Society made a lion of him, and although he laughed at his hostesses, he also enjoyed himself. There is a theory that he felt a little guilty about his excursions into the beau monde. I am sure this is not so. The outside world could never influence him—he was incorruptible and irreverent. But he was not a puritan; he liked good food and wine and comfort and beauty. He dreaded boredom, but he fled at the merest hint of that. It is hard to imagine a French writer who would refuse a delicious dinner because the host was one of the idle rich; on the contrary, if not invited he would censure the rich man for lacking the wit to realize that clever conversation is as essential to a good dinner as old wines and perfect cooking. Lytton’s sorties into the fashionable world were severely rationed by his need for quiet to write, but he would regret that it is now an almost vanished world, into which writers and other artists can but seldom escape. In those days, for them, it was like a free journey into another, rather delightful, country.
Lytton’s bread and butter letter was no doubt as insincere as such letters generally are. ‘How, oh how, to say how much I enjoyed every moment of my visit, and how, how, oh how, to thank you for your angelic kindness? It was the greatest refreshment for me—a veritable experience too!—I dwell in memory upon every detail, every single one. [Including, I suppose, my reprehensible incompetence.] What fun! I only hope my occasional vagaries didn’t infuriate you. I imagine you at this moment in a nest of Sitwells.’ There is a postscript to this letter. ‘Oh! The fires of Knockmaroon. A subject for an Ode by Pindar.’ It was August, but fires, if not a necessity, are at least a comfort in a damp climate.
While Lytton was with us I continually questioned Henry and Pansy Lamb about his life. I doted upon him. I particularly wanted to hear about Carrington, who was said to love him so dearly and to ask so little in return. People told one that Carrington’s husband, Ralph Partridge, and his lover, Frances Marshall, lived with Lytton and Carrington and made a happy foursome; but the one who mattered to me was Carrington. Would she like me, or at any rate not dislike me too much? The Lambs were pessimistic: they said they couldn’t imagine Carrington and me together; no, it would never do.
A month or two later Lytton invited Bryan and me to stay at Ham Spray. Besides Carrington, Ralph Partridge and Frances Marshall there were Raymond Mortimer and Roger Senhouse, a typical Ham Spray house party. Lytton’s library, a well-proportioned room where he worked, was upstairs. Standing beside him in the window with its view of the Berkshire Downs, I saw Roger Senhouse crossing the lawn. ‘Almost too charming, don’t you think?’ asked Lytton, in such a way that I realized Roger was his beloved.
I felt shy of Carrington, probably because I so much wanted to be liked by her. On Saturday evening Lytton read us an essay on Froude he had recently finished. Perhaps it was true that the Irish visit had been a refreshment to him, at any rate when he got home he began to write again, which he had not done for months. He liked reading aloud: he said it helped him to judge the flow of words.
On Sunday evening Carrington made us a rabbit pie for dinner. I had never tasted rabbit before—it is forbidden to the children of Israel, and we were brought up by my mother according to the laws of Moses. Why rabbit? Not to eat the dirty pig, the accursed one as my mother always called him, was probably wise for the inhabitants of hot countries like Jews and Moslems. But surely the rabbit with its clean vegetarian diet must be harmless? However, Moses was right, as I discovered that night. Like the oyster, it occasionally harbours a poisonous substance which has an appalling effect upon the human digestion. Carrington’s was one of these terrible creatures. I was violently ill all night long; I thought I was going to die. The doctor had to be summoned in the small hours; he gave me something that sent me to sleep for a long time. When I woke up the house party had disappeared, except for Carrington who nursed me back to health. This accident of food poisoning was a short cut from mere acquaintance to great friendship, for henceforward I looked upon Carrington as a great friend.
