‘Garsington must be the retreat where we come and knit ourselves together.’
D.H. Lawrence to Lady Ottoline Morrell (20 June 1915)
‘Here one feels the real England – this old house, this countryside – so poignantly.’
D.H. Lawrence to Edward Marsh (10 November 1915)
‘I should beware of Garsington.’
D.H. Lawrence to Mark Gertler (21 February 1918)
‘I seem to have plunged into others’ lives – Roger Fry, Lamb, Lytton, Bertie,’ Ottoline Morrell wrote, surveying the year 1915, ‘but from some cause they all seem to have come to an end.’ Was her health responsible? she wondered. Or those formidable remedies – the devastating programme of red hot needles and the awful diet of starch and radium milkshakes that Dr Combe had prescribed over these pre-war years. It was the radium that alarmed Lytton. ‘One day there’ll be an explosion on your balcony, if you’re not careful,’ he had warned her (18 October 1912). ‘The boots will rush up – too late! too late! Miladi will have been dissipated into a thousand fragments and the reputation of Dr Combe at last ruined for ever.’
Dr Combe had advised Ottoline to remove herself from London and live in the country – and so had a Swiss psychiatrist she consulted on how to eliminate ‘unnecessary thoughts’. Were Roger, Henry, Lytton, Bertie unnecessary? It was sometimes difficult for Ottoline’s friends to respond to her condition with sympathetic seriousness. But when Lytton heard that she and Philip had begun looking for a country house, he took the news hard. ‘I suppose it won’t make much difference to you,’ he had remarked to Henry (9 November 1912); ‘to me it will be desolating. It was the one centre where I had some chance of seeing amusing and fresh people – my only non-Cambridge point of rapport in London. I was looking forward to rushing up from time to time and mingling with the beau monde! – All dashed. But I’m sure it’s the only thing for her health, and I don’t think she’ll much mind.’
Lytton was equally frank with Ottoline herself. ‘I am altogether écrasé by your new regime,’ he declared, ‘– chiefly from a selfish point of view – for I am sure it is the one thing to do you real good, and I think you’ll probably on the whole enjoy the country. I had counted so enormously on Bedford Square for the future that I feel quite shattered. London will be almost a perfect blank now.’
Bedford Square had offered romantic adventure in a grey metropolis. He felt like a child cheated of some promised treat. ‘I suppose you hardly felt it,’ he wrote to Virginia (1 December 1912). ‘I think you’ve never taken to the caviare.’
Ottoline’s move to the country, however, was continually being postponed, and the illuminations of Bedford Square shone ever more garishly as the streets filled up with marching soldiers. Yet the war had thrown deeper shadows over Ottoline’s life. Some of her friends, considering pacifism to be unpatriotic, refused to see her any more. Though she had ended her quarrel with Roger Fry by planting a passionate kiss on Vanessa’s lips (‘nice though muddle-headed,’ Vanessa felt), she seldom spoke to Roger now. She seldom spoke to Henry Lamb either, and her relationship with Bertie Russell was often being interrupted by his other romances and the pull of his political work. Though Lytton was always curious to know what she was up to (‘An escapade with John? Or an amorous adventure with an ice-cream boy?’) she saw less of him since he had been living at The Lacket. And now that he had come back to town she was finally preparing to move into the country.
For a long time she had had her eye on a certain house which she used to pass when driving out to Philip’s political meetings from Oxford. ‘The vision of this house as we passed it one night touched some spot of desire,’ she narrates, ‘and I exclaimed, “That is the only country house I could live in.” It had a wonderful beauty and mystery.’ Accordingly, when this house came up for sale in March 1913, Philip Morrell bought it – though they could not take possession for two years. ‘So this day our die was cast – for better or worse,’ wrote Ottoline in her Memoirs. ‘That which had been a misty castle was now a solid possession.’
Lytton hardly knew if it were good news or bad: ‘2 years hence!’ he exclaimed (4 April 1913), ‘– where shall we all be by then? – and what? – infinitely grey-haired, respectable, crutch-supported antiquities – or bankrupts – or exiles with ruined reputations … Or do you think we shall be altogether rejuvenated & sprightly?’ Two years later, as the Morrells left Bedford Square, Lytton was back with his family at Belsize Park Gardens reflecting that a misty castle in Oxfordshire might be a very agreeable place to hide out.
Garsington Manor was a Tudor house built in Cotswold stone and set in two hundred acres of garden and farmland. Here Ottoline was to live for fourteen years. Here she became a legend. It was Bedford Square all over again, but on a far more spectacular scale. The early months of 1915 she spent supervising the redecoration of the house and the landscaping of the garden. She removed floorboards, ripped out windows, replaced doors. She brought in a wonderful confusion of Chelsea porcelain, Chippendale chairs, eighteenth-century Italian furniture, Persian carpets, Samarkand rugs, a Welsh oak dresser, a huge Chinese jar of pot-pourri, and her collection of contemporary British paintings by Charles Conder, Duncan Grant, Augustus John, Henry Lamb, Gilbert and Stanley Spencer. She dug up the garden, creating dark corridors and bright flower-beds, planting yew and box hedges, an avenue of lime trees, cypresses, and brilliant congregations of phlox, marigolds, sunflowers, snapdragons. She transformed the old fishpond into a miniature Italianate lake overlooked by ranks of Classical statues. By June everything was more or less ready and the old manor lifted its mullioned windows, its fair stone, among the trees and foliage. ‘I imagine wonder,’ Lytton wrote (8 June 1915),’– ponds, statues, yew hedges, gold paint… I’m sure you needn’t be afraid of my Critical Eye – for the simple reason that it won’t be able to find anything to criticize!’
Nevertheless Ottoline was apprehensive of her friends’ reactions, particularly the reaction of Lytton, whose malice at other people’s expense she had so often enjoyed. On 16 June, her forty-second birthday, she launched Garsington with a small party, inviting Bertie Russell, Gilbert Cannan and Mark Gertler, D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda – but not Lytton and his Bloomsbury friends. Cannan had lent her Sons and Lovers and The White Peacock the previous autumn, and she had been enthralled by the re-creation of Nottinghamshire and its mining villages – though worlds apart socially, she and Lawrence had grown up within twenty miles of each other. Then Bertie and Ottoline had read The Prussian Officer that winter. ‘I am amazed how good it is,’ she told Bertie, ‘– quite wonderful some of the Stories – He has great passion – and is … a far better writer than Cannan.’ Early in 1915 she invited Lawrence to Bedford Square. Like Lytton, he had recently grown a beard. It was the colour of strong tea and worn as a protest against the false standards of manhood raised by the war. ‘He was a slight man, lithe and delicately built, his pale face rather overshadowed by his beard and red hair falling over his forehead,’ Ottoline saw. ‘… I was extraordinarily happy and at ease … it was impossible not to feel expanded and stimulated by the companionship of anyone so alive … I felt when I was with him as if I had really at last found a friend.’1
Lawrence too was charmed by Lady Ottoline. Though ‘I don’t belong to any class now’, as he told E.M. Forster (28 January 1915), he was still ‘perceptively over-eager in aristocratic company’, Katherine Mansfield had sharply observed. ‘It is rather splendid that you are a great lady,’ he was soon writing to Ottoline (c. 11 February 1915). ‘… I really do honour your birth … I would give a great deal to have been born an aristocrat.’ Previously he had been taken up, along with Rupert Brooke, as one of Eddie Marsh’s band of struggling writers and artists. But Brooke’s death, which lit up Marsh’s patriotism, filled Lawrence with a sense of futility. ‘I cannot get any sense of an enemy – only of a disaster,’ he had written to Eddie Marsh (13 September 1914). ‘… it is not fine but an awful necessity that these young men lose their chance of life … I used to think war glorious … You are not to hate the Germans, you can understand how it is – We are frightfully nice people, but it is so difficult for the English to understand anything that is not English.’ His position was made still more awkward by his recent marriage to a German Baroness following a controversial divorce from her first English husband and separation from her children. In his misery Lawrence yearned to escape from England. With his friends Katherine Mansfield, Middleton Murry and others, he invented a Coleridgean dream of setting up an ideal community in Florida or on some faraway island, which prospered in their minds until his wife Frieda arrived with some maps of islands.
Lawrence was armed with a powerful fundamentalist vocabulary, but the ingredients of his fundamentalism were often changing. Meeting Ottoline, getting to know Bertrand Russell, he cancelled his utopian island-plans and conceived a new fantasy of sowing the seeds of a regenerated England at Garsington – so much nearer than Florida if no less far-fetched. ‘I want you to form the nucleus of a new community which shall start a new life amongst us – a life in which the only riches is integrity of character,’ he instructed Ottoline (1 February 1915). ‘… It is communism based, not on poverty, but on riches, not on humility, but on pride, not on sacrifice but upon complete fulfilment in the flesh of all strong desire, not on forfeiture but upon inheritance, not on heaven but on earth.’ Having elected Ottoline as his new patron, he felt nervous of her other recruits, such as Lytton who, Ottoline told him, was demolishing Christianity in the person of Cardinal Manning and setting up a religion in the flesh of his own desire. ‘Curse the Strachey who asks for a new religion – the greedy dog,’ Lawrence added in the same letter to Ottoline. ‘He wants another juicy bone for his soul, does he? Let him start to fulfil what religion we have.’
Probably there were ‘enough people to make a start with’, Lawrence calculated. ‘We cuckoos, we shall plume ourselves, in such a nest of a fine bird,’ he assured Ottoline. But when these decent people, these plumed cuckoos, Cannan and Gertler, Bertie and Ottoline, Frieda and Lawrence himself, began nesting at Garsington that June, a terrible flurry and commotion broke out. Resenting Ottoline’s new role as Lawrence’s muse, Frieda quarrelled violently with her ‘Lorenzo’ and quit the house, leaving Lawrence, an ‘unhappy, distraught, pathetic figure’, to trail after her back to London.
Three weeks later, Lytton made his first entry into Garsington accompanied by Duncan and Vanessa. They were welcomed by Ottoline swathed in a Turkish cloak and hung with ropes of pearls. Vanessa was to take the line that Ottoline ‘has a terrifically energetic and vigorous character with a definite rather bad taste,’ as she later (c. May 1916) explained to Roger Fry. This ‘was different from having any creative power – but Lytton thinks Garsington a creation’. And in truth Lytton was amazed by what he saw. Ottoline’s personality, reinforced by the influences of Bakst and Beardsley, overwhelmed the old mixture of seventeenth-century and Victorian baronial styles. Instead of varnishing the Elizabethan oak panelling, or leaving it sombre and bare, she had defied tradition and covered it with vivid coats of paint, dove-grey in the hall, sea-green (matching her eyes) in one of the drawing-rooms, and in the other a Chinese scarlet that occasionally matched her hair. Silk curtains, patterned hangings and an abundance of cushions gave an atmosphere of oriental magnificence to the rooms which were filled with the aroma of pot-pourri and cloves and orris root from bowls of incense on the side-tables and window-sills. Garsington was, as Ottoline herself wrote, ‘a theatre, where week after week a travelling company would arrive and play their parts’. But was it a stage for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral? Probably the last. But whatever the genre Ottoline was always the star, whether pursued as she stalked from scene to scene by her trotting pack of pug dogs or, when in the geometry of the garden, pursuing a dishevelled peacock, its quills drily rattling among the gallery of antique statuary and stone pineapples or uttering its screams from the branches of an ilex above her nasal laughter.
Ottoline was less wealthy than her visitors supposed and whenever a choice arose between a new statue or a second bathroom, the statue not the bathroom was added, and exoticism prevailed over comfort. So Garsington expanded into a Renaissance court or Arcadian colony rather than a home, and into a fantasy in her writers’ imaginations – another Castle of Otranto or Nightmare Abbey. Leonard Woolf was to recognize its counterpart in Peacock’s Crotchet Castle; D.H. Lawrence thought it ‘like the Boccaccio place where they told all the Decamerone’; to Aldous Huxley it appeared as an Oriental palace from a story by Scheherazade; to Desmond MacCarthy it looked like ‘a wonderful lacquered box, scarlet and gold, containing life-size dolls in amazing dresses’; and Lytton called it ‘Shandygaff Hall’.
Though Garsington was flamboyantly Ottoline’s creation, she had also created a magic reflection of her visitors’ dreams and illusions. Whenever these dreams and illusions vanished, her guests would take their revenge on her. Where Lawrence saw a sacred precinct for England’s mystical rebirth, Lytton looked for the reincarnation of Madame du Deffand and a miraculous transplantation of eighteenth-century French civilization. Behind the silvery-grey stone front, the lofty elms and tall iron gates, he pictured another Sceaux ‘with its endless succession of entertainments and conversations – supper-parties and water-parties, concerts and masked balls, plays in the little theatre and picnics under the great trees of the park’.
Lytton wanted Ottoline to reach maturity as one of the leaders of contemporary society. It was here at Garsington – where the prime minister, entering with Maynard Keynes, was announced as ‘Mr Keynes and another gentleman’ – that literature and the arts could secure their true worth. It was here that Bloomsbury could mingle with the floating company of diplomats and aristocrats and practise ‘those difficult arts which make the wheels of human intercourse run smoothly – the arts of tact and temper, of frankness and sympathy, of delicate compliment and exquisite self-abnegation’. Through their literature, their art, their manners, they would be an example to the world. This was Lytton’s dream.
But the radiant atmosphere of Sceaux was only parodied, and the gifts of tact and temper proved beyond Ottoline’s placatory powers. Instead of recapturing the grace of Madame du Deffand’s salon – like ‘dancers balanced on skates, gliding, twirling, interlacing, over the thinnest ice’ – they floundered and pushed and fell into envious gossip and bickering. It was not delicate compliment and exquisite self-abnegation that were practised, but perpetual rumour and intrigue.
Lytton’s Critical Eye soon found much to fix upon. ‘It was not particularly enchanting,’ he complained to David Garnett (14 July 1915). ‘Such fussifications going on all the time – material, mental, spiritual … Dona nobis pacem, dona nobis pacem, was all I could murmur. The house is a regular galanty-show, whatever that may be; very like Ottoline herself, in fact – very remarkable, very impressive, patched, gilded and preposterous. The Bedford Square interior does not suit an Elizabethan Manor house in the wilds of Oxfordshire. It has all been reproduced, and indeed redoubled. The pianola too, with Philip, infinitely Philipine, performing, and acrobatic dances on the lawn. In despair I went to bed, and was woken up by a procession circumnavigating my bed, candles in hand … the rear brought up by the Witch of Endor. Oh! Dona nobis pacem!’
To Ottoline herself Lytton sent a letter by the same post telling her how deliriously enjoyable Garsington had been – and to prove that this was not simply politeness, he invited himself back there a fortnight later.
The other guests on this second visit were Mary Hutchinson and her lover Clive Bell to whom Garsington appeared a ‘fluttering parrot-house of greens, reds and yellows’. They came with a young art student, Barbara Hiles, and an ex-Newnham undergraduate, Faith Bagenal, who were encouraged to scamper off together leaving their elders to discourse on life and literature. A sudden loneliness descended upon Lytton: ‘a sort of eighteenth-century grim gaiety comes upon me, and I can hardly distinguish people from pugs,’ he confided to Bunny Garnett (25 July 1915). ‘I wish they’d all turn into embroidered parrots, neatly framed and hanging on the wall – but they won’t; they will keep prancing round, snorting, and (one after another) trying to jump up into one’s lap. It’s most tiresome – one pushes them down in vain – the wriggling wretches! …’
Ottoline was a dog person, Lytton a cat person: in such simple ways the world divides. It is divided too by other people’s expectations of us. Lytton had encouraged Ottoline in their games together to treat him as a French count. He played the part nicely but felt restricted by such repetitive casting. Besides, they could not play games all the time. ‘Now I must go down on to the lawn,’ he continued to Bunny Garnett, ‘and have tea with them all, and practise my grim gaiety again with them, as if I were a M. le Marquis circa 1770. What fun it would be to be one really! – Or at least infinitely convenient. But I’m not. I’m circa 1915 or nothing …’
To Ottoline he then (31 July 1915) wrote to express his gratitude and delight. ‘I find even my vigorous health taking on new forces, so that I am seen bounding along the glades of Hampstead like a gazelle or a Special Constable.’ He was looking forward, so he assured her, to many more Garsington weekends. ‘I shall come again,’ the letter concluded.
He did go there again, very often, almost always leaving behind him the same backwash of alternating flattery and complaint. These pages of glorification and disparagement, when read through eighty years later, show Lytton diverting ridicule from himself as an inexplicably persistent guest by ridiculing Ottoline as an overwhelmingly possessive hostess. Virginia, who was the recipient of so many of Lytton’s skits on Ottoline, and who also disparaged her while insisting that ‘she deserves some credit for keeping her ship in full sail’, wondered at Lytton’s double-attitude. It matched what she called ‘the blend of one’s own mind of suavity & sweetness with contempt & bitterness’. She questioned the suavity rather than the bitterness. ‘I suppose the danger lies in becoming too kind,’ she wrote to Lytton (14 September 1919). ‘I think you’re a little too inclined that way already – take the case of Ottoline. It seems to me a dark one.’
Some justification of Lytton’s strategy was to follow his death when Ottoline proudly showed Virginia the letters he had written to her. ‘Now Lytton is dead how comforting it is to be with you who loved him. We must always hoard the memory of him up together,’ Virginia answered (8 February 1932), ‘… with you, who loved him, some reality comes back.’ Ottoline always loved hearing from Lytton. ‘Oh, if you only knew the happiness your letters bring!’ she had written to him (22 March 1912). Virginia could see from this correspondence how Ottoline had depended on Lytton’s love, demanding more and more of it. ‘I live in dread’, Ottoline told him after Roger Fry’s estrangement (25 October 1912), ‘of you also shaking me and casting me off. Oh please don’t. I should mind it too much.’ So he had reassured her that he would always be there. ‘Our great-grand-children will see us gallivanting down Bond Street as nonagenarians, and gnash their teeth with envy.’ It was fantasy, of course, and in the narrative of their actual lives they would be drawn in different directions. But Ottoline had felt she needed Lytton’s adoration to gush forth like a cascading hot tap; and Lytton needed to moderate this steamy flow of sentiment with jets of criticism.
