one of the most pathetic
sights however
is to see the ghost of queen
victoria going out every
evening with the ghost
of a sceptre in her hand
to find mr lytton strachey
and bean him it seems she beans
him and beans him and he
never knows it
Don Marquis, ‘archy goes abroad’
from archy’s life of mehitabel
‘The agitations are of course terrific. Do you think there is no end to love affaires and one can never say “c’est fini”?’
Carrington to Alix Strachey (11 May 1925)
Reviewing a book called Fifty Years of a Good Queen’s Reign in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1886, Bernard Shaw had called for a new class of royal biography. ‘The truth is that queens, like other people, can be too good for the sympathies of their finite fellow-creatures,’ he wrote. ‘A few faults are indispensable to a really popular monarch … What we need now is a book entitled “Queen Victoria: by a Personal acquaintance who dislikes her” … The proper person for the work would be some politically indifferent devil’s advocate who considers the Queen an over-rated woman and who would take a conscientious delight in disparaging her.’1
Such conscientiousness was widely expected from Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria thirty-five years later. Among contemporary biographers he was the outstanding devil’s advocate. Though he had not been a personal acquaintance of the Queen, he had acquired ‘private information’, referred to in his footnotes, from Lady Lytton (widow of his godfather, the first Earl) who had been one of her ladies-in-waiting. He had no political ideology and he was known for taking intense delight in revealing ‘the hidden quality of things’.2 What other writer of non-fiction could so disparage a public reputation by linking it incongruously to the subject’s private life, especially the sexuality of that private life? He was anxious, he had promised his cousin Edith Plowden, not to make Victoria appear ‘ridiculous’ since she was a ‘great queen’. 3 At the same time he was writing to his brother James (20 November 1920): ‘It’s quite clear that Queen Victoria was a martyr to analeroticism.’ The biographical difficulty, he added, lay in steering ‘the correct course between discretion and indiscretion’ – that is providing a serious sexual subtext to the regal panoply of his narrative.
Strachey’s originality as a biographer partly derived from his sexual temperament and psycho-sexual insights. In Eminent Victorians he had shown the inflated ambitions of Cardinal Manning and the destructive energies of Florence Nightingale flaring out from the suppressed fires of their sexuality. He also attributed Thomas Arnold’s failure as an educational reformer to sexual fears beneath his attitudinizing moral righteousness. ‘Was he to improve the character of his pupils by gradually spreading round them an atmosphere of cultivation and intelligence?’ Strachey asked. ‘By bringing them into close and friendly contact with civilized men, and even, perhaps, with civilized women? By introducing into the life of his school all that he could of the humane, enlightened, and progressive elements in the life of the community? On the whole, he thought not.’ Finally he allows us to see the extreme imperialist section of the British Government easily misleading General Gordon, whose lack of self-knowledge arises from a lifelong retreat from his true sexuality, the nature of which Lytton hints at several times (‘his soul revolted against dinner-parties and stiff shirts; and the presence of ladies – especially fashionable ladies – filled him with uneasiness’). He was to give a similar interpretation of the Prince Consort’s character in Queen Victoria.
Queen Victoria is presented like a romantic novel beneath whose surface moves a current of subversive irony. ‘You’ve discovered a new style which gives the essential and all-pervading absurdity of most human and all official life without losing anything of its pathos,’ Roger Fry wrote to him (18 April 1921). ‘You’re so kind and so unsparing. It seems to me more nearly a true perspective than anyone’s yet found.’
The characters arrange themselves into three categories. There are the unseen powers and immaterial beings who lurk in shadowy recesses and mysteriously control the event-plot; there are some highly-coloured portraits-in-miniature of nineteenth-century prime ministers who believe they control events; and then there are the heroine and hero round whom all these events cluster.
The Duchess of Kent, Baroness Lehzen, King Leopold I and Baron Stockmar are all used by Strachey as mechanical tricks of his trade to dramatize the battle for political power behind the scenes. As latent supremacy passes from one to the other, so the kaleidoscope of the biography shifts. While Victoria is growing up a fierce struggle develops between the child’s mother and her governess – and it is the governess, Lehzen, who emerges triumphant. ‘Discreet and victorious, she remained in possession of the field,’ Strachey writes. ‘More closely than ever did she cleave to the side of her mistress, her pupil, and her friend; and in the recesses of the palace her mysterious figure was at once invisible and omnipresent.’ In international affairs Victoria’s uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians, tries to gain ascendancy over the young Queen. It is, however, Leopold’s ‘confidential agent’, Baron Stockmar, who at length carries all before him. If Victoria is the Baroness’s pupil, Albert is the genie whom the Baron summons out of his bottle to enact his every wish. After Albert and Victoria’s marriage a Punch-and-Judy show starts up, Stockmar and Lehzen violently activating the royal marionettes upon the stage until Punch-Albert-Stockmar is acclaimed the winner. Lehzen ‘lost ground perceptibly’, Strachey records. Then Stockmar gives the Prince the annihilating powers of his magic: ‘He spoke, and Lehzen vanished for ever.’
Strachey’s creation of Stockmar as an Invisible Man who holds prodigious sway over Albert was based on the mythical version which Stockmar himself conceived in a trance of retrospective optimism. With his trap-door exits and entrances, he is the good fairy of this pantomime, while the royal couple become two mandarin figures nodding or shaking their heads as their master pleases. The satisfaction of Stockmar’s ‘essential being lay in obscurity, in invisibility’, we are told, ‘– in passing, unobserved, through a hidden entrance, into the very central chamber of power, and in sitting there, quietly, pulling the subtle strings that set the wheels of the whole world in motion’. The end of Stockmar is heralded by the death of Albert. Deprived of his medium, the Baron is suddenly redundant: a magician without a wand; a ventriloquist without a dummy. ‘The Baron, by his fireside at Coburg, suddenly saw the tremendous fabric of his creation crash down into sheer and irremediable ruin. Albert was gone, and he had lived in vain.’ No longer animated to new life by the master puppet-maker, Victoria can only go through her old tricks again. Her friendship with Disraeli is a distorted mummery of her earlier love for Melbourne; her dislike of Gladstone recalls her coldness to Peel. Sedately she enters her second childhood.
Victoria’s early years, under the domination of her mother the Duchess of Kent, are likened to those of a novice in a convent. ‘The child grew into the girl, the girl into the young woman; but still she slept in her mother’s bedroom; still she had no place allowed her where she might sit or work by herself. An extraordinary watchfulness surrounded her every step.’ Above all, the young Victoria was protected from the contaminating presence of men. Yet the female atmosphere that enclosed her, Strachey suggests, may have given rise to an unforeseen reaction: ‘perhaps, after all, to the discerning eye, the purity would not be absolute. The careful searcher might detect, in the virgin soil, the first faint traces of an unexpected vein.’ For all the care taken over her upbringing, ‘there was something deep within her which responded immediately and vehemently to natures that offered a romantic contrast with her own.’
It is this hidden sexuality that Strachey explores when describing Victoria’s relationships with her prime ministers. He makes the romantic contrast between the young Queen and Lord Melbourne particularly striking. We see Lord M. not only through the fascinated gaze of Victoria, but also with the admiring eyes of her biographer. The result is the most vivid impressionistic study in the book. Charles Greville described Melbourne as ‘a man with a capacity for loving without having anything in the world to love’. This undirected capacity for loving suddenly focuses upon the Queen. Strachey picks out images that suggest the romantic sexuality of their attachment: ‘the autumn rose, in those autumn months of 1839, came to a wondrous blooming. The petals expanded, beautifully, for the last time. For the last time in this unlooked-for, this incongruous, this almost incredible intercourse, the old epicure tasted the exquisiteness of romance.’ Robert Peel possessed none of Melbourne’s sex-appeal. He seemed embarrassed by women and his manner was unattractively pompous in their company. Since he made little impression on Victoria, he occupies little space in her biography.
After her marriage, Victoria (whose simple pleasures, Strachey tells us, were mostly physical) lost her ‘bold and discontented’ look, and her infatuation for Lord Melbourne gently faded. Obsessed by her husband, her response to any man was decided by his opinion alone. The jaunty and volatile Palmerston, to whom she might otherwise have been attracted, repelled her because he represented all that was most hostile to the Prince Consort in the spirit of England. But Strachey introduces the gipsyish figure of Tsar Nicolas I of Russia to remind us that Victoria was aroused by handsome men.
After Albert’s death this power of appreciation again blossomed: whenever Victoria’s sexual instinct came into play Albert’s posthumous endorsement was taken for granted. He had preferred Gladstone to Disraeli, yet because Gladstone behaved towards her as if she were a public meeting rather than a woman, she could never warm to him as she did to Disraeli, who gave her back her feminine self-confidence. Strachey passes swiftly over Gladstone as he had done over Peel, but his portrait of Disraeli is almost as sympathetic as his Melbourne. ‘After the long gloom of her bereavement, after the chill of Gladstonian discipline, she expanded to the rays of Disraeli’s devotion like a flower in the sun.’
Strachey’s Victoria is a woman who becomes dependent on men. Though shrewd, she has none of the political genius of Queen Elizabeth. Her politics belonged to the eighteenth century. She suspected political zeal and was more at ease in her later years with her Highland gillie John Brown and her Indian attendant Munshi Abdul Karim than with politicians. To overcome Albert’s mute protest from the grave, she invented an obscure spiritual bridge – ‘the gruff, kind, hairy Scotsman was, she felt, in some mysterious way, a legacy from the dead. She came to believe at last – or so it appeared – that the spirit of Albert was nearer when Brown was near.’
Victoria’s deepest happiness came from her marriage to Albert, which forms the central panel in the biography. She was swept off her feet by a violent sexual upheaval described in highly charged romantic language: ‘Albert arrived; and the whole structure of her existence crumbled into nothingness like a house of cards. He was beautiful – she gasped – she knew no more. Then, in a flash, a thousand mysteries were revealed to her.’
Although the Prince was a mirror of manly beauty in the eyes of the Queen, his constitution was not strong and ‘owing either to his peculiar upbringing or to a more fundamental idiosyncrasy he had a marked distaste for the opposite sex’. Strachey told Hesketh Pearson that he had intended to suggest that Albert was homosexual. This must be taken as the key to several passages which bring out Albert’s melancholy and isolation: ‘A shy young foreigner, awkward in ladies’ company, unexpansive and self-opinionated, it was improbable that, in any circumstances, he would have been a society success … Really, they thought, this youth was more like some kind of foreign tenor … From the support and the solace of true companionship he was utterly cut off.’
Strachey sees in Albert something of his own loneliness. His Prince Consort has the power of arousing an idolatry that does not answer his emotional needs. But he could not turn elsewhere for companionship. This was his ‘curious position’ to which Strachey returns in a later paragraph: ‘The husband was not so happy as the wife. In spite of the great improvement in his situation, in spite of a growing family and the adoration of Victoria, Albert was still a stranger in a strange land, and the serenity of spiritual satisfaction was denied him … Victoria idolized him; but it was understanding that he craved for, not idolatry … He was lonely.’ The fascination of this marriage for Strachey is clearly disclosed when he asks: ‘was he the wife and she the husband?’ and answers, ‘It almost seemed so.’ From resembling a foreign tenor Albert changes during the course of his marriage into an idealized butler. By adapting himself body and soul to the role of Prince Consort, he sacrifices what is original in his character and becomes the caricature of a worthy man. What pricked Strachey’s curiosity was the underlying ascendancy of Victoria. Only when we see Victoria through the eyes of her declining husband are we made to feel a repugnance for her.
After the death of Albert, and during Victoria’s old age, Strachey’s attitude softens to the Queen. His last two chapters contain a full inventory of her shortcomings – her imperialism and religious obscurantism, her disapproval of the memoirs of Greville, her insistence on etiquette, her complacency, pride, egotism, insensitivity. It is a formidable list – yet Strachey seems more amused than censorious. Victoria’s middle-class morals were really, we are led to believe, a development of her family affection. Her passion for John Brown contributes to that most loved of English qualities, eccentricity. Her collecting instinct, which is described in terms of an obsessional neurosis, has its roots in her fear of death, so that our hearts are touched. Even her indefensible insistence upon changing the form of the verdict in criminal cases involving insanity is partly excused as being due to her memory of Albert’s feelings on the subject. This picture of the Queen’s old age is framed with the abiding love of her people. In many ways she did not merit such devotion. She was out of step with her times and often insufferable to those near her. Yet the extraordinary loyalty persisted, so that each limitation of character Strachey points to only serves to increase our wonder at this spell. In the penultimate chapter he writes:
‘The Queen was hailed at once as the mother of her people and as the embodied symbol of their imperial greatness, and she responded to the double sentiment with all the ardour of her spirit. England and the people of England, she knew it, she felt it, were, in some wonderful and yet quite simple manner, hers … At last, after so long, happiness – fragmentary, perhaps, and charged with gravity, but true and unmistakable none the less – had returned to her.’
