Carrington : Letters and Extracts from Her Diaries (1970)

There's one acknowledgement I'd like to make straight away - to David Garnett, who edited these. He had the foresight to make this a long book, though I don't know how much even longer it might have been. It seems to me that the power of this collection lies in the cumulation. We start out with Carrington mid-war writing to Mark Gertler, a fellow Slade graduate, and it's almost painfully evident from the start that she wasn't an easy person to like at that time. Full of deceit and evasion with cold running to hot and back again in misleading bursts - all the while seeming to be exclusively dedicated to honesty in relations, in the way that signified the bohemian at that period. But then we see her develop the 'peculiar-triangular' with Ralph Partridge and Lytton Strachey and the first strong mentions are made of place, in this case Tidmarsh's Mill House. Somehow the filling out of the portrait with a beloved house, almost as a kind of deeply observed background in a painting, provides enriching context. The semi-convenient marriage to Partridge and the concurrent maintenance of the Strachey connection are precursors to the great story of place in her life, the purchase and development of Ham Spray house, just south of Hungerford between Marlborough and Newbury, which they all three shared. Intermingled with the slow deadening of the Partridge marriage and his new interest in Frances Marshall is Carrington's passionate affair with Gerald Brenan, mostly carried on at a distance while he lived in Spain. Her own art is given spirited mention, and is much wider in application than I realised - trompe l'oeil paintings on friends' cottage walls, the decoration of tiles and domestic porcelain, the magnificent traditional canvases, and groups of commissions, broadened by word of mouth, of intriguing works like pub signs. As the relationship with Brenan subsided, her last affair flowered - that with Bernard 'Beakus' Penrose, a sailor. And then that, too, cooled, and she was left with her only constant, Strachey, and a sense of settledness approaching, of a kind of grace. Then the unthinkable occurs - Strachey's longish final illness, diagnosed as typhoid but discovered to be intestinal cancer after his death, which simply left a yawning gap for Carrington, and no-one with whom she might share the things that they enjoyed exclusively. She tried once to asphyxiate herself while Strachey was dying, and finally succeeded in exiting this world with the help of a shotgun in March 1932, a couple of miserable months after his death. This woman whom I had started out disliking became, if not thoroughly likeable, brilliantly compelling.