Virginia Woolf's Women

by Vanessa Curtis

  I wish I wasn’t so ‘tied up in knots’ over my painting. I feel as if I was painting behind iron bars, in a cage, unable to do really what I want to do.

  Virginia might have understood this sentiment better than anyone. She wrestled throughout her life against restrictions imposed upon her writing by ill health and by the repressive ghosts of Julia and Stella, and in particular against the torturous self-doubt, inherited from Leslie, combined with ruthless perfectionism, that caused agonies of despair both prior to and after publication of each of her novels:

  I have finished my book [The Waves] – yes – but it is a failure. Too difficult: too jerky: too inchoate altogether.

  When Carrington felt unable to paint, or was unhappy with the result, she channelled her energy into looking after Lytton, tidying the house or cooking. Virginia, waiting for publication of a novel, cooked, walked, embroidered or, at the end of her life, energetically scrubbed floors. Neither woman was good at being idle, as idleness would immediately encourage too much damaging self-analysis. Instead, by frenetically throwing themselves into practical activities, these two highly sensitive and talented women attempted to hold the dark shadows of insecurity, despair and depression at bay. Each of them had a pronounced tendency towards these darker moods, which were often heightened by absence from loved ones and a fear of the onset of old age. This did not prevent them from being sought-after company, as both were also capable of enjoying themselves and spreading much good humour. Virginia loved conversation and parties, and Carrington would play the clown, to make her friends roar with laughter.

  These gregarious qualities were totally at odds with the private, emotional attachment that both women had for the peace and tranquillity of the English countryside. Carrington spent her happiest times at Ham Spray in Wiltshire, reading under the trees with Lytton at her side, or riding her white horse Belle over the Downs as a release from stressful situations (particularly in the wake of her destructive affair with Gerald Brenan). Virginia also took to the Downs in times of stress, walking vigorously for miles whilst she composed fragments of fiction in her head. Monk’s House, with the almost constant companionship of Leonard, became her favourite dwelling-place and, like Carrington, she eventually came, with age, to view London with some ambivalence; the complexities of urban life, however exciting, could not compete with the inspirational beauty of the countryside. Carrington painted the landscapes and farmland that she loved; Virginia captured her beloved garden at Rodmell in prose that was as visually colourful as the fruits of Carrington’s paintbrush:

  The opals on her finger flushed green, flushed rosy, and again flushed orange as the sun, oozing through the apple-trees, filled them. Then, when the breeze blew, her purple dress rippled like a flower attached to a stalk; the grasses nodded; and the white butterfly came blowing this way and that just above her face.

  Nowadays Carrington is known predominantly for her art, but her talents as a correspondent should not go unnoticed. She was a prolific and considerate letter writer; even when coping with the agonizingly slow death of Lytton, she still took time to respond to each and every one of the letters written by his concerned friends, including Roger Senhouse, Lytton’s last lover. Although her diaries can be difficult to read, being so honest and self-effacing, her letters to friends shine with vigour and wit:

  I, after breakfast, was walking over the bridge across the little duck stream, in rather a bad temper and vague mood and walked off the edge and fell with my bucket of duck’s food into the stream. This for some reason drove me into such rage that I ran into the hen’s house and cried and in my rage tried to hit a hen on the head with a wooden spoon.

  As an ardent correspondent herself, Virginia appreciated and encouraged Carrington’s letters. They were often charmingly illustrated with little sketches of animals that must have reminded Virginia of Leslie Stephen’s own illustrated letters to his children. Carrington wrote letters to keep her relationships alive, even when it was obvious that they perhaps should have been allowed to fade gently – she had a great fear of losing people. Virginia’s letters also flattered, seduced, cajoled and amused her many friends, as indeed they were intended to; to receive a letter from Virginia was to be almost immediately inspired (or provoked) into replying. She, like Carrington, demonstrated her inherent sense of fun far more succinctly in letters than in the personal and ruthlessly self-analytical diaries. A letter to her nephew, Quentin Bell, reveals Virginia as a probing, teasing aunt with a sense of the ridiculous not dissimilar to Carrington’s:

  You admit your trousers have holes in them. Why at Lewes station you had to be covered with a potato sack in order to save the blushes of the young women who sell violets.

  But Carrington’s letters could also, at times when Lytton was away, display a terrible pathos that was less evident in Virginia’s correspondence. Carrington seemed truly unable to hide her misery:

  I talk with Julia all day, on rather painful topics and get rather gloomy. I do not know what to advise, for I have very little faith in there being any happiness for human beings on this earth.

  The greatest similarity between Carrington and Virginia Woolf was, of course, that they both loved, and were loved by, the same man – Lytton Strachey. Virginia had come to know Strachey long before Carrington came onto the scene, when, as a friend of Thoby’s from Cambridge, Strachey had begun to visit 46 Gordon Square for tea. His early and astute impressions of the young, eccentric Virginia Stephen, recorded in this 1904 letter to Leonard Woolf, were already positive:

  The latter is rather wonderful, quite witty, full of things to say, and absolutely out of rapport with reality.

