Ralph looks very beautiful in his velvet jacket. It would be good to get back to our Lytton again and fire. I hope darling your cold is better, and you aren’t feeling depressed […] The weather is quite as FOUL here as Tidmarsh. My fondest love and a kiss from the
Mopsa
To Gerald Brenan
The Mill House
Sunday evening [15 September 1923]
It’s all settled dearest, we BOTH will come!!!!!! Ralph has written you a letter swearing he will come. Today he had a talk with Lytton on a walk and told me afterwards that Lytton relents and so I shall come. So WE BOTH will come some time the end of November and stay at least a decent lengthed month with you at Yegen […]
Virginia and Leonard are really superb people. We visited them on our way back. I always choose the Newhaven crossing, it’s such a good place to see England at its best. We drove straight to the Woolves in the car. They are only a few miles from Newhaven; Sussex is a wonderful county!
That part round Newhaven is filled with queer memories for me. We always went to Seaford or Brighton every year. And as I hated the sea, and bathing with family groups I used to walk on the Lewes downs, and paint. Within a stone’s throw of the Woolves’old house. Little did she think that L.S. would kiss her on those downs. And turn her into a poetical dormouse. But that’s a long story […]
I like the Woolves far more than they like me. Ugh. I have a queer love for Virginia which fills me with emotion when I see her. They talk better than any people I know. How quickly the conversation becomes intelligent and amusing when Virginia talks! We slept at Lewes in a superb old English Inn. The beauty of England, even although it is so vulgar after France, makes one’s heart warm with an inside joy. It soon vanishes, but the first two days are always remarkable to me for their vividness.
Tidmarsh was exquisite with its rows of shining books, and the dresser with your plates.
Again I thank you for those plates. It’s an achievement to have given me two presents which I literally look at every day and then think of you. The little picture on my mantelpiece and the plates. I wrote this morning a frantic letter telling you we are coming in December. It’s true unless I commit some incredible act of folly, or unless Ralph changes his mind … We are now on the most amiable terms. And I can’t see any reason why we shouldn’t go on being sensible like this, at any rate until December.
Ralph’s carrying on some intrigue in London at the moment, so I sit alone in the dining room. Looking out not on anything as poetical as your mountains and blue skies, but on dark sombre elms and privet hedges […] Don’t get ill on your travels. I dread these months before November. My dear I am so happy.
Your, elated
Princess of Georgia
Carrington hoped that Ralph’s ‘intrigue’ – his pursuit of Frances Marshall – meant that he would be more easygoing about her relationship with Gerald.
To Gerald Brenan
In the top attic, Tidmarsh
Tuesday afternoon [about 8 October 1923]
My Dear, I can’t write you letters when I don’t know if you are at Yegen. Then I keep on saying one more month and I will be at Yegen. That makes it seem absurd to tell you what I am thinking in a letter, when we will talk to each other so soon. You can’t think with what restraint I behave. I hardly ever mention Spain, even to Ralph. I feel if I pretend outwardly that it is very improbable I shall go, God with His white beard who dominates our lives from the top of the apple tree won’t be able to frustrate us.
Are you really excited, as excited as I am? […]
I shall buy painting materials at Granada. I know where there is quite a good shop, on the hill, on the left hand side. We won’t stop at a single place on the way until we reach Granada. I long to come by Lanhiron, you know what I mean, the way we came with Lytton, or will the river be too full? Ralph is up in London today book binding. He lives a very gay life with intrigues, and love affairs, after his book bindings shut up. He is much happier now he is working for himself, and not under Leonard […]
Do you allow me to admire Mr Norman Douglas? Lytton was so taken with Alone he bought an entire set of all his books. I was very delighted with South Wind. It seemed to me so interesting. But after that Fox into Lady faux pas I hardly dare venture an opinion.fn172
Just to annoy you, I tell you Garnett has been awarded two of the grandest prizes in literature this year amounting to several hundreds […]
My fondest love.
The restored
Princess of Georgia
To Lytton Strachey
102 Ridgemount Gardens, London
Saturday [17 November 1923]
Lying low, very low, very low indeed.