Garsington was a blessing for Lytton. A mixed blessing. It provided ‘the mixture he wants of town and country’, Vanessa thought. But the mixture soon curdled. Virginia ‘was astonished that he wrote so affectionately to me’, Ottoline later noted in her diary (23 November 1932). ‘… I was very much afraid that she would be slightly jealous, so that I said all I could about Lytton’s devotion to her.’ So Virginia entered the conspiracy to protect Ottoline. She had been ‘looking through his old letters, but cant find the ones we want,’ she lied (14 February 1932), ‘ … you need never doubt his affection for you.’
Would it have been better to cast her off as Henry and Roger had done, or caricature her openly like Augustus, Duncan and Simon Bussy? This was how Ottoline moved artists’ imaginations. She felt bitter at the published treacheries of Aldous Huxley and Osbert Sitwell, Gilbert Cannan and D.H. Lawrence. In his partial portrait of her as the macabre Hermione Roddice (‘tall and rather terrible, ghastly’) in Women in Love, Lawrence attributed her difficulties to an absence of natural sufficiency concealed beneath her dominating will. ‘There was a terrible void, a lack, a deficiency of being within her. And she wanted someone to close up this deficiency. To close it up forever.’
Women in Love was to end their friendship which already seemed to be in retreat by the summer of 1915. One reason was Lawrence’s experience of meeting Ottoline’s and Bertie’s friends, particularly their Bloomsbury friends. Forster turned out to be ‘bound hand and foot bodily’, and so reticent, so moribund, as to be useless for their revolutionary purposes. ‘The man is dying of inanition.’ Duncan Grant, though likeable, was foolishly wasting away his life. ‘He looks as if he dissipates and certainly doesn’t enjoy it,’ Lawrence explained to Ottoline. ‘Tell him to stop.’ But there was no stopping these people. Even David Garnett, who was ‘adorable’, had fallen in with that ‘horrible and unclean’ Francis Birrell. ‘You can come away, and grow whole, and love a woman, and marry her, and make life good and be happy,’ he advised Garnett (19 April 1915), ‘… in the name of everything that is called love, leave this set and stop this blasphemy against love.’ Russell had taken him to Cambridge in March 1915 and introduced him to Keynes one evening. Seeing him next morning at eleven o’clock in pyjamas nauseated Lawrence. ‘I am sick with the knowledge of the prevalence of evil, as if it were some insidious disease,’ he wrote to Ottoline (24 March, 19 April 1915). ‘… I will not have people like this – I had rather be alone. They made me dream in the night of a beetle that bites like a scorpion … It is enough to drive one frantic … Sometimes I think I can’t stand England any more.’ This meeting ‘had been one of the crises in my life’, he told David Garnett. It was the climax of a nightmare that had begun to steal over him ‘slightly before, in the Stracheys’.
Although Lawrence had met his brother James and two of his sisters at Cambridge, he had never seen Lytton himself until they unexpectedly encountered each other one Friday night early in November that year at a party in the Earl’s Court studio of Dorothy Brett, the painter.2 Arriving there late, Lytton was thrust into the centre of a large crowd – Brett herself looking, with her retroussé nose and childish hands, about seventeen (less than half her age), and spoken of as the ‘virgin aunt’ of her two companions, Mark Gertler, who rushed about the room acting as assistant-host, and another artist Dora Carrington ‘like a wild moorland pony’, as Ottoline described her, ‘with a shock of fair hair, uncertain and elusive eyes, rather awkward in her movements’, standing speechless next to a large silent dog. While poor Brett, terribly deaf, laboured energetically at the pianola, her drunken guests lay around the studio – ‘dreadful women on divans trying to persuade dreadful men to kiss them, in foreign accents (apparently put on for the occasion),’ Lytton afterwards told his brother James (8 November 1915).
Among this jumble of humanity, Lawrence and Frieda caught his attention. ‘There were a great many people I didn’t know at all,’ Lytton wrote to Bunny Garnett (10 November 1915), ‘and others whom I only knew by repute, among the latter, the Lawrences, whom I examined carefully and closely for several hours, though I didn’t venture to have myself introduced. I was surprised to find that I liked her looks very much – she actually seemed (there’s no other word for it) a lady; as for him I’ve rarely seen anyone so pathetic, miserable, ill, and obviously devoured by internal distresses. He behaved to everyone with the greatest cordiality, but I noticed for a second a look of intense disgust and hatred flash into his face … caused by – ah! – whom? Katherine Mansfield was also there, and took my fancy a good deal.’3
What caused Lawrence tins intense disgust on seeing Lytton, and brought on his crisis after meeting ‘that satyr Keynes’, as Ottoline called him, was the Bloomsbury cult of ‘higher sodomy’. Lawrence was preaching a contrary creed: ‘The great living experience of every man is his adventure into the woman,’ he had exhorted Russell (24 February 1915). ‘… The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action.’ The actions and reactions in Lawrence’s life – his urge to seek new places, to form new societies, to find the pentecostal inspiration of a new life – were impelled by the need for self-escape. Women, he liked to believe, were wholly alien to men, and the great adventure into them amounted to a total loss of self in the dark unconscious of the womb. He was ill and disgusted by himself as well as by homosexuality which duplicated the ill self instead of transcending or obliterating it. Yet he was sexually aroused by the act of buggery which did not violate the womb, and ‘something dreadful was going on inside him’, David Garnett saw, as he contemplated these Bloomsbury friends of Ottoline and Russell. ‘He was in the throes of some dark religious crisis and seemed to shrink in size with the effort of summoning up all his powers, all his spiritual strength.’ From this struggle emerged the covert smuggling of the act of buggery into some of his novels, and the ideal allegiance in his life of male blood brotherhood which he attempted to impose on Middleton Murry and Bertrand Russell.
‘Lawrence has the same feeling against sodomy as I have,’ Russell explained to Ottoline; ‘you had nearly made me believe there is no great harm in it, but I have reverted.’ In these early war years Lawrence was to take the place of Wittgenstein in Russell’s emotional life. ‘Lawrence is wonderfully lovable,’ he told Ottoline. ‘… I love him more and more.’ The two of them planned to give a series of lectures in London during the summer of 1915. Russell was to speak on ethics; Lawrence would tackle immortality. But already Lawrence had begun to feel that both Ottoline and Russell were tainted – ‘they filch my life,’ was how he phrased it to Lady Cynthia Asquith, whom he saw as a possible replacement for Ottoline as his patron. Tearing up Russell’s lectures, he wrote to Lady Cynthia (16 August 1915): ‘I’ve got a real bitterness in my soul, just now, as if Russell and Lady Ottoline were traitors – they are traitors. They betray the real truth … I had hoped to get a little nucleus of living people together. But I think it is no good.’
What brought Lawrence back to Russell and Ottoline, and drafted Bloomsbury to his cause, was the mounting war fever. It was the autumn of Edith Cavell’s execution, the Gallipoli failure and Winston Churchill’s resignation from the government. At the front, British casualties exceeded half-a-million, and in London the big Zeppelin raids were beginning. The Bishop of London spoke of ‘a kind of glorying in London at being allowed to take our little share of danger in the Zeppelin raids’. There was a rising demand for compulsory conscription. In private conversation at Garsington, the belletrist Augustine Birrell expressed surprise at so much fuss made over the soldiery. ‘After all, the men out there will be returning some day.’ In a public speech, however, delivered in his capacity as Chief Secretary for Ireland, he declared that the government should ‘forbid the use, during the war, of poetry’.
The most dramatic act of literary censorship was the prosecution and suppression of Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow, ostensibly on grounds of obscenity, but chiefly because of its denunciation of war. Clement Shorter asked readers of The Sphere whether Lesbianism was ‘a fit subject for family fiction’; James Douglas in The Star decided that ‘this kind of book has no right to exist’ and called for preventative action from ‘the sanitary inspector of literature’; and J.C. Squire, writing under the pseudonym of ‘Solomon Eagle’ in the New Statesman, suggested that Lawrence might be ‘under the spell of German psychologists’. It was Ottoline who rallied Bloomsbury to Lawrence’s defence, and Bloomsbury, recognizing a common enemy in police censorship, responded. While Philip Morrell raised questions in Parliament about the book’s suppression, David Garnett wrote angrily to Augustine Birrell, E.M. Forster signed a letter of protest to The Times which was not published, and Lytton wrote ironically in favour of suppression to the New Statesman which suppressed his letter. ‘It seems strange that they [the police] should have the leisure and energy for this sort of activity at the present moment,’ he commented in a letter to Bunny Garnett (10 November 1915).
‘But no doubt the authorities want to show us that England stands for Liberty. Clive is trying to get up an agitation about it in the newspapers but I doubt if he’ll have much success. We interviewed that little worm Jack Squire, who quite failed to see the point: he thought that as in his opinion the book wasn’t a good one it was difficult for him to complain about its suppression. Damn his eyes! In vain we pointed out that it was a question of principle, and that whether that particular book was good or mediocre was irrelevant – he couldn’t see it. At last, however, he agreed to say a few words about it in his blasted paper – on one condition – that the book had not been suppressed because it mentioned sapphism – he had heard that that was the reason – and in that case, well, of course, it was quite impossible for the New Statesman to defend perversity.’
Lawrence made his last two visits to Garsington that November while the campaign was going on. ‘It will always be a sort of last vision of England to me,’ he wrote to Ottoline (11 November 1915), ‘the beauty of England, the wonder of this terrible autumn.’ It was his premature farewell to England before misanthropy rose up and he called down fire and brimstone on his native land. Driving from Garsington ‘with the autumn falling and rustling to pieces, I am so sad’, he told Lady Cynthia Asquith (9 November 1915), ‘ … this house of the Ottolines – It is England – my God, it breaks my soul … these elm trees, the grey wind with yellow leaves – it is so awful, the being gone from it altogether, one must be blind henceforth.’
Over Christmas, Garsington filled up with Bloomsberries – Maynard and Lytton, Clive and Vanessa with their two sons – and there were games and a dance and a charade, ‘The Life and Death of Lytton’ in which all the children acted. Then on Christmas Day there was a grand festivity in one of the barns, which was rigged up with decorations on a Christmas tree, ‘and all the children in the village came and had tea there’, Lytton wrote to his mother (28 December 1915). ‘It was really a wonderful affair. There were a hundred children, and each one had a present from the tree; they were of course delighted – especially as they had never known anything of the kind before, since hitherto there haven’t been any “gentry” in the village. Every detail was arranged by Ottoline, whose energy and good-nature are astonishing. Then in the evening there was a little dance here, with the servants and some of the farmers’ daughters, etc. which was great fun, her Ladyship throwing herself into it with tremendous brio. It takes a daughter of a thousand Earls to carry things off in that manner.’
Within a year, Ottoline had changed from a defender of The Rainbow to the prosecutor of Women in Love. Russell ‘wrote to me that “our ways are separate”. Soit – I never wrote to him again,’ Lawrence explained to Forster (30 May 1916). ‘… Lytton Strachey is the chief friend of Ottoline’s just now … Lytton, Duncan Grant, and all that set … What they will do now, God knows.’
‘My life here has been rather dissipated of late,’ Lytton wrote to David Garnett from Belsize Park Gardens (8 November 1915). One of his dissipations was a new series of German lessons under the supervision of an astringent English spinster in Mecklenburgh Square, whom he called on once a week. In the intervals he would struggle with Heine; but it proved uphill work. Apart from this, ‘I am also engaged on a short life of Dr Arnold (of Rugby), which is a distinctly lugubrious business, though my hope is to produce something out of it which may be entertaining,’ he wrote to his mother (12 December 1915), who was spending the winter in Menton. ‘He was a self-righteous blockhead, but unlike most of his kind, with enough energy and determination in him to do a good deal of damage – as our blessed Public Schools bear witness!’
Still it was an active if idle winter. ‘I attend lectures by Maynard and Mr Shaw,’ he told Francis Birrell (November 1915).
‘The latter function was an odd one, Bertie in the chair, and a large audience eager for a pacifist oration and all that’s most advanced – and poor dear Mr Shaw talking about “England” with trembling lips and gleaming eyes, and declaring that his one wish was that we should first beat the Germans, and then fight them again, and then beat them again, and again, and again! He was more like a nice old-fashioned Admiral on a quarter-deck than anything else. And the newspapers are so stupid that, simply because he’s Mr Shaw, they won’t report him – instead of running him as our leading patriot.’
The dusky streets of London, so invitingly blacked out, had grown extraordinarily attractive to him. ‘How I adore the romance and agitation of them!’ he exclaimed in a letter to Ottoline (21 January 1916). ‘Almost too much I fear!’ Periodically he would feel a need for the more peaceful attractions of the country, spending several weekends with Clive and Vanessa Bell at Eleanor House, with Leonard and Virginia Woolf down at Asheham, and With Ottoline and her court at Garsington. ‘The country is certainly the place for peaceful happiness – if that’s what one wants,’ he explained to Ottoline (24 February 1916). ‘I think one wants it about half the time; and the other half unpeaceful happiness. But happiness all the time.’
Much of the talk during these winter weeks centred around conscription. To solve the task of bringing enough men to the Colours, within a country the bulk of whose population was still believed to be hostile to the idea of military service, the Government had, in October 1915, started the notorious Derby Scheme. This was a voluntary plan, on the continental pattern, the purpose of which was to persuade men of serviceable age to ‘attest’ – that is, to undertake to join up whenever called upon to do so – by means of a moral rather than a legal obligation. Almost all Bloomsbury was opposed to the blandishment and blackmail on which the Derby Scheme operated, and felt alarmed by the compulsory conscription that was threatened if this scheme failed. ‘The conscription crisis has been agitating these quarters considerably,’ Lytton had written to James from Garsington as early as 23 September. ‘… Some say that Lloyd George is verging towards the madhouse cell. Others affirm that E. Grey is “immovable” against conscription. Personally I feel despondent – about that and most other things.’
By December, the Derby Scheme was seen to have failed, and, in the first week of January 1916 the Government introduced a Military Service Bill, under which all single men were automatically deemed to have enlisted and been transferred to the Reserve, from which they could be called up when needed. The Labour members of the Coalition Government threatened resignation – then withdrew their threat. Nothing then stood in the way of the Bill, though Lytton still hoped for some last-minute uprising against it. ‘Philip [Morrell] now seems to think that it may take a fortnight or even 3 weeks getting through the committee stage,’ he informed James; ‘and in that case isn’t it still possible that something should be done? Surely there ought to be a continual stream of leaflets and pamphlets. Also if possible meetings all over the country, and signatures collected against the bill.’
To help disseminate anti-conscription propaganda, Lytton joined the No Conscription Fellowship or NCF as it was called, and the National Council against Conscription, or NCC – the two societies that had been formed to resist the Act, to campaign for pacifism, and, subsequently, to urge that out-and-out conscientious objectors be given unconditional exemption from participating in the war, instead of being forced either into prison or into government occupations. Several other members of Bloomsbury including James Strachey – recently sacked from the Spectator by the militaristic St Loe – assisted at the NCC offices in Bride Lane, addressing envelopes, sticking on stamps, and writing leaflets. One of these (Leaflet No. 3), which stated that the Government’s motive for bringing in compulsory service was to prevent strikes and crush labour, was drafted by Lytton.
WHY they want it, and why they say they want it.
THEY SAY THEY WANT IT to punish the slackers
THEY WANT IT to punish the strikers.
THEY SAY THEY WANT IT to crush Germany
THEY WANT IT to crush Labour.
THEY SAY THEY WANT IT to free Europe
THEY WANT IT to enslave England.
DON’T LET THEM GET WHAT THEY WANT BECAUSE THEY KEEP SAYING THEY WANT SOMETHING DIFFERENT.
The Cat kept saying to the Mouse that she was a highminded person, and if the Mouse would only come a little nearer they could both get the cheese.
The Mouse said ‘Thank you Pussy, it’s not the cheese you want; it’s my skin!’
Shortly after this leaflet had been printed, H.W. Massingham4 saw it, decided it was seditious, and rushed round to the Bride Lane office to get it withdrawn from circulation. Sir John Simon, who had resigned from Asquith’s Cabinet to lead the opposition to the Military Service Bill, and who, according to Maynard, was rather regretting his hasty decision, also disapproved. And so it was agreed to send out no further copies, though half-a-million had by then been distributed. The Morning Post had already got hold of a copy and blazoned it across a page of anti-pacifist propaganda. After quoting some sentences from Lytton’s leaflet, the paper demanded: ‘Would it be possible to imagine a more wanton and malicious indulgence in false witness?’ ‘Queer fellows they are,’ he remarked to Ottoline on reading the article. There seemed no intelligible point of contact between the two sides.
It was a comfort for Lytton to find himself in a solid phalanx of agreement with his friends. Bloomsbury, as a whole, believed that the war had been entered into to refute militarism, and that to introduce compulsory military service would contradict Britain’s original intentions. Distrusting the political management of the war, they favoured, from 1916 onwards, the policy of a negotiated peace settlement. In his prepared statement as a conscientious objector, Lytton explained how he had arrived at his pacifist conclusion. Before 1916, he declared:
‘I was principally concerned with literary and speculative matters; but, with the war, the supreme importance of international questions has been forced upon my attention. My opinions have been for many years strongly critical of the whole structure of society; and after a study of the diplomatic situation, and of the literature, both controversial and philosophic, arising out of the war, they developed naturally into those I now hold. My convictions as to my duty with regard to the war have not been formed either rashly or lightly; and I shall not act against these convictions whatever the consequences may be.’
Among the men in command of political operations, few were moved by philosophical ideals towards decent ends. Woodrow Wilson meant well, but was a simpleton; Clemenceau appeared to be a worldly and ambitious cynic; and as for Lloyd George, Lytton’s one ardent desire, he told Francis Birrell, was, once the war had ended, to see him publicly castrated at the foot of Nurse Cavell’s statue. Nor did Churchill inspire him with confidence.
