Ottoline couldn't help but know that she was different from others of her class. Throughout her twenties, she vainly sought a means of escape, with the sole aim of avoiding being forced into marriage with one of her brother's friends. She tried studying, at Edinburgh and Oxford, but found herself unsuited to academics. She tried travel; her second voyage to Italy, accompanied by a dour governess, was enlivened by a brief passion for the charismatic psychologist Axel Munthe, a man twice her age. His offer of a guest cottage on his estate in Anacapri was made at a price she was unwilling to pay, however, and he dismissed her by noting that he already had enough neurotics in his practice and did not need one at home. Until she met the Oxford lawyer Philip Morrell, it seemed as if the life she aspired to - vaporously envisioned as one "lived on the same plane as poetry and as music" - was going to be beyond her grasp.
They were married in 1902, the same year in which Philip alienated both his and her families by running as a Liberal for a seat in Parliament; he alienated them even further by winning. Lady Ottoline Morrell was now a politician's wife, a step up from her former abjectness but not quite what she was looking for. In 1905, Philip opened a practice in London. They took a house at 44 Bedford Square, in the Bloomsbury neighborhood just then rising to respectability as an enclave of fashionable intellectualism. In 1906, Ottoline gave birth to the twins Hugh and Julian (a girl); Hugh died of a brain hemorrhage three days later, and a subsequent operation left Ottoline unable to bear more children. Strangely, of all her life's watersheds, it was this tragedy that galvanized her to remake herself in the image that had by then taken hold of her imagination. Declaring in 1907 that "I am not suited to good works," she decided "to launch recklessly on the sea of London." The makeover was comprehensive, to say the least.
At first, her guest list drew heavily on Philip's liberal and political connections and on her Bloomsbury neighbors. Henry James, Bertrand Russell, and Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith were among the early regulars. Lady Ottoline soon found that she had the instincts of a born hostess. "I was intensely interested in these people - most of whom were remarkable in some way and I who found them so exciting, so thrilling, was anxious that they should know each other. If I liked a personality my instinct was that I wanted that one to meet others in whom I was interested."
Within a year, her Thursday evening "at homes" for artists, writers, politicians, and intellectuals had become the preeminent salon of London and 44 Bedford Square "the most civilised few hundred square feet in the world." Virginia Stephen (later Woolf) wrote: "We have just got to know a wonderful Lady Ottoline Morrell, who has the head of a Medusa; but she is very simple & innocent in spite of it, & worships the arts." Quentin Bell found her "extremely simple and not very clever," but conceded that "she brought petticoats, frivolity and champagne to the buns, the buggery and high thinking of Fitzroy Square."
Now considered to be striking rather than awkward, she welcomed her guests from the balcony of the second-floor landing, done up in Grecian, Cossack, or Oriental dress. In one of the more generous descriptions of her newfound flamboyance, Virginia Stephen likened her to a Spanish galleon, "hung with golden coins, & lovely silken sails." A typical costume was one described by Vanessa Bell: "It might have been designed by Bakst for a Russian ballet on a Circassian folktale theme. Russian boots of red morocco were revealed under a full, light-blue silk tunic, over which she wore a white kaftan with em broidered cartridge pouches on the chest, on which fell the ropes of Portland pearls. On her head was a tall Astrakhan fez."
The Bloomsbury crowd - notably the Stephen sisters, Virginia and Vanessa, Lytton Strachey, and Roger Fry - ensured the bohemian bona fides of "Our Lady of Bedford Square." Hungry artists could always be certain of a decent spread and a handout. The painter Augustus John assured her that she did not need to prove her generosity to him, but that was after she had already slept with him. Artists Jacob Epstein and Henry Lamb were not so proud and accepted her financial assistance and adulation as their due. Henry James, who despised these "irreverent young people," stood with her one evening on the landing looking down at the boisterous crowd below. "Look at them," he warned her. "Look at them, dear lady, over the banisters. But don't go down amongst them." It was a warning she chose to ignore and would later have good cause to recall.
