A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  This is a very good book, possibly a bit too reverential, but deeply felt and deeply researched. Perhaps, as a common reader, I might be allowed to take issue on two points. The first is the influence, if any, of painting as an art on Virginia Woolf as a writer, and, in particular, the relationship between Lily Briscoe’s picture and To the Lighthouse itself. To be sure, Lily’s canvas (unlike Mrs Ramsay’s knitting) is finished at the same time as the novel, but it is subject to all the limitations of painting that made Virginia Woolf impatient. It seems uncertain (and Jane Dunn isn’t certain either) whether it is Impressionist or Post-Impressionist, but it is carried out in a limited colour range of greens and blues, with a triangle of violet and finally a dark line down the centre. My feeling has always been that, until perhaps the last page, Lily’s picture is a mess, and who can say this, at any stage, of To the Lighthouse? Certainly the picture’s subject is fixed forever at the window. It can’t convey, as the novel so beautifully does, changing place and passing time. ‘It was a miserable machine,’ Lily thinks, ‘an inefficient machine, the human apparatus for painting or feeling; it always broke down at the critical movement.’ Virginia Woolf sometimes spoke enviously of artists’ lives (by which she meant life at Charleston) because they could work ‘alongside,’ whereas the writer is in a lonely agony, ‘blown like an old flag.’ When speaking or writing to painters she often used metaphors from painting, in the hope of being understood. But they were people who fussed about a change of light, fussed about a viewpoint. It is the novelist who has fifty pairs of eyes, plus ‘some secret sense as fine as air,’ which can move both inside and outside Mrs Ramsay. But in any case if we’re comparing the arts, isn’t To the Lighthouse in sonata form? E. M. Forster had been told this, and he accepted it.

  My second point is, I suppose, a small one. Jane Dunn deals most sympathetically with the crucial decision (apparently made over Virginia’s head) that the Woolfs must remain childless. How much human unhappiness this caused is not to be guessed at, but I should like to defend Leonard Woolf from the suggestion that he was too orderly or perhaps too repressed to welcome the idea of young children. That can be corrected, I think, by one quotation from Richard Kennedy’s A Boy at the Hogarth Press:

  When I got back LW was up smoking his pipe and seemed pleased to see me. He told me that we were going over to see the Bells at Charleston for the day. So after breakfast I went with him in his Singer to Lewes to do some shopping. Children pounded along the village pavement. ‘The first day of school,’ remarked LW, his features softening.

  Charleston Magazine, Issue 3, 1991

  The Last Artist

  On Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf

  Virginia Woolf began Between the Acts in the spring of 1938 and finished it on 23rd November, 1940. The finally-arrived-at title suggests that in this last novel everything of importance will happen in the intervals. Perhaps so, but it is the pageant itself, the pageant in the gardens of Poyntz Hall, with cows in the next field, swallows overhead, and a donkey engine somewhere in the bushes, which creates ‘the token of some real thing behind appearances’.

  Readers often find the action of the book stranger than Virginia Woolf intended. Pageants were as much a part of country life between the World Wars as jumble sales (which have survived). They were popular (or assumed to be popular) fund-raisers, involving all those of goodwill. E. M. Forster, for example, wrote two pageants, one for the parish of Abinger, another, England’s Pleasant Land, for the Surrey District Preservation Society. T. S. Eliot’s The Rock was written for the London diocesan church-building fund. Up in Radnorshire, in the 1930s, I saw a pageant in which the ghost of the Black Vaughan entered (as he was supposed to do from time to time in real life) with his head under his arm and trundled it into the audience. The Black Vaughan was played, in fact, by the secretary of the local bowls club, who could be relied upon to aim straight, and this illustrates the curious interplay in a local pageant of fantasy and reality. Hitches, disasters and bizarre incidents were expected.

