The Pursuit of Laughter (6 page)

In his
Memoirs of an Aesthete
Harold pays tribute to William and his talent for painting and drawing. He did vast portraits of his friends, all wonderfully like them, but in an
old-fashioned
style that ensured the portraits were underrated. His method of painting was to ask his model to allow her head to be photographed from every angle. Then William made rather beautiful pencil drawings, the studies for his paintings. The only other painter I knew who used photographers was Sickert; the results were very different. But fashion is all-powerful, and doubtless William’s amazing facility was a disadvantage. His pictures are not works of art, but they are a faithful record of a whole generation of English women.

The last time I saw William was in the summer of 1940. France was falling, the British army had made its way home via the Channel ports, gloom was on every face. I ran into William by chance in Piccadilly, and we sat for a few moments to talk. ‘What are you doing now?’ I asked. ‘I’m learning Urdu,’ was his reply. He lived in a world of his own, and so, in a way, did Harold.

After the war Harold inherited La Pietra, and a new phase of his life began. He wrote well-received histories of the Bourbons of Naples, he was revered as an historian, as well as as a host and a wit. He and Nancy shared old friends, as well as an old enemy, Violet Trefusis. Their enmity was a great link: Violet was Harold’s neighbour in Florence, and Nancy’s in Paris. In his memoir there is a delightful photograph of her.

Harold changed nothing at La Pietra. The walls were covered with his father’s
collection
of Italian pictures. Except for them and the villa itself, everything was redolent of 1900, red velvet armchairs with antimacassars. His mother’s bedroom, the size of a large ballroom, where I slept when I stayed with him, had 18 oil paintings of the Madonna and Child on the walls, as well as a large Della Robbia china representation of the same
subject
.

A great joy for the last 20 years of Harold’s life was that Lord Lambton became a neighbour. They were made for each other, with the same malicious sense of humour. There were screams of laughter from Harold’s dining-room when this fantastically amusing man was a guest. It is sad that conversation is so ephemeral, and brilliant talk so rare. Never can two wits have been more closely attuned, more uninhibited, than they. Both were
bibliophiles
, art connoisseurs and gardeners.

Harold Acton never changed. I first met him in 1928, and saw him on and off until a couple of years before he died. He never seemed young or old; simply himself. He made a few television appearances, and was an instant star: the beauty of his surroundings, his exquisite courtesy to one and all, and his verbal dexterity.

Harold had no heir, and he hoped to bequeath his estate in Florence to Christ Church or to Eton. Both refused to accept it, incredible as it may seem. He therefore left it to an American university, whose fortunate undergraduates go to La Pietra to study Italian art.

Spectator
(2001)

‘Poor old Ott, her wits have gone the way of her bladder.’ Did these cruel and quite untrue words occur in a letter from Lytton Strachey to Virginia Woolf, or to his brother James, or are they apocryphal? If the latter, they not unfairly sum up the way he wrote about Lady Ottoline, his great friend and benefactress. He could never resist a joke, he loved to imagine his correspondent’s scream of laughter, and probably he never thought his letters would be published.

Miranda Seymour’s book is the perfect riposte to the spiteful accounts of Ottoline, which, along with her truncated memoirs ‘edited’ after her death by Philip Morrell, are all the public has been vouchsafed hitherto.

She describes a wonderful, extraordinary woman, who held the love of the cleverest man of her time, Bertrand Russell, to the very end of her life, and the friendship of three generations of writers and painters.

Russell wrote her 2000 letters, many of them passionate love letters, but she refused to leave Morrell. Russell married several times while remaining a great friend.

She had extravagant looks, huge features, ‘a face like a horse’, and she wore what can only be described as fancy dress. Feathered hats were pink, scarlet and orange; silks,
chiffons
and brocades were made into fantastic clothes. She was six foot tall, and struck
everyone
with amazement.

As a child I sometimes caught a glimpse of this gorgeous apparition in Oxford,
driving
her pony cart through streets full of drab undergraduates on bicycles, or choosing stuffs in Elliston and Cavell. She was an unforgettable vision.

I knew her name, and that her country house had been a refuge for conscientious objectors in the Great War, and this in itself made her a heroine for me.

The intellectual friends Lady Ottoline collected at Garsington were monumentally
disloyal
, ungrateful and ill-mannered, not just Lytton Strachey. He at least never ‘put her in a book’, as all the novelists did—notably D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley—and she was wounded every single time, though she generally forgave in the end. Huxley’s novel, in the window of Blackwell’s, was bought by the Garsington vicar who had met him at the manor. He found a sermon he had injudiciously printed reproduced verbatim as a great joke.

Miranda Seymour shows that Ottoline’s generosity and hospitality were far from easy for her. The Morrells were not rich, and the farm lost money. No wonder, as they who were supposed to work it lay under hedges discussing poetry and philosophy.