Although her salon was flourishing, Ottoline was not yet satisfied, and her status as London's paramount hostess had failed to sate a gnawing emotional hunger. Her torrid affair with Bertrand Russell, begun in 1911, seemed to hold great promise, but Russell, who exploited their relationship to disentangle himself from a loveless marriage, would never regard her as an equal. "He told me that I could never accomplish anything important in life by my reading while I could help by being with him," she wrote in her Memoirs. "The great thing seems to me in dealing with people is to find the centre of a human being, their core, to get into touch with that, and from that to radiate out in understanding." This foolhardy quest was never going to be realized in a busy, transient, fashion-conscious London salon. Through the glory years of Edwardian indulgence, she gradually came to the conviction that what she really wanted was to "collect people . . . and make a more complete compact society of in tellectuals." Only in such a setting could she indulge her "one touch of genius . . . the power of loving people."
In 1915, she got her chance. Ostensibly out of concern for Julian's delicate health, the Morrells left London for the Jacobean manor of Garsington, in Oxfordshire. In her memoirs, Ottoline limned her aspirations: "I should like to make this place into a harbour, a refuge in the storm, where those who haven't been swept away could come and renew themselves and go forth strengthened." With hindsight, she added. "But people are very difficult to manage.'' It was to be a retreat and an egalitarian Utopia, with Ottoline in the role of angel presiding over a community of brilliant, liberated, and grateful artists and writers. She painted one drawing room Venetian red to match her hair, the entrance hall dove gray, and the sitting room peacock green, with gold moldings. She filled the house with oriental boxes, cabinets, china, and hangings. The scent of incense, potpourri, and clove-studded oranges permeated the manor. She converted an old fish pond into a swimming pool with an ornamental island at the center. As Virginia Woolf said of the place, "I think even the sky is done up in pale yellow silk, and certainly the cabbages are scented."
When she was thoroughly satisfied that all had been done to make the artists feel relaxed and at home, Ottoline opened the doors to her eager guests. "This ornate, other-worldly environment was soon the Mecca of all aspiring young writers and artists," writes Michael Holroyd. "From being a highly fashionable meeting-place, Garsington was quickly transformed into a cultural legend."
Almost from the outset, Garsington proved to be a naive proposal ripe with portents of disaster. The artists and writers showed up in droves - D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Roger Fry, Dora Carrington, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and Robert Graves, among others immediately ensuring that Garsington would be "a bedlam of conflicting egotisms." Some came for the weekend; others for the year. The painter Dorothy Brett stayed three years. They ate Ottoline's food and complained about it. She provided towels and bathing suits; after a swim, the guests would "sit or lie on the lawn endlessly talking, talking." Many who sought to evade military service were provided the legal alternative of agricultural labor on the working farm, although few did any farming. As dedicated pacifists, Ottoline and Philip declined to promote the war effort, but they did invite many of the wounded to recuperate at Garsington. The Morrells, who never enjoyed great wealth, were perennially strapped, but the guests kept coming. And staying. And backbiting.
However clueless Ottoline may have been about artists' capacity for gratitude, she was not unaware that many took her hospitality for granted. Siegfried Sassoon may have been briefly right that, although already into her forties, she had yet to learn that "the writers and artists whom she befriended were capable of proving ungratefu
l," but she was learning fast. Only a year after opening Garsington, she was referring in her journal to "This crowd of crude and selfish people which have invaded us." She elaborated on this theme in her memoirs:
Sometimes I used to feel hurt when people came and did not trouble to talk to me, but just amused themselves and ignored me. When I was talking to Gilbert Cannan one day I said that I felt that the young people who came looked on me as a sort of kind manageress of a hotel, and he rather took me aback by saying, "Of course, we do."
Others noticed, too. Referring to "the horror of the Garsington situation," Virginia Woolf wrote that "O. and P. and the house provide a good deal, which isn't accepted very graciously." Ottoline tried to take it in her stride, noting that "I can go my own way and let them go theirs," yet conveniently forgetting that she was already going her own way. But she could not entirely repress a dawning awareness of the reality that was evident to everyone around her. "It is exhausting to give and give . . . without any return. One deludes oneself with the belief that by giving one will receive something, but it isn't true."