This tenderness can partly be attributed to Strachey having associated the Queen with his mother. It seemed that the ‘cool and unsparing portrayer of the Victorian notables was no longer the aloof scrutineer’, wrote the critic Ivor Brown. ‘Following the Queen herself down the decades he found himself at last engaged in a sentimental journey.’4 The relief in the country was prodigious. Strachey had come to curse, remarked G.M. Trevelyan, and stayed to bless. ‘Much as I liked your last book,’ he congratulated him (6 May 1921), ‘I think it beats it a lot.’
Strachey’s treatment of Victoria proved the truth of Bernard Shaw’s assertion that ‘a few faults are indispensable to a really popular monarch’. The biography inaugurated a new and legendary view of the Queen – a whimsical, teasing, half-admiring, half-mocking view that found in Victoria a quaintly impressive symbol of a quaintly impressive age. The book, which was translated into more than twenty languages, was an instant success. In Britain the first five thousand copies were sold out within twenty-four hours and another four impressions printed within the year; in the United States it was even more popular, going through seventeen impressions during the 1920s. Many critics came to regard it as a masterpiece of biography, a technical tour de force. ‘To mould this vast material into a synthetic form,’ wrote Harold Nicolson; ‘to convey not merely unity of impression but a convincing sense of scientific reality; to maintain throughout an attitude of detachment; to preserve the exquisite poise and balance of sustained and gentle irony, and to secure these objects with no apparent effort … this, in all certainty, is an achievement which required the very highest gifts of intellect and imagination.’5 Strachey had not only re-created the Queen, he had extended the architecture of biography. ‘He it was who first saw the possibilities of this new medium,’ wrote David Cecil. ‘He it was who evolved the technical equipment for its expression. We may extend his building, but we must always construct on his foundations. He was the man who established the form.’6
Strachey had revolutionized the art of historical biography by showing that it could use one of the genres of fiction, but few biographers or historians followed this direction. ‘The fate of this wonderful book has been extremely sad,’ wrote the novelist and critic Nigel Dennis. ‘It appeared when kings and queens were on the way out among historians, yielding sovereignty to economics and social studies. As Strachey’s overwhelming interest was in the characters of Victoria and Albert, his book was regarded as frivolous – a stigma that it has kept to this very day.’7 In the opinion of the historian E.H. Carr, Lytton’s work was a contribution to literature rather than history. ‘To Lytton Strachey, historical problems were always, and only, problems of individual behaviour and individual eccentricity,’ explained Hugh Trevor-Roper. ‘… Historical problems, the problems of politics and society, he never sought to answer, or even to ask.’8 Also the form of romantic novel into which Strachey had shaped his biography was already a debased form in fiction and did not commend itself to serious contemporary novelists. Wyndham Lewis poured scorn on his celebration of ‘the quiet little great’, at the head of which ‘dazzling élite is usually some whimsical, half-apologetic, but very much sheltered and coddled projection of himself’. E.M. Forster found his ‘skippy butterfly method’ limiting, and Virginia Woolf agreed that it was ‘flimsy’. She had been pleased to have the biography dedicated to her, but ‘my jealousy is twinged’ she admitted after seeing its great critical and commercial success. ‘I expect’, Forster hazarded, ‘he has written an important work,’ and this eventually became Virginia’s conclusion too. Strachey had probably done for the old Queen ‘what Boswell did for the old dictionary maker’, she wrote at the end of the 1930s. ‘In time to come Lytton Strachey’s queen Victoria will be Queen Victoria, just as Boswell’s Johnson is now Dr Johnson. The other versions will fade and disappear. It was a prodigious feat.’9
As for Lytton, he came to doubt whether he had put enough subversive energy into his subtext. When his brother James reported from Vienna that Sigmund Freud preferred Eminent Victorians to Queen Victoria, he replied (15 February 1922): ‘I was delighted to hear of the Doctor’s approval of Eminent Victorians, and I agree with his preference of it to Q.V.’
‘Private life continues to flow on very smoothly,’ Lytton wrote to James. ‘The curious ménage or ménages work, I think, quite well. Ralph is really a charming creature, and seems quite content, and Carrington appears to be happy.’
Lytton himself was more than ever the social lion, faithfully sending Carrington accounts of the other animals as he wandered through this grand menagerie. After dining with the Sitwells, he was taken off ‘to an incredibly fearful function in Arnold Bennett’s establishment’, he wrote (28 June 1921). ‘He was not there, but she was – oh my eye, what a woman!
‘It was apparently some sort of Poetry Society. There was an address (very poor) on Rimbaud etc. by an imbecile Frog; then Edith Sitwell appeared, her nose longer than an ant-eater’s, and read some of her absurd stuff; men Eliot – very sad and seedy – it made one weep; finally Mrs Arnold Bennett recited, with waving arms and chanting voice, Baudelaire and Verlaine till everyone was ready to vomit. As a study in half-witted horror the whole thing was most interesting. The rooms were peculiarly disgusting, and the company very miscellaneous … Why, oh why, does Eliot have any truck with such coagulations? I fear it indicates that there’s something seriously wrong with him.’
The demands of Lytton’s social life may have made him less alert that summer to impending changes to their ménage-á-trois. Carrington’s ‘visionary days’ at Yegen had stayed bright in her mind. In her daydreams she saw Gerald Brenan as a creature romantically cast adrift like herself. It was his innocence she loved. He did not even realize she was flirting with him when she wrote beguilingly to tell him that she could be ‘very fond of two or three people’, that she thought of him ‘with great emotion’, and that when he came to visit her at Tidmarsh she would feed him with ‘strawberry ices, & cream, & cheese straws’ and he would be allowed to ‘drink Lytton’s port’.
Though Gerald was ‘always being delighted’ by Carrington’s letters, they overwhelmed him with his own loneliness. ‘You are’, he wrote (8 May 1921), ‘one of the few, almost the only, young lady (I have met few!) whom I might have fallen in love with.’ But she had been his friend Ralph’s girl, and now she was his wife. ‘If anyone is to be congratulated upon engaging on such a perilous enterprise as matrimony, I think you’re the man,’ he wrote to Ralph (1 June 1921). ‘… I can’t help adding that D.C. is scarcely less lucky.’ But Gerald did not feel lucky. ‘I am sorry for my own sake,’ he told Carrington, ‘because have love affairs I simply must, and whom shall I ever find as charming as you?’
That summer Gerald’s great-aunt adopted him as her heir and sent over a little money so that he could visit England. He arrived in mid-June. ‘I suppose we’ll meet in July and clasp each other’s honest palm,’ he had written to Ralph. On 2 July he spent a night at Tidmarsh and five days later bicycled over from his parents’ house to the White Horse at Uffington, for a picnic with Carrington. Ralph was unable to join them because of his work at the Hogarth Press, and Lytton, who distrusted picnics, stayed in London. Carrington and Gerald were therefore alone.
It was possible that day to taste the full flavour of an English summer. The sun burnt the grass, made the air tremble around them, sucked up the juices of the trees. Not a leaf stirred. The sky was a motionless dull purple as they ate their picnic on the crumbling slope of a hill, under a haystack near a little misty wood. ‘We talked and suddenly she put her arms round me and kissed me. I let her, but afterwards felt angry because I was Ralph’s friend and because she meant nothing to me …’ A fortnight later Gerald came to stay at Tidmarsh for the weekend. He was determined that nothing more should spring from this episode. ‘Then as I sat in an armchair I saw her move across the window with the evening light behind her, and I knew I was in love. It was like the first attack of flu to a Pacific Islander – I was completely, totally under from the first moment. I had fallen for her in the same way in which she had fallen for Lytton, and just as violently. And she was in love with me.’
Of these startling developments Ralph Partridge suspected nothing. He had welcomed his friend’s arrival in England with the greatest amusement and delight. Gerald was ‘the apotheosis of vagueness in man’, he reported to Noel Carrington (17 July 1921). ‘He eats, moves and sleeps, entirely unaware of the natural laws which govern these processes. He will talk anyone into a coma and withal is always interesting. Also he may very likely write a good book before he breaks his neck day-dreaming.’
Once the weekend was over, Gerald returned to London and Carrington followed him for a two-day ‘orgy of kissing’. ‘There is no need for me to tell you how fond I am of you,’ he wrote to her (29 July 1921), ‘for you can see that every time I look at you – nor of what kind my affection is, for that I only vaguely know myself. There are moments when you appear so entirely, so tormentingly beautiful that I begin to lose my head a little … [you are] a creature so beautiful that it would be a sort of madness not to fall in love with you.’ At the beginning of August Carrington left for a holiday in the Lake District with Lytton and Ralph, and Gerald prepared to take his solitary journey back to Yegen. Then a telegram arrived from Carrington asking him to join them. Without hesitation he put off his journey to Spain and set off northwards to Watendlath Farm, near Keswick in Cumberland. By this time, the party also included Marjorie Strachey, who had turned up ‘in pitch darkness and a howling tempest… having lost a reticule containing £6’, James and Alix recently returned from Vienna, much in love, busy playing chess and translating Freud.10 ‘My family leaves me gasping,’ murmured Lytton. The seven of them herded together into the small back parlour of Farmer Wilson’s sheep farm. ‘I am sitting, as you may guess, rather comatose, in a small cottage apartment,’ Lytton wrote to Virginia (23 August 1921), ‘green mountains out of the window, the stuffed head of a very old female sheep over the window.’
For Gerald these next twelve days sped by in a dream of surreptitious excitement. Everything that was beautiful and sad seemed crowded into this short period of his life. When the sun shone they would all clamber about the stony hills, until Lytton’s feet were covered with blisters and ‘I can only wear silk socks and slippers in which I totter occasionally into the air’. On rainy days the two Strachey brothers stayed crouched over the fire – Lytton reading Beckford’s Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters, and James, ‘on an enormous air-cushion balanced upon a horsehair sofa’, ruminating on the psychology of day-dreams. But whatever the weather, Ralph would go determinedly out to fish – he had ‘caught two sardines so far’ – and he was accompanied by Carrington and Gerald, carrying fish-hooks and hard-boiled eggs wrapped in newspaper. While Ralph sat, rod in hand, beside the river, the other two would kiss and cuddle behind a bank close by or farther off in a barn on the dry crackling bracken. Gerald was soon riven by guilt about this deception. He had looked forward to an intense platonic attachment leading perhaps to some poems. But within a few hours of his arrival at Watendlath Farm, everything except love was driven from his head. He was like a man drowning in the sea. That he should love his best friend’s wife became a torture – and yet he could not give up loving Carrington. There was only one right course. He would go and explain to Ralph exactly what was happening. Surely Ralph would understand. For in their desire not to be unfaithful to him they thought of themselves as being special friends and would have been shocked to have heard their liaison referred to as ‘an affair’. Nevertheless Carrington, who knew Ralph better, would not agree to divulging anything. So the kissing and the fishing continued. Carrington luxuriated in this exquisite concealment, while Gerald lived in a romantic ecstasy, feeling an increased affection, almost a gratitude, towards his friend. Each night Ralph would take Carrington to bed; each morning Gerald would wander in and sit talking on the bed ‘in a strange state of mind’. As for Ralph himself, he felt pleased that Carrington and Gerald were so amicable. He had fewer rows with his wife now that his friend had joined them. They were just like one another, he thought, vague, imaginative, hopelessly impractical – they even peeled apples in an identically clumsy way.
The others too paid them little attention. In one of his letters to Mary Hutchinson, Lytton complains that the sole adventures in the vicinity appeared to be meteorological (25 August 1921), ‘and – so far as I can see – there is precious little love-making’. The only sign from the Outer World, he informed Pippa (30 August 1921), ‘has been a vision of Mr Stephen McKenna trailing over the mountain-tops in company with a lady in magenta silk’. Altogether, it seemed, their holiday had turned out pretty uneventful.
Then, after Ralph almost caught Carrington and Brenan together, Gerald agreed to leave. ‘You can’t think how I minded sending you away,’ Carrington apologized to him (30 August 1921). ‘… my heart was almost breaking and my eyes crying when you left.’ ‘It was getting more than I could stand,’ Gerald agreed (5 September 1921). ‘I was no longer satisfied at being with you, not even kissing you – I did the only possible thing in coming away.’ But Ralph was angry that his friend had left and blamed Carrington for driving him away. She loved Ralph, but she had used Gerald for unconscious revenge against his bullying and her dependence on him for the happiness of Tidmarsh. Sometimes ‘I pour coals of contempt on my head for not taking more risks,’ she wrote to Gerald (30 August 1921), ‘for not being more adventurous, for not spending more time with you.’ Then her mood would change and she would (14 September 1921) ‘Pray God the truth will never leak out.’