I cannot remember what I said to Lytton in my bread and butter letter; nobody cares much for a guest who falls sick, and he with his long history of ill health probably minded a good deal. If he did, he soon forgave me, and we saw each other quite often in London. I hoped he was going to be bowled over by Harold Acton, the one friend of our own generation whom we revered as well as loved. I longed for them to appreciate each other as much as I appreciated both. After dining with us, ‘a rather dreary dinner’, he tells Carrington, ‘once more Harold Acton figured. I feel myself falling under his sway little by little’.
A few months later, having acquired Biddesden, a house on the borders of Wiltshire and Hampshire, we became neighbours of Ham Spray and Carrington. She frequently came over, sometimes with Lytton and sometimes without. I imagined I knew her intimately, but this was mere illusion. Only many years later, from innumerable books about the Bloomsbury Group, did I learn that although obviously Lytton was her star, the irreplaceable focal point of her life without whose presence she preferred to die, yet she was simultaneously juggling with a number of lovers whom she kept throwing up in the air and catching and throwing again. Just occasionally one of them fell to earth with a crash but, though painful for him, it was of supreme unimportance to her. It was natural to her to dispose of the part of herself for which Lytton had no use in a rather cold-hearted way, and she made her lovers suffer because they all sensed her indifference, and that ultimately they meant nothing to her at all. Only Lytton counted.
Carrington wielded an extraordinarily powerful weapon which she used with unusual skill. It was flattery. Once caught by it the lovers probably found it indispensable. It was comforting, insidious flattery calming their sense of insecurity, an addictive drug they soon could hardly do without. Jealousy raged around her who always appeared to be so calm. She dwelt in the eye of the storm.
I suppose Lytton knew a good deal about it. In early days he certainly knew how violently jealous of him the painter Mark Gertler had been. Gertler attacked him physically in the street after a party of Augustus John’s; Lytton was saved by Maynard Keynes, who managed to lead Gertler away. But Lytton had the selfishness of the true artist. Carrington adored him, made him comfortable and ensured quiet when he was working, and entertained his friends when he decided to invite them to the house. He would no more bother himself with her affairs than he would wish to hear whether she had found fish or lamb chops in the local shops for his dinner. That the ‘happy foursome’ at Ham Spray was not so happy as it might have been, and was, in fact, upon the point of breaking into fragments, was something he preferred not to think about.
I have said that Lytton seemed old to me. Carrington, in her thirties, did not seem young. She was a contemporary and great friend of an extremely beautiful and seductive woman, Phyllis de Janzé, who lived in a different world but who had been at the Slade School with Carrington before the First World War. Phyllis had left her French husband for a succession of lovers; at the time of which I write she was looking for a rich protector, for she was very short of cash. She confided in me, among others—she made free of her confidences. She used to telephone every morning to tell how she was getting on. One day she rang me up to say that Cartier’s van had arrived with a parcel for her, a present from a multi-millionaire ducal admirer.
‘Don’t ring off while I unpack it, it’s from the dumble,’ she said. ‘Is it light or heavy?’ I asked.
‘Heavy.’
That was a bad sign, and, the layers of tissue paper removed, it turned out to be an onyx paperweight with her initials in gold, not at all what was needed to pay the bills. However Phyllis was an optimist, and her beauty and charm did not long go unrewarded; the rich protector soon appeared. Carrington and I talked it all over—she loved Phyllis and admired her extravagantly. It seemed to me that if Phyllis could confide in me so could Carrington, and as she did not I naively assumed there was nothing to tell. If at the time I had been told that she and not Phyllis would be known to posterity as a famous l
over, if not a femme fatale, I should have laughed in disbelief, as would Carrington herself; yet so it has turned out. Carrington wrote fascinating letters and diaries and her many talented friends did the same, and there are innumerable biographies and autobiographies about her circle. Above all, it is because of the depth of her love for Lytton and her tragic death that she is remembered.