Darling Lytton, I lie low with the fiend, and lower still after an entire glass of sherry. So forgive my wandering wits […] A curious evening here last night, Marjorie S your sister, Frances Marshall your niece-in-law, and Missie Partridge. Marjorie S was at her wildest. She sang us song after song. Dorothy P who had never heard, or seen anything like Marjorie before was completely bowled over! It was an extraordinary merry evening. Missie sang Mozart most beautifully. Even Marjorie was very pleased I think with her voice. Sweet Frances sang Purcell, Ralph sang Spanish songs, and only the Monster Mopsa was silent […]
I saw James yesterday. I lunch with them today. James says we must get Ham Spray and supports every extravagance! But then he is already bankrupt. What are we to do? I feel in terrible despair! I can hardly bare to let it fade, and yet it seems impossible unless the other client turns out to be a straw scare-crow. Lytton you are a darling. Perhaps I might see you next Tuesday for a moment … I love you Lytton more and more, and you can’t think how much I miss you although it’s only yesterday that we parted […] I hope you will enjoy yourself very much. The car is a great boon in London. We went for a drive in it this morning. It is such fun. Bless you a thousand times for being such an angel to me and to us.
Your loving and most intoxicated Mopsa
Ham Spray was a handsome farmhouse with eight bedrooms near Hungerford beneath the Berkshire Downs, where Carrington had long dreamed of living. Ralph had inherited some money from his father, and the plan now was that he and Lytton should buy the house together.
To Gerald Brenan
The Mill House
Thursday, 20 November 1923
Amigo, a despair has fallen over me. Not a reason that will draw forth sympathy from you.
I am in love with a house …
For the last week I have been in the depths of misery. For it is apparent that I will never posess this enchanted house. My hatred for Tidmarsh, for love, for everyone has reached a crescendo – I feel nobody sympathises. Ralph is in love with a blackhaired beauty and thinks life perfect. Lytton thinks life what it is, and is not surprised at our failure to posess this house […] So I keep my griefs to myself and only sulk outwardly.
How I hate Mrs Partridge and her idle thousands. A mere five hundred pounds would gain for me my Elysium.
We come to Spain.
Today even that sentence doesn’t make me happy …
Bless you, your weeping
Queen of Georgia
A month later, with Ham Spray still in the balance, Carrington and Ralph set off for Spain. Ralph was trying to persuade Frances Marshall to meet them in Paris on their way home; Carrington was hoping that Lytton would also join them there.
PART THREE
The Erosion of Happiness: 1924–1932
Two places, Carrington wrote, were written on her heart: Watendlath (where her romance with Gerald really began) and Tidmarsh. Ham Spray was a larger and more distinguished house, with its classic Queen Anne front and veranda looking across fields to the hills. She turned it into the perfect setting for Lytton, somewhere he could arrange his library and write his books and see his friends, and where she herself had a big studio. But the happiness and ease of the early days at Tidmarsh were not to be recaptured. There were many hilarious gatherings and good times,
but the best times of all for Carrington were when she was alone with Lytton, and this never happened quite often enough.
At Ham Spray the ménage a trois was never settled. Gradually it expanded to include other lovers for all three of them. After the crisis over Carrington’s attachment to Gerald, Ralph’s own affair with Valentine Dobrée faded away, but he had other lovers before falling in love and finding a permanent partner in Frances Marshall, which Carrington minded more on Lytton’s behalf than her own. For herself, she could only accommodate lovers who understood that her love and loyalty were fundamentally Lytton’s. Apart from Gerald, they all did. She accepted Lytton’s series of relationships with young men, several of whom became her close friends and correspondents; only his last serious attachment, to Roger Senhouse, with whom he hoped to set up house in London, unnerved her. Her own dalliances with women, apart from one, were less serious, more a source of fun and distraction than anything deeper.