As for Gerald, he felt that they were soul-mates and that Carrington had married the wrong man. ‘Oh, if I had never come back to England,’ he lamented, ‘if I never had, if I never had! I should then have been living an eventless life in Spain, calling myself happy … I have lain awake sometimes thinking that soon I shall see you no more for 8 months, and I feel absolutely sick at the thought. I do not want, as things are, to be with you any longer; but to be without you is horrible. It is like going out suddenly into complete darkness.’
‘One wonders whether one has been quite wise in coming North,’ Lytton had written to Virginia from Watendlath Farm (23 August 1921). Now early in September, he floated south again, staying with the Woolfs at Monk’s House, the Hutchinsons at Eleanor House, and the Bells at Charleston, where ‘I read for the first time the (almost) complete account of Oscar’s trials,’ he told Carrington (September 1921). ‘… It is very interesting and depressing. One of the surprising features is that he very nearly got off. If he had, what would have happened I wonder? I fancy the history of English culture might have been quite different, if a juryman’s stupidity had chanced to take another turn.’
There were plenty of invitations this autumn: from Ottoline and Lady Astor, the Sitwells, Lady Colefax and Princess Bibesco. At Cambridge, as Maynard’s guest, he met another batch of post-war undergraduates, and grew absorbed again by Apostolic affairs. Among those who became his friends and whom he began inviting back for weekends to Tidmarsh were George (‘Dadie’) Rylands,11 a feline, fair-haired Etonian of great poise and elegance of dress, with a flair for stagecraft, then in his first year at King’s and much under the influence of Sheppard; a brilliant and precocious logician Frank Ramsey, whose brother became Archbishop of Canterbury; and the three eldest Penrose brothers, Alec, ‘a complete womanizer’, as Lytton once called him, Lionel, the geneticist, and Roland, the art critic and biographer of Picasso. ‘He [Alec] is a man of character (rare nowadays), and determined to be aesthetic,’ Lytton informed James (28 November 1921), ‘but I rather fear with no very great turn that way… Lionel Penrose (younger brother) is at John’s, and a complete flibbertigibbet, but attractive in a childish way, and somehow, in spite of an absence of brain, quite suitable in the Society.’12
Shortly after the publication of Eminent Victorians, Geoffrey Whitworth had suggested to Lytton that he bring out a volume of selected essays, as an interlude between his two biographies. ‘Such a book would be sure of success,’ Whitworth believed (4 April 1919), ‘even though it might be slight in bulk.’ But Lytton had already begun Queen Victoria and the scheme was dropped. After his biography had appeared, Lytton’s mind did not immediately revert to this idea. He discussed various biographical projects with Virginia, in particular the ‘History of the Reign of George IV,‘ which she considered to be a magnificent subject for him. But there were difficulties. ‘The worst of George IV’, he said one afternoon over tea at Verreys, ‘is that no one mentions the facts I want. History must be written all over again. It’s all morality.’ ‘And battles,’ Virginia added.
While he was thus undecided, Chatto & Windus wrote to remind him of Whitworth’s original proposition for a volume of essays, this time making him a definite offer. Lytton at once accepted and opened up bargaining with his American publishers, Harcourt Brace. ‘I don’t think you heard the end of my negotiations with Mr Brace,’ he reported to James (28 November 1921), ‘– they were perfectly hectic, and I spent days in which I alternated between the vast halls of the Hotel Cecil and the office of the Authors’ Society, where poor Mr [Herbert] Thring13 assisted me with his advice and exclamations.
‘Mr Brace was a very pale, worn out American, with the inevitable tortoises, and we had a high old time, struggling and bargaining in the strangest style. I made a gallant effort to recapture the copyright of Victoria, but I found that he wanted more for it than I was willing to give, and it ended by my agreeing to let him have my next book (on very good terms) and the offer of two others, in exchange for £1500 down [equivalent to £27,000 in 1994]. It was an extraordinary, prolonged and feverish battle, at the end of which Mr Brace nearly dropped dead, as with shaking hand and ashy face he drew out his cheque-book. He had begun by offering £1200; but at the last moment I was able suddenly to raise my terms, and in a jiffy I had made £300. I can only hope that in some mysterious way I haven’t been let in – but Mr Thring supported my every movement.’
Once these arrangements had been settled, Lytton returned to Tidmarsh where, over the next two months, he busied himself choosing from the many reviews and articles he had written since Cambridge days. Finally, he selected fourteen essays – including those on Beddoes, Blake, Sir Thomas Browne, Samuel Johnson, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Stendhal and Voltaire – all composed between 1904 and 1919, to make up this volume, passing each of them through a fine comb of textual emendation and making extensive alterations to the earlier ones such as ‘Racine’ in which he rewrote no fewer than twenty-three passages. Some of his corrections were trivial; others smoothed away awkward or redundant phrases which stood out when he read them aloud. ‘Still others’, records C.R. Sanders, who made a line-by-line comparison of the essays in the first and second versions,14 and documented all discrepancies, ‘are motivated by the desire to convert journalistic articles and reviews into literary essays.’ Footnotes were dropped or drastically reduced, adjectives cut, some new illustrative material and the occasional amusing comment were added, and the number of parallel constructions increased.
The most interesting revisions were stylistic. They were of two kinds: those which tightened his prose, and those which added emphasis to the original narrative. Some long transitional passages were either trimmed or thrown out altogether. Opinions concerning living authors were sometimes toned down or occasionally qualified by the insertion of a ‘perhaps’. A few long paragraphs were broken up to make for easier reading, but more often Lytton would fuse two paragraphs together so as to achieve an effect of greater weight. He also provided several quotations only alluded to in the earlier text.
He had thought of calling the collection Views and Reviews, but rejected this after discovering that W.E. Henley had already used it. ‘Help! Help!’ he implored Pippa (31 January 1922). ‘The title question is pressing, and I am almost desperate. What do you think of “Books and Brains” – with “French and English” added underneath on the title page? A mixture of pure literature and biography should be indicated … Send a p.c. if you or Lady S. have any suggestions.’ Two days later he decided on Books and Characters – ‘tame but harmless’, as he told Pippa adding ‘French & English’ to the title page.
Books and Characters was dedicated ‘To John Maynard Keynes’ and came out on 18 May 1922 in Britain and a month later in the United States. The press notices were generally favourable, often praising the literary criticism at the expense of the biography. A reviewer in The Times congratulated Lytton on having ‘cleared the honour of the nation. He has repaired past sacrileges by publishing the finest essay upon Racine which has ever been written in English … Mr Strachey’s is perhaps the finest critical intelligence at work in English literature to-day.’15 Middleton Murry, in the Athenaeum, described him as ‘neither iconoclast nor hero-worshipper’ but a ‘man with a critical intelligence of the first order’ who ‘goes about redressing the injustices of time’.16 To Aldous Huxley, he appeared ‘a superlatively civilized Red Indian living apart from the vulgar world in an elegant park-like reservation’, who rarely looked over the walls at the surrounding country. ‘It seethes, he knows, with crowds of horribly colonial persons. Like the hosts of Midian, the innumerable “poor whites” prowl and prowl around, but the noble savage pays no attention to them.’17
Books and Characters led to a reissue of Landmarks in French Literature the following year, and consolidated his reputation as a post-Swinburnian literary critic in the manner of Walter Raleigh and Edmund Gosse rather than a biographical innovator. Many readers were grateful for this step. ‘He had achieved some of his best, least popular work, in Landmarks in French Literature and Books and Characters,’ Hugh Trevor-Roper was to write, ‘– early works which by their sympathy seem more mature than his later, more famous studies.’18
His growing eminence was marked by the award of a Benson Silver Medal and an invitation from the Royal Society of Literature to become a member of its Academic Committee.19 This last offer he rejected and after sending back a polite letter of refusal disclaiming his ‘election’, he asked Edmund Gosse, himself on the Academic Committee, to act as his interpreter. ‘It would be futile to argue the pros and cons of Academics and similar bodies in general,’ he explained to Gosse (30 December 1922), ‘and I realise that a good case may be made out for them; but so far as I am personally concerned I am convinced that I should really be out of place in one. This is as much a matter of instinct as of reason. Perhaps it is regrettable, but the fact remains that, as Saint-Simon said of himself: “Je ne suis pas un sujet académique” … if I am ever able to do any service to Literature, it will be as an entirely independent person and not as a member of a group.’
In the United States, Books and Characters went through five more impressions that year, and in Britain the first printing of five thousand copies was sold within a month, forcing Chatto & Windus to order another five thousand copies immediately and later embarrassing them to the extent of selling fifteen thousand more copies in their Phoenix Library. Between the spring of 1918 and the autumn of 1921, Lytton had earned almost eight thousand pounds (equivalent to around £140,000 in the early 1990s), but had escaped income tax.20 ‘The authorities here seem to have overlooked my existence,’ he had confided to Maynard (11 November 1921), ‘and if this happy state of things could continue, so much the better.’ But he knew that it could not, and when Maynard came down to Tidmarsh with ‘his attendant slave’ Sebastian Sprott that Christmas, Lytton asked his advice. Maynard also gave him a ‘detailed list of stocks of every kind, in which he insists that I shall put all I have. There is no choice but to submit, and face bankruptcy.’
Following the publication of Queen Victoria, Lytton had languished somewhat. ‘I put it down to the Winter – the agony of thick underclothes, etc. etc.; but of course it may be sheer deliquescence of the brain,’ he confessed to Virginia (6 February 1922). ‘Anyhow, from whatever cause, I am sans eyes, sans teeth, sans prick, sans … but after that there can be no more sanses, – and on the whole I feel more like a fish gasping on a bank than anything else. It is terrible. I hope wildly that a change will come with the swallows …’
He had recently joined the Oriental Club, of which his father had been a prominent member,21 and this new status, he felt, suited very well his winter senility. The place was like a luxurious mausoleum. ‘Very ormolu,’ Carrington noted in one of her letters to Noel. ‘Full of old Indian Dug Outs.’ And Lytton, in a letter to Virginia (6 February 1922), described it as ‘a vast hideous building … filled with vast hideous Anglo-Indians, very old and very rich. One becomes 65, with an income of £5000 a year, directly one enters it. One is so stout one can hardly walk, and one’s brain works with an extraordinary slowness. Just the place for me, you see, in my present condition. I almost pass unnoticed with my glazed eyes and white hair, as I sink into a leather chair heavily with a copy of the Field in hand. Excellent claret too – one of the best cellars in London, by Jove. You must come! I’ll write again soon, if you can bear it.’ But when he did write again, four days later, it was the same tale of lassitude. ‘The horror of getting up is unparalleled, and I am filled with amazement every morning when I find that I have done it. To my mind there is clearly only one test of wealth, and that is – a fire in one’s bedroom. Until one can have that at any and every moment, one is poor. Oh, for a housemaid at dawn!’
Towards the end of February, Ralph took Carrington to Vienna to see James and Alix, who was ill with pleurisy, while Lytton, who paid for the journey, moved up to Gordon Square. Without an anaesthetic, the doctors had to cut a section of Alix’s ribs away to clean her lungs ‘and she can use only one lung to breathe with now,’ Carrington wrote to Lytton. ‘But ever since the operation she has been getting a little better … Poor James is very exhausted.’ She cooked special meals on a small burner for James, but was not allowed to see Alix, whose temperature rose whenever Carrington’s name was mentioned.
In London, life ‘has been proceeding in its usual style of utter dullness punctuated by hectic frenzies’, Lytton wrote to Carrington on his forty-second birthday. ‘One of the latter occurred last night – a very absurd party at Lady Astor’s to meet Mr Balfour – a huge rout – 800 extremely mixed guests – Duchesses, Rothensteins, Prime Ministers, Stracheys (male and female) – never did you see such a sight!
‘As it was pouring cats and dogs the scene of jostling taxis and motors in St James’s Square was terrific – it was practically full up. No one could get out it was so wet – for hours we sat ticking and cursing and occasionally edging an inch or two nearer the portals of bliss. To add to the confusion, various streams entered the Square by the side streets, and mingled with the cars. However the police and the good nature of the English lower classes saved the situation. If such a thing had happened in Paris it would have been simply Pandemonium. As it was, it was merely a great bore. The P.M. was leaving as we entered. Horror of horrors! The Rt. Hon. gentleman did not recognise Lytton Strachey! – though he bowed very politely – as did Mrs Lloyd George – an unparalleled frump. Mr Balfour was very complimentary behind large demi-ghostly spectacles.’