Though Time from History’s pages much may blot,
Some things there are can never be forgot;
And in Gallipoli’s delicious name,
Wxxxxxx, your own shall find eternal fame.
Asquith, too, though in some ways more appealing than Churchill, was equally unprincipled and, Lytton had come to feel, of even vaster incompetence. ‘Nothing is more damning than his [Asquith’s] having told Maynard (who told me of it at the time) that “the Conscriptionists were fools”, and that he was giving them enough rope to hang themselves by”, three weeks before he was himself forced by them to bring in a bill for Conscription,’ Lytton later commented in an essay on Asquith (May 1918). ‘If it was true (as Maynard assured me it was, on what I gathered was the best authority) that in December 1916, after he had been turned out with ignominy and treachery by Lloyd George and Bonar Law, he was willing and in fact anxious to act under them as Lord Chancellor, his wits must have sunk even lower than his sense of decency. I think eventually he must have grown too positively fuddled – with too much food and drink, too much power, too much orotund speechifying, too many of those jovial adventures of the “lugubre individu”.’
Lytton believed that the world was still governed not by extremists, but by moderate men. The sight of these men, with their pin-stripe plausibility, controlling events, posed for him a profoundly menacing spectacle. It was a revelation of what the multitudes of ordinary respectable men and women were capable of thinking. Amid the bigotry and hysteria of war, people on both sides too easily relinquished their individuality and with it their humanity. Even before conscription, the British Government had undertaken to improve recruitment by means just as discreditable as those of the Germans. ‘Is your “best boy” wearing Khaki? … If your young man neglects his duty to his King and Country, the time may come when he will NEGLECT YOU!’ This was advocacy ‘limited neither by the meagre bounds of the actual nor by the tiresome dictates of common sense’. A form of patriotism which justified mendacity to ensure national unity sprang not from too much love of one’s country, Lytton argued, but from too little. A propagandist now himself, he used similar methods to popularize his convictions. In ‘The Claims of Patriotism’, an article published in the pacifist periodical War and Peace, he wrote:
‘The lover who loved his mistress with such passionate ecstasy that he would feed her on nothing but moonshine, with disastrous consequences – did he, perhaps, in reality, not love her quite enough? That, certainly, is a possible reading of the story. And it might be as well for patriots … to reflect occasionally on that sad little apologue, and to remember that nothing sweetens love – even love of one’s country – so much as a little common sense – and, one might add, even a little cynicism.’
To Lytton’s commonsensical and cynical mind, the passing that spring of the new Conscription Bill for establishing National Service made Britain as ardent a supporter of the principle of militarism as Germany herself. ‘What difference’, he asked, ‘would it make if the Germans were here?’ His quarrel was with the whole militarist point of view, whether emanating from allied or enemy officialdom.
During the eighteenth century Voltaire had waged a constant fight against religion – then the dominating factor in human affairs. Stendhal had continued this struggle into the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, the ‘powers of darkness’ were no longer led by theologians, but by their modern counterparts, political warmongers. It was with this breed of men that the Voltaire of the twentieth century had to do battle. Despite the wartime rash of intolerance, Lytton believed that the odds were not set quite so heavily against him as against previous crusaders. War did not obsess or unnerve the human mind so ceaselessly as religious superstition. To moderate men with their limitations of average passions and average thoughts, it might still appear that ‘militarism and the implications of militarism – the struggles and ambitions of opposing States, the desire for national power, the terror of national ruin, the armed organization of humanity – that all this seems inevitable with the inevitability of a part of the world’s very structure; and yet it may well be, too, that they are wrong, that it is not so, that it is the “fabric of a vision” which will melt suddenly and be seen no more’.
If, as Lytton believed, war was seen as justifiable only as the last means of defence and never as an assertion of nationalism, then the days of aggressive patriotism were already numbered. Lloyd George stalked the political arena like some prehistoric monster, doomed to extinction. At the end of the war Lytton was to write to Maynard: ‘To my mind the ideal thing would be to abolish reparations altogether – but of course that is not practical politics – at any rate just yet; perhaps in the end it will become so.’
These were opinions on which nearly all his friends, from Maynard Keynes to Bertrand Russell, seemed in agreement. ‘Bertie was most sympathetic,’ Lytton wrote to Ottoline (31 December 1915) on the eve of the introduction of the first Military Service Bill. ‘I went to see him this morning and we had lunch with Maynard in an extraordinary underground tunnel, with city gents sitting on high stools like parrots on perches, somewhere near Trafalgar Square. Maynard is certainly a wonder. He has not attested, and says he has no intention of doing so. He couldn’t tell us much – except that McKenna is still wobbling; but he seemed to think it not unlikely that he and Runciman would resign – in which case he would resign too and help them to fight it.’
But after compulsory military service had been introduced Reginald McKenna, Chancellor of the Exchequer, made no move to resign; nor did the President of the Board of Trade, Walter Runciman; and nor did Maynard. Certainly both Lytton and Russell felt that he had ‘ratted’, and they both pressed him to leave the Treasury, reasoning that it must be impossible to reconcile his sympathy for conscientious objectors with the job of demonstrating how to kill Germans as cheaply as possible: ‘the maximum slaughter at the minimum expense’. Maynard now found himself situated awkwardly between his Bloomsbury friends and his colleagues at the Treasury.
On 20 February, Lytton placed on Maynard’s plate at Gordon Square ‘the conscientious objector’s equivalent of a white feather’. This was a newspaper report of a violent militaristic speech by the Financial Secretary to the Treasury Edwin Montagu – with a short covering note: ‘Dear Maynard, Why are you still at the Treasury? Yours, Lytton.’ In a letter to his brother James (22 February 1916), Lytton described Maynard’s reaction: ‘He really was rather put out when he read the extract … He said that 2 days before he had a long conversation with Montague [sic] in which that personage had talked violently in exactly the opposite way … I said … what was the use of his going on imagining that he was doing any good with such people? I went on for a long time with considerable virulence, Nessa, Duncan and Bunny sitting round in approving silence … The poor fellow seemed very decent about it, and admitted that part of his reason for staying on was the pleasure he got from being able to do the work so well [and] … saving some millions per week.’
Maynard agreed with Lytton that the war was futile and should be ended as ‘peace without victory’ rather than pursued as a fight to the finish. If Lloyd George was determined to do this, then there would come ‘a point at which he would think it necessary to leave – but what that point was he couldn’t say’, Lytton explained to James. Next day Maynard sent fifty pounds to the National Council against Conscription. Though he was granted exemption from military service by the Treasury, he also applied at the end of February for exemption on grounds of conscientious objection, but was ‘too busy’ to attend the Tribunal hearing a month later. This suggests that after his virulent lecture from Lytton he had considered resigning from the Treasury, but decided against this at the last moment. He was also under pressure from his parents to stay in his job. Besides, he believed the war could not go on much longer and, while it did, he was well placed to save Duncan and his other Bloomsbury friends from imprisonment under the new Act. When Lytton and Russell seized on the inconsistencies of his position to attack his weak moral perspective, he parried them pragmatically. Only by the end of the following year did he bleakly admit to Duncan: ‘I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.’
Although at one in their repudiation of Maynard, Lytton and Russell went separate ways as the war progressed. The passing of the Military Service Bill, which took the wind out of Lytton’s sails as a political crusader, redoubled the force of Russell’s activity. ‘The anti-conscription movement has been rather fading out as far as I’m concerned,’ Lytton wrote to Ottoline (21 January 1916). Russell, by contrast, was embarking on a series of crowded pacifist lectures. Lytton attended all of them and was unstinting in his praise. ‘Bertie’s lectures help one,’ he wrote (16 February 1916). ‘They are a wonderful solace and refreshment. One hangs upon his words, and looks forward to them from week to week, and I can’t bear the idea of missing one – I dragged myself to that ghastly Caxton Hall yesterday, though I was rather nearer the grave than usual, and it was well worth it. It is splendid the way he sticks at nothing – Governments, religions, laws, property, even Good Form itself – down they go like ninepins – it is a charming sight! And then his constructive ideas are very grand; one feels one had always thought something like that – but vaguely and inconclusively; and he puts it all together, and builds it up, and plants it down solid and shining before one’s mind. I don’t believe there’s anyone quite so formidable to be found just now upon this earth.’
Two month later, Russell’s campaigning reached a crisis. On 10 April, Ernest F. Everett, a conscientious objector and member of the NCF, was sentenced to two years’ hard labour for disobedience to military orders. Nine days afterwards the NCF issued a leaflet protesting against this sentence, whereupon six men were arrested and imprisoned for distributing it. On learning this Russell immediately sent off a letter to The Times declaring that he was the author of the leaflet and that, if anyone should be prosecuted, it ought to be himself. This letter made prosecution unavoidable and Russell duly appeared before the Lord Mayor, Sir Charles Wakefield, at the Mansion House on 5 June 1916, charged with making, in a printed publication, ‘statements likely to prejudice the recruiting discipline of His Majesty’s forces’. A.H. Bodkin5 appeared for the prosecution; Russell defended himself; and the proceedings were brightened by the startling arrival of Lytton and Ottoline Morrell dressed in an astonishing hat and cashmere coat of many colours. ‘B.R. spoke for about an hour,’ Lytton recorded, ‘– quite well – but simply a propaganda speech. The Lord Mayor looked like a stuck pig. Counsel for the prosecution was an incredible Daumier caricature of a creature – and positively turned out to be Mr Bodkin. I felt nervous in that Brigand’s cave.’ Russell was found guilty and fined £100 (With £10 costs and the alternative of sixty-one days’ imprisonment), a sentence that was confirmed on appeal.6
Russell despised Lytton’s inability to persevere with the cause of pacifism, to stick at nothing. But Lytton suspected that Bertie had almost come to want bad conditions, so that he might have the joy of altering them. Conscription filled Lytton with no joy. ‘It’s all about as bad as it could be,’ he wrote to Vanessa from Garsington (17 April 1916).
‘Bertie has been here for the week-end. He is working day and night with the N.C.F., and is at last perfectly happy – gloating over all the horrors and the moral lessons of the situation. The tales he tells make one’s blood run cold; but certainly the N.C.F. people do sound a remarkable lot – Britannia’s One Hope, I firmly believe – all so bright and cheery, he says, with pink cheeks and blithe young voices – oh mon dieu! mon dieu! The worst of it is that I don’t see how they can really make themselves effective unless a large number of them do go through actual martyrdom: and even then what is there to make the governing classes climb down? It is all most dark in every direction.’
Towards the end of 1917 Russell himself decided to withdraw from pacifist agitation, believing – as did Lytton – that it was by then more important to work for a constructive post-war peace. Yet he could point to some courageous achievements as a propagandist. In the Everett case, for example, his own leaflet and the ensuing trial had caused the Government to commute Everett’s original sentence to a hundred and twelve days’ detention.
Lytton had no such triumphs to his credit. He preferred to campaign by writing Eminent Victorians. The worsening conditions appear at times to have released his mind from its absorption in his own ill-health and he felt his spirits rising, he told Virginia (25 February 1916). ‘I don’t know why – perhaps because the horrors of the outer world are beginning to assert themselves – local tribunals, and such things – and one really can’t lie still under that.’ To Ottoline he wrote (16 February 1916): ‘At moments I’m quite surprised how, with these horrors around one, one goes on living as one does – and even manages to execute an occasional pirouette on the edge of the precipice!’
After the two Military Service Acts had been passed (the second enlisting married men in addition to bachelors and childless widowers between eighteen and forty-one), he at once appealed for absolute exemption on the grounds of health and conscience, expecting that, after a medical examination and an interview with the tribunal, he would be placed in Class IVb, and made liable for clerical work. Once this had happened he intended to appeal and, in the event of this appeal failing, he was prepared to be sent to prison. ‘The conscience question is very difficult and complicated,’ he wrote to James who was in a similar predicament (28 February 1916), ‘and no doubt I have many feelings against joining the army which are not conscientious; but one of my feelings is that if I were to find myself doing clerical work in Class IVb – i.e. devoting all my working energy to helping on the war – I should be convinced that I was doing wrong the whole time; and if that isn’t a conscientious objection I don’t know what is … I’m willing to go to prison rather than do that work.’
He was subject to much nervous strain while waiting for the Hampstead Tribunal. ‘I am still in a most half and half state – with a brain like porridge, and a constant abject feeling of exhaustion,’ he reported to Bunny Garnett. ‘However, I am now on a diet, and drink petroleum o’nights, and even try now and then to do a Swedish exercise or two … I wish I could go away from this bloody town and its bloodier tribunals – I should like to go to sleep for a month; but it’s no good thinking of moving till the first stage of the affair, at any rate, is over.’
His apprehension rose after making a number of visits to watch the proceedings of the Hampstead Tribunal. ‘It was horrible, and efficient in a deadly way,’ he told Ottoline (March 1916). ‘Very polite too. But clearly they had decided beforehand to grant no exemptions, and all the proceedings were really a farce. It made one’s flesh creep to see victim after victim led off to ruin or slaughter.’ And to Dorothy Bussy he wrote (25 March 1916): ‘I believe the name of the tribunals will go down to History With the Star Chamber.’
These tribunals had become a means of venting public horror at the mounting slaughter on the Western Front upon the ‘shirkers’. Very few of the papers dared refer to them, while the debates in the House of Commons were scarcely reported at all. It was really only by reading Hansard that anyone could find out what was going on. Perhaps it was not surprising that such scratch bodies, Without judicial training or defined procedure, armed with immense powers and subject to the most violent animus, should find it difficult to interpret the conscience clauses of a complicated Act of Parliament. Yet it was not just with conscientious objectors that they abused their powers; they were almost as unrelenting with cases of hardship. ‘I don’t think that even if you had mentioned God in your application it would have had much effect,’ Lytton wrote to Francis Birrell (March 1916), ‘– he is quite out of fashion; and as for Jesus he’s publicly laughed at. Odd that one should have lived to find oneself positively on that fellow’s side.’
On 7 March Lytton appeared as a claimant for exemption before the local Advisory Committee. These Advisory Committees had no legal basis, though in effect they controlled the administration of the law, at the same time shrugging off admitted responsibility. When an applicant appeared before one of these bodies, he was not allowed to argue his case, since the Committee maintained that it existed for advice, not decision. Yet the Tribunal invariably carried out the recommendation of the Committee, so that, when each applicant subsequently came up before it, he would find its mind already made up on the motion of a body that had refused to consider his case judicially. Lytton stated that he had an ineradicable conscientious objection to assisting in the war.
‘I have a conscientious objection to assisting, by any deliberate action of mine, in carrying on the war. This objection is not based upon religious belief, but upon moral considerations, at which I have arrived after long and painful thought. I do not wish to assert the extremely general proposition that I should never, in any circumstances, be justified in taking part in any conceivable war; to dogmatize so absolutely upon a point so abstract would appear to me to be unreasonable. At the same time, my feeling is directed not simply against the present war: I am convinced that the whole system by which it is sought to settle international disputes by force is profoundly evil; and that, so far as I am concerned, I should be doing wrong to take part in it.
These conclusions have crystallised in my mind … and I shall not act against those convictions whatever the consequences may be.’
To all this the Committee listened politely. At the end, they made no comment whatever, but simply informed him that they would recommend the Tribunal to grant him ‘no relief’. The only logical assumption to be made was that they had spontaneously decided that his objection was fraudulent. He bowed coldly and left the room.
Between these court appearances, his social life helped to quell his anxieties. ‘Ottoline has been up this week, receiving a series of visitors in her bedroom at Bedford Square, in a constant stream of exactly-timed tête-à-têtes – like a dentist,’ he wrote to Bunny Garnett (10 March 1916).
‘Yesterday there was a curious little party at Maynard’s, consisting of her ladyship, Duncan With a cold, Sheppard with a beard, James and me. There she sat, thickly encrusted with pearls and diamonds, crocheting a pseudo-omega quilt, and murmuring on buggery.
I have also met Mr Ramsay MacDonald lately – not I thought a very brilliant figure, though no doubt a very worthy one. He struck me as one of Nature’s darlings, whom at the last moment she’d suddenly turned against, dashing a little fatuity into all her gifts.’
Nourished by special foods, fortified by Swedish exercises, Lytton prepared for his examination before the Hampstead Tribunal like an athlete. The conduct of the Advisory Committee had given him an opening for saying something scathing, and he spent his days drawing up imaginary cross-examinations of Military Representatives. But although, as he told Ottoline (11 March 1916), ‘I am beginning to tighten my belt, roll up my sleeves and grind my teeth’, he did not relish the prospect of putting his case without the aid of counsel, without hope of justice being done or even the elementary rules of fairness kept. ‘I don’t feel as if I had sufficient powers of repartee, and sufficient control of my voice, or my temper,’ he wrote to Francis Birrell (March 1916); ‘and public appearances of any kind are odious to me.’
The spectacle he presented was considerably odder than his appearances at previous oral examinations, for entry to Balliol and to the Civil Service. The proceedings, in view of his unfitness for soldiering or even manual work in a factory or farm, grew farcical, as each side endeavoured to make his opponent feel acutely silly.
‘There was a vast crowd of my supporters surging through the corridors of the Town Hall, and pouring into the council chamber,’ Lytton recounted in a letter to Pippa (17 March 1916). ‘My case was the very last on the list. They began at about 5, and I appeared about 7.30, infinitely prepared with documents, legal points, conscientious declarations etc’ His friends and family now put in a strong appearance. First there entered Lytton’s character witness, Philip Morrell, bearing a light blue air cushion. Following him, innumerable Strachey brothers and sisters, including James, Elinor, Marjorie, Pernel and Oliver, trailed in and lined themselves up opposite the eight members of the Tribunal, seated at a long table. Meanwhile, in other parts of the small courtroom, some fifteen attendant spirits, painters and pacifists, took their seats amid a miscellaneous sprinkling of the general public. Finally, the applicant himself, ‘a wonderful sight … looking terribly dignified’ though suffering from piles and carrying a tartan travelling rug, made his entrance. Philip Morrell gravely handed him the air cushion which he applied to the aperture in his beard and theatrically inflated. Then he deposited his cushion upon the wooden bench, lowered himself silently upon it facing the mayor, arranged the rug carefully around his knees, ‘reared his head like some great sea lion and looked slowly round at all the old gendemen’.7
The examination could now commence. In the course of it the military representative fired a volley of awkward questions from the bench.