The greatest threat to her happiness at Ham Spray came after Ralph and Frances came back from a journey to Spain in the autumn of 1925 announcing that they planned to live together. Carrington’s great fear was that if Ralph withdrew from Ham Spray life Lytton would not want to carry on. Her concerns were not unfounded; Lytton was very fond of her, but he had always feared her emotional dependence, and worried about their companionship without the influence of Ralph’s reassuring, practical, familiar masculinity. After a short but painful period of negotiation the situation settled down; but inevitable tensions remained. Both Lytton and Carrington, while never disliking Frances, found her constant presence difficult. It was not easy for her, either; as she later wrote, at Ham Spray she felt neither guest nor host. The women did their best, but by 1928 the situation was making them both wretched. Frances became depressed and ill, while Carrington, whose tormented relationship with Gerald was finally coming to an end, began to write in her diary of her loneliness and fears for the future. She also began to drink rather too much. The diary which she began in January 1928, when she found herself alone and unwell (writing on the cover, in a typical but somehow significant slip of the pen ‘D. C. Partride. Her book’), gives an impression of increasing unhappiness. ‘The year ended rather melancholy’, she wrote. ‘The great distinction suddenly seemed to appear between couples supporting each other – & isolated figures unattached […] If one becomes detached there seems a danger of becoming eccentric, and old maidish. A dislike against the melange of living too closely against other people’. She had ominous dreams, about Mark Gertler and about Ralph. In one, she was frightened by strange shadows on the lawn ‘so I called to R who I knew was talking upstairs, I could hear his voice but I couldn’t make any words carry, so then I crawled because I was so terrified on my hands and knees indoors to the foot of the stairs, & cried Ralph … and tried to cry louder, but only made noises in my throat…then I heard quite clearly his voice arguing with F saying “the point about Ibsen is” and I realised with terror it was no good, I couldn’t interrupt and I woke up trying to cry loud’.
For all her deep ambivalence about men, something in Carrington still needed a male presence in her life. She also found to her surprise that she missed sexual contact. She had a brief affair with the bisexual and sexually voracious sculptor Stephen Tomlin, who was also a passing lover of Lytton’s and might, according to Gerald Brenan, have been a substitute for Ralph in the Ham Spray triangle, but this possibility evaporated when he took up with Julia Strachey. She had an even less serous fling with a Cambridge academic, Peter Lucas. Then, a handsome younger man from a family long connected with Bloomsbury entered her life. Bernard Penrose, known as Beakus, became her lover, and proved to her and to those around her that she was not just an eccentric old maid.
Although she was always thinking about painting, and regretting her lack of dedication to her art, she exhibited only once more, in Salisbury in 1930, and sold no paintings during the Ham Spray years at all. Instead, she took up making decorative glass and silver-paper pictures, designing tiles for friends kitchens and bathrooms, and decorating walls, furniture and cupboards. Ham Spray, and the life she made there around Lytton, took up almost all her creative and artistic energies. When he was away, she relied more and more on the Augustus John clan, who had come to live nearby. Her greatest fear remained that of losing Lytton.
1924
In Yegen, it proved difficult for Carrington and Gerald to be alone together and tensions simmered. Carrington, who needed Frances to join them in order to keep Ralph happy, sent her glowing accounts; the two women realised they needed to be friends, not rivals.
To Frances Marshall
Yegen, Ugijar, Prov. de Granada
Monday [January 1924]
Dearest Frances,
So many letters seem to have been written to you that I can’t think of anything to tell you. I do wish you were a little rasher. Why didn’t you abandon all and follow us? The sun alone would have been worth it, and who would live off coffee in Gerrard Street when she could eat persimmons, grapes, oranges and turkey stuffed with chestnuts? And why do people eat breakfast in the cold shades of Brunswick when they might bask in the sun, munch on toast and cherry jam on a roof gazing on the sea and the green mountains of Africa? And who would go to parties in Fulham Road when she could sit over a log fire and watch the dancers of the Alpujarras and hear exquisite shepherds sing ravishing coplas?
