Naturally secretive, hating to feel she was under scrutiny or anyone’s control, she needed to create private, intimate connections with those she cared about and, in the days when letters could arrive several times a day or even within the very same day, her correspondence enabled her to maintain these friendships. Bloomsbury valued emotional and intellectual intimacy highly and relished gossip and jokes; letter-writing was a crucial component of an intricate web of constant communication. ‘The humane art, which owes its origin to the love of friends’, was how Virginia Woolf, a great and brilliant correspondent herself, described it.
Carrington found that letter writing came naturally to her, unlike painting, which was always a hard struggle. Indeed, much of her creative energy went into her letters, which were frequently small works of art in themselves, with her delicate curly writing decorating the pages and sprinkled with many drawings, some tiny, some taking up much of a page. She drew portraits and caricatures of herself and Lytton and other friends and lovers, interiors of rooms and views of wild landscapes, and above all the flowers and birds she loved, as well as many cats, sometimes curled on the lap of a naked girl, and once or twice a small phallus in the margin to amuse Lytton. The fact that her spelling and punctuation were wildly inaccurate, with dots for commas, ampersands and random squiggles, only added to the effect. Virginia Woolf described them as ‘tearing like a mayfly up and down the pages’ and ‘completely like anything else in the habitable globe’. For Michael Holroyd, the great appeal of Carrington’s letters lies in their timeless emotional power: ‘Love, loneliness, beauty, elation and harrowing despair – these are what she wrote about with such freshness and immediacy that, fifty years later, the ink seems only just to have dried.’
In making this new selection of Carrington’s letters, my aim has been to provide a fresh portrait of her in her own words and to show her as I believe she was: a woman at the centre, not on the margins, of her world. A gifted and serious artist, she was above all as someone who quietly, with some difficulty but also much delight, built a life for herself, her lovers and her friends, outside the conventions of the time.
PART ONE
Growing Up: 1893–1915
No letters from Dora de Houghton Carrington’s childhood have come to light; the earliest to have survived were written when she was in her late teens. She always looked back on her childhood with distaste, describing it as ‘awful’, although her brother Noel, the only sibling to whom she remained at all close, called it ‘uneventful and certainly not unhappy’.
She put some of her memories and feelings about her childhood into a letter written to a lover in 1924 when she was thirty-one. She began by explaining that her mother’s family were socially inferior: ‘Her father was a sanitary inspector or something like that […] my mother’s mother said “ain’t” which I remember shocked me as a child […]’ Her maternal uncles ‘frankly weren’t gentlemen’. This sense of a class division in her own family lingered, and helped to alienate her from her socially anxious mother. She was born on 29 March 1893 in a house called Ivy Lodge in Hereford, the fourth of five children, with two older brothers, Sam and Teddy, an older sister, Charlotte, and a younger brother, Noel. Her father, Samuel, was sixty-one when she was born. He had retired from a long career with the East Indian Railways and married Charlotte Houghton, a family governess twenty years his junior, in 1888. Dora grew up adoring her large, powerful-looking father, whose travels and adventures in India she found thrilling and romantic, and at odds with her mother, whose religiosity and obsession with respectability she came to despise.
One of her earliest memories was of locking Noel out of the house and telling her parents he was lost. ‘I remember my intense pleasure at thinking I alone knew he was running round the outside of the garden trying to get in.’
Like most children, she went through a stage of being fascinated by her and her brother’s excretions, but her memories of watching them performed seem especially detailed and vivid. She was punished after cutting a hole in her dress ‘just there’: ‘I was then beaten on my naked bottom by a nurse with pale yellow frizzy hair rather like Queen Alexandra. I turned my head round as I lay on her knee and saw my bottom. I was mortified to see it. I thought very large, and pink.’ She wet her knickers a lot, and remembered having diarrhoea but being too embarrassed to ask to leave the room, ‘so I was constantly being punished, and was disliked by the nurses.’
She also recalled, before she was six, ‘having a character implanted on me. I was made to feel “good”. I had mixed feelings. I liked being praised. But I also disliked being made to be “good” when secretly I wished to do other things’. She was also not happy with her appearance. ‘I was called Dumpty because I was very fat and always falling down.’
The adult Carrington remembered herself as having been a child well aware of the social hierarchy, easily embarrassed by her body, who liked having secrets. All these traits, as she no doubt realised, were with her for life. Any pressure on her to behave in a certain way led to trouble, and often to lies and deceit.
Dora Carrington arrived at the Slade in the autumn of 1910 when it was in its heyday. Founded in 1871, and housed in dignified grey neoclassical buildings alongside University College in Gower Street, it combined a reputation for artistic excellence (former students included Walter Sickert and Augustus John) with social acceptability, particularly for the daughters of upper- and middle-class families where drawing and painting were traditional female accomplishments. There were three women students to each man; the emphasis was on draughtsmanship and the classical tradition, but at the same time it was considered less formal and stuffy than the Royal Academy.
