The Pursuit of Laughter Read online

  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)

  The Lady and the Tramps

  ‘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)

  Wonderful Arms

  If I could have my way, I should go out to dinner every night, and then to a party or an opera, and then I should have a champagne supper, and then I should go to bed in some wonderful person’s arms.

  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 k
itchens, 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.

  ‘Do you like oysters?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, very much,’ said Berners unsuspectingly.

  ‘That’s splendid, because I’ve bought some oysters from a dirty little shop round the corner.’

  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)

  A Bloomsbury Echo

  ‘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.

  The diary abounds in examples of her talents as critic. After reading Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss: ‘… her mind is a very thin soil, laid an inch or two deep upon very barren rock’ (this in 1918, when Katherine Mansfield was being hailed as a new Chekov). Of Byron: ‘The truth may be that if you are charged at such high voltage you can’t fit any of the ordinary human feelings; must pose; must rhapsodise; don’t fit in. He wrote in the Fun Album that his age was one hundred. And this is true, measuring life by feeling.’ Of Paradise Lost: ‘I can conceive that even Shakespeare after this would seem a little troubled, personal, hot and imperfect. I can conceive that this is the essence of which almost all other poetry is the dilution. The inexpressible fineness of the style, in which shade after shade is perceptible, would alone keep one gazing into it, long after the surface business in progress has been dispatched. Deep down one catches still further combinations, rejections, felicities and masteries.’

  The art of writing was her chief passion; but the following shows her close observation, and curiously aloof sympathy: ‘Saw and heard the Salvation Army making Christianity gay for the people; a great deal of nudging and joking on the part of very unattractive young men and women; making it lively, I suppose; and yet, to be truthful, when I watch them I never laugh or criticise but only feel how strange and interesting this is; wonder what they mean by “Come to the Lord”. I daresay exhibitionism accounts for some of it; the applause of the gallery; this lures boys to sing hymns; and kindles shop boys to announce in a loud voice that they are saved. It is what writing for the Evening Standard is for…’

  The Woolfs owned the Hogarth Press; they were offered Ulysses and refused it—a curious parallel to Gide’s refusal, for the NRF, of Du Côté de chez Swann.

  Most of the chief Bloomsbury figures are dead. Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes—they did not live to a great age, they never reached the Grand Old stage of an earlier generation. But some of the younger ones are still alive, and here is the first volume of David Garnett’s autobiography. In it he describes his upbringing, with the typical background of the future Bloomsbury; the intellectual parents (Constance Garnett, a translator of genius, was his mother); the liberal, rationalist opinions; the famous friends; the cranky food; the sofa propped up with books; the solid discomfort. Excellent writer that he is, readers of The Golden Echo will eagerly look forward to the next instalment; hoping, meanwhile, for a new novel after too many silent years.

  Were the Bloomsburies as parochial as the name suggests? Roger Fry proclaiming the merits of post-impressionism to Edwardian London was an interpreter; Lytton Strachey, E.M. Foster, Virginia Woolf and David Garnett are artists, whose books will be read as long as there is anyone left to enjoy the ‘combinations, rejections, felicities and masteries’ of the English language which they all know how to employ.

  A Writer’s Diary, Woolf, V.; The Golden Echo, Garnett, D. (1953)

  Nervous Endings

  The second volume of Mr Garnett’s autobiography is a less polished success than The Golden Echo; in places it reads almost like notes for somebody’s memoirs rather than the finished product. Nevertheless the book has virtues, of which the chief is that the author tells tales and anecdotes about his clever friends and contemporaries the Bloomsburies which marvellously bring them to life. If, at times, the narrative seems jerky instead of running on ball bearings, it may be that it cost him a good deal to write about the war years which must, in some ways, have been a disagreeable time for him.

  Unless he is buoyed up by particularly strong political or religious beliefs there is no doubt that, for a healthy man in the twenties, the position of conscientious objector in war time is a difficult one, even if he belongs to a group of clever and like-minded friends which forms a cushion between himself and the outside world. (Mr Garnett spent part of the 1914 war with Frankie Birrell working behind the lines in France among Quakers, and the rest with Duncan Grant as a labourer on a Sussex farm, where he stayed with Vanessa Bell.) That simple people may suspect him of cowardice is the very least of the complicated feelings which he must have about himself and about the attitude of others towards him. Keynes, for example, the only member of the circle to take part in the world of action, faithfully gave evidence for all the Bloomsburies of military age at their Tribunals, and was obviously a great help in getting them exempted from fighting. Yet there was a ‘painful scene’ at 46, Gordon Square when ‘the conversation turned on conscientious objection and Maynard declared that he did not believe anyone had a genuine conscientious objection. If he said this to exasperate Vanessa and Norton he certainly succeeded.’

  In Mr Garnett’s case the result of these tensions seems to have been that he suffered from nerves and angst. Not until a few years after the war, when success came to him, did he become once again the delightful person he was in The Golden Echo.

  Many of the best Bloomsbury sagas are told. There is the Garsington peacock, named Argus by Aldous Huxley, which got carbuncles and conveniently died in December 1917 and was roasted for Christmas dinner; when the guests were violently sick. Lady Ottoline said it was an appendicitis epidemic. And Lytton Strachey’s evidence when he came before the Tribunal for conscientious objectors, where he was accompanied by his whole family: The Military Representative was inspired with a flight of fancy and asked: ‘What would you do, Mr. Strachey, if you saw an Uhlan attemp
ting to rape your sister?’ Lytton looked at his sisters in turn, as though trying to visualise the scene, and gravely replied in his high voice: ‘I should try to interpose my own body.’

  The Flowers of the Forest, Garnett, D. (1955)

  Past Notes from a Spirited Puritan

  In her nineties, the last of the Bloomsbury group, Frances Partridge, has produced a delightful book, full of indiscreet gossip, amusing stories and fascinating journeys. There is something for everyone in these diaries, far and away the best she has bestowed upon the public.

  Sharply observant, she gives a lyrical description of restored Warsaw and St Petersburg, enjoying every moment despite the bitter cold. Then there is a calm visit to David Garnett in his French cottage with its pastoral setting, walks in woods, hunting for wild flowers, talking about the past.

  In Italy she goes on a rather frenzied tour with Dadie Rylands and Raymond Mortimer, visiting cities, palaces, cathedrals and museums, almost too much beauty; Raymond is rather tiresome with his schoolmaster-like comments forced upon his companions. For her journeys abroad she chose her companions well on the whole, not as easy as it sounds. Spain was perhaps her favourite country.

  Back in England life was very different. Strikes galore, rubbish in the streets, electric fires sadistically fading during ‘cuts’, torch batteries and candles unobtainable: London in the early 1970s became almost as uncomfortable as it had been in the war.

  All Frances Partridge’s friends were ill, some desperately so. She herself is a widow mourning her clever husband as well as their only son, who died in his twenties, yet she flies to comfort her ailing contemporaries. Her greatest friend Julia Strachey, always neurotic, at this time goes completely mad. The account of the descent into hell of the charming, intelligent Julia is frightful and sad as only the truth can be. It is a relief when Julia herself insists upon enmity where once had been deep friendship. Frances was getting to the end of her fund of sympathy when she was forced to abandon the terrible task to others.