To Vanessa Bell
Ham Spray House
Friday [March 1932]
Dearest Vanessa,
I thought you might like a photograph of Lytton which was taken last year – I will look out some snapshots one day, and have some copies done for you, and Virginia. Will you ask Ralph and Frances round one evening. Ralph feels terribly upset, and only cares I think to see people who loved Lytton also. It would be very kind if you would please give my love to Duncan.
My love
Yr veryloving C
To Sebastian Sprott
Ham Spray House
March 1932
[…] You see I’m not a modern cynical character really, I mind terribly the changes. And nothing seems to me worth anything in comparison with that perfection of jokes and intelligence. It breaks my heart every night I sit in the library to think of all the hours Lytton spent arranging his books and putting in book plates and cleaning them, all to see them within a few months dispersed and probably sold. I know these things are bound to happen and are always happening. But if one person really flavours all life for one it is difficult to see how to set about starting a new one. Yes, that is what I should ask you this evening. Alix says one’s object must be to maintain and live up to, those standards of good and intelligence that he believed in. But for whom? You see my weakness is that I only led, or tried to lead, a ‘good’ life to please Lytton, left to myself I lapse (secretly) into superstition, drink and mooning about. Come, write me on your typewriter a discourse on ‘the object of life.’ You must know the preliminary lecture by now. Can you refute Mr Hume? But unless you write before Thursday afternoon Ralph will be back and will read your letter. So perhaps you had better leave me alone to my mooning meditations.
To Gerald Brenan
Ham Spray House
6 March 1932
Dearest Amigo,
A & J [Alix and James] arrived down here on Friday morning for lunch […] I felt very tired, and the unhappiness of remembering everything came back as usual when I entered Ham Spray. A little girl in the kitchen told us that Olive was ill with influenza so there was no lunch. Despondently we looked at dull letters & old newspapers – suddenly your Box appeared from a bundle of papers!!! It was an inspiration!!! We ate it for lunch with exquisite Brown toast, and lemon juice, and the miseries of life were instantly lightened.
‘Only Gerald, the poorest of our friends thinks of such presents,’ said Ralph. Thank you, & Gamel very much. I hope you are both keeping well. Most people in the country seem to have influenza or colds and we spend this weekend at Biddesden with Bryan Guinness as he was alone there, and we had no servant here, with R & F & Bunny. We have just come in. It’s such a lovely house and we had a beautiful ride across the Downs […] and afterwards a picnic in some woods with a blazing bonfire, & omelettes, & sausages. It is rather a pleasant trait in Bryan’s character that his greatest happiness should be fried sausages, and sitting in damp winter woods, or eating chicken in the kitchen – which we did last night – Perhaps it proves that there isn’t as much point in having £20,000 a year after all as we thought!!
I find everything rather difficult. But as everyone tells me it will get better I resign myself … actually I find it hard to believe. I hope you are both writing. Do go up to London, and stay with Ralph sometimes, if you feel like it. I know he would love it if you both would.
I stayed 3 days in London last week. But it was rather more difficult than living here. So I don’t think I’ll go up again for a bit. I send you all my love amigo. I wish I could write you a letter to tell you how much I loved your present, but I feel unable to express anything tonight intelligently.
All my love to Gamel.
Your fondest amiga
C
This was Carrington’s last letter to Gerald. On the back of the envelope he wrote: ‘How can I think of anything but you?’
At Biddesden, Carrington was heard to ask Bryan if she could borrow a shotgun to shoot rabbits, as she had done before. She did not take a gun away with her, but went back after a few days to collect it.
On 10 March, Virginia and Leonard Woolf went to Ham Spray and found Carrington alone. She had insisted to Ralph that she would be all right, as she was leaving within two days for France with the Johns.
With Virginia, she wept and said, ‘There is nothing left for me to do. I did everything for Lytton.’ Virginia could not console her. ‘I did not want to lie to her. – I could not pretend there was not truth in what she said. I said life seemed to me sometimes hopeless, useless when I woke in the night and thought of Lytton’s death.’
