A Moth and Her Flames

THE LAST FEW years have seen the publication of the biographies, diaries and memoirs of virtually every figure of England's Bloomsbury set. But a central figure has been left out till now. Many of the circle turned against her in the last few years of her life, but Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873-1938) had a unique influence on many of the literati of the early twentieth century.

Bertrand Russell left his wife for her, though Ottoline remained with her husband. She was the inspiration for the character of Hermione Roddice in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, the eccentric baronness whose passion for the hero, Birkin, is more a contest of will than a deep emotion. She knew them all: Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, J.M. Keynes, Aldous Huxley, Henry Lamb, William Butler Yeats, Henry James.

Born the half-sister of the sixth Duke of Portland, Ottoline spent most of her adult life playing the role of patroness of the arts. Her mother and brothers tried hard when she was young to force her to conform to the conventional role of an upper-class woman of Edwardian England, to become the kind of vapid woman that, as Ottoline said later, "gossiped all the morning, then drove out to lunch with the shooters in tweeds, had tea in pink tea-gowns from Paris, and dined in still more gorgeous brocades and velvets." Throughout her life, Lady Morrell sought intensity--through mysticism in her youth and old age, and, in between, through a network of relationships with brilliant artists. Unable to find a satisfactory outlet for her own creative energy, she compensated for her failure by living vicariously what she called their "experiences of the soul."

Ottoline did not begin to live through others, however, until her attempts to find a lifestyle of her own had failed. She married at 28, after travelling through Europe and going to college, probably because she had no choice if she wished to continue to move freely in a society where spinsters were considered eccentric. Her husband, Philip Morrell, became a member of Parliament some years after their marriage, leaving Ottoline free to throw herself into these webs of relations.

The relationship between Ottoline and her husband is one of the few that Darroch, Ottoline's biographer, leaves unexplored. We are told that Morrell tolerated all Ottoline's friends, although he never quite fit into the group. He must have been extremely broad-minded; there was rarely a period during their marriage in which Ottoline was not involved with some other man, yet Darroch gives no hint that the two ever quarreled seriously. The relationship, however, was somewhat lopsided--although he accepted her perpetual liaisons, Ottoline had a nervous breakdown when she discovered Philip had been unfaithful to her. She always returned to him following her own extramarital affairs, as if their relationship was the base of security that allowed her to deal with the inconstancy of the outside world, a shelter from her own intensity. When she died, he decided to edit her memoirs; and sometimes, Darroch says, Philip would go upstairs "where Ottoline's clothes still hung, her unique scent clinging to them, and he would gently lift the silks and velvets in an attempt to get in touch with her again."

Darroch concentrates instead on Ottoline's relationships with more influential artists and thinkers--it is her contribution to their lives, after all, that lifts Lady Morrell from the sad category of the eccentric to the realm of the creative. From her first days in London as a political hostess, to her old age spent in Garsington, the country home that became a haven for both aging artists and young Oxford undergraduates, Ottoline kept herself surrounded by a protective wall of friends and acquaintances. Like Hermione Roddice, she filled her house with intellectuals, defining her own worth by her part in their creative efforts.

Ottoline was described in a number of novels, and rarely kindly. The most famous of them is Women in Love; Lawrence had gotten to know the Morrells through Bertrand Russell, and had visited the manor where Ottoline held court a number of times. She was horrified when she read the description of Hermione, "a tall, slow, reluctant woman...who drifted forward as if scarcely conscious, her long blanched face lifted up, not to see the world." Hermoine is presented as a creature of the intellect, whose intense passion is only superficial. Like Ottoline, she dresses in bright, untidy flowing clothes; like Ottoline, she surrounds herself with people who act on her as intellectual stimulants.

Virginia Woolf described Ottoline as "a Spanish galleon, hung with golden coins and lovely silken sails." Other writers, Darroch says, described her variously as "an oversized Infanta of Spain, an enormous bird, a lion-hunting hostess." In Those Barren Leaves, Aldous Huxley described those moments, just before retiring, when the Ottoline-like character would turn to her house guest and ask probing, intimate questions. "For on the threshold of her bed-chamber she would halt," he says, "desperately renewing the conversation with whichever of her guests happened to light her upstairs. Who knew? Perhaps in these last five minutes, in the nocturnal silence, the important thing would be said." It is as if each of the artists with whom she was most intimate had to come to terms with what she meant to them by writing about her, and then break with her.

None of her friends seem to have reciprocated Ottoline's intensity, to have gone beyond the outside decor of flowing gowns and ostrich feathers, past the insistent questioning to the woman beneath. W.J. Turner, a little-known Australian poet, came closest to the truth in his novel The Aesthetes, where he wrote of yet another caricature of Ottoline--that she was "not the physical construction we may shake hands with or photograph, nor the intellectual or conceptual construction Darthy may present to us as a psychological fiction, nor the intuition-image each one of us may have, nor the work of art each one of us may experience, but the indiscernable, where all these meet." Ottoline had constructed such a shell around her--despite her desire to truly connect to the artists around her--that in the end they were left with an image, an evasive sense of having been taken apart by a force greater and more intense than their own creative energy. They could only reconstruct themselves by hurting her.

DARROCH'S BIOGRAPHY leaves the reader with the same sense of confusion--a sense that somewhere the real Ottoline is still hiding behind the draperies of her acquaintances. At the end of the book, one can almost understand her; but the promise of knowing her fully still teases us. She spent her life trying to breach the defenses of those around her, but ultimately she could not reveal her own emotions. She expressed her energy as an intellectual phenomenon, unable to get to the passion beneath. As a result, her relationships ended with rejection of her domination. "How inaccessible we all are," she wrote at last, "so apart and alone."