  To all this, Virginia Woolf, who in 1940 was elected treasurer of the Rodmell Women’s Institute, has remained true in Between the Acts. The pageant at Poyntz Hall is in aid of the church lighting, and actually raises thirty-six pounds, ten shillings and eight pence. She is true, also, in a poet’s sense, to the central idea which gave some dignity even to the most wretched of pageants, the idea, that is, of passing time: ‘It would take till midnight unless they skipped. Early Briton: Plantagenets: Tudors; Stuarts—she ticked them off, but probably she had forgotten a reign or two.’ As a general rule, the organizers skipped nothing, carried on through rain or shine, and overran until night fell. At Poyntz Hall, time is presented, not through local history, but through the changing forms of English literature which Virginia Woolf (like Joyce in the maternity hospital section of Ulysses) imitates in turn. And these scenes too run on, with two long intervals, into ‘the tender, the fading, the uninquisitive but searching light of evening’.

  The pageant’s organizer is awkward, hard-drinking, lesbian Miss La Trobe, by no means popular in the village. In spite of, or because of, her oddness, she has ‘a passion for getting things up’—a definition as good as any other of the artist. As an artist, however, she is strikingly different from the painter Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. Lily’s picture may, in the end, never be seen at all, and she no longer cares about this. Miss La Trobe, on the other hand, demands an instant reaction and true communication. Threatened by inattention and shallowness, knowing herself to be grotesque, she dominates her audience from her retreat in the bushes: ‘Hadn’t she, for twenty-five minutes, made them see?’. The impending war (aircraft are passing overhead in formation) is a distraction only. Virginia Woolf did not believe—as she had written to Benedict Nicolson—that the artist is able to change the course of history. War is not Miss La Trobe’s concern, and nature itself takes her part. The cows bellow, the rain falls and stops, precisely at the right time to cover a difficult moment in her production when the illusion threatens to fade. It is the rector, trying to say a few words, who is interrupted by the noise of the aircraft.

  If Miss La Trobe is less afraid of life than Lily Briscoe, she is also more human than Bernard, the wordmaster of The Waves. ‘What a sense of the tolerableness of life the lights in the bedrooms of small shopkeepers give us’, says Bernard, and we feel (as Virginia Woolf probably intended) like hitting him. But Miss La Trobe, unlike Lily, unlike Bernard, is in there struggling, ‘making everyone do something’, brandishing her manuscript in the face of Mrs Clark from the shop, old Mrs Otter from the end house and Albert, the village idiot, and impelling them into transformation. They call her Old Bossy, but do not disobey. This closeness of Miss La Trobe’s to her material corresponds to a noble, but unappeasable, longing which Virginia Woolf felt for all the later part of her writing life: ‘I always sit next the conductor in an omnibus and try to get him to tell me what it is like—being a conductor. In whatever company I am I try to know what it is like—being a conductor, being a woman with ten children and thirty-five shillings a week…’. Miss La Trobe does know, otherwise she would not be able to transform.

  The unlikely harmony she creates cannot last for long. At the end of the pageant, she remains awkwardly stooped over the grass, as though looking for something, so as to avoid being thanked or misunderstood. Then, when everyone else has gone, she trudges off, carrying her heavy suitcase. She accepts that, in spite of what she has offered them, the villagers have made her an outcast. The terror of this, however, does not grow any less with time.

  From the earth green waters seemed to rise over her. She took her voyage away from the shore, and raising her hand, fumbled for the latch of the iron entrance gate.

  Charleston Magazine, Issue 1, 1990

  Living Doll and Lilac Fairy

  Carrington: A Life of Dora Carrington, 1893—1932, by Gretchen Gerzina, and Lydia and Maynard: Letters Between Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes, 1918—1925, edited by Po
lly Hill and Richard Keynes

  These two books, a full-length biography of Dora Carrington and the edited correspondence of Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova from 1918 to their marriage in 1925 (more volumes to follow), suggest that there is still a good deal of reading to be done about Bloomsbury. Both show the fate of newcomers, arrivals in Bloomsbury from the outside.

  ‘Most people were at that time ordinary,’ said Frank Swinnerton, looking back with nostalgia to the beginning of the century, and Dora Carrington might have had the good luck to stay ordinary. In 1970 David Garnett, introducing his selection from her letters and diaries, felt that the reader might ask: ‘Who was this woman Carrington?’ She derived her importance from the fact that she lived with Lytton Strachey. Hostesses, he went on, like the Asquiths and Lady Colefax, who welcomed Strachey, ‘would no more have invited Carrington than the cook.’ Knowing her very well, he thought she was a complex and original character in a strange situation, but did not say what effect on her the strange situation had.