Early the next morning Carrington put on Lytton’s yellow silk dressing gown, stood in front of a long mirror with her back to one of the windows at the front of the house, placed the barrel of the gun against her heart, and pulled the trigger.
POSTSCRIPT
Carrington did not die at once, alone in an empty house. Ralph and Frances were woken early on 11 March by a phone call from the gardener, who had discovered her on her bedroom floor fatally wounded in the side. She had aimed for her heart but missed. He called a doctor but there was little to be done. They drove down to Ham Spray, David Garnett at the wheel, and picked up a nurse on the way.
Ralph and Frances found Carrington still conscious, lying where she had fallen as the doctor feared moving her. According to Frances, when Carrington saw Ralph break down in anguish on seeing her she told him she would try to live after all. She maintained that she had shot herself by accident while aiming at a rabbit on the lawn, as she had indeed done many times in the past. She died later that afternoon and accidental death was the verdict at the inquest held two days later. The stigma of suicide was thus avoided.
When David Garnett saw her body, he thought she looked triumphant. Gerald arrived soon afterwards, as did Alix and James Strachey. Yet emotions were mixed for Gerald – he felt anger as well as pity: she had killed herself, he thought, to prove the importance of Lytton’s death. ‘Or perhaps’, he later wrote, ‘it is merely that I am obliged to go on reproaching her – for the last act as for so many other acts of her life.’
Bloomsbury was godless, and on principle did not hold funerals, or observe any of the social rituals around death; there had been no ceremony for Lytton, and a strange vagueness persists as to what happened to Carrington’s remains. She was cremated, and had left Ralph a letter suggesting that her ashes be scattered in the grove at Ham Spray where she had planted snowdrops. She also asked that Stephen Tomlin might make a statue to be placed there. Her requests were ignored; the idea of a shrine in the garden was anathema to Ralph. Much later he told a friend that Carrington’s ashes had eventually been placed under the yew trees as she had wished.
It was Tomlin who took the news to the Woolfs in London. Virginia, too, found herself angry, not with Carrington but with Lytton. ‘Lytton’s affected by this act’, she wrote in her diary. ‘I sometimes dislike him for it. He absorbed her, made her kill herself.’ A week later, on a fine spring day, she added, ‘I am glad to be alive and sorry for the dead. Can’t think why Carrington killed herself and put an end to all this.’ Nine years later Virginia walked into the River Ouse with stones in her pockets and drowned herself.
Mark Gertler was told what had happened by Brett. Neither of them had seen anything much of Carrington for years. Mark’s life was difficult: always short of money, he had become a society portrait painter, his marriage was troubled and his health was poor. He killed himself in 1939.
Inevitably, there were some in their circle who blamed Ralph for leaving Carrington alone and for supplanting her with Frances, even though he had done all he could to prevent her killing herself and they had made it plain that Ham Spray was her home as well as theirs. Others assumed that after such tragedy they would move elsewhere. But there was never any doubt in their minds that they would live together at Ham Spray. In one of several ominous conversations, Carrington had told Ralph she hoped they always would and that they
would one day have a child. They married in 1933, and Burgo Lytton Partridge was born in 1935. Carrington’s studio became his nursery. Apart from that, very little changed from the days when the trio had colonised it; lampshades and Christmas decorations she made were still in use decades later, and the same relations and friends continued to gather at Ham Spray until 1960, when Frances sold the house after Ralph’s death.
Carrington’s correspondence with Gerald is held in the Ransom Centre library in Austin, Texas, where I have spent weeks on end over the years working in their rich collection of British literary manuscripts.
