bishop with a mitre married them.

  It was a fitting end to her gay life. The bridegroom is a charming young man. I met him on Monday evening in her bedroom. (I left out that visit, for before I went to the Anreps to dinner I spent 2 hours with the lady of charms in her bedroom. She was lovely, I actually suffered torments because I longed to posess her in some vague way. To make her realize somehow, that I was important to her. But she only prattled away in her bed about her chateau in Normandy, her parents, her past lovers & the scandals of London.) She looked very lovely in her white, given away by her terrible old rake of a father, stout with grey curling moustaches & the figure of a comic French roué. It was like some lively scene in a Ballet. The voices of the choir boys, the smell of the church & the flippant society audience, mingled with the devout governesses & Catholic nuns, who hope to save the soul of this lady of charms.

  Then Ralph & I went off to the Strand & bought chicken houses & a bicycle pump … & came back to Tidmarsh in the evening.

  Lytton read us such a good dialogue that he wrote whilst we were away. But I shall tell you no more. It will appear in his essays in the Spring.

  A BAD COLD

  DULL letter

  But we live in a

  BAD DULL COLD

  Climate

  And I’ve a cold, Bad, Dull character

  Oh to be my Persian cat

  Lying snug upon the mat

  To Gerald Brenan

  The Mill House

  Thursday evening, 29 January 1923

  Mi guerido,

  Your epistle to the lady of Tidmarsh arrived last night! I was so delighted with it that my French lesson which begins at a quarter past six, just after the post man comes, went ill. I could hardly pay attention and my mind wandered from La Malade Imaginaire to un letter non imaginaire.

  I am progressing with my French. Every evening as punctually as hen lays its egg, Lytton and I open our Molière’s over the fire. He reads it aloud in English & I follow the French […]

  I snatched your mystic P.S. and concealed it in my corsage. I cannot write today about the white fawn. I must think a little then on Thursday when I am alone I will write a long letter.

  I write every day, a short letter, because then the many things I want to tell you, do not vanish from my head […]

  Yesterday Ralph asked to read your letter. Then he said ‘You evidently have a great many jokes & intimacies of which I know nothing with Gerald.’ He then carried on the conversation later at night. He said I always evaded discussing my feelings for you, and he thought perhaps these letters which we are always writing might be leading us on in that direction. He said he did not mind (except as a friend he hated to see you in pain), you being in love with me, it slightly flattered him, but if he knew you were, he would then know I would probably return it, & that is what interested him. He wanted to find out my exact feelings for you. For even if he knew we were quite loyal (or whatever the expression is I can’t think of it) to him, if he knew I felt physical feelings for you, it would enrage, or make him unhappy, just as much, even if we never indulged in them. – He admitted his affection for Frances [Marshall] made him more indifferent to my feelings & relations with you. But he said that if he suspected I had more than friendly feelings for you all his old jealousies would come back.

  As it was he had no hostility at all towards either of us.

  I tell you this, because I realized rather acutely how important it is we should not in letters betray our feelings. You must not write more affectionately than your last letter […] It is so perfect at present being able to care for you, that I cannot bear the thought of it ceasing, and it will be our own folly if it gets into those complicated bogs.

  Because of this I do not ask you to send me your treatise. If I think of a plan that I could be certain of receiving it alone I will tell you. I am rather loathe to ask any third person to negotiate for us. It at once makes things complicated.

  Ralph is so charming most of the time & so friendly towards you, that I do not want to risk a reversion of attitude […]

  N.B. It is rather important if you leave Yegen that my effects & letters should be absolutely safe … You must know that the inhabitants of Bloomsbury are not above tampering with locks, or bursting boxes … Today I meant to paint, but I had to find a canvas in my little attic. I discovered whilst I was searching for the canvas that mice & rats had crept into my wooden boxes of old letters & had played gay games with them.

  They were shredded into confetti, chewed into flakes of tissue. Whole bunches of letters had vanished to make little nesties for the mousies.

  Well, it was rather a relief. There were far too many of them. And this mice feast gave me an opportunity for burning all the half munched pages […] They stopped short at a packet of Lytton’s letters. So there is snobbery even in the rat world!