‘I understand, Mr Strachey, that you have a conscientious objection to all wars?’
‘Oh no,’ came the piercing reply, ‘not to all. Only this one.’
‘Then tell me, Mr Strachey, what would you do if you saw a German soldier attempting to rape your sister?’
Lytton turned and forlornly regarded his sisters. Then he confronted the Board once more and answered ambiguously: ‘I should try and come between them.’
The Tribunal, however, was not amused, and his application for absolute exemption on the grounds of conscience was adjourned pending an examination by the military doctors. This examination took place a few days later at the White City. From eleven in the morning until half-past three in the afternoon he sat, among crowds of rowdy young men, bent over S.R. Gardiner’s History of England. For once his disabilities did not let him down. He was rejected as medically unfit for any kind of service and formally pronounced a free man. ‘It’s a great relief,’ he confessed to Ottoline that evening. ‘… Everyone was very polite and even sympathetic – except one fellow – a subordinate doctor, who began by being grossly rude, but grew more polite under my treatment. It was queer finding oneself with four members of the lower classes – two of them simply roughs out of the streets – filthy dirty – crammed behind a screen in the corner of a room, and told to undress. For a few moments I realized what it was like to be one of the lower classes – the appalling indignity of it! To come out after it was all over, and find myself being called “sir” by policemen and ticket collectors was a distinct satisfaction.’
He straightway set off for Garsington. ‘I am still infinitely délabré,’ he wrote to Virginia (15 April 1916), ‘in spite of the infinite solicitudes of her Ladyship. It is a great bore. I lie about in a limp state, reading the Republic, which I find a surprisingly interesting work. I should like to have a chat with the Author.’
When he left Garsington it was to spend Easter at Asheham with the Woolfs. ‘Virginia is most sympathetic, and even larger than usual, I think,’ he wrote back to Ottoline (23 April 1916); ‘she rolls along over the Downs like some strange amphibious monster. Sanger8 trots beside her, in a very short pair of white flannel trousers with blue lines, rattling out his unending stream of brightness. Woolf and I bring up the rear – with a couple of curious dogs, whose attentions really almost oblige me to regret the charms of Socrates.’*
He returned to Belsize Park Gardens at the end of the month to see his mother who had returned from wintering in Menton. Lady Strachey was now in her seventy-fifth year and had recently lost the sight of one eye. ‘The news of Mama is very appalling,’ Lytton had written to Pippa (10 February 1916). ‘The only hope is that in spite of everything it will be possible to read with the other eye.’ For the time being this other eye remained all right, and her vigorous spirit continued to shine out unimpaired. ‘Really I consider, apart from illness, and apart from the present disgusting state of the world, that I’m an extraordinarily happy person,’ Lytton had written to her on his thirty-sixth birthday. ‘One other reflection is this – that if I ever do do anything worth doing I’m sure it will be owing to you much more than to anyone else.’
Shortly after his return to London, Lytton took his mother down to Durbins, Roger Fry’s somewhat austere house at Guildford, which Oliver and Ray Strachey had rented, and where Lady Strachey was to pass most of the next eighteen months. Before long, the distinctive Strachey regime was in full swing. ‘Several members of the Strachey family were staying there,’ wrote Nina Hamnett, another guest that summer. ‘In the evening Lady Strachey would read us restoration plays and we would play games. Everyone would choose a book from the library and hide the cover. They read a passage from their books and the others had to guess who had written it.’9 Outside, among the hollyhocks and lavender, Lytton pressed on with his work on Thomas Arnold; inside, Fry painted him still reading, in purples, blues and greys.
Much of this summer Lytton spent at Garsington, which had recently been converted into a reserve for conscientious objectors, who lived at the Bailiff’s House or in one of the farm cottages. Philip Morrell was an enthusiastic pig-farmer and was able to offer these non-combatants the sort of labour described in the Military Service Acts as being work of national importance. Gerald Shove, recently married to Virginia Woolf’s cousin Fredegond Maitland, was transformed into a wonderfully inept keeper of poultry; Clive Bell became an erratic hoer of ditches and cutter of hedges. As an encampment for ‘agricultural dilettantes’, Garsington grew still more fantastical. Part-guests, part-workers, these semi-residents would invite their families, friends, lovers, and at weekends a convoy of cars, motorcycles, bicycles and taxis would draw up and erupt in non-combative fighting over bathing-costumes, tennis rackets, towels and food. By day Ottoline appeared as a ‘kind manageress of a hotel’, by night she seemed what Goldie Lowes Dickinson called ‘a rare and gentle pagan saint’ spreading goodwill through a series of love-affairs. ‘There was love-making everywhere from the pugs and peacocks to Ott and the Prime-minister,’ reported Vanessa Bell to her ex-lover Roger Fry, having heard this from her husband’s mistress Mary Hutchinson. And Fry himself (once the platonic love-object of Goldie Dickinson) lamented to Vanessa after one weekend that there had been ‘no chance for me to do any lovemaking, so I had to listen all night long to doors opening and shutting in the long passage, though in common decency I suppose I ought to have gone out to the WC once or twice to keep up appearances’.
Amid this ‘assemblage of Bloomsbury and Crankdom’, Lytton soon got to know a younger generation of writers, artists and students, including Katherine Mansfield, ‘very amusing and sufficiently mysterious’; Aldous Huxley, ‘young and peculiarly Oxford’; and the beautiful refugee, Maria Nys, daughter of a Belgian industrialist, later to become Aldous Huxley’s wife, whom Lytton was now coaching in Latin for her entrance examination to Newnham.10 Both Katherine Mansfield and Maria Nys, with her vulnerable look of a child in a mature body, stirred in him a strongly indecisive attraction. ‘Why on earth had I been so chaste during those Latin lessons?’ Lytton asked himself in an autobiographical essay later that year (26 June 1916). ‘I saw how easily I could have been otherwise – how I might have put my hand on her bare neck, and even up her legs, with considerable enjoyment; and probably she would have been on the whole rather pleased. I became certain that the solution was that I was restrained by my knowledge that she would certainly inform “Auntie” of every detail of what had happened at the earliest opportunity.’
All over the country there were rumours of conscientious objectors being shut up in underground cells, fed on bread and water, transported as cannon fodder to the front line. But in the early summer stillness, from behind those high yew hedges and the placid grey stone façade, such rumours faded as echoes in the air, faint and improbable. ‘It’s been unusually peaceful,’ Lytton wrote to Maynard (10 May 1916), ‘and I’m lying out under my quilt of many colours in the sun. I hope soon to have accumulated enough health to face London again for a little. It is horrid to sit helpless while those poor creatures are going through such things. But really one would have to be God Almighty to be of any effective use.’
In the autumn of 1915 Lytton had gone down for a few days to Asheham which Vanessa was briefly borrowing from the Woolfs. Duncan was there of course, and also Mary Hutchinson. And two art students, Barbara Hiles and Dora Carrington, had been invited. Barbara, ‘a nice springing and gay girl’, as Ottoline described her, was pretty and good-natured, and much admired by Saxon Sydney-Turner who (Virginia later noticed) gave off the sound of a simmering kettle whenever he went near her. Her friend Carrington was not really pretty, having a broken nose, moonlike face, uneven teeth – and being, in Virginia’s imagination, ‘green & yellow in the body, & immensely firm & large all over’. Her voice was flat, somewhat mincing and precise, and from time to time she would give an affected little gasp. She seemed a mass of odd moods: impulsive, self-conscious, restless, eager to please – losing herself in ceaseless activity. ‘You are like a tin of mixed biscuits,’ Iris Tree told her. ‘Your parents were Huntley and Palmer.’
Though Carrington had little glamour, she reached towards people out of her mystery; and they, responding to a strange allure, circled round, moved closer. Her manner was naturally flattering: she had a dazzling smile; and she made up to – almost flirted with – anyone she liked. She appeared extraordinarily alive at every point, consumed by the most vivid and confusing feelings about people, places, even objects.
There was something childlike about her – the round apple cheeks, the large intense blue eyes so full of light, the pink and cream complexion smooth as china, her bouncy straw-coloured hair tinged with gold, worn short and straight, like a Florentine page-boy’s. She was shy of photographs, veering erratically off like a butterfly from a net. But her paintings show a passionate involvement with nature and her letters, ‘like the rustling of leaves, the voices of birds, the arrangement of natural forms’ (as Gerald Brenan described them), reveal how she had carried her instincts miraculously intact from childhood into adult life. She was twenty-two – thirteen years younger than Lytton. Though she had accepted Ottoline’s invitations, refused Bunny Garnett’s advances, and worked a little for Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, this was her first plunge into Bloomsbury. ‘I was much happier than I expected,’ she wrote to Mark Gertler (December 1915). Early each morning she was up walking over the hills and ‘huge wild downs’, returning to find the others all still asleep in their beds. During the day she helped Vanessa in the kitchen where they lived and ate – ‘everyone devoid of table manners. The vaguest cooking …’ In the evenings they drank rum punch and gossiped. ‘What traitors all these people are!’ she exclaimed in a letter to Gertler. ‘They ridicule Ottoline! … I think it is beastly of them to enjoy Ottoline’s kindness & then laugh at her.’ Duncan was ‘much the nicest of them’, she told another friend (6 December 1915), ‘and Strachey with his yellow face and beard. Ugh!’
One day they went for ‘a fine walk over tremendous high downs. I walked with Lytton…’ Attracted to her, as he had been to Katherine Mansfield and Maria Nys, he suddenly stopped and embraced her. She broke away; and later that day complained to Barbara Hiles that ‘that horrid old man with a beard kissed me!’ Her friend tried to reassure her that his advances would go no further, but she refused to understand and the giggling Barbara spelt out the word H-O-M-O-S-E-X-U-A-L. ‘What’s that?’ Carrington asked. But no amount of explanation could wash away her resentment. Planning to pay him out she tiptoed very early the next morning into Lytton’s bedroom, taking a pair of scissors with which she intended to snip away his beard while he slept. It was to be one of those devastating practical jokes of which she was so fond – a perfect revenge for his audacity. But the plan misfired. As she leant over him, Lytton opened his eyes and looked at her. It was a moment of curious intimacy, and she, who hypnotized so many others, was suddenly hypnotized herself.
*
‘I had an awful childhood’, Dora Carrington later (18 November 1928) told Alix Strachey. She was the daughter of Samuel Carrington, a civil engineer with the East India Railway Company, who had travelled the world, returned to England in his fifties, ‘an Odysseus … home at last’, and married a governess, Charlotte Houghton. Dora idealized her father, but detested her mother whom she saw, her biographer Gretchen Gerzina writes, as an example of ‘conventional, domestic and repressive English womanhood’.11 In 1908, when Dora was fifteen, her father had a stroke which left him paralysed and very deaf. This affliction gave special poignancy to his qualities in Dora’s eyes, and reinforced her hatred for her governess-mother. ‘I can’t forgive [her] for taming him as she did, & for regarding all his independence, & wildness as “peculiarities”,’ she confided (January 1919) to Mark Gertler.
She was determined never to be tamed herself. Yet involuntarily she had absorbed a fear of sex from her mother to whom (her younger brother Noel remembered) ‘any mention of sex or the common bodily functions was unthinkable’.12 To escape this suffocating gentility, she began to devise a system of alibis, white lies, half-truths, evasions which developed into ‘a complicated calendar of deceptions’ on which her emotional life became suspended. ‘It is often a burden to me my deceit,’ she later confessed to Gerald Brenan. Being financially dependent on her mother she made an art of devious self-protection until ‘I couldn’t speak the truth if I wanted to’. Sometimes she felt like H.G. Wells’s eponymous heroine Ann Veronica, a new woman striving to be free. ‘It’s just like being in a bird cage here,’ she wrote from home (May 1915), ‘one can see everything which one would love to enjoy and yet one cannot. My father is in another cage also, which my mother put him in, and he is too old to chirp or sing.’ Dora could sing enchantingly and many enraptured young men came to her cage offering to liberate her. But could she trust them? She yearned for liberation – ‘and yet one cannot’. It was as if she feared, like one of the early doves from the ark, being lost for ever. Perhaps it was better to wait, to use her battery of alibis, white lies, half-truths, evasions to hide at the crucial moment in her secrecy and reserve. So, unlike Ann Veronica, she did not fly off; rather she seemed paralysed, like her father.
For her elder sister, Lottie Louise, a nurse who quickly exchanged the humdrum home for a humdrum marriage to an orthopaedic surgeon, she had little liking. On the whole she was closer to her brothers. Sam, the eldest, was a rather hopeless red-faced young man who enlisted as a regular soldier. During the war he was badly shell-shocked, and afterwards took a job looking after dogs at the Knightsbridge Kennels. Sam was always a joke to her. But ‘Teddy’, her charming ‘sailor-brother’ soon to be killed in the battle of the Somme, she came to love for his beauty and strength, ‘so brown with his black shining eyes and hair … so immense and solid’. She was closest of all to her younger brother Noel, who later became a publisher and farmer.13 Forced into independence by these brothers, she came to feel that she ought to have been a boy too. Her letters are full of disgusted complaints at being female. It was all so pointless. She did not want children. She did not want sexual intercourse with any man. ‘I have never felt any desire for that in my life’, she wrote (16 April 1915).
Visual experiences made up for much that was otherwise unhappy. At school she had been in perpetual need of discipline. Her reports stated that she was no good at anything except drawing, and, since she also caused trouble at home, her mother packed her off to the Slade School of Fine Art, where she won a scholarship.14 Rejoicing in her new freedom, she cut her hair short and dropped the use of her feminine baptismal name Dora – ‘a sentimental lower class English name’ as she described it to Noel (27 December 1916), which only her mother continued to use. For the rest of her life, even after her marriage, she was known simply as Carrington.15
From the moment she left home, ‘there was a constant struggle to avoid returning for holidays and to evade by some ruse maternal discipline and inquisition’, her brother Noel remembered. Their mother never ceased to regret this loss of control over her daughter or lose her dread of Dora’s artistic friends.
Among the students at the Slade, she soon became ‘the dominating personality’, the artist Paul Nash wrote, ‘… a conspicuous and popular figure’. She was popular with the other girls and more than popular among the young men. Paul Nash who, while riding on the top of a bus, lent her his braces for a fancy dress party, was not the only one attracted by her. For many months, Albert Rutherston longed to speak his love – and then suddenly declared it in an apologetic letter from France. ‘I’ve loved you, & all of you, yes, your talent, your delightful insight and wit … have brought me golden hours.’ C.R.W. Nevinson, too, had grown infatuated with her. ‘I do not recall ever having been in such an exotic condition,’ he admitted. ‘… I do like you abominably … & am absolutely yours.’ Mark Gertler also was consumed with sexual passion. ‘To touch her hand is bliss!’ he rhapsodized, ‘to kiss it Heaven itself! I have stroked her hair and I nearly fainted with joy.’ Unfortunately Gertler addressed this rhapsody to Nevinson. The two talented young artists were close friends until this entanglement with Carrington changed them into rivals. It was a wretchedly painful time. ‘We were both very young,’ Gertler remembered after his marriage many years later, and it had been ‘nobody’s fault’.16 But at the time he blamed Carrington. ‘I hated you for playing with the feelings of two men,’ he told her (January 1913).
But Carrington did not really understand all this misery and commotion. She liked them all – Nash and Rutherston and Nevinson and Gertler – indeed she admired them and needed them as fellow-artists from whom she could learn. What was the need for all this sexual frenzy? She felt ‘heartily sick’ of it. The only advantage of having so many wooers was that it made a commitment to any one of them almost impossible. Nevertheless, by the time she left the Slade, Gertler had scattered his rivals and gained the thankless position as Carrington’s special suitor.
‘You are the Lady and I am the East End boy,’ he wrote to her (December 1912). He was the son of devout Jewish parents, had passed an impoverished childhood in Whitechapel, and been sent to the Slade on the advice of William Rothenstein by the Jewish Education Aid Society. Like Carrington, he struggled with an inability to adapt himself to Slade standards, and he elected her, another outsider, as his femme inspiratrice. ‘Your friendship INSPIRES MY WORK,’ he proclaimed. ‘… I think of you in every stroke I do.’ As Nevinson observed, Gertler was ‘popular with the girls and adored by them’. But Carrington was unlike any of the actresses and East End Jewish girls he had known. ‘I don’t know anybody to equal you,’ he wrote. She was his ideal of beauty. ‘I think you are the purest and holiest girl I have ever met and as long as you remain with me you will remain so,’ he assured her. ‘I am going to devote my whole life to try and make you happy.’ She became not only the focus of his painting, but also ‘my most intimate friend’; not only his inspiration but an obsession. She was unique, he thought, in her sudden enthusiasms, her air of simplicity, her trustfulness. Yet a veil of mystery still enclosed her, and when she spoke in that strange breathless voice, stealing looks out of her forget-me-not blue eyes, he felt as if she were confiding some special secret to him. After she left, he could not erase the image of her face ‘like some beautiful flower encased in a form of gold’. He was enchanted, but also disturbed. ‘You are the one thing outside painting worth living for,’ he told her. But increasingly his preoccupation with her was exhausting him and spoiling his painting. He decided to solve the problem masterfully and propose marriage to her. But incredibly she turned him down. Was it true that their ‘roads lie in different directions’ and their differences in class, which had so excited him, would inevitably come between them? He was struggling to reconcile himself to this bitter rejection when she added that she loved him.