When I came to the end of the over 400 letters Carrington wrote to Gerald Brenan between 1920 and 1932, I found something that astonished me. A snowdrop, brittle and faded, was pressed between the pages of the final letter she wrote to him, on 6 March 1932, five days before she died. My head was full of images from her last days and weeks, when in the chill of winter, deep in the misery of Lytton’s death and her own suicidal despair she planted snowdrop bulbs around the yew trees and planned her own memorial. Snowdrops flower in February; perhaps, I thought for a moment, she had picked one for Gerald. Before the romance between them died she had been in the habit of bringing him flowers to London from the Ham Spray garden.
Coming to my senses I realised that it was impossible that a snowdrop picked in March 1932 could possibly be intact and folded into a letter in a library in Texas eighty years later. Her letters had been sorted, packed, typed up, filed and refiled, and read by many researchers both before and after they arrived in Texas. They had passed through many hands, including the scrupulous ones of David Garnett, who first edited the letters in 1970 and Gretchen Gerzina, who published her biography in 1989. The librarian and archivists were as surprised as I was when I showed them the letter and the snowdrop. They removed it – leaving a faint outline on the paper – and put it in a plastic pouch. Future researchers will not find it as I did. The sensible explanation must be that someone working on Carrington’s life and death quietly left it there as a tribute. Little about Carrington was ever sensible; she was always a mystery to those who knew and loved her and, as her letters show, often mysterious to herself. The ghostly snowdrop seemed somehow appropriate.
1. Heading for the Slade: self-portrait, aged seventeen, 1910
2. Her younger brother and ally, Noel, 1912, and her much loved sailor brother, Teddy, in 1915, the year before he was killed
3. Girl in a blue dress: Carrington by Mark Gertler, 1912
4. Mark Gertler, her passionate admirer, by Carrington, c. 1912
5. Her close friend from the Slade, Christine Kuhlenthal, 1919
6. The ‘Cropheads’: Carrington, Barbara Hiles (later Bagenal) and Dorothy Brett, 1912
7. The Slade School Picnic, 1912. Front row from the left: Carrington, Barbara Hiles, Richard Nevinson and Mark Gertler
8. Tidmarsh Mill, c. 1918. Carrington placed two imaginary birds on the water by the house she found for herself and Lytton Strachey
9. At Garsington, 1920: Michael Llewellyn Davies, Carrington, Ottoline Morrell’s daughter Julian and Ralph Partridge
10. A labour of love: Lytton Strachey reading, painted during the winter of 1916
11. In 1919 and 1920 Ralph Partridge was often at the Mill, modelling for Carrington. These two drawings of him naked were sure to delight Lytton
12. Ralph with his clothes on, 1920
13. Carrington and Gerald Brenan, August 1921
14. Gerald, Ralph’s wartime friend, had fallen in love with Carrington, and romance blossomed at Watendlath in the Lake District, where she also painted his portrait
15. Portrait of Annie Stiles, one of Carrington’s favourite cook-housekeepers at Tidmarsh Mill, 1921
16. Two examples of the many tiles designed and made by Carrington for friends and clients from the mid-1920s
17. She also liked to paint furniture: cabinet, mid-1920s
18. Tulips in a Staffordshire jug, 1924. Flowers, especially tulips were among her favourite subjects
19. Cactus, c. 1924. This more exotic plant was perhaps inspired by her travels in North Africa in 1923
20. Larrau in the Snow, 1922
21. Mrs Box, c. 1919. Carrington’s monumental portrait of the farmer’s wife and her landlady at Welcombe, near Bude in Devon
22. Henrietta Bingham, 1924. Carrington’s study of the lover of whom she wrote: ‘no shame afterwards’
23. Henrietta with Stephen Tomlin, also her lover and briefly Carrington’s, at Ham Spray, 1924
24. Portrait of Julia Strachey, 1928. Carrington was ‘strangely moved’ while painting it
25. Drawing, possibly of Julia Strachey, c. 1928
26. Portrait of Stephen Tomlin by John Banting, 1925. Sexually versatile and voracious, he married Julia Strachey in 1927
27. Bernard (Beakus) Penrose (right), Carrington’s last lover, on the veranda at Ham Spray, 1929.
28. Carrington’s last painting: the trompe l’œil window at Bryan and Diana Guinness’s at Biddesden, 1931, showing Tiber, the favourite of her many cats
NOTE ON SOURCES
After Carrington’s death all her letters, papers and copyrights became the property of her husband Ralph Partridge. On his death, these passed to his widow, Frances Partridge, who died in 2004, and formed part of her estate. For permission to publish them I am indebted to her literary executor, Gill Coleridge.
