The Pursuit of Laughter (67 page)

Carrington wielded an extraordinarily powerful weapon which she used with unusual skill. It was flattery. Once caught by it the lovers probably found it indispensable. It was
comforting
, insidious flattery calming their sense of insecurity, an addictive drug they soon could hardly do without. Jealousy raged around her who always appeared to be so calm. She dwelt in the eye of the storm.

I suppose Lytton knew a good deal about it. In early days he certainly knew how
violently
jealous of him the painter Mark Gertler had been. Gertler attacked him physically in the street after a party of Augustus John’s; Lytton was saved by Maynard Keynes, who
managed
to lead Gertler away. But Lytton had the selfishness of the true artist. Carrington adored him, made him comfortable and ensured quiet when he was working, and entertained his friends when he decided to invite them to the house. He would no more bother himself with her affairs than he would wish to hear whether she had found fish or lamb chops in the local shops for his dinner. That the ‘happy foursome’ at Ham Spray was not so happy as it might have been, and was, in fact, upon the point of breaking into fragments, was something he preferred not to think about.

I have said that Lytton seemed old to me. Carrington, in her thirties, did not seem young. She was a contemporary and great friend of an extremely beautiful and seductive woman, Phyllis de Janzé, who lived in a different world but who had been at the Slade School with Carrington before the First World War. Phyllis had left her French husband for a succession of lovers; at the time of which I write she was looking for a rich protector, for she was very short of cash. She confided in me, among others—she made free of her confidences. She used to telephone every morning to tell how she was getting on. One day she rang me up to
say that Cartier’s van had arrived with a parcel for her, a present from a multi-millionaire ducal admirer.

‘Don’t ring off while I unpack it, it’s from the dumble,’ she said. ‘Is it light or heavy?’ I asked.

‘Heavy.’

That was a bad sign, and, the layers of tissue paper removed, it turned out to be an onyx paperweight with her initials in gold, not at all what was needed to pay the bills. However Phyllis was an optimist, and her beauty and charm did not long go unrewarded; the rich
protector
soon appeared. Carrington and I talked it all over—she loved Phyllis and admired her extravagantly. It seemed to me that if Phyllis could confide in me so could Carrington, and as she did not I naively assumed there was nothing to tell. If at the time I had been told that she and not Phyllis would be known to posterity as a famous lover, if not a
femme fatale
, I should have laughed in disbelief, as would Carrington herself; yet so it has turned out. Carrington wrote fascinating letters and diaries and her many talented friends did the same, and there are innumerable biographies and autobiographies about her circle. Above all, it is because of the depth of her love for Lytton and her tragic death that she is remembered.

In the early 60s there was a retrospective exhibition of Henry Lamb’s drawings in London. All Bloomsbury was on the walls, and the survivors were there at the private view. Clive Bell, whom I knew slightly, came up and said: ‘You knew Lytton, didn’t you?’ We talked for a few minutes, and went our ways. Some years later I got a letter from David Garnett, who was passing through Paris, inviting me to luncheon ‘so that we can talk about Lytton’. We had met briefly years before when I was visiting Lytton in a London nursing home. The power of Strachey’s personality was undimmed, he was someone whom those fortunate enough to have known him liked to remember and discuss. Of late years fewer people say, ‘You knew Lytton Strachey.’ It is more often, ‘You knew Carrington. How fascinating she must have been!’

Yes, she was fascinating. To me, she looked like a little Beatrix Potter character in her unfashionable print cotton dresses, but Lady Ottoline Morrell describes her as a moorland pony. She had brown hair, cut straight and short with a fringe, as though she hoped to hide as much of her face as possible. It was no longer the ‘golden bell’ described by Aldous Huxley. Her deep-set eyes were blue, her hands worn with toil—gardening, cooking,
working
for her beloved Lytton. All summer she had bare legs, sunburnt, sandals and white socks. When she walked she turned her toes in, and her every gesture was that of a desperately shy and self-deprecating person. She was clever and perceptive and original; she had learnt a great deal from Lytton over the years. Gossip amused her, but she did not confide much to me. What else? There was the delightful flattery. I suppose she sensed just how much of this rich and delectable fare her companion of the moment could swallow.

Carrington was a talented artist, and it is sad that Ham Spray and the other houses where she lived with Lytton consumed so much of her time and energy. She loved painting, and creating objects like a rococo fantasy of shells she gave us; it was mounted on a painted
wooden base which she said once belonged to a sewing machine. She made beautiful flower pictures out of crumpled silver paper—exuberant huge bright flowers with silvery green leaves. Far too modest about her work, to which she attached little importance, she painted because she loved painting; she was like a bird singing, all too easily interrupted.

