The story behind the myth
Richard Shone
CARRINGTON: A LIFE OF DORA CARRINGTON 1893-1932 by Grechten Gerzina
John Murray, £18.95, pp.342
Dora Carrington is more famous for the circumstances of her death than for any achievements of her life. In her twenties, soon after leaving the Slade School of Fine Art, she fell in love with Lytton Strachey and remained so until he died from cancer in January 1932. A few weeks afterwards, inconsolable at the loss of the friend who gave point to her existence, she took a gun and shot herself. She staged it as an accident but it was clearly suicide. 'He first deceased, she for a little tried/To live without him, liked it not and died.' Car- rington had copied these lines of Sir Henry Wotton into her diary shortly before her death. Her unlikely devotion to Strachey and its tragic outcome were revealed by Michael Holroyd in his life of the writer. Interest was roused. The publication of Carrington's letters and diaries in 1970 was an unexpected success. She rapidly became a cult figure, mainly through the attentions of feminists claiming her for their martyr- ology. The American author of this biogra- phy avoids any myth-making sentimental- ity and casts clear eyes over the facts. Although her book is ungracefully written and too long, it tells the kind of story from which myths evolve.
It is, however, worth looking first at Carrington's more tangible achievements. There is a handful of memorable paintings and a voluminous correspondence. The former includes portraits, mainly of her friends, and several landscapes, usually of the English countryside. The few that exist are highly prized, though her most famous work The Mill House, Tidmarsh, with its two black swans, is apparently missing. At their best, her landscapes combine an understated sense of menace with an almost child-like simplification of form, as found in Watendlath, recently acquired by the Tate Gallery. Her portraits are accom- plished and precise rather than penetrat- ing. Grechten Gerzina ascribes feverish psychological motives to them which strikes me as nonsense.
Carrington's letters, her other legacy, are inimitable, infuriating, hilarious. They tumble out, misspelt, ungrammatical, fre- quently interrupted by comic drawings. They are mostly quotidean in content and teasingly affectionate in tone; they can also be painful in their self-disclosures as well as in their self-deception. They have some- thing of Virginia Woolf s exuberance — re-written by Daisy Ashford. Although her views on art and literature are unexcep- tional, there are spellbinding descriptions of landscape and catty profiles of people. Dizzy gossip of the lunch-with-Aldous-tea- with-Osbert variety alternates with purring contentment over her life with Strachey, first at Tidmarsh and later at Ham Spray House. Gerzina quotes liberally from pub- lished and unpublished texts. But there are many minor discrepancies between her selections and the same ones in David Garnett's 1970 edition. And some of the visual charm has been lost with the remov- al of Carrington's bursts into CAPITALS. One day there should be a select but definitive edition, with excisions restored and the drawings correctly placed.
As to Carrington's biography, Gerzina amplifies, through diligent research, what is already well known. Her problem is that Carrington's short life was entirely taken up with personal relationships and states of mind and these are vividly described by Carrington herself and several highly liter- ate witnesses. In Gerzina's version the tortuous, cat-and-mouse love affairs with Mark Gentler and Gerald Brenan, Carring- ton's marriage to Ralph Partridge, her devotion to Strachey are all trowelled onto the pages in prose like cold porridge. Nevertheless, Carrington emerges in all her siren-like complexity. 'Was there ever a creature,' wrote the enamoured Brenan, `more expressly created to torment those who loved her?' She adored her elderly father; despised her mother; hero- worshipped a brother killed in the War. She hated being a woman, was horrified by the idea of having children, nursed a massive 'virginity complex' and built around her a ring of evasions and half- truths. Behaviour was often irreconcilable with feeling, fiction slid into fact. Though she could plunge her hands into the cold water of self-analysis, she seemed power- less to act on her findings. The only certainty was Strachey's benevolent and solicitous presence and with his death her own was almost inevitable. A moving entry in Virginia Woolf's diary is an account of her and Leonard's visit to Ham Spray the day before Carrington killed herself. They found her 'like some small animal left . . . "I did everything for Lytton. But I've failed in everything else. People say he was very selfish to me. But he gave me every- thing." ' Gerzina's corrective view establishes once and for all that Strachey tried in every Way through their 15 years together to encourage Carrington to paint. Other friends commissioned decorative work from her and there was a brief phase of Commercial success. But the exigencies of domestic life (everything had to be perfect) and a masochistic self-denigration made it easy to stop painting and easier still not to begin. In her last years, the possibilities of writing fiction inspired her. But, ironically, her most amusing effort was a razor-sharp parody of Strachey's style which won first Prize in an Observer competition.
It is hardly reassuring to be told that Carrington was 'a major figure of her period' — the period, remember, of Paul Nash and Ben Nicholson, of Stanley Spencer and Matthew Smith. She was no such thing. That she was an extraordinary Personality is borne out by everyone's memories of her, by her appearances (not always flattering) in the fiction of Huxley, Lewis and Lawrence, by the hold she had on all who came to know her. By assemb- ling the facts of Carrington's life and emphasising her habitual gusto, Gerzina has rescued her subject from inevitable myth-mongering. Certainly Carrington de- serves more than a spectacular role in the necrology of Bloomsbury. What a shame that Gerzina's worthily-motivated book lacks those qualities of poetry, pace and humour which Carrington herself had in abundance.
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