Carrington's Letters

by Dora Carrington

  This is such a stupid letter. But I feel so excited and at the same time depressed that I can do nothing sensibly.

  The cold here is dreadful after Rome and I can hardly bear the way the elms seem to press against the windows, after living in an Archbishop’s Palace at Ravello that looked across the Bay to Paestum.

  Lytton comes back tomorrow and then perhaps by murmuring the mystic words Segesta … and removing the chair covers one will gain a little of one’s lost happiness. Dear Virginia, I do so long to see you again. Please give Leonard my love. I send you a little present which I brought you in Rome. Perhaps round your garden hat?

  My fondest love

  Yr old Carrington

  Although their relationship was increasingly fractious, when travelling with Lytton Carrington and Ralph were in harmony, both of them dedicated to his welfare and enjoyment. Back in Tidmarsh, she found herself discontented, especially after Virginia Woolf gave her news of Gerald.

  To Gerald Brenan

  The Mill House

  Sunday, 28 May 1923

  Amigo, I put off writing the long letter that had been fermenting in my head since we left Italy because it is so difficult to write letters off hand, and then when I got back to England I felt the most violent depression which has only just left me. We have now been exactly a week in England. It was madness to return. Rome is a far better place in which to live than this flat greenery. The cold is awful in England. I was going to write to you this long letter after I had seen Virginia but then something she told me when I went to tea with her last Wednesday made everything vanish out of my head.

  I wanted to go to tea with her alone, but that wasn’t possible, as R was in London with me. Still it didn’t really make any difference really. Virginia said just as I was putting a piece of stale ice cake into my mouth, ‘You know Gerald is going to get married; he has just written and told Leonard that he is engaged to that American girl.’fn169 I think it was the word ‘engaged’ that made me feel that it wasn’t true and that made me rather angry. I felt Virginia couldn’t know you very well to use such a word in reference to you, or perhaps everything had changed. I quickly argued that my feelings were absurd, all words are absurd and ‘engaged’ is just as good a word as ‘bedding’. Then she said: ‘I thought he probably would get married very soon, but of course it may be one of his jokes.’

  I wish I could have the definite feelings that Ralph has, he was plunged into a profound gloom, and felt he must go out and see you at once.

  All the way back from Richmond, he talked about you and saw all the horrors of marriage, the end of our friendship and every possible disaster. If it is true that E is going to live with you, or marry you, Gerald, I am so very glad. Because at any rate for a certain time, a few years, you will be happy, or happier than you have been this last year. No one but a fool imagines that he can be certain of achieving happiness for more than a few months. If it was only one of your passing jokes to Leonard which he misunderstood, then all I have written is unnecessary. But I wanted to tell you, because I think I probably care more for your happiness than anyone else, that I am very glad if you are going to be happy with E.

  Will you please write, and tell me soon. It does in a curious way make rather a difference. I am not going to write a long letter today. In a few days I will.

  In any case I refuse to believe our friendship was so ordinary that if you take a new friend, or a wife, to yourself, our relation ends. Ralph couldn’t understand why I wasn’t ‘hurt’. Really he understands very little of my feelings for you. Perhaps I shall be more contented if you remove finally all possibility of my ever coming to Spain alone. In spite of growing older I still find I have lapses. I am often very stupid. I hate facing certain things as impossibilities and seeing the limitations of our life.

  Your letter is in my hand. It is not true that R is more human than I am and has no feelings about classes. You only know such a small portion of my life. You do not know the number of ‘ordinary’ friendships I make and my attachments for such people.

  I told Virginia I wasn’t surprised and that I guessed you would soon marry E. it was only half true. I wanted to gain a little time to hide my feelings from her. Then it is partly true for ever since you first told me about E I had faced this probability.

  Perhaps if you have her with you, you will be able to regard me more easily as a ‘neuter’ friend. It’s pretty depressing what a mess I made of your feelings and of mine this last year. I always thank you for not reviling me.

  Virginia was so charming. But it was a slight nightmare. I longed to talk to her about you, ask her hundreds of questions. But I felt as if there was a glass window between us and that she couldn’t hear what I was saying.