In August 1931 Lytton went for his last visit to France. Roger Senhouse was to have gone with him, but finally went elsewhere. He probably felt remorse about this a few months later, but he need not have worried. The solitary journey in late summer seems to have been
nearly
perfect, with Lytton unaccountably calm and contented, not nervous as he usually was when he travelled.

While I was in London in September for the birth of my son Desmond, Carrington painted a surprise for me—a girl peeling an apple, watched by a cat—on a blank window at Biddesden. She said that Phyllis sat for the girl and Tiber (Lytton’s cat Tiberius) for the cat. The picture was not quite finished when I came back, and I was kept away from the west side of the house so that it should be a complete surprise. She wrote to Lytton that she had got up early to go over and finish it, but the car refused to start and it was ten o’clock before she arrived at Biddesden.

This letter dated 29 October 1931 must be one of the last that Carrington wrote to Lytton about days she spent at Biddesden. He was in London, because ‘Diana says Will you tell Mr oh indeed to remember the christening on Monday.’ I called him ‘oh indeed’ because it was what he so often said during our conversations, and it is more than possible that on being told of the christening this may have been his rejoinder.

Once when she and Julia Strachey [daughter of Oliver Strachey, and niece of Lytton] came for luncheon my younger sisters were there. Carrington wrote: ‘The little sisters were ravishingly beautiful, and another of 16 very marvellous, and grecian [Unity]. I thought the mother was rather remarkable, very sensible and no upper classes graces. The little sister [Debo] was a great botanist and completely won me by her high spirits and charm.’ She also told him that she and Julia ‘had a long talk on rather painful topics and got 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 painful topic was the imminent breakdown of the ‘happy foursome’, which was becoming unhappier all the time. One sensed a good deal of strain at Ham Spray, with Ralph Partridge torn between his love for Frances Marshall, his fondness for Carrington, and his deep affection and admiration for Lytton. Yet to me there was also a feeling of permanence, perhaps only because to the young the idea that the present is transient seldom occurs.

My great joy was their frequent visits; Carrington telephoned: ‘Lytton says may we come over?’ Sometimes, in that autumn of 1931, Lytton seemed rather quiet; there were fewer jokes, fewer shrieks; he was not well. But none of us, not even Carrington, who watched over him so lovingly, realized that he was mortally ill, that tragedy was looming and that quite soon the problem of the unhappy foursome was to be permanently solved.

Carrington was becoming very worried about him when she wrote to Rosamond Lehmann to tell her she had met Mrs Hammersley at Biddesden, ‘and was fascinated by her. She talked a
great
deal about you. She is so beautiful in a romantic Russian style I couldn’t take my eyes off her… You are dear to write such cheering letters. I’ve been feeling in a black dungeon all this week. Nightmarish day and night.’

He became much worse; typhoid was diagnosed, he had a high temperature, which
persisted
. He had to have nurses, and all his friends and relations gathered round, some staying in the house, some at the Bear in Hungerford. I tried not to telephone too often, but during those weeks my thoughts were constantly with Lytton at Ham Spray, and with Carrington, distracted by worry and grief. On the telephone she always said he was a
little
better, but it was not true. He saw many grand doctors, but only after his death was it discovered that he had been suffering from cancer; inoperable cancer. He died in January.

When he was in a coma and there was no more hope, Carrington tried to kill herself. She waited until the milking machine at the farm near the garage started up at five thirty in the pitch-dark early morning, so that nobody in the house should hear the car engine running. Then she lay down and breathed in the fumes from the exhaust, and after a while lost
consciousness
. Unluckily for her she was found and brought painfully back to life. Life without Lytton, which she rejected.

In her diary she has set out, unanswerably, her reasons for wishing to die. Every single thing had lost its point for her since he was no longer there to share it: everything—art, nature, books, friends, jokes. Thus life could only be a burden and a bore. We who loved her and longed for her to live thought that if only a little time could go by her grief would become less sharp and painful and intense. But this was precisely what she most dreaded. The idea that she might become accustomed to life without Lytton was abhorrent. When she went to stay with Dorelia and Augustus John at Fryern Court in Wiltshire we hoped the change of scene and the fact of being surrounded by such old and dear friends might do her good, which was in fact what she herself feared. All the time she was thinking of ways and means of suicide.

Out riding at Biddesden her horse bolted; she hoped to fall and be killed. She did fall, but only got a few bruises: ‘I who long for death find it so hard to meet him,’ she says in her
diary describing the incident.

