‘Human life in its last stages is certainly a miserable affair. And yet we are horrified when Death comes to put an end to it’
Lytton Strachey to Carrington (19 November 1931)
‘I hope by this time you’ve finished Orlando,’ Lytton had written to Roger Senhouse on 23 October 1928. In a long article for the American Bookman (February 1929), Raymond Mortimer was telling United States readers that Elizabeth and Essex and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando were ‘the two most remarkable books of the autumn season.
‘She has revolutionised fiction and he, biography … neither the novel nor the biography will ever be the same again … The weapons they have turned on the Victorians were forged in Victorian homes … the ethic implicit in them … is a pagan ethic … In style they are a world apart but in mind the authors have this mysterious quality in common … It has some relation to a voice that is never too loud, a scepticism that remains polite, a learning that is never paraded and a disregard, that never becomes insulting, for the public taste. It is a quality of inherited culture.’
In seeking to define their kinship, Raymond Mortimer had reached back through the generations as well as to the styles and techniques of Mrs Dalloway and Eminent Victorians, To the Lighthouse and Queen Victoria. But he was unable to analyse the mysterious atmosphere, to some extent shared, of Orlando and Elizabeth and Essex ‘not because it is non-existent, but because it is indefinable’. It was indefinable partly because the source of both books was a private emotional experience – Virginia’s love-affair with Vita Sackville-West and Lytton’s with Roger Senhouse – transferred to the page as self-projected dreaming. Instead of being confined by their culture, both writers were now experimenting with ways of leaving the polite world, mingling gender and time, and challenging public taste with deviant fantasy.
‘Isn’t it possible’, Lytton asked Dorothy Bussy (3 January 1930), ‘certain minds can build up these edifices out of their sensibilities and their dramatic power?’ At Ham Spray there had been talk of Virginia’s inadequate psychology, her lack of body language and inability to differentiate between people and places – all turned into something special, nevertheless, by her genius. At Monk’s House it was observed that Lytton, for all his brilliant gifts and successes, had not become the ‘great Voltairian historian or biographer’1 his contemporaries at Cambridge expected. In her diary (25 November 1928), Virginia calls Elizabeth and Essex a ‘lively superficial meretricious book’, and confesses to being ‘secretly pleased’ that it was bad, though also to a feeling of depression at such mean pleasure. It was not until the following June that she discussed it with Lytton, and though she could see that he minded her criticism she liked him the better for this, seeing also that what she said mattered to him despite the clouds of praise from Dadie, Roger, Carrington and the rest. ‘And I felt, among the discreditable feelings, how I had no longer anything to envy him for,’ she noted (15 June 1929); ‘& how, dashing off Orlando I had done better than he had done; & how for the first time I think, he thought of me, as a writer, with some envy.’
Their talk was ‘a relief’ to her; and there would be more relief to come once she had subsumed her discreditable feelings, or ‘disagreeables’ as she called them, in a literary theory that made Lytton’s comparative failure a matter of the confining nature of the genre in which he worked rather than his limited sensibilities or weak dramatic power. For this solved the problem of how such a remarkable intellect as his, with its suppleness and flickering wit, had not achieved something more original; and it proved the deconstructive thesis of her own biographical pastiche – that the ‘riot and confusion of the passions and emotions’ could not be fitted into an orthodox biographical form and that (as George Gissing had written) ‘the only true biography is to be found in novels’.
In her essay called ‘The Art of Biography’, composed more than six years after Lytton’s death, Virginia argued that ‘biography is the most restricted of all the arts’. Where ‘the novelist is free; the biographer is tied.’ She used Lytton’s Queen Victoria to show what biography could do, and Elizabeth and Essex to show what it could not do. ‘In the Victoria he treated biography as a craft; he submitted to its limitations,’ she reasoned. ‘In the Elizabeth and Essex he treated biography as an art; he flouted its limitations.
‘Could not biography produce something of the intensity of poetry, something of the excitement of drama, and yet keep also the peculiar virtue that belongs to fact – its suggestive reality, its own proper creativeness?
Queen Elizabeth seemed to lend herself perfectly to the experiment … to the making of a book that combined the advantages of both worlds, that gave the artist freedom to invent, but helped his invention with the support of facts – a book that was not only a biography but also a work of art.
Nevertheless, the combination proved unworkable; fact and fiction refused to mix. Elizabeth never became real in the sense that Queen Victoria had been real, yet she never became fictitious in the sense that Cleopatra or Falstaff is fictitious …’
By talking frankly to Lytton about Elizabeth and Essex, Virginia was doing no more than he had done over Mrs Dalloway. ‘You should take something wilder & more fantastic,’ he had said, ‘a frame-work that admits anything, like Tristram Shandy.’ This she had now done with a happy pantomime whose beginnings in the sixteenth century overlapped with the period of his own highly-coloured ‘tragic history’, presenting an ageing Queen Elizabeth very similar to his Queen and an eponymous hero who, with his ‘strength, grace, romance, folly, poetry, youth’ inevitably brings to mind the Earl of Essex.
‘I want to revolutionize biography in a night,’ Virginia had declared. Yet her love-tribute to Vita implies a recasting of life itself, as much as a change in our way of looking at it. Perhaps such an escapade – for it was an escape from factual imprisonment – could never be repeated, and its contribution to the future of biography – a contribution arising from suggestion rather than example – was after all quite close to that of Elizabeth and Essex. ‘That failure,’ she wrote, ‘because it was the result of a daring experiment carried out with magnificent skill, leads the way to further discoveries … he has shown us the way in which others may advance.’2
*
‘A quarter of an hour later – it was ten o’clock – the Earl was at the gate. He hurried forward, without a second’s hesitation; he ran up the stairs, and so – oh! he knew the way well enough – into the presence chamber, and thence into the privy chamber; the Queen’s bedroom lay beyond. He was muddy and disordered from his long journey, in rough clothes and riding boots; but he was utterly unaware of any of that, as he burst open the door in front of him. And there, quite close to him, was Elizabeth among her ladies, in a dressing-gown, unpainted, without her wig, her grey hair hanging in wisps about her face, and her eyes starting from her head.’
This closing passage from Chapter XII of Elizabeth and Essex, describing Essex’s forbidden return from Ireland on 28 September 1599, reproduces the opening scene from the blank verse play, Essex: A Tragedy, he had written in 1909, the action of which covers Chapters XIII to XVI of the biography. Many of the book’s dramatic happenings are framed by such theatrical entrances and exits. When, for example, in Chapter XI Essex is appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland, Strachey gets him and Robert Cecil off the pages as follows: ‘With long elated strides and flashing glances he left the room in triumph; and so – with shuffling gait and looks of mild urbanity – did Robert Cecil.’
Strachey writes in places as if giving directions to a group of actors. In the scene where Elizabeth makes her speech to an assembly called by the Speaker of the House of Commons, he uses her exact words but also provides instructions as to how they should be delivered and heard:
‘There was a pause; and then the high voice rang out’.
‘She stopped, and told them to stand up, as she had more to say to them’.
‘Pausing again for a moment, she continued in a deeper tone’.
He closes this scene at the end of Chapter XVI with a dramatic curtain.
‘She straightened herself with a final effort; her eyes glared; there was a sound of trumpets; and, turning from them in her sweeping draperies – erect and terrible – she walked out.’
Whenever possible, Strachey treats his readers as direct onlookers – which is to say, as an audience. He endeavours to transform every source – letters, diaries, documentary accounts – into visual material. For example he brings in word for word a letter from Essex to Elizabeth, interrupting the text several times (‘as he wrote, he grew warmer’; ‘now he could hold himself in no longer’; ‘the whole heat of his indignation was flaring out’) so as to give readers the impression they are actually watching Essex write the letter.
Frequently he uses indirect speech to present the facts as seen by the characters themselves and to carry their tone of voice: ‘The Attorney-Generalship fell vacant, and Essex immediately declared that Francis Bacon must have the post,’ he writes in Chapter V. Then, slipping into Essex’s own thoughts and attitude, he continues: ‘He was young and had not yet risen far in his profession – but what of that? He deserved something even greater; the Queen might appoint whom she would, and if Essex had any influence, the right man, for once, should be given preferment.’
In these soliloquies, Strachey conceals himself behind his characters who present their one-sided view of a situation or verdict on another character, passing from statements of facts to stream of consciousness without any verbal conjunction – though often using a dash: or sometimes a colon to mark the connection. These meditations (perhaps the best example occurs in Chapter XV where the Queen, thinking back on her relationship with Essex, deliberates over his pardon) have their origin in the monologues of the Elizabethan stage.
For it was as a five-act Elizabethan drama that he had constructed his biography. Elizabeth and Essex is his Antony and Cleopatra. ‘There is only one thing which could have blinded a man in Antony’s position so completely as we now know he actually was blinded,’ he had written, ‘and that thing is passion.’3 Passion is the supreme motive in Elizabeth and Essex. Essex, whose sensual temperament and genius for friendship are brought out in a style that emphasizes his similarity to Antony, leaves and returns to his Queen as Antony leaves and returns to Cleopatra; and like Antony he dies a violent death. Elizabeth is no Cleopatra, but each in her fashion was ‘a lass unparallel’d’, the Queen of England’s variations of mind and temper making a dramatic equivalent to the ‘infinite variety’ of the Queen of Egypt. In Sir Robert Cecil, the mastermind of the drama (who performs a function similar to Baron Stockmar’s in Queen Victoria) there is a close approximation to the calculating Octavius. Shakespeare closes Antony and Cleopatra with the triumph of Octavius; Strachey, in the carefully weighed passage with which Elizabeth and Essex ends (a reversal of the famous retrospective last paragraph in Queen Victoria), employs another device from the Elizabethan stage, picturing Cecil brooding over the destiny of England and the future of his own house. With some qualifications, the comparison can be extended to Essex’s loyal friends, Sir Christopher Blount, Henry Cuffe, Lord Southampton and Sir Charles Travers who may be likened to Shakespeare’s Eros and Scarus. But Strachey simplifies his menagerie of characters. Francis Bacon, ‘the serpent’, is a blacker villain than Enobarbus; and Sir Walter Raleigh, ‘the fox’, is far more sinister than Lepidus.
Lytton dedicated Elizabeth and Essex to James and Alix Strachey who had by now established themselves as, in Freud’s words, ‘my excellent English translators’.4 He did not read German and was not affected by the early American translations of Freud by A.A. Brill as he had been affected by Constance Garnett’s translations of Dostoyevsky whose novels were the chief psychological influence on Eminent Victorians. As late as 1923 he is describing psychoanalysis as ‘a ludicrous fraud’.5 But during the mid-1920s, as psychoanalysis gradually permeated Bloomsbury and came of age in England, he began to change his mind. Adrian and Karin Stephen had decided to become analysts after the war; the Hogarth Press published the translations of Freud’s works after 1924 (Sebastian Sprott was to translate Freud’s New Introductory Lectures); and Lytton began reading and discussing his work with James and Alix.6
The book’s Freudian thesis was partly a method of deepening the general pattern of Shakespearian predestination by adding a stream of unconscious inevitability to the mood of sixteenth-century superstitious fatalism. Strachey uses a number of dramatic incidents, such as the tempest which the expedition against Ferrol encounters, as omens to Essex’s final tragedy, and reinforces this Elizabethan theatrical device with a subtext of unconscious processes. He had come to accept the general premise that infant sexuality and the adult operation of the sex instinct infiltrate human thought and action. In particular he used Freud’s ideas concerning father–daughter relationships to account for the underlying attitude of Elizabeth to Essex’s execution. There are several passages in the earlier chapters of the book that prepare us for the description of her sensations on sending Essex to his death. Strachey imagines, rising within her, the spirit of her father, Henry VIII, who had executed his wives, one of whom was Elizabeth’s mother:
‘He would find that she was indeed the daughter of a father who had known how to rule a kingdom and how to punish the perfidy of those he had loved the most. Yes, indeed, she felt her father’s spirit within her; and an extraordinary passion moved the obscure profundities of her being, as she condemned her lover to her mother’s death. In all that had happened there was a dark inevitability, a ghastly satisfaction; her father’s destiny, by some intimate dispensation, was repeated in hers; it was supremely fitting that Robert Devereux should follow Anne Boleyn to the block. Her father! … but in a still remoter depth there were still stranger stirrings. There was a difference as well as a likeness; after all, she was no man, but a woman; and was this, perhaps, not a repetition but a revenge? After all the long years of her life-time, and in this appalling consummation, was it her murdered mother who had finally emerged? The wheel had come full circle.’
When Strachey left the Mother Empress for the Virgin Queen his manner changed. ‘We are aware for the first time disagreeably’, wrote Edmund Wilson, ‘of the high-voiced old Bloomsbury gossip gloating over the scandals of the past as he ferreted them out of his library. Strachey’s curious catty malice, his enjoyment of the discomfiture of his characters is most unpleasantly in evidence in Elizabeth and Essex.’7 The writing is full of sexual allusion and innuendo – a critic in The Criterion, the Reverend Charles Smyth, described it as ‘preoccupied with the sexual organs to a degree that seems almost pathological’.8
To dramatize the psychological disturbances of Elizabeth’s childhood and show how these may have influenced her decision over the execution of Essex, Strachey conjectured an early traumatic experience. ‘Manhood – the fascinating, detestable entity, which had first come upon her concealed in yellow magnificence in her father’s lap – manhood was overthrown at last, and in the person of that traitor it should be rooted out. Literally, perhaps … she knew well enough the punishment for high treason.’
In Elizabeth and Essex there are as many references to the mutilation of ears related to fear of castration, as to castration itself. Strachey ends Chapter V, which covers the relationship between Essex and Francis Bacon, with the divertissement of Mr Booth ‘who, poor man, had suddenly found himself condemned by the Court of Chancery to a heavy fine, to imprisonment, and to have his ears cut off’. Though this anecdote takes the reader away from the main theme of this chapter, it adds to the brutal and capricious picture Strachey creates of this age. It was as if, with a shiver of delight, he imagined himself living in sixteenth-century England, his ghost flitting between these gorgeous and alarming figures.
‘Who can reconstruct those iron-nerved beings who passed with rapture from some divine madrigal sung to a lute by a bewitching boy in a tavern to the spectacle of mauled dogs tearing a bear to pieces? … the flaunting man of fashion, whose codpiece proclaimed an astonishing virility, was he not also, with his flowing hair and his jewelled ears, effeminate? … A change of fortune – a spy’s word – and those same ears might be sliced off, to the laughter of the crowd, in the pillory; or, if ambition or religion made a darker embroilment, a more ghastly mutilation – amid a welter of moral platitudes fit only for the nursery and dying confessions in marvellous English – might diversify a traitor’s end.’
Strachey’s Elizabethanism is a personal evocation peopled by extravagant phantoms which act out the instincts that four hundred years later had receded into our subconscious – a never-never-again land with which we were connected by residual memories and in whose strange atmosphere we are invited triumphantly to lose ourselves.
*
In an early issue of Scrutiny, T.R. Barnes attributes Strachey’s ‘middlebrow’ success to the fact that, with ‘appropriately Freudian and free-thinking reasoning, [he] appealed to that desire for fantasy satisfaction through “character” or substitute lives, which is the basis of commercial fiction,’ and concluded that, ‘being incapable of creation in life or in literature, his writings were a substitute for both.’9
Rebecca West took a similar line when criticizing Elizabeth and Essex for breaking ‘too flagrantly the rule that a work of art must never be an obvious compensation for the deficiencies of the author’s existence. It was too plainly the revenge taken by the suppressed romantic elements in a character committed by a majority vote to a cool and classical way of living, and it had the turgid and disconcerting quality of adolescent dreams that have been dreamed too long.’10
This game goes on – since to use psychoanalysis is to invite its further use. The Canadian poet and critic John Ferns was to suggest that ‘Strachey felt that his manhood had been denied and thwarted by a female presence that he could not get beyond … [he] was unable to struggle free of the oedipal web. If one sees Elizabeth and Essex in the Freudian terms that Strachey himself used in writing the book, one might ultimately identify Elizabeth with Strachey’s mother and Strachey himself with Essex.’11
Alternatively, and at the time he was writing, he saw Essex, through the Queen’s eyes, as the sort of person he desired to be – a pale and sorrowful scholar, shivering in the agonies of ague as he lay in the darkness of his bedroom, then flowering into this ‘handsome, charming youth, with his open manner, his boyish spirits, his words and looks of adoration, and his tall figure, and his exquisite hands, and the auburn hair on his head, that bent so gently downwards.’ Reading the book when it was first published, Maynard Keynes wrote to him (3 December 1928): ‘You seem, on the whole, to imagine yourself as Elizabeth, but I see from the pictures that it is Essex whom you have got up as yourself.’12
Elizabeth and Essex has added to Lytton Strachey’s influence as a liberator of biographical forms, and its intermittently thin texture may have been due less to psychological factors, which have enriched the book’s subtext, man to physical deterioration. His correspondence over the period he was writing the book shows an enfeeblement of his health which seems detectable in many passages. There are some ironical flashes from the author of Eminent Victorians such as the portrait in Chapter X of King Philip, spider of the Escorial, ‘spinning cobwebs out of dreams’ who is troubled on his death-bed by a fearful thought: ‘Had he been remiss in the burning of heretics? He had burnt many, no doubt; but he might have burnt more.’ There are some charming metaphors from the author of Queen Victoria, such as the picture of Elizabeth’s vacillating disposition, which he likens to a ship: ‘Such was her nature – to float, when it was calm, on a sea of indecisions, and, when the wind rose, to tack hectically from side to side.’ But the contrivance is held together by a connecting tissue of weak puns, shaky transitions, and the running-on of empty words.
‘On the whole, it seemed certain that with a little good management the prosecution would be able to blacken the conduct and character of the prisoners in a way which would carry conviction – in every sense of the word.’
‘The state of affairs in Ireland was not quite so bad as it might have been.’
‘They [the Spanish ambassadors] had come into contact with those forces in the Queen’s mind which proved, incidentally, fatal to themselves, and brought her, in the end, her enormous triumph.’
Between these deserted spaces he places his dramatic set-pieces, ‘whipping the flanks of the language’, as Virginia observed (25 November 1928), ‘& putting it to this foaming gallop, when the poor beast is all spavins & sores’.
The minor figures, often likened (as in all his books) to birds and beasts, and skilfully arranged in his Elizabethan tapestry, were now recognizable as stock characters from the Strachey repertoire. There is the brilliant enigma, an all-but-invisible Master Mind, here attached to a humpback and suspended in an endless state of purposeful inanimation. This assiduous quill-pusher is Robert Cecil, a man of superhuman intelligence bent double over his accumulation of papers as he directs the momentous affairs of the nation with fractional gesticulations of his feet and hands. Then there is the Bad Man of the tragedy, Francis Bacon of the ‘viper-gaze’. Bacon is determined to prove a rascal. ‘It is the Lion and the Snake,’ commented Wyndham Lewis (27 November 1928) referring to his own The Lion and the Fox (1927) where he pictures Othello as the simple-hearted noble lion and Iago as the wily Machiavel. ‘Essex as the embodiment of simple-minded chivalry and poor Bacon as the “Machiavel”! What a villain! One is almost inclined to believe after reading S[trachey]’s book, that he wrote Shakespeare’s plays and did all the other things he is accused of.’13
Strachey’s fox was the ‘dangerous and magnificent’ Walter Raleigh who, as an implacable enemy of Essex, is cast as ‘ominous prophet of Imperialism’. He needed this characterization so as to help identify Essex as ‘the spirit of ancient feudalism’ symbolizing a romantic, doomed way of life in the England of Elizabeth. She is ‘the supreme phenomenon of Elizabethanism’, served by rational new men such as Bacon and Cecil. All this is to give historical significance to the love story whose tragic hero had found no place in G.M. Trevelyan’s recent History of England (1926).
Trevelyan had paid tribute to Strachey four years earlier for ‘doing history a great service by connecting her again with literature and by interesting the public in her themes’. But, he added: ‘I should be sorry if those who know most about history, those who give their whole lives to the study of history, relinquished the interpretation and exposition of history entirely to novelists and literary men who were not primarily historians.’14 The further Strachey moved from the mainstream of history, the happier Trevelyan felt. Eminent Victorians had seriously disturbed him; Queen Victoria, he told Strachey (6 May 1921), ‘beats it a lot’. With Elizabeth and Essex he relaxed completely. ‘I have just finished Elizabeth,’ he wrote (25 November 1928).
‘We have not waited 7 years in vain, and your long hesitations over a subject have been rewarded by a success as great as crowned Elizabeth’s long hesitations in her happier years. She is a much subtler and much greater subject than Victoria and one more completely suited to your genius. The idea of telling the tale of her and of her age not by full biography but by this particular episode was most happy.
It is much your greatest work. And its success bears out my theory as against your own – or what used to be your view. You used to tell me that your strength was satire and satire alone, so you must choose people you did not much like in order to satirize them. I thought the argument bad then, and now the time gives proof of it. Your best book has been written about people to whom you are spiritually akin – far more akin than to the Victorians. And it is not a piece of satire but a piece of life.’