In the early 60s there was a retrospective exhibition of Henry Lamb’s drawings in London. All Bloomsbury was on the walls, and the survivors were there at the private view. Clive Bell, whom I knew slightly, came up and said: ‘You knew Lytton, didn’t you?’ We talked for a few minutes, and went our ways. Some years later I got a letter from David Garnett, who was passing through Paris, inviting me to luncheon ‘so that we can talk about Lytton’. We had met briefly years before when I was visiting Lytton in a London nursing home. The power of Strachey’s personality was undimmed, he was someone whom those fortunate enough to have known him liked to remember and discuss. Of late years fewer people say, ‘You knew Lytton Strachey.’ It is more often, ‘You knew Carrington. How fascinating she must have been!’
Yes, she was fascinating. To me, she looked like a little Beatrix Potter character in her unfashionable print cotton dresses, but Lady Ottoline Morrell describes her as a moorland pony. She had brown hair, cut straight and short with a fringe, as though she hoped to hide as much of her face as possible. It was no longer the ‘golden bell’ described by Aldous Huxley. Her deep-set eyes were blue, her hands worn with toil—gardening, cooking, working for her beloved Lytton. All summer she had bare legs, sunburnt, sandals and white socks. When she walked she turned her toes in, and her every gesture was that of a desperately shy and self-deprecating person. She was clever and perceptive and original; she had learnt a great deal from Lytton over the years. Gossip amused her, but she did not confide much to me. What else? There was the delightful flattery. I suppose she sensed just how much of this rich and delectable fare her companion of the moment could swallow.
Carrington was a talented artist, and it is sad that Ham Spray and the other houses where she lived with Lytton consumed so much of her time and energy. She loved painting, and creating objects like a rococo fantasy of shells she gave us; it was mounted on a painted wooden base which she said once belonged to a sewing machine. She made beautiful flower pictures out of crumpled silver paper—exuberant huge bright flowers with silvery green leaves. Far too modest about her work, to which she attached little importance, she painted because she loved painting; she was like a bird singing, all too easily interrupted.
In August 1931 Lytton went for his last visit to France. Roger Senhouse was to have gone with him, but finally went elsewhere. He probably felt remorse about this a few months later, but he need not have worried. The solitary journey in late summer seems to have been nearly perfect, with Lytton unaccountably calm and contented, not nervous as he usually was when he travelled.
While I was in London in September for the birth of my son Desmond, Carrington painted a surprise for me—a girl peeling an apple, watched by a cat—on a blank window at Biddesden. She said that Phyllis sat for the girl and Tiber (Lytton’s cat Tiberius) for the cat. The picture was not quite finished when I came back, and I was kept away from the west side of the house so that it should be a complete surprise. She wrote to Lytton that she had got up early to go over and finish it, but the car refused to start and it was ten o’clock before she arrived at Biddesden.
Then, typically as you would say, the moment I started to paint it came on to rain. So all my paints got mixed with water. My hair dripped into my eyes and my feet became icy cold.
Diana was delighted. Bryan kept it a complete surprise from her till 3 o’clock. May [a parlourmaid] joined in the joke, and kept my presence dark all this morning and pretended I had walked over from Ham Spray as my car had to be hidden. Diana, of course, thought nothing of my walking over in the rain [twelve miles] and merely said ‘But Carrington you ought to have let me send the car for you.’ I had tea there and then came back.
This letter dated 29 October 1931 must be one of the last that Carrington wrote to Lytton about days she spent at Biddesden. He was in London, because ‘Diana says Will you tell Mr oh indeed to remember the christening on Monday.’ I called him ‘oh indeed’ because it was what he so often said during our conversations, and it is more than possible that on being told of the christening this may have been his rejoinder.
Once when she and Julia Strachey [daughter of Oliver Strachey, and niece of Lytton] came for luncheon my younger sisters were there. Carrington wrote: ‘The little sisters were ravishingly beautiful, and another of 16 very marvellous, and grecian [Unity]. I thought the mother was rather remarkable, very sensible and no upper classes graces. The little sister [Debo] was a great botanist and completely won me by her high spirits and charm.’ She also told him that she and Julia ‘had a long talk on rather painful topics and got rather gloomy. I do not know what to advise, for I have very little faith in there being any happiness for human beings on this earth.’