From Fryern she wrote me a loving letter:

Then a few words about Lytton, and ‘we talked of you so often’. The waistcoat was thick silk embroidered with little flowers, pink and blue.

Not long after this, once again at Ham Spray, Carrington shot herself. I have never understood why she did not repeat her attempt of two months before and breathe in fumes from her car. As she was alone in the house, she would have been undisturbed. Perhaps this time she was determined to make absolutely sure.

Looking back, how strange it seems that I knew Lytton for barely three years and Carrington for less time still. They had become so closely woven into my life that their loss was extremely painful. This must have been generally realized, for I received many letters of condolence, almost as if they had been near relations.

When, a generation later, Lytton and Carrington were put under the microscope, I read the results with interest, but could hardly relate them to the people I knew and loved. Carrington in particular has been blown up into something quite unlike herself. Not that it much matters. Lytton lives in his books, and she in her pictures, her letters, and her diaries.

Gerald Tyrwhitt was born in 1883 at Apley Park in Shropshire, a large house belonging to his rich but mad maternal grandfather. His father, third son of Sir Henry Tyrwhitt and Baroness Berners, came from nearby Stanley Hall. Gerald’s father died in 1907, his uncles died without issue (Gerald used to say ‘three uncles fell off a bridge’), therefore in 1918 he succeeded as fourteenth Lord Berners.

It is a measure of the humdrum yet violent and threatening age in which we live that Gerald Berners should usually be referred to as an eccentric. He was talented, civilized,
hospitable
, and extremely funny. He liked the company of people who appreciated beauty,
intelligence
, elegance and jokes; he created an atmosphere in which these qualities combined to make perfection. Wherever he was host the food he provided was beyond compare. None of this would have been considered particularly eccentric in days gone by. He was fortunate in that he had enough money to live in comfort and surround himself with beauty, but he was not immensely rich except in talents and the number, diversity and devotion of his friends.

I had met him a few times, but we first became friends staying with Mrs Ronnie Greville at Polesden Lacey in 1932, when I was twenty-two and he forty-eight. Our hostess was an amazing old woman, very ugly and spiteful but excellent company; her standard of luxury was of the highest. Gerald told me the story of Bacon, her butler, who one evening at
dinner
was so drunk that she gave him a note: ‘You are drunk. Leave the room.’ He put it on a silver salver and handed it to Sir Robert Horne. I have since been told this tale by others, the recipient of the note varies, some say it was the wife of Sir Austen Chamberlain. It matters little so long as the person was either prim or pompous, or preferably both. Mrs Greville was neither. She was extremely amusing, and her parties at Polesden Lacey and in London at Charles Street were delightful.

Soon after this visit my marriage to Bryan Guinness ended, and I came to live a few
minutes
’ walk from Gerald’s house in Halkin Street; we saw each other constantly and I often stayed with him at Faringdon in Berkshire.

He also had a small house in Rome overlooking the Forum, and in the autumn of 1933 I stayed with him there for a month. This must have been too long, and I can only hope he pressed me to stay on, and that I didn’t assume because I was happy, he too was content. Towards the end of the visit we were joined by Desmond Parsons, a good-looking boy with a pronounced lack of enthusiasm. This amused Gerald, who was delighted when he came in for luncheon one day and told us: ‘I’ve had a
disastrous
morning in the Vatican.’

‘I hope you like veal?’ said Gerald as we sat down. ‘Oh
yes
,’ replied Desmond in gloomy tones. ‘I’m a regular
veal fiend.
’

Gerald worked every morning and the rest of the day he was sociable. We lunched and dined all over the place and his Roman friends came to Foro Romano. We visited churches and galleries in Rome. Not normally very fond of exercise he could perform feats of endurance when sight-seeing, but on the whole he preferred carriage exercise, so we often went driving very slowly in his cumbrous Rolls Royce to Caprarola, or Frascati, or the Villa d’Este, or lunched with the Caetanis at Ninfa, that oasis of green and rushing water, or we wandered along the Via Appia. At Caprarola the huge house was empty and locked, but the concierge gave Gerald the key, and we both loved the gardens. He was a superb guide because he knew Rome well, having been an attaché at the Embassy before the First World War when Sir Rennell Rodd was ambassador.

Some of his favourite jokes were about Lady Rodd (My sister Nancy’s mother-
in-law
). When he was in Rome these jokes surfaced, because various places and people reminded him of how much the Embasssy staff had laughed about her, years before. She had a swarthy complexion and when she announced that she was giving a
dîner de têtes,
‘Just dress up your heads,’ she told the attachés. ‘You know, black your faces or something.’ As she left the room one of them was heard to say gloomily, ‘Some of us won’t need to.’