This was not the general view. ‘Lytton must look to his laurels,’ Logan Pearsall Smith was writing to Mary Berenson. ‘… he has made no use of his real gift – his exquisite sense, like that of Voltaire or Gibbon, of human absurdity, of the unbelievable grotesqueness of men’s actions and beliefs on this planet. It is a rare and shining gift and should not be laid under a bushel.’15
As Trevelyan must have known, professional historians would take little notice of what A.L. Rowse nevertheless called Strachey’s ‘brilliant and insufficiently appreciated book’. Here and there a surprising reference appears: Conyers Read in The Tudors points to ‘some brilliant glimpses of her [Elizabeth] and her court’ in Elizabeth and Essex; J.B. Black in The Reign of Elizabeth 1558–1603 (part of The Oxford History of England) calls it a ‘penetrating and suggestive study’. But it is not cited in a standard work such as J.E. Neale’s Queen Elizabeth and was generally regarded as, in Logan Pearsall Smith’s words, ‘melodrama rather than history’. Or were historians too academically confined? G.B. Harrison, whose Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (1937) was written as a riposte to Elizabeth and Essex, thought it a ‘fine scenario but not history’.16 The dovetailing of letters and conversations, Harrison wrote, were ‘privileges denied to the pedestrian scholar’. Strachey was up to his old tricks. By leaving out passages without indication and transposing the rhythms of what he does quote (as if editing a dramatist’s speech to assist an actress), he represented Elizabeth’s last speech to Parliament, for example, as shorter and more striking than it actually was – though the sense was the same.
‘I am deluged by E & E correspondence,’ Lytton wrote to Dadie Rylands (29 November 1928). The most interesting letter of all came from Sigmund Freud, written in Vienna on Christmas Day. ‘I am acquainted with all your earlier publications, and have read them with great enjoyment,’ Freud wrote. ‘But the enjoyment was essentially an aesthetic one.
‘This time you have moved me deeply, for you yourself have reached greater depths. You are aware of what other historians so easily overlook – that it is impossible to understand the past with certainty, because we cannot divine men’s motives and the essence of their minds and so cannot interpret their actions. Our psychological analysis does not suffice even with those who are near us in space and time, unless we can make them the object of years of the closest investigation, and even then it breaks down before the incompleteness of our knowledge and the clumsiness of our synthesis. So that with regard to the people of past times we are in the same position as with dreams to which we have been given no associations – and only a layman could expect us to interpret such dreams as those. As a historian, then, you show that you are steeped in the spirit of psychoanalysis. And, with reservations such as these, you have approached one of the most remarkable figures in your country’s history, you have known how to trace back her character to the impressions of her childhood, you have touched upon her most hidden motives with equal boldness and discretion, and it is very possible that you have succeeded in making a correct reconstruction of what actually occurred.’
*
‘It’s being very successful,’ Lytton wrote to Topsy Lucas a week after publication (30 November 1928), ‘and I gather from Prentice that the only difficulty is to get enough paper and binding material for the multitudes of editions that will have to be printed. However a good many copies will have to be sold to keep pace with my growing extravagance. Aubusson carpets, for instance – I am plunging wildly in that direction – egged on, of course, by Carrington.’
In Britain, where Elizabeth and Essex was published on 23 November, over forty thousand copies had been printed and most of them sold within six months. In the United States, where it came out on 1 December, the book made publishing history. Two big presses and one small press were used, and with each revolution of these three presses one book was printed. Harcourt Brace prepared a first edition of thirty thousand copies and a week after publication twenty-five thousand more copies were sent out. By Christmas seventy thousand copies had been shipped and not once had the book been reported out of stock. This was a record for the production and distribution of a big non-fiction book. In the second week of January, William Harcourt wrote: ‘For three weeks your book was being manufactured night and day,’ and the situation had become ‘unprecedented’. Ninety thousand copies were in print, and still the demand continued, until the eventual sales of Elizabeth and Essex reached one hundred and ten thousand hardback copies in Britain, and in the United States one hundred and fifty thousand hardback copies.17
‘I have made incredibly huge sums out of E & E,’ Lytton told his sister Dorothy Bussy (February 1929). But when Vanessa Bell asked him whether he liked such success, and the celebrity which it brought, the best answer he could manage was: ‘It’s vaguely agreeable.’ It had come too late, he said to Virginia, ‘to make us hop on our perches’. Nevertheless – and this was strange – his financial winnings did not fan his popularity among other writers, but would spur on a posthumous reaction against his books with more allegations of their meretricious middle-brow popularity.
Lytton was in ‘very good spirits’, Carrington reported that winter. ‘I think he was very set up by the success of Elizabeth.’ The motor car was broken (Lytton had suggested converting it into a summer house), cook had vanished, the pipes were frozen solid, and it was so devastatingly cold they sometimes stayed in bed all day. But they had used Lytton’s royalties to install some central heating at Ham Spray, and this ‘sort of pads over the deficiencies of wayward lovers and cold hearted young men’.
Roger Senhouse came and went and came again, ‘sweetness and vagueness incarnate’. Some of Lytton’s friends had begun to wonder whether Roger had any character of his own, whether he wasn’t all make-believe. But Lytton felt an extraordinary tenderness for him, really an absorption. ‘I seemed to be living in some sort of golden trance,’ he wrote to Sebastian Sprott. He thought of Roger constantly, riding the seas of doubt and expectation, sometimes in tears, then settling into a calmer sense of it being ‘my metier to accept his peculiarities and peccadilloes’. Though fearful of being thought possessive or tiresome, he could not stop himself writing letters to his dearest creature, angel, monster, antelope, every two or three days. ‘Look here, the magic carpet is waiting at the door, you’ve only to step on to it, and you’ll be here in five seconds.’ Sometimes it almost seemed as if Roger had indeed stepped on to this magic carpet, that the door of Lytton’s study were opening and Roger was about to walk in filling the room with the beauty and comfort of his presence. Such moments came after specially happy hours together when, though still missing him, Lytton was left with the lingering sense that ‘you are somehow with me – as if you could hear me, if I raised my voice – as if I could almost touch you if I could stretch out my hand a little further than usual’. He knew his imagination ‘is naturally couleur de rose’, and perhaps it was heightened by the new central heating among the shelves.
Lytton made many proposals to establish their relationship on a surer basis. He suggested that they make a catalogue of the Ham Spray library together (‘how the hours and days would rush by! The perfect employment surely, for 2 people in the winter!’). He offered to buy Roger a Citröen car for £185 (the equivalent of £4500 in 1994) so that he could get down there more easily (‘would you really not like it? A bulky cheque has this moment come from Chatto’s – so now’s the time’). He questioned whether in the future they might share rooms somewhere in London (‘I would get any house you liked and fall in with all your wishes’). He also offered him a loan if he decided to leave his well-paid but unsatisfying import-export job and take up some more congenial business (‘a bookshop perhaps’). Surely the risk would be better. ‘I cannot believe that starvation would be the result! You might have to be comparatively poor, but there are worse things than poverty and one of them, it seems to me, is lack of freedom.’
But Roger avoided all Lytton’s plans to re-arrange his life, and there was never any telling what he would do next. It was like being perpetually at a fancy-dress ball. ‘I believe you would make an excellent trapezist,’ Lytton decided (16 January 1929), ‘or instructor in discobolos-throwing, or Russian Emperor, or whipped guardsman!’ In good times these mercurial feats intoxicated Lytton with ‘a sort of stupor, made up of happiness, remembrances, a pleasant exhaustion’.
He had never believed in past years that his expectations of love could really materialize, but during some days-and-nights with Roger he felt they were exceeded. This was what he had waited for and dreamed of. To be with Roger as the last experience of the day made Lytton so tremulously joyful that he did not know how to put his feelings into words. Yet it was impossible to let a day pass without a few words.
‘Your perfectly divine elasticity lures me on and on – I fear I am almost too happy whenever I am with you … the intricacy and intensity of existence reduces me to a shadow. Every moment is peculiar beyond words … my love rushes out to you, and wraps you round and round, and keeps you very near me in spite of Time & Space …’
But time and space and other elements of reality gnawed away at their relationship. ‘I am here’, Lytton wrote (15 January 1929), ‘to listen to everything you like to say to me.’ But so often there were inexplicable silences and Lytton’s confidence began to waver, his imagination to play tricks. Over the same period that he was proclaiming his love, he also communicated his sadness and perplexity:
‘Please don’t be too vague, and let me have an answer … It was impossible not to feel anxious … I’ve lost count of the letters I’ve sent you already of this kind … I’ve quite given up speculation about you! … Roger dear, you don’t realise how little you say. You sometimes think you have told me things which in fact you have left to my instinct & imagination to pick up as best they can … I only hope it doesn’t mean the prospect of our some day living together for some length of time is being obliterated.’
One special crisis cropped up in the autumn of 1929. ‘Was I rather tiresome perhaps about crabs?’ Lytton inquired on 2 September. Over the next week the story continued:
‘Thank you so much, dearest creature, for the medicaments and the charming letter of instructions … If it hadn’t been for your decision and competence – your determination to deal with the hideous truth – I shudder to think what my condition would have been … could you get me another bottle … some moments of maddening irritation recur … I suppose you wouldn’t look in en route for the Schneider Cup and have a local inspection! …
… a painful circumstance has arisen. The previous applications had a terribly violent effect on my unfortunate skin, which has been excoriated and inflamed over rather a long area … I can’t be absolutely sure that the original monsters have been eradicated. Its terribly difficult for me to see … with the aid of that special mirror I could detect nothing … I shall have to wait to be quite sure till I see you.’
‘I beg you not to think I’m depressed,’ Lytton assured him shortly afterwards (1 October 1929). As the winter started, he wrote apprehensively to Dadie (23 December 1929): ‘The drear months are now beginning, and we shall have to give each other the support, love, lust etc that we can … Where are the heats of next July?’ Despite their setbacks – Roger’s sudden departures and non-appearances, the cancellation of holidays and the sheer painfulness of Lytton’s adoration – they survived the winter and next July Lytton was writing to Roger (30 July 1930): ‘I hope things may improve – at any rate it’s cheering to think how much worse they might be! With love on both sides all must be well really.’
*
Carrington was attempting to overcome her own difficulties with a campaign of painting. She painted portraits of the dashing fourteen-year-old Vivien John and the enigmatically married Julia Tomlin; she decorated Dadie’s gothic rooms at King’s College with apricot and grey-pink classical pastiches, and a little room for Dorelia at Fryern Court with identifying labels on the drawers (‘Twine & String’, ‘Silk & Cotton’, ‘Rags & Bones’). She also set about designing an imitation bookcase over an unused door at Ham Spray with a series of ironic tides (The Empty Room by Virginia Woolf, The Lad by Leonard Woolf, and the ambitious Deeds Not Words volumes I & II by A. Carpenter). Every year she started with these resolutions to paint, then reached the summer with a sense that ‘my life has been frittered away without producing anything worth looking at’. But she went on painting.
She was still ravaged by nightmares. In one she was ‘having my neck cut off, & blood running down my chest’. In another ‘terrible enemies pursued me into the kitchen & tried to put my eyes out with a small bent fork’. Though she loved Ham Spray and the smooth enfolding landscape, she felt marooned as if on a quiet green island whenever Lytton was elsewhere. It was strange how much of everything he took away with him. The rooms looked different, and half the purpose of living seemed to evaporate. ‘My life is conducted on a fugue basis,’ she had told Gerald Brenan (30 August 1928). ‘I go forwards a few bars and then retreat and pick up the old theme.’
Their new living experiment, with Ralph and Frances spending weekdays in Gordon Square, had not really suited her. She felt excluded when they were away, irritated when they came down. She could hear them talking and laughing in the bathroom together and their happiness emphasized her solitude. Ralph was sometimes exasperated by her moods. It seemed impossible to think up anything that pleased her. Was it not time she began acting her age? But a sense of ageing, a sense of death, time running out and love-affairs ending, was part of her nightmare.
Lytton had also been disappointed by the Gordon Square arrangement. He found it impossible to see Ralph except in the company of Frances. Every time Ralph came down to Hungerford he brought her; and at the end of their stay they would leave together. Lytton did not dislike Frances, but he could not easily get on with her, and nor could Carrington. The two women had never been real friends. Frances, it is true, felt an admiration for Carrington. But the most that Carrington felt for Frances was gratitude for havin accepted so readily Ralph’s links with Ham Spray – gratitude complicated by a lesbian attraction which leapt over her guarded feelings with sudden rushes of tenderness. They were therefore not simply rivals for Ralph’s love, but two people who, because of circumstance, found the independent lines of their happiness knotted together in a way that they could not unravel.
The situation was particularly awkward for Carrington. She never complained to Lytton about this latest arrangement for fear it should change to something worse. But he could sense her discomposure. The atmosphere between the four of them at weekends had become heavy with a weight of unspoken feeling which all Ralph’s parades of jocular friendliness could not dispel.
Towards the end of 1928, Lytton decided to try and remedy matters. ‘My dearest,’ he wrote to Ralph (6 November 1928), ‘I am writing this without telling Carrington, and perhaps you may think it best not to show it to Frances, but of course you must do just as you like.
‘I have felt for some time rather uneasy about F[rances] – but have been unable to bring myself to say anything. What worries me is her coming down here with you so much, and staying for so much of the time you are here, so that we see so little of you alone. It is not quite what I had expected would happen – and I think not exactly what you intended either. I am afraid you may suppose that this indicates some hostility on my part towards F[rances]; but this is far from being the case. Can you believe this? I hope so. I hope you will trust that I am telling the truth, and believe in my affection for you, which is something I cannot describe or express. I feel it too deeply for that. I know that this must be painful to you, but it seems better that I should tell you what is in my mind than that I should continue indefinitely with a slight consciousness of a difficulty not cleared up between us. Perhaps it can’t be cleared up – but at any rate I think it’s better open than secret. I don’t want to force you into anything unwillingly. If you feel that you can do nothing – then it can’t be helped. If you feel that you cannot answer this either by writing or in talk, do not do so, I will say nothing more about it, and all will be well between us. But conceivably it might be possible for you to suggest to F[rances] that it would be better if she came down rather less often – and if that could be managed the situation would be very greatly eased. It is for you to judge what you can do. I trust your judgement. I only feel that you may perhaps have allowed things to drift from an unwillingness to take an unpleasant step. I don’t know. And please do not do anything under a sense of “pressure” from me. I press for nothing. I only ask whether perhaps it may be possible, without too much pain, to make me happier.’
It was impossible for Ralph to ignore this appeal. ‘If Lytton supposed Ralph wouldn’t show me this letter he betrayed unusual lack of understanding of his character,’ Frances tartly commented. ‘Of course he did, and it was the only occasion I have ever seen him really furiously angry with Lytton.’18 He knew how this rejection had hurt Frances, who partly attributed a mysterious illness early in 1929 to Lytton’s letter. Though she did not feel quite as Ralph felt, she loved Ham Spray. But her ambiguous position there – neither guest nor host – had come to symbolize a state of limbo, and the suppression of her maternal instincts was a purgatory. All this pained Ralph who, the following week, argued it out with Lytton at 37 Gordon Square – after which ‘things went on much as before’, Frances noted, ‘except that Ralph and I both stayed away from Ham Spray rather more’.
What made everything more difficult for Carrington was her final break with Gerald that month. They had tried to pick up the old theme again that summer and play it with more sweetness and resolution. But neither of them was any longer certain what they wanted. She thought it was ‘nice’ seeing him again, but did not want to lose ‘the curious pleasures’ of her privacy at Ham Spray. He loved her, but desperately wanted to be free from the ‘agony and misery’ she always brought him. For months they swayed between rows and reconciliations.
The end came over a trivial incident involving a bundle of old ties. Lytton had recently taken it into his head to go through his wardrobes and cupboards discarding clothes he no longer needed. But Carrington, who never liked getting rid of anything or anyone, felt it would be bad luck simply to throw out Lytton’s old suits and socks. Then she had a brainwave – a solution to please everyone. She would offer these hallowed articles to Gerald who could not afford such things. He angrily refused the offer. But Carrington, who liked making parcels, wrapped up a couple of Lytton’s old ties anyhow and sent them off to Gerald ‘to tie our love’.
It was the last straw. To be handed Lytton’s cast-off clothes symbolized for Gerald the second-hand place he had for so long occupied in Carrington’s affections. Besides, they were such awful ties, one a frightful shiny wood-silk – ‘quite impossible to wear it’, he complained bitterly to Frances. He and Lytton had practically nothing in common with each other, yet Gerald had felt obliged to live in Lytton’s shadow and now he was being invited to dress up in his old clothes. It was the end. He threatened to send Carrington some knickers from a prostitute he knew; he made plans to take ‘honourable revenge’ on her in his writings. What he actually did was to wrestle with an enormous parcel containing all the presents she had given him – books, paintings and ingenious pictures on glass using coloured inks and silver sweet papers – and leave it with the irritated Ralph in Gordon Square. So they parted. ‘She could not bear anyone to reproach her because she was all too prone to feel guilty,’ he later wrote, ‘and that was how I lost her.’
But she continued to haunt him in such a way that the touchstone of all his future loves was to be their likeness to her. ‘If I ruin my life,’ he swore to Ralph (23 October 1929), ‘I shall blame Carrington.’ At times she seemed like a Vampire; at other times he sensed that she had ‘awakened’ something in him. For twenty years she would return to him in strange dreams from which he would wake up wondering at the mystery of their lives, then ‘lie in the darkness, swept again by the sweetness and sadness of their remembered love’.19
*
From the late 1920s Carrington kept an intermittent commonplace-book-and-diary – thoughts, emotions, incidents, hurried on to the page in any order, mixed with drafts of letters, beginnings of stories, pasted-in poems, brief notes, outpourings – on the stiff, beige-coloured cover of which she inked in with her child’s hand its misspelt title: D.C. Partride, Her Book.
This volume exhibits the vast disorganization of her life. She was drinking more and sometimes ‘the spelling seems rather drunk’. Using Roger Senhouse’s firm, Lytton and Ralph were now importing wine from France by the barrel and bottling it in the cellar: then while ‘the cat is away the mice will make hay’, Carrington teased Lytton (21 May 1929), illustrating her letter with a picture of mice triumphantly emptying the bottles. It was good training for her visits to Augustus John and his family, particularly a journey she took with them in the late summer of 1929 to France in preparation for which ‘I got very drunk on hock, in spite of all my intentions to keep a clean palate for Burgundy’ and eventually ‘to my shame, I passed away insensible after drinking some glasses of vodka, and had to be removed home by Dodo …’ She drank to banish violent pangs of terror, inexplicable depression. ‘What absolute despair can seize one without warning or apparent cause,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Lytton maintains it is the adrenalin glands not working.’
Lytton’s nearness brought some order and security to her existence. But when he went party-going and weekending she would fall into the doldrums, and Ham Spray seemed ‘a good setting by Synge’, she told James, ‘but a poor setting for a lonely middle aged old haggis’. ‘I cannot try to say all you are to me,’ Lytton succinctly reassured her while he was with Roger (August 1929). She increasingly needed his reassurance. ‘I wish I had a lover,’ she had written to Julia. Lytton of course was a very able substitute, ‘curious as it may seem’. Sometimes she could not bear the thought of anyone coming near her – and of course he never touched her. But listening to him read in the evenings gave her a serene happiness. ‘I get tremendous pleasure you know by living here,’ she told Sebastian Sprott. It’s so lovely, and Lytton is such an angel to me.’ All the same, a lover would give her a measure of independence and after Gerald’s departure enrich her life with secrets again. ‘My life is rather too untouched by human hand at moments,’ she admitted.
All her passions and affections seemed to be attempts to re-create some childish situation. She treated Lytton almost as if he were an adopted father, and saw the young men with whom she had affairs as semi-substitutes for her dead sailor brother, Teddy. Gerald had never been a convincing replacement. But after he left, she took up with someone who was better fitted to approach her ideal. This was Bernard Penrose, nicknamed Beacus, youngest of the four Penrose brothers. Beacus had trained as a cadet in the British India Steamship Company, and lived as Able Seaman and Second Mate before the mast, sailing the clipper route round Cape Horn in one of the last four-masted windjammers and voyaging to the Arctic on the ‘rum and bible’ mission ship Harmony. He had been psychoanalysed by John Rickman in Vienna to cure him of this fever of seafaring, but he was incurable. He was now twenty-six – ten years younger than Carrington – had a square muscular body and brick-red face.
Beacus was to be ‘the last great passion’20 of Carrington’s life. He was unlike any of her previous lovers. He thought her ‘a mysterious, brilliant woman’, but he was not in love with her. Often he treated her casually, not seeming to care where she went or what she saw, and always ‘quite incapable of understanding my odd cravings and feelings about him’. Nor was he ever at ease in Bloomsbury. ‘I suppose you wonder sometimes why I am so fond of him,’ Carrington later (June 1931) wrote to Rosamond Lehmann, who understood such things.
‘It’s really very little to do with him actually, but because he is so like my brother who was killed … I am awfully self-conscious of being a romantic, and rather stupid. My brother was very silent and removed. I hardly ever was allowed to be intimate with him and I always put it off, thinking one day I’d be able to show him how much I cared and then it was too late … it took me ages to ever believe he was dead.’
Being so young himself, Beacus brought back youth into Carrington’s life. And there was something else. Though he was maladroit in Bloomsbury, he became a different person when sailing with her on his square-rigger to Plymouth or the Scillies. Was being at sea a feeling you could ever describe to others? When Beacus spoke to Carrington he found himself recalling some of his experiences. Carrington loved to hear these stories of schooners and barquentines, and halcyon days on fine sailing ships, and moments of strange lucidity on fo’c’sle watch. So he told her his sea-adventures: of the time when, in the grey-green morning light, the masts, yards and rigging were solid with ice up to the tops; of the gentle aroma of soil, livestock and woodsmoke off the rocky South Irish coast; and of the marvellous beauty of the Aurora Borealis, forerunner of dangerous gales, shining like brilliantly illuminated curtains over the North Pole. And after listening to him she made pictures of gallant vessels plunging through crested foam under icebergs and perpendicular white cliffs to tropical destinations.
