Written Lives

by Javier Marías

  In Djoun she had a kind of labyrinthine fortress built, full of pavilions and rooms intended to shelter the illustrious fugitives who would, sooner or later, come asking for asylum, fleeing from the numerous revolutions which she believed were taking place in Europe. She did, in fact, receive a lot of refugees, but none was particularly illustrious or even European: the place became a protective roof for the disinherited and the persecuted of the region.

  Lady Hester Stanhope could be charming, but, more often than not, she was quick-tempered and tyrannical, even when being solicitous: she would oblige her visitors to take strange potions and salts to protect them from disease and fever, and sometimes she handed these doses out seven at a time. She smoked a pipe constantly and, during the final months of her life, when she barely left her rooms, it is said that a permanent cloud of smoke emanated from them and that there was not a single object or item of furniture that had not been singed by sparks and cinders. She did not get on well with other women; she boasted that she could tell the character of a man at a single glance; and her indefatigable talk touched on every subject: astrology, the zodiac, philosophy, politics, morality, religion or literature. She was feared for her mocking burlesques, in particular her imitation of the terrible lisp that afflicted Lord Byron, whom she had met in Athens.

  In the final days of her existence, as she lay helpless on her deathbed, she watched as her servants filched everything they could, waiting only for her finally to expire in order to make off with the rest. This was in 1839 when she was sixty-three years old. When her body was found by two Westerners who had come to visit her, they discovered the corpse alone in the fortress: her thirty-seven servants had disappeared and there was nothing left, not even in her bedroom, only the things she was wearing, for no one had dared to touch her. So perhaps she was not lying when she said in another letter: “I am not joking: beneath the triumphal arch of Palmyra, I have been crowned Queen of the Desert.”

  Vernon Lee, the Tiger-Cat

  VERNON LEE WROTE an enormous amount, but, it would seem, poured her real talent into conversation, that ephemeral gift which survivors appropriate so that they can retell, as if they were their own, the anecdotes and witty comments of those who, once dead, can no longer accuse them of plagiarism.

  Her real name was Violet Paget, and although she was English by nationality and language, she did not visit London until she was twenty-five. She was born in France and had spent her childhood and adolescence travelling on what her compatriots call “the Continent”. What the Paget family practised, though, was not so much travelling as nomadism, changing residence every six months and settling in different parts of Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium or Italy. Indeed, all four members of the family prided themselves on never admiring a view, consulting a guidebook or visiting any monument or museum during their travels, and of leading exactly the same life wherever they chose to set up house (they were the declared enemies of tourism), until in 1873, all this racketing around stopped, and they ended up in a villa called “Il Palmerino”, near Florence, where Vernon Lee spent most of her adult life.

  Her family was clearly not a conventional one; her mother (Vernon Lee’s father was her second husband) was a tiny woman, about five feet tall, as despotic as she was lively, irreligious and megalomaniac (she used to make fun of the genealogies in the Bible, but, on the other hand, claimed descent from the kings of France); her relationship with her husband does not appear to have been exactly stimulating, for visitors to the villa often mistook him for the gardener, and his one (infallible) obligation to his wife consisted in accompanying her with a lamp on a night-time walk, after a supper which they always ate separately. As for Vernon or Violet’s half-brother, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, eleven years older than her, he had a nervous breakdown in order to avoid a diplomatic transfer to Buenos Aires, and then spent two decades shut up in the house, prostrate on a sofa or a mattress, incapable of moving his limbs, but occasionally writing a few poems.

  Although she was not allowed to go out without a chaperone until she was twenty-three, she was precocious as regards literary matters: at thirteen, she published her first piece in a newspaper (“The Biography of a Coin” in French), and at twenty-four, her first book, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, which astonished readers with what was, for the time, the unusual nature of the subject and with the vast erudition involved. Shortly afterwards, in 1881, she arrived in London and set about consolidating her career by publishing new works and by building personal relationships. With the latter, however, she was unlucky. This is not surprising when one reads the harshness of her judgments and the terrible impression even the most illustrious people made on her: William Morris seemed to her like “a railway porter or a bargee”; she found her teacher, Walter Pater, however much she admired him, “heavy, shy, dull”; she described the painter Whistler as “a mean, nagging, spiteful, sniggling little black thing”; she said that D’Annunzio resembled “an inferior Russian poet. Still I suspect him rather of being—well, a Neapolitan”; and she called Berenson “an ill-tempered and egotistic ass”. She thought Oscar Wilde “quite kind”, but he avoided her, and as for Henry James, whom she venerated and to whom she dedicated a novel, she had no luck there either: James praised her and took an interest in her work (“She shows prodigious cerebration,” he said), but he proved elusive after the publication of a story by Lee in which he quite blatantly appears as a character (her worst sin was not that she should have used him in a story, but that she should have done so without the necessary literary filter). And although James did not deign to read the story himself, references to it were enough for him to warn his philosopher brother William in a letter: “… she is as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent—which is saying a great deal. Her vigour and sweep of intellect are most rare and her talk superior altogether … At any rate draw it mild with her on the question of friendship. She’s a tiger-cat!”