  The flowered cottons were lovely. They looked so beautiful in the sitting room at Hogarth. Ralph’s without a job. I hardly think we will ever get a Press. There seems no money to start it with. Perhaps something will turn up soon […]

  If you are happy, or unhappy it matters to me. It will be a relief if for a change I am not responsible.

  I think Ralph is writing to you. His agitation over your fate shows how deeply he cares. I have seldom seen him so upset. In a few days I will write sensibly of other matters. Even if you become a Moslem and marry four wives I am damned if I will stop writing to you.

  Gerald dear I send you my love.

  I can hardly bear Barbara going out to you. It’s intolerable. Why do you allow it! Why can everyone go to Spain and stay with you except your rejected, and deserted

  QUEEN OF NOTHING

  PS Tidmarsh seems incredibly squalid and cramped after Ravello. And I hate these backyard hens and ducks. Ugh! Perhaps we will leave it soon. It is too green and stuffy.

  The strength of Carrington’s and Ralph’s reactions to the rumours (which turned out to be unfounded) of Gerald’s engagement shows how emotionally involved they were with him. Both felt he belonged to them.Unsettled, Carrington began to think of moving on from Tidmarsh, which had started to feel claustrophobic and had been tainted by the Great Row of the year before. There was no question of breaking up the ménage, which remained central to their lives, but with Lytton increasingly pursuing romances with young men and Ralph falling in love with Frances Marshall it was clearly changing.

  To Gerald Brenan

  The Mill House

  31 May 1923

  Amigo, I will make some attempt to fill in the gaps now, the interval between Rome (two weeks now) and Tidmarsh. But it shows how dreary everything is, travelling, London, gossip, all dreary compared to friendship. Because in spite of my head being fuller than it’s ever been full before of things I want to tell you, I can only remember Virginia saying: ‘Gerald has just told Leonard that he is engaged.’

  I remember so accurately what happened a year ago today. You probably can’t remember. The gloomy days of despair didn’t begin until June 7th for us. How I sympathise with those aged women who suddenly say over the cold mutton on Sunday evening: ‘exactly twenty years ago, I and my dear husband …’ ‘It was just this time of the year, I remember the apple blossom on the grass, and the organ grinder …’ I used to wonder how my mother remembered. I see really it’s one of the forms of masturbation, self-indulgence. One doesn’t want to forget. I went up to London yesterday. I telephoned Virginia. I wanted to go and see her alone. I wanted to hear more about you. But she was away from Richmond. You can’t tell me anything. So don’t bother to write me a sermon of reproaches and explanations. If you tell me anything at all, I shall understand. I know you couldn’t have remained a hermit for ever and I have said every time I read a letter from you that I didn’t deserve such luck to have your letters. And when you said our friendship was futile and probably doomed from all the circumstances, I knew you were right. But I thought perhaps because nothing ever happens as I expect it will happen, that perhaps we might always be friends. Perhaps you were really as curious as I thought you were. What I regret, and always will regret, is I didn’t know
you better when I might have known you. And you never knew how fond I was. I concealed that. I can’t think why I did now. At the time there seemed some reason for it.

  But I will refrain from more masturbation of the spirit. And I will go back to my old philosophy that one need never be gloomy about the future, since it is never what one thinks it will be. I wish, so very much, I could come out with Barbara to Yegen. I find one doesn’t care for new people. And when I hear news of you indirectly, all my old impatience to see you again and laugh and joke, comes back to me. I am going to do my best to prevent Ralph getting involved in a business which prevents him having holidays. Then unless you lose all your money, or become a hopeless family man, we may meet more often. Shall I tell you what comes into my head. I don’t really see that it matters. The difficulty is, without making a letter as bulky as the Bible, to describe one’s exact feelings. The reason why your friendship matters is because you are nearer to me in spirit than anyone else. I agree so very closely with your views on life. It gives me a support, and a self respect for myself. Lytton has the effect of making me feel so stupid and hopeless about myself that I wish to avoid the world and retreat. It isn’t that he thinks this about me, it’s grasping his standards and preciseness, his truth and the way he is ‘himself’ so entirely. Ralph has the opposite effect. I feel it isn’t a very serious matter after all and that one had better face oneself and then leave it alone. When I talk to you, I am not conscious of all these struggles, I feel clearer when I read your letters but not gloomy.