It wasn’t long before she had made new friends, cut off her long golden hair and dropped the first name she had always disliked. Both were gestures of rebellion for art students of her generation, and from 1911 on she was always just Carrington. Her social horizons broadened: at the hostel off Gordon Square where she first lived, she met two other new Slade girls who became close and lasting friends, pretty dark-haired Barbara Hiles, the daughter of a businessman living in Paris, and the plain, slightly deaf and eccentric Dorothy Brett, daughter of the royal family’s trusted courtier Viscount Esher. They too chopped their hair off and dropped their first names, and were soon nicknamed the Cropheads. Carrington was not conventionally pretty, despite her thick blonde bob, cherry-blossom complexion and intensely blue eyes; but having grown up with three brothers she was not shy of young men, and was soon being pursued by several fellow students. She enjoyed their company, their admiration and especially their shared excitement about art, but was not interested in romance; she seems to have had an innate fear of sex, exacerbated by her upbringing. She and Noel both recalled how any acknowledgement of physical relations between the sexes was anathema to their mother, and Carrington grew up detesting the monthly reminder that she was female. She later admitted that she had always found the prospect of sex and childbirth disgusting and terrifying.
At the Slade, she soon fell into a pattern of behaviour: men were drawn to her, she responded eagerly to their admiration and friendship, but as soon as they wanted more, she pulled away. Tensions and complications inevitably ensued.
Three of her most talented male contemporaries fell in love with her: John Nash, Richard Nevinson and Mark Gertler. Paul Nash, the elder of the two Nash brothers, arrived at the same time as she did, in 1910, and spotted her at work in the Antique Room, drawing from casts of classical sculpture. She seemed to him ‘clever and good-looking to an unusual degree’. Nevinson and Gertler were already there, having arrived in 1909 and 1908 respectively, and were good friends; now Nash introduced her to his brother John, who was seriously smitten by her. Her disregard for convention and passion for art, as well as her slightly androgynous appearance and dress (she and Brett, when they could get away with it, liked to wear men’s corduroy breeches), drew these young men to her; when she proved shy and elusive they pursued her even more. Nevinso
n called her ‘a gorgeously egotistical, impulsive, unsettled youth’. It was at the Slade that Carrington’s lifelong tendency to fall into love triangles, playing rivals off against each other, first began. Both the Nash brothers were able to find their way out of love and back to friendship based on shared artistic interests, and both, before long, had married other girls; but it was very different with Nevinson and Gertler.
None of her letters to Nevinson have survived, nor any to Gertler at this point; but her friendship with the Nash brothers, and her life during and just after the Slade can be glimpsed through the letters she wrote to John Nash between 1912 and 1915.
1912
To John Nash
1 Rothesay Gardens, Bedford
Saturday [n.d.]
Dear Jack,
You are going to to Florence! And you announce it calmly in a word. And again you tell with a coolness only found in Strand magazines, that M– has bought your Gypsies! Try & have a little enthusiasm about it. I know after selling so many pictures it must be hard. But surely one doesn’t go to Florence every afternoon. Is Paul going too? And can you speak Italian?
[…] I did a painting of my youngest brother, side view, which met with some approval in the family circle. But a great discussion still continues as to whether his nose is too long or his upper lip too short.
In a rash moment I was taken to a dance in my tiny native town the other night, by my brother. It was sad. For the village lads had quite forgotten me, & taken unto themselves new lasses. They gaze askance at my shorn locks – little did they realize who it was who was in their midst. No, sad it is to relate but I was not appreciated […]
Paul sent me a good book by Borrow.fn1 Which delighted me very much. I am just going to write to him so your letter must be curtailed somewhat. Today I return to London, which has made me very happy! I have done no work these hols of any worth, as the family do not encourage my efforts, & won’t let me use the study to paint in. I have a loud dress with a ballet frill round it, orange on purple, a little daring perhaps. But bright & cheerful. Paul, I hear, has run amuck in a near check suit. I hear of it with grief.
Well, I hope I shall see you soon. But I’ve got a great deal of work to do when I get back the first two weeks – But you must write & say when you will come & see us. I am in much haste.
Carrington
The next letter was written from Brett’s father’s estate, the Roman Camp at Callendar in Perthshire, Scotland. Two other Slade friends, Ruth Humphries (later Selby-Bigge) and Constance (Cooie) Lane, were also there.
To John Nash
The Roman Camp
2 August 1913
Dear Jack,
I am sorry to have been so long answering your letters.
On Monday night I travelled up here. What a journey! Everything cold & noisy, & do you know of the hardness of a carriage seat, and the fear of a cockchafer on the ceiling, & trains that run in the night & shriek to each other in passing. A slothful clergyman & his sister disturbed my frenzied slumbers at Crewe & cuddled up in blankets & cushions spent a voluptuous night […] worn out I arrived at Callander at 6.30 on Tuesday morning. Gosh! But … the excitement of these big hills and forests and lochs. Humphries is here too. The house is pink outside with slate pointed towers, & the garden has many flowers of purple red & purple blue. More flowers, & more beautiful than if you thought hard you could imagine. We go out every day drawing on these big mountains, and one day Humphries & me swam in a big loch. The sun shining hot & all round towering mountains, & the water very deep and clear, and nobody else to be seen. The whole world was ours. Everyday is hot here. It is never even cool. From the top of the mountain one can get a most gorgeous view, of big lakes & these mountains sliding down to them, & a little river wending through coloured fields, pale green with new wheat & yellow with hay, and more distant mountains. But how hard to draw.
