613: Love Story

Lytton Strachey, painted by Carrington

Image source

My sweet companion and my gentle peer,

Why has thou left me thus unkindly here?

Thy end forever and thy life to moan,

O thou has left me all alone.

Thy soul and body when Death's agony

Besieged around thy noble heart,

Did not with more reluctance part,

Than I, my dearest friend, part from thee?

My dearest friend, would I have died for thee?

Life in this world henceforth will tedious be.

Nor shall I know hereafter what to do,

If once my griefs prove tedious too.

Silent and sad I walk about each day,

As sullen ghosts stalk speechless by.

Where their hid treasures lie;

Alas! My treasure's gone. Where do I stay?

No, it's not great poetry in the conventional sense, and for all I know it might even be derivative - my poetry education being almost entirely lacking. But it cannot be criticised for lack of emotional power; I was in tears when today, I read it for the first time.

These lines were written by (Dora) Carrington into her diary following the death early in 1932 of Lytton Strachey, whom she had loved for 17 years - entirely platonically of course - with great passion and commitment.  Two months later she shot herself.

As those of you who read these posts will guess, the poem is quoted in Gretchen Gerzina's biography, Carrington.  This was a true love story - complicated by other affaires (as Carrington called them) - though always paramount, and by the complexity of her nature.  The biography is sensitively written and very moving; I recommend it.

 

Carrington: The Farm at Watendlath

Source

Rosamond Lehmann, a writer I respect enormously (you will find references to her in this blog) was extremely fond of Carrington.  After her suicide, Lehmann wrote:

"It was such an exciting joy to be with her, always, for me.  Nobody has ever enriched me as she did, and I counted much too much on her love and support - and the intimacy I thought I had with her.  And to think how many others felt the same!"*

Forty years later Rosamond Lehmann wrote to David Garnett, "I never loved any woman as I loved her."*

It would seem that despite her intermittent yearnings for solitude and privacy, Carrington's heart was large and generous indeed.

There you are: a proper love story for this (unfortunate) time of year, and infinitely better than a pink, plastic, heart on a card eh?

By the way, should my scribblings about Carrington give you the impression that she has certain characteristics in common with someone I know (and love) then you would be perfectly correct (see Lehmann quotations above).

* Quoted from Rosamond Lehmann by Selina Hastings (Vintage 2003).

Until the next time.

Characters in Books (Again)

The classics: something everyone wants to have read, but nobody wants to read.

Mark Twain

As will become obvious, Mr Twain was referring to more ancient works than the ones to which I shall refer in this piece.  However, attempting to ignore the warning implicit in his dictum, I recently acquired a copy of Henry James's Portrait of a Lady; it cost only a pound, and after reading the first page or two I decided to give it a chance.

I have managed about 40% of the novel and am starting to weary of it.  Mr James created a splendidly simpatico character in old Mr Touchett, but then - naturally for good plot reasons - decided to kill him off; I was disappointed to read of his decease.  Then there is Miss Isabel Archer, the 22-year old upper-middle-class American female to whom he refers from time to time as "our heroine."  I'm afraid that in my view this epithet is quite undeserved.

It is true that Miss Archer started well, but by page 200 or thereabouts I started to get fed up with her; in fact, so annoyed did I become that I decided that perhaps the book should have been named Portrait of a Silly Bitch whose Formidable Intelligence was only Exceeded by her Selfishness and Naïveté.  In other words, she started to get on my tits.  And there's another one - Miss Archer's friend, Henrietta Stacpole, meddling "democratic" American journalist who certainly by page 180 has earned if not a smack in the mouth, certainly a one-way ticket back to the U.S.A.  And there's another meddler, the elegant Madame Merle; curiously I took no exception to the rather cold and stiff Mrs Touchett, though I had the suspicion that I was supposed to.  Really it is all too much.

Reflecting on this dismal situation this evening whilst eating a hamburger, brought to mind some other silly women I have come  across in "the classics."  Consider Anthony Trollope's infuriating Lady Eustace (The Eustace Diamonds) or Thomas Hardy's Bathsheba Everdene.  The latter of course appeared in Far from the Madding Crowd, annoying silly woman - she did NOT deserve Gabriel Oak I'm afraid - and that was in Hardy's first novel.  In his last, Jude the Obscure he created a 24-carat, ocean-going cow in the form of Jude's wife, Susan - and this opinion is based on my reading the book over thirty years ago.  Perhaps I am wrong, but I won't go back there.

