From Carrington’s letters:

1922

[Clive Bell had criticized Bernard Shaw in the New Republic in a way that Carrington thought unjustified. She therefore got Ralph to type the following letter which she signed.]

To Clive Bell

10 Adelphi Terrace, London

Dear Clive Bell, Thank you for the numerous compliments you have paid me in this weeks’ New Republic. I am sorry I cannot return the compliment that I think you, or your prose, ‘Perfectly respectable.’

In my young days a ‘taxicab’ was a name given only to aged whores, ugly as Shaftesbury Avenue.

You do not, it would appear, lead a very enviable aesthetic life; to me it seems dull.

Yours, Bernard Shaw

[Clive was completely taken in although a moment’s reflection would have shown him that taxicabs were unknown in Bernard Shaw’s young days. He therefore wrote a letter to Shaw getting in reply a postcard saying he had never written to him.]

To Lytton Strachey

February 15th, 1922

The Mill House, Tidmarsh

Dearest Lytton, Thank you so much for your letter. We shrieked with laughter under our canopy of blue very often as we read it… Especially about Clive and Shaw’s letters. Really he was a greenhorn. Did it never occur to him Bernard Shaw wasn’t likely to type the address on his note paper? Perhaps he does. Perhaps God inspired me, and the first letter was the image of the second! Poor Shaw I wonder what he thought of Clive’s apologies! ‘Clive Bell completely ga-ga. Never wrote him a letter in my life.’ I see a new aspect: a new avenue in life now! Forgery between lovers, enemies, dukes and duchesses.

Yr devoted Carrington