When Carrington returned from Vienna, Lytton joined her and Ralph back at Tidmarsh. All of them seemed precariously happy. ‘I miss him so much when he leaves,’ Carrington had written to Gerald (12 October 1921). ‘I love his appearance so much & there is an emptiness in the rooms & garden when he has left.’ But Ralph, who was not enjoying work at the Hogarth Press, sometimes talked of going to North Africa as a war correspondent. As for Lytton, his amorous adventures and those of his friends seemed to have become ominously suspended.
Over the past six months, since Gerald sailed away to Spain, Carrington had been writing to him every few days; and he had replied. Although Ralph insisted on reading their correspondence, he still suspected nothing – principally because there were postscripts to these letters, on separate sheets of paper, which he never saw. Now, at the beginning of April, they were all to meet again, Lytton and Carrington and Ralph and Gerald, at Larrau, as guests of Valentine and Bonamy Dobrée, in the Basses-Pyrénées. Carrington and Ralph had spent their wedding night with the Dobrées when they lived in Paris; and Gerald had stayed with them at Larrau on his way back from England the previous autumn, pouring out his feelings about Carrington to Valentine but failing to notice Valentine’s passionate interest in himself. Early in 1922 the Dobrées had visited Spain, and it was then that Valentine laid her plans with Gerald for this spring reunion. She promised to ‘distract’ Ralph so that Gerald and Carrington could be together – and even stole into his bed so that she could expound her plans more intimately. But Gerald ‘couldn’t fall in love’ with anyone but Carrington, and climbed out of bed to write to her about their new arrangements. Both of them were mad with excitement. ‘I only want to be happy with you,’ Carrington answered (12 March 1922), ‘& have as few regrets as possible. I have a feeling we might achieve this at Larrau.’ She felt additionally excited by the involvement of Valentine. ‘Everything she does moves me strangely.’ In fact she could not understand Gerald preferring herself. Valentine ‘is so much more talented beautiful, & charming than your Doric’, she pointed out. Nevertheless she was secretly ‘bringing out enough money for you to come back to England with’, she told him. ‘… Lytton is so delightful. This time I insist on you knowing him better.’
To Ralph’s joy the Dobrées’ house overlooked a trout stream. It seemed to Carrington a perfect place to re-enact the kissing and fishing of Watendlath Farm. They arrived with Lytton on 5 April and Gerald, an amazing figure leaping down the bare mountains and through the woods, appeared out of the mists four days later. All around were deep valleys coated with the greenest grass, and everywhere grew tall bracken spreading itself into arches. Beech forests covered the headwaters of the streams, and above these, standing out against the sky, pointed the sharp peaks of red and yellow rock. ‘We are pretty high up among the hills,’ Lytton wrote to Pippa (7 April 1922), ‘– a charming house full of the local furniture – armoires and cupboards innumerable – in a small village, with steep heights on every side. Everything seems quite nice, though not exciting. There is hope of fishing, when the streams, which are at present Niagaras, subside … I am writing this in a basque bed, but now I shall have to get up and go downstairs and face the family. Le père de Madame (an Anglo-Indian planter, I gather) is rather distressing. He once went out to shoot Bustards in Nagpore, but never found any … However, Madame herself is very agreeable and sings Italian songs very nicely after dinner.’
‘Valentine’s diplomacy will count for much,’ Carrington had written to Gerald. But the dark voluptuous Valentine was not a natural diplomat. It was strange that she had ever married her dry dull diminutive donnish husband22 – ‘a nimble second-rate man’, Virginia called him – unless it was on account of his complaisance. She was rumoured to have been Derain’s mistress and had been lovingly painted by Mark Gertler who stayed with her in Paris and was soon to come out to Larrau. She gave ‘a touch of genius’, Gertler said, to everything she did. Carrington, who had got to know her at the Slade, thought her as remarkable in her way as Alix.
A late snow had fallen on the lilac blossom, and while Ralph fished below, and Lytton sat silently listening to Bonamy Dobrée trying out passages from his book on Elizabethan tragedy, Gerald, upstairs in the attic, would pose for Carrington. Unfortunately Ralph appeared to have taken a violent dislike to Valentine, and was persistently rude to her, so that the atmosphere grew embarrassingly strained. But Carrington seemed more drawn to her than to Gerald who at a critical moment won back her sympathy by lapsing into impotence. Even more inexplicably, at least to Lytton, Valentine started flirting with Ralph. On the last day of their visit, to everyone’s astonishment, Ralph and Valentine fell into each other’s arms.
No sooner had this happened than, the very next morning, Lytton, Ralph and Carrington packed up and hurried away via Toulouse and Provence, back to England. They were pursued across the Continent by the passionate Valentine, and the distracted Gerald, who, absent-mindedly rejecting Valentine’s advances a second time, was delayed by having to collect a sleeping bag and the camping kit which he had abandoned on his journey from Yegen in the deep snow of the Roncesvalles Pass. They were entering ‘a vertigo of ever-intensifying complications’.
Gerald, his moods swinging wildly between elation, jealousy and despair, put up at Pangbourne during May, while Ralph proceeded openly to carry on his impetuous affair with Valentine in London, adopting a very disparaging attitude to Carrington. For some weeks it looked as if the whole Tidmarsh regime was about to disintegrate. Carrington, in despair, appealed to Lytton, who counselled patience, in the meantime sending Bonamy Dobrée some books on the Elizabethan dramatists. Up to this time, Gerald had kept his relations with Carrington confined to a more or less platonic level, out of a rather tarnished sense of loyalty to Ralph (whom he nevertheless knew to have been previously unfaithful). Now, when Ralph and Valentine went off for a few days together, he and Carrington began a sexual affair. Carrington was frightened that they might ‘spoil the pleasure we get from being friends by having complications and too many secrets from Ralph’. Confusions, she warned Gerald, disrupt intimacies. It was as if she had a presentiment that everything would go wrong. ‘I have lost something which seems to prevent me giving myself away completely ever again,’ she wrote (early June 1922). All the same, she reassured him: ‘in some ways I can give you everything and I do give you a great deal of love.’
Then the storm burst. While they were away together, Valentine revealed to Ralph that his wife and his best friend had fallen in love. She told, him of the love-making that had taken place at Watendlath Farm, and that, in the Pyrenees, Gerald, Carrington and herself had hatched an adulterous ‘Larrau Plot’ by which she should flirt with Ralph so as to leave Carrington and Gerald alone together. Valentine had not forgiven Gerald for his offhand rejections of her and, sensing her sexual superiority to Carrington, used all she had been told, and much she imagined, to establish her relationship with Ralph. But though he believed everything she told him, he would never feel much for her again. To Barbara Bagenal he confided that, regretfully, he would have to kill Gerald. He also rushed round to Mark Gertler to obtain particulars of Carrington’s sexual involvement with him. But his first actions were still more dangerous. He drank half a bottle of whisky and drove furiously down to Tidmarsh in a car that Lytton had recently given him. It seemed that he considered it quite proper for him to have a love-affair with a married woman, though outrageous for Carrington to take a lover. But there was more to it than this – there was the humiliating deception – Valentine with her ‘touch of genius’ had told him that everyone knew of the affair except himself. He liked to think that he believed in openness at all times – and in comparison to Carrington he was remarkably open. She cherished her secrecy and would conceal small quite unobjectionable matters to safeguard her privacy. The key to Ralph’s character lay in his belief that marriage and friendship meant trust and communication. His frenzy on hearing Valentine’s revelations was caused less by questions of technical infidelity – though these became important – than by the dissimulation. The knowledge of this deceit damaged his marriage to an extent that no patchings up could really heal.
After a tremendous argument with Carrington in the Mill House, Ralph dispatched a telegram to Gerald demanding to see him in London. When they met at Hogarth House he announced that unless Gerald could promise him that he had had no sexual intercourse with Carrington, he would leave her and end the marriage. Gerald, who had been secredy briefed by Carrington at the 1917 Club, concentrating his mind on Watendlath and Larrau to the exclusion of what had happened over the last month at Tidmarsh, admitted to a romantic flirtation, but denied any ‘interference’. Although his instincts were still to tell his friend the truth, he felt that he had no right, by doing so, to endanger Carrington’s life with Lytton. Besides, since Ralph was asking about an earlier period he was telling him the literal truth. Ralph, now somewhat at a loss, replied with stern uncertainty that he would have to consider what he would do, but that if he decided to go on living with Carrington, then Gerald must return to Spain and give his word never to communicate with her again. Gerald promised. There was nothing else that he could do. The first person in Carrington’s life was always Lytton, and Gerald himself could never hope to take Ralph’s place. So, briefly and for the last time, Gerald returned to Tidmarsh to tell Carrington what had happened. Over lunch with her and Lytton his hands trembled so violently he could hardly hold his knife and fork. His life seemed in ruins. He returned to London and waited for Carrington to see him once more before he set sail for Spain on 14 June. But she did not come. Instead he was besieged by Valentine which added to his distress, but came as a relief to his parents as evidence that he was not homosexual. ‘I am very sorry for him,’ Lytton wrote to Ralph. ‘He has injured himself very badly, and his life at the best of times was not a particularly pleasant one.’ The day after he sailed, Lytton sent Gerald an encouraging letter.
‘Things are still unsettled here and the first necessity is to clear the atmosphere. Letters between you might seem ambiguous to Ralph, and all ambiguities just now are to be avoided.
… I hope you will go on writing. From the little I’ve seen of your work, it seemed to me to differ in kind from everything else going about by writers of your generation. To my mind there is a streak of inspiration in it, which is very rare and very precious indeed.
… Things have turned out unhappily; but never forget that, whatever happens, and in spite of all estrangements, you are loved by those you love best.
Yours ever affectionately,
Lytton Strachey’
This letter shows the compassion of someone who had himself suffered in love-affairs. It also illustrates what Bloomsbury, at its best, meant by civilized behaviour in personal relations, and how difficult others sometimes found it to accept this behaviour. For Bloomsbury refused to accede any rights or claims to jealousy. ‘Please forgive me the unhappiness I have caused to you as well as to others and do not think too badly of me,’ Gerald wrote to Lytton the night before his departure. ‘And thank you for the kindness you have always shown me. It has been a great pleasure to me to have known you and to have caught a glimpse at Tidmarsh of people who cultivate a free, happy and civilised life. Now that I have lost my part in it, I see all its attractions.’
He had lost his best friend and the love of his life. But though he felt guilty at having contributed to their unhappiness, the turmoil still seemed senseless and unnecessary. He could not change his love or friendship, and he could not altogether regret what he had done.23 ‘But that, among reasonable people,’ he wrote to Lytton from Spain (14 July 1922), ‘I who am fond of Ralph, can be – O wonderful irony! Too fond of C, and that without being the cause of their seeing less of each other or of their affections diminishing, and without my wishing for anything new for myself – that by these good and innocent means can be so great a source of unhappiness to all of us – is nothing less to me than madness, madness, horrible madness …’
The task of reintroducing a spirit of affection into Tidmarsh during the next eighteen months was predominantly Lytton’s. Finding some common ground on which to renew their relationship presented a difficult exercise in diplomacy. First of all he had to reconcile Ralph to Carrington. Neither of them would consent to see the other until he had negotiated a face-saving settlement. He started off by assuring Carrington that he sympathized absolutely with her feelings, and that, however things might turn out, he would never leave her. Nevertheless, he insisted that she must keep this confidence to herself, and for a while at least, look with extraordinary leniency upon Ralph’s indiscretions. ‘Lytton was superb and tried to smooth it out,’ Carrington reported to Alix Strachey (19 June 1922). ‘… [He] says R’s complex about my virtue is almost insane. It has made him dreadfully wretched and reduced him to a man of nerves … R now says he can’t face living with me at moments because I am such a fraud etc. Lytton thinks it will be alright in time.’ But he warned her not to have any more affaires if she wanted to go on living with Ralph. ‘As they were not even affaires,’ she explained to Alix, ‘romances I suppose is the only word … and as I have had no others, it isn’t much sacrifice to give up this imaginary life of [a] rouée. I am now feeling as you’ll see rather grim – perhaps the end of this rather wretched business will be I’ll paint and be some good as an artist.’