The following archives and libraries have major holdings of Carrington’s letters, and I am grateful to them all for allowing me access and permission to take copies.
The British Library (letters to Alix Strachey and Lytton Strachey)
The Harry Ransom Center Library, University of Texas (letters to Gerald Brenan, Noel Carrington, Mark Gertler, Augustus John and Poppet John)
King’s College, Cambridge, Archive Centre (letters to Frances Partridge, John Maynard Keynes, Peter Lucas, Rosamund Lehmann,George Rylands and Sebastian Sprott)
University College, London (letters to Julia Strachey)
Tate Gallery Archive (letters to John and Christine Nash, and Arthur and Margaret Waley)
Minor letter collections consulted include those to David Garnett (North Western University), Diana Guinness (Chatsworth Archive), Roger Senhouse (Berg Collection, New York Public Library) and Virginia Woolf (Sussex University).
Carrington kept two journals, not as a chronological record of her life but an occasional outlet for her thoughts and feelings. Both volumes were in the possession of Frances Partridge, until the first, from the early 1920s, went missing and cannot be traced. I have quoted from the extracts included in David Garnett’s edition of the letters. The second, from 1928 until her death in 1932, entitled D. C. Partride (sic) Her Book is now in the British Library.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This edition of Carrington’s letters was suggested to me by the literary executor of her estate, my former agent and friend Gill Coleridge. My thanks are firstly due to her. Michael Holroyd was the godfather of the project and, as always, has been generous with encouragement and advice.
For much help with research and for many enjoyable and enlightening conversations, I thank in particular Susan Fox, whose knowledge and expertise has been invaluable. I am also very grateful to Roger Louis of the British Studies Center at the University of Texas, whose invitation to speak there enabled me to undertake essential work in the Ransom Center’s collections, with the assistance of its helpful staff. Patricia McGuire, the Archivist at King’s College, Cambridge, was invariably responsive and efficient. For help with organising, filing and transcribing material that seemed at times overwhelming I thank: Gillian Adam, Henrietta Freeman-Atwood, Eleanor Jenyns, Jessica Maybury, Molly Rosenberg and Eilis Smyth.
For exemplary patience and confidence in the project I must thank Zoe Waldie, who succeeded Gill Coleridge as my agent, and Juliet Brooke, my editor, whose perceptive suggestions have clarified and enhanced the text at every stage. I am also grateful to Madeleine Hartley for her
work on the illustrations, Matt Broughton for the cover and Vicki Robinson for the index.
The following people gave me information, hospitality and help in many different ways, and I am grateful to them all: Ariane Bankes, Emily Bingham, Xandra Bingley, Ann Blaber, Tony Bradshaw, Carlyn and Colin Chisholm, Susannah Clapp, Mary Clemmey, Virginia Duigan, Maggie and Jamie Fergusson, Henrietta Garnett, Gretchen Gerzina, Adelheid and Grey Gowrie, Rosaleen Guinness, Selina Hastings, the late Antony Hobson, Rebecca John, Trudy McGuinness, Fay Maschler, Christopher Ondaatje, Wendy Perry, Jans Ondaatje Rolls, Karl Sabbagh, Sally Sampson, Caroline Sandwich and Polly Toynbee.
Finally I want to thank Caroline Moorehead, who helped me cut and shape this text.
The book is dedicated to three women in my family who could not be more different from Carrington but who all share her originality and capacity for love: Alison, Paloma and Tabitha Stoecker.
Carrington's Letters Page 46