Lady Rodd never noticed when people were making fun of her, which was probably just as well. She gave a fancy dress ball at the Embassy: ‘Juno—Lady Rodd—was a striking
figure
in cloth of gold… Afterwards Nausicaa and her maidens performed a classic dance, which was interrupted by a Satyr represented by Mr Tyrwhitt of the British Embassy,’ says a contemporary gossip column.

The attachés had a competition with a prize for the designer of the most hideous house combining the greatest number of architectural oddities. The winning drawing was pinned to the wall. Lady Rodd saw it, and exclaimed, ‘My dream house!’ She asked to borrow it and built her dream house at Posillipo. It stood there for many years until it was shelled and reduced to rubble during the Second World War by the British fleet; rather a mercy.

Gerald’s work in the mornings was either composing or painting. When he composed, he sat at the piano and one heard a phrase or two played, and then silence while he wrote it down. He painted out of doors, usually in company with Princesse Marie Murat; they set up their easels side by side. She was a great friend of his. A widow, she had gone to live at the French Embassy in Constantinople where the Ambassador was Comte Charles de Chambrun. Gerald said that a young man, shown into the drawing room and finding her there alone, had shyly asked her: ‘
Je m’adresse à la maîtresse de maison?’
and that she had replied:
‘Maîtresse oui, mais je ne m’occupe pas de la maison.’
When Chambrun was transferred to Rome she settled in at the Palais Farnèse, and after a time the Pope indicated that it would please him if she and M. de Chambrun got married. Marie Murat thought it somewhat ridiculous for two middle-aged people, but did as she was asked.

A man with whom we sometimes dined at his luxurious villa near Rome was M. Sandoz,
a Swiss millionaire whose pharmaceutical business bore his name. The villa was rather beautiful, with a marble floor designed by Picasso, and a large library. One evening, talking shop, M. Sandoz informed us that in Paris one could buy from a chemist in the Place Blanche a miraculous drug ‘
qui rend la vie merveilleuse
’. Gerald and Desmond Parsons both felt they
needed
to keep such a drug handy. Gerald suffered quite often from depression, and Desmond was more or less permanently ‘below par’.

Going home to England Gerald, Desmond and I motored from Rome to Paris at the leisurely pace Gerald liked. Several times a day he would refer to the drug M. Sandoz had told us about; he could hardly wait to try it. It was supposed to be quite harmless, with no unpleasant side effects.

We often stopped on the journey and we spent some time at Rapallo with Max Beerbohm, who showed us his collection of photographs of celebrities touched up in such a way as to make them into monsters with squints, huge noses and mouths awry. Max Beerbohm must have spent hours on these skilful transformations; Gerald was very
appreciative
. He himself was an adept at the work. One of his masterpieces was a photograph of George V with a group of army officers; his uniform could be opened to show a naked female body, a bearded lady. Perhaps this activity might be described as eccentric, but Gerald and Max Beerbohm were rewarded by the screams of any friends who were allowed to see the photographs.

As we neared Paris, stopping at every three-star restaurant en route, excitement at the thought of the drug mounted. Gerald had really begun to believe it might cure him of his depressions, and that life would be permanently
merveilleuse
instead of intermittently so as was now the case. We deposited our luggage at the Hôtel Crillon and rushed to the Place Blanche.

That evening we dined with Violet Trefusis, who lived in Paris and had an old château near Provins. She pointed out that as Gerald had a charming London house, and Faringdon, and Foro Romano, between them they had desirable residences for all seasons and moods, and that if they married and pooled them, how delightful that would be. By the end of
dinner
they were engaged. Gerald must have swallowed the miraculous drug while dressing, which made him ready for any joke, however outrageous.

I tried the drug myself and was very disappointed when it had no effect whatsoever. Gerald and Desmond Parsons persevered for a day or two, but they finally admitted it was a dud. Back in London, however, news of the engagement between Gerald and Violet appeared in a gossip column one evening. Next morning she telephoned him and said: ‘I’ve had dozens of telegrams of congratulation,’ to which he replied: ‘Have you really? I haven’t had
one
.’

At Faringdon he had a toy, one of Disney’s Three Little Pigs: you wound it up and it danced on its little trotters. He used to put it on the dining room table and say: ‘Violet!’ And it was indeed the very image of Violet Trefusis—pink, plump, absurd. Violet’s mother, Mrs Keppel, thought the marriage joke in very poor taste and insisted upon a denial being
published
.
Gerald thereupon sent
The Times
a note: ‘Lord Berners has left Lesbos for the Isle of Man,’ or at least so he said.