Ralph himself, having tentatively agreed to return to Tidmarsh on certain conditions, was staying in the basement of Hogarth House pending Lytton’s negotiations on his behalf. ‘I think I was able to make her realize your feelings and point of view,’ Lytton wrote to him (June 1922). ‘Of course, she was, and is, terribly upset. She said that you were essential to her – that Gerald was not at all – that this crisis had made her realize more than ever before the strength of her love for you. I explained your dread of a scene, reconciliations, etc., and said you wanted to sleep in the yellow room. She quite understood. I am sure that she loves you deeply. Be as gentle with her as you can when you come.
‘We must try now to forget all those horrid details, and trust to the force of our fundamental affections to carry us through. At any rate, we know where we are now, which is a great thing.
… As for me, my dear, I can’t say how happy your decision to try going on here has made me. I suppose I could face life without you, just as I could face life with one of my hands cut off, but it would have been a dreadful blow…
… my nerves are rather on the jump, and I am longing for your presence – the best restorative I know of! I sympathise with you so absolutely, so completely, my dear, dear love. Sometimes I feel as if I was inside you! Why can’t I make you perfectly happy by waving some magic wand?
Keep this letter to yourself.’
The route having been paved for Ralph’s return, Lytton did what he could to make life at Tidmarsh delightful. He would invite over for week-ends the most amusing of his new Cambridge friends whom Ralph liked and who adored Carrington, and older luminaries such as E.M. Forster who spread a calming influence. He had also bought a car and since neither Carrington nor he understood it and ‘R.P. is a born driver’, this increased their joint dependence on Ralph together with his sense of responsibility towards them – though Lytton assured him that ‘of course you know the little car belongs to you’. Then, after Ralph complained about his job at the Hogarth Press – his poor income and prospects – Lytton stepped in and tried to reason his case with Virginia. ‘There have been various conversations on the Hogarth question – with rather indeterminate results,’ he reported to her (19 September 1922). ‘I think the poor creature is really anxious to continue, but foresees difficulties. He is already brushing up his energies! On the whole I gather that he thinks less printing and more business might be a solution. Perhaps if some department in the business could be handed over in toto to him he would fling himself into it with more zest. But this is only a vague suggestion, and so please don’t draw conclusions from it. I suppose he will write himself before long. The distance from London question is a very trying one.’
Lytton was ‘extremely adroit’ when speaking up for Ralph. It was clear that he was still tremulously in love with him, taking pleasure in his simplicity though acting in a fatherly way on behalf of both Ralph and Carrington. ‘One cannot treat lovers like rational people,’ he reminded Virginia, remembering his own tortures over Duncan and Henry. Of course it was probably true that Ralph’s uncertainties at the Hogarth Press were exacerbating the difficulties of his marriage. ‘It’s all very distressing,’ Virginia wrote to Vanessa (22 December 1922), ‘as I feel slightly responsible for that marriage … And if it is true that we are all responsible for the sins of all, surely we ought to sink together?’ Nor can it have been easy for a vigorous and educated young man to spend so much time in the Hogarth basement among the parcels and printing press. Yet Ralph threw away so many of Lytton’s valid points, debasing his arguments when, for example, hinting that he would get Lytton’s next bestseller for the Hogarth if he was promoted; or, if he got the sack, describing how he would set up a rival publishing house at Tidmarsh with Lytton’s money. Such schoolboy craftiness put Virginia on edge. ‘We wont be downed by the prestige & power & pomposity of all the Benson medallists in England,’ she burst out (7 January 1923). ‘… Love is the devil.’
Love had a specially devilish effect on Ralph. ‘We have a mad bull in the house – a normal Englishman in love,’ Virginia had noted in her diary (23 June 1922), ‘& deceived.’ At the best of times he was, as Carrington had observed, ‘ill suited for any continuous labour’. Now he grew oddly undependable – lazy, industrious, grumpy, amiable, belligerent, disarming – all within a day. On the whole Virginia took Carrington’s part. She was far subtler – and besides Virginia did not ‘like to see women unhappy’. There could be no doubt that Carrington had lied, ‘but then one must lie to children’, and Ralph in the grip of his bullying passion was a child. His thoughtless remarks and insensitive actions made her blood boil whenever they inconvenienced Leonard, who would sometimes, she could see, turn white with rage. What she could not see, and Carrington did see, was that the Woolfs were ‘perfect people to know as friends, but rather difficult as overseers, & business people’. In any case, publishing was a part time profession for them and only a part time hobby to Ralph. His grumblings and bellowings from the basement rose through the house and when he came upstairs, he was often bristling like a bear. ‘I don’t like the normal when it is 1000 horse power,’ Virginia wrote (23 June 1922). ‘His stupidity, blindness, callousness, struck me more powerfully than the magic virtues of passion … It was the stupidity of virility that impressed me – & how, having made those convenient railway lines of convention, the lusts speed along them, unquestioning.’
That December, after a weekend at Tidmarsh, Leonard agreed that Ralph should give three months’ notice. ‘The breach with the Woolfs, long anticipated, has at last been achieved – by whom I can’t say,’ Ralph wrote (22 December 1922). ‘… I didn’t comprehend them and they didn’t comprehend me, two years ago, or we should never have embarked on partnership.’ There was some discussion about a Tidmarsh Press to bring out Lytton’s extravaganzas, but instead Lytton was to employ him as his secretary to answer correspondence, deal with the Inland Revenue, publishers, editors, and assist with proof reading. ‘I thank you for trying so valiantly at Tidmarsh to come to a happy ending,’ Carrington wrote to Virginia (21 December 1922). ‘But perhaps reviewing everything now it will all turn out for the best.’ Virginia would have given ‘a good deal to combine with Lytton in producing literature’, but there had been no more practical chance of achieving this perhaps than of achieving a successful marriage with him – and to have his subtle ideas blared through Ralph’s brass trumpet was exasperating. In some ways she was sorry to see him go because she liked the association with Tidmarsh. But the parting has been reasonably amiable and she was able to reassure Carrington (25 December 1922) that ‘all friendships remain intact’.
This was only one of the problems Lytton had to solve. To outward appearances the triangular ménage at the Mill House went on very much as before. ‘You have no idea what a perfect life we lead here,’ Carrington wrote to her brother Noel (25 July 1922). ‘3 Hives of Bees, 30 ducks, 30 chickens, a Forest of delicious raspberries, and peas, and a Roman Bath to bathe in out of doors. Annie who is a gay little girl of sixteen, exquisitely lovely, who cooks and housekeeps for us all and then Lytton who is a paragon of a friend, who buys new books for our delight. The new car is a great joy. We go lovely rides in it …’
But under the surface, everything was still in crisis. For Carrington these summer months were miserable, and she was often in tears. Her deceits and subterfuges shamed her. She feared that she had lost Lytton’s confidence and that it would be impossible to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives together. At the same time there seemed no alternative but to go on living at the Mill House where ‘everything was completely awfull for me’. She missed Gerald’s letters ‘more than I ever thought, in my wildest moments, I should, and when one mustn’t talk of it, it keeps on tormenting my head. But I won’t talk of him because it only makes me remember him more.’ Each day she wrote him an account of her feelings and everything that had happened since he left. ‘I shall write a life of myself at intervals in the form of letters to you,’ she recorded (14 June 1922). But she would not send it to him ‘for, perhaps a whole year’. She was so worn out that she no longer knew what was in her mind or anyone else’s mind. She still believed there existed enough between them all to make it worth going on, though perhaps it was only a matter of time before the final break-up. ‘We’ve forty years probably to think it all over!’ she wrote to Gerald. ‘… I feel a captive now. My spirit has gone … the play is over, the audience has left; the epilogue has been said.’
Lytton went on calming and reassuring her, but she felt that Ralph’s love had changed to hatred. Sometimes he was completely silent, looking so ill and upset she could not bear to see him. At other times he was gripped with such a frenzy of rage that his face would grow distorted beyond recognition. Thoughts of Carrington and Gerald were a torture to him. He longed to drive them from his imagination, yet he could not really dislike Gerald, could not cut himself off from Carrington. ‘As a friend I cannot love her,’ he wrote, ‘… as a lover, not a husband, she is so tainted … yet she has been three quarters of my life to me for many years, and I can’t operate on myself for the removal of such a vital portion without intolerable pain.’
He was openly continuing his affair with Valentine, bringing her down to Tidmarsh and sleeping with her there, while suggesting that Carrington go off to Vienna to be ‘cured’ of her lies and delusions by Dr Freud. ‘I can tell you it was pretty intolerable,’ Carrington admitted in a secret letter to Gerald later in the year (19 October 1922). Valentine seemed determined to ‘push matters as far as she can’, blowing upon the embers of Ralph’s jealousy to bring the Tidmarsh regime crashing down. It was all the more tormenting for Carrington since she had herself felt a strong sexual attraction to Valentine: ‘It follows from my lustful sapphism.’ At first she could only believe that Valentine had acted ‘unconsciously’ and did not ‘mean all this pain’. But now she saw her as a female Iago beside Ralph’s impersonation of Othello. ‘Its only when he gets with her, & she writes to him everyday, that Tidmarsh seems rather dull, & Lytton and me “cold fishes”,’ Carrington wrote in her journal for Gerald. Lytton had told her that Valentine was incapable of making Ralph happy, that had they loved each other they would already have gone away, and that Ralph was still sleeping with her chiefly from motives of revenge. It was impossible to welcome such a mischief-maker into their lives, he said, and the affair would soon die a natural death.
A little later that summer Bonamy Dobrée finally lost his patience and summoned his wife back to Larrau. She went, taking a new lover, Mark Gertler. Mark had always hated Ralph (he used to call him ‘the Policeman’) and may have felt there was some retributive justice in supplanting him. But to Lytton it seemed the best opportunity yet for Ralph and Carrington to get on terms again. This might more easily come about, he believed, if he himself were not there looking on. He therefore made plans to leave for a fortnight in Venice with Maynard’s lover Sebastian Sprott. But before leaving, he invited ‘bright little Barbara’ Bagenal down to Tidmarsh to keep an eye on Carrington.
Lytton and Sebastian put up at the Casa Frollo in the Giudecca, a ‘nice sort of broken-down place, which will just suit us’, Lytton had told his sister Pippa (22 June 1922). The one drawback was a typically Venetian one – noise. ‘An ice factory, if you please, is next door, and naturally chooses the hour of 3 a.m. for its most agitating operations – sounds of terrific collapses and crushes shake the earth, and I awake in terror of my life.’ Otherwise everything was as beautiful as the previous year when Ralph and Carrington had joined him for their honeymoon. ‘Venice is very lovely – but oh dear! not so lovely by half as it was last year,’ he wrote to Carrington (July 1922). ‘Such a difference does the mind make upon matters! Sebastian is really charming – most easy to get on with, most considerate, very gay, and interested in everything that occurs … Of course he is young – also, somehow, not what you might call an “intimate” character – which has its advantages too. Nor is he passionate – but inclined if anything to be sentimental, though too clever to be so in a sickly style. His sentimentality is not directed towards me …’
Lytton’s own sentimentality was directed towards a ‘sublime’ gondolier named Francesco, whom he had already eyed on his earlier stay there. ‘Francesco carries one to the Piazzetta in about 10 minutes, according to wind and obstacles,’ he wrote to Ralph (24 June 1922).
‘He is exactly the same as ever. It was luck being able to have him … a few weeks after we went away last summer a new rule was made by which no one was allowed to hire a gondolier for more than a day at a time – except old clients – under which heading I mercifully come! Apparently Berenson last July tried to take Francesco as I did, with the result that a mob of enraged gondoliers collected booing and shouting, and he was nearly torn limb from limb. But I was at once recognised, and no mob assailed me … the rule was made by the degraded gondoliers, who found they were losing all their custom. It seems to me next year they’ll do away with the blessed privileges of “old clients” as well – the pigs … Sebastian enjoys everything very much, and keeps up a constant chatter of a mild kind, which just suits me at the present moment. I can’t say he looks ultra respectable, with a collarless shirt, very décolleté, and the number of glad eyes he receives is alarming. However so far his behaviour has been all that could be desired.’
The news from Tidmarsh during these weeks was bleak. Ralph had suggested that the only way of reviving their relationship was for Carrrington to have his child – his parents would certainly then give them some money. But this seemed to her impossible. At moments she even contemplated ending her life. Barbara was ‘very understanding and I think her calmness and simple affection has a wonderful influence,’ she wrote to Lytton. But she was sleeping badly and realized in his absence how much she relied on Lytton. ‘Thank you, Lytton for all you have done for me, and for him, trying to make us both happy,’ she wrote (21 June 1922). ‘You alone prevented me many days from committing acts of madness and flying away somewhere.’