There was a novelty and excitement about everything they did – drinking pink gins in sailors’ pubs along the waterfront, making films with his motion picture camera, kissing in taxis and holding hands in the cinema, then speeding through the summer countryside in his navy-blue racing Bentley and, happiest of all, spending nights on his Brixham trawler, the Sanspareil, in Southampton harbour, with its black cat keeping watch over them on deck until they woke up together in its shiny mahogany cabin. ‘It’s an infinitely romantic ship,’ she told Julia (December 1928),‘with brown varnished cupboards and cut glass handles and a little fire place with a brass mantelpiece. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed an evening more in my life, the rain beating down on the deck above, sitting in the cabin lit by lamplight, cooking eggs and sausages over the fire and drinking rum … He is so in love with his ship that he moons about in a trance opening cupboards and eulogising over its beauties, in his slow voice … The black puss is a great charmer and sat on the rails of the little balustrade that goes round the bunks peering with green eyes at the midnight feast.’
She called Beacus ‘Seagull’, though frequently he was her ‘unworthy gull’, incurious and unapproachable, as she had been with Ralph and Gerald and Mark (with whom she was again corresponding). With her ‘gypsy’s warning’, she sensed that Beacus must be making love to other women, younger women, and ‘I felt I was ugly’. Sometimes, too, when he seemed particularly monotonous, she would resent the time with him ‘which might have been more happily spent with Julia and Tommy, or Dorelia and Augustus’. Then her mood abruptly switched and she would decide that for the time being his ‘remoteness just suits me. For I feel I am not being “observed” all the time, that No reactions are expected. That whatever happens is alright. A moon shining in the window across the bed. In the morning seeing a tousled face lying beside me, and then embraces, and more Love. But the sky is light, it has to come to an end and reality must return.’
Lytton noticed that she was sometimes ‘unhappy with her Figure-head’, as he later phrased it in a letter to Mary Hutchinson (15 March 1931). He could see that she found Beacus boring, and he was hardly surprised. ‘But he is a Figure-head,’ Lytton conceded, ‘– and that is almost enough to make up for everything.’ It was the unsteadiest of relationships, and whenever reality did return she knew it must be doomed because ‘the whole thing is a chimera’, she admitted to Lytton, ‘a mirage of my own making’. Other people’s loves were perpetually inexplicable. Lytton, who sometimes felt bemused over his own past affairs, had mocked Ottoline’s unceasing demands for love-attention, and exclaimed incredulously over the spectacle of Maynard and Lydia as singing lovebirds – and had himself been mourned by the Visigoths in a duet of despair after he fell head over heels for what Vanessa called (22 February 1927) the ‘incredibly boring … well meaning … empty headed’ Roger Senhouse. But as extraordinary as any of these wonders was this mirage of Carrington’s. How to understand this ‘most deplorable case’ of what was called love? ‘He [Beacus] is entirely made of wood,’ Lytton protested to Sebastian Sprott (19 March 1926). His insignificance ‘positively opens up vistas of human pointlessness hitherto undreamt of.’
But not to Carrington for whom Beacus opened up other vistas. Into HER BOOK she put all the desire, anxiety, excitement he released about which she could never speak to him.
‘A short love affair. Then a month thinking about little else. A weekend to Cornwall. The pleasure of leaving London invisibly in the rain, like a ghost, curious how little interest anyone takes in trains, and then a sudden panic as usual. “I am too old, it is ridiculous. Probably it is all a mistake”. At Exeter the car outside and then later on the Platform. And my misgivings returned. As I felt it would all be a delusion. One of my own day dreams which had no relation to anybody else’s head. At Oakhampton. The disappointment because the bedroom wasn’t exactly as I had imagined. I had “seen” a big tester bed, a large low room with Dark mahogany furniture, and burning fire … Instead a neat spare room in my Mother’s style with no fireplace and everything white and polished. I felt Nothing can survive this. But curiously enough, it did … I lay in bed and read Tristram Shandy, while he drank in the bar. When I said it doesn’t matter tonight he never questioned, or enquired. Not very much curiosity. Yet that is probably the main attraction. Perhaps the most beautiful moment with a shirt in dark close fitting trousers and a brass belt. Do men know the beauty of their appearance as exactly as females do?’
Her infatuation grew into an obsession and her obsession into a panic. Each day was important – it could not last many days. Yet somehow it lasted. Waiting for it to end was such misery that she sometimes longed to take the initiative, ‘cut this nautical knot & retreat back to my former solitude’. Because they saw each other so irregularly, one night of lovemaking ‘sets me up for days afterwards’. The potency of this ‘animal affection’ was ‘partly the effect of having laid two years in the coffin untouched,’ she confided to Julia (January 1930). ‘… It’s difficult to go back to coffin life again and with my numerous complexes not very easy even if one wanted to, to get a transfer ticket to some one else.’ Whenever she sensed him moving away from her, she would feel herself ‘sinking back into that previous state of not being a female’, she explained in HER BOOK. ‘Hating undressing, hating getting into bed.’ A curious numbness then moved over her, as if the present already seemed to lie in the past.
The affair was brought to a sudden crisis late in 1929 when Carrington discovered she was pregnant. ‘If, when I am 38, I am not an artist,’ she had written to Gerald (October 1920), ‘& think it is no good my persevering with my painting, I might have a child …’ At her next birthday (29 March 1930) she would be entering her thirty-eighth year. But now that her youthful speculation presented itself as a reality, the impossibility of it became clear. She was an artist and wanted to persevere with her painting in the new Ham Spray studio. It was too late for a child. ‘She was in utter despair,’ Frances wrote. ‘… Ralph had long conversations with her and with Lytton, and came up to bed very much worried … it was unthinkable that she would go through with it.’ It was probably this event more than anything else that led to Frances’s breakdown that winter. She still longed for a baby of her own; and here was Carrington, raging and suicidal and going for violent rides along the Downs in order to bring about a miscarriage. For the first time she did what Lytton and Carrington had wanted her to do. ‘I made myself as scarce as possible while these critical discussions went on,’ she wrote, ‘and Lytton was so nice to me in the taxi to Gordon Square that I felt my efforts to be accommodating had not been in vain.’21
Carrington liked children, but she was disgusted by childbearing. Only for a child of Lytton’s, or so she believed, would she have been prepared to go through with it – and that was out of the question. As for Lytton himself, he had never previously objected to Carrington’s and Ralph’s lovers, except for that femme fatale Valentine (or was it Gladys?) Dobrée. For over a dozen years Carrington had been making sacrifices for his welfare. No one so naturally self-willed as she was could have so immolated herself without many unconscious longings for liberty. Her affair with Beacus was the most extreme expression of these longings, and though Lytton did not really like ‘the wretched Beacus’, as he called him in one of his letters to Roger, he knew that he had no right to object. ‘You give me a standard of sensible behaviour which makes it much easier to be reasonable,’ she wrote to thank him (4 and 5 November 1929).’… I love you so much, and I shall never forget your kindness lately to me … Really your understanding is magnificent. Nobody can be so reassuring, or so endearing.’
Lytton did not tell Roger of her pregnancy, and for a time Carrington did not tell Beacus. She had wanted to have secrets again in her life, and this was the biggest secret of all. So she held on to it. ‘As he hugged me in the kitchen,’ she wrote in HER BOOK, ‘I thought “you little guess what you hug between us!"’
Ralph arranged for her pregnancy to be terminated in a London nursing home later that November, paying most of the expense himself. ‘I really don’t see why such foolishness should be rewarded,’ Carrington wrote gratefully. Beacus, too, as he sailed away to the Mediterranean, acknowledged that Ralph had been ‘damned nice’. He admired Carrington’s way of life and sometimes wished she had kept the child and that he had married her.
It was the climax of their relationship: but it was not the end. ‘I still rather adore my strange gull, & pub life among the sailors,’ Carrington confessed to Lytton the following spring (17 April 1930). Observing Beacus and Roger at Ham Spray one weekend, she was suddenly struck by ‘the similarity between Lytton[’s] and my position. Both unable to do anything because we long for our bed companions who were equally indifferent … about coming to bed.’
But as Carrington practised her lamp-trimming and her nautical language with Beacus on the Sanspareil, and as Lytton bent over Roger to assist him with The Times crossword puzzle in a Brighton hotel, they both came to a similar conclusion. ‘All decent people remain young for an incredible length of time and suffer accordingly,’ Lytton had told Roger (16 January 1929). Carrington too accepted this suffering. ‘In spite of my miseries I would not have had anything different,’ she was to assure Lytton (31 December 1930). ‘Would you?’
‘It is really shocking, I am becoming a nature-lover and observer – fatal!’ Lytton had written to Roger early that winter (12 November 1928). ‘The intellect fades in proportion.’ In the aftermath of Elizabeth and Essex, idleness had become his chief occupation. There were always plenty of improbable schemes in the air for a new magnum opus – Voltaire or Julius Caesar. The poet Robert Nichols urged him to tackle Louis XIII – ‘one of the most extraordinary beings who have ever lived’. J.B. Pinker, the literary agent, coaxed him with the secret Life of Shakespeare. Peter Davies, the publisher, offered him a contract to write a short devastating book on Edward VII. As an antidote to Elizabeth and Essex, he considered writing a biography of more limited appeal, on General Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, or even on the heretical Master of Balliol Benjamin Jowett. He also contemplated the idea of a book on George Washington, from which he was apparently put off by the prospect of having to learn ‘that almost incomprehensible and quite intolerable language – American’. Occasionally he thought of an admirable Victorian, such as Charles Darwin, as a subject; or toyed with something shorter, like a history of the world.
There had been talk of a new Bloomsbury weekly magazine which Lytton proposed should be called the W.C.I. Desmond MacCarthy had approached him in March 1929 asking him to write for his new monthly periodical, Life and Letters, which was to be published by the New Statesman publishing company as a rival to J.C. Squire’s London Mercury. Lytton replied giving as his choice of subject either King Lear or Bishop Creighton, and MacCarthy chose Creighton. To Life and Letters Lytton also contributed his essay on Froude (originally entitled ‘One of the Victorians’), this being the last of his series ‘Six English Historians’, and ‘Madame de Lieven’, the last but one of his portraits in miniature. His final essay, ‘The Président de Brosses’, did not come out until April 1931 in the amalgamated New Statesman and Nation which, following the financial failure of Life and Letters, came under the editorship of Kingsley Martin, for whom Lytton promised to write regularly.
He had become the most unprolific of writers, but he was always reading. Every time he travelled up to London, he would scour The Times Book Club, finding there that spring I.A. Richards’s Practical Criticism, which he thought ‘fascinating’, W.P. Ker’s posthumous Form and Style in Poetry (‘full of learning and sense’) and Edwin Muir’s ‘excellent’ Structure of the Novel which he preferred to Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, ‘but I imagine few will agree with me’. Soon he returned again to his old favourites, to Chesterfield, to Virgil, to Moore’s Principia Ethica – ‘such pleasant reading’ – and Gibbon. ‘My laziness is becoming more scandalous than ever,’ he happily told Roger (13 September 1929). ‘I do nothing but read Gibbon – first in the quarto – then in Bury’s edition.’
The dearth of contemporary literature was ‘serious’. But his admiration for Virginia’s A Room of One’s Own was unqualified. It was ‘a masterpiece’, he told Dorothy Bussy. Also a masterpiece was Richard Hughes’s first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica, about which he wrote to many of his friends. ‘My chief conversation will be, now and henceforward, on the subject of a High Wind,’ he informed Roger (1 October 1929), ‘insisting that everyone should read it who hasn’t and that everyone should admire it who has.’ Eighteen months later, Lytton met Hughes one afternoon at Ham Spray. ‘Yesterday there was an incursion in the shape of Richard Hughes, who arrived with Faith Henderson, with whom he was staying,’ he wrote to Roger (5 May 1931). ‘Slightly sinister, we thought – but perhaps only timid under a mask.’ To Richard Hughes it was Lytton who appeared sinister. ‘My first impression was of the extraordinary beauty of the inside of the house,’ he wrote, ‘– a beauty based on little original architectural distinction. Lytton, I think, spent most of his time deep in a chair – he was certainly ill at the time – but I was too frightened of him to look at him closely; my general impression, however, was that he looked as if he had been designed as the perfect objet d’art to go with the background of the house.’ With characteristic shyness Lytton did not mention his admiration for A High Wind in Jamaica, and Hughes never suspected it. ‘How cock-a-hoop I should have been at the time had I known it!’
The blue weather continued to fasten him at Ham Spray, where he was visited by Pippa. The two of them had been appointed joint executors and trustees of their mother’s will, a long and complicated document, under which Lytton himself was left two thousand pounds (equivalent to £48,000 in 1994), minus any sum which he had received from her during her lifetime.22 Later that year, Lytton arranged with Pippa to move back into 51 Gordon Square, taking over the ground floor which he converted into a self-contained flat. On 13 June he also made what was to prove his own last will, in which he bequeathed ten thousand pounds (equivalent to £240,000 in 1994) together with all his pictures and drawings to Carrington, and a further one thousand pounds (equivalent to £24,000 in 1994) to Ralph, the residue of the property – with the exception of the books given to Roger – being left to his brother James, whom he appointed his executor.
The weeks slipped by like a recurring dream. As the days lengthened and grew warmer, Lytton’s idleness became more strenuous. It was impossible to enjoy leisure thoroughly unless there was plenty to do. He went up to London to watch Edith Evans act in Reginald Berkeley’s The Lady with the Lamp, a play about Florence Nightingale which ‘seemed to me entirely based on E.V. except for some foolish frills added by the good gentleman’, and to lunch, unsuccessfully, with Lady Cunard who ‘talked the whole time, so that Max [Beerbohm] was never once allowed to open his mouth. Idiocy! Idiocy!’
While Carrington went to France and Ralph dealt with Lytton’s publishers and managed his finances, Lytton returned to King’s – ‘such sunshine – such crowds of young gents – such benignity’, was invited to still more lunches, more enormous tea-parties and then went off for ‘a perfect week-end with Roger’ to Bath. They stayed at the Pulteney Hotel in Laura Place – ‘a perfect spot – and quite a sympathetic établissement’, he told Carrington (3 June 1929), ‘with a lift boy no less sympathetic, who at last said to me (in a broad West Country accent) “Excuse me, zurr, bout are you the zelebrated author?”… We inspected all the favourite sights – including Prof. Saintsbury at No. 1. the Crescent – his white hair and skull-cap were visible as usual through the window.’23
They all did a lot of travelling that year. At the beginning of July, Lytton and Carrington set off with Ralph and Sebastian Sprott for a fortnight in Holland. It was a peculiar trip. On board ship the four of them crouched cheerlessly drinking gin and watching their Dutch and German fellow passengers who sat in long rows of deck-chairs, drifting off for heavy meals and otherwise staring stonily at the horizon as it tilted gently above the rail and then slipped below it.
They arrived at Rotterdam, examined the zoo, then hurried on to The Hague to look at the Van Goghs. The mood of all four of them was still sombre and, hoping for a rapid uplift in their spirits, they left for Leyden, which Nancy Cunard had told Lytton was ‘wonderful’. Again they were disappointed, and made their way to Amsterdam, where they remained a week, ‘looking at cheeses’.
‘I have been rather maddened by the sporadic behaviour of the party,’ Ralph burst out in one of his letters to Frances (4 July 1929). ‘… all are piano, piano, I don’t know why. Perhaps we are all very old indeed, or perhaps we are growing a little Dutch.’ Ralph himself was anything but piano, boiling over with small grievances. Each member of the party seemed resentful of what Ralph termed the ‘selfish egotism of the others’. He himself was severely missing Frances, wondering why he had consented to come on this purposeless journey; Sebastian, usually a perfect compagnon de voyage was unfathomable, unforthcoming; Carrington behaved tiresomely, her thoughts reeling back across the sea to Beacus; while Lytton, anxious over Roger, contributed his most alarming silences. Beside each one moved the unseen presence of a loved-one whose company hovered more closely than any actual companion.
‘Have you ever been to this hydroptic country?’ Lytton asked Mary Hutchinson (4 July 1929) from Amsterdam.
‘… It makes an odd mixture of impressions. The few days before I left England were curiously filled with experiences, and they are as much present with me as the beautiful seventeenth-century doors and windows – so solid, so rich – that line the waterways, and the Rembrandts and De Hooghes in the picture galleries, and the delicious dinners at a pound a head that one stumbles into quite accidentally, having intended simply to have a snack at an A.B.C…. but it is true that I am troubled about Roger – in an unexpected way. It is not easy to know one’s own mind – not easy to balance instinct and reason – not easy to be sensible and in love. Do not mistake me, though – I am not unhappy – only speculative, a little dubitative, faintly uneasy, perhaps. I wake up at three o’clock in the morning and lie awake for an hour, trying drowsily to disentangle the puzzle of my mind and heart – and then sink to sleep again, having accomplished nothing and not in the least put out… there is nothing but hazard, intensity, and interrogation.’
When Lytton returned from Holland he found that Roger had abruptly left with a friend for the South of France. Days passed in silence and speculation. A weekend on which they had planned to go away together came and went – and still there was no news. ‘I am in rather a state about R., as you may imagine,’ he confessed to Mary Hutchinson (25 July 1929). ‘The possibilities are so various – the poor thing may be ill – or the wretch may be dreaming – or the little devil may have sailed for Greece in Mr B[urton]’s yacht. In any case there’s nothing to be done, but twiddle one’s thumbs, and seek such consolations as are available.’
A few days later a letter arrived from Cannes, written in Roger’s most cramped style, which mentioned that he had been obliged to postpone his return home because of constipation! ‘Surely, surely, something better might have been thought of as an excuse for another week in the South of France,’ Lytton complained to Dadie Rylands (29 July 1929),’– but such are our friend’s strange fancies. I … have grown inert – cannot really bother any more … I shall twiddle my thumbs like an aged Barbary Ape.’
All further speculation became futile. He determined to act sensibly even in love and shake off the heartache with some literary work on The Greville Memoirs which he had long been putting off. To his friends he seemed ‘rather low and flat’ that summer, but ‘this does not mean that I am depressed or worried – quite the reverse,’ he assured Dadie (2 August 1929). ‘I feel extremely cheerful, and seem to have emerged on to some upper plateau from which I can contemplate all the eventualities with equanimity. It is something of a miracle, and a great relief.’
*
‘Do you know how ambitious I am?’ Lytton had asked Roger (16 January 1929). ‘Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone, but I long to do some good to the world – to make people happier – to help to dissipate this atrocious fog of superstition that hangs over us and compresses our breathing and poisons our lives. But it can’t be done in a minute.’
‘I believe that the great fault of the English nation is its hankering after compromise,’ he had written to Ottoline Morrell (8 December 1910) ‘– and it’s quite a new thing: it was not compromise that repealed the Corn Laws and cut off Charles the First’s head.’
According to his brother James, he aimed to write one more biography then ‘burn his boats’ by declaring his homosexuality, and campaigning for sexual egalitarianism – even if it meant casting adrift from society and living abroad. He had supported financially many avant-garde and philanthropic causes, from birth-control to relief of war victims, and thought of himself as ‘left-wing’ but not a socialist. Yet he had never wanted to step into politics professionally. ‘So glad I’m not a Prime Minister!’ he wrote in one of his letters to Roger. ‘So happy to be what I am.’ What he wanted to do was to infiltrate his libertine and libertarian beliefs through literature, into the bloodstream of the people, and by such oblique methods that readers accepted it all quite naturally. The polemics of Eminent Victorians had been created by the war; in Queen Victoria he had carefully laid down a subversive sexual subtext; and then, more boldly in Elizabeth and Essex, written sexual deviation into the mainstream of English history.
The main threat to personal freedom, Lytton believed, was an incursive post-war tendency to interfere with the private life of the individual which had begun during the war itself. Through the 1920s this desire to regulate others persisted. In the United States, where the war fever had been most virulent and the losses of men smallest, and where the dragooning of vast masses of fellow citizens had come as a new experience, the cessation of conscription had left a want which was supplied by the enforcement of prohibition. In Italy, Germany and Russia autocracies were formed, the unconscious aim of which was to recover in another war the national prestige lost in the Great War. France alone left its citizens in peace, for France, unlike the United States or Britain, knew conscription before the war, and unlike Italy, Germany and Russia, emerged from the war with its prestige enhanced.
In Britain, state interference with the individual had for many the charm of novelty. The Defence of the Realm Act lingered on, vexing the ordinary man and encouraging energetic busybodies to plan more penetrating invasions into people’s lives. It was this type of governmental officiousness that exasperated Lytton.
One example had been the Oscar Levy affair. Dr Levy, a distinguished philosopher, scholar and man of letters, had left England in 1914 and returned again in 1920 on business, staying on because of ill-health. After a few months he was threatened with deportation under the Aliens Restriction Act – a law that was due to expire at the end of 1921. In the early autumn of that year, Lytton had joined the Bloomsbury Committee which was making protests against his expulsion, and signed a petition to Lloyd George pointing out that Dr Levy had relinquished his German citizenship and had nowhere to go. ‘The police expulsion of so eminent a man’, this petition concluded, ‘is surely a grave reflection on English civilization.’
All sorts of rumours were broadcast – that Levy had been connected with espionage during the war, that he was in counter-intelligence or the secret service. The Government confirmed or denied nothing, though granting a short delay of the deportation. Lytton was not optimistic. He disliked joining movements and committees and felt ill at ease among his allies. ‘I have become involved in the great pro-Dr-Oscar-Levy movement,’ he had reported to Ralph (5 October 1921).
‘… I was summoned this afternoon to the headquarters of the movement at 34 Gordon Square, one of the principal props of which turned out to be Mr [David] Bomberg, painter … Another Jew welcomed me, and I rather gathered that I too was a Jew – which made me uneasy. At last I tore myself away, but I am in dread of being pursued for the rest of my life by this strange collection. As for poor Dr Oscar Levy I can’t believe that with such supporters his chances are very good.’
So it turned out. On 25 October, Dr Levy left England for France, the French consultate having given him permission to enter the country and stay there without time limit. Once again French civilization had shown itself to be superior to English.
