Long life
Two memories
Nigel Nicolson
It was quite something to watch Car- rington and the first episodes of Pride and Prejudice in a single week, and to judge which was the truer to the original. My ver- dict is in favour of Carrington, not because it concerned people who were alive when I was young and some of whom I distantly knew, but because I knew the Bennet sis- ters even better and found their stand-ins wanting.
Emma Thompson was very much like the Carrington whom I once met briefly, and Jonathan Pryce resembled Lytton Strachey closely, apart from his voice, which should have been more sing-song; and their rela- tionship was perfectly rendered in the film. The Bennet girls, on the other hand, were less beautiful and duller than their proto- types. It is a cruel thing to say of any actress, but Elizabeth and Jane needed to be younger and slimmer, especially Jane whose only characteristic was her gentle loveliness, while Elizabeth's attractiveness amounted to more than the knowing smiles and sidelong glances of Jennifer Ehle. Per- haps it is because the nightdress style of the period is unflattering to the female figure, but I was expecting a sprightly girl and was given a reliable housekeeper. There was no such disappointment with her parents or Mr Collins. They were exactly as I imagined them About Bloomsbury we have as much information as about Longbourn and Pem- berley, in fact more, because Tidmarsh, Ham Spray and Charleston exist, and the Bloomsbury diaries, letters and memoirs, as Simon Jenkins pointed out in these pages two weeks ago, left on record their thoughts and relationships with a detail that is unlikely ever to be equalled. Though he acknowledged their achievements, he called them 'those limpid creatures', and accused them of 'self-regard', but here I think he erred, and the Carrington film dis- proves. My problem in editing Virginia Woolfs letters was not with their conceit but with her mordant wit at the expense of her surviving friends. There has never been a more mutually critical society, and 'limpid' is not an epithet that I would attach to any of them. The fierceness of their jealousies, the keenness of their ambi- tions, are well brought out in the film And their tenderness too. Take this letter from Carrington to Gerald Brenan written when she was ill at Ham Spray:
The only thing that makes it a pleasure to be ill is the beauty of the room where the fire casts great shadows from my bed across the ceiling, and Lytton sits on the little low Span- ish chair framed against the black Ilex in the window reading Tamburlaine. '
This scene is not in the film, but its spirit is, and an undocumented scene when Car- rington, standing at night in the garden, looks up at the house and witnesses through each window a separate part of their com- plicated love-life, is truer than true. The end is very moving. We are spared Caning- ton's death-throes. Her suicide is signalled by a distant shot. This supreme gesture, I felt, was Bloomsbury's vindication. There was no limpidity about it. No self-regard.
After that, the lives and loves of the Ben- nets seemed insipid, even Elizabeth's. There is something inconsistent in the behaviour of hero and heroine, as there never was in Bloomsbury. Darcy should not have been capable of such boorishness at the start when he turns out so compassionate at the end, and Elizabeth should not have forgiven him so readily for his treatment of her sis- ter. Vanessa never would have. If I can compare Darcy to Lytton, and Elizabeth to Carrington, I find the real people more sympathetic than the fictional, and the reconstruction of what actually happened more credible than the drama of what didn't, even though Longbourn's story was far less extraordinary than Ham Spray's.
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