It did not sound as if they were drawing any closer and at moments Lytton felt discouraged – ‘a feeling that everything is too difficult and fearful – a feeling of the futility of life’. But such moods passed, and his letters to Carrington are cheerful while those to Ralph reveal more of his anxieties. Was he returning from Venice too early? Would it ease matters if he stayed at Gordon Square for ten days before coming down to Tidmarsh? Had Ralph already forgotten him? The uncertainties of the last months had stimulated Lytton’s affection. ‘I hug you a hundred times and bite your ears. Don’t you still realise what I feel for you? how profoundly I love you? … I wish I could talk to you now … I am always your own Lytton.’
As soon as he got back, he resumed patching and repairing their broken marriage, trying everything he knew to expel the uneasy atmosphere that still hung over the Mill House. During August he sublet Tidmarsh and took Ralph and Carrington on a five weeks’ motor tour of Devon and Wales. But things went badly. After three weeks ‘we have had exactly two fine days, and on one of them the motor broke down, so that we spent most of it in a garage.’ They were constantly on the move from one dreadful and exorbitant hotel to another. ‘I think my next work will be a fulmination on the Hotels of England.’
In the third week of August, they took rooms for ten days at Solva, near St David’s. ‘It is on the snout of Wales – a sea coast in the Cornwall style with rocks, coves, and islands, and would be perfect if there were any sun to see it in,’ Lytton wrote to Pippa (18 August 1922). It was a relief to be settled at last in this empty spot – but not for Carrington and Ralph. Once there was no succession of calamities to distract them from their personal antagonisms, the tension mounted quickly; then exploded. All the time they had been travelling, Carrington could sense Ralph’s thoughts fixed on Valentine, who was coming back to London. At Solva, angry scenes broke out. Carrington complained that since she had sacrificed Gerald, Ralph should give up Valentine whom she cursed for ‘all this havoc!’ Ralph retorted that he had no objection now to her and Gerald being friends – and at once sat down and wrote off a letter to Gerald to tell him so. ‘If you’re as wretched as I am, I’m heartily sorry for you.’ According to Ralph, Carrington had subtly imposed this law of non-communication upon herself so as to put him in the wrong with Valentine. So they argued, and as the days passed and the arguments blazed on, the sun began to shine and the atmosphere between them gradually cleared.
On the first day of September they motored back to Tidmarsh. That same day Valentine returned with Mark Gertler to London, and Carrington, dreading another period of misery leading to an ultimate crisis, broke down. All that she most valued seemed to be slipping away from her. ‘I love R very much,’ she burst out in a letter to Gerald (19 October 1922). ‘I suppose that when a person dies, or nearly leaves one for ever one becomes very aware of all one’s feelings … I also love Lytton and I also love our life here, when I see other peoples lives I see how good this is … I care enough for it to put a good Deal of energy into opposing any enemy who threatens it.’ The crisis she feared never materialized. By the end of October she and Ralph appeared to have reached some accommodation. So long as Carrington did not resume relations with Gerald, Ralph promised not to see Valentine. ‘You say you mistrust Valentine,’ he told her, ‘and think she is wicked. I tell you that I mistrust Gerald, and think, not from wickedness but from thoughtlessness and vagueness he may imperil my happiness.’
No one was more responsible for this amnesty than Lytton. ‘Lytton is still my Caesar, or whatever the expression is,’ Carrington wrote that autumn. ‘Through all the scenes, the wretchednesses, he has been amazing. If it hadn’t been for his friendship I should have rushed away. He makes one see that one ought never to let other people’s meannesses wreck one.’
Ralph, too, had stayed with Carrington during these terrible months because of a sense of loyalty to Lytton. Now his rage against Carrington evaporated and he seemed a different person to the tormented figure of the summer. ‘My mind is perfectly restored to its balance,’ he wrote (23 October 1922) to Gerald who also received confirmation from Carrington (1 January 1923) that ‘Ralph has completely altered’. That winter he finally gave up Valentine and reaffirmed his intention to go on living at Tidmarsh. ‘My relation with D.C. has reached the stage that can only continue by a mutual compromise,’ he explained to Gerald (27 November 1922). ‘It may look strong, but it has all these old patches which would open if any new crisis came.’ Though he was not wholly easy in his mind, discounting the healing effects of time and believing they had passed through a minefield of misunderstandings (‘Don’t let’s have any more mysteries’), yet their respective positions had by the end of the year ‘been declared, re-declared, confirmed and receipted’ so voluminously that he felt strongly re-attached to Carrington. But it was a different kind of attachment, less possessive, and one that would eventually invite further complications for them both.
As for Carrington herself nothing mattered compared to ‘our Triangular Trinity of Happiness’. She no longer dreaded or feared Ralph, or felt that she had helped to ruin him. ‘Oh Gerald you will never know what it was to be on the battlefield,’ she wrote (14 November 1922). She wished she could see Gerald again soon. ‘Is all this,’ she asked him (1 January 1923), ‘to have a Tchekov ending?’
‘I am stiff – frozen stiff – a rigid icicle,’ Lytton had written to Virginia from Pembrokeshire (22 August 1922). ‘I hang at this address for another week, and slowly melt southwards and eastwards – a weeping relic of what was once your old friend.’
He had made out an elaborate schedule for his autumn visitings, joining Clive and Vanessa at Charleston and dividing the next week between them and the Woolfs at Monk’s House. ‘I pretend to read, and really do nothing but chat,’ he wrote (27 September 1922). ‘Clive and I go for vast walks over the downs, which have grown more beautiful than ever. Oh for a farmhouse at the foot of them, for my very own.’ He looked forward to the winter which always seemed to bring with it a suspension of amorous entanglements. His spirit, so he confided to Mary Hutchinson (22 August 1922), had been almost broken by the events of the spring and summer. ‘It would be indeed charming to see you again, and exchange confidences. But I hope you will lay in a good supply of wood, coal, mackintoshes, umbrellas and galoshes – rum punch for the evenings, too; followed, very likely, by glasses of porter in our bedrooms, warmed by red-hot pokers. I pray for Winter, when we shall be snug once more, and the sun will shine, and we will only occasionally shiver.’
Ottoline had been besieging him with invitations, so after leaving the Hutchinsons, Lytton went off for a ‘pretty grim’ weekend to Garsington, the other guests being the poet and critic W.J. Turner and his wife – ‘a very small bird-like man with a desolating accent, a good deal to say for himself – but punctuated by strange hesitations – impediments – rather distressing; but really a nice little fellow, when one has got over the way in which he says “count”’, he patronizingly wrote to Virginia (19 September 1922). ‘Ott. was dreadfully dégringolée, her bladder has now gone the way of her wits – a melancholy dribble, and then, as she sits after dinner in the lamplight, her cheek-pouches drooping with peppermints, a cigarette between her false teeth, and vast spectacles on her painted nose, the effect produced is extremely agitating. I found I wanted to howl like an Irish wolf – but perhaps the result produced in you was different.’*
From Garsington he took himself off to the Manor House, Mells, for some days with Lady Horner. ‘The house is a very charming one – the true country-house style, and the Horner famille seem a cut above the ordinary run of the upper classes. Lady H. has heard of Beaumont and Fletcher, and Katherine A[squith]24 dabbles in theology.’ The following week, he left for a brief visit to Berlin with James, who was attending a congress on psychoanalysis, with Sigmund Freud in the chair – ‘it seems a good opportunity of being shown round’. Later, the two brothers visited Potsdam and Sansouci, and saw the Voltaire Zimmer prepared by Frederick the Great, its walls decorated with monkeys, and with Voltaire’s books still on the shelves.
In the new peaceful atmosphere, Lytton was more than content to pass the winter at Tidmarsh. ‘The winter is too terrible,’ he wrote playfully to Maynard (28 November 1922). ‘I can neither feel, think, nor write – I can only just breathe, read, and eat. I am impotent – my hair has turned perfectly white – my beard has fallen off …’ But the winter, as he predicted, had brought a sweet cessation to their emotional dramas. Over Christmas, Maynard and his surprising mistress, the tiny Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, came down to stay, and Lytton wrote a short playlet for Carrington to produce for them in her toy theatre. So, quietly and harmlessly, the old year came to an end with Tidmarsh, like a vessel which had weathered a great tempest, gliding on its course.
*
The new year opened amiably with Lytton making few expeditions from the Mill House. One of these was to Cambridge, where he saw a performance of Oedipus Rex given by the Marlowe Society. Among the audience were many of his new undergraduate friends – F.L. Lucas, Stewart Perowne and Dadie Rylands, who had already made something of a name for himself in The Duchess of Malfi, acting the part of the Duchess. Cecil Beaton noted the scene in his diary. ‘During the interval, the audience rushed to the club room to shout and smoke. Lytton Strachey peered at everyone through thick glasses, looking like an owl in daylight. He is immensely tall, and could be even twice his height if he were not bent as a sloppy asparagus. His huge hands fall to his sides, completely limp. His sugar-loaf beard is thick and dark, worn long in the fashion of an arty undergraduate.’25
He also made another visit to see Ottoline. ‘Now I am off – est-il possible? – to Garsington,’ he announced to James (February 1923). Ottoline’s invitations were frequent and insistent, and despite his acid comments about her to others, Lytton remembered well enough her kindness to him in the past. She had now grown much less sympathetic to him, yet an afterglow of the old enchantment still glimmered round her house. Besides a core of the old Bloomsbury guard, there was usually an influx of clever pink-and-white undergraduates from Oxford with the guests. Among these younger men were Edward Sackville-West, David Cecil, L.P. Hartley, Lytton’s cousin John Strachey and C.M. Bowra. One hot Sunday afternoon John Rothenstein records:
‘I found myself with two companions, likewise Oxford undergraduates, in a house where none of us had been before, pausing at an open french window that gave upon a lawn, at the farther end of which a tea-party was in progress. We paused because the lawn was not so large that we could not discern among the tea-drinkers the figures of Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley and Duncan Grant, as well as that, so awe-inspiring upon a first encounter, of our hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell. At that moment this modest patch of grass seemed to us an alarmingly large area to cross beneath the gaze of so many august eyes. So it is that I can still picture the group: Lytton Strachey inert in a low chair, red-bearded head dropped forward, long hands drooping, finger-tips touching the grass; Aldous Huxley talking, with his face turned up towards the sun; Duncan Grant, pale-faced, with a fine, untidy black hair, light eyes ready to be coaxed from their melancholy, and Lady Ottoline wearing a dress more suitable, one would have thought, for some splendid Victorian occasion, and an immense straw hat … After listening to the discourse of Lytton Strachey and several others I vaguely apprehended that in this Oxfordshire village were assembled luminaries of a then to me almost unknown Cambridge world.’26
Early in March, Lytton went up to Gordon Square to be with his mother, who was now going completely blind. ‘I hope it will not be long before I get sight of you,’ she had scrawled with a shaky hand, in her last letter to him (February 1923). ‘… I am not able to see what I write, but I hope you will be able to read. Ever, dearest, Your Loving Mama.’
As the spring approached, Lytton again grew concerned over Ralph and Carrington. Ralph was already seeing a lot of ‘new people, a younger generation than Bloomsbury… rising talent, dancers and party-goers; the 1917 Club, new faces …’ Carrington suspected him of having ‘at least four intrigues on foot with various lovely creatures in London’ – certainly there was what Virginia called a ‘Champagne love affair’ with Marjorie Joad, the soi-disant wife of Professor C.E.M. Joad, whom Ralph was training to take his place at the Hogarth Press. The new regime at Tidmarsh was not yet resilient enough, Lytton judged, to withstand more shocks, and as soon as Ralph was at ‘liberty from Woolfdom’, he made plans for them all to travel abroad.
In the third week of March, the three of them set off for Algeria to join James and Alix at the Établissement Thermal, in the tiny inaccessible village of Hammam-Méskoutine a few miles south-west of Bône, where Alix was recovering from bronchitis. ‘Apart from the unfortunate circumstances, it is a pleasure to be here,’ Lytton wrote to Pippa (27 March 1923). ‘… The hotel is almost by itself in very beautiful country, with mountains all round, and masses of vegetation, and wild flowers such as I have never seen before. Oranges, lemons, palms, and bananas grow in the garden, and hoopoes hop from bough to bough.’ As for the Arabs, they appeared highly romantic though infinitely unapproachable. The other residents at their hotel were English couples, invalids all, who had come there for the sake of the natural springs – ‘extraordinary boiling hot affairs, which come bursting and bubbling out of the ground, giving off steam, and literally too hot to put your finger in’.