He did not know where he was, and in his bafflement began discussing his troubles with D.H. Lawrence, Gilbert Cannan, Aldous Huxley, Ottoline Morrell and others. So he and Carrington were to find their way into the literature of the times. In Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921) Gertler becomes the painter Gombauld, ‘a black-haired young corsair of thirty, with flashing teeth and luminous large dark eyes’; while Carrington may be seen in the ‘pink and childish’ Mary Bracegirdle, with her clipped hair ‘hung in a bell of elastic gold about her cheeks’, her ‘large china blue eyes’ and an expression of ‘puzzled earnestness’. In D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1921), some of Gertler’s traits are used to create Loerke, the corrupt sculptor to whom Gudrun is attracted (as Katherine Mansfield was to Gertler), while Carrington is caricatured as the frivolous model Minette Darrington – and Lytton too may be glimpsed as the effete Julius Halliday. Lawrence became fascinated by what he heard of Carrington. Resenting the desire she had provoked and refused to satisfy in his friend Gertler, he took vicarious revenge by portraying her as Ethel Cane, the gang-raped aesthete incapable of real love, in his story ‘None of That’. ‘She was always hating men, hating all active maleness in a man. She wanted passive maleness.’ What she really desired, Lawrence concluded, was not love but power. ‘She could send out of her body a repelling energy,’ he wrote, ‘to compel people to submit to her will.’ He pictured her searching for some epoch-making man to act as a fitting instrument for her will. By herself she could achieve nothing. But when she had a group or a few real individuals, or just one man, she could ‘start something’, and make them dance, like marionettes, in a tragi-comedy round her. ‘It was only in intimacy that she was unscrupulous and dauntless as a devil incarnate,’ Lawrence wrote, giving her the paranoiac qualities possessed by so many of his characters. ‘In public, and in strange places, she was very uneasy, like one who has a bad conscience towards society, and is afraid of it. And for that reason she could never go without a man to stand between her and all the others.’
But was that man to be Mark Gertler? There was something striking and intense about him – the shock of hair, amazing vitality, his beautiful hands, those extraordinary gifts of draughtsmanship, his sense of humour and mimicry, ‘the vivid eyes of genius and consumption’. His eager response to everything he saw found an immediate echo in Carrington’s own heart. She was almost sure she loved him. And if she did, then he could wait for her. She saw nothing wrong in waiting. She loved him as a friend, as an artist, as a sister loves a brother. ‘I do not love you physically, that you know,’ she reminded him (November 1915), ‘but I care for you far more than I do for anyone else.’ But would this caring ever ripen into love? Sometimes he wondered if she understood sexual passion at all.
A vein of unconscious comedy ran through the intimate struggle of their wills. Gertler impatiently declared his total love, and urged her without delay to become his mistress or his wife. Carrington, finding herself unable to speak of such matters in any but the most oblique terms, reassured him that he was the mainland from which she made expeditions across the seas to remote islands, but to which she would always return. And when, growing tired of this metaphorical eloquence, he tried to cross-question her more precisely as to the date on which he might expect to be accepted as her lover, she would murmur ‘next summer’ or ‘next winter’, depending upon whether it was autumn or spring. Yet whenever the season appointed arrived, Carrington would ascend once more into flattering evasions about islands and continents. Finally, when Gertler demanded to know why ‘you allow that barrier – Sex – to stand between us’, she informed him that he was not ready yet for her ‘corporeal body’.
He would almost despair of ever winning her love, when, out of the blue, she would send him a parcel of spotted ties or a jar of honey or some freshly picked flowers or an arousing photo of herself accompanied by a letter stating her determination to be less selfish, and make him happier. So he would be encouraged to take up the struggle again. But her repeated exhortations to him to be happy depressed Gertler. He could never make her out. When she smiled, he imagined she was mocking him and was amazed at his terrible dependence on her.
For a long time Gertler had only two themes to offer Carrington: first, he explained his passion as being ‘not lustful, but beautiful!’ and that she was wrong to ‘think that I was vulgar and dirty’; then, he would assure her that although he was ‘not worthy of her company’, being ‘far too vulgar and rough for you’, he was nevertheless hoping ‘through my work to reach your level’. During 1915 he changed these tactics and invited her to spend weekends with him in the country – at Gilbert Cannan’s millhouse, Ethel Walker’s cottage, Ottoline Morrell’s manor – and she was delighted. Whenever she could not leave her mother’s house, he would send her enticing descriptions of his adventures in London. ‘We are having exciting times here in London just now,’ he wrote. At one party, he had been paired off with ‘that little German girl you drew nude’ and found that she ‘dances excellently. She has a lovely little figure to clasp.’ At another party, he played a love scene with the poet Iris Tree, ‘very beautiful in a pale-lemon coloured evening dress … I like Iris more than is good for me.’ At a third party ‘Katherine [Mansfield] and myself – both very drunk – made passionate love to each other in front of everybody!’ When not party-going he was painting. ‘My pictures, apparently, have created a tremendous uproar!’ he reported. Clive Bell and Roger Fry had praised him, Eddie Marsh was taking him up and Lady Cunard ‘assures me that I am “the talk of London’.”
These letters ‘excited me terribly,’ Carrington replied. ‘… You are famous, and also infamous.’ She felt ‘jealous that all these other people’ should be seeing his pictures before she did, and sad to be missing all the fun. ‘You must not forget me,’ she pleaded. ‘ … I am afraid I miss you terribly … I am longing to come up.’ They had shared so much, nearly everything, for so long that perhaps, after all, she could make a life with this artist who loved her. He had been so patient and his friendship was now a necessity. ‘Do you miss my soups?’ she asked. She promised to ‘make some puddings and good dishes to cook for you when I come back’, and when she did come back she also promised to go to bed with him. They did go to bed, once, in Gertler’s new studio in Hampstead that summer, and Carrington emerged from their lovemaking a virgin, vexing and perplexing not only Gertler but also whole ranks of Bloomsbury scholars down the century. The experience, like an earlier assault he had made on her, ‘made me inside feel ashamed, unclean. Can I help it?’ she had asked him. ‘I wish to God I could. Do not think I rejoice in being sexless, and am happy over this. It gives me pain also.’
Gertler’s predicament was worse now than ever. ‘You are a sort of person with whom one never gets beyond a certain point of intimacy, or if one for a moment oversteps the boundary line, one finds that you have immediately rushed back, leaving one alone gaping. You are in some ways amazingly inhuman.’ He was determined to leave her – only he could not leave her. What was he to do? ‘If only you could give yourself up in love,’ D.H. Lawrence advised him (20 January 1916), ‘she would be much happier. You always want to dominate her, which is no good. One must learn to relinquish oneself …’ But Lawrence, too, wanted to dominate people. So, turning instead to a scholar of the human heart, Gertler consulted Lytton Strachey.
*
Gertler had met Lytton at one of Ottoline’s parties after which Lytton seems to have cherished some hopes that the young painter might succeed Henry Lamb as the artist in his life. He put himself out to be generous and gallant to Gertler, pressing on him copies of Virgil’s Pastorals, Tristram Shandy, Hamlet, the poems of Thomas Hardy, Keats’s letters and the novels of Dostoyevsky. Gertler was flattered and read hard. He did more: responding with invitations to tea, going off for walks with Lytton in Kensington Gardens, speaking French, visiting The Lacket and Belsize Park Gardens. Often they were uphill work, these classics and tea-parties and French lessons. Yet he was grateful for Lytton’s attentions. ‘I have become great friends with Lytton Strachey,’ he boasted to Carrington (March–April 1915). ‘… We carry on a correspondence. He is a very intellectual man – I mean in the right sense. He is splendid to talk to … [he] talks a great deal to me when we are alone.’ Slightly in awe of Lytton’s sophistication, he was on his best behaviour. On one occasion Lytton sent him several of his own poems and a typescript of ‘Ermyntrude and Esmeralda’. Some of these pieces were bewildering, but Gertler was determined to be impressed. ‘“Ermyntrude and Esmeralda” I thought extremely amusing. But the poems I thought were fine. I wonder if you have any more work you could let me read? I should like to.’
What author could resist such an appeal? More poems quickly followed, interspersed with volumes of Shelley, and these helped to establish Lytton as a man of enlightened sexual views in Gertler’s mind and serious artistic intent. He was proud to have such a friend. ‘I am unhappy. Come and see me soon,’ he invited Lytton. But this had been a mistake, since Lytton took it as a sexual invitation. ‘Since then I feel uncomfortable when I am with him,’ Gertler explained to Carrington, and when Lytton, refusing to be put off, hurried round to his studio again, Gertler peeped through the hole in the door but didn’t let him in. ‘You can’t think how uncomfortable it is for a man to feel he is attracting another man in that way … to any decent man to attract another physically is simply revolting!’ Despite this difficulty, ‘I like Lytton,’ he told Carrington. Perhaps unwisely, she confided to him what had taken place between herself and Lytton at Asheham – and immediately regretted it. ‘I am sorry I told you about Lytton, I did not mean to,’ she apologized. ‘Only I would rather you knew about it from me … a man so contemptible as that ought not ever to make one miserable or happy.’ But Gertler could not take the incident seriously. Over the months that followed Carrington seemed more happy than miserable, and Gertler began to benefit. From all his swotting under Lytton’s tutorship he was growing, like Monsieur Jourdain, marvellously improved – especially in Carrington’s eyes. Having little education herself, she valued book-learning highly.
Early in 1916 a plot of astonishing craftiness occurred to Gertler for breaking down Carrington’s resistance. He had tried, on his own behalf, every trick in the book: he had left her for three months at a time; he had bombarded her with his extremest attentions; he had spoken openly of his love for her; he had lied to her; he had lost his temper; he had reasoned; he had pleaded – all in vain. But might not Lytton’s scholarship succeed where his own crude ardour had failed? If this apostle of sexual licence could use his learning and authority to unravel the knot of Carrington’s virginity, then she might at long last give herself to Gertler. The more he thought about it the more this scheme recommended itself. Lytton, he felt sure, regarded him highly as a painter and would obviously have no interest in replacing him in Carrington’s affections. The plan seemed foolproof.
Gertler therefore offered no objections to Carrington seeing Lytton alone. He did not know the ‘incredible internal excitement’ (20 April 1916) that sprang up in her whenever she went to see him – indeed he would not have believed it; and she never revealed that she sometimes deserted him in order to be with Lytton. Her happiness was unlike anything else she had experienced. It was inexplicable. It was extraordinary. She set out to make herself indispensable to him without at the same time relinquishing Gertler’s friendship. The obstacles in her way must have appeared almost insurmountable. The anticipated hostility of the terrifying Bloomsberries, the disapproval of her formidable mother and the jealous anger of Gertler himself – all of whom must consequently be kept in ignorance of her devotion to Lytton – would have deterred some women. But not Carrington. Even more discouraging was Lytton’s giraffe-like aloofness. So in awe of him did she feel that she would seldom risk even a telephone call, since he sounded ‘so very frigid and severe on that instrument’. Often, too, he terrified her with his silences.
Lytton’s feelings towards Carrington changed as their relationship progressed. He felt pleased by her adoration; but at other times she alarmed him. Observing this strange liaison with the man she might have married, Virginia noticed how, in his late thirties, Lytton was becoming ‘curiously gentle, sweet tempered, considerate’. ‘Intimacy seems to me possible with him as with scarcely anyone,’ she wrote. So what was the nature of his intimacy with Carrington? Would he marry her, as Ottoline was telling everyone? ‘God!’ he exclaimed, ‘the mere notion is enough – One thing I know – I’ll never marry anyone – ’
‘But if she’s in love with you?’ Virginia pressed him.
‘Well, then she must take her chance.’
‘I believe I’m sometimes jealous – ’
‘Of her? thats inconceivable.’
‘You like me better, don’t you?’17
Then they had both laughed and he said that of course he liked Virginia better. In her diary she recorded that he had spoken ‘with a candour not flattering, though not at all malicious’. Yet his candour had been somewhat tempered by his ‘most sympathetic & understanding’ knowledge of Virginia’s wishes. For he was ‘one of the most supple’ of her friends, ‘whose mind seems softest to impressions’. Perhaps then he knew how secretly pleased she would be when he spoke of his fear that Carrington might not ‘let me write, I daresay’; and also on another occasion, when the two of them were calling on her, he whispered that ‘he would like to stay with us without her’. Virginia was delighted, too, some years later when he dedicated his Queen Victoria to her. ‘You ought to have dedicated Vic[toria] to C[arrington]’, she reproved him.
‘Oh dear no – we’re not on those terms at all.’
‘Ottoline will be enraged.’18
On the whole, he thought Ottoline might be enraged. But not Carrington.
What mystified Virginia, when she contemplated the unappealing aspects of the Strachey character – its prosaic scholarship ‘lacking magnanimity, shorn of atmosphere’, its meagre physical warmth, its failure of vitality, its orderliness, dustiness, its tacit assumption of the right to superior comfort and opulence to protect a nature ‘infinitely cautious, elusive & unadventurous’ – what mystified Virginia, in view of all this, was the source of Carrington’s overpowering admiration for Lytton. ‘I wonder sometimes what she’s at,’ Virginia was to write in her diary (6 June 1918). ‘… I suppose the tug of Lytton’s influence deranges her spiritual balance a good deal.’
Gradually Virginia’s suspicions of Carrington lifted. She was the easiest of visitors and she looked at pictures like a genuine artist. With Lytton she was ‘ardent, robust, scatterbrained, appreciative, a very humble disciple, but with enough character to prevent insipidity’. By 1918 Virginia came to the conclusion that Lytton had improved Carrington, and she complimented him on the improvement. ‘Ah, but the future is very dark – I must be free,’ he answered. ‘I shall want to go off.’ Yet what if Carrington herself might want to go off? she volunteered, and saw that he was not pleased by this hypothesis. The fact was, she thought, that Carrington had also improved Lytton. ‘If he is less witty, he is more humane,’ she noticed (22 January 1919). ‘… I like Carrington though. She has increased his benignity.’ Nevertheless the future of this unlikely attachment did indeed seem dark, and from time to time Virginia would ask herself, ‘But whats to happen to C[arrington] … What is to happen now to Carrington?’
Lytton was surprised by how much he enjoyed teaching Carrington the pleasures of English literature. Though he could make her feel her ignorance acutely, she would eagerly absorb these lessons and sometimes pass them on to the vainly waiting, still attentive Gertler, who was soon receiving a double quota of prose and poetry. As the months passed and summer came, Carrington’s attachment to Lytton grew still stronger until it seemed to infect every particle of her being. She almost lost her identity, caring for him as others care for themselves. When he was with her, she was alive; when he was away for a week, a day, she ceased to exist except in her letters to him – sprawling, unpunctuated, misspelt letters, scribbled urgently on page after page of foolscap paper or the torn-out leaves of children’s exercise books, and lit up by Edward Lear-like drawings that illustrated her stories, her predicament. She partly attributed this mysterious happiness with Lytton to the very different nature of their intimacy from her stormy affair with Gertler. Lytton made few demands on her and never interfered with her freedom. If she was no longer free, it was because she made such extraordinary demands upon herself. Unlike the tortured Gertler, Lytton was gentle and courteous. She felt safe with him. She felt at peace. He became her ‘Chère Grandpère’; she was ‘Votre grosse bébe’. Seeing them together, Virginia later observed (23 July 1918): ‘Lytton very amusing, charming, benignant, & like a father to C[arrington]. She kisses him & waits on him & gets good advice & some sort of protection.’
News of how Lytton had become a father substitute was to reach Wyndham Lewis. A prolific and elusive father himself, he saw Lytton’s honorary status as a characteristically Stracheyesque method of asserting his revolutionary pseudo-manhood, and Carrington’s mission to establish, rather belatedly and inadequately, the paternal dominance that had been absent from her childhood. In his novel, The Apes of God (1930), this archenemy of the Bloomsbury ‘Pansy-clan’ caricatured the caricaturist under the name Matthew Plunkett. The crane-like Plunkett walks with an affected anarchical gait, adopts mannerisms reminiscent of his father, puts on in front of strangers an owlish ceremony of regulation shyness, and articulates with two distinct voices, one a high-piping vixenish shriek, the other of a more fastidious percussion – ‘a nasal stammer modelled upon the effects of severe catarrh’. Being a modern man much taken up with psychology, this hero conceives the intensely original idea of submitting himself to psychoanalytical treatment in the Zürich consulting-den of the Jewish Dr Frumpfsusan – a bizarre notion suggested by the career of James Strachey, Freud’s patient, pupil and English-language translator. Plunkett’s aim, expressed in Jungian terms, is to get himself extroverted so that he can overcome a ‘virulent scale complex of psychical-inferiority’. Dr Frumpfsusan explains that he must falsify nature to his personal advantage. ‘Inferiority-feeling’, he flatteringly suggests, ‘may result from an actual superiority! The handicap of genius, isn’t it?’ For successful extroversion Plunkett should contrive to be a Gulliver in Lilliput. ‘For that truly uppish self-feeling,’ he concludes, ‘… you must choose your friends small … believe me, you cannot choose your lady friend too small …’
It is therefore on doctor’s orders that Plunkett takes up with Betty Blythe, his Carrington-like girlfriend, a petite doll-woman. Of the magical puppet prescription, her tiny figure is dwarfed by the fairy giant of this Bloomsbury legend. Towering far above her, he strives to assume a buccaneering manner. When she calls on him one afternoon, he manages to caress one of her flaxen curls with the extreme fingertips of a tapering hand, and feeling at last ‘a distinct vibration, in the recalcitrant depths of his person’, swoops down and picks her up ‘as though she had been a half-ton feather’. His knees bent and trembling, he staggers against the wall and then into his bedroom, only to drop Betty on the floor at the sudden shock of seeing, stretched out fast asleep on his bed, his last year’s boyfriend.
In this farcical drama Lewis ingeniously implies that the acquisition of an awed and submissive girlfriend, like the growing of a beard, was meant to promote Lytton as a man of virility. But this extravaganza does not follow the biographical events. It was true that Lytton’s boyfriends would still lie upon the bed. But he did not drop Carrington before reaching this bed which in due course would become loaded with a Vorticist conglomeration of intertwined figures.
For some months Carrington had continued to write to Lytton ‘with the censor inside’ (June 1916). Yet her letters still made him laugh out loud, even at breakfast. Though she did not wholly trust him yet, she could not help growing more openly loving, telling him ‘(since this disgusting cult of truth has begun)’ how much she longed ‘to be with you again’.