  Lytton was attracted to Virginia’s ethereal, otherworldly countenance, her intelligence and her asexuality. She in turn became fond of him, finding him an inspirational and comforting companion. Despite his obvious homosexuality, Virginia accepted his proposal of marriage, and then, recoiling with horror, they both realized that they were about to make a dreadful mistake and so discarded the whole idea at once. Carrington must have been aware, after meeting Lytton some ten years later, that a very special place in his heart was reserved solely for Virginia, who was beautiful as well as clever, and also that she, Carrington, was unlikely ever to receive a marriage proposal from Lytton. Nevertheless, oddly enough, when jealousy did arise, it was not from the big-hearted Carrington, but from Virginia, who constantly asked Lytton to reassure her that she was his favourite correspondent and confidante.

  There were, of course, a few very marked differences between Virginia and Carrington, one of the obvious ones being sexuality. Although both were at times attracted to members of the same sex, Carrington had been experimental with men and women both before and after she met Lytton. She was impulsive in affairs of the heart, but somehow succeeded in remaining friends with all her ex-lovers, a feat in no small way due to her total lack of maliciousness. She was not, unlike Virginia, faithful to her husband, nor he to her.

  Another very clear difference between Carrington and Virginia was the reactions they had to social occasions. Virginia could be intimidating, sometimes intentionally, towards people she considered not to be on her own level, but Carrington was always easy company to be with and helpful almost to the point of subservience. Whilst Virginia enjoyed ‘holding court’ in a circle of admirers, Carrington was more likely to be serving drinks to the group, or sitting quietly at the side. She put visitors at their ease and saw to their every need. She was not snobbish and was unconcerned with ‘class’ and, in the absence of regular hired help, fetched and carried for Lytton devotedly, submissively, in a manner that Virginia would not have done for Leonard.

  A poignant section of archive film footage entitled ‘Carrington – Home Movies 1929’ has preserved one of the last happy times that Carrington and Lytton were to have together at Ham Spray. A smiling, barefoot Carrington rides Belle, or swims nude in the water on top of a huge plastic swan; Ralph and Lytton sit happily on a first-floor windowsill, waving to the
camera; a group of artist friends frolic in fancy dress. Although there were, as usual, hidden complications behind the smiles (Carrington was embroiled with Beakus Penrose; Lytton and Ralph spent much time in London), there is no hint of the rapid descent into illness and death that was to begin over the next two years.

  Sadly, at the beginning of 1930, the situation at Ham Spray began to deteriorate. Carrington had a new servant, Flo, but she was difficult to manage; the house was full of too many guests, shrieking and staying up late, expecting meals and entertainment; every morning, poor Carrington had to suffer the indignity of hearing her husband, Ralph, giggling and splashing in the bathroom with his lover, Frances Marshall; and Lytton was hardly ever at home. In addition, Beakus Penrose had become nastily critical of Carrington’s clothes and appearance. She developed insomnia, and even her work began to depress her; nearly all her energy had to go into the painting of tiles, which was lucrative but unfulfilling.

  In March 1931, Lytton turned fifty-one and Carrington thirty-eight. Beakus, still an important part of her life, became less so after he developed jaundice at Ham Spray and expected her to become his full-time nurse. This she did, with some exasperation, for it killed all the passion that had existed between them. Lytton’s affair with Roger Senhouse was also turning sour, which brought him back to Carrington newly affectionate, with the result that she grew closer to him again, but they had little time to enjoy this – by the end of 1931, Lytton was at Ham Spray in bed with a very high fever.

  Lytton’s illness was serious. Nurses were called in, and the real cause of his pain, stomach cancer, was not diagnosed until after his death. The illness was presumed to be typhoid. Shocked and worried, all of Lytton’s friends rallied round. Carrington replied to the letters that flooded in, including some from Ottoline, Sebastian Sprott, Vanessa and Clive Bell, and Virginia, whose concerned letter clearly reveals the extent of her genuine affection not only for Lytton, but also for the terrified Carrington:

  We’re so unhappy to hear that Lytton is ill. We didn’t know it. If you or Ralph could ever let us have a card to say how he is we should be more than grateful. Our best love. If there was anything I could do you would let me know wouldn’t you.

  Sadly, there was nothing that Virginia or anyone else could do. Lytton’s illness progressed rapidly throughout Christmas 1931 and into the New Year. In a series of heartbreakingly sad letters to his lover, Roger Senhouse, Carrington bravely and unselfishly charted the final days of the man whom she loved more than life itself:

  Darling Roger,

  Lytton loved your flowers. He asked to hold them in his hands and for a long time buried his face in them, and said, how lovely. He sends you his fondest Love … the Doctor said Lytton’s state was much the same this morning. He couldn’t say there was any improvement. The Diet is to be altered today. Perhaps it will have a good effect on the digestion. Leonard and Virginia dropt [sic] in today. It was nice to see them. Your freesias look so beautiful against the dull green-yellow wall in a pewter mug.

