The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down (5 page)

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 ungrateful," 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 prints 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."

From the very beginning, the Steins' Saturday "at homes" were essentially open houses. All you needed was an introduction
to attend.
"De la part de qui venezvous?
rr
Gertrude would ask at the door. "By whose invitation are you here?" On at least one occasion, the new arrival was there by
her own invitation, which she had extended and promptly forgotten. He would be ushered through the interior courtyard into
the crowded studio, where Leo harangued the throng with passionate and learned discourses on the new art. The paintings rose
in tiers to the ceiling, the higher ones all but invisible in the dim gas light. Gertrude sat silent and Buddha-like, her
legs tucked under her ample frame, on an overstuffed armchair to the side. It was a position she was to maintain with increasing
comfort for the next thirty years.

Special friends - the Matisses, the Picassos, Georges Braque, Andre Derain, Marie Laurencin, Marcel Duchamp, Marsden Hartley,
Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, a very young Joseph Stella, and the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob among them - were
invited to supper before the salon, where they were served simple meals, roasts and omelettes. Matisse once offended the Steins'
cook, Helene, by asking about the evening's menu before accepting an invitation. Helene considered such rudeness acceptable
in a foreigner but not in a Frenchman, and thereafter served fried eggs instead of omelettes whenever he attended. After the
meal, the artists were served up to the hungry crowd in the studio. James Mellow writes:

Inevitably, the tourists came because it was the thing to do when one was in Paris. A few went away converted, spreading the
gospel of modernism among the heathen, sending fresh troops for later visits. Others came to scoff at the pictures, barely
able to conceal their laughter before the doors closed behind them. Some came purposely to bait the artists.