  The total effect of all this made me gloomy & cynical. What a life I saw before me stretched on the floor! What letters! What friendships! Some of them made me positively uncomfortable but I laughed & preserved one example of every friend & lover & tied them up in neat packets […] I found your first postcard & the first letter you ever wrote me … one wouldn’t have guessed much would have come from them.

  Tomorrow morning I shall finish tying up the packets & then they will be put in a mouseproof box & locked up until we move. – I burnt over 500 hundred I should think this afternoon!

  […] I found some old m.ss. in a book amongst the letters, one’s affections when young are so depressing. In fact I am now very glad I shall be thirty next month & forty ten years after. I detested my ingenuousness today exposed in these letters.

  Goodnight my fondest love.

  Yr Cirod

  By now, Ralph was in serious pursuit of Frances Marshall. She was attracted to him too, but unlike Ralph’s other lovers she had no intention of having a casual affair with a married man. Highly intelligent and very pretty, she had many more eligible admirers. Unlike Carrington, she was already part of Bloomsbury: her mother, a keen suffragist, knew the older Stracheys; her sister Rachel was married to David Garnett and her sister Judy to one of Lytton’s nephews, Dick Rendel.

  To Gerald Brenan

  The Mill House

  29 January 1923

  Amigo,

  I wrote you two tiresome letters but what of that – I can’t be proud with you. I have to confess my affection & ask for your pardon.

  Grrrrr so Virginia & Leonard will see you in March!!! That makes one chomp one’s teeth. There is a project on foot for us – a visit to North Africa coming back though Sicily, Naples, Rome, & Florence in March & April. But whether anything will come of it I don’t know. At the moment we’ve no money left & even Lytton is rather reduced in wealth. He has been spending so much on books lately […]

  Last week I spent a whole day with Brett in Hampstead. She told me the whole account of Katherine Mansfield’s death.fn163

  Brett was in her curious way in love with Katherine, she was very broken by the suddenness of her death.

  Katherine had retreated to a mysterious priory at Fontainbleau, a community with mystical tendencies run by a Russian whose name I forget [George Gurdjieff]. Men & women of all nationalities live in this priory. The Russian Seer is all powerful & all wise and a complete dictator … There are no servants, everyone has his particular task allotted to him. Everyone must work. Then they have a theatre in the grounds which they built and decorated themselves where they act plays & do Delacroix-sort-of-dances. They gar
den & milk cows and build when they want out houses. There are sixty disciples – Brett gave a very good description of the community! – She disliked the Grand Seer who apparently is so busy firing orders and devising tasks that he is never seen to work. Katherine had been there two months as an invalid so she was allowed a servant & kinder treatment. Fortunately Murry was staying with her. He had arrived three days before she died.

  She suddenly had a haemorrhage after walking upstairs & died in ten minutes.

  Brett went over to the funeral with Sullivan. I am sorry Katherine is dead. I hadn’t seen her since she lived with Brett and me in Gower Street. But she was a great life enhancer. Her writing was the least interesting part of her.

  You take a dark view of that remark? – But if you had known her you would have seen she was no ordinary woman. Even Lytton was impressed by her. She was so witty, and had such courage. She lived every sort of life. She knew every sort of person. It was queer that she wrote so dully. For she was the reverse of that when one talked to her. I always think she was doomed through her connection with Murry. I think he ate her soul out of her […]

  At last the curtain is down and the orchestra has gone home. Even the bills are torn down & never more will La Bella Valentine Dobree grace the boards.

  She returns to England today […] She wrote a characteristic letter to Ralph saying she never wanted to see him again & wished to avoid meeting him in London … Ralph said unmoved ‘if she wishes to avoid meeting me there wasn’t any need to tell me she was coming to London. I can’t say I think she is very sincere.’ But the farce is over. I confess when I saw her familiar writing on the French envelope I shivered.

  I wonder in two years time how she will tell this romance to her intimate friends.

  You will hear of the Hogarth Controversy when you meet the Woolfs in Granada.

  One thinks Ralph is absurd not to stick to such excellent people, but really he is right. The whole difficulty is working under anyone & receiving orders. Leonard & Virginia are perfect people to know as friends, but rather difficult as overseers & business people.