Personal Record, 1920-1972 by Gerald Brenan (1974)

This record is interesting in terms of fact. The writing is plain, rarely adorned with poetry. The focus of the earlier parts is Dora Carrington, and the tangle around her in which Brenan became involved, which included the love of her life, Lytton Strachey, as well as her husband, Brenan's good friend Ralph Partridge. It also included Frances Marshall, Partridge's second wife, and the edges of the Bloomsbury set, including Roger Fry, Augustus John and others. Carrington and Brenan had a typically (for her) changeful relationship, in which pretty well everything blew hot and cold, and got twisted up in moodful wrangling. As their connection waned, she took on other lovers (of a kind), but was ultimately left at Ham Spray house with her one mainstay, Strachey, after whose death she killed herself. Brenan is honest enough at this longer distance of time in examining their relationship, and includes in that spirit some information which I think is critical: Carrington told him that he had a quality of sometimes understanding very deeply, sometimes of being really very slow on the uptake. Here she seems to me to have been piercing. This trope is repeated again and again in this book, acknowledged and otherwise. He can be insightful and thoughtful one moment, quite blunt and unseeing the next. Brenan, as comfortable-space-for-the-otherwise-engaged, is next drawn into a relationship with Gamel Woolsey, who is pretty dedicated to Llewelyn Powys. This brings him into the remit of this other circle, the Powyses, who are an alternative to Bloomsbury. Her love affair with Powys, and friendship for his wife, Alyse Gregory, made the connection with Brenan another complicated one. Although Brenan's summary is that their marriage was a good one in many ways, he does admit that there were spaces in their lives in which they were quite separate, almost not knowing each other, or, if knowing, not deeply appreciating. His travel through, and living in, Spain throughout this period, with punctuations in Britain, underlies these stories. The section on the Spanish Civil War and how it affected Woolsey and he in Malaga changes the tone considerably. Again, here, there is the feeling that he had an obtuseness which meant the making of some interesting decisions, like harbouring a fascist, which, although consistent with his ideas of pacifism, and of nobody being hurt despite their views, which I find essentially admirable, has an underfeeling in this section of 'careful' telling and perhaps of recasting for more favourable light, unlike the rest of the book. Overall, I like that I am left with a clear-eyed view of the fact that I may not have felt completely at ease with the author had I met him - this seems a shard of honesty shining through. This, with the countering idea always at the back of the mind that autobiography is a constructed reality, leaving us with the classic conundrum; true mixed picture or mixed picture as reconstructed truth?