  Dora Carrington was born in 1893, the daughter of an engineer in the East Indian railways. She lived at a house called Ivy Lodge, went to Bedford High School, was good at drawing, bad at spelling, and loved her father more than her mother. She studied at the Slade under the all-powerful trinity of Frederick Brown, Wilson Steer and Henry Tonks. It was 1910, and the students were advised not to attend Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition. By 1914 Carrington, a mild bohemian, had cut her hair short. Mark Gertler and C. W. Nevinson were in love with her, and the world outside the Slade lay open.

  Reading a good biography means thinking of unfulfilled conditionals. If chance or affection had given Carrington a push in another direction, she might have painted, cooked, travelled, and made love in something like contentment. She was at the Slade with Paul Nash (who gave her his braces, taking them off on top of a bus), and through him or through Nevinson she might have become an illustrator, as they were, for the Poetry Bookshop. She could have learned etching from Sickert, always generous to beginners, or have worked with James Guthrie at the Pear Tree Press. She might have lived in Hampstead and gone to Robert Bevan’s Sundays, or tramped with Eleanor Farjeon to Edward Thomas’s cottage. As it was, she found herself in Bloomsbury. Even if they were, as Quentin Bell called them, ‘as amorphous as friends can be,’ they were nearly all highly literate, and judged accordingly. They treated her as a kind of peg-top doll, a sailor doll with blue eyes, ‘a thought unnaturally wide open,’ or, at best, as a child. Neither Duncan Grant nor Vanessa Bell was seriously interested in her pictures. When, after Lytton’s death, she shot herself, Gerald Brenan said that her suicide was not a great tragic act ‘but had something childish and thoughtless and pitiful about it.’ Perhaps, if pathos is the tragedy of the bewildered, Carrington might be called tragic. After her death, no one could remember whether she had been cremated or not, or, if so, where the ashes had been put.

  Her letters are beguiling but quite often apologetic and self-accusing. Her strange spelling (perhaps dyslexia) grew no better. On the honey labels that she designed for David Garnett at Charleston, even ‘Charleston’ is spelled wrong. This was in spite of her great capacity for enjoyment and her strong physical appeal, which made her, to a number of men and women, irresistible. Here, too, Carrington was anxious to please, but not to tell the truth, and for a long time (she would have preferred to have been born a boy) she was not anxious for sex. Affectionate words were easier, and gave so much pleasure. Gerzina’s chapter headings—‘The First Triangle,’ ‘The Second Triangle,’ ‘Separations and Unions,’ ‘Picking Up the Pieces,’ ‘Compromise’—suggest how much pain and havoc were caused. One of Mark Gertler’s letters to her in 1917 stands out in its naked misery:

  …for years I wanted you—you only tortured me, then suddenly you gave yourself to such a creature, and you yourself said if he wanted your body you would without hesitation have given it to [that] emaciated withered being. I, young and full of life, you refused it, tell me Carrington what am I to think of life now…he will deaden you in time & that is what hurts me so. You are absolutely at his feet. You follow him about like a puppy…

  This book is beautiful to look at, decorated with Carrington’s little pen-and-ink drawings, which are often more light-hearted than the text. Gerzina starts from the suicide, and the rest of her book calmly and scrupulously explains it. She is not a historian. Her concern is with Carrington’s thirty-nine years of life. Her best work was probably done in the early years at Tidmarsh, but Gerzina is careful to point out that Lytton was encouraging and (except when his own comfort was at risk) generous. ‘His homosexuality allowed them full rein in all other aspects of their relationship, and both were productive in their life together.’ The hardest question, then and now, is How could she care so much? Gerzina, quite rightly, does not attempt to answer this. ‘Love is love and hard enough to find.’