One of the chief dangers to the liberty of the individual in the 1920s was the rising popularity of autocratic controls. Autocracies, whether they were called Fascism, Bolshevism or Puritanism, claimed that they subordinated the prurient desires of the individual to the service of the community. To Lytton’s mind, they in fact subordinated these individual desires to the passion for power of a few emotional misfits with enormous vigour and no internal resources. He objected to autocracy for much the same reason as he had objected to militarism. For all autocracies, however excellent the ideals with which they started, inevitably move towards war, partly because war is the simplest expression of power, and partly because the suppression of your own citizens cannot continue for long without a common enemy abroad.
In Britain, the most threatening form of autocracy was Puritanism. In the field of literature and the arts, this Puritanism took the form of censorship exercised by people who seemed to fear that society would at any moment sink into vicious iniquity. Throughout his career as a literary critic, Lytton waged an offensive against the expurgated text. In reviewing the first four volumes of Mrs Paget Toynbee’s sixteen-volume edition of Horace Walpole’s letters, he complained vehemently against certain omissions. ‘The jeune fille is certainly not an adequate reason, and, even if she were, the jeune fille does not read Walpole. Whoever does read him must feel that these constant omissions are so many blots upon perfection, and distressing relics of an age of barbarous prudery.’24
Some fifteen years later, in 1919, Lytton reviewed Dr Paget Toynbee’s two-volume Supplement to the Letters of Horace Walpole, and again protested at the numerous passages dropped on the score of propriety. ‘Surely,’ he exclaimed, ‘in a work of such serious intention and such monumental proportions the publication of the whole of the original material was not only justifiable, but demanded by the nature of the case.’25 Toynbee defended his policy in the correspondence columns of the Athenaeum. Great care, he assured his readers, had been taken over his responsibilities as editor. Improprieties would be too mild a word with which to describe the excised passages, which might be compared ‘to the grossest of the avowals contained in the unexpurgated editions of Rousseau’s Confessions’. The manuscripts had been deposited under sealed cover in the Bodleian ‘where they will be available to any future editor of the letters at the discretion of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press’.
Lytton returned to the attack the following week. ‘If a surgeon were charged with having made an unnecessary amputation,’ he wrote, ‘and were to answer that after all the limb was still in existence, carefully preserved, under a sealed cover, and that, if need arose, it might be sewn on again by another surgeon, at a future date, the patient’s friends would hardly feel that the reply was reassuring.’ After expressing wonder at the type of literary man who would reproduce Rousseau’s Confessions only in a truncated version, he passed to the general problem of censorship:
‘It is, moreover, extremely hard to see what good purpose is served by the deletion of passages which, in the opinion of individual editors, are indecent… Literature is inundated with improprieties and grossnesses of every kind; the mischief – if mischief it be – has been done already. It is too late to be prudish: Catullus, Rabelais, and a hundred others stare us in the face; the horse is gone, and no locking of the stable door will bring him back again.’26
When, in 1926, Paget Toynbee brought out a further supplementary volume of Walpole’s letters, there were more expurgated pages. ‘The editor’, complained Lytton, ‘is still unable to resist meddling with the text. The complete edition is incomplete, after all.
‘Apparently, we should blush too much were we to read the whole of Walpole’s letters; those privileges have been reserved for Dr Toynbee alone. It was impossible not to hope that, after so prolonged téte-à-tête with his author, he would relent at last; perhaps, in this latest volume at any rate – but no! the powers of editorship must be asserted to the bitter end; and the fatal row of asterisks and the fatal note, “passage omitted” occur, more than once, to exacerbate the reader. Surely it would have been kinder not to reveal the fact that any deletion had been made. Then one could have read on, innocent and undisturbed. As it is, when one’s irritation has subsided, one’s imagination, one’s shocking imagination, begins to work. The question must be asked: do these explicit suppressions really serve the interests of the highest morality? Dr Toynbee reminds one of the man who …* But enough; for, after all, it is not the fly but the ointment that claims our attention.’27
Lytton was continually spotting this fly in the ointment. Not only Walpole’s correspondence, but Blake’s poems, Pepys’s Diary and Boswell’s letters had been mutilated by academic editors who claimed to be rehabilitating the author’s text. ‘When’, Lytton demanded, ‘will this silly and barbarous prudery come to an end?’
In one instance he saw an opportunity for defeating such prudery. The Greville Memoirs is not listed among the four bibliographies of Eminent Victorians, but on 6 November 1917, while at work on ‘The End of General Gordon’, Lytton had written to Clive Bell: ‘I spend most of my time reading Greville’s Memoirs (do you know them?) – very dry, and as they are dry – just the kind of book that pleases me. He was a slow-going medium member of the governing classes of those days – the days of Sir Robert Peel and Lord Melbourne – and he writes with a restraint and a distinction.’
When he had come to compare the complete manuscript in the British Museum with the Silver Library edition – which he included among the ‘Works Referred to in the Notes’ at the end of Queen Victoria – he had been disgusted to discover just how badly tampered with even the fullest published version had been. He drew attention to this state of affairs both by a preliminary note in Queen Victoria acknowledging his indebtedness to the Trustees of the British Museum for their permission to make use of unpublished passages, and in the text of the biography itself, where he recounts Victoria’s indignation at seeing the contents of the abridged version. Two years later, in 1923, he published his biographical essay ‘Charles Greville’ in the Nation and Athenaeum, stating that Greville’s diary was good enough ‘to make him certainly famous and possibly immortal’. In this essay, which provided the background history of the diary, he did not exaggerate its literary merits, comparing it unfavourably with Saint-Simon. Many of its pages, he explained, were rather metallic in style and its political information was not always reliable. Yet, he added, it was of extreme value, since the sheer quantity of Greville’s first-hand knowledge was enormous.
‘He was not exactly a gossip, nor a busybody; he was an extremely inquisitive person, in whom, somehow or other, it seemed natural for everybody to confide. Thus the broad current of London life flows through his ample pages, and, as one turns them over, one glides swiftly into the curiously distant world of eighty years ago. A large leisureliness descends upon one, and a sense that there is plenty of room, and an atmosphere of extraordinary moderation. Reason and instinct, fixity and change, aristocracy and democracy – all these are there, but unaccountably interwoven into a circumambient compromise – a wonderful arrangement of half-lights … So Greville unrolls his long panorama; then pauses for a little, to expatiate in detail on some particular figure in it. His portraits, with their sobriety of tone and precision of outline, resemble very fine engravings, and will prove, perhaps, the most enduring portions of his book.’
In his conclusion Lytton suggested that ‘perhaps the time has now come when a really complete edition of the whole work might be produced with advantage; for the years have smoothed down what was agitating and personal half a century ago into harmless history. When the book first appeared, it seemed – even with Reeve’s tactful excisions – outrageous. The later Victorians were shocked … To turn from their horrified comments to the Greville Memoirs themselves is almost disappointing. In those essentially sober pages the envenomed wretch of the Victorian imagination is nowhere to be found.’28
Unknown to him at this time, a copy of the diaries made by a clerk employed by the original editor, Henry Reeve, had found its way, after the death of Reeve’s widow, to the United States. Shortly after the appearance of Lytton’s essay in the New Republic, this unabridged manuscript fell under the notice of P.W. Wilson, formerly a writer on the Daily News and a Liberal member of Parliament, who, in 1927, brought out in two volumes a collection of extracts from it, containing some new material. This publication gave rise to an even more anomalous situation. The manuscript diary, which filled ninety-one small quarto books bound in red morocco, had originally been published in three instalments, totalling eight volumes altogether, in 1874, 1885 and 1887. P.W. Wilson’s compilation, while apparently supplying Reeve’s omissions, contained only a series of rearranged fragments from the diary, and provided no means of distinguishing the new material from the old. So there was still no satisfactory text.
In a letter to The Times, Lytton proposed that, in order to resolve ‘this curious state of affairs’,29 a full and accurate edition of the diaries should at once be prepared. Next day, he received a wire from the publishers Allen & Unwin inviting him to edit a complete version of the memoirs. The task commended itself to him on several grounds. He was already familiar with the social and political world between 1814 and 1860, and working in such a world would come as a relief from Elizabeth and Essex. He might look forward to many civilized hours of methodical occupation.
But after a month of indecisive negotiations, the British Museum Trustees backed away. Greville’s niece, Lady Strafford, then aged ninety-seven, would probably institute proceedings, they advised Lytton. In these circumstances they could not be a party to his scheme. ‘What a world!’ Lytton explained in exasperation to Carrington.
The following summer Lady Strafford died. Almost immediately Lytton applied again to the Trustees who, this time, put up no obstacles. Work began late in August. ‘It is very agreeable here,’ Lytton wrote to Carrington from London (11 September 1928). ‘The weather is most soothing – and so is the work in the British Museum. We have been so far most industrious. I enjoy it very much and R[alph] is an excellent work-companion. The only question is whether I shall ever be able to give it up. It seems to me an ideal way of spending the hours – and we can hardly bear to tear ourselves away from the beloved MS at 1/4 to 5, which is closing time.’
Another version is given by Frances, who had recently left the Birrell and Garnett bookshop and was shortly to undergo ‘a rest-cure’. In her diary entry for 15 September she wanly noted: ‘R[alph] has now become to all intents a business man, going to the British Museum every day until 5, and as he lunches at present with Lytton I don’t see him from morning till evening, which is the strangest sensation.’ Frances could see that Ralph was thrilled to be doing the groundwork for this new edition under Lytton’s supervision. ‘I am quite envious,’ she had noted (7 September 1928). Before the end of the month she herself was to change into a business woman, joining the others at work in the Manuscript Department. ‘R[alph] and I are both now working on the Greville MSS in the British Museum,’ she recorded (21 September 1928).
‘We sit side by side on a shelf just wide enough to hold a table and two chairs, in the upper part of the Documents Room, looking down upon Magna Carta. The streams of schoolchildren and others who buzz around that memorable object might be distracting, except that our work is so utterly absorbing. On our table lies the previous, incorrect and much expurgated edition of the Memoirs made by Henry Reeve, and the first few volumes of the diary itself brought up from their locked safe by a museum official in the morning and taken back there at night … I see now how important it was to get every formal question settled from the very start, and never let oneself forget the decisions made.’
Having decided these questions of misspellings, cross-references, abbreviations, and the methods by which to distinguish old notes from new, and to indicate hitherto unpublished passages, Lytton planned that Ralph and Frances should transcribe the missing and disputed pages of the memoirs, and every so often Ralph should come down to Ham Spray bringing with him the material they had prepared, which he would then annotate. ‘I have been working with Ralph nearly every day at the British Museum,’ he told Roger (19 September 1928). ‘Now Frances takes my place in the afternoons, and before long she will altogether I think. It is very pleasant work. Various amusing details keep turning up, sometimes in a childishly easy cipher.’
Presently, as he had predicted, Lytton ceased going to the British Museum almost entirely, Frances taking over from him in the mornings also. This arrangement, which gave Frances much-needed work, also enabled Lytton and Carrington to see rather more of Ralph by himself, easing tension at Ham Spray. Already, by the end of January, the three of them had made considerable headway. Ralph ‘brought an enormous quantity of Greville MSS’, Lytton wrote to Roger (2 February 1929), ‘and I see that the moment is rapidly approaching when I shall have to plunge into that ocean in good earnest’.
First there was the problem of publishers. ‘I am beginning to fear that I may have some trouble with the publishers about printing everything – which is what I want to do,’ Lytton confided to Roger (19 September 1928). There was little sensational appeal in such a book, and the sales could hardly be large. On the other hand, Lytton reasoned, all the public libraries and educational institutions would have to stock it, and his edition – if it did contain everything – would never be replaced. The firm which stood most to gain was Heinemann, having been responsible for bringing out the English edition of P.W. Wilson’s two piecemeal volumes. Early this year, Ralph called at the Heinemann offices and persuaded them to agree, in principle, to bringing out the full text.30 A few months later, Harcourt Brace wrote to Lytton inquiring whether they might publish the American edition. ‘It is very interesting to hear that your firm contemplates the publication of the new and complete Greville,’ Lytton replied to Donald Brace (24 October 1929).
‘… it would be a serious undertaking; I think it will take about ten large volumes; probably it would bring you more glory than profit! From my point of view, nothing would please me better than that you should undertake it. Our relations have been so pleasant that I would welcome any extension of them, and there is the minor point that a republication of the introduction would be facilitated … It is really the size of the affair that is the vital point – both from the point of view of the publisher and from that of the reader, who will not buy it unless he is a serious student; the plums of scandal and surprise – and there are some – are too few and far between to allure anyone else.’
From the summer of 1929 onwards he gave a regular part of his time to ‘my Greville grubbings’ and over the next two years his correspondence carries intermittent notes of ‘continuing to grovel in Greville’. This year, too, saw the publication of Leaves from the Greville Diary, a potted version in one volume, with an agreeable introduction by Lytton’s old friend, Philip Morrell. This book, by drawing attention to the need for an authoritative edition, acted as a spur to Lytton and his team. In 1930, he arranged with Gabriel Wells of New York for the American manuscripts to be transferred back to England and placed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. By the time of his death, all the passages omitted from Reeve’s edition, including those in cipher and those scratched out with a pen, had been transcribed from the original manuscripts. ‘The latest and best edition by Reeve,’ Roger Fulford wrote, ‘that in the Silver Library published by Messrs Longmans in 1888, had been collated with the manuscripts and his frequent liberties with the text corrected. The notes are almost all Mr Strachey’s – though here and there it has been found possible to add to them in the light of information published since his death.’
Lytton also attacked the censorship of contemporary authors, identifying himself with those campaigning against the prosecution of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, though he does not seem to have thought very highly of the book’s merits. When, on 23 March 1929, Gilbert Murray wrote a letter to the Nation and Athenaeum deploring the cult of obscenity in modern writing, which he claimed, had a peculiar power for destroying the imaginative values in its vicinity, Lytton replied, calling up in evidence to refute this statement two classical writers, Rabelais and Swift. ‘Both in “Pantagruel” and in “Gulliver” it is obviously this very element [obscenity] which acts as a stimulus to the authors’ most profound observations and most astonishing flights.’31
In the past he had petitioned against the suppression of D.H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow and now found himself supporting Lawrence once again. Lytton’s distaste for Lawrence seems to have been sharpened by Lawrence’s inverted puritanism. On 14 June 1929, an exhibition of his pictures, organized by Philip and Dorothy Trotter, had opened at the Warren Gallery in Maddox Street, London. After some thirteen thousand people had been to the gallery, the police suddenly arrived and carried off thirteen of the pictures, storing them in a cellar of the Marlborough Street Police Court before having them burnt. ‘I suppose you heard about the police raid on Lawrence’s pictures at the Warren Gallery?’ Lytton wrote to Roger (15 July 1929). ‘I saw Dorothy and her spouse at Boulestin’s one evening, and heard her account of it.
‘The police appear to have been singularly idiotic, but D[orothy] herself, it seems to me, was almost equally so. They were on the point of seizing a drawing by Blake of Adam and Eve as obscene, and she was silly enough to tell them it was by him, and so make a cheap score; but if she had only let them do it, there couldn’t have been a better exposé of their methods. Next day I had lunch with Mary [Hutchinson] and she showed me the book of reproductions from his pictures. They are wretched things – no drawing or composition so far as I could see – and in fact no point – not even that of indecency; there were some pricks visible, but not a single erection, which one naturally supposed would have caused the rumpus.’
Shortly afterwards he went round to the Warren Gallery with Geoffrey Scott. The exhibits were ‘poor’ and in his view the whole show had been a mistake. ‘At least you think the pictures respectable?’ queried Scott in the context of the impending trial. ‘Much too respectable!’ Lytton answered.
Immediately after the police seizure, Philip and Dorothy Trotter had started to get up a petition, but sensed, as Philip Trotter wrote, ‘a winter wind from Bloomsbury in the dudgeon of Lytton Strachey and the silence of Roger Fry’. The Trotters were careful not to invite Lytton’s judgement on the artistic merits of Lawrence’s paintings in the petition.
‘Since many pictures of admittedly great artistic value contain details which might be condemned as “harmful to the morals of those who are unstable or immature”, we protest in principle against the destruction of pictures on that ground. The burning of a book does not necessarily destroy it, and condemned books have sometimes taken their places among the classics, but the burning of a picture is irreparable.’
This petition sought to change a law that permitted an anonymous informer, spurred on by the sensationalist section of the press, to put into action the machinery by which a painter’s work was placed in peril of destruction. After a brief hesitation, Lytton added his signature to those of Leonard and Virginia, Vanessa and Duncan, Maynard, Vita Sackville-West, Roger Fry, Clive Bell and Augustus John, to help ‘protect contemporary art from the grave menace implied in the terms of the summons issued in regard to Mr Lawrence’s work’. However, this issue was never pressed, since at the trial St John Hutchinson, acting on Lawrence’s instructions, offered to withdraw the pictures, assuring the court that they would not be shown again.
These were small but necessary battles against the moral evasion and mendacity that debased public opinion and had overshadowed Lytton’s sexual life. After the war this ‘atrocious fog’ of peril and opprobrium was beginning to lift with the break-down of old class divisions. When Sebastian Sprott spoke to him about ‘Len’, ‘Ernie’, ‘the Blackamoor’ and other exotics of the Nottingham underworld, and then brought his working-class lover to Ham Spray (‘large, decided, in mind and feature – not beautiful, though, and probably with false teeth. The Nottingham accent … has an odd barbarous effect. When he dealt [cards], he licked his thumb in a very winning manner’); or when Morgan Forster came with news ‘of having achieved a complete success with a member of the lower classes, aged 24’, showing plainly that ‘never has he been so happy, and he is 53’, Lytton sensed that sexual barriers were beginning to come down along with social barriers. The trial of Oscar Wilde was thirty years past and seemed to belong to a different age. The ‘New Age’, which Lytton had confidently predicted after Moore’s Principia Ethica, now appeared to be advancing again with the influence of Freud and Marx – an economic and psychological reformation that aligned new understanding of our interior lives with new ideas of how to arrange the society in which we lived. In these readjustments to our thinking, Lytton saw a renewed opportunity for escaping the ‘superstition that hangs over us and compresses our breathing and poisons our lives’. And if, by helping to release homosexuality from legal danger and social disgrace, he could change the future destinies of people like himself, then his secret ambition would be accomplished.
Ever since Carrington took up with Beacus, the ‘sweet canary Don’ Dadie Rylands had stepped forward as the principal confidant of Lytton’s heart. Whenever the love and lust Lytton desired from Roger were being withheld, it was Dadie who chiefly provided the support he needed. ‘I enjoy what he provides – an atmosphere of the schoolroom,’ Lytton had explained to Sebastian Sprott (31 August 1925). ‘If only one could beat him, it would be perfection.’ Sympathetic to Lytton’s varying bouts of ill-fortune, Dadie was none the less critical of his weaknesses. ‘I suppose you realize that he’s (unconsciously) jealous of both of us,’ Lytton was to warn Roger (30 July 1930), ‘– that he wants (unconsciously) to supplant each of us with the other.’ Yet he was so affectionate, and ‘enhances life so immensely’, that such unconscious motives might be discounted ‘so long as one realizes their existence, & keeps a good look out (which I’m sorry to say I haven’t always done)’. This was an oblique apology to Roger for various indiscretions. But mostly Lytton had been loyal enough. When Dadie irritably complained of the dismal pattern of his affaire with Roger, Lytton would defend himself with just the lightest hint of reproof (20 November 1929): ‘People must gang their ain gate … And I also feel that it’s specially my business to understand and make allowances for that peculiarly sweet creature. So you see …’
Dadie could not always be expected to see. During the spiritless months of winter, he was very close to Lytton. But by July, Lytton was again much happier, and their friendship receded a little. There were moments when Lytton felt slightly ashamed of having to confess that, for the time being, he had no further misdemeanours to unfold. Intermittently that summer, the vision of Roger spread across the whole horizon, obliterating other friends. ‘To me our relations have always been among the greatest blessings of my life,’ he wrote to him (30 June 1930), ‘– that I have never doubted. The truth is I’m gorged with good fortune, and really if I can’t be extremely happy it’s a scandal.’
There had been something strangely debilitating about Lytton’s health over the winter. He was continually plagued by ‘collywobbles’ or ‘a wuzzle buzzle of a cold’. Unable to wait patiently for the far-off heats of July, he had decided to break out of his hibernation at Ham Spray that spring and go to Rome. The idea immediately brought him to life. Roger, after prolonged indecision, came to the conclusion that he could go, and then that he could not. Finally Lytton invited Dadie to accompany him instead. They booked in at the Hotel Hassler and New York – where Lytton had previously taken Roger – Dadie carrying with him a portable edition of Shakespeare, and Lytton some novels of Trollope and most of Proust. But once they had done The Times crossword each day (‘my theory now’, Lytton had decided, ‘is that life is not so much a pattern as a crossword puzzle’) there was little opportunity for reading. When the sun shone, they would march off on long sightseeing expeditions. ‘The beauty of everything is very great,’ Lytton wrote to Carrington (13 April 1930), ‘but it is a rigorous vigorous life one has to lead – so difficult ever to dream in Italy – and the Italians, one gathers, do nothing else! I don’t understand it.’
Their social life in Rome proceeded as a caricature of the London scene – ‘upper-class vagueness and unreality, American frenzy, intellectual sodomy etc. etc.’, as Lytton described it in a letter to Ralph (19 April 1930). ‘It is rather amusing, but it would be much nicer to lie under a tomb in the Campagna, or linger among the cypresses of Tivoli.’ One afternoon the two of them went to have tea with a countess who politely inquired whether Dadie was Lytton’s son; another day they encountered Lady d’Abernon who, ‘poor soul, appeared out of space, and disappeared again after a slightly painful interchange of civilities’. They dined at the British Embassy with Maurice Baring; they met Beverley Nichols one evening and his American millionaire companion, Warren Curry, both of whom ‘after wandering in despair over Europe and Africa, now openly quarrel standing in the street outside hotels’.32 The climax to their social life was ‘a particularly mad lunch party at Lord Berners,33 where an Italian princess ‘dressed in flowing widow’s weeds, and giving vent to a flowing stream of very dimly veiled indecencies, kept the table in a twitter’.