I have seldom been so happy continuously day after day. In the afternoon I generally go out with a little village girl of 12 and paint the mountains. She talks to me the whole time in Spanish. To everything I reply ‘si, si’ occasionally I vary it with ‘no intendo’. She sits behind me and holds my paint box for me. R. P. spends most of his day arguing with Gerald. Yesterday we spent an entire day in a village haggling over jugs, and dishes. You would have laughed to have seen the finale: a small upper room in an inn, with about 80 females, children, weeping babies, crowded round us, every few minutes a new person pressed in with a plate. Sometimes terrible little Victorian rosebud horrors, which they were amazed when we refused. At last a small girl brought a broken china duck! The bargaining was terrible. Gerald and Ralph are the most adamant characters. We feel in despair at the thought of ever packing up these objects and getting them to Almeria and then England. I fell off a cliff yesterday into a ditch full of Spanish chestnuts so my hands are engrained with prickles today which is an excuse for writing so badly. I hope in secret you will escape your overseers and come to Paris. Partly I confess because I would like to linger in that town and I know I shall have very little chance unless the Gerrard Street siren is there. Another time Frances you must come to Yegen. It is a unique Arcadia. I am always so fond of you. I was sorry at Tidmarsh I was so distracted with packing, but you will come again when we come back and admire sympathetically all our carpets, and dishes?
My fondest love
Carrington
To Lytton Strachey
Yegen, Ugijar, Prov. de Granada
Before breakfast on the roof, 8 o’ck, 2 January 1924
Dearest,
Do you know we nearly sent you a wire yesterday ‘Silence is brutal.’ If only you knew how I am tormented in my dreams. Last night a letter came from you saying you had bought Ham Spray for £2000 and were moving in next week! My only correspondents since I left England have been one letter from N.L.C., [Noel] and Mr [Raymond] Mortimer and one from you. Ralph is in a dudgeon because his young lady has only written once. Your fate hangs on today’s post. SHOULD the postman NOT bring a letter with the Tidmarsh mark we have resolved NEVER to return, but to live for ever in this TROPICAL heat eating persimmons and listening to the sweet guitars. We had another party the night before, not quite such a large assembly. But some new characters which made it interesting. A lovely Shepherd boy with a much better voice than any we had heard before. To make our presence less royal Gerald asked the young man to dance with me. I had one exquisite dancer he was so pink, and beautifully mannered. I really believe he was at Oxford! The
young men are far better looking than the females in this particular village […] Today is a great ‘fiesta’. Already a brass band and a procession has been twice, or even thrice, round the walls of Yegen. Last night they carried, with lanterns and torches, the Holy Virgin round the village. All the windows of the houses were lighted with candles. We watched from our roof. Spanish fire works were sent off. Those that reached the stars were very gorgeous, but far more never left the earth. We live like princes, eating cold turkey and ham every day and drinking Spanish wine.
Yesterday we all walked to Valor and had lunch lying in a grassy grove under some slim grey poplars. How I longed to have you with me lying on the hot bank, gazing up at these exquisite bare poplars against the most delicate of blue skies. A butterfly flew above my head and bumblebees searched for flowers. In the bank we found wild smelling violets. Ralph and Gerald on the way back from Valor after ‘tea’, i.e. black coffee, bathed in a mountain stream. We then climbed some mountains and came back to Yegen by another way. Gerald reads early Spanish poetry to me and one evening I had a French lesson and read Baudelaire. He has far more books on Verlaine and Rimbaud than you have, with a great many new portraits. He has one book with a facsimile of Rimbaud’s poems in manuscript. Have you ever seen it? Ralph is reading the Arabian Nights and Proust […]
Oh Lytton, so often I have longed to have you here, to share all these delights with me. You could not feel Spanish was ‘antipathetico’ in this weather and with such material pleasures. We have all been very well ever since we came. I do hope Tidmarsh is not uncomfortable for you in any way. I now have a great many new plans for furnishing H[am] S[pray]. All hideous furniture is to be sold and there are to be far fewer objects in the rooms. The pleasure of having so much space and so many rooms is very great here.
Carrington's Letters Page 30