  Most of Vernon Lee’s friendships were female and, on her part, rather obsessive, although they were, it seems, based entirely on a communion of intellects, which means that hers overwhelmed the intellects of those friends. When she found out that one of them was getting married to a man whom she had met only three times, she suffered a nervous collapse which was only the first in a series of such attacks that would last until her death. Another friend said that when she saw her for the first time, she felt like the Virgin before the Angel of the Annunciation. Vernon Lee must have been entirely asexual: she certainly never married and there was no mention of any love affair, and she was quite clear on the subject: “Loving people in the way of being willing to do anything for them is intolerable to me. I cannot like, or love, at the expense of having my skin rubbed off. I can do without people. I find it more comfortable to do without them.”

  She wore suits, occasionally a tie, occasionally a soft felt hat, and glasses that toned down her fiery grey-green eyes—the eyes of a “tigress”, according to another female friend. Her lower lip and her teeth were rather protuberant, her nose ungrateful: she said of herself that she had “a baroque ugliness”. Her talk was brilliant, her wit caustic, and she came up with so many arguments in a discussion that she would sometimes contradict herself and it would become hard to follow her. Her many original studies on aesthetics are now rather antiquated and her novels were never very good, but her books on the “spirit of place” and, in particular, her stories about ghosts or the supernatural are written with a mastery that approaches that of Isak Dinesen.

  At the end of her life, she read Freud, but got nothing from him: she considered him an obscurantist, her bête noire. She died in 1935, at the
age of seventy-eight. During her final years, she could hear nothing, and so spent those years even more isolated from the world than she always had been, and lacking the two things she most enjoyed, conversation, at which she excelled, and music, which consoled her.

  Adah Isaacs Menken, the Equestrian Poetess

  IT SEEMS ODD that at the end of her vertiginous life, Adah Isaacs Menken’s main concern should have been the publication of her one book of poems entitled Infelicia, which, in fact, she never saw, because she died on August 10, 1868, just a week before it appeared. It is true, however, that during the dozen or so years when she was at her most famous, she was not indifferent to literature or to men of letters, although she spent most of her time on stage, tied to a horse, and it was more because of this and the continuous scandals linked to her name that she became the first internationally known American lady of the theatre and a favourite of newspapers on two continents.

  Many of her contemporaries questioned the words “lady” and “theatre” when applied to her. As well as her four husbands (who included a boxer and a gambler – the latter came to a sticky end in Denver), she had numerous lovers, some of whom, inevitably, were writers, such as Alexandre Dumas père at the end of his days and that masochistic poet par excellence, Algernon Charles Swinburne, that tiny, red-haired, Victorian, homosexual drunkard, addicted to the whip. Adah Isaacs Menken had dealings of a different sort with other writers too: Walt Whitman was her friend and she was his first disciple; George Sand was godmother to her first child, the magnificently named Louis Dudevant Victor Emmanuel, who lived but briefly; the ill-fated Fitz-James O’Brien, a friend of Poe and possibly just as talented, was her companion in revels; Charles Dickens, when he was an easy-going, respectable gentleman, gave his permission for The Menken (as she herself liked to be called) to dedicate her slender volume of poems to him; Gautier praised her during his stay in Paris; Verlaine mocked her in a few malicious verses; and, as for her compatriot Mark Twain, when he was still Samuel Clemens, he bequeathed to posterity the most complete description of her performances. Menken’s art, alas, failed to impress that Southern journalist and, alas for her, Clemens was to make his name as a satirist. Adah Menken’s pièce de résistance, the one that made her famous in half the world, was the ride at the end of Mazeppa, an extremely free adaptation of Byron’s play, in which she played the eponymous hero. For all Twain’s malevolence, it is clear that the star’s interpretative gifts were nothing if not original: on one occasion, she played Lady Macbeth and—quite involuntarily and without the audience even noticing—changed Shakespeare’s text (in these more classical performances, her fellow actors, less gifted in improvisation, were, thanks to her, left floundering). The reason people went to see her in Mazeppa, however, was her final appearance on stage tied to the back of the horse and wearing a skin-tight, flesh-coloured leotard which, even from a short distance away, created the illusion that the actress was naked (it mattered little that The Menken was also sporting a ridiculous little moustache in keeping with her masculine role). According to Twain, who regretted not having taken his binoculars to the theatre, Menken appeared to be wearing not a leotard but “a thin, tight, white linen garment, of unimportant dimensions; I forget the name of the article, but it is indispensable to infants of tender age”. He considered the actress-hero’s behaviour throughout the performance as “lunatic”, and was pleased that in the second most popular play in her repertoire, The French Spy, The Menken played the part “as dumb as an oyster”, and so her “extravagant gesticulations” seemed almost passable.