  How badly I express this. It seems complete balderdash when I read it over. And yet when it came to the point I couldn’t face giving up Ralph and Lytton for you. All I want to put forward to you is my point of view. I can’t give my reasons for caring for you. Although it’s illogical and impossible I do still care […]

  It’s curious but no matter what you do, or say, I never for a moment feel angry or criticise you. If you marry: in you I see it’s perfectly sensible and even courageous. If you don’t marry I think you are equally original. Alix would say I’ve a complex about you. Probably, I often suspected it. I am in love with Shelley and so I pretend Shelley lives in you and you can never do wrong for me. In any case I should make the most of your rare advantages, and trounce me and bounce me since you cannot turn me into a vixen!

  […] Yesterday I went up to London to my dentist again. I spent all the rest of the day with Alix. She is amazing. She never disappoints me. She always has some amusing new mood. Yesterday she had developed an aesthetic mood, and bought two carpets of great beauty for her rooms and told me the Cambridge gossip. Morgan Forster spent last weekend with us. I always feel that I know him so well before he comes, but when he is actually here, I feel rather shy with him […]

  I hated Switzerland. We passed through the Simplon tunnel and saw all the grand mountains, and lakes, complete with sunset, Swiss cows, chalets, and glaciers. It seemed to me a monument of all that was pretentious, and vulgar in the Victorian epoch. The country between Naples and Rome was lovely. Wonderful fields of corn, and vineyards, with distant blue mountains. It reminded me of that lovely blue picture by Poussin in the Louvre, Ruth and Boaz. Beautiful women with bare legs and feet, broad straw hats and blue pinafores were heaping hay on to great carts in the fields.

  They looked so gay, but at the same time classical. One returns to England and finds wet green fields, cold winds, and perpetual rain and females in the fields wearing artificial silk jerseys, with hideous young men in navy blue serge Sunday clothes. You have no idea how I hated Tidmarsh when we came back […] It’s better now. Two weeks have dulled my sensations. I still hate the ducks and the bees, but I no longer think of Ravello, and Rome.

  I am contemplating buying a studio, and putting it up in the garden. I find the room-space is too cramped. But perhaps we will leave Tidmarsh next year; then it won’t be worth while. I want to find a house on the Lambourn Downs. I think it’s a mistake to become sentimental over any place and I can’t quite get over my hatred for this garden and the dull green fields since our return from Rome […]

  I advise you to take a ship to Naples and inspect Amalfi to Ravello. All the country from Amalfi to Calva seemed to me very good. My mother now lives near Newbury in an old Georgian cottage. Ralph and I go over and see her once a week and loot her house of eatables and clothes. Today Ralph found in the old cellars beneath her house 8 very old wine flasks. They must be some 300 years old. I have washed them and put them on the dresser. They are amazingly beautiful. Dark olive green. One has a glass seal on it with three wild geese, and a hand rampant.

  Next week we will see Duse act in Ghosts.fn170 Lytton has just read the play to us. We are now reading Othello in the evenings. Lytton acts the moor superbly whilst he reads. I am sending you Middleton Murry’s new magazine [the Adelphi] It really is very good reading!

  Can you imagine a man of education could sink so low? You must read the story of Mr Joiner and Rosie. It is thought Middleton Murry himself wrote it. It should be called ‘The Servant Maid’s Adelphi.’ I am going to write them a little story about a charwoman and a lost hairpin in a drain. I promise you it will be accepted. Let us lower the Adelphi until even the scullery maids reject it!

  Friday, 1 June 1923

  Lytton finished reading Othello last night. It is almost too moving […]

  Reading Othello made me realise last night that a year is not long enough to forget some things. Ten years is a more suitable interval. Bless you. I send you my love. Don’t answer this letter. I write it in a particular mood. By the time you answer would reach me, I should feel differently. I think I only just want to hear about you. For the moment I am bored by myself. I will send you some photographs soon. Perhaps Barbara will take them to you.