What she was probably unaware of, at least at first, was the extent to which they not only took advantage of her, but also mocked her behind her back. Even the compliments of good friends had a nasty edge to them. "Lady Ottoline was the only person I have ever seen who could look, at one and the same moment, beautiful and what I can only call grotesque," wrote Lord David Cecil. "The house is . . . very like Ottoline herself, in fact - very remarkable, very impressive, patched, gilded and preposterous," noted Lytton Strachey. They coined cruel nicknames for her, such as "the Old Ott" and "Lady Omega Muddle." Dora Carrington seems to have been among the few guests to sympathize. "What traitors all these people are! They ridicule Ottoline! . . . I think it's beastly of them to enjoy Ottoline's kindness and then laugh at her."
The financial and emotional investments in Garsington had been substantial, however, and Ottoline stoically continued to endure their diminishing returns. How long this state of affairs might have lasted is anyone's guess, but sooner or later something had to give, and in 1917 that something was D. H. Lawrence, who had been one of Garsington's very first and most pampered guests. Women in Love was not the first time Ottoline had been portrayed as a fictional character - she had been somewhat crudely fictionalized by a lovesick professor, John Adam Cramb (writing as J. A. Revermort), in his 1910 novel Cuthbert Learmont. But Lawrence's Hermione Roddice, a member of "the slack aristocracy that keeps touch with the arts," was of a different order:
She was impressive . . . yet macabre, something repulsive. People were silent when she passed, impressed, roused, wanting to jeer, yet for some reason silenced. Her long, pale face, that she carried lifted up, somewhat in the Rossetti fashion, seemed almost drugged, as if a strange mass of thoughts coiled in the darkness within her, and she was never allowed to escape.
The portrait of Hermione may also have been particularly painful to Ottoline for being so close to the mark:
She suffered a torture, under her confidence and her pride, feeling herself exposed to wounds and to mockery and to despite. She always felt vulnerable, vulnerable, there was always a secret chink in her armour. She did not know herself what it was. It was a lack of robust self, she had no natural sufficiency, there was a terrible void, a lack, a deficiency of being within her."
All of her friends had read Lawrence's manuscript. Ottoline recognized herself in Hermione and took it as a personal betrayal. "Chapter after chapter, scene after scene, all written, as far as I could tell, in order to humiliate me . . . I showed it to Aldous . . . and he was equally horrified." Lawrence, it goes without saying, was banished.
But Women in Love was just 1917's opening salvo. That year, long-suffering Philip finally went ahead and found himself a lover. Worse yet, Bertrand Russell initiated a yearlong affair with Lady Constance Malleson, claiming that Ottoline was very "uninstinctive and . . . entirely lacking in the qualities that would make me a comfortable companion." Then, she found herself snubbed by Katherine Mansfield when Mansfield's husband, critic John Middleton Murry, claimed that she had made advances toward him. A nasty case of the measles capped a very bad year for Ottoline.
A diary entry for November sums up her heartbreak and disillusion:
It is like death, though still alive, the death of all illusions, death of desire. Everyone that I thought was a friend has shrivelled up, faded away. It is not their fault, only the result of their characters. But now I see them clearly as they are, without the veil of illusion that I had clothed them in, and I see that what one individual can give to another is infinitely small. I dreamt that I could give my friends something wonderful, but now I see that to them it isn't wonderful . . . most people live in a steaming cauldron of resentments, irritation and dislike and envy and have only a varnish of decent behaviour.
The year 1918 brought fleeting relief. "This is too beautiful, it cannot last," she wrote on getting rid of the last of her guests. She was right. The ensuing years would see no fewer than three new fictional portraits, two of them by her beloved friend Aldous Huxley, the betrayal made all the worse by the fact that he had witnessed the pain caused by Women in Love. In Huxley's first novel, 1921's Crome Yellow, she is Priscilla Wimbush; in his second, 1925's Those Barren Leaves, she is Lilian Aldwinkle. In both cases, it was not only she but also all of Garsington that were satirized. "How could he, who had lived with us in such intimacy, so violate the human decencies as to mock and ridicule the life in which, after all, he had partaken with such apparent pleasure and happiness?" How indeed?