The painful topic was the imminent breakdown of the ‘happy foursome’, which was becoming unhappier all the time. One sensed a good deal of strain at Ham Spray, with Ralph Partridge torn between his love for Frances Marshall, his fondness for Carrington, and his deep affection and admiration for Lytton. Yet to me there was also a feeling of permanence, perhaps only because to the young the idea that the present is transient seldom occurs.
My great joy was their frequent visits; Carrington telephoned: ‘Lytton says may we come over?’ Sometimes, in that autumn of 1931, Lytton seemed rather quiet; there were fewer jokes, fewer shrieks; he was not well. But none of us, not even Carrington, who watched over him so lovingly, realized that he was mortally ill, that tragedy was looming and that quite soon the problem of the unhappy foursome was to be permanently solved.
Carrington was becoming very worried about him when she wrote to Rosamond Lehmann to tell her she had met Mrs Hammersley at Biddesden, ‘and was fascinated by her. She talked a great deal about you. She is so beautiful in a romantic Russian style I couldn’t take my eyes off her… You are dear to write such cheering letters. I’ve been feeling in a black dungeon all this week. Nightmarish day and night.’
He became much worse; typhoid was diagnosed, he had a high temperature, which persisted. He had to have nurses, and all his friends and relations gathered round, some staying in the house, some at the Bear in Hungerford. I tried not to telephone too often, but during those weeks my thoughts were constantly with Lytton at Ham Spray, and with Carrington, distracted by worry and grief. On the telephone she always said he was a little better, but it was not true. He saw many grand doctors, but only after his death was it discovered that he had been suffering from cancer; inoperable cancer. He died in January.
When he was in a coma and there was no more hope, Carrington tried to kill herself. She waited until the milking machine at the farm near the garage started up at five thirty in the pitch-dark early morning, so that nobody in the house should hear the car engine running. Then she lay down and breathed in the fumes from the exhaust, and after a while lost consciousness. Unluckily for her she was found and brought painfully back to life. Life without Lytton, which she rejected.
In her diary she has set out, unanswerably, her reasons for wishing to die. Every single thing had lost its point for her since he was no longer there to share it: everything—art, nature, books, friends, jokes. Thus life could only be a burden and a bore. We who loved her and longed for her to live thought that if only a little time could go by her grief would become less sharp and painful and intense. But this was precisely what she most dreaded. The idea that she might become accustomed to life without Lytton was abhorrent. When she went to stay with Dorelia and Augustus John at Fryern Court in Wiltshire we hoped the change of scene and the fact of being surrounded by such old and dear friends might do her good, which was in fact what she herself feared. All the time she was thinking of ways and means of su
icide.
Out riding at Biddesden her horse bolted; she hoped to fall and be killed. She did fall, but only got a few bruises: ‘I who long for death find it so hard to meet him,’ she says in her diary describing the incident.
From Fryern she wrote me a loving letter:
Darling Diana
It was lovely seeing you on Saturday… Diana, I wanted so much to give you something of Lytton’s. He bought an 18th Cent waistcoat years ago and we never could think of anyone worthy of it because it was so beautiful. Now it will be yours. Perhaps you could alter it. I’d like to think of you wearing it.
Then a few words about Lytton, and ‘we talked of you so often’. The waistcoat was thick silk embroidered with little flowers, pink and blue.
Not long after this, once again at Ham Spray, Carrington shot herself. I have never understood why she did not repeat her attempt of two months before and breathe in fumes from her car. As she was alone in the house, she would have been undisturbed. Perhaps this time she was determined to make absolutely sure.
Looking back, how strange it seems that I knew Lytton for barely three years and Carrington for less time still. They had become so closely woven into my life that their loss was extremely painful. This must have been generally realized, for I received many letters of condolence, almost as if they had been near relations.
The Pursuit of Laughter Page 47