Almost every day Lytton and Carrington wrote to each other; he telling her how homesick he felt and asking whether she would like to join them in Rome; she, half-tempted to do so, nevertheless reassuring him that he ‘mustn’t think I mind in the least you being in Rome. I mean I do. But at the same time I shall be very happy so you mustn’t think of me.’ He returned in the last week of April and spent May at Ham Spray. ‘I feel I must stick to Greville for this month,’ he wrote (11 May 1930). At weekends there were relays of relatives and friends – the Bussys, the Lambs, the MacCarthys, Sheppard and Norton, Alix and James, Julia and Stephen Tomlin who had made a remarkable bust of Lytton, ‘a highly impressive, repulsive, and sinister object’, Lytton had described it to Dadie while Tommy was at work on it (9 August 1929). ‘Perhaps it is the pure truth.’34 Clive Bell also turned up and ‘chirps away with swinging legs which reveal a strange span of drawers below the knee, as ever’; and Boris Anrep who, pacing the rooms, described some enormous fishes he had seen off the coast of Brittany, round as footballs, and with a cruel triangular mouth which, if you wedged a brick into it, gave a crack! – and spat it out as powder.
Lytton divided this summer between Ham Spray and his flat in 51 Gordon Square. William Plomer, meeting him in London for the first time, left a description of what he looked like in this last phase of his life. The beard and spectacles, Plomer observed, made him appear older than his real age of fifty.
‘Although he was lanky and Edward Lear was rotund, I imagine that Lear’s beard and spectacles may also have seemed to create a certain distance between himself and others. About Strachey’s eyelids, as he looked out through the windows of his spectacles over the quickset hedge of his beard, there was a suggestion of world-weariness … I did not think of him in terms of a sum of years but as an intelligence alert and busy behind the appendage of hair and the glass outworks. A glint came into his eyes, the brain was on the move as swiftly as a bat, with something of the radar-like sensitivity of a bat, and when he spoke it was sometimes in the voice of a bat.’
He was more man ever in demand at London social events, submitting to them with a characteristic mixture of enthusiasm, malice, curiosity and goodwill. ‘I’ve been plunging in the oddest manner among the Upper Classes,’ he reported to Dadie (8 July 1930). Among the very oddest of these functions was a tea-party given by the Duchess of Marlborough, the purpose of which was to assemble the most eminent writers in the land and record photographic groups corresponding to Conversation Pieces. If these proved sufficiently inspiring, it was planned to have paintings made of them. A miscellaneous crowd assembled in the gilded salons of Carlton House Terrace – among them Augustine Birrell who in his eightieth year ‘seems extraordinarily vigorous, and in fact younger than anyone else’. While the duke, who absolutely forbade the use of a spiked tripod on his parquet floor, or of flashlight bulbs in case their smoke discoloured the ceiling, argued to a position of stalemate with an American photographer, the writers waited in their formal group. ‘The exhaustion was terrific,’ Lytton complained, ‘the idiocy intense.’
Wherever he went, he wrote to Carrington. ‘I had quite an interesting time last night,’ he told her (28 May 1930) after a dinner-party with Bryan and Diana Guinness. ‘… On the way I fell in with the endless stream of motors going to the “Court”, each filled with a sad bevy of débutantes – and an occasional redcoat.
‘A considerable crowd lined the Mall, gaping at this very dull spectacle. I found again a large party – about 18 – with Eddie Marsh, but not Lady Cunard – again sat next to Diana [Cooper]. Once more Harold Acton figured – I feel myself falling under his sway little by little. At last, after a rather dreary dinner, we reached Rutland Gate, where, as I’d feared, Pa and Ma Redesdale35 were in evidence. However, it was really a pleasant and a very young party – everyone looked very nice and behaved very well, it seemed to me – such good, gentle, natural manners – no stiffness – no blatancy – more like a large family party than anything else. The effect was rather like a choice flower-bed – each tulip standing separately, elegant and gay – but a ghostly notice glimmered – “Please do not pick”.’
Lytton could still fall into curious dilemmas. One incident that summer took place in the National Gallery ‘where I went yesterday to see the Duveen room – a decidedly twilight effect: but spacing out the Italian pictures produces on the whole a fair effect,’ he wrote to Carrington (10 June 1930). ‘There was a black-haired tart marching round in india-rubber boots, and longing to be picked up.
‘We both lingered in the strangest manner in front of various masterpieces – wandering from room to room. Then on looking round I perceived a more attractive tart – fair-haired this time – bright yellow and thick hair – a pink face – and plenty of vitality. So I transferred my attentions, and began to move in his direction when on looking more closely I observed that it was the Prince of Wales – no doubt at all – a Custodian bowing and scraping, and Philip Sassoon also in attendance. I then became terrified that the latter would see me, and insist on performing an introduction, so I fled – perhaps foolishly – perhaps it might have been the beginning of a really entertaining affair. And by that time the poor black-haired tart had entirely disappeared. Perhaps he was the ex-king of Portugal.’
To recover from excitements such as these, he fled down to King’s to stay with Dadie. But the pace of life in Cambridge, with its river-parties and dinner-parties, its theatres crammed with young men, grew almost as hectic as London. He hurried on for a few days to Taplow Court, a large mansion in the French château style, set high amid green lawns overlooking the Thames near the wicked weekend town of Maidenhead – the home of Lady Desborough, the most celebrated hostess of the age. The names of the guests staying with her over the previous weekend would appear on Monday mornings in The Times: a long list of statesmen, diplomats, proconsuls, fashionable beauties, terminated generally with one or two men of learning or letters. Lytton, however, does not appear to have been impressed by this clientele, which included ‘a knot of dowagers and [J.M.] Barrie. Also Lord D[avid] Cecil, who struck me as being too much at home among the female antiques.
‘Desmond was there too – a comfort; but I came away feeling pretty ashy. Lord Desborough36 himself was really the best of the crew – a huge old rock of an athlete – almost completely gaga – I spent the whole of Sunday afternoon with him tête-à-tête. He showed me his unpublished books – “The History of the Thames” – “The History of the Oar” etc., etc. He confessed he had read the whole of Shakespeare. – “And, you know, there is some pretty stiff stuff in him”!’
A visit to Ireland a few weeks later gave Lytton the opportunity for more social misadventures. He had been invited by Bryan and Diana Guinness to Knockmaroon, a large comfortable house in Castleknock, on the farther side of Dublin from the enormous Phoenix Park. In preparation he purchased an aggressive suit of orange tweeds and, splendidly attired, travelled by a luxurious train over the sea to Kingstown, where, ‘owing to the incompetence of the idle rich’, there was no one to meet him. He was obliged to board an uncomfortable train to Dublin, and then a lawless taxi which ‘wandered for hours in the purlieus of the various Maroons and Knocks – the rain all the time pouring cats and dogs’. At an advanced hour of the evening he raced in, with the speed of a fast bowler, to be met with looks of faint horror from the massed ranks of guests. ‘Oh dear me!’ he exclaimed in a letter to Roger (9 August 1930). ‘My new tweeds were far too loud, and, when I burst in rather unexpectedly, quite horrified (I could clearly see) Lady de Vesci – but no matter, she left for England almost at once (whether in consequence of my tweeds or for some other reason) accompanied – this I regretted – by her son (or so I gathered) Lord Rosse, a foolish young man, but not unattractive.’
The company, which rapidly diminished the longer Lytton stayed (until, after ten days, there seemed to be no one else there) included Nancy Mitford, the ‘amusing’ sister of Diana Guinness whom he made shriek with laughter all the time, Henry Yorke37 and his wife (‘rather nice, I think’) and the ‘little Guinnesses’, his hosts. ‘He is so small … as to be almost invisible; but she is I suspect more interesting, but probably too young to provide any real sustenance.’ Dominating this company, looked up to by all and evidently enjoying everything tremendously was Henry Lamb, who had arrived with his ‘very agreeable’ wife Pansy. The change that had taken place in him was extraordinary. ‘Henry will obviously be my great support in this gathering,’ Lytton wrote to Carrington (9 August 1930). ‘… [He] is a great success. They all adore him, and he is evidently quite happy. A strange unlooked-for transformation … How curious to be thrown together with Henry after all these years, and in Ireland, too, where such a fearful crisis was once enacted between us.’
In rapid succession Lytton was whisked off to a ball at the Viceregal Lodge, assisted along a mountain-climbing expedition, escorted round the Dublin National Library and taken to the Abbey Theatre, ‘where Diana G. grew so restive over the brogue and the boredom that she swept out in the middle of the performance with the whole party at her heels’. Some aspects of this drawing-room life, in particular its mixture of decorum and impropriety, did surprise him. ‘The state of civilization here is curious,’ he reported to Roger, ‘– something new to me. An odd betwixt-and-between-ism. The indecency question, for instance – certain jokes are permissible, in fact frequent – but oh! mere are limitations. And I must say I am always for the absolute. And the young men invariably leap to their feet when a young woman enters the room.’
The warm weather appeared to have given him fresh energy, ‘and also – may I say it?’ he asked Roger (4 September 1930) after his return from Ireland, ‘the new warmth, chez toi has filled me with vigour and delight’. Roger was off to Scotland that September, Carrington planned to stay with the Johns and the Tomlins as well as spending some secret days at sea with Beacus, and so to prolong the summer warmth, Lytton set off to join Dadie, Rosamond Lehmann and her husband Wogan Philipps in France. ‘Our movements have been peculiar and almost continuous,’ he wrote to Roger (9 September 1930), ‘… a strange existence, this, so altogether cut off from the world – life on a raft, in fact, in mid-ocean, with 3 companions – a drifting, vague, and yet concentrated life.’
They arrived at Trébeurden, rode on to Brest (‘le pot de chambre de la France’), continued to a minute seaside village, Les Mouettes, near the fishing town of Douarenez (‘a place to while away the hours in, sipping cointreau, quite indefinitely’), and splashing through perpetual rain came to Quimper and on by road to Chartres where there was a fair ‘with whirligigs and oiseaux and mechanical organs’, and the sun finally shone. ‘The cathedral there is a hundred times better than the rather pretentious object at Bourges,’ Lytton wrote to Roger (15 September 1930).
‘It was wonderful coming into it yesterday in the dark, only able at first to discern dim shapes of pillars and those astonishing blazes of stained glass. Gradually, as our pupils expanded, we saw more & more – all the glorious proportions at last, and the full sublimity. Oh, my dearest creature, I wished so much for you to be with me as I stood at that most impassioned point – the junction of the transept & the nave, where the pillars suddenly soar and rush upwards to an unbelievable height, and one is aware of the whole structure in its power and its splendour. The christian religion itself positively almost justified! And I made wishes for you, too …
I … have loved the movement and oddity …’
However sweet they were to him, he sometimes longed to be travelling with Roger. At other times he wished that Carrington had joined their raft. ‘I think of you so often and love you more than I can say,’ Carrington wrote to him (14 September 1930). And Lytton wrote to Roger (9 September 1930): ‘I think of you a hundred times a day, and want you to be here to listen to a thousand comments on things that pass & things in general.’
Carrington met him at Southampton as he sailed in grandly on a four-funnelled liner, The Olympic, from Cherbourg. ‘I only wish I could send you some of my own bouncing strength,’ he wrote to Roger (23 September 1930). ‘I never thought in days gone by that I should have any to spare for other people.’
He seemed to be enjoying an Indian summer and was ‘in his most urbane mood’, Vanessa noted. He went again to Charleston where the ‘inevitable dolce far niente’ still reigned, and somersaulted through more hoops of London entertainment, meeting a young Welsh short story writer, a young Italian novelist and a young English poet. ‘Such a scene at the Ivy where Caradoc Evans, rather the worse for drink, apostrophized me in Anglo-Welsh for 3/4 of an hour,’ he told Roger (23 September 1930).
‘… “Truly to God” was one of his favourite phrases – “Truly to God, Mr Strachey, you can write English – English – you know what I mean – you know – yes, Mr Strachey, English, truly to God!” It was only ended by his mistress, a vast highly coloured woman in the Spanish style [Countess Barcynska], taking the whole party in her car to the house [51 Gordon Square] – where I cleverly escaped, without letting the others in. So you can see one does have a certain sort of adventure …’
His adventure with Alberto Moravia was a more sober affair, and took place in ‘that palace of faded grimness’, the Reform Club, to which they had both been invited by Morgan Forster. ‘E.M.F. assured me that he [Moravia] really was good-looking,’ he told Roger (15 November 1930). ‘– however (knowing the peculiarity of his taste) I wasn’t surprised to find a human weasel awaiting me under the yellow-ochre Ionic columns of the central hall. Otherwise he wasn’t so bad, as foreigners go. He’s apparently written a novel that is so shocking that even Beryl de Zoete refuses to translate it. “I deescra-eeb nékeed weemin” was his explanation. (Rather a disappointing one!)’38
It was at Ipsden House, some forty miles from Hungerford, near Wallingford, where he had been invited by ‘Ros and Wog’, that Lytton met Stephen Spender ‘whom I liked very much’, he afterwards told Roger (27 December 1930). With his red cheeks, blue eyes and a romantic expression Spender seemed ‘a gay, vague, lively creature – youthful and full of talk. Has written a homosexual novel,39 which he fears will not be published. Thinks of living in Germany with a German boy, but hasn’t yet found a German boy to live with. Writes poems after lunch, and reads them aloud to Rosamond.’ On Boxing Day, ‘Ros and Wog’ and Stephen Spender motored over for dinner to Ham Spray where the other guests were Clive and Vanessa, Ralph and Frances, and Carrington’s brother Noel. ‘It was a curious little party, but I enjoyed it,’ Lytton wrote.
‘Got some talk with S.S. who was very amusing and nice. Then we played Up Jenkins – rather a fearful game. Then the wireless was turned on, and dancing took place – Clive tottering round with Frances, Wogan gyrating like a top with Carrington – and for a moment with me! … The latest scandal is that the Woolves (aided and abetted by Dadie, of all people) are trying to lure John Lehmann to join the Hogarth Press, and put all his capital as well as to devote his working hours to doing up parcels in the basement. And the large ape is seriously tempted.’
Lytton was still feeling unaccountably happy and light-headed. With an influx of energy he ended the year finishing the last essays for ‘my little Spring book’. It was ‘quite a pleasure to be working again’, though he had difficulty thinking of a title. ‘As at present envisaged, there will be a dozen small biographical essays, and 1/2 dozen historians … Do you think “Little Lives’” would do?’ he asked Roger (25 November 1930). By the beginning of 1931 he had settled on Portraits in Miniature and Other Essays. ‘I think of writing a book moulded on Malinowsky,40 called “The Sexual Life of the English”,’ he told Roger while correcting his proofs (20 March 1931); ‘it would be a remarkable work, but no doubt would have to be published in New Guinea. In the meantime “Portraits in Miniature” is progressing in its tamer fashion.’
Chatto & Windus brought out Portraits in Miniature on 14 May 1931 in two simultaneous versions – a limited large-paper edition of two hundred and sixty copies (of which two hundred and fifty were for sale) costing two pounds; and a regular trade edition of twelve thousand seven hundred copies costing six shillings. Both in Britain and the United States (where Harcourt Brace published it on 16 July) the book sold well and was also well received. Edmund Wilson called it ‘one of Strachey’s real triumphs’41 and Virginia Woolf noted in her diary (19 May 1931) ‘Lytton’s book: very good. That’s his line. The compressed yet glossy account which requires logic, reason, learning, taste, wit order & infinite skill – this suits him far better, I think than the larger scale, needing boldness, originality, sweep.’
He had dedicated Portraits in Miniature to Max Beerbohm.42 It was an appropriate dedication. Both of them were natural miniaturists or, as Virginia preferred to phrase it, had ‘a small talent sedulously cultivated’ – something she could respect but need not fear. In fact she felt surprised, she told Vanessa (23 May 1931), by how good the book actually was, ‘indeed rather masterly in technique’, she admitted, ‘and the essays read much better together than separate’. This she attributed to Lytton having ‘combed out his rhetoric somewhat in respect for us’. Though he did weed out various ‘indefatigables’ and ‘deliciousnesses’, he made far fewer emendations to the text of Portraits in Miniature than of Books and Characters. These essays read better together because a theme runs unobtrusively through them tracing, in France and England, town and country, the evolution of the modern world from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. In Eminent Victorians he had pulled down the powerful from their high places; in Portraits in Miniature he raised up the victims of history – obscure pedants and pedagogues, sectarians and solipsists, crackpots, biographers and other square pegs and odd birds – pushed by circumstances into awful shapes, and treats them with ironic tenderness. Here are the butterfly careers of Lodowick Muggleton, an incomprehensible prophet with a tiny band of crazed disciples; poor forgotten John North, Master of Trinity, a caricature of seventeenth-century academic learning; Sir John Harington, led by his sensitive nose to become the inventor of the water-closet; and Strachey’s predecessor, that assiduous muddler in love and literature John Aubrey, seeking after Apparitions and Impulses, and transmuting ‘a few handfuls of orts and relics into golden life’.
These, and many others, had been swept from the narrative of history ruled over by the ‘Six English Historians’ at the end of the book, and lay like dried specimens from the past, pinned by Strachey’s curiosity, illustrating the waywardness of the human spirit, the frustrated offshoots and cul-de-sacs of ambition. Because their reputations have lapsed, their faiths decayed, their arguments been buried in the dust, their troubled spirits do not vex the twentieth century. They are the subjects of historical burlesque, ‘shorn beings, for whom the word is not tempered, powerless, out of place’, breathing the pure air of comedy and pathos.
‘A biography should either be as long as Boswell’s or as short as Aubrey’s,’ Strachey wrote in his essay on John Aubrey. ‘The method of enormous and elaborate accretion which produced the Life of Johnson is excellent, no doubt; but, failing that, let us have no half-measures; let us have the pure essentials – a vivid image, on a page or two, without explanation, transitions, commentaries, or padding.’ But it was difficult to cover his historians without any explanations and transitions. His method was to exhibit one facet of each – the detachment of Hume, the balance of Gibbon, the philistinism of Macaulay, the morality of Carlyle, the provincial protestation of his disciple Froude, and the dryness of Mandell Creighton. Where his similarity to them is gratifying (Hume and Gibbon) he is sympathetic, and where it becomes uncomfortable (Carlyle and Macaulay) he grows more critical. Seventy-five years later we are better informed about Hume and Carlyle and know that Macaulay’s emotional life was more complicated than he allows; but these vignettes still exemplify Strachey’s view that history is a literary art.
No one arranged so anxiously for the demise of his characters. For Strachey the dying historian was an aesthetic necessity. The most remarkable death of all was that of Froude’s tormentor, the red-bearded Professor Edward Augustus Freeman who was himself mercilessly attacked by another ‘burrower into wormholes’, Horace Round. The effect of Round’s vitriolic articles on Freeman was alarming.
‘His blood boiled, but he positively made no reply. For years the attacks continued, and for years the professor was dumb. Fulminating rejoinders rushed into his brain, only to be whisked away again – they were not quite fulminating enough. The most devastating article of all was written … Freeman was aghast at this last impertinence, but still he nursed his wrath. Like King Lear, he would do such things – what they were yet he knew not – but they should be the terrors of the earth. At last, silent and purple, he gathered his female attendants about him, and left England for an infuriated holiday. There was an ominous pause; and then the fell news reached Brighton. The professor had gone pop in Spain.’
Strachey wanted to ruffle the sensibilities of Freeman’s counterparts among modern academic historians – and he appears to have succeeded. Shortly after his essay on Froude appeared in Life and Letters, he wrote gleefully to Roger Senhouse (17 December 1930):
‘Virginia has just met Lord Esher who had told her that he had just met George Trevelyan, who was foaming at the mouth with rage. “Really! I should never have believed that a writer of L.S.’s standing would use an expression like that – went pop!” So some effect has been produced, which is something.’
In the summer of 1931, The Week-End Observer ran a competition for the best profile of Lytton Strachey done in his own manner. After reminding readers of his ‘Six English Historians’, it added: ‘Let us suppose that to these a seventh is added – that of Mr Strachey himself.’ Signing herself ‘Mopsa’, Carrington sent in an imaginary death scene which won first prize. ‘If Mopsa be thought cruel,’ wrote the organizer Dyneley Hussey, ‘– and I was in two minds whether on that score she might not have to be ruled out – the victim is, after all, only getting as good as he gives.’ It is an apt mimicry of Lytton’s style, with its planted mots, its insinuations, and its flippant moment of extinction, composed with the loving malice of someone who was moved at times by a furtive wish to escape. ‘We might have had such a happy life without these Stracheys!’ she had written to Alix.
‘Crouching under the ilex tree in his chaise longue, remote, aloof, self-occupied, and mysteriously contented, lay the venerable biographer. Muffled in a sealskin coat (for although it was July he felt the cold) he knitted with elongated fingers a coatee for his favourite cat, Tiberius. He was in his 99th year. He did not know it was his last day on earth.
A constable called for a subscription for the local sports. “Trop tard, trop tard; mes jeux sont finis.” He gazed at the distant downs; he did not mind – not mind in the very least the thought that this was probably his last summer; after all, summers were now infinitely cold and dismal. One might as well be a mole. He did not particularly care that he was no longer thought the greatest biographer, or that the Countess no longer – or did she? Had he been a woman he would not have shone as a writer, but as a dissipated mistress of infinite intrigues.