By contrast, Rosamond Lehmann's heroines, Olivia and Kate Curtis in Invitation to the Waltz are really quite delightful (Olivia rather lets her standards drop I think in the sequel The Weather in the Streets); Miss Lehmann's heroines in her other novels (with the exception of Dusty Answer) are more difficult in this regard, and several are pretty bloody, although I believe that we are supposed to sympathise with them.  Despite  Miss Lehmann's superb writing I usually, as one might expect, find this pretty hard - if not impossible - to do.

Rose Macaulay created a complex though not unsympathetic character in The World my Wilderness: Madame Michel; she is however finally redeemed - at least in my eyes.  Her daughter is difficult, but understandably so.  Her female characters in Told by an Idiot are largely attractive - especially Rome (yes, that was the name).  Sadly Miss Macaulay's books are not so easy to find.

For the time being, Henry James having brought  me to this summit of annoyance, I shall return to the relaxed and cultivated English of one of his (many) admirers: Sir Max Beerbohm, where I shall be soothed; equally I know that there will be no silly bitches in Sir Max's writings to wind me up - oops!!  I had momentarily forgotten his infuriating charcter, Zuleika Dobson; I'll give HER a miss.

Re-reading the foregoing, I have concluded that anyone who can be bothered to read my scribblings will assume that I expect perfection in an imperfect world; perhaps I do and am thus a disappointed man.

I rather think that I am.

Until the next time.

Rosamond Lehmann, William Blake And the Spreadeagle

I have just finished reading Miss Lehmann's The Echoing Grove.


In this novel appears a couplet taken from William Blake's poem Broken Love, a powerful thing indeed.

"And throughout all Eternity

I forgive you, you forgive me."

Yes, "infinite love" was her expression.

There's no escape.  Today I found an ancient Penguin - John Fothergill's An Innkeeper's Diary; I had to buy it - she had a copy and introduced me to the story of The Spreadeagle at Thame and Fothergill's often outrageous tales; typical of the things we shared.

Inevitably I had forgotten the dedication:

To ["T"]

Too Good for Words

&c.

I suppose I might have guessed that Fothergill's wife would have to have had that name.

Yet another stab in the heart I'm afraid.

Until the next time

A Gem from Rosamond Lehmann

[21/20]

In this case from her second - and under-rated - novel A Note in Music (1930):

Beauty is a visitor, coming without warning, transforming for an hour, a day - sometimes for longer; crumbling at a breath, vanished again.

Miss Lehmann was writing here about the countryside, but this certainly speaks to me in another connexion.

Until the next time.

Coincidence

[18/17]

Books are a life-saver for me - a means of escape from what one might call self-contemplation; therefore I am a regular at the charity bookshops.

I especially love certain 20th-century English writers - Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Lytton Strachey, Rosamond Lehmann, Rose Macaulay amongst others.   One of my recent acquisitions is an excellent biography of Miss Macaulay, A Writer's Life by Jane Emery.  This penetrating work really seems to me to capture Rose Macaulay's nature - at least insofar as any biography can achieve this daunting objective.

The reason for my mentioning this here is a quote from a letter Miss Macaulay wrote to Rosamond Lehmann (they were good friends).

[Background: Rose Macaulay had a twenty-year love affair - and working relationship with a married man Gerald O' Donovan, which lasted until his death from cancer in 1942.  Rosamond Lehmann had a number of affairs and in particular one of nine years' duration (nine years!! just imagine!!}with writer Cecil Day-Lewis  that ended when he left her for a young actress].

Referring to her novel Towers of Trebiziond, Miss Macaulay writes:

"It's a book I have had in mind to write for a long time and writing it - like that, at a remove from myself, in an idiom not normally my own, and in a lot of circumstances that I enjoyed making up, but still the heart of the matter being my own story - writing it did sublimate and clarify life life for me a little.  I never, thank God, killed my lover; I don't have that to bear; I only watched him die of cancer. and couldn't often be with him during his illness.  And for years after he died, I felt starved - a ghost as Laurie [in the novel] did. But less hard than what happened to you; death is not a poison, only a knock-out blow."

As my title reads COINCIDENCE - I wrote this here  in March with regard to the same idea, but sadly without Miss Macaulay's elegance of feeling and sympathy expressed.

She is of course absolutely correct.

Until the next time.