  For Carrington Bloomsbury felt at least some pity. Lydia Lopokova aroused terror. When, in 1922, Maynard Keynes began his serious courtship of Lopokova, one of Diaghilev’s most popular stars, they could hardly believe, at first, that he was caught. ‘She has him by the snout,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘a sublime but heartrending spectacle.’ ‘Don’t marry her,’ Vanessa Bell advised. ‘However charming she is, she’d be a very expensive wife and would give up dancing and is altogether to be preferred as a mistress.’ Lopokova was delightful in a way in which they didn’t want to be delighted. Her pranks put them all on edge. The Lilac Fairy was impossible, they felt, at close quarters, and Maynard would be lost to them. ‘How we all used to underrate her,’ said Morgan Forster.

  Their early correspondence has been edited by a niece and a nephew, Polly Hill and Richard Keynes, who rightly believe that it will be ‘of value and interest and will not offend their ghosts.’ In an excellent introduction, they admit that Lydia, in the early stages, must have worn herself out in flattering Maynard. She had abandoned her husband and Diaghilev, and although she was still dancing with Massine, and was only thirty, her great days were over. In spite of innumerable friends, she was adrift. Maynard was working very hard, travelling between London and Geneva: he had installed her at 50 Gordon Square, where Vanessa Bell was also living, terribly disturbed by Lydia’s entrechats upstairs. For Lydia the necessary thing was to hold on to Maynard, who was prepared to take responsibility for her financial affairs. ‘Maynard,’ she writes, ‘you are so brilliant I think sometimes I say things not as bright as you expect. Anyhow I try to develop my mind.’ She doggedly reads everything he recommends, and takes more interest in his ailments even than his mother. Maynard writes as a busy man, affectionate and expecting to be amused. But Lydia never loses her sense of her own value as a woman and a professional artist. Before long they are writing each other true lovers’ letters.

  When they are apart they write almost every day. Maynard is at conferences, Treasury meetings, college feasts, and, at one point, rather absurdly, a stag hunt. Lydia can tell him what Picasso said or what Nijinsky did, but she also has, as the editors put it, ‘a creative taste for ordinary day-to-day living,’ so that even a bus ride or a stomach ache becomes an absorbing skandal. At the end of the letters there are endearments invented for her Maynarochka: ‘I have no chemise. I touch your bosom without a shirt,’ ‘Your pale chaffinch,’ ‘If it is cold where you are, as it is here, I warm you with my foxy licks,’ ‘Recurrent dismals of sympathy,’ ‘The jolts from my heart for you.’ Lydia’s cunning misuse of the English language enchants Maynard, and sometimes, out of tenderness, he tries to imitate it, but cannot. It is an artistic version of English, just as her Highland divertissement was an artistic version of a fling. In May 1925 she writes to him

  I took your key, read ¼ of Mrs Dalloway, it is very rapid, interesting, and yet I feel in that book all human beings only puppets. Virginia’s brain is so quick that sometimes her pen cannot catch it, or it is I who is slow. However I shall pursue the book to the end in a short time, and be established in the critis
ism…

  I thank you for the papers [banknotes]. I shall buy ‘Eau d’ Atkinson’ and sprinkle myself everywhere except the hairy spots.

  Be comfortable and I am so very fond of you.

  L.

  P.S. I have been on the bicycle since but my skins make my pantelettes flick before the passers-by. I could not do for long.

  These letters have been judiciously edited and cut, on principles that the editors explain, and carefully annotated (though I think ‘Rupert Dome’ on page 191 must be Rupert Doone, and they don’t give the meaning of the Russian word pupsik, which the lovers use so frequently). The notes and indexes don’t take away from the immediacy of the letters. They have the kind of warmth that, in To the Lighthouse, frightens Lily, the detached artist. ‘They turned on her cheek the heat of love…It scorched her and she flinched.’

  London Review of Books, 1989

  MODERNS AND ANTI-MODERNS

  The Great Encourager

  Ford Madox Ford, by Alan Judd

  Most people first come to be interested in Ford Madox Ford through reading his novel The Good Soldier. This must be one of the most carefully organized fictions ever written. Ford himself, however, was almost as disorganized as a human being can be. Ezra Pound told him that even if he were placed naked and alone in a room without furniture he would reduce it, in an hour’s time, to total confusion.