Her letters to Gertler over a similar period are less consistent. In one she suggests parting from him at least temporarily, ‘as it nearly sends me mad with grief, at seeing you so miserable’. In another she urges him to read Keats. She struggles to explain their differences: ‘You are too possessive, and I too free. That is why we could never live together.’ But in April she writes: ‘I am longing to see you again. Like a hungry person who has been waiting for [a] meal a long time … We will see a great deal of each other now.’ Then in a pencilled note the following month, she is even more encouraging. ‘You will not love me in vain,’ she promises him (16 May 1916), ‘– I shall not disappoint you in the end.’
*
The last ten days of May Lytton and Carrington spent together at Garsington during one of Ottoline’s most ambitious house-parties. Among the guests were Philip Snowden19 and his wife, Bertie Russell, Maynard Keynes and various young ladies either deaf or French. ‘The Snowden couple were as provincial as one expected,’ Lytton wrote to James (31 May 1916), ‘– she, poor woman, dreadfully plain and stiff, in stiff plain clothes, and he with a strong northern accent, but also a certain tinge of eminence. Quite too political and remote from any habit of civilized discussion to make it possible to talk to him – one just had to listen to anecdotes and observations (good or bad); but a nice good-natured cripple …’ Into this anti-Cabinet conclave, during the Sunday afternoon torpor while the peacocks were setting up their continuous howling like damned souls about the garden, the prime minister and his party arrived, just in time for one of them to effect the rescue of a servant who for a joke pretended to be drowning. The atmosphere was more like a campaign in Flanders than an English garden-party, but when the excitement had died down and tea was served, Lytton was able to study Asquith’s entourage. ‘They were a scratch lot,’ he reported to James. It was the prime minister himself who chiefly interested him. Asquith seemed to have grown redder and bulkier since their last encounter in the summer of 1914. Then they had met at the height of the Ulster crisis; now they met again a few days after the Irish Rebellion. ‘I studied the Old Man with extreme vigour,’ Lytton wrote to James, ‘and really he is a corker.
‘He seemed much larger than he did when I last saw him (just two years ago) – a fleshy, sanguine, wine-bibbing, medieval Abbot of a personage – a glutinous lecherous cynical old fellow – oogh! – You should have seen him making towards Carrington – cutting her off at an angle as she crossed the lawn. I’ve rarely seen anyone so obviously enjoying life; so obviously, I thought, out to enjoy it; almost, really, as if he’d deliberately decided that he would, and let all the rest go hang. Cynical, yes, it’s hardly possible to doubt it; or perhaps one should say just “case-hardened”. Tiens! One looks at him, and thinks of the War … And all the time, perpetually, a little pointed, fat tongue comes poking out, and licking those great chops, and then darting back again. That gives one a sense of the Artful Dodger – the happy Artful Dodger – more even than the rest. His private boudoir doings with Ottoline are curious – if one’s to believe what one hears; also his attitude towards Pozzo [Keynes] struck me – he positively shied away from him (“Not much juice in him”, he said in private to her ladyship … so superficial we all thought it!). Then why, oh why, does he go about with a creature like Lady Meux? On the whole, one wants to stick a dagger in his ribs.’
Enjoyment was the keynote of Asquith’s personality. He had clearly enjoyed a good lunch with several glasses of good wine. ‘There was a look of a Roman Emperor about him (one could imagine a wreath on his head),’ Lytton afterwards remembered (2–6 May 1918), ‘or a Renaissance Pope (“Well, let me enjoy the world, now that I am Vicar of Christ”) … It was disgusting; and yet, such was the extraordinary satisfaction of the man that, in spite of everything, one could not help feeling a kind of sympathetic geniality of one’s own.’20
In calmer moments at Garsington, Lytton went ‘for some enormous walks’, he told James, ‘– “expeditions” – with, precisely, Carrington. One was to the town of Abingdon, a magical spot, with a town-hall by Wren perhaps – a land of lotus-eaters, where I longed to sink down for the rest of my life, in an incredible oblivion …
‘As for Carrington, she’s a queer young tiling. These modern women! What are they up to? They seem most highly dubious. Why is it? Is it because there’s so much “in” them? Or so little? They perplex me. When I consider Bunny … or even Gertler, I find nothing particularly obscure there, but when it comes to a creature with a cunt one seems to be immediately désorienté. Perhaps it’s because cunts don’t particularly appeal to one. I suppose that may be partly the explanation. But – oh, they coil, and coil; and, on the whole, they make me uneasy.’
From Garsington, where Asquith had made his accelerating advance on her, Carrington wrote scolding Gertler for casting ‘a cloud of doubt on our trust in each other’, and promising ‘not to kiss anyone since it causes you pain’. She cared little for anything except making him happy, she assured him, and she cared for no one else. She ended with a simile that may have heartened him. ‘It has felt like a lock on the river, with our two boats up against the lock. Now, it is open, and we can rush so swiftly down the river.’
When Carrington spoke about Gertler, Lytton hardly knew for whom he felt most. He was disquieted by Gertler who had written a despairing account of himself. It appeared that he was nearly bankrupt. ‘I’ve just heard from Gertler, who says he’s on the brink of ruin,’ Lytton wrote from Garsington to Clive Bell (12 May 1916), ‘– has taken his last £2 out of the bank, and will have nothing at all in another week. Do you think anything can be done? I’m sure £10 would make a great difference to him, and I thought perhaps you might be able to invest some such sum in a minor picture or some drawings. Or perhaps you could whip up somebody else. If you do anything, of course don’t mention me, as his remarks about his finances were quite incidental, with no idea of begging.’
On the same day Lytton wrote a somewhat stilted but generous letter to Gertler himself. ‘I have long wanted to possess a work by you – so will you put aside for me either a drawing or some other small piece, which is in your judgement the equivalent of the enclosed [£10] – And I’ll carry it off when I’m next in London. I only wish I could get one of your large pictures – what idiots the rich are! And how I loathe the thought of them swilling about in their motors and their tens of thousands, when people like you are in difficulties. What makes it so particularly monstrous is that the wants of artists are so very moderate – just for the mere decencies of life. All the same, though I’m very sorry that you’re not even half as well off as an ordinary Civil Servant, you may be sure that I don’t pity you – because you are an artist, and being that is worth more than all the balances at all the banks in London.’
Carrington was delighted that her new Bloomsbury friends, especially Lytton, were helping Gertler, and wrote enthusiastically to say how happy she was to hear that he was at last selling some of his pictures. But this was not the sort of letter he wanted from her. ‘Don’t write and congratulate me on having money,’ he chided her (20 May 1916). ‘I hate money and the people I get it from … If you could give me one night do, as you would make your unhappy friend happier!’ She did give him one night in London, but afterwards wrote apologizing ‘because in trying to help you out of your wretchedness last night, I feel that I only succeeded in being nasty to you’. She felt easier writing to him about ‘the wonderful blue flowers, and so many birds singing all day’. She has been painting tulips, she writes, and is returning to Garsington in order to paint more – ‘such tulips I feel weak with excitement’. She has also swum in the swimming-pool twice before breakfast. ‘The children wear no clothes and run over the grass, and stand in the tulips, thigh deep in yellow tulips. It has made me depressed for they are so beautiful and I wished for the impossible to be more like them, and I hated this bulk of a body which surrounds my spirit … Are you happy now because I love you?’
But Gertler was not happy. All he got were descriptions of flowers and birds, and copies of Keats’s poems. ‘I have no use for Keats in my present mood,’ he had told her. He was confused by those grand metaphors that led nowhere. ‘You are always writing to me of the many ships on the sea,’ he protested. Sometimes he felt he might die if he opened another envelope full of metaphors. Moreover, he had begun to suspect that she was concealing something from him, and accused her of being too friendly with Gilbert Cannan, who was then finishing Mendel, his novel built round the Gertler–Carrington love-affair. Carrington repudiated this accusation. It was true that Cannan had given her a brotherly kiss on the cheek – like a handshake – but the incident was not worthy of discussion, being nothing more than a novelist’s legitimate research.
Nevertheless Gertler’s suspicions had acted as a warning to Carrington and she veered hastily into harmless topics. She wished she could share with him her love of Rimbaud, but it was all too new and enthralling for her to speak about yet. Also she had shared a taxi with Augustus John who, she volunteered, had made no assault at all on her famous virginity.
Gertler was little comforted. If even Augustus quailed before her virginity, what hope was there for him? ‘It gets more and more complicated with C[arrington],’ he wrote to his friend Koteliansky (20 June 1916). ‘… If only the torment would end. It is like a terrible disease and incurable. We both put our heads together to try to end it, but we can’t … because it has neither beginning nor end.’
After the hurricane of guests moved on, the rag-time and whirlpool abated, Garsington became once more a House of Rest for Lytton. Since his tribunal he had been ‘like a sick dog’, as he described it to Gertler (10 May 1916), ‘dragging about from cushion to cushion, or creeping out into the sunshine to lie there dreaming’. Ottoline herself had departed, and Lytton was free to sit out alone in the kitchen garden, idling, reading, and writing letters. ‘I feel as if I were gradually turning into a pear-tree on a South Wall,’ he wrote to Vanessa Bell (2 June 1916), ‘and unless you come and pull me up by the – root, before long, I shall very likely be doomed for the rest of my life to furnish fruit for her ladyship’s table.’
In the third week of June he eventually left for Wissett Lodge, a Suffolk farmhouse with a large half-timbered façade which Duncan had rented so as to set himself up as an official fruit farmer with David Garnett and discharge their obligations under the National Service Act. After the pugs and cushions of Garsington, the atmosphere of bees and blackberries suited Lytton’s mood, and he hesitated here until the end of the month, with Harry Norton as the other guest. ‘Is it the secret of life or of … something else … I don’t quite know what? … Oblivion? Stupor? Incurable looseness? – that they’ve discovered at Wissett?’ he asked Virginia (28 July 1916). ‘I loved it, and never wanted to go away.’
Vanessa certainly believed that they could be ‘perfectly happy’ in such a place. ‘I feel our ways are changing,’ she had told Lytton (27 April 1916). Lost in its six acres of orchards and fields, Wissett was ‘amazingly remote from the war and all horrors’ (through Bunny swore he heard a Zeppelin, sounding like a threshing machine, pass by). It felt even more isolated than Asheham. Duncan and Bunny worked in the fields all day, while Lytton lay writing under the rambler-roses and laurel bushes, Norton went about thinking loudly about prime numbers, and Vanessa laboured to make Wissett a rival outpost to Garsington. It was inconceivable to her that they would ever wish to go back to London. Their only adventure occurred one Sunday morning when the four of them set out for a long walk towards the sea – an unwise direction, they discovered, when an agitated corporal rushed up and threatened to frogmarch them all into a military gaol because of their collective Germanic appearance and the incorrect Suffolk accent in which they answered his questions.21 Otherwise ‘everything and everybody seems to be more or less overgrown with vegetation’, Lytton informed Ottoline (20 June 1916), ‘thistles four feet high fill the flower garden, Duncan is covered with Virginia (or should it be Vanessa?) creeper, and Norton and I go about pulling up the weeds and peeping under the foliage. Norton is in very good spirits, having evolved a new theory of cubic roots.’
One afternoon, as they walked together in the shrubbery, Lytton, in strictest confidence, told Bunny something about Carrington. His curiosity roused, Bunny urged him to invite her down. But she could not abandon Gertler again so soon, and a temporary lull settled over their triangular relationship.
Lytton filled in this pause with an experiment in autobiography22 describing the minutiae of a single not extraordinary day, Monday, 26 June. The essay uncovers a few disturbances in his emotional life – a slight breach with Ottoline, which, though quickly healed, heralded a more serious division between them; an uneasiness with Vanessa over their mutual attraction to Duncan, and some hint of awkwardness with Duncan over their mutual liking for Vanessa; a tremulous flirtation in the garden with Bunny; and, arising from this episode, an awareness that, although he was fortunate in knowing so many friends, Lytton could never be sure if any of them really liked him.
Vanessa believed that Lytton ‘had very little sense of anything but the human interest in painting’.23 On leaving Wissett, he called on Gertler at his studio in Rudall Crescent to choose the drawing for which he had sent ten pounds. Gertler’s famous ‘Merry-Go-Round’ (a tile as ironic as Eminent Victorians), which reflects both the dehumanization of war and the repetitive pattern of his affair with Carrington, was there. ‘Oh lord, oh lord have mercy upon us! It is a devastating affair isn’t it?’ Lytton wrote to Ottoline (3 July 1916). ‘I felt that if I were to look at it for any length of time, I should be carried away suffering from shellshock. I admired it, of course, but as for liking it, one might as well think of liking a machine gun. But fortunately he does all that for himself – one needn’t bother with one’s appreciations. He said it reminded him of Bach – Well, well!’
While Lytton was at Belsize Park Gardens, Carrington came over one afternoon. She had been invited to Garsington later that July, this time with Gertler. Lytton himself was expecting to return there about the same time, and wrote to Ottoline confirming this arrangement. ‘I want to get my Arnold life done,’ he had told her earlier from Wissett (20 June 1916), ‘and I think under your peaceful shades it might be accomplished.’ After his few days in London, he was eager for the country once more. ‘I am accumulating writing material,’ he wrote (3 July 1916), ‘– and mean to be very industrious for the next month or so.’
A week later he arrived at Garsington, where he was able, for more than a fortnight, to do no work whatever. Presided over by Ottoline, her face covered by peeling flakes of white chalk, her body swathed in a stiff gown of peacock silk, her throat encased in baroque pearls, innumerable guests spiralled round the house and overflowed into a cottage and the village inn. Most of them, Lytton complained to Mary Hutchinson (10 July 1916), were ‘so damned political and revolutionary that I got quite sick of the conscientious objector and the thought of Ireland’s wrongs’. Among the non-political guests were Evan Morgan,24 ‘a tall bright-coloured youth with a paroqueet nose, and an assured manner, and the general appearance of a refined old woman of high birth’; and, once again, the alluringly impassive Katherine Mansfield – ‘an odd satirical woman behind a regular mask of a face … very difficult to get at; one felt it would take years of patient burrowing, but that it might be worth while.’
The weekend passed, the party went on. ‘I came here with the notion of working,’ he protested to Barbara Hiles (17 July 1916). ‘Mon Dieu! There are now no intervals between the week-ends – the flux and reflux is endless – and I sit quivering among a surging mesh of pugs, peacocks, pianolas, and humans – if humans they can be called – the inhabitants of Circe’s cave. I am now faced not only with Carrington and Brett (more or less permanences now) but Gertler, who … is at the present moment carolling a rag-time in union with her Ladyship. I feel like an open boat in a choppy sea – but thank goodness the harbour is in sight.’
The Gertler–Carrington situation struck him as gloomy and complicated, he confided to Mary Hutchinson (23 July 1916). ‘The poor thing [Carrington] seems almost aux abois with Gertler for ever at her, day in, day out – she talks of flying London, of burying herself in Cornwall, or becoming a Cinema actress. I of course suggested that she should live with me, which she luckily immediately refused – for one thing, I couldn’t have afforded it. And there she is for the present at Garsington, with Mark gnashing his teeth in the background, and Brett quite ineffectual, and her Ladyship worming and worming for ever and ever, Amen.’ At the same time, Lytton noticed that Carrington still admired Gertler. Lytton also sympathized with him over the perpetual virginity question – ‘unless she’s the most horrible liar’.
At the end of the month he sailed to another anchorage with Oliver and Ray Strachey at Durbins. Since Oliver only returned in the evenings from the Foreign Office to play Bach at the piano, Lytton was left with his mother, his sister-in-law Ray and his sister Pippa, who competed in looking after him as he worked away at ‘Dr Arnold’. The only interruption was provided by the brief appearance of Ray Strachey’s uncle, Logan Pearsall Smith, who, Lytton told a grateful Ottoline (21 August 1916), ‘is really now more than middle-aged – senile, one’s inclined to say, poor old fellow – doddering on with his anecdotes and literature, which, in spite of the efforts of a lifetime, remain alas! American. I was rather amused by his view of Vernon [Lee]. “I think on the whole she’s the best talker I know” – I gave paralysed assent, and then ventured to add, “But perhaps at times she tends to be slightly boring” … He wouldn’t have it though. Well, well, de gustibus non est disputandum, which may be translated:
‘Tastes differ: some like coffee, some like tea;
And some are never bored by Vernon Lee.’25
Another visitor to Roger Fry’s house was his old friend Walter Raleigh. ‘He was far less outré and bloodthirsty about the war than I’d expected – chiefly just childish; rather timid too, it seemed, on controversial questions; and I really liked him more than I ever had before.’
While Lytton was at Durbins, Carrington and Gertler had arranged to stay at Eleanor House as guests of Mary Hutchinson. Here they swam in the sea, Carrington told Lytton, and ‘even Mark came in. Looking very absurd, in a bathing dress.’ These were unusually happy days. ‘Wittering was a very wonderful time for me, and all through you,’ she afterwards reminded Gertler, ‘ … how much I loved being with you in those fields, and for showing me so much.’ Perhaps it was because they were both painters that ‘the intimacy we got at lately makes other relationships with people strangely vacant’. At such moments, doubting her secret liaison with Lytton, Carrington became silent. ‘Are you in the Jew’s arms at the present moment,’ Lytton wondered. ‘So near, and yet so far. Oh! Ah!’ In the past he would have envied her being in Mark’s arms, but now he felt a curious jealousy. The absurd fact was that he missed her, even missed her letters (which he ‘perused in the privacy of my four-poster’). ‘Write, write, write for Jesus’ sake,’ he demanded.
When Virginia invited him over to Asheham after leaving Durbins in mid-August, he refused because ‘I have engaged myself to go [to] Wales then, with a small juvenile party’ (28 July 1916). He would, he added, be at large again in September, when he hoped to see Leonard and Virginia in Cornwall.