No sooner had Lytton set foot in Algeria than an extraordinary change came over the northern African continent. Its climate altered. While the Easter crowds in London sat out with their iced drinks in Regent’s Park, the Algerian population shivered round their native fires. The weather was unprecedented, as it so often is, and far worse than anything ever recollected by the Oldest Inhabitant. While Carrington and Ralph went off for a week to inspect Constantine and Biskra, and James looked after Alix, Lytton did a little semi-recumbent work. On 12 April, he sent Maynard his essay on ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ for the first number of the newly reconstituted Nation and Athenaeum. ‘She is most suitable,’ replied Maynard (27 April 1923) who had also dispatched a review copy of Harold Nicolson’s ‘Stracheyesque’ Tennyson. But at this Lytton demurred. ‘I’m sorry to say I can’t face Lord Tennyson,’ he wrote back (16 April 1923). ‘Harold N’s book is so disgusting and stupid.’ Virginia too tried to read Nicolson’s Tennyson but, she informed Lytton’s sister Pernel, had flung the book of this skilful imitator ‘onto the floor in disgust’.
The five of them left Hammam-Méskoutine for Tunis on 15 April, travelled on to Palermo, in Sicily, and after a week went north to Naples. ‘We have been having a very enjoyable though rather exhausting time,’ Lytton wrote to Maynard from Parker’s Hotel (5 May 1923). ‘I am now recruiting in this slightly dreadful place. The sun shines, the sea glitters, the trams ting-tang along – and this evening at 6.30 St Januarius’s blood will liquefy. But I fear that, like Cardinal Newman, I shan’t “have time” to go and see the miracle.’
From Naples they progressed to Rome, and from Rome returned to Pangbourne – ‘more or less alive’, Lytton wrote to Maynard from Tidmarsh (28 May 1923), ‘but furious at having been fool enough to exchange the heats of Rome for this fearful refrigerator’. The next week he was at Garsington again for what turned out to be the most disastrous weekend of all. To Carrington (who since her marriage had not been invited – Ottoline not wishing to see her any more, Mark had explained), Lytton did not reveal that Leonard and Virginia were also there. Instead he wrote of Ottoline’s new medical attendant, an anti-Semitic quack ‘quite in advance of England’, who had renounced the pre-war practice of ‘stuffing’ for severe diets relieved by injections of bees’-stings and sour milk. ‘It has been even worse than I anticipated,’ he complained (3 June 1923). ‘Appalling! A fatal error to have come. I see now only too clearly. ‘The only other guest a miserable German doctor – a “psycho-analyst” of Freiburg – ready to discourse on every subject in broken English for hours.27 The boredom has been indescribable. Most of the conversation is directed towards the dog, when the doctor is not holding forth. Imagine the ghastly meals. Then Philip at the pianola, then Philip reading out loud his articles in the Spectator, then Dr Marten on mysticism – “it can be explained in a few sentences” – followed by an address for 40 minutes by the clock. After which Ottoline joins in. Horrible! horrible! … Julian [Morrell] has become a kind of young lady – plays Bach and cuddles the dogs all day. Mr Ching came and played Bach. Pipsey is to play Bach after dinner. My brain totters. Soon I shall be playing Bach myself … If there had been a telephone in the house, I really believe I should have rung you up and fled. I am tempted to start walking as it is.
‘ “Psycho-analysis” is a ludicrous fraud. Not only Ottoline has been cured at Freiburg. The Sackville-West youth was there to be cured of homosexuality. After 4 months and an expenditure of £200, he found he could just bear the thought of going to bed with a woman. No more. Several other wretched undergraduates have been through the same “treatment”. They walk about haggard on the lawn, wondering whether they could bear the thought of a woman’s private parts, and gazing at their little lovers, who run round and round with cameras, snapshooting Lytton Strachey. Query, what did Ott go to be cured of? Whatever it may have been, she is pronounced by all the youths to be “better – much better”. Probably after playing Bach this evening, I shall hurry to Freiburg myself. I shall certainly be badly in need of some “treatment”. But I admit that I would rather receive it at the hands of P[hilip] Ritchie than of the German doctor. I must go downstairs. He will explain to me the meaning of asceticism “in [a] few sentences” – and then Ottoline will join in. The bell rings. Terror and horror!’
Philip Ritchie, the eldest son of Lord Ritchie of Dundee, soon to embark on a legal career with the novelist C.H.B. Kitchin28 in the chambers of Lytton’s old friend, C.P. Sanger, was then an Oxford undergraduate. Together with some of his friends, he had come over to tea that Sunday afternoon and ‘was the one charming element’, Lytton claimed. ‘He told me shocking gossip about everyone, and in my gratitude I nearly flung my arms around his neck.’
As the warmer weather seeped in and rumours of summer circulated, Lytton’s refrigerated spirit quickly thawed. Virginia observed that he seemed buoyant and had declared, with an embracing optimism, that they had twenty years of creative work still before them. ‘Why not let oneself be content in the thought of Lytton – so true, gentle, infinitely nimble, & humane?’ Virginia mused after their Garsington weekend. ‘I seldom rest long in complete agreement with anyone. But here I think one’s feelings should be unqualified.’ He seemed absolutely happy and therefore, she thought, must be writing something that pleased him. In any event he had recovered from the long prostration that followed his writing of Queen Victoria. ‘I have pledged myself to write once a month for that fiend Maynard,’ he told Dadie Rylands (14 July 1923). Though he claimed to have been ‘lured’ into this ‘perfectly mad occupation’, it proved rewarding. Maynard, whom he had visited at King’s early that June, arranged for him to be paid forty pounds for each contribution (equivalent to £1000 in the 1990s) – ‘a splendid remuneration’, Lytton acknowledged – and had also ‘made a precarious arrangement with the New Republic’ for each of these articles to appear in the United States, from where he would receive almost as much again.
Now that he was writing regularly once more, there was less time for social entertainments and he turned down a number of invitations with positive relief. Life at Tidmarsh was unclouded. During the whole of July, he emerged for only a single weekend house-party – with the Duchess of Marlborough at Blenheim, the potent architecture of which ravished him. ‘Nobody was particularly interesting (except, perhaps, the Duchess)’, he confided to Mary Hutchinson (11 July 1923), ‘– it was the house which was entrancing, and life-enhancing. I wish it were mine. It is enormous, but one would not feel it too big. The grounds are beautiful too, and there is a bridge over a lake which positively gives one an erection. Most of the guests played tennis all day and bridge all night, so that (apart from eating and drinking) they might as well have been at Putney.’
There was a procession of visitors to Tidmarsh – Pippa, Boris Anrep, J.H. Doggart, Frank Ramsey (twice), Sebastian Sprott, Dadie Rylands (who was soon to join the Hogarth Press), and the son of Lord Justice Tomlin, Stephen Tomlin, a brilliant and erratic sculptor, bisexual, good-looking and intermittently depressive.
So far there had been little sign of friction between Carrington and Ralph, but Lytton was not taking chances. His policy was still to keep them all on the move. At the beginning of August with Sebastian Sprott (‘very interesting … But perhaps too much of a bugger for your taste’, Carrington informed Gerald), Lytton and Ralph and Carrington and Barbara Bagenal crammed into the car and careered off on an ambitious tour of France. From Boulogne they drove to Amiens, then hurtled on to Rouen and Chartres, whose cathedral Lytton rated ‘superior to any other I have seen’. From here they motored south to Le Mans, then swept eastwards via Orléans to Dijon, where Sebastian left them to join up with a young friend at Basle. Lytton’s destination was the Cistercian Abbaye de Pontigny, on the Yonne, where he had been invited to attend the annual ‘Entretiens d’été’. At these conferences, which used to last some ten days, writers and professors from a number of countries would assemble to discuss moral and literary problems. Lytton had been invited by André Gide, who was himself on Le Comité provisoire des Entretiens d’été, and who had written in his all but illegible hand to assure Lytton that they were anxiously awaiting ‘votre présence à cette réunion “d’éminents” – penseurs des pays divers, qui doit avoir lieu cet été – du 16 au 27 août, à l’abbaye de Pontigny (celle-même où Thomas Becket trouvait asile) … J’aurais le plus grand plaisir à vous y voir et à vous présenter quelques amis qui ont un vif désir faire votre connaissance.’
The original plan had been for Ralph to continue touring the country with Carrington and Barbara while Lytton was stationed at this ‘highbrow club’. But learning that his father was dying, Ralph dashed back to England, depositing the two women at an inn near Vermonton, and promising to motor out and collect them all at the end of the month.
Meanwhile Lytton was being introduced by Gide to his fellow penseurs,29 in particular the strong French contingent which included Georges Raverat, Paul and Blaise Desjardins, Charles du Bos (who was later to write a long critical essay on Lytton), Jacques Rivière, Roger Martin du Gard, Jean Schlumberger and Max Lazard. They were all immediately startled by his resemblance to the Henry Lamb portrait which they had regarded as a caricature. ‘On the first day,’ recalled André Maurois, ‘we were alarmed by his tall, lanky frame, his long beard, his immobility, his silence; but when he spoke, in his “bleating falsetto” it was in delightful, economical epigrams.’
Lytton too was startled by his experiences at Pontigny. The sanitary arrangements at the abbey were ‘crushing and inadequate’; his breakfast featured not a single egg; and his bedroom turned out to be nothing more nor less than a monk’s cell. He felt melancholy, too, at being separated from Ralph, and at his own ‘constant and immense difficulty in effecting any kind of communication with the natives’. Like a schoolboy pitchforked into a new school, he was lonely and bewildered. Some of the older boys seemed particularly aloof. ‘Gide is hopelessly unapproachable,’ he told Carrington who was busy painting every day (26 August 1923). ‘He gave a reading last night of one of his own works – in a most extraordinary style – like a clergyman intoning in a pulpit. It was enormously admired.’ In a letter to Ralph (25 August 1923) he explains that he is overwhelmed by ‘a sort of sentimental sunset Verlaine feeling’. He enjoys ‘some secret love-affairs of course – confined, equally of course, to my own breast’. One of these secret passions was for the austere Blaise Desjardins – ‘largish, pale, unhealthy, who sings very well – but apparently particularly dislikes me, hélas!’ There were also some pseudo-adventures in which he was the object of other people’s admiration.
‘La belle Américaine, with the short black hair … she is an “artist” – has asked me to sit to her – has read my article on Racine, which she thinks wonderful – gazes at me with slightly melancholy eyes, etc. etc. … I shall only, I fear, turn out a disappointment. Her husband is an agreeable American-speaking Frenchman … I am beginning to wonder how we shall weather through another week. Translation hardly seems to be a subject adapted for 10 days of discussion! I only wish I were translated myself, like Bottom. Sometimes I feel as if I had been! And my Titania? – La Belle Américaine? Peut-être.’
Invariably the best part of each day was the morning, when he was allowed to sit in the excellent library and, without superintendence, read. But even then, owing to the lack of morning eggs, his exhaustion was considerable. At moments, either from early faintness or the soporific effect of the afternoon debates, the old abbey appeared like a dream. He listened to the discussions with an air of politely scornful indulgence. ‘The “entretiens” which occur every day from 2.30 to 4.30 (what a time to choose) are rather appalling,’ he complained to Ralph. ‘Almost perpetually dull – and then the constant worry of one’s being expected to speak and never doing so. Up to now I have allowed exactly three words to issue from my mouth – in public; so that I am growing very unpopular.’
Some of the subjects were in themselves pretty vacant – ‘LES HUMANITÉS, sont-elles irremplaςables pour former une Élite?’ or ‘Y-a-t-il dans la Poésie d’un Peuple un trésor réservé impénétrable aux Étrangers?’ During the long conference on ‘THE MEANING OF HONOUR’, lapping one of his grasshopper legs over the other, he nodded off. ‘And what in your opinion, Monsieur Strachey, is the most important thing in the world?’ suddenly inquired Paul Desjardins. There was a long and painful pause. Then from the slumbering beard there issued a tiny treble: ‘Passion!’ This was one of his three words, and as he uttered it the solemn circle of intellectuals, relieved for an instant, burst into laughter. Pressed during another discussion on the subject of ‘LES CONFESSIONS’ to contribute something, he stood up and announced: ‘Les confessions ne sont pas dans mon genre,’ then sat down. Anodier day, towards the end of an analysis of Gidean ‘actes gratuits’, his still small voice from the back of the hall was overheard inquiring plaintively: ‘Est-ce qu’un acte gratuit est toujours désagréable?’
Many of the French éminents penseurs did not know what to make of this strange francophil in their midst. Possibly he was too English to be fired by abstract ideas. ‘Looking at him there,’ André Maurois wrote, ‘we had the impression of an almost infinite disdain, of a wilful abstraction, of a refusal … And yet sometimes, for one fleeting instant, a glance would flash behind his spectacles so vividly that we wondered if all this lassitude might not be the mask of a man really amused and keen, and more Britannic than any Briton.’