He sometimes invented practical jokes to make us laugh, but I doubt, for example, whether he really invited Lady Colefax to meet the P. of W. and then introduced the Provost of Worcester. The idea was to pay her back for her illegible postcards, inviting people to meet H.G. or W.S.M., meaning Wells or Maugham. When Beverley Nichols, author of
Down the Garden Path
, visited Faringdon and went into ecstasies over the scyllas and grape hyacinths, Gerald pretended he had said, ‘Oh, I told the gardener not to plant those nasty little
flowers
,’ and rubbed them out with his foot. I never believed it. He would never have done it, not on account of Lady Colefax or Beverley Nichols, but because of the Provost of Worcester and the spring flowers.

When I stayed with him the following year in Rome, Robert Heber-Percy was there. At that time aged twenty-two, he was to be a life-long friend. His high spirits, elegant appearance and uninhibited behaviour en chanted Gerald, who no longer needed a drug to give him
contentment
. Robert took his horses to Faringdon, hunted regularly and got a quiet hack for Gerald, who enjoyed riding round his farms. To Robert is dedicated the first volume of Gerald’s memoirs,
First Childhood
, published in 1934. He was an ideal companion for Gerald: busy all day out of doors, hunting or seeing to the estate, he had a streak of pure fantasy in his make-up. With Robert about, Diaghilev’s demand to Cocteau: ‘
Étonne moil
’ would not have been necessary, for he never failed to astonish.

I spent Christmas at Faringdon that year; Gladys Marlborough (Second wife of the ninth Duke of Marlborough), Edward James (A collector of Tchelichev, Dali, Magritte, and Picasso) and I were all either getting divorces or hoping to do so, and Gerald put only
bachelors
’ buttons and thimbles in the Christmas pudding. When we reproached him about the absence of sixpences, rings, and lucky pigs, he said he had thought it best to put what he knew would please his guests.

First Childhood
is a deceptively artless account of a fairly happy childhood spent in the country with his mother. Of his two grandmothers, one was an angel and the other a devil. The devilish Lady Berners (Called Bourchier in the book) was, however, interested in ornithology, as was Gerald himself. ‘At a very early age I became a bird bore,’ he wrote. Lady Berners fed her birds on the windowsill and was very pleased because she had succeeded in taming a pair of blue tits so that they would take food from her hand; at least so she said, though nobody had actually seen them do it. “One day I was privileged to catch a glimpse of the birds and I remember causing a mild sensation by rushing into the drawing room where several members of the family were sitting and crying out excitedly: ‘I say! I’ve just seen Grandmother’s tits.”’

He says Lady Berners looked like Holbein’s portrait of Bloody Mary, mixed with Charley’s Aunt.

His whole family was devoted to sport; there was no music, until one day when he heard
a guest, who was an excellent pianist, play Chopin’s
Fantaisie Impromptu.
He implored her to play it over and over again. Henceforward the very name Chopin had magic for him, and he managed to learn one of the mazurkas and play it on a piano in the billiard room. Nobody encouraged him.

His mildly dull but quite happy existence changed when he was sent to school at Cheam where the headmaster was an appalling bully. Gerald says he feels that to call him a sadist would be unfair to the Marquis de Sade. ‘It would be doing an injustice to that wayward nobleman. Mr Gambril’s cruelty was of a far more inhuman type. It was cruelty for cruelty’s sake, pure unadulterated cruelty, and there was no extenuating circumstance of sexual
aberration
.’ Probably, here, Gerald was wrong. Be that as it may, he loathed the school and hated games. His only moment of triumph in four miserable years was when, at the school
concert
, he played a piece with brio.

It was to be several years before Gerald published the second volume of his memoirs.
A Distant Prospect
is about his adolescence; it is a tiny wartime production on wretched paper and with minuscule margins, but it is the most delightful of all his books.

The loathsome headmaster of his private school took leave of him without giving Gerald the customary lecture about sex which he had been told by the other boys to expect. He was rather surprised, although at that age he says he had ‘no intimations of immorality’. It may be that Mr Gambril vaguely felt that lurking in the little boy’s make-up there was a germ of deadly sarcasm. It is not always realized that masters fear their pupils as much as they are feared by them, and with more reason. It is the pupil who has the last laugh. Instead of warning him of the dangers of sex, Mr Gambril warned him against letting music
interfere
with his studies; then he gave him Scott’s poems and let him go.