Is there another side to all this? Miranda Seymour is right hardly to hint at such a thing, so false was the picture Bloomsbury left. Nevertheless, Lady Ottoline did probe for everyone’s secrets, she did question people closely about their loves and hates. She had powerful charm, and probably her guests often wished they had disclosed less.

I was once told that one Christmas at Garsington they clubbed together to give her a steaming outfit. They never felt their letters were quite safe when she was about. She was
so deeply interested in them, she longed to know everything about everyone, and to
interfere
.

But when all is said, she was a great and unique person, generous, loving, appreciative of art, nature and human oddity, recognizing genius, admiring and fostering talent. She had wretched health and admirable courage, both physical and moral. She herself was a living work of art.

Her daughter, Julian Vinogradov, who suffered from the caricature of her mother in book after book down the years, told me she thought David Cecil’s introduction to a
photograph
album the best description of her. It is sad that Julian died before this excellent definitive biography was finished.

Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale
, Seymour, M.
Evening Standard
(1992)

Who wrote that? Lytton Strachey, to Virginia Woolf. Strangely enough, the first time I ever met him part of the fantasy had come true. It was twenty years after, and he had become a literary lion who could have gone out to dinner as often as he chose.

We had been to the opera, and Lady Cunard gave a supper party afterwards for about forty people at a huge table in her upstairs drawing room at 7 Grosvenor Square: I
suppose
we were too many for the dining room. It was very gay and glittering. Lytton Strachey came and sat next to me, old and mysterious behind his beard and spectacles. I was 18, and not long married. I thought how wonderful and amusing and fascinating he was, and was amazed at my luck and at his condescension in honouring Lady Cunard with his
presence
at her party and me with his proximity. Writers and painters and composers seemed to me then the princes of mankind; they do still, but I realise now, as I did not in those days, that
Uebermenschen
can love gaiety and pleasure just as much as ordinary people.

But Lytton’s periodic excursions into the
monde
were not always a success. ‘Garsington was terribly trying,’ he wrote on one occasion after a visit to Lady Ottoline Morrell. ‘I was often on the point of screaming from sheer despair.’

Many of these letters are bitter complaints about the small miseries of life. Lytton Strachey was delicate and always felt cold; cold during damp English summers, freezing in the winter time. The Bloomsburies had a genius for making themselves uncomfortable. This was not the result of dire poverty; the poorest peasant in central Europe would refuse to put up with such discomfort as they did—he would get himself a stove and keep it
burning night and day. When I knew Lytton he was quite rich and had a pretty country house, but I remember how cold it was staying with him.

The Bloomsbury revolt against Victorian values extended to other spheres besides literature and philosophy. No blazing fires or heavy nourishing meals for them; no scrubbed kitchens, shining door-knobs or starched linen. Lord Berners told a story about one of the group whose name I cannot mention because he is still alive.* This Bloomsbury was his host at dinner.

Leonard Woolf and James Strachey, who have edited the letters, leave dots here and there to spare feelings. This is very tantalising. They have obliged with some footnotes, but probably many people who knew already that Rumpelmayer was a pastrycook might care to be told who Carrington was: dear, faithful friend of Lytton Strachey, whose death killed her with sorrow.

* Clive Bell.

Virginia Woolf & Lytton Strachey>: Letters
(1956)

‘What is to become of all these diaries I asked myself yesterday? If I died, what would Leo make of them? He would be disinclined to burn them; he could not publish them. Well, he should make up a book from them, I think, and then burn the body,’ wrote Virginia Woolf. Leonard Woolf, thirteen years after her death, has made up the book from them; let us hope he has not burnt the body. After three hundred and sixty pages we could do
with
three hundred and sixty more—no doubt there are fierce things in them about the
living
, as here about the dead, but if Mr Woolf waits another few years could not a great deal more be published?

As it stands, the book is deeply interesting, the diary of a remark able and gifted woman; written partly, no doubt, as a safety valve for her highly nervous temperament and partly to remind herself of facts and figures connected with her writings, but also to note her thoughts on friends and acquaintances, books and poems, journeys and everyday
happenings
. One is never conscious of its having been written with an eye to future
publication
, as one is for example in the
Journal
of André Gide. She never appears to worry about hurt feelings, or libel; never troubles to pose for an audience. Her judgments are
completely
honest and candid, and have the freshness and vigour of truth. (Read what she has to say about Lady Colefax, or on a slightly higher level about Lady Ottoline Morrell or Lady Cunard, compare it with the rubbish some other writers have felt obliged to churn out as
quid pro quo
for hospitality received. She pins them down, drab moths and gay
butterflies
alike.) She was gifted with the seeing eye; her descriptions are exactly right, there is never a wasted word. Her friends were the cleverest and most gifted of her
contemporaries
; it was their opinion of her writing that she cared about, even though she could be momentarily cast down by a bad review.