  If we are to believe her chronicler, it seems inexplicable that an actress of such limited scope should for years have been able to fill theatres on both sides of the Atlantic. She must have had other qualities too. In person, she was doubtless a great seductress, capable of taming and even charming her most acerbic critics, among them the journalist Newell, who was utterly scathing about her, but who ended up being her husband for a week (another husband lasted only three days). And it would seem that her talent for provocation and publicity had no equal in the world until well into the twentieth century. When Baltimore was about to fall to the Union during the Civil War, she decided to remember her roots (she had been born near New Orleans and may have been a quadroon) and demanded that the entire theatre be painted grey to match the uniforms of the Confederate troops who were about to lose the city; when she had time (for she also gave lectures), she revealed herself to be one of the bravest, wisest and most ironic feminists of her day, protesting against the enslavement of women and always doing exactly as she pleased, until she was arrested by Northern troops. As she wrote in a letter: “They wanted to send me to ‘Dixie’, but would not permit me to take but one hundred pounds of luggage. Of course I could not see that … I wasn’t going across the lines without any clothes.”

  We know little about the true facts of her life and a great deal about its legends: it was even said that she was a Spanish Jewess born in Madrid (she may well have been Jewish), who, in her adolescence, had been a prostitute in Havana (having first been corrupted by an Austrian baron) and that, when she was famous, she appeared before the Emperor Franz Josef, at the court of Vienna, wearing a cape which she removed on greeting him to reveal, underneath, the equestrian costume she wore in Mazeppa, the one that gave every appearance of nudity (she did not, apparently, take the horse to the palace). There are numerous photos of her, almost always in poses plastiques, and the most delightful of these is one that shows her sitting on the knee of an old, fat and almost shirtless Dumas, with her head resting on his convex chest.

  Although she suffered more than a few falls from her horse, one of which occurred shortly before her death, she seems to have died of something else, although the doctors could not agree as to what this was, nor did they seem very interested in doing so. It is not entirely clear when she was born, but she was, at the time, in her thirties: in her final years she became increasingly depressed, absorbed in writing about the character of Shylock and, as I said at the start, worrying, above all, about her poems. However, rumour has it that it was her own fault that she did not see the published volume, being too preoccupied with choosing which portrait of her should adorn the cover, changing her mind again and again, thus delaying her launch as a poetess for so long that the book, in the end, was published posthumously. Perhaps it was for the best, since, although she had long ago ceased caring what the critics said about her performances, the virulent reviews that her poetry received might have wounded her deeply.

  Violet Hunt, the Improper Person of Babylon

  NO ONE COULD ever have accused Violet Hunt of being consistent, at least as regards her love life, for while she had a great liking for “irregular situations”, she also suffered frequent and spectacular attacks of respectability. The worst of these attacks occurred during her relationship with that famous man of letters, Ford Madox Ford, author of the brilliant novel The Good Soldier and close friend and collaborator of Conrad. Faced by his wife’s refusal to grant him a divorce and by Hunt’s insistence on ceasing to be merely his lover, Ford was on the point of retrieving the German citizenship of his ancestors in order to be able to marry under German law, and even underwent a depressing simulacrum of marriage, with a defrocked priest officiating, all in order to please his unhappy mistress. The result of this whole operation was scandal and a law suit—with the two Mrs Fords in the middle—which brought the novelist a few days in prison and Violet Hunt both a brief period of exile in Europe and the displeasure of one of the men she most admired, the very cautious and formal Henry James, who described the situation as “lamentable, lamentable, oh, lamenta
ble!”

  Violet Hunt was another of his protegées, with all of whom, contrary to the usual implications of the term, James had only the most chaste of relationships. Not that there was, in this case, any lack of opportunity, for, on one occasion, when invited to James’s house in the country, Violet fell ill after supper and threw up. She took advantage of the situation to go and change and presented herself in the living room later dressed only in a Chinese robe and, as she puts it in her diaries, “in a flirtatious mood”. James, however, began a long disquisition on the novels of Mrs Humphry Ward, whom it seems, he read more and valued more highly than he did Violet, who, to her double chagrin, never became a Mrs.

  James was not the first older man with whom Violet had tried her luck: when she was thirteen, she had offered herself in marriage to that apostle of the aesthetic, John Ruskin, who was, at the time, fifty-six. She felt terribly sorry for him after the death of Rose La Touche, for whom Ruskin had long yearned, having been captivated by her when she was just ten years old: a patient man, he had had the good taste to wait until she was eighteen, only to be met with rejection and, years afterwards, her death. Fortunately for Violet, her generous offer was also postponed and, later, forgotten. It seems that even the young Oscar Wilde—when his sexuality was more all-embracing—proposed marriage to her, and we know that Violet was one of the few women who succeeded in seducing an ingenuous and subsequently far more restrained Somerset Maugham, while she herself was seduced by H.G. Wells, a well-known womaniser. One should not infer from the mention of all these famous names that Violet Hunt was a megalomaniac, for some of her most difficult and enduring affairs were with men who have not passed into history, such as the diplomat who not only had five or six other lovers besides her, but also infected her with syphilis. Before that, another man had brought her both pain and pleasure, a man only three years younger than her father and, like him, a painter.