This journey to North Wales was occasioned by Nicholas Bagenal, a young man who had just then come out of hospital after recovering from a wound in the hip. He was in love with his future wife, Barbara Hiles, who persuaded Lytton to act as chaperon during a fortnight’s holiday they were to spend together at her father’s cottage near Llandudno, before Nicholas returned to the front. Agreeing to this, Lytton had inquired whether he might in turn bring Barbara’s friend, Carrington. ‘You must come to Wales,’ he insisted (28 July 1916) to Carrington. And so the juvenile party was formed – ‘though really’, Lytton confessed to Mary Hutchinson, ‘I sometimes begin to wonder what the diable I am doing in this galère of grandchildren’.
Difficulties and anxieties abounded. ‘Oh Lytton I’m so excited and so afraid you will be unhappy or bored,’ Barbara wrote to him (5 August 1916). He endeavoured to set her mind at ease, though his own doubts gleam clearly through. ‘I pray for this weather to last,’ he answered (8 August 1916). ‘But if it doesn’t, we can always shut the doors and windows, and cook and eat and cook and eat indefinitely. In the intervals we can hum tunes and recite ballads. But if it’s fine we must scale the mountains with gazelle-like tread … I’ll bring some books.’
The chief difficulties, however, were provided by Carrington, whose fears outmatched the sum of Lytton’s and Barbara’s and possibly those of the wounded Nicholas Bagenal. The invitation had arrived at the end of July, while she was at ‘Shandygaff Hall’. She wanted ‘so much to go to this land of mountains,’ in silks or rags, on foot or by rail. But she was penniless; she would have to invent a story for her mother; and then, would Mark mind? After her recent lecture on trust, surely he would not dare to object. Eventually she resolved to walk to North Wales, or possibly to bicycle there. But was it all going to be worth this tremendous effort? ‘It would be awful to walk so far’, she admitted to Lytton (30 July 1916), ‘and then be met with the chilly eye of criticism!’ She was training herself as best she could, assiduously reading Donne and, like Gertler, taking lessons in French. But her real fear was that after the strain of two or three weeks together, their peculiar relationship might snap.
The Morrells, meanwhile, were doing all they could to assist Gertler.
‘Ottoline insists on trying her best to get my state of virginity reduced, and made me practically share a bedroom with Norton! … I was dismal enough about Mark and then suddenly without any warning Philip after dinner asked me to walk round the pond with him and started without any preface, to say, how disappointed he had been to hear I was a virgin! How wrong I was in my attitude to Mark … Ottoline then seized me on my return to the house and talked for one hour and a half in the asparagrass bed on the subject … and told me truthfully about herself and Bertie. But this attack on the virgins is like the worst Verdun on-slaught … Mark suddenly announced he is leaving … and complicated feelings immediately came up inside me.’
‘What Devils they all are, with their proddings & preachings, & virginity-gibberings,’ Lytton replied (1 August 1916). ‘… Have you looked at Donne’s Satires? They’re rather in that style … (asparagrass?).’
While Carrington tried to rise above this ‘mass of intrigue’, climbing out of her unbearably hot attic room and spending her nights chastely on the roof with Aldous Huxley (‘Strange adventures with birds, and peacocks, and hordes of bees,’ she reported to Lytton. ‘Shooting stars, other things’), Ottoline below was writing to Gertler querying whether Carrington ‘will ever find a mate that fulfils all she desires … I love Carrington too and you. I hope you will always tell me anything you feel like and when you feel like it.’ Lytton had once told her everything, but now he was growing most ungratefully secretive.
Before Wales, Carrington had to return to her parents’ home at Hurstbourne Tarrant in Hampshire. She was in a fiercely rebellious mood, vanishing out of the house for long walks over the hills with a dog named Jasper, and at night sleeping out on the roof as she had at Garsington. Her mother, she complained to Gertler, ‘was more awfull than ever’, and her father more pitifully ill and old: ‘I hate him for living as he does or rather I hate life for making him live. It is so undignified an end like this.’
Meanwhile negotiations over the holiday were growing more tightly knotted. Lytton had offered to pay for Carrington’s travelling expenses, but, unable to write to her at her parents’ home he communicated the news to Barbara. ‘I am rather rich just now, I find,’ he lied (8 August 1916), ‘so it would be absurd for her [Carrington] to go by foot, or worse, for lack of money.’ This was passed on to Carrington, but still she hesitated, until her mother, learning of her expedition now for the first time, absolutely forbade it. Her mind was then made up. She would burn her boats and go.
It was settled that at four o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday, 12 August, the four of them would converge on the platform of Llandudno Junction – Barbara and Nicholas travelling from Westbury-on-Severn in Gloucestershire, Lytton via Guildford in Surrey, and Carrington from Andover in Hampshire.
Leaving Durbins for Belsize Park Gardens on the first stage of his journey, and pausing for a few moments in the Haymarket, Lytton was swept up in an atmosphere of sudden cheerfulness. The streets were empty, but ‘I became aware of a curious sensation of “bien-aise” in the air,’ he recounted. ‘Looking round I saw a motor coming up the hill; it was open, and in it was Asquith, alone, with a look of radiant happiness upon his face – happiness which was indeed literally radiant, for I had actually felt it when my back was turned. He passed on without seeing me – he really looked too happy to see anything. I think there was a portmanteau in the car, and I suppose he was off somewhere for the weekend.’26
As the prime minister, glowing with joy, glided away into the distance, like – the simile is Lytton’s – a seraph in a heavenly ecstasy, the euphoria flooding the Haymarket drained away, and Lytton was left with a sense of amused and astonished envy. How the devil did he manage it? He wished that he could feel so buoyant over his own holiday. It was impossible to withhold a grudging feeling of amiability – despite Lytton’s disapproval of Asquith’s conduct over the recent treason trial of Roger Casement. ‘I should be very glad if they didn’t hang him [Casement], but I can’t believe there’s much chance of that – especially with Asquith prime minister,’ he had written to Ottoline (3 July 1916). ‘That old buffer has certainly been distinguishing himself lately. Is he a coward, or a fiend, or simply a dunderhead I wonder?’
Still pondering on this, he arrived at Llandudno. The cottage itself, very small and sequestered, with bees-waxed parquet floors and spring mattresses, was painted white outside and had a tiny garden filled with flowers. It was perched half-way up one of the chain of mountains which on all sides shut them in. Along the flat valley directly below ran a broad and shallow river. Lytton was reminded of Rothiemurchus. ‘You can’t think how kind they all were to me – and how wonderfully nice. Barbara managed the cottage, and the cooking with the greatest skill,’ he wrote to Bunny Garnett (2 September 1916). ‘… Nick was really charming – his gaiety of spirits never ceased. It will be too horrible if he is forced back into that murderous whirlpool. As for Carrington – we seemed to see a great deal of each other. But this let me remark at once – my attitude throughout in relation to all, has been of immaculate chastity, whatever the conduct of others may have been.’
Increasingly as he got older, Lytton loved being in the company of people younger than himself. They helped him to shrug off his own ‘antique spirit’, as he called it. One half of him, he told Ottoline, felt as if it had gone back ten years or twenty, while the other half, he was pretty sure, had moved forward by about the same amount; with the result that – ‘me voici, a mixture of 18 and 52’.
Great bundles of cloud would come toppling down the mountains and envelop the cottage; and not a day passed without some rain. Indoors Lytton lay reading Donne and Shakespeare while Carrington painted his portrait. In the sunnier intervals, the party, released from its hideout, sprang up into the mountains or made expeditions to Conway and Llandudno.
One highlight of the holiday was a bottle of champagne. Nick withdrew the cork with a pop – and Lytton, flinging his arms wildly in the air, shrieked: ‘God! What the war must be like!’
‘I am most happy here,’ Carrington reassured Gertler, who had gone off to stay with Gilbert Cannan. ‘… Lytton sends his love. You must like him, because I do, so very much.’
‘Remember me to Barbara,’ Gertler replied, ‘and my love to Lytton.’
But Carrington did not like such sarcasm, and wrote to reprove him, ‘because that other objection [homosexuality] comes so much always before you. I have altered my views about that … one always has to put up with something, pain or discomfort, to get anything from any human being.’
Gertler, who felt he did not need a sermon on pain and discomfort, took exception to this, and a competition developed between them as to who genuinely liked Lytton better. No one had recently read more Donne and Dostoyevsky than Gertler and even ‘my French is getting on better. I do half-an-hour a day.’
‘Of course you liked Lytton and praised him before I did, because I did not know him in those days when you did’. Carrington countered.
The holiday drew to an end. ‘What do you fancy?’ Lytton had asked Carrington. ‘Perhaps we might walk back to England through Wales? It would then be September …’ In the final days of August the two of them set off together for Bath – ‘a most charming town’, Lytton told Bunny Garnett (2 September 1916). ‘How one bounds along those elegant streets, and whisks from Square to Circus and Circus to Crescent! One almost begins to feel that one’s on high heels, and embroidery sprouts over one’s waistcoat. And then – the infectious enthusiasm of my youthful companion … you smile; but you are mistaken.
Carrington, too, was passing on news of their progress – to Gertler. ‘Yesterday we investigated the whole town,’ she wrote to him (29 August 1916). ‘Every house nearly! and sat for about two hours in a 2nd hand book shop.
‘I discovered accidently an early Voltaire which gave Lytton great joy, as he had been looking for it a long time. After tea we walked through the city upon to a high hill because we had seen in one of the books on architecture, (that I studied all Sunday), a wonderful house. Called “Widcomb House”. and indeed it was beautiful! – Fielding lived in this village also – We boldly asked the maid if we might go over the garden. She fetched after a long time an incrediably old lady. Who said we might. But seemed utterly bewildered why anyone should want to see her house! The garden with a deep valley very big with high trees, distant hills gave me strange emotions. It was a sad morbid place, and deadly quiet – Lytton read the Voltaire to me an account of Frederick the Great, and Voltaire’s relationship with his son.’
From Bath they moved to Wells – ‘What a pity it is that it should now be the fashion for clergymen to believe in Christianity,’ Lytton later wrote to his mother (3 September 1916). ‘I should so have enjoyed being Bishop of Bath and Wells!’ – and from Wells they went to Glastonbury. ‘We are staying here,’ Carrington wrote to Maynard from the George Hotel on 29 August. ‘… I doubt if Lytton will ever return.’ On the opposite page Lytton added a few lines of verse for Maynard.
When I’m winding up the toy
Of a pretty little boy,
– Thank you, I can manage pretty well;
But how to set about
To make a pussy pout
– That is more than I can tell.27
Below these lines Carrington drew a picture of a pussy cat curled up and fast asleep. They had shared a hotel bed the previous night, and from that night, scholars have dated the end of Carrington’s virginity. She felt burdened with gratitude to Lytton. She had been with him for three consecutive weeks, had lived with his moodiness, his invalidism, and loved him more than ever. ‘I did enjoy myself so much with you,’ she wrote after getting back to Hurstbourne Tarrant at the beginning of September, ‘–you do not know how happy I have been, everywhere, each day so crowded with wonders … Dear Lytton. I have been so happy, incrediably happy!’
Still at Wells, ‘sunk down into lodgings under the eaves of this somewhat démodé Cathedral’, Lytton wrote of his loneliness apart from her. ‘Lunch is over, tea is over, dinner is over, and here I am lying in my solitary state on the sofa among the white cushions – silent, nieceless, sad!’ They had agreed to try and find a country cottage where they could spend part of their lives together. It was to be a commitment that would never exclude other emotional commitments, but give them both an androgynous enlargement of experience. ‘What excitements in store for us all,’ Carrington exclaimed (8 September 1916). Lytton, too, writing a short poem in these ‘unregarded hours’, was cautiously excited.
Who would love only roses among flowers?
Or listen to no music save Mozart’s?
Then why not waste life’s unregarded hours
With fragile loves and secondary hearts?
Ah! Exquisite the tulips and the lilies!
The Schuberts and the Schumanns, how divine!
Then kiss me, kiss me quickly, Amaryllis!
And Laurie, mix your wantonness with mine!
It was not long before strange and disturbing rumours of Lytton’s affair with Carrington were breezing through Bloomsbury. Had Bunny Garnett passed on his suspicions to Duncan and Vanessa at Wissett? On the whole Lytton thought not. Was it possible that Carrington herself had broken down and confessed before Ottoline and Clive’s fusillade of questions at Garsington? She swore she had spoken only of the landscape. Even so, enveloped in mystery as Carrington was, Ottoline clearly spied the truth. ‘Ottoline dislikes me!’ Carrington revealed to Lytton (6 September 1916). ‘Rather plainly.’ Whenever something unpleasant happened, Ottoline usually blamed the woman rather than the man. She was to blame Frieda Lawrence for Women in Love and Maria Huxley for Crome Yellow. Now she blamed Carrington for alienating Lytton’s affections. ‘Her ladyship loves and fondels me no more! and Brett28 was rather severe,’ Carrington told Gertler (September 1916).
Though she had committed herself to Lytton, Carrington still could not bear to give up Gertler. ‘I find you such an inspiring person to know,’ she assured him (1 September 1916) on returning from Glastonbury. ‘Without you all my life would collapse – like a punctured balloon.’ Even when she feared seeing him, she loved to dream about him and write letters to him. She wrote as many letters to him that autumn as she did to Lytton, telling him of her happiness, though not the reason for it. ‘I am excited over everything lately,’ she exclaimed (3 September 1916). ‘The fullness of life … the things to come … the wonder of it all!’ She dispatched fresh tokens of her love: presents of flowers and plums, and more allegorical endearments. She asked Gertler for a new photograph; admitted that ‘my moods vary like a sky of clouds!’ and exulted in the wonder of wearing trousers like a boy. ‘How I hate being a girl … tied – with female encumbrances, and hanging flesh.’
These letters had a terrible effect on Gertler. With their denial of the body he longed to possess, they struck from him a long despairing cry – a tirade of pleas and recriminations which he let loose in the first week of September, but never sent Carrington.
‘God, I am lonely – so lonely. I can’t bear my loneliness … Do you love me? Can you love? Is there nothing between us except my own fiery love? … God save me from this Hell that I have been living in for so long. Save me soon, I can’t bear it much longer! Your body seems most beautiful to me. Most painfully I long for it … How can you bear to let your beauty pass by, when you know there is a man dying for it! … There is only one period of Youth in our lifetime – Don’t waste it! And me, take off the Rack of Torture soon … You have had Lytton with you and he easily made up for my absence. He did well enough … How I hate the coldness of life! It is not your fault Carrington Life is so arranged. Life has made you cold … You say in your letter you are “a wild Beast never to be tamed” … you are not a “wild” Beast but a frightened Beast and a timid Beast … If you had known many men – had had many lovers then you could boast of this “Wildness” … But my poor Virgin you have known no man yet … I hate your Virginity.’
Then, just as he seemed finally to have lost her, she turned to him. Guilty over misleading him, she found herself more than ever affected by his unhappiness. Also reading ‘Venus and Adonis’, ‘To his Coy Mistress’ and ‘The Extasie’ was having its effect. ‘If I find many more poems by Donne urging me to forsake my virginity I may fall,’ she conceded (September 1916), ‘… I think he is a man of such rare wisdom that I take his words very seriously. Far more so than Philip and Ottoline … But I ought not write this to you.’ Then what ought she to do? That autumn she decided to surrender her virginity once more, this time to Gertler. ‘What wonderful times we shall have later! When we are freer with one another,’ he responded (25 September 1916), ‘… such interesting intimate times, close moments – moments of ecstasy! … Oh! Love is a good thing!’
But Carrington was still cautious. Sex – or ‘sugar’ as she called it in her letters to Gertler – ‘does make one appreciate those poets more fully. But I only like sugar some times, not every week and every day … I shall … only allow you three lumps a month.’
Since Clive still worked on Ottoline’s Garsington estate, and Vanessa was settling with Duncan and Bunny into Sussex, Maynard had arranged to take over the Bells’ Gordon Square house (occupying it with Sheppard who had been employed as a translator by the War Office) and rent the larger premises at 3 Gower Street to Dorothy Brett. That September Brett invited Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield to occupy the lower rooms and, for nine pounds a year, invited Carrington to move in upstairs. ‘What fun we will have in Gower Street,’ she wrote to Lytton (September 1916). ‘She [Katherine Mansfield] will play all the games I love best. Pretending to be other people and dressing up and parties!’ These parties and pretences, and her deepening intrigues with Lytton and Mark, were a protection against the terrible war which she so seldom mentioned in her letters. But one night, the sky suddenly went crimson, the houses and trees were lit up and a sound of savage cheering, rising and falling, filled the streets. ‘Carrington shot out of her room and we both clawed at the hall-door and dashed out,’ remembered Beatrice Glenavy.
‘… There it was, creeping and dripping down the sky, head first … a great flaming torch, and away above it the little light of the plane, signalling to the guns … it sounded as if all London was cheering. Carrington burst into terrible sobbing and rushed back into her room. I felt almost unconscious with excitement, and was on a plane of living where human suffering no longer existed. It looked as if the remains of the Zeppelin had come down on Hampstead Heath … I wanted to get a taxi and go to where it had fallen, and went to Carrington to get her to come with me, but she was crying so bitterly she could not speak, so I left her.’29
As soon as she had settled into Gower Street, Carrington began questioning friends, studying maps and pedalling off on her ‘iron steed’ to look for Lytton’s ideal cottage. She sent him appraisals and diagrams and regular reports of her expeditions: ‘40 miles in one morning did I bicycle for your sake revered uncle?’ she wrote (16 September 1916). ‘Searching the highways and hedges, for your blasted house!’
The plan was to raise money to buy a house on something like a company basis – some of Lytton’s Bloomsbury friends taking shares (that is, paying an annual sum of money) in return for which they might use the place for weekends or as an occasional retreat. ‘Have you heard of the scheme for a country cottage?’ Lytton asked Maynard (14 September 1916). ‘Would you be willing to join? Barbara has already found something that sounds as if it might be suitable. Oliver [Strachey] and Faith [Henderson] are going to take shares – also perhaps Saxon … Oh, Carrington, too.’