At the end of the month Ralph reappeared to rescue Lytton, collect Carrington and Barbara, and motor them all back to England. They drove in leisurely stages up to Paris and then back to England where Lytton made off for what was now his customary September trip to Charleston. The summer was almost over, and still no serious trouble had broken out between Carrington and Ralph. To his great satisfaction the plan of extensive travel that year seemed to have worked. There were no quarrels because ‘there is nothing to quarrel about. After all we have been married four years now,’ Carrington had miscalculated in a letter to Gerald (1 June 1923). ‘And I am thirty years old … I think Ralph may become a bookbinder … For the moment I am bored by myself.’ She wasn’t worried by Ralph’s ‘intrigues, and love affairs, after his book binding shuts up’ in the evening at the Polytechnic in London; and he didn’t trouble himself over her new passion for an American bisexual beauty, Henrietta Bingham, who had ‘the face of a Giotto Madonna’, sang ‘exquisite songs with a mandoline’ and mixed ‘such wonderful cocktails’ that Carrington ‘almost made love to her in public’. But what did exercise them both was the curious predicament of Gerald.
Among the mules and little beggar children of Yegen, Gerald had passed his time since leaving England eating bread and grapes, reading Proust, writing down and tearing up his poetry, and going for enormous walks along the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, immersed in the ocean air, dreaming of Carrington. ‘I could not bear to be cut off from all information about you,’ he had written to Ralph (11 and 31 October 1922). ‘… our annual meetings and my correspondence with D.C. have been a kind of nourishment that I cannot easily dispense with.’
In April 1923 Leonard and Virginia had come out to stay with him. This was their first holiday abroad since their honeymoon eleven years ago and it turned out ‘the greatest success’, Virginia told Roger Fry (16 April 1923), ‘… we discuss literature 12 hours every day’.
But they also discussed Tidmarsh, and after Leonard and Virginia left, Gerald concocted a scheme for reintegrating himself there. Since his correspondence with Carrington resumed, he had failed to catch her interest with references to the rather unconvincing flirtations with which he tried to assuage his loneliness at Yegen. Now he wrote to Leonard conveying some extraordinary news which Virginia quickly passed on to Carrington. ‘Gerald tells Leonard that he has just got engaged to an American girl at Granada,’ she wrote (27 May 1923). ‘Have you heard? Perhaps its a joke.’
It was a joke of the most serious intent and it did its work very effectively. ‘We are told you are marrying,’ Ralph responded (29 May 1923). ‘… I am strongly against it … Virginia would tell us all about it … Curse Virginia … Curse her again.’ The fact that Ralph was ‘plunged into profound gloom’ by the news, Carrington added (28 May 1923), ‘shows how deeply he cares’.
But she was startled by how much she herself cared. ‘It does in a curious way make rather a difference,’ she admitted. She had begun dreaming of him again. ‘I can’t give my reasons for caring for you,’ she volunteered (31 May 1923). ‘Although it’s illogical and impossible I do still care.’ On his mountainous walks through the Sierra Nevada, Gerald had imagined his relationship with her as being ‘of the same nature as that of Dante and Beatrice, the troubadours and their ladies, or Shelley with Emilia Viviani and Jane Williams.’ Now, feeling spiritually so close to him again, Carrington explained: ‘I am in love with Shelley and so I pretend Shelley lives in you and you can never do any wrong for me.’
Yet he had done something wrong. It was almost as wrong, and as provoking, as his engagement joke. He had invited pretty Barbara Bagenal to come out and visit him. ‘Why can everyone go to Spain and stay with you except your rejected and deserted QUEEN OF NOTHING?’ Carrington demanded. ‘… I wish, so very much, I could come out with Barbara to Yegen.’ Ralph felt the same. ‘I nearly made up my mind to come out to you and Barbara,’ he wrote (29 May 1923).
So why should they not both go? The real obstacle was Lytton. He would not go himself (the last journey had been ‘DEATH’ he assured Virginia) and he foresaw all manner of complications – added pain for Gerald and extra strain (after all his diplomacy) on Ralph and Carrington. Perhaps, he suggested, Ralph should go this year, and Carrington next year. ‘I think it’s best I write to Gerald quite frankly and tell him what I feel and the difficulties … you explained to me,’ Carrington reluctantly agreed (27 August 1923). ‘But there’s no immediate hurry …’ Ralph, however, was not to be persuaded by Lytton, for there was a still more powerful advocate recommending this expedition.
Frances Marshall was the sister-in-law of David Garnett and Lytton’s ‘niece-in-law’ (her elder sister Judy having married Lytton’s nephew Dick Rendel). She was twenty-three, sparkling and intelligent, and quite unlike the superficial pretty girls with whom Ralph had been carrying on brief affairs over the past year. She had read philosophy at Newnham and now worked at Francis Birrell and David Garnett’s Bloomsbury bookshop in Taviton Street. It was here that she had first seen Ralph striding in with books from the Hogarth Press. ‘Ralph’s carrying on some intrigue in London at the moment,’ Carrington notified Gerald (15 September 1923). But when she met this ‘black haired beauty … a beautiful Princess that lives in Birrell & Garnett’s bookshop’, she liked her and was not upset by the relationship. Lytton positively welcomed it, since it made Ralph so charming. Unlike that ‘seasoned adventuress’ Valentine (whose name they had been delighted to discover was really Gladys), Frances loved Tidmarsh, taking to Carrington and being alarmingly impressed by Lytton.
Though subjected to a high-powered courtship by Ralph, Frances would not let his advances go too far – a precaution that earned his respect and deepened his fondness for her. As he began to fall in love, so his attitude to Gerald softened. It was Frances’s influence that made him so set on taking Carrington out to Yegen. He was determined to remove any particles of bitterness that still lay between them all. He had told Frances everything and knew that their vertical love-making would have a better chance of becoming horizontal love-making if Gerald and Carrington resumed their own relationship. So, with Frances as his secret agent, he persuaded Lytton to relent. ‘It’s all settled dearest, we BOTH will come!!!!!!’ Carrington immediately told Gerald.
Their three weeks in Spain at the end of 1923 and the beginning of 1924 were an entr’acte that, while settling nothing, created the atmosphere for the next scene of their drama. They went to parties, danced, swam, ate persimmons to the sound of guitars, read Eliot and Joyce, and had ‘fascinating conversations ranging on every subject’, Carrington wrote back to Lytton (23 December 1923), ‘… and then more hectic conversations’. It seemed to her, as she set off into the landscape with her painting materials, that these two men, Ralph and Gerald, could spend every day arguing even in perpetual sunlight. They were the most adamant characters – and yet they never really fell out. Gerald was intending, with his great-aunt’s help, to return to England in the spring, and Ralph gave him his blessing to kiss Carrington as he kissed Frances. ‘I do not dispute the attraction you have for each other, nor am I now made unhappy by it, because I am more reconciled to my own relation with her than I was,’ he explained to his friend (21 January 1924). Besides, he believed that whatever happened, Carrington ‘won’t let Lytton go, or me, at any price’.
‘Everything is so perfect,’ Carrington had told Lytton (23 December 1923). ‘… Oh why, why, can’t you be whisked here on a magic carpet … How happy you would be with us.’
Frances had arranged to meet them on their way back in Paris where Lytton joined them too. He came with marvellous news. For some months Ralph and Carrington had been speculating about the possibility of moving with Lytton from Tidmarsh. ‘It is tame, without a doubt, hopelessly domestic, provincial, unimportant, smug and ridiculous,’ Ralph had pointed out after getting back there from Italy the previous summer (29 May 1923). ‘There is a cringing subservience all round – the flowers, the furniture, the tame birds and the wild birds, all very respectful and very well trained, but crushing, with the whole weight of England.’
Carrington found herself agreeing with him. ‘I’ve grown bored with these damp meadows, & the Ibsen-esque drip of the rain, & the night mists from the Fjiord.’ The rooms were too cramped for her painting and too damp for Lytton’s health, she complained: but really she had absorbed too much pain at Tidmarsh to feel it was still an ‘earthly Paradise’. ‘I think its a mistake to become sentimental over any place,’ she had excused herself to Gerald (31 May 1923), ‘& I can’t quite get over my hatred for this garden & the dull green fields …’
But Lytton still felt very fond of the Mill House. Despite all the difficulties, he had been happy there. ‘Old age I suppose, but for whatever reason the solid calmness of Tidmarsh exactly suits me,’ he confided to Carrington (1 January 1924). Nevertheless he had agreed to join in their house-hunting the previous October, and Carrington quickly found what she wanted. ‘I am in love with a house,’ she announced. Ralph, too, was enraptured. ‘Such a house’, he exclaimed in his letter to Gerald (17 October 1923). ‘A dream house under the downs near Hungerford, a refuge for old age. We gibber about it all day long.’
It was called Ham Spray House. ‘That’s a good title to begin with,’ Carrington had written to Gerald (23 October 1923).
‘It is within a mile of the village of Ham & the village of Inkpen and a stone’s throw (if one threw well) from the most marvellous downs in the WHOLE WORLD – Tibet excluded – Inkpen Beacon. It is four miles from Hungerford. We saw a ram shackle lodge, a long avenue of limes but all wuthering in appearance, bleak, & the road a grass track. Barns in decay, then the back of a rather forbidding farm house. We walked to the front of it & saw to our amazement in the blazing sun a perfect English country house. But with a view onto downs before it that took our breaths away … Inside the house was properly built, simple & good proportions. It faced south so one would never shiver with the damp & cold as one does here. And there were eight bed rooms, & numerous queer lofts, & outhouses, also a small cottage separate from the house.’
The difficulty was price – a prohibitive £3000! ‘What can we do? I feel in terrible despair!’ Carrington asked Lytton (27 November 1923). ‘I can hardly bare to let it fade, and yet it seems impossible …’ By the time Ralph and Carrington went off to Spain, negotiations were still ploughing on. ‘I believe I’ve bought Ham Spray for £2,300 [equivalent to around £55,000 in 1994] – but it still totters,’ Lytton wrote to his brother James on 4 January. As soon as the agreement was settled, he sent a telegram to Spain and then met Ralph and Carrington in Paris with all the details. Ham Spray House had no drains or electric light and was in need of general repairs. But Carrington had already redecorated all the rooms in her imagination.
The builders started work there in the early spring. Carrington would go over nearly every day to plan her decorations and the layout of the garden. ‘We are beginning to be busy over our new house,’ Lytton told Ottoline on 24 April. ‘… It is altogether rather agitating, and complete financial ruin stares me in the face. I suppose I shall have to write another masterpiece.’ Even with some help from a legacy which Ralph had received on his father’s death, it was all turning out to be fearfully expensive, and Carrington admitted that they were ‘on the rocks for d’argent’.
But she was in her element painting and decorating the walls, staining the floors and doors. As the rooms blossomed her spirits rose. ‘All is beautiful!’ she assured Lytton (16 July 1924). ‘And we are growing happier.’ Ralph was continuously driving her and their guests from Tidmarsh that spring – Leonard and Virginia, Sebastian, Dadie, Maynard, Frances Marshall and others – to the new house, and they would be put to work on any job that needed doing. Lytton’s letters are full of the bustle of these months. ‘We spent yesterday at our new house,’ he wrote to Bunny Garnett (23 May 1924), ‘with various persons, among them Tommy [Stephen Tomlin] and Henrietta [Bingham] – I liked her more than before. She white-washed amazingly and never said a word.’
When they left Tidmarsh on 15 July, Ham Spray was still not really habitable. Lytton stayed away as much as possible during these first weeks, fleeing with Pippa for a fortnight to Brittany. Tidmarsh would always have a special place in his memory. One night in July 1928, he almost wept as some music on the phonograph recalled their life there. ‘Among others, there was a string quartet by Schubert, which brought back Tidmarsh to me with extraordinary vividness. I felt the loss of that régime very strongly, and in fact … nearly burst into tears. I hope and pray that our new grandeur … won’t alter anything in any way.’
Carrington felt differently. Though she often blamed herself for the complications she had forced into Lytton’s life, and had terrible nightmares about his leaving her, she was feverishly excited over Ham Spray. ‘We must hope that the perfection of our lives will be so great in the sun and on the Downs that we will never regret it,’ she rallied him (10 January 1924). ‘I feel certain myself that we will master the situation. The real thing that matters is the indissolubility of our affections. The addition of hot sun, a verandah and the most beautiful country can only add to an already existing state of perfection. We love you so much.’