Chapter 14 Luxury and Grandeur (1) Mrs. Ottoland Morel

I have known the existence of Mrs. Ottoland Morel many years ago, just as one has learned the existence of the myth of Atlantis—she is a legendary quote repeated again and again in different contexts.With her 1.85m height, her horse face and fiery red hair, Ottoland appears in the letters or diaries of a legion of British intellectuals and artists: those who spent the first third of the twentieth century They are mature people.That was the generation that buried Victorian society and insisted on enlivening its delicate and rigid morals; so they demanded something emotional, and spent their days analyzing their troubled inner lives in minute detail.Since they came from a world of power and order where neither body nor emotion existed, talking about the lover they slept with the night before was an act of revolution.

Perhaps for this reason, because they were so devoted to themselves, that generation was composed of obsessed letter-writers who, when they were not recording something in their diaries, wrote profusely to others. letter.On the basis of all that material countless books have been published (biographies, autobiographies, collections of letters), many of which are fascinating; characters are presented.It was that Ottoland, who held for decades a very important salon of art and knowledge, in the style of the French salons of the eighteenth century: who went there, to name only a few, not only the so-called "Blooms The Bury Group" (Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Edward Morgan Foster, Maynard Keynes, etc.), and David Herbert Lawrence, Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, Nijinsky, WB Keats, Bertrand Russell, Robert Graves, Bernard Shaw , Graham Greene and Charles Chaplin.

Altolan was mentor and protector to many of them, and she was protector to all and mistress to several.For example, she was the lover of the painters Augustus John and Bertrand Russell, with whom she maintained a long and very important relationship that was central to the life and work of the Nobel Prize winner. "Ottoland struck men's imaginations deeply, and that was perhaps the greatest thing a woman could do," said David Herbert Lawrence with masculine freedom.Indeed, the most important painters of her time painted her portraits, and a whole host of writers made her a character in their novels, such as Aldous Huxley's Yellow Chrome, David Huxley Burt Lawrence's (she's Heleonie in the work) and Graham Greene's It's a Battleground.

①Augustus John (1878-1961): Welsh oil painter, muralist and portrait painter - Annotation. But all these portraits are mostly crude and mocking.In those letters and novels, the intellectuals of the era (particularly members of the "Bloomsbury Group", the famous telltale 21:39:11 who made malice an art) treated Ottoland Trampling, outlining a vulgar buffoon.There's such cruelty in their display—and if you know that she admired them, cared for and fed them for decades, you'll be even more bewildered by the character: you'll ask yourself why Ortolán chose such a poor friend.

For example, Virginia Woolf wrote in a letter, "Ottoland is not without grandeur in London, as if a ship whose sails have been eaten by rats, its masts are rusted, and green sea snakes are on the deck. Sliding up." "What is certain is that no image can ever convey that unique combination of grandeur and insignificance and hypocrisy that is hers. Sprinkling powder on the floor, she asks: Virginia, why do women wear makeup?" It's a prime example of Ottoland's irony—so much malice, and so well written.Although Virginia has a good heart in addition to her unfaithful tongue, and is therefore able to recognize and admire the value of Ortolan at other moments of her life.

In short, her image has been overwhelmingly that of a wretched queer woman, a disheveled, ugly, fallen aristocrat, with hair horribly dyed red, and a face over-made up like an old piece of furniture.But if you read between the lines and look for other sources (especially Seymour's excellent biography of Ottoland), the portrait of Ottoland that emerges is very different. First of all, she's not ugly at all.Until her forties, she was considered a very beautiful woman: she had shiny copper-colored hair, divine green eyes, and a sculptural body.There is something disturbing about a woman who was once one of the most celebrated beauties of her time, who grows old into a sad symbol of ugliness itself.But Ortolan's beauty, like everything about her, borders on excess.She is tall, her features are too big, her appearance is too unique.The photographs attest to that precarious, unnatural balance: in some she is stunningly beautiful, in others terrifying.She was never ordinary, and she will never be forgotten.

Her uniqueness, her dashing life, presumably led to her slander - the "Bloomsbury Group" always maliciously attacking those who are different, if their victims don't seem to suffer from the attack , or even act nonchalantly and arrogantly, then their criticism will be more violent.Brought to the dual self-restraint of British aristocracy and Victorianism, Ortoland always tried to maintain a semblance of calm.She was born in 1873 and belongs to the highest nobles in Britain.At the age of six her half-brother had succeeded to the title of Duke of Portland, and she had come to be treated condescendingly as a lady by all; her social circumstances were so old and noble that she was not expected to dress or comb her hair alone.Naturally, such a dame should not study and engage in any work except finding a suitable husband and playing herself.

But Ortolan was full of ambition—she had artistic, intellectual, spiritual, and philanthropic aspirations.Of course she couldn't have planned any kind of profession—women like her wouldn't do that.So she used her creative ability to design wonderful clothes for herself, adorning with oriental imagination the three homes that successively became the center of her party: the home in Bedford Square, London; Garsington Manor in the countryside near Oxford; Back to London, home on Gower Street.Her philanthropy centered on helping others—artists, young intellectuals, whose qualities she had an unerring intuition about.

She was thirty-four and married when she began receiving clients in her salon.She likes to create a fairy-tale magical and romantic atmosphere.Her home is scented and filled with delicate and exotic trinkets.Her fabled gathering was at Garssington country estate, where she moved in 1915.Garssington Manor was always full of guests, and she entertained them sumptuously and magically during the battle; the central building, like a delicate candy box, was the Garden of Cypresses, sculptures, and peacocks, the "First Garden," the Heaven.Because Ottoland not only enjoys being a protector of her friends in the traditional sense (supporting their work, introducing them to influential figures, sustaining them for a while), but trying to envelop them in a magical environment, turning her life as a hostess into a work of art.So she organized crossword puzzles, masquerade balls, elaborate picnics in the garden, dances in the moonlight, concerts.Her desire for absolute beauty made her a great deal of ridicule among her guests.They were much younger than she, and they belonged to the twentieth century.That is to say, to an age of cynicism who discovered that there is no absolute.

And Ottoland is a man who is completely out of date.Her time is unreal—she moves, dresses, and talks like a Renaissance man.But also a fictional renaissance recreated or imagined from a Romantic perspective with lots of metal dust and cardboard. "Wouldn't the sun be normal at least in Garsington?" Virginia Woolf asked herself in a letter to a girlfriend, "No, I think even the sky is covered with a yellowish silk, naturally Those cabbages were perfumed, too." Ortolan's meticulous delicacy delighted her ill-intentioned friends—active artists who couldn't comprehend that Ortolan, in the only circumstances he had, was In the trivial affairs of family life, there is a touching need to create beauty.