Barbara Bagenal’s discovery was an unfurnished house in Hemel Hempstead, at an annual rent of forty-eight pounds and with ‘a loft for conscientious objectors’. When this fell through, the search was vigorously taken up again by Carrington. ‘I have maps of every square inch of the country now,’ she told Lytton (8 September 1916). ‘And correspondence with every auctioneer in Newbury, Marlborough, and Reading!’ But her notions of what would accord with Lytton’s literary sensibilities were so elevated that no estate agent could rise to them. ‘Our country cottage still floats high in the air,’ Lytton commented to Ottoline (1 October 1916) ‘– a cottage in Spain.’
From Wells he had gradually and with great indecision drifted back to London, which ‘I found horrible – stuffy and chilly at the same time, and packed full and flowing over, with inconceivably hideous monstrosities. They push one off the pavements in their crowds, they surge round every bus, they welter in the tubes – one dashes wildly for a taxi, but there are no taxis left. In the night it’s pitch dark; one walks wedged in among the multitudes like a soldier in an army … No! London is decidedly not a place to be in just now.’
Nevertheless, it was in London that Lytton was to remain. At Belsize Park Gardens, by the last week of October, he was able to announce that ‘cet épouvantable Docteur Arnold est fini – praise be to God!’ Almost immediately he began reading and making notes for ‘The End of General Gordon’, the final essay in Eminent Victorians.
Whenever she could get him to sit for her, Carrington went on painting Lytton’s portrait which ‘will be really a good picture’, she believed (6 November 1916). By the end of the year she had finished it, Lytton’s elongated hands raised before his dreaming face, as if in prayer, holding a book above the reclining body. ‘I wonder what you will think of it when you see it,’ she wrote in her diary on New Year’s Day, ‘… now tonight it looks wonderfully good and I am happy. But then I dread showing it. I should like to go on painting you every week … and never never showing what I paint. It’s marvellous having you all to oneself … I would love to explore your mind behind your finely skinned forehead. You seem so wise and very coldly old. Yet in spite of this what a peace to be with you, and how happy I was today.’
When Lytton was not dining with Maynard at the Café Royal, going off with Sheppard ‘and a party of young men’, or, among the roaring and gloating, to a boxing match in Blackfriars with Boris Anrep (‘I was quite close – almost touching their terrific naked bodies’), he would accompany Carrington to parties at Barbara’s studio in Hampstead and at Augustus John’s in Chelsea, and take her over to Hogarth House in Richmond where Leonard and Virginia were soon to start the Hogarth Press.30 He would also come over to Gower Street for teas with her and Brett and Katherine Mansfield. ‘I shall like living with Katherine I am sure,’ Carrington had predicted in a letter to Lytton. But the trouble was that Katherine waylaid all the men – Mark, Lytton, Bertie and others – and enticed them into her first-floor rooms. ‘To our chagrin, no one gets further than Katherine!’ Brett told Ottoline. ‘… all disappear like magic … I have my little instrument [hearing aid] trained on the cracks in the floor!’ Middleton Murry was flirting openly with both Ottoline and Brett (herself in love with Ottoline) while Katherine made off briefly and secretly with Bertie Russell. By February 1917 Katherine was to leave Gower Street because, according to Ottoline, ‘she had been made uncomfortable by Carrington who spied on her; watching when she went out or came in and who … made up all manner of fantastic tales, that Katherine used to disguise herself and go out at night, seeking exciting adventures, that she acted for cinemas and that she had mysterious visitors.’
Lytton came and went: listening, staring, curious, incredulous. That November he subsided at Asheham nursing a winter illness and over Christmas went to convalesce with Ottoline at Garsington. Clive Bell and Aldous Huxley were there as residents; Bertie was invited, as well as Brett and Carrington. There was much discussion of the war, long walks over the fields, secret messages passed from one to another, the celebrating of Evensong and some literary entertainments which included performances of Lytton reading his ‘Dr Arnold’ and a mock-Russian play, ‘marvellously witty and good’, Carrington thought, devised by Katherine. Carrington herself played Marcel Dash, the grandchild of Dr Keit, a part taken by Lytton. ‘We performed a superb play invented by Katherine, improvising as we went along,’ Aldous Huxley wrote to his brother Julian (29 December 1916). ‘It was a huge success, with Murry as a Dostoevsky character and Lytton as an incredibly wicked old grandfather.’
Back in the fogs of London, Lytton interrupted his work on General Gordon with reviews for the New Statesman and by reading Rabelais (about whom he was to write in the New Statesman a year later). Gargantua and Pantagruel ‘has surged over me altogether’, he informed Ottoline (6 February 1917). ‘I read very little else. I find him far the best antidote yet discovered against the revolting mesquineries de ces jours. I read him in the tube, and he is a veritable buckler of defence, warding off those miserable visages, with their miserable newspapers. What an adorable giant, to drop into the arms of! And then the interest of the book, from so many points of view, is so great. I am glad I never really read it before; it is intoxicating to get a fresh enthusiasm when one’s over eighty.’
By the end of March, he had begun to feel again something like his actual age – now thirty-seven. The weather brightened and grew warmer, ‘and now I feel that I really must set to and seriously attack the General’, he told Ottoline, who had gallantly invited him again to Garsington, this time without Carrington (23 March 1917). ‘I’m afraid it would be fatal to leave my stool until I’ve captured his first line of trenches.’
Meanwhile Carrington’s relationship with Gertler had slowly been moving towards a crisis. He had imagined that he would be seeing far more of her since she moved to Gower Street, but either she was away on unexplained rambles in the country, or else the house was crowded with other men. ‘What with one thing and another we hardly ever meet alone,’ he complained (January 1917). When they were together ‘I am always nervous and awkward in your presence and tongue-tied’ (February 1917). One of their new problems was contraception (‘I really did try that thing. Only it was too big, and wouldn’t go inside no matter what way I used it!’). Carrington promised not to be childish; promised to be less selfish and to make him happier: but sexual relations between them did not get better. ‘I envy often amiable people who can love more simply, and get on,’ she told him. ‘… I wish to God I was not made as I am’. Her dislike of sexual intercourse with Mark gave her the idea, her biographer Gretchen Gerzina suggests, that she could ‘sleep with him without being “unfaithful” to Lytton’. All the same, she felt miserable at making Mark so unhappy. But what could she do?
What she could do, Gertler urged, was to live with him. ‘I shan’t worry you for much “sugar” if only I can see you and talk,’ he promised (December 1916). But he added: ‘if any other man touches any part of your beautiful body, I shall kill myself – don’t forget that! I could not bear such a thing … Some moments I wish one of us dead!’ Carrington, however, felt certain that ‘I could never live with you sexually day after day,’ though conceding: ‘I see no reason why another summer it should not be a few months.’ Their intermittent love-making was deeply frustrating for Gertler, and became worse whenever Carrington explained to him it was only ‘because you want me sexually that you are miserable’ or comforted him with the news that it was merely ‘my corporeal body [that] has left you’. The quarrels between them this winter multiplied. He scorned her for trying to look like a boy, with her short hair, lack of make-up and fondness for wearing trousers – then, regretting his anger, showered her with apologies. ‘As for trousers, forgive me for having grumbled – I don’t really mind. I may even take up wearing a skirt!’
If only they could reach ‘a much broader relationship like old friends’, Carrington believed (25 March 1917) she would not be so frightened of hurting him or of his retaliation. ‘I want you to meet my friends & share my interests,’ she explained. Yet when Leonard and Virginia lent her Asheham, she went there not with Mark, but with Barbara and Saxon Sydney-Turner, and they passed the time like children, tobogganing on tea-trays across the Downs. The conclusion to which Gertler felt himself driven was that their relationship ‘has one fault and that is we do not contrive to be in the country enough together’. He therefore invited her again to Gilbert Cannan’s enchanted Mill House at Cholesbury in Hertfordshire and she haphazardly extended the invitation to Lytton, promising him a fire in his bedroom. Sensibly he declined.
Carrington had been horrified by the publication of Mendel, Gilbert Cannan’s roman à clef dedicated to ‘D.C.’ ‘How angry I am over Gilbert’s Book,’ she had written to Mark (1 November 1916). ‘Everywhere this confounded gossip, and servant-like curiosity. Its ugly and so damned vulgar.’ D.H. Lawrence had disliked it (‘it is a piece of journalism, absolutely without a spark of creative fire’), though Virginia had found it ‘interesting’ on account of the facts it provided about the younger generation. But Cannan, too, was now in despair, having fallen in love with a South African girl aged nineteen. Unable to believe that such a beautiful woman really loved him, unable to rid himself of this requited passion or contain it within his marriage, he had suffered a breakdown. ‘The bursting of the cloud of insanity … has been growing and growing … the facts are appalling,’ he confided to Gertler. ‘… My dear old Mark, we do seem to go through these things together … I wish I had your toughness.’
But Gertler did not feel at all tough. He felt vulnerable to whatever Carrington wrote or said or did. Their relationship was brought to a crisis by two deaths. In the first week of February 1917 Gertler’s father died. It was ‘the worst day I’ve had in my life’. Carrington had been hoping to hear something of her brother Teddy, missing in action since the previous autumn, but the passing of his birthday that month without news finally convinced her that he was now dead. ‘I am losing hope of Teddy,’ she admitted (26 February 1917). ‘Its beginning to depress me terribly sometimes.’ Gertler desperately needed to assuage his grief with sexual love; but Carrington needed the comfort of solitude. They met, and he lost control. ‘You could have avoided all that dreadfulness by just letting me go away quietly,’ she wrote to him afterwards. ‘… It is not that I do not love you, it is that I was sad and could not make love to you. When one is in sorrow one feels isolated curiously, and to be forced into another’s animal passion suddenly makes it almost a nightmare.’
So she turned for solace over her brother not to Mark but to Lytton. ‘You will not mind if I want to see you often,’ she wrote to him (26 February 1917). ‘For its wretched being alone and knowing how he went – without ever having been seen or loved. He had the independence of a child like Poppet,31 all his joys contained inside himself – made by himself.’
Lytton’s kindness to her, his compassion and gentleness, was her one source of relief. Her adoration of him deepened. She knew that there must always be limits to their relationship, but it was a satisfaction simply to be with him whenever that was possible; and when it was not, to receive and memorize his marvellous letters. She believed that she understood him, inexplicable as he was, better than anyone. In his reply to her from Alderney Manor, where he was staying with Augustus and Dorelia John,32 Lytton ruefully apologizes (8 March 1917) for his inability to do more for her.
‘I fear I am at times a trifle – unsatisfactory. Is it age, sex, or cynicism? But perhaps it’s really only appearance – of one sort or another. The fellow, as they say, (only they don’t) is good at heart. I wish I could be of more avail – I often think that if the layer of flesh over my bones were a few inches thicker I might be. But that is another of the tiresome arrangements of the world … Ma chère, I’m sure I do sympathise with your feelings of loneliness. I know what it is so horribly well myself.’
If only Mark were more like Lytton – and in some ways Lytton more like Mark! Carrington could not reconcile her attachment to them both. She shrank from making a decision between them. They were so dissimilar she could not possibly consider them as rivals. Yet a decision of some sort would have to be made.
For Easter Carrington went down to stay at Lord’s Wood, her friend Alix Sargant-Florence’s home on Marlow Common – ‘a very nice house’, as she described it to Gertler, ‘one of the best sort. With great comforts and a most beautiful bathroom you ever saw with coloured tiles.’ The other guests were Lytton and James, Harry Norton and Maynard Keynes. ‘I hope you will not think things have been done on too grand a scale,’ Alix wrote to her mother (3 April 1917). ‘But we want so much to make the party a success & every member is a glutton – Lytton (fussy), Maynard (voracious), James (systematic), Norton (hypochondriac), Carrington (healthy) & myself (greedy).’ The sun shone, Carrington, happily dressed in breeches, roamed the great woods, painted the greedy intellectual Alix, read Plato ‘and was very excited over it’, and in the evening listened to James playing Bach and Beethoven at the pianola. Afterwards Lytton remembered (10 April 1917) ‘quaffing Chianti twice a day, gorging Périgord Pie, dreaming by the fire and perpetually putting off the Grande Expédition’. Sometimes they read plays representing Bloomsbury’s comic and tragic views of the world – Vanbrugh’s The Relapse and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida – ‘which was great fun’, Carrington wrote. ‘Only I was so agitated when it came to my part that I could hardly enjoy it as much as I should.’
Soon Carrington was to find ‘a brilliant new game, completely shutting my eyes’, she told Lytton (3 August 1917), ‘and being a blind girl led by Alix’. It was natural for her to follow Alix whose love for James, which had begun at The Lacket eighteen months ago, seemed so similar to her own love for Lytton. This Easter party at Lord’s Wood was the opening of Alix’s three-year campaign to win James – a campaign that had to overcome James’s infatuation for Noel Olivier as well as to absorb Alix’s own affairs with Bunny Garnett (inspiring him with ‘a longing to commit murder and rape’) and Harry Norton which Virginia mockingly analysed as ‘Copulation every 10 days in order to free his suppressed instincts!’ Never knowing when she was beaten, Alix knew very well what she wanted, and though the difficulties of her campaign revealed ‘her sepulchral despair – poor woman’, she pursued this quest of James, Virginia observed, with an ‘air of level headed desperation’.33
These few days at Lord’s Wood had a decisive effect on Carrington. On her last day there she wrote two letters, one to Mark telling him something of her feelings for Lytton and arranging to meet him on the following Monday afternoon; and the other to Lytton – who had just left Marlow – asking to see him the evening of the same day. On Sunday she travelled up by train to London, and the next morning woke from a disquieting dream of her brother Teddy drowning at sea. She took a bus to Penn Studio, where she found Gertler calm and ghostly. At first they talked nervously about pictures. Then he asked her what she intended to do, how she wanted to plan her life. She had been prepared for all sorts of scenes, and his control disarmed her. For she had decided to leave him. ‘I became more and more wretched and wept,’ she scrawled in her diary. ‘It seemed like leaving the warm sun in the fields and going into a dark and cold wood surrounded by trees which were strangers. I suddenly looked back at the long life we had had between us of mixed emotions. But always warm because of his intense love and now I had to leave it all and go away.’
For the first time Gertler seems to have become aware that Carrington meant this meeting to signal the end between them; and he too broke down and sobbed. His tears were terrible and made her feel hateful to herself. ‘For he wanted to die and I thought how much this love mattered to him,’ she wrote, ‘and yet in spite [of] its greatness I could not keep it, and must leave. His loneliness was awfull.’
Shortly afterwards they left the studio and had tea together in a café, hardly speaking at all. He asked her whether she intended to go and live with Lytton and she told him that she did not.
‘But he may love you,’ Gertler protested.
‘No, he will not,’ she answered flatly.
This seemed to make their separation easier for him to accept. But he still begged her to go on seeing him as a friend, a brother, though both of them knew that such an arrangement could not work. As the time came for them to part they grew embarrassed. ‘How very much I cared for him suddenly came upon me,’ she wrote. ‘The unreality, the coldness of Lytton.’ They went by bus through the rain to the British Museum. It was a relief to be on the move and they laughed sometimes on the way. When they arrived, Carrington left him, ‘frightfully sick with a bad pain in my side’.
She returned to her rooms, which she was now sharing with Alix, had a hot bath and dressed for the evening. Lytton was already downstairs having tea with Alix and her mother. Carrington joined them, but felt too sick to pay much attention, though she observed with a mixture of fascination and dread how, despite knowing what she must have gone through with Mark, Lytton ‘sat there quite calmly, quibbling and playing lightly with his words’. Later, the two of them went out to dinner, and Carrington was glad to prolong the conversation about Lytton’s friends and illnesses. But soon, the weight of what was being left unspoken began pressing upon her. The time they took over dinner was appalling. Should she speak up now in the restaurant or wait until Lytton took her home? He seemed unaware of her anxiety.
Then, when they got back to Gower Street and had settled down in front of the fire, he finally asked her what had happened, and she tried to explain.
‘I thought I had better tell Mark, as it was so difficult going on,’ she said.
‘Tell him what?’ Lytton inquired.
‘That it couldn’t go on. So I just wrote and said it.’
‘What did you say in your letter?’
Carrington hesitated. ‘I thought you knew.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I said that I was in love with you. I hope you don’t mind very much.’
‘But aren’t you being rather romantic?’ Lytton asked. ‘And are you certain?’
‘There’s nothing romantic about it,’ she answered wryly.
‘What did Mark say?’
‘He was terribly upset.’
Lytton looked alarmed. ‘Did he seem angry with me?’
‘No. He didn’t mention you.’
‘But it’s too incongruous,’ he protested. ‘I’m so old and diseased. I wish I was more able.’
‘That doesn’t matter.’
‘What do you mean? What do you think we had better do about the physical?’
‘Oh I don’t mind about that.’
Lytton paused. ‘That’s rather bad,’ he said.
As their discussion progressed, Lytton again brought up their physical incompatibility and the responsibility for what they were doing. ‘They will think I am to blame,’ he said. Carrington repeated that she knew what she was doing and that if there were fault, it was hers. ‘I wish I was rich,’ Lytton remarked, ‘and then I could keep you as my mistress.’ But this angered Carrington, and she told him that no amount of money would make any difference, to which he ruefully assented.
‘Then he sat on the floor with me,’ Carrington wrote in her diary, ‘and clasped my hands in his and let me kiss his mouth, all enmeshed in the brittle beard and my inside was as heavy as lead, as I knew how miserable it was going to be.’34
Carrington hoped that he might stay the night with her, this night of all nights, but soon he got up and said he must leave. Alone, she was suddenly overpowered by ‘the misery at parting and my hatred of myself for caring so much. And at his callousness – He was so wise and just.’
A little later she wandered downstairs to Alix, and began talking with her long into the night – of how to cope with her worship of Lytton, of how to arrange their lives together, of how to avoid the necessity for secrecy and deception.
Why had this happened to her? And although no answer presented itself, and ‘there was no consolation’, she felt relief at being able to discuss the problem with someone who comprehended so well. And as she talked on, later and later, it seemed as though in a little while a solution must be found, and then a new and wonderful life would begin. And it was clear to her, as it had been to another before her, that the end was nowhere yet in sight, and that the most tortuous and difficult part of it was only just beginning.