But – lying on the grass lay a loose button, a peculiarly revolting specimen; it was an intolerable, an unspeakable catastrophe. He stooped from his chaise longue to pick it up, murmuring to his cat “Mais quelle horreur!” for once stooped too far – and passed away for ever.’43
Death was much in Lytton’s thoughts over these last few years. Apart from Philip Ritchie and Lady Strachey, many friends had recently died – several of them Apostles.
How fast has brother followed brother,
From Sunshine to the sunless land.
In the spring of 1922, he had gone to the cremation service of one of the eldest and most eminent brothers – Walter Raleigh. Lytton had not seen Raleigh for two or three years, but the occasion prompted many memories of the old days at Liverpool and Cambridge.
When Jane Harrison, the classical anthropologist who had courageously gone with him to Saltsjöbaden in those far-off days before the war, died in the spring of 1928, he mourned not just the demise of an old friend, but the deprivaton to the world of a fine talent. ‘I’ve been feeling rather sad about Jane Harrison’s death,’ he told Roger (18 April 1928). ‘She was such a charming rare person – very affectionate and appreciative, very grand, and very amusing. Her humour was unique … I had not realised that she was quite as old as 77. What a wretched waste it seems that all that richness of experience and personality should be completely abolished! – Why, one wonders, shouldn’t it have gone on and on? – Well! there will never be anyone at all like her again.’
The extinction of anyone whose faculties were still intact struck him as a ridiculous arrangement. There were so few people of genuine talent. Geoffrey Scott, for instance, who died in August 1929, he had never greatly liked. But he respected his intelligence and felt the loss to English scholarship – especially since his work on the Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle was incomplete. There was a danger now that the Boswell papers would be shipped from Europe to some pottling old translantic professor to tinker with over the years. ‘One doesn’t see who can grapple with them,’ he wrote to Roger (18 August 1929). ‘I only hope they won’t be handed over to some wretched American.’
The most serious shock of these years was the sudden death of Frank Ramsey. He had been suffering from an undiagnosed disease of the liver, entered hospital for an operation, and never recovered. He was twenty-six years old, perhaps the most brilliant philosopher of his generation and with the main body of his work hardly begun. Like Moore at the turn of the century, he had revived the Society and started a vintage Apostolic era after the war. In Maynard’s view he was a genius, a humorous and unassuming genius who claimed that the aim of philosophy was not to answer questions but to cure headaches. ‘I am terribly distressed about Frank,’ Lytton told Dadie Rylands (19 January 1930), who had also known him well.
‘It is truly tragic. He was one of the few faultless people, with a heavenly simplicity and modesty, which gave a beauty to his genius such as I have never known in anyone else. He had all the charm of childhood, yet one never doubted for a moment when one was with him that one was in the presence of a very great mind. The last time I spoke to him was – do you remember? – when we met him coming out of the Provost’s Lodge, and he told us, with those delightful fits of laughter, about the cat that came into his lecture room. I am miserable – miserable – to think that I shall never be able to make him laugh again, never hear him again at the Society, never again be able to say to myself, after reflecting on the degradation of humanity “Well, after all, there is Frank”. The loss to your generation is agonizing to think of – and the world will never know what has happened – what a light has gone out. I always thought there was something of Newton about him – the ease and majesty of the thought – the gentleness of the temperament – and suppose Newton had died at – how old was he? – twenty-six? – I am afraid Richard [Braithwaite]44 will be particularly upset – will you please give him my love?’
The following month, another Apostle, Lytton’s friend C.P. Sanger, collapsed and died after a short illness. Like Ramsey, like Moore, and a few others, he had combined great talent with natural modesty, ‘unworldly without being saintly, unambitious without being inactive, warm-hearted without being sentimental’, Goldie Dickinson called him. Lytton had never forgotten Sanger’s kindness when he had gone up to Trinity. ‘A nervous breakdown was the apparent cause,’ he explained to Roger (11 February 1930).
‘I fear it was the result of a long process of over-work, underfeeding, and general discomfort – a wretched business. He had an astonishing intellect; but accompanied by such modesty that the world in general hadn’t any idea of his very great distinction. And he was so absolutely unworldly that the world’s inattention was nothing to him. I knew him ever since Cambridge days, when he constantly came for week-ends for the Apostles’ meetings – and then in London, when, at first, they lived in a little set of rooms at Charing Cross – and afterwards by a curious chance, Philip [Ritchie] became an added link between us. How he loved Philip, and how often he used to talk to me about him, with mild expostulations over his illnesses! – And so all that is over now, and I shall never go to New Square again.’
The deaths of these friends prompted many bitter-sweet memories which had been given a new sharpness that spring when Sebastian Sprott came down to Ham Spray to arrange the last of Lytton’s bundles of correspondence. As before, Lytton could not resist dipping into these old papers, though they stirred many complicated and uncomfortable sensations. Why, he wondered, should it sometimes depress him so much to go through these letters? It was like putting on a pair of distorting spectacles that presented – or did it redress? – an illusion of the past.
The past appeared more exciting now than the present. Ottoline had written him a letter that April which recalled many incidents long closed and half-forgotten. He seldom saw Ottoline these days – just occasionally in Gower Street, where she presided as a faded relic of a great hostess. In her prime, she had been a splendid figure, generous, comic and encouraging; but disaster seemed to spread over her relationships like a winter blight. She referred in her letter to the ashes and poisonous vapours lying over what might otherwise have been so good; yet the ashes and vapours, Lytton believed, had been of her own making. He felt some uneasiness over answering her letter. Clearly a certain amount of sentiment was called for, and some sincerity too – but how to mix them tactfully? After ten days’ hesitation, he replied in what was to be the last long communication between them, partly truthful, agreeably clouded with metaphor, the conclusion to a long friendship now extinct. He wrote (8 April 1931):
‘For me, getting to know you was a wonderful experience – ah! those days at Peppard – those evenings in Bedford Square! I cannot help surmising that if H[enry] L[amb] had been a little different – things would have been very different, but perhaps that is an impossible notion. Perhaps we are all so deeply what we are that the slightest shift is out of the question. I don’t think I want to go back. It was thrilling, enchanting, devastating, all at once – one was in a special (a very special) train, tearing along at breakneck speed – where? – one could only dimly guess – one might be off the rails – or at Timbuctoo – or in Heaven – at any moment. Once is enough! … I have been astonishingly happy now for a long time – if only life were a good deal longer – and the sunshine less precarious!’
Something of Lytton’s mood may be glimpsed from an entry made by Carrington in HER BOOK, dated 20 March 1931. ‘At tea Lytton said to me. “Remember all the bird Books and flower Books are yours”, I said “Why?” “Well, after I am dead it would be important.” Then I said, and “all my pictures, and objects are yours”. and he said “Really?” almost as if he didn’t believe me. I said “but if you died first –” but I felt suddenly serious, and gloomy, and Lytton noticing the change, like a wind sweeping across the lawn through the laurels, changed the conversation.’
But the interior dialogue persisted. He did not expect to die – most of his family were long-lived, and he was only fifty-one that March. But there were other reasons, besides the deaths of his friends, to account for these forebodings. Throughout 1931 he was almost perpetually ill. These illnesses did not in themselves appear to be serious, but they seldom left him and their cumulative effect was very enfeebling. He had been familiar with sickness all his life but now the sensations were unspecific. As if partly anaesthetized or suspended in a dream, he felt his physical consciousness of things separating from his emotional awareness. It was not so much pain he experienced as the blurred invading presence of some discomfort that he could not precisely locate, which made all movement unpleasant, and sitting or bending curiously difficult. At first his physician, Dr Starkey Smith, diagnosed internal piles and prescribed some suppositories. Later, changing his diagnosis, he arranged for Lytton to be attended by a professional masseuse and treated with an ultra-violet lamp. The wandering symptoms came and went, and returned in a more complicated form, accompanied by headaches, a slight temperature and a buzzing in the ears. ‘I feel inclined to retire into a monastery,’ he concluded after four months of these disorders (31 April 1931), ‘but on second thoughts that couldn’t be much good really – a nunnery, possibly …’
In his letters, Lytton makes light of this illness. He is always hopeful of a quick improvement. But occasionally he comes near to admitting the darker implications of his condition: ‘I suppose I am gradually recovering,’ he wrote to Roger (26 January 1931), ‘but there are still moments when I feel as if I were at the bottom of a well with only the dimmest chance of getting out.’
He was frightened of appearing fussy and tiresome to his friends, especially to Roger whom he issued with bright bulletins of his progress which often had to be adjusted by disappointing statements of fact. ‘As for my health,’ he declared on 20 March 1931, ‘it’s now becoming the Grand Bore of Christendom, and I fear to refer to it. However, I’ll just remark that I’m perhaps rather better – but not yet right. I feel quite well – and men seem to sink back into a buzzing ineptitude.’
He passed much of the year at Ham Spray. How English it all was and how well it suited him. ‘There is a romantic beauty about everything here which ravishes my heart,’ he had told Mary Hutchinson. He was reading Keats, ‘who is perfect’, and whose poetry heightened his sensitivity to the unemphatic green shapes all round, making him feel at one with them. ‘Last night’, he wrote to Roger on 29 June, ‘just after sunset, an extraordinary light, as of some vast motor car appeared behind the trees on the top of the downs – a blaze between the trunks – we gazed – and then realised that it was the moon, that was just there – it moved rapidly upwards and sideways – a surprising and romantic spectacle, until at last it was balanced – a golden circle on the edge of the hill.’
Life went on in the quietest style, and ‘the question of the next book to read is the only pebble that ruffles the surface of the pond,’ he told Roger (17 April 1931). ‘Yesterday there was an event though – 2 visitors by aeroplane – viz. Dorelia and Kaspar John. The latter took C. up for a turn – she adored it; but I refrained – the attraction, somehow or other, was not sufficient.’ After her flight, Carrington tried to coax Lytton into going up, but he seemed not at all keen to ‘have a go’. Caspar promised to deal gently with one of so gentle a nature and Dorelia asked Lytton how he would be able to discipline Carrington if he wilted where she had braved, and so the argument went on until they reached the safety of the house. The dreaded two-seater aeroplane was now out of sight in a field beyond the trees, and with renewed confidence Lytton rounded on his tormentors, and declared he was the wrong shape for flying and that his beard would certainly foul the controls. Then he coiled himself down into an armchair and there was no more to be said.
He still made small trips to London and to Cambridge where there was no diminution of social life, though ‘it’s the social life of a preparatory school to my mind’. With a new young friend, Alan Searle – ‘my Bronzino Boy’ as he called him – he visited Oswald Balfour45 at the White House, in Thorpe-le-Soken, Essex, but was not sorry to leave after two nights. The Bronzino had behaved very tiresomely, to his mind, getting himself bitten in the stomach by their host’s bulldog, and then collapsing into hysterics; an intolerable Dickensian charwoman called Mrs Scroggins had appeared and bearded Lytton with tales of village politics; and the rest of the house guests seemed a painful crew – Nature’s second fiddles. Towards the first violin Oswald Balfour himself, an unmarried field officer with superior connections, Lytton felt not the least attraction ‘except physically in a very odious way. The English upper class characteristic of going in for character as opposed to mind is annoying,’ he observed to Roger (4 July 1931), ‘even when it crops up in such queer (in every sense of the word) surroundings.’
It was a relief to return to Ham Spray. He was reading the ex-prime minister A.J. Balfour’s Chapters of Autobiography which was ‘very well done in its way – that is the way that tells you nothing of any real interest – curiously 18th century, in fact – so clear and limited. But the silly fellow was a Christian, and that I cannot forgive.’ He also tried ‘one of my imitators’, Philip Guedalla’s Life of Wellington, The Duke, but could not finish it. ‘After going through the Peninsular War and Waterloo, I’ve given up,’ he told Roger (7 October 1931), ‘ … Queen V[ictoria]’s letters are much better in every way – so full of incident and feeling, and so idiotically to the point.’
Among recent fiction, there was a new novel by Somerset Maugham – to whom he had been introduced by Alan Searle – the notorious Cakes and Ale. It ‘is causing some excitement here’, he explained to Dorothy Bussy (November 1930), ‘as it contains a most envenomed portrait of Hugh Walpole, who is out of his mind with agitation and horror. It is a very amusing book, apart from that – based obviously on Hardy’s history (more or less) – only marred, to my mind, by some curious lack of distinction.’ Apart from that he had returned to the ‘pretty strenuous business’ of reading Proust, and so had Carrington who found the end of Baron Charlus ‘almost too terrible’, she told Lytton (12 May 1931). ‘It has the appalling horror of Lear.’ She had designed some bookplates for Lytton’s library, but sticking them in with him at Ham Spray, and remembering him bidding for books at Sotheby’s, it occurred to her that ‘these books will one day be looked at by those gloomy-faced booksellers and buyers. And suddenly a premonition of a day when these labels will no longer [be] in the library came over me.46 I linger to ask Lytton not to stick in any more.’
Carrington had begun the year with yet another new resolution to paint. ‘I cater for every taste,’ she had told Alix. As well as her glass and silver-paper pictures (‘Victorian beauties, soldiers, tropical botanical flowers, birds and fruits are a few of my subjects’), she had been designing decorative tiles for bathrooms and fireplaces (under Beacus’s influence ‘mostly of shells, fishes and ships’) and selling them through shops and by commission. (Beacus’s brother Alex Penrose ordered a tiled fireplace which she did heraldically in a Dutch delft style showing a fountain pen crossed with a rose.) Few people guessed ‘What Bloody Sweat went to produce these trifles light as air’. Most of her serious painting now depicted ‘the botanicals’ in her Ham Spray garden where she laboured every week with her cats (‘I wish cats could be trained to weed gardens’). She also painted a rare cactus given to her by Dorelia, and the fairground at Marlborough where, one amazingly beautiful day, she went with Alix, shooting at bottles and swinging on the merry-go-round while Alix flew about ‘on those little electric motor cars and charged everyone to pieces’, she wrote to Frances (September 1931).
Her love affair with Beacus persisted though it had not prospered. When he criticized her ‘awful’ white stockings and asked her to wear black silk ones for him instead ‘I realised our PATHS lay differently,’ she confided to Julia (June 1931). Sometimes when Beacus arrived at Ham Spray she would stare at him and question whether this was really the person who had obsessed her while he was away. ‘Can this be the nose, the mouth I craved for? … This the body?’ she demanded in HER BOOK. There were still evenings together lit by mysterious happiness, but perhaps at thirty-eight she ‘should be settling down over tea-cups, bottling gooseberries’, she reflected, instead of having ‘Shelley cravings to sail and leave these quiet rural scenes for Greek Islands’.47
The end of the affair came that summer when, visiting Ham Spray again, Beacus fell ill with jaundice and had to be nursed by her for almost a month, while Lytton crept about in the next room and eventually made off for London. ‘Rather ironical to realize one’s mission in life is Florence Nightingale!’ she wrote to Sebastian Sprott (July 1931). ‘However I learnt everything there was to know about him and in some ways cured my illgotten passion.’ When Beacus recovered and sailed away it was ‘all off’ between them, and Carrington sensed she had severed her last connections with youth. In some ways she was relieved. Happiness was largely a matter of the timing of relationships, she observed in HER BOOK. This one had come too late. She was feeling remorse lately at neglecting Lytton. She never tired of nursing him as she had with Beacus and now that her ‘lusts had run dry’ and her ‘high jinks’ were over, she planned to make it up to Lytton. Each year she had grown happier with him and, while she was recovering from her emotions over Beacus, she felt closer to him than ever. At the end of that summer she was looking forward to a more contented life among the rooms and gardens she had created for them both at Ham Spray. Everything was designed for the future.
Lytton’s love-affair with Roger was also playing itself out. ‘I think of you a great deal, my dearest angel – a great deal – and of everything about you,’ he had written (20 March 1931). ‘I long to be with you, to talk to you, to pull your lolls [ears], to be happy – Ah well! It is a blessing to be able to write to you and to get your letters.’ Despite his illnesses, Lytton was always ready to pack his bags and dash off anywhere in the world with Roger. The pity was that there were so few chances. ‘These ages of absence are very desolating – will you recognise me when you see me?’ he wondered (21 April 1931). ‘My retroussé nose and sky-blue eyes have probably by now quite faded from your memory, and I daresay if an imposter arrives on Monday, obviously disguised in a beard & spectacles, you’ll be completely taken in.’
Seeing each other so seldom, their relationship became more bookish. ‘So here I am in my solitude,’ Lytton wrote from Ham Spray (12 May 1931), ‘buried in books – chiefly about old atheists – such strange stories are told of them! The Elizabethans grow more and more peculiar … Perhaps on the whole we live in better times, but it’s difficult to calculate.’ Some ingenious compromise between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, he sometimes thought, would have suited him best. Indeed this was what, in their make-believe, he had tried to fashion between Roger and himself. From the strange stories that lay in his old books, he had made their secret code, translating the cruelties of human nature into gentle games. These fantasies multiplied while the actual relationship shrank so that they gradually became a substitute for that relationship rather than a stimulus to it.
He had known Roger for seven years, and his capacity for being surprised by this handsome invisible lover was nearly exhausted. Tenderness and great affection he still felt, but his early adulation had dispersed itself too often into the empty spaces created by Roger’s elusiveness. There were still moments when his special charm made all things seem possible, but ‘I’ve had the feeling that our relationship was coming to an end – or perhaps just fading away,’ Lytton wrote to him (18 August 1931). ‘… What is it that you want? I’m afraid it may be some kind of impossible mixture of the occasional & the profound – or at least impossible for me who am neither a saint nor an acrobat.’
Ralph and Frances were still working at The Greville Memoirs in London and visiting Ham Spray less often, partly because Ralph’s mother in Devon was ill with cancer, and partly because, having been ‘turned out’ of 41 Gordon Square because of expanding psychoanalysis, they had moved into a beautiful Queen Anne house, 16 Great James Street, which housed the Nonesuch Press. ‘We are very contented here,’ Ralph assured Gerald (25 February 1930).
Ralph and Frances had come up with a scheme to shut up the house this coming winter and, all four of them, sail for Malaga. Meanwhile they went off for a short holiday in the South of France. Carrington and Lytton remained ‘crouching over the embers’ at Ham Spray. He had felt some hesitation over their winter plan and she was full of forebodings. ‘It is still lovely here,’ Lytton wrote, ‘and peace has descended – everyone has gone – C & I are left alone in this vague garden with its weeds and roses – ah! one draws a long breath, and looks out dreamily at the dreaming downs.’
That summer Lytton had begun ‘a thing on Othello’ intended as the first in a series of essays on Shakespeare’s plays. It was ‘fiendishly difficult to do’, he had told Roger Senhouse, ‘as it’s all solid argument – and is perhaps rather mad’. The argument has an air of unreality as of someone turning away from actual life – from the illness and disenchantment that filled his own life. The Othello into which he draws himself is not an intense and tragic love poem within the play, nor does his ‘solid argument’ touch on the imaginative solution between a belief in virtue and knowledge of human nature. The Strachey Othello is a piece of impeccable stagecraft that is peopled by magnificent phantoms and driven by the aesthetic requirements of ancient Greek theatre. Iago, that great challenge for critics, becomes a contrivance designed for artistic balance in which the notorious ‘motivelessness’ blends with ‘dramatic necessity’.
‘I shall try to finish it,’ Lytton wrote to Roger. But the essay was written with the last reserves of his strength, and they were exhausted before he was able to finish.48
A less arduous flight from reality was what Frances was to call his ‘unusually adventurous step of going abroad alone’.49 He wanted to cut adrift from people. He was tired of humanity, tired of common sense, tired of everything except dreaming. Solitude seemed to relieve his weariness – and solitude with plenty of comfort, good food and travel might renew his spirits. For the time being Carrington, having parted only recently from Beacus, was too full of her own guilt-ridden worries to be overloaded with his. Dadie Rylands could not safely be trusted as a brother-confessor with matters that concerned Roger. It was better to travel alone. For the first time since 1902, Lytton started keeping a diary. ‘A Fortnight in France’, as he labelled the exercise book into which, each night, he committed his reflections and the impressions of his journey, is the most unselfconscious of his autobiographical writings, and before the end of September, when he returned to England, it had helped to purge his temporary distaste for life.
He started out for Paris on 3 September, arriving later that day at the Hôtel Berkeley, in the Avenue Matignon. After many weeks of strangely febrile tension, he could pause and look round. More than once that summer, his visionary existence had felt more real than the physical world around him. He was drowsy with love-sickness, remembering vividly that brief interlude in Paris some twenty-five years ago with Duncan, up those forty-two soaring flights of stairs in the Hôtel de l’Univers et du Portugal, and other visits, the most recent of them with Roger to see Norman Douglas. He was alone this time, but not lonely.
‘After the decidedly dreary and by no means cheap dinner at the restaurant here, I struggled out to a glass of coffee at the Rond Point,’ he wrote that night in his bedroom. ‘… and then, not very conscious, strolled down the Champs Elysées towards the Place de la Concorde, in the darkness. Lights in the distance caught my eye, and then I remembered the new illuminations.
‘I went on, begining to be excited, and soon came to the really magical scene; the enormous Place – the surrounding statues – the twin palaces on the North side – and in the middle the astonishing spectacle of the obelisk, a brilliant luminous white, with black hieroglyphics, clear as if drawn by ink, all over it. A move to the right revealed the Madeleine; and then, looking back, I saw the Arc de Triomphe, brightly lighted, with the avenue of lamps leading to it. A most exhilarating affair! It was warm, the innumerable motors buzzed, the strollers were many and – so it seemed – sympathetic.’
The following day he left Paris by train for Rheims, literally ‘a godforsaken city’. Large areas, including the cathedral, had been wiped out by the war. ‘Naturally with the cathedral bashed God goes,’ he observed; ‘but what’s more serious is that nearly everything else has gone as well. I had imagined a few neat German bombs had blown up the sacred building and that that was all. Far from it – the whole town was wrecked. A patched-up remnant is all that remains – the patches dated 1920. Miserable!’