Life at Garsington did not come to an end after the war, but the old spirit of recklessness and mayhem was gone. In the place of the bohemians came a more staid crowd: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Siegfried Sassoon, the latter so embarrassed to be seen with her in public that he hid until he could be sure she was dressed with restraint. But the Jazz Age was coming, and younger, wealthier hostesses, such as Nancy Cunard and Lady Colefax, were siphoning off her guests back in London. By 1927, when the novelist W. J. Turner parodied her one last time in his book The Aesthetes, it hardly seemed to matter anymore, or to hurt. Turner likens his heroine, Lady Virginia Caraway, to Switzerland, the Russian Ballet, and the Tower of Pisa: "She is known only to tourists or sight-seers. They look at her and go away - and write books about her." That year, broke and dispirited, Ottoline and Philip sold Garsington and retreated to London.
Like Ottoline Morrell, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was the youngest of five siblings. Unlike Ottoline, Gertrude believed in her own genius. Indeed, she believed that there were only three living geniuses in the world: Pablo Picasso, Alfred North Whitehead (coauthor with Bertrand Russell of the Principia Mathematica), and herself. She believed, according to one source, that "nobody has done anything to develop the English language since Shakespeare, except myself, and Henry James perhaps a little." She believed that "the Jews have produced only three originative geniuses: Christ, Spinoza, and myself." Of the latter in particular she was firmly convinced; her life's work was to convince the world of it, which she ultimately did - at least to her own satisfaction.
But all of that was many years off when she joined her brother Leo in Paris in 1903, where he was trying to learn to paint and had rented himself a studio and home at 27, rue de Fleurus, on the Left Bank. Stein had been raised in some affluence in California, studied at Radcliffe under William James, and spent several years at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine before flunking out from sheer boredom. Now, at twenty-nine, with a couple of rehearsal manuscripts lying in a drawer somewhere, she was going to launch a new life as a writer. Believing as she did that the United States, having launched the modern era, was the oldest country in the world, simply being a writer was not going to be enough. She was to be the first writer of the modern age and her book Three Lives the first work of literary modernism. But there were a few distractions on the way.
Leo, like many progressive gentlemen of his day, was an avid collector of Japanese pri
nts in 1903. But he had recently gotten wind of a little-known painter, an old man whose unusual works were said to be considerably cheaper than Japanese prints. After a visit to the gallery of Ambroise Vollard, the only dealer in Paris to sell this painter's work, Leo and Gertrude walked out with a luminous landscape, their first Cezanne. The following year, a small windfall of about sixteen hundred dollars from their father's estate allowed them to pick up two more Cezannes, a couple of Gauguins, and some Renoirs. Leo and Gertrude started dressing in cheap brown corduroy and sandals to save money to buy art. Their economies netted them works by Degas, Delacroix, Manet, and Toulouse-Lautrec.
In 1905, they attended the Autumn Salon to consider the work of nonestablishment painters. The scandal of La femme au chapeau - a rough portrait of garish colors that was eliciting howls of outrage throughout the capital and had provoked one journalist into slanging the artist as a wild beast, or fauve - had attracted their attention. The painter was askingfive hundred francs (about one hundred dollars); the Steins offered four hundred, the painter held out for his asking price, and the Steins caved. In this way, the Steins became the principal patrons of Henri Matisse, who, at the time of the Salon, was being supported by the income from his wife's millinery shop.
The Steins continued to acquire Matisses over the next few years, becoming good friends of the artist and his wife. Gradually, the Japanese prints came down. Soon, there was no room left on the apartment walls and Leo started hanging his pictures in the painting studio. Word spread of the unorthodox collection, which the Steins generously opened to anyone who cared to view it. "Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody, and they came at any time and it began to be a nuisance, and it was in this way that Saturday evenings began." 27, rue de Fleurus was on its way to becoming what James R. Mellow would call "a ministry of propaganda for modern art."
The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down Page 4