  Your loving Doric

  Reading this over before I post it, it seems to be rather a dismal wail from a cast-off mistress! But I didn’t mean it to be that. I merely want to ask you to write to me, since no matter what the news was that I received through Virginia, if you were ill, if you were going to America, becoming a sailor, marrying an American, I should at once want to hear more about it from you. Anyway she told me nothing except extolling your virtues, which after all I knew about better than she did. I really only want to have a letter from you. Nothing more. I’ve long realised my life will never change much. If you marry, you will join the fixtures, fixed gas brackets. I would persuade you eloquently against the few years of loneliness and isolation that I lived through after I left the Slade.

  The great thing I am sure is to realise the grotesque mixture of life, the pleasures of being loved and loving and having friends, and the pains and sordidness of the same relations. The pleasures of freedom, and isolation, and the despairs at the same time which beset one in that state. One year I would like to take an average of the days one is happy against the wretched days. Perhaps it’s absurd to ever think about it. If one painted pictures it wouldn’t matter and one probably wouldn’t think about it. But I can’t see the use of painting pictures ‘as good as’ those at the London Group. I think except for a few French artists, and perhaps two English artists there are NO important LIVING artists. Painting hasn’t advanced, there are very few inventors and original artists alive now. They reduce painting to the same culture as architecture, and furniture, always reviving some style and trying to build up a mixture with dead brains. The French cover their tracks better than the English do. But really I don’t think much of this revival of Rembrandt, nudes à la Rubens, imitations of the naïve artists, Poussin. Matisse seems to me one of the most definitely original artists alive now. I think all this ‘culture’, and ‘groups’ system perhaps is partly the reason of the awful paintings produced. Then the intelligence of most English painters is so low. They are only fit to be house decorators.

  Do you know, plain and aged that I am, I made a conquest just before I left England, at a party given by David Garnett?fn171 An American girl. I only know her name is Henrietta. She has the face o
f a Giotto Madonna. She sang exquisite songs with a mandolin, southern state revivalist nigger songs. She made such wonderful cocktails that I became completely drunk and almost made love to her in public. To my great joy Garnett told me the other day she continually asks after me and wants me to go and see her. I am sure she is far more beautiful than your E! And if you think I am imitating you I tell you I am not. Ralph cut my hair too short last week. When it has grown longer and my beauty restored, I shall visit the lovely Henrietta and revive our drunken passion. Gerald dear I care so much for you. Forgive me for whining and write to me soon.

  D. C.

  After a holiday in France with Lytton, Sebastian Sprott and Barbara, Carrington, to Lytton’s alarm, began to pursue her plan to visit Gerald in Spain. Ralph’s father died in August, necessitating a reluctant visit to his mother in Devon.

  To Lytton Strachey

  Cofton, Star Cross, Exeter

  Thursday morning [September 1923]

  Dearest Rat-Husband,

  I wish you’d play your pipes and lure your two Mopsämen home again. The cold here is terrible. LISTEN, with all this wealth we have NO FIRES in any rooms in this house. I was simply frozen to a block of salt last night sitting round a table in a large dining room with the rain and wind beating against the window pane, and NO FIRE. Give me our poverty stricken life with rats, and a FIRE. The conversation is entirely about money and investments. Poor Mrs Partridge is in a great flutter because she saw Mr Sparke’s estate announced in The Times and she realised her estate will have to be exposed to every curious eye. She is terrified someone will snatch her money if they know how much she has. Really it’s Tchekhov it’s so mad. Père Perdrix left over £38,000 in England, the India estate isn’t settled yet. And yet they are too poor to have FIRES. GRRRR. We only just bear up. Thank goodness escape will soon be here. The port was superb last night. But the females hardly sipped it. It might have been medicine. Cider is 1910, and more delicious than any cider I’ve ever tasted. A dreadful poor relation is staying in the house with a face like the fish footman in Alice in Wonderland. She sews curtains, and occasionally murmurs ‘in Cornwall I’ve often noticed …’ But no one ever listens, so she never finishes her sentence […]