And when we return at 8 we have astounding dinners. Are you above grub? I hate ascetic people who pretend not to be interested. The strawberry & fruit ices are beyond all comparisons. Venison & ‘pasties of the doe’. Brett’s father is a nut, in his highland kilts and aristocratic demeanour […] We ran barefooted with big leaps across the fields through sleeping cows, till we climbed the slope to a cornfield. The moon was new, & shimmering, & the elms big clumps against the emerald purple grey sky, all the fields were dark green grey. Do you ever go out when everything is over at night? The corn field was greeny purple, & poppies making dark black red stains, and you grabbed at them, for they seemed only stains on the waving mane of wheat, and Lane’s nightdress shone a wonderful colour in the midst of the field, and behind a big dark wood […]
The strain of the perfect lady is rather much, as it is now almost a month since I was natural. But all day we can break out & shout and run on the hills […]
On Tuesday I am going away, right down to Hove, Sussex, with my family. Noel, the little brother, will be with me, and Pendennis his friend, who has a good head to draw. But it will seem smooth and slippery after this land. But a sea to swim in, so I shall be happy.
I am yours sincerely,
Carrington
1913
During the summer of 1913 Carrington and Cooie Lane worked on a cycle of frescoes commissioned by Lord Brownlow for his library at his nineteenth-century Gothic house, Ashridge, in the Chilterns. They stayed nearby in the Lanes’ cottage at Nettleden.
To John Nash
Tuesday [n.d.]
[…] Your pictures were good […] One day I shall ask politely a big landscape of fields & trees & figures from you to put up on my walls, and try & coerce Paul too. Alas! I am neither rich nor famous! would that I were dead for my design is indeed lamentable, and it fills me chock up with despair […]
At present we have not done much as all the time we have been working hard at our cartoons, drawing & painting them. Cooie Lane’s is best. She is doing sheep shearing. She sings whilst we work, lustily with much force old ballades & folk songs & Handel. The plastering is a joy to do […] But you have no idea how frescoeing wearies the brain.
I am yours,
Carrington
1914
To John Nash
Clearwell, Portland Avenue, Exmouth
4 April 1914, 11:00 in bed
Dear Jack,
[…] And now, good morning! I arrived here at 11 o clock on Monday night. On Tuesday I expored with Teddy & Noel who are splendid brothers. Teddy is at Cambridge, & Noel at Oxford. The country here surpasses all belief. The cliffs are huge, & towering & Indian Red in colour, & long reaches of smooth sand, & a cobalt sky, & a blazing hot sun. Which makes one’s face shine like a bronze from the shore looking over the cliffs you see the landscape trees & ploughed fields all wooded like a Francescafn2 landscape. Flowers grow here in abundance, and the garden is full of violets, white & purple & polyanthus, & primroses, daffs in great quantities & many others. On the cliffs yellow gorse & celandines grow. Going to the New Forest, until I return to London. Aren’t you glad I am coming back. It has made me enormously happy […] What pictures are you working at now? I did so like your Adoration. I think it will be very good. What work is friend Paul doing? I hope you are well. I saw the boat race last Saturday, it was rather amusing.
Although the surviving correspondence of Carrington and her Slade painter friends that summer gives no hint of approaching disaster, their lives, like millions of others, would be changed for ever by the outbreak of war in Europe on 4 August 1914. Carrington was preoccupied by a scheme, never realised, to collaborate with John and Paul Nash on the decoration of a church near Uxbridge with a fresco of Jacob’s meeting with Rebecca. She was, and remained, diffident about her work. Meanwhile John was trying to take their relationship further, but she was determined just to stay friends.
Before long, Carrington’s three brothers, Sam, Teddy and Noel, had joined up. Noel was wounded within a few weeks and brought home to recover. Mark Gertler, who had a weak chest, was eventually exempted as unfit; but Pa
ul and John Nash and Richard Nevinson were all to serve at the front as war artists. The work they produced remains among the most powerful depictions we have of the horror and devastation of the First World War. Carrington’s letters contain very little about the war, which she appears at first to have supported, and nothing, apart from one brief impersonal reference, about her friends’ paintings from the front. She turned away from it as best she could, into her painting and her personal life.
To John Nash
Clearwell, Portland Avenue, Exmouth
Friday [summer 1914]
My Dear Jack,
Thank you for your long letter … & the rebuffs or reproof dealt out to the slothful, & ungodly. I am sorry I didn’t measure it right. But I only have an inferior old school ruler, so perhaps that is why. Nothing could upset my design! I will add to it breadth as you suggest. Thanks you also for your advice. I know Jacob was badly drawn, but I only had my brother for about 3 mins, to look at, & his face I was aware, was a failure […]
Carrington's Letters Page 2