Next morning in the drizzling rain, Lytton set off with overcoat and umbrella to explore the town more thoroughly. ‘The Cathedral, what with pre-war restorations, war destructions, and post-war restorations, presents a deplorable spectacle,’ he wrote. ‘I doubt whether even in its palmiest days it was anything very much – except, probably, for the glass. I tottered away from it to lose myself in dreary streets, jumping sky-high at one moment before the startled gaze of an elderly inhabitant – an attack of the Strachey twist.’
These attacks of ‘the Strachey twist’ no longer worried him as they did when he was young. He had learned to meet them with an ironic inquiry, as if he were watching someone else. Passing down the rue St-Honoré in Rheims one day, he inspected his own image mirrored back to him in a shop-window, like some woman d’un certain âge before her dressing-table. ‘I saw for the first time,’ he recorded, ‘how completely gray my hair was over my temples. So that has come at last! I was beginning to think it never would. Do I feel like it? Perhaps I do a little – a very little. A certain sense of detachment declares itself amid the agitations that continue to strew my path.’
This, then, was the consolation of a middle age he had once dreaded. A numbness had spread over everything, protecting him from the heartache that only a short time ago could drop him into such despair. It was an agreeable change. Buoyed up by this curious composure, he felt that he could never again be much upset by romantic ordeals. Roger had again gone off with his friends to the Riviera but Lytton was recovering as Carrington was recovering from Beacus.
‘I hardly feel as if I could now be shattered by him as I was … I am really calm – that dreadful abysmal sensation in the pit of the stomach is absent. What a relief! Whether this means that I am out of love or not I can’t pretend to say. I hope it means that my feelings are at least more rational. The inexpressible charm of his presence, the sweetness of his temper, his beautiful affectionateness – why should these things make it difficult for me to accept the facts that he must be allowed to have his own tastes, and that his tastes happen not to be what I would have wished?’
He felt perplexed by his own calmness. Could his chloroformed fading away be what they called ‘the prime of life’? Was this maturity? On thoughts of age he drifted back to thoughts of death. What was his attitude to death? Perhaps it was like leaving a party. ‘If one’s in love with life,’ he wrote, ‘to leave it will be as terrible as the dreadful moment when one has to leave one’s beloved one – an agony, long foreseen – almost impossibly fearful – and yet it inevitably comes. And really it is a kind of death whenever the beloved object goes; which is why sleeping together is such a peculiar solace – death is avoided – one loses consciousness deliciously alive.’
On Monday 7 September, he caught a train at Rheims station, stopped off at Châlons to inspect the cathedral, and then travelled to Nancy. It was ‘a perfect town’, like a miniature rococo Bath, laid out with enchanting squares, a triumphal arch or two and a delightful little park called the Pépinière – regular alleys of trees, amateurish lawns, neat flowerbeds, a fountain, some statues. Unfortunately the Grand-Hôtel in the Place Stanislas was moribund. The lift never moved; the hot water was cold; even the door-key dropped to pieces. But, though nothing worked, he resolved to stay a few days. He wanted to wander in that glorious rococo square, under those arches, along the alleys in the Pépinière – and sip vermouth on the cobblestones, dreaming of Voltaire.
So time agreeably slipped by. The only out-of-the-way episode took place over dinner on his first evening. It was one of those trivial incidents that Lytton relished and showed a reawakening interest in his fellow beings. ‘The table next me was reserved for one,’ he wrote that night in his diary. ‘Presently the guest arrived – one of those thin-lipped intellectual epicures, who correspond exactly to some of our friends who interest themselves in art.
‘Enjoyment the one thing that is not present. With my neighbour, the severity and pedantry of taste was carried to its most ascetic pitch. He ate his melon like a scrupulous rabbit, and then, in flawless French, entered into elaborate and distressed dissertations with the waiters. “Où est le maître d’hôtel?” etc. The French was in fact so flawless that I decided he must be an Englishman. The clothes seemed certainly English. No decoration in the button-hole. The only slightly suspicious object – and this really ought to have decided me – was a rather effeminate wrist watch. But I came to the conclusion that he must be some distinguished member of the Civil Service – one of those infinitely cultivated and embittered eunuchs who, one must suppose, govern the country, and perhaps afford the most satisfactory explanation of its present plight. But really the wrist watch ought to have shown me that I was wrong. However, at last I determined, coûte qu’il coûte, to satisfy my curiosity. After a great deal of complicated manoeuvring of orders and counter-orders, he ate a fig. I also had figs; but before eating mine, I turned to him and said, in the most off-hand and idiomatic English style possible – “Are these all right?” I calculated that if he’d been French he would have been quite at sea. As it was, there was a moment’s hesitation, and he answered, with the precise politeness that one expected, “They’re excellent.” The question seemed solved, and I ate my fig, which, as a matter of fact was not very good. But then doubt suddenly assailed me – “May I ask you another question? Are you an Englishman who speaks French very well, or a Frenchman who speaks English very well?” A faint – a very faint smile – appeared (for the first and last time) and he answered “I’m Italian.” This completely ruined me. The eventuality had never occurred to me; and I saw at once that he belonged to that dreariest of classes, the cosmopolitan, that he was doubtless merely a diplomat. At the same time – naturally, given his status – not the remotest sign of unbending: he coldly continued with his cigar. I had got into an impossible position – was being tacitly told that I was a tiresome intruder – and all I could do was to depart in silence as soon as I could and with whatever dim dignity I could muster.’
Three days later, Lytton went for the night to Strasbourg. ‘I’d no idea how thoroughly teutonic this town was,’ he noted, ‘everyone speaks German in the streets – everybody is German – the place is simply German – and how the French managed to get up such a hullabaloo about it I can’t understand.’
After walking around the streets for two hours, he was glad to get back to the Hôtel de la Maison Rouge and have a bath before dinner. Of course such comforts meant, in those days of inflation, paying twelve shillings a day for one’s room, instead of eight shillings; but even so, it was well worth it. The inter-war depression made the survival of these luxuries seem very doubtful. ‘All the more reason to snatch them while one can,’ Lytton decided, ‘– to plunge into a hot bath immediately, before the revolution comes and all the water’s permanently cold!’
The following day, he journeyed back to Nancy. The dingy outskirts with their smelly and decayed streets reminded him strongly of the slums in Liverpool. Another revolution would have to come. ‘France, with all her gold, seems pretty poverty-stricken,’ he observed. ‘The beggars here are such as I’ve rarely seen – they look as if they’d all sat to their fellow townsman Callot – visions of utter horror and degradation. The soldiers are uncouth rustics with red noses and (about half of them) wear spectacles – which doesn’t seem quite the thing.’
One morning in Nancy, as he was sitting outside a café sipping a glass of grenadine and seltzer, ‘my mind pleasandy blank’, a passing motor slowed down and a woman, slightly familiar in appearance, looked in his direction, then seemed to whisper his name to her male companion. ‘The motor stopped, and I automatically got up, thinking it might be Diana Cooper, but – such is my vagueness for faces – not at all sure.’ Only after she had introduced her remorselessly shaved and spherical companion as Dr Rudolph Kommer – her enigmatic ‘dearest friend’ – did Lytton’s hesitation disappear. ‘The truth was she was looking younger,’ he observed, ‘more cheerful, and less like the Madonna than usual’.50 They got out, and insisted on my motoring with them to the Café Stanislas – more expensive. There we sat for some time.’ After Duff Cooper’s return to London in August to be made under-secretary of state for war, Diana Cooper explained to Lytton, she had stayed on in Venice with Laura Corrigan, enjoying the season there and meeting many younger people who, as she put it, frolicked her along with them. Now she was driving back to London ‘– with this ghastly-looking dago – an odd couple, but somehow or other not in the least compromising. But why?’ Lytton questioned.
‘Perhaps he was paying … She was very agreeable; but I had, as I always do for some mysterious reason with her, the sensation of struggling vainly to show that I’m not a fool – mysterious, because really her own comments are very far from being out of the ordinary. K (or C) was polite. They admired Nancy; but it was too early for lunch and they had to hurry on to catch the boat to-morrow [12 September] at Calais. They went to their car, and then I observed that there was another member of the party – a kind of chauffeur, who sat in the dicky behind. He grinned a good deal – rather tendentiously I thought; perhaps he was K (or C)’s man – in every sense – and I daresay the brightest of the three.’
Two days later, Lytton returned to Paris where he went to an exhibition of Degas portraits at the Musée de l’Orangerie in the Tuileries. ‘The pictures were fascinating,’ he wrote that evening in his diary, ‘– so exquisite, witty, and serious – and there were admirable sculptured studies too, in bronze. Then a stroll down the Tuileries Gardens – how supremely enjoyable it all was! My old dread and dislike of Paris melted into nothing in the shining sun. A rainbow in the fountain – the long alley beyond – the magnificent Louvre closing in the distance – nothing but radiance and exhilaration.’
The truth was that Paris had become for him a city of le temps retrouvé. He went again to the Luxembourg Gardens. The trees were beginning to turn, and he remembered that time – almost exactly twenty years ago (but at the very end of September 1911) – when he had strolled along these same well-ordered avenues after his visit to Henry Lamb in Brittany, following a night journey through Nantes, and felt an extraordinary current of vitality and excitement push through him. As he walked on, he remembered another curious visit, not so long ago, with Carrington, in the intense heat, when, half-dead with exhaustion, he had crept out to try and get a little air under the trees, but, not succeeding, limped back again to this same Hôtel Foyot, where he remained in bed until Ralph came and rescued them.
Carrington and Ralph. For two weeks he had been cut off from them without news, and realized how he had come to miss England and all the extraordinary pleasures of Ham Spray. The absence of letters had produced a strange vacuum round him. Yet it had also given him the relaxation he needed, stimulating his appetite for the complexities of human relationships, the rigours of work, and all that made up ordinary life. Suddenly he longed to be back in England. Carrington, Ralph, Frances, Ham Spray – it would be delightful! And when winter came, perhaps they could after all make that expedition to Malaga, avoiding the discomfort of the winter which was past a joke now that he was nearly fifty-two.
The autumn was crowded with social engagements. Lytton dined with Somerset Maugham, and with Lady Cunard, Desmond MacCarthy and Noël Coward. He met William Gerhardie and Victor Cazalet at a party given by Syrie Maugham in the King’s Road,51 and Charlie Chaplin at one of Ottoline’s Gower Street receptions. In the country he saw ‘Ros and Wog’ and a good deal of the ‘little Guinnesses’ at Biddesden, their country house near Andover. Carrington had been there, too, painting a trompe l’oeil window showing an eighteenth-century cook peeling an apple opposite a cat seated on a table which stares at a canary in a cage. It was to be a surprise for Diana Guinness when she returned from London after giving birth to her second son. For once Carrington was pleased with her work, which Lytton praised. He had bravely gone up to see Diana in the London nursing home. ‘In those days one did not put a foot to the ground for 3 weeks after the birth,’ she wrote. ‘I told the nurse to take the baby to her room “because Mr Strachey can’t abide babies”. However, when Lytton and I were in the midst of our chatting she came in with the child in her arms and insisted on holding it practically under poor Lytton’s nose. He said politely: “What a lot of hair!” To which she replied in a rather scornful way: ‘Oh, that will all come off.” Lytton gave a faint shriek: “Is it a wig?”’
He was greatly cheered by seeing Roger in London. The following month, the two of them ventured down for a weekend to Brighton, staying this time at the Bedford Hotel since ‘it seemed to me rather unadventurous not to try something new’. Whether this would be enough to revive Roger’s interest remained undecided.
‘Don’t come back too exhausted,’ Carrington warned him; ‘remember our literary weekend. You are responsible for the dazzling conversation.’ At the beginning of November they were expecting Aldous and Maria Huxley at Ham Spray, and Carrington was threatening to ‘put opium in the pies to mitigate Aldous’s brilliance’. But the weather turned out beautiful and the visit went off well. ‘They were evidently out to be agreeable,’ Lytton reported (7 November 1931), ‘– especially Maria, who hasn’t quite got over her early Ottoline bringing-up. Aldous is certainly a very nice person – but his conversation tends to be almost perpetually on high levels with a slightly exhausting effect.’
This exhaustion, which came over him very easily now, he put down to ‘too much wit and too little humour perhaps’. Yet he was suffering from restlessness – ‘one of the worst cares of life!’ and with an overpowering urge to enjoy himself rushed up once more to London. Dining with Clive Bell one evening shortly after arriving in Gordon Square, he complained of feeling off colour, and left early, saying that they must meet again soon. At the weekend, accompanied by Pippa, he travelled down by train to Ham Spray. At Paddington he discovered by chance that Clive was journeying to Wiltshire in the same coach. ‘He came to see me in my compartment,’ Clive recorded, ‘where I was alone, and we had some talk … At Reading he rejoined his party. At Hungerford I watched him walk along the platform on his way out. That was the last time I saw Lytton.’52
On his return to Ham Spray, he went to bed with what appeared to be a bad attack of gastric influenza. On 4 December, in one of his last letters, he wrote to Roger: ‘I’m sorry to say I’m still sadly pulverised – have been for some days in bed – now creep about, but in an enfeebled semi-miserable condition. I cannot feel that I’m really on the mend yet. A sudden reversion to a state of affairs that I thought had gone about 15 years ago! … This is a gloomy recital, I fear! – In a way particularly annoying because there doesn’t seem to be anything serious the matter. Only an eternal lack of equilibrium inside. Hélas! Luckily there are a lot of books to read.’
There was Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil – ‘class II, division I’ – Burns’s Letters to Mrs Agnes Maclehose – ‘an amusing, curious book, published in the ’40’s’ – and Leonard Woolf’s first volume of After the Deluge – ‘on Civilization, History, Humanity, Life etc…. I find it quite readable.’ Virginia, too, had sent him a copy of her latest novel, The Waves, but he shrank from immersing himself. ‘It’s perfectly fearful,’ he admitted to Topsy Lucas (4 November 1931). ‘I shudder and shiver – and cannot take the plunge. Any book lying about I seize up as an excuse for putting it off – so at the moment I’m in the middle of Lucien Leuwen (Stendhal) – said by the French to be one of the masterpieces … well, well! – ’
During the last week of November and the first two weeks of December, there were days when he seemed to start a recovery, but the general drift was downwards, and soon he was hardly able to read anything. Although his pulse stayed steady, his temperature fluctuated wildly, sometimes soaring to 104° and men tumbling down to 96° within a day. He was able to retain very little of what he ate, and could only be fed on what Carrington termed ‘sparrow’s food’ – rusks, mashes and tumblers of brandy. He lost weight and strength rapidly. For almost two months the struggle went on. ‘Lytton is so good,’ Carrington wrote. ‘He lies without moving day after day and never complains … He is marvellously brave and the doctors are all astonished by his courage and spirits.’ He was dying with the aid of many physicians – at one time or another four specialists, two general practitioners and three nurses. Dr Elinor Rendel, Lytton’s niece, who was not officially called in but fulfilled the part of a gloomy Greek chorus by commenting on the medical team’s combined utterances, pronounced his case to be one of typhoid, due to the ‘deep well water’ at Ham Spray. But ‘every suggestion she has made has been wrong’, Ralph noticed.53 Lytton’s regular consultant from Hungerford, Dr Starkey Smith, appeared positively doubtful. Lytton was ill – no doubt at all of that; he was seriously yet not dangerously ill. Also he was never without ‘a good fighting chance’. So there was little cause for alarm. Possibly, Starkey Smith conceded, Lytton’s illness was a bad attack of colitis or alternatively one of four groups of paratyphoid. ‘Nobody has ever seen a case like it,’ Virginia commented, ‘and nothing goes as they expect.’54
Meanwhile the only treatment that he could be given was a strict diet and constant nursing. The house filled up. Three professional nurses moved in and took it in turns to look after him. One was named Mooney, another McCabe, and the third, who was deaf, Phillips. Lytton made up nicknames for all of them: Clytemnestra; Old Mother Hubbard; Mousie. Pippa and James soon came down to join Carrington and Ralph who had gone to Ham Spray at once. ‘Lytton asked me this morning how long I could stay and I said I would stay until he was better,’ he wrote to Frances (10 December 1931). ‘… Carrington cries every time she goes to see him, as soon as she gets out … I talk to her hour after hour to prevent her rushing panics … I hate our being separated, but you shall come here if it goes on.’
The routine of a long illness set in. Frances came down and stayed in a room above the Post Office in Ham so that she could take some care of Ralph. ‘Always a very emotional man, easily moved to tears, and deeply devoted to Lytton, he had been left with his powers of resistance reduced to practically nothing by the constant strain of trying to support Carrington in her even more agonising state of dread.’55 Driving from Hungerford station and, during the following days, while walking through the fields together, Ralph would ceaselessly weep in front of her, before resuming his officer-like control at Ham Spray. Not a weeper herself, Frances could not help feeling some resentment over the devastating effects this Strachey illness was producing on him. Was there not a folie de grandeur in summoning all those eminent specialists to Ham Spray, as well as in the bulletins of Lytton’s condition that were appearing each day in The Times and that were apparently rated so important? Why in any case were there so many Stracheys hanging round? Lytton had only wanted James and Pippa, and the others merely complicated Carrington’s predicament. Frances could see that Lytton’s suffering was ‘really awful’ and that it excited extremely strong emotion; nevertheless, it seemed to her there was ‘a vein of hysteria in the agitation’ that surrounded his bed. The reason, as Vanessa pointed out, was that for Bloomsbury Lytton was the first person they had all known since adolescence to be on the point of death.
‘We are at your service at any moment day or night, Leonard and I,’ Virginia wrote to Pernel Strachey (30 December 1931). On the whole visitors were not encouraged to come over since ‘nothing more can be done in the way of human kindness’, Carrington explained to Sebastian Sprott. But many found relief simply by driving to Hungerford. Saxon silently strolled in one day; Clive and Vanessa came over; Leonard and Virginia arrived: but Lytton was too ill to see them. Carrington and Ralph kept everyone informed by telephone and letter of each little improvement, every new emergency. ‘I feel so relieved when each day is over,’ Carrington confessed to Rosamond Lehmann.
The Bear Hotel at Hungerford had filled up with Lytton’s sisters and brothers, ‘all grey, all woollen, all red nosed, swollen eyed, quiet, exact’,56 battening down their family love as they pored over detective stories, played chess, finished crossword puzzles by the fire, and occasionally relieved their despair in bursts of cackling laughter or strident quarrelling as they waited for the doctors.
The burden of anxiety fell mainly on Ralph, Carrington, Pippa and James. Ralph attended to the electric light, the water supply, the fetching and carrying from Hungerford or Newbury. Carrington, who could only respond to the situation emotionally, was also, in a sense, a patient, and it was with her that Ralph felt he had to deal. Held by a terrifying dread, she would not stir beyond the garden, and avoided most callers. At nights, she hardly slept at all, or if she dozed off, woke every few minutes from nightmares and would listen to the owls hooting round the house or stand at the window gazing at the white frost. ‘I feel nothing as bad can happen again,’ she told Mary Hutchinson. By day she would sit at Lytton’s bedside, sponging his face with scent and water and reading Jane Austen to him. Outside his room she pitched herself into the running of the house, the cooking, gardening, even painting. Weeds were pulled up, nettles flung on the bonfire. Enormous glass pictures emerged from her studio. For hours Ralph, who was none too controlled himself, continued talking to her, while the self-controlled Pippa took her place at Lytton’s bedside.
It was Pippa whom Lytton probably liked to see most. As he sank deeper into his illness, his mind reverted, like Queen Victoria’s, to scenes from his childhood, and these he was best able to communicate to his sister, who had nursed him through early illnesses. She had always adored Lytton, but never betrayed her grief. Her screeching laugh, too, seemed to cheer him. Once, when his temperature had reached 104°, Ralph entered the bedroom to find him weakly but coherently discussing with her the merits of McTaggart’s philosophy. ‘He remains reasonable, calm,’ Virginia wrote to Ethel Smyth after hearing this story (4 January 1932), ‘will even argue about truth and beauty and thus vindicates the race of scholars.’
James was also admirable in emergencies. Less alarmist than Ralph yet unexcelled by anyone except Carrington in his devotion to Lytton, he sat reading novels when there was nothing practical to be done. His pink unruffled presence, supported by Alix who was ‘terrifyingly strong’, reassured Carrington. ‘James is such a truthful exact person,’ she noted, ‘that I believe everything he says and looks’.
On 9 December, the bacteriologist and physician-extraordinary to George V, Sir Maurice Cassidy – ‘very grand specialist, bluff, 50, toothe-moustache’, Carrington described him – took over the case. He was called in by Starkey Smith, who had been with him at medical school. After driving down from London, he examined Lytton with great thoroughness, concluded that he was suffering from ulcerative colitis – adding that his heart, lungs and pulse were all satisfactory – and carried off with him two samples of blood. His cheerful matter-of-fact manner inspired everyone with fresh confidence. The following night, his report came through via Starkey Smith: the samples had shown nothing. At various stages over the next week he examined six more blood cultures, but they too proved negative. Nevertheless, he felt convinced that Lytton was suffering from some sort of enteric fever. On 17 December, Ralph took him further samples to be analysed, but with the same result. By then Cassidy’s optimism had begun to ebb. The state of affairs seemed more inexplicable and grave than at any other time. On the advice of Lionel Penrose, the family also consulted Leonard Dudgeon, professor of pathology at the University of London, who was a renowned diagnostician and ‘the grandest pathologist in the world’, Carrington told Sebastian Sprott. After a most elaborate examination, he confirmed the ulcerative colitis verdict. Throughout these weeks, this diagnosis was on the whole maintained, though at Christmas the possibility of paratyphoid was again admitted, and everyone in the house was instructed to be scrupulous over hygiene.