  In her diary entry for Friday, 1 January 1932, Virginia rightly predicted that Carrington would try to commit suicide. Nobody was prepared, however, for Carrington’s first attempt at suicide to take place before Lytton’s actual death. She was saved – Lytton was suffering a bad attack at the time, which roused the household early and caused Ralph to realize her absence. He found her in the car, in their garage, with the engine running, and dragged her free. Carrington remained in bed until lunchtime on 21 January, when she crept back into Lytton’s room and found that her soul mate with the beady eyes and high-pitched laugh was dying. She heard a bird singing outside the window and then Lytton drew his final breath. There was no funeral, and nobody recalls what became of Lytton’s ashes, which were given to his brother James.

  Carrington’s grief was all-consuming and catastrophic. She poured her thoughts out into her diaries, in the form of long, pathetic letters to the dead Lytton. Wide-eyed and pale, she drifted around Ham Spray, constantly attended by Ralph or by well-meaning friends; they all knew that there was a high risk of her committing suicide. Virginia initially thought that suicide seemed a ‘quite reasonable’ option for Carrington. Her letters to the grieving, lost child-woman were supportive, loving and demonstrated her own sizeable sorrow at the loss of Lytton, and his enormous influence on her life and work:

  I hope you don’t mind me writing to you sometimes – it is such a comfort because there is nobody to talk to about Lytton who knew him as you did … one so hates the feeling that things begin again here in London without him. I find I can’t write without suddenly thinking Oh but Lytton won’t read this, and it takes all the point out of it.

  Carrington’s response to this letter was typically selfless and must have comforted Virginia:

  Thank you so much for your letter. There are only a few letters that have been any use. Yours most of all because you understand … I can’t quite bear to face things or people. But you are the first person I’d like to see when I come to London.

  Shortly afterwards, at Virginia’s request, Carrington sent some photographs of Lytton. Virginia, aware that Carrington was now hanging onto life by a thin thread, tried to get her interested in providing some new woodcuts for one of Julia Strachey’s novels; but Carrington could not look that far ahead, although she made some half-hearted entries in her appointment diary. She continued to churn out letters to friends, changing from her usual illustrated notepaper, with its sketch of Ham Spray, to a more austere and formal one. A letter in faint, spidery writing to her dear friend Dadie Rylands demonstrates the futility of all attempts to console her:

  I am sorry not to have written before but you understand I expect. There is nothing anyone can say that is any comfort. For everyone, in their different way, has lost something irreplaceable.

  Carrington carefully copied out a paragraph from David Hume’s Essay on Suicide (1777) into her diary, concentrating on the sentences that seemed particularly relevant to her own situation. The following paragraph, with its tone of great reasonableness, must have made a particular impact:

  A man who retires from life does no harm to society. He only ceases to do good. I am not obliged to do a small good to society at the expense of a great harm to myself. Why then should I prolong a miserable existence … I believe that no man ever threw away life, while it was worth keeping.

  Although Ralph had refused to leave Carrington’s side for the five weeks since Lytton’s death, she finally managed to persuade him to leave her on her own at Ham Spray. She was there, alone, when Virginia and Leonard called on 10 March to see how she was. Virginia’s painfully honest account of that meeting is detailed in her diary. The three of them had gone into Lytton’s study and gazed in sad silence at all his treasured books. Later, in the sitting room, Carrington had burst into floods of tears as Virginia held and tried to comfort her. She gave Virginia a little box of Lytton’s as a keepsake.

  On leaving, the Woolfs tried to get her to commit to a return visit at Rodmell. She would not. As they reluctantly left, Carrington turned round to wave goodbye. It was the last time anybody would see her alive. By the time Ralph, Frances and Bunny had rushed back from London the next morning, Carrington lay dying on the floor, wearing Lytton’s dressing-gown and with a gunshot wound to her thigh – she had missed her heart. She had borrowed a gun, ostensibly to shoot rabbits, and on seeing Ralph’s distress, the dying Carrington assured him that it had been an accident. Three hours after having raised the gun, she died. A letter that Virginia had written on returning home the day before was probably delivered too late. In it, Virginia, terribly worried, begs Carrington to hold onto life.

  Although it was obvious to her friends that Carrington’s death was far from being an accident, the coroner, remarkably, pronounced a verdict of ‘accidental death’. It is possible that the question of why Carrington was left dying on the floor for three hours, rather than moved to a hospital, was discussed among her wider circle of friends. The answer, in
all probability, is that Ralph, worn down and fully aware of Carrington’s mental anguish, respected the fact that she only wanted to die, and thus let her be. At any rate, Ralph and Frances were shocked and numbed by Carrington’s harrowing death. They later married, as she had wished. Frances, still alive today, possesses and treasures some of Carrington’s most beautiful paintings.

  Virginia was haunted by the image of Carrington, pale and tragic, on that final evening, and by the events of the following morning. She immediately tightened her own grip on life, proclaiming in her diary that she was

  Glad to be alive and sorry for the dead: can’t think why Carrington killed herself and put an end to all this.

  Nine years later, almost to the day, Virginia wrote her own suicide notes and took the lonely walk to the River Ouse.

  6 Vita

  Over my head the years and centuries sweep,

  The years of childhood flown,