Meanwhile, Lytton continued to get steadily worse. The danger which Cassidy and the other doctors feared was the risk of perforation, which is constantly present in enteric fever. The worst of this condition was that it might go on for months. It had no curve and no crisis; the danger period might be almost as lengthy as the sickness itself. The critical stage gave little warning usually of its approach, Cassidy declared, and could occur at any time, day or night, regardless of temperature or pulse or any haemorrhages. An immediate emergency operation would then become essential. Plans for this operation had already been made. If Lytton were to collapse entirely and his temperature sink well below normal, Ralph was to telephone Starkey Smith, who had instructions to summon John Ryle, the surgeon at Guy’s Hospital specializing in gastro-intestinal illnesses, to Ham Spray at once. The operation would then be performed in Lytton’s bedroom. At some moment an injection of blood would be needed, not a transfusion, and Ralph was shown how to provide this. Since no antitoxins were then known, nothing more could be done.
The house was submerged in ponderous gloom. Carrington and Ralph, Pippa and James were obliged to conduct an entirely defensive campaign. The continual strain reminded Ralph of the worst days of the war. ‘I feel back in the trenches myself,’ he told Frances (13 December 1931), ‘there are the same orders for the day to carry out, telephone messages from headquarters, visits from the Colonel and Staff, N.C.O.’s to question and tell to carry on doing what they do infinitely better than ever you could, and at the back of one’s mind the anxiety at night, the possibility of something unexpected and certain to be unpleasant being sprung upon one. I sleep as lightly as a feather. During the dark hours I breathe with only the top half of the lungs, and when I see daylight I take a deep breath and eat a hearty breakfast.’
It remained to be seen whether Lytton, with all his tenacity, could withstand the double strain of prolonged high fever and low diet. For a further week his constitution held out. ‘All the doctors are amazed by his strength,’ Virginia wrote, ‘… I always feel a toughness and sanity in Lytton, for all his look of weakness.’57 He knew that a great deal depended upon his own efforts, and so long as there was hope of recovery he concentrated his will-power upon this objective. But each day his symptoms remained unaltered or grew worse, and his strength inevitably declined. He understood about the possibility of enteric fever from which his cousin, Sir Arthur Strachey, had died nursed by Pippa out in India, and the question of whether the struggle was worth continuing, of whether recovery was at all possible, must have occurred to him. ‘If it’s only keeping me alive a little longer don’t,’ he said. The crisis came, very alarmingly, on Christmas Eve. His condition sank swiftly and he appeared to be dying. Cassidy, Ryle and an anaesthetist were sent for from London, but everyone had by this time given up hope. Everyone except Carrington. ‘I simply wouldn’t believe that he could be defeated,’ she said, ‘and I still can’t.’
Then, when it appeared almost impossible that he should do so, he rallied. The doctors now decided to administer injections of a new serum. Lytton was told that if he could maintain the fight a little longer, there was every hope of his fever subsiding. He did his best. Carrington had been shattered by his acceptance of death, moving around the house, numbed and desperate, scarcely recognizing people. But now she saw Lytton take up the fight once more. Miraculously, by the evening he had grown a little better, and over the next few dangerous days, though fearfully weak, he managed to hold his own.
It was an exquisite relief. Everyone was worn down after the weeks of misery, but inclined to be hopeful again. It appeared as if the Strachey constitution had triumphed and that forty-eight hours of improvement must mean something solid. At least Lytton was not sinking into unconsciousness again. ‘Although the Stracheys and Stephen’s may fight like cat and dog,’ Virginia wrote reassuringly to Pernel Strachey, ‘I cant help thinking we are of one flesh when it comes to a pinch.’
Feeling so close to him (after Leonard ‘I don’t suppose I care for anyone more than for Lytton,’ she wrote. ‘… He’s in all my past – my youth’), Virginia had sat in Monk’s House with Leonard over Christmas Eve when they both believed Lytton to have already vanished from their lives, talking of the loss of friends, feeling a sense of age, speculating on their own deaths, suddenly bereft and crying together. But next day when Vanessa telephoned to tell them of the New Serum and the tea with milk and brandy Lytton was drinking, and then over the next week, as he slowly seemed to mend, their optimism rose irresistibly. ‘Now again all one’s sense of him flies out & expands & I begin to think of things to say to him,’ Virginia wrote in her diary.
‘… I am therefore freely imagining a future with my old serpent to talk to, to laugh at, to abuse. I shall read his book on Sh[akespeare]; I shall stay at Ham Spray; I shall tell him how L[eonard] & I sobbed on Christmas Eve … we have lived through every grade of feeling – how strong, how deep – more than I guessed, though the cavern of horror is well known to me … Lytton too, always reasonable, clear, giving his orders; & dying as he thought; & then as reasonably, finding some strength returning, deciding to live … one has taken him back after those sepulchral days.’58
At the end of the year he was still maintaining this slight advantage, and having once escaped death so narrowly, his fight for life fired all his friends with hope. Describing the New Year celebrations at Ipsden, Rosamond Lehmann wrote to her brother John: ‘That evening was the first for a week when the feeling of being in a bad dream lifted a bit – as we had just heard that a miracle had happened and Lytton pulled round after being given up by everybody. I now feel he will live, though the danger is still acute. The bottom would fall out of the world for us if Ham Spray were no more.’
‘Lytton goes on, now better, now not so well,’ Virginia noted in her diary on 13 January 1932, ‘… & now I say it is not the end.’ Carrington too felt they had emerged from a dungeon. Although always in discomfort and sometimes in pain, Lytton lay, day after day, swallowing his ‘vile black medicines’ without a murmur. ‘D’you know,’ remarked Cassidy, ‘I’d quite dote on that chap if I saw much of him.’ Knowing the awful strain his illness was imposing upon the others, Lytton tried to lighten it by a wry cheerfulness and the kindly messages he sent everyone. He was too weak to speak much, but towards Carrington he was now careful to remain in good spirits, whenever possible greeting her with some joke. At night he had to be given sleeping draughts and these, he claimed, induced a whole series of amusing dreams. ‘I’ve spent the whole night skipping,’ he told her one morning, ‘so curious. I didn’t know I could skip. It was rather delightful.’
He thought about literature, not so much about people. He talked of Shelley’s youth; and with deep satisfaction, he would recite lines of poetry:
Lorsque le grand Byron avail quitté Ravenne …
It was the music of such lines, a river of sound, that soothed him. He also tried to compose poems of his own. ‘But it’s so difficult,’ he sighed. ‘Poetry is so very difficult.’
‘Don’t think about poetry,’ Pippa advised him, ‘it’s too tiring. Think of nice simple solid things – think about teapots and chairs.’
‘But I don’t know anything about teapots and chairs.’
‘Well,’ replied Pippa, ‘think of people playing croquet, moving quietly about on a summer lawn.’
Lytton seemed pleased. ‘Ah yes, that’s nice.’ Then a pause. ‘But I don’t remember any reference to croquet in French literature.’
Once, in the early hours of the morning, when he was alone with one of the night-nurses, he began trying under his breath to compose a poem.
‘Don’t you weary yourself, Mr Strachey,’ she commanded. ‘I’ll write all the poetry that has to be written.’
There was a long silence. Then the nurse overheard two whispered words, incomprehensible to anyone not recognizing the slang of thirty years before: ‘My hat!’
The poems of these last two months Lytton transcribed, very faintly in pencil, into a small exercise book.
Let me not know the wherefore and the how.
No question let me ask, no answer find;
I deeper taste the blessed here and now
Bereft of speculation, with eyes blind.
What need to seek or see?
It is enough to be.
In absolute quiescence let me rest,
From all the world, from mine own self, apart;
I closer hold the illimitable best,
Still as the final silence, with calm heart.
What need to strive or move?
It is enough to love.
Love was his religion, and he could only accept a god who would sanctify those loves, so singular, so plural, which had formed the most enduring passions of his life. Another of these poems, cast in the traditional form of a prayer, is really a hymn to sexual passion addressed to an officially unknown god:
Lord, in Thy strength and sweetness,
Be ever by my side
Close as the foot to fleetness
The bridegroom and the bride.
Through sickness and through sadness
Still let me see Thy face;
Bestow upon my gladness
Thy consummating grace;
Fill with a golden clearness
And hallow with Thy nearness
My most abandoned night!
The satirical last line springs unexpectedly upon the Christian God of married love. Yet his disbelief is swept back by the emotional intensity in these poems, especially in the last one of all with its final double entendre:
Insensibly I turn, I glide
A little nearer to Thy side …
At last! Ah, Lord, the joy, the peace,
The triumph and the sweet release,
When, after all the wandering pain,
The separation, long and vain,
Into the field, the sea, the sun,
Thy culminating hands, I come!
The days passed: his condition remained the same. While he lay motionless in his bedroom, willing himself to live a little longer, a little longer, letters from his friends poured in, and these were read out to him by Pippa and Carrington. The last one which he was able to read for himself was from Virginia to Carrington. Ham Spray, she wrote (18 January 1932), was really ‘the loveliest place in England … I want very much to come again.’ To Vita Sackville-West she had written: ‘I should mind it to the end of my days if he died.’
‘There seems no end to this illness,’ Ralph wrote to Gerald Brenan. By the second week of January, another celebrated specialist was called in on the recommendation of Ottoline. This was Sir Arthur Hurst, ‘a weird little man’, Carrington told the Guinnesses. ‘I feel great confidence in his queer excited manner, and he looks extremely intelligent.’ Hurst, who inclined to Cassidy and Dudgeon’s original diagnosis though admitting the possibility of paratyphoid, recommended certain variations in Lytton’s treatment, and said he had seen similar cases recover. But by now Lytton had shrunk to such a shadow of himself that to those who were visiting him for the first time since November and who saw the extraordinary fragility of his appearance, it seemed scarcely possible that he could ever get well again.
Three days later, his condition began to deteriorate once more. By this stage no one knew what to believe. Following the various symptoms, hour by hour, they lived on an endless switchback of hope and despair. One new anxiety had been added to the previous ones. Ralph discovered from one of Carrington’s letters torn up in a waste-paper basket and written during the earlier crisis in Lytton’s condition, that should he die, she meant to commit suicide. Ralph had no doubt that she was set on this course, and if allowed to, would kill herself. Who, that knew her, could doubt the violence of her desires or, in spite of all obstacles, her determination to carry them out? Ralph felt certain, however, that she would choose certain ways of suicide and reject others – those, for example, which were disfiguring. James openly accused her of planning suicide, and she denied it. But her denial meant nothing. They secretly searched her studio, that studio which ‘is a mirror of my existence on earth. Untidy, disorganized and incomplete’, and took away a medicine that was poisonous.
On the afternoon of Wednesday, 20 January, while Carrington was bathing his face, Lytton whispered: ‘Carrington, why isn’t she here? I want her. Darling Carrington. I love her. I always wanted to marry Carrington, and I never did.’ It was not true; but he could not have said anything more deeply consoling. Afterwards she remembered ‘it was happiness to know he secretly had loved me so much and told me before he died.’
Later he fell asleep for an hour, his mouth open, and she watched him, as she had done so often, with terror in her heart, thinking that if he died, she could not live. At a quarter to three, she observed a change in his face. ‘I suddenly noticed his breathing was different although he did not wake up. And I thought of the Goya painting of a dead man with the high light on the cheek bones.’ She ran out and called nurse McCabe who asked her to telephone Dr Starkey Smith and find out how much strychnine Lytton might be given. After telephoning, Carrington rushed back and held his arm while the nurse injected the prescribed dose. Presently his breathing deepened, and Carrington ran off to tell James and Pippa. When Lytton regained consciousness, Pippa told him that the doctor would soon be calling again. ‘I shall be delighted to see him,’ he said weakly. ‘But I’m afraid I shan’t be able to do much socially.’
That afternoon, for the first time, Carrington gave up hope. ‘It became clear to me that he could not live,’ she scrawled in HER BOOK. Dr Starkey Smith arrived and gave Lytton another injection. ‘I saw from his face he had no hope,’ Carrington noted. ‘He slept without any discomfort or pain. A hatred for nurse Phillips came on me. I cannot remember now anything except watching Lytton’s pale face, and his close shut eyes lying on the pillows and Pippa standing by his bed.’
At four o’clock, Ralph returned from a late picnic with Gerald Brenan, who was now living in a tiny thatched cottage at East Lulworth with the poet Gamel Woolsey. Carrington had invited Gerald over to tea, saying she particularly wished to see him. Hardly were the two men at the door when James came out. There had been a fresh crisis, he told them, and Lytton was sinking fast. Ralph hurried in, and Gerald drove to the post office to send off telegrams, since James did not want to use the telephone in the house for fear of being overheard by Carrington. Then he motored back, went in, and sat waiting in the drawing-room. Presently he heard Carrington’s low and musical voice, more exquisitely modulated, more caressing than ever. He did not feel able to look at her, but she came up behind him and took his hand.
It had been decided, in the event of a crisis occurring, to send for another of Carrington’s lovers, Stephen Tomlin. This was Ralph’s idea; he wanted to mobilize anyone who might help to ensure her safety. They had got in touch with him and he was standing by. While Tommy was in the house, it was felt, Carrington would not attempt to take her own life. It was a cruel but clever expedient, for its success depended upon Tommy being so unbalanced and neurotic, so prone himself to suicide, shattered by his brother Garrow having been killed flying only the previous month, by the failure of his marriage to Julia Strachey and by all the supports in his life tottering, that Carrington’s sense of responsibility would be aroused, and she would pull herself together to attend to him. Tommy’s principal relations with other people contained a strong element of dependence. Lytton was not merely one of his closest friends; he relied, in some almost filial way, upon his existence. In the event of Lytton’s death, Carrington would have to control herself and Tommy.
‘Be nice to Gerald, he has been of great help,’ Ralph told Frances. Stephen Tomlin having been sent for, Gerald drove off to Hungerford station in Ralph’s car to meet him. ‘He stepped out of the train looking more than usually undecided and pale and we set off in silence for Ham Spray,’ Gerald recorded in his diary. ‘But D.C., though apparently glad to see him, would not hear of him staying there and declared she could not understand why he had come.’ So the two of them went back to the Bear Inn at Hungerford, where they sat up late, talking. ‘When at last we went upstairs to bed, he asked if he might sleep in my room, since he could not face the idea of sleeping alone,’ Gerald wrote. ‘I consented and then, instead of lying down in the other bed, to my embarrassment he got into mine and like a child that is afraid of the dark and cannot bear to be separated from others, burst into tears. It was impossible not to be touched by his misery and I regretted that I was not a young woman so as to be able to console him more effectively.’
At Ham Spray that night special watches were arranged by Lytton’s bedside. Pippa was to remain there till midnight; Carrington would replace her until three o’clock; Ralph would then relieve Carrington and carry on for the next three hours, until James took over for the last three. At three o’clock Carrington passed James on the landing on her way to Lytton’s bedroom. Neither of them had slept. During the early part of her vigil, Carrington had asked nurse Mooney whether there was any chance of Lytton living. She seemed surprised at the idea. ‘Oh no – I don’t think so now,’ she replied. Carrington leant over the bed and gave Lytton a kiss on his forehead: it was damp and cold. Ralph, also unable to sleep, came in with a cup of tea, and sat down by the fire. Carrington went over and kissed him too, said she was going to her bedroom and asked him not to wake her, since after weeks of her ‘non-sleeping disease’, she was exhausted. James, she noticed, had gone downstairs to the front room. She walked quickly along the passage and down the back stairs.
It was half-past three. The house was very quiet, and outside the moon shone in the yard through the elm trees and across the barns. She walked over to the garage. The door was stuck fast open, and she could hardly move it. Every jerk seemed to shriek through the night air. At last she scraped both doors closed. She got into the car, and accidentally touched the horn. ‘My heart stood still, for I felt R[alph] must have heard as the landing window was open. I stood in the yard watching for a light to go on in the passages. After some time I crept back again, & made every preparation all ready that I could start up the car directly the milking engine started in the Farm yard.’
Then she waited, feeling very cold in her dressing-gown. Outside, there was not a sound. Her plan was to stay there until half-past four, at which time every morning the farmers started up the milking-machine, the noise of which would drown the car engine. Half-past four came by the car clock, and still nothing happened. Then she remembered it ran ten minutes fast. She went outside again and continued to wait. At half-past five she suddenly heard sounds from across the yard, and movements in the milking-shed. She ran back to the garage, shut the door, and a few moments after the milking-machine had started up, switched on the car engine.
‘I was terrified by the noise … There seemed no smell. I got over in the back of the car & lay down, & listened to the thud of the engine below me & the noise of the milking machine puffing away outside. At last I smelt it was beginning to get rather thick. I turned on the light in the side of the car & looked at the clock only 10 mins had gone. However Ralph would probably not come exactly at 6 ock. The windows of the car looked foggy & a bit misty. I turned out the light again, & lay down. Gradually I felt rather sleepy, and then the buzzing noise grew fainter, & further off. Rather like fainting I remember thinking … I thought of Lytton, & was glad to think I shouldn’t know anymore. Then I remembered a sort of dream which faded away …’
Shortly before six o’clock there was another crisis in Lytton’s condition. Thinking that he must be dying, they sent for Carrington, and not finding her in her bedroom, they searched the house. Going out to the garage, Ralph saw her lying behind the exhaust pipe of the car, the engine still running. She was unconscious. He carried her up to her room and immediately summoned Dr Starkey Smith. Had he found her ten minutes later, she would have been dead.
The doctor gave her an injection. There was a terrible buzzing in her ears, she woke up, saw Dr Starkey Smith still holding her arm with the syringe, and cried: ‘No! No! Go away!’ pushing his hand off until he seemed to vanish ‘like the Cheshire cat’. Then she looked up and saw her bedroom window. It was daylight. ‘I felt angry at being back after being in a very happy dream. Sorry to be awake again … something wrong with my eyes. I couldn’t see my hands or focus on anything.’ Ralph was there. He held her in his arms, and kissed her, and asked: ‘How could you do it?’ It had never occurred to him that she would attempt anything with Lytton still alive. She would wish, he thought, at all costs to be there at the last moment, and that was why, when Lytton was on the point of death, he had gone to look for her.
She had promised him not to try anything. But she must have been aware that, the moment Lytton died, she would be closely guarded, and that Stephen Tomlin, waiting a few miles away with Gerald Brenan, would be brought into the house. By some obscure train of feeling, she had hoped, through the offer of her own life, to rescue Lytton’s. ‘It is ironical’, she scribbled in HER BOOK, ‘that Lytton by that early attack at 6 ’ock saved my life, when I gave my life for his, he should give it back.’
But Lytton was not dead. Although everyone had tried to keep from him the gravity of his illness, he was not deceived. He accepted the idea of extinction with a quizzical humour, very typical of him. ‘If this is dying,’ he remarked quietly, ‘then I don’t think much of it.’
Early that morning, Stephen Tomlin was urgently called to the house. Other friends and relatives arrived, their cars crunching backwards and forwards on the gravel. The fine frosty weather that had gone on without a break since Christmas still lasted. It was intensely still – the sort of weather Lytton had always loved. A soft mist lay over the meadows and hung in the elm trees. The sunlight, sprinkling through their branches, spreading across the lawn, seemed to linger and delay, before touching the walls of the house, and streaming through the windows. The nurses popped in and out, arranging things. The others, strained, silent, seemed held in surreal immobility. It was impossible for them while they waited not to contrast this beauty with Lytton dying, or to wonder what result might follow for the three, bound together in precarious equilibrium, whom he left behind.
In London they were coming back from a Bloomsbury fancy-dress party, a tightness round their lips, a sense of something spent. ‘One misses people more and more,’ Duncan said. It was the stupidity of death that Virginia thought intolerable. Vanessa had asked what they would have liked if one of them were dying, and they all agreed that the party should go on. ‘It is like having the globe of the future perpetually smashed – without Lytton,’ Virginia wrote, ‘– & then, behold, it fills again.’
Carrington lay that morning in her four-poster bed. Ralph took Frances up to see her ‘still very white, but with the hectic colour in her cheeks that comes from inhaling gas’. They kissed and Frances felt ‘the thick softness of her hair against my cheek’. At midday she got up and went into Lytton’s room. He was still sleeping, breathing deeply and fast. Pippa sat near his bed. ‘I went up and sat in a chair, and watched him,’ Carrington wrote. ‘"So this is death” I kept on saying to myself.’ She was witnessing and recording what she had longed to escape. Two nurses moved about behind the screen. Ralph came, and sat on the floor.
‘I felt completely calm,’ she wrote. ‘His face was very pale like ivory. Everything seemed to be transfixed. The pale face of nurse MacCabe standing by his bed in her white clothes, Pippa watching with those sweet brown eyes all tear stained and her face mottled. The noise of the electric light machine outside. I sat there thinking of all the other mornings in Lytton’s room and there was “Pride and Prejudice”, that I had been reading the afternoon before still on the table – It seemed as if time had lost all its properties, as if everything was marked by Lytton’s [heart] beating … Suddenly I felt very sick and ran out to my bedroom and was violently sick into the chamber pot … I went back to Lytton’s room, and sat on the chair. About 2 o’clock or 1.30 Lytton grew worse and his breathing became shorter. I stood holding Pippa round the waist. Lytton never opened his eyes. I could not cry … James came in and stood behind us with Ralph … Nurse Philipps suddenly came forwards and said: “I think you ladies had better go and sit down, you can do no good here.” I was furious and hated her … A blackbird sung outside in the sun on the aspen. We stood there … Sometimes his breathing almost stopped. But then he breathed again fainter. Suddenly he breathed no more and nurse MacC. put her hand on his heart under the clothes and felt it. I looked at his face it was pale as ivory. I went forward and kissed his eyes, and his forehead. They were cold.’