Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  Denys freed himself from being accountable to or for his wife when he matchmade between her and the Princesse de Polignac. He accompanied her if a husband was required but she saw him less and less. Unencumbered, he travelled. He was drawn to Russia, had been working as a tutor there in 1914 and left only to fight in the war. In 1926 and again in the winter of 1927, he returned. Violet wanted to go too but he discouraged her. He was gone for months at a time. ‘I realised I was married to Lohengrin,’ she wrote.

  In an unpublished book, The Stones of Emptiness, he alluded to business appointments and curiosity as to what he would find ‘after a disastrous European war’ and eight years of Bolshevik rule. He was emphatic he was not a spy. ‘Above all I have never taken any part whatever in espionage of any sort or kind.’ But he was undoubtedly an English aristocrat averse to egalitarianism, socialism, trade-union rule.

  He found a changed country. He called it a wilderness now with the stones of emptiness stretched out on it. His prewar Russian friends shunned him. He was shadowed night and day, arrested, fined 500 roubles for contravening the Labour Code and half a rouble for getting off the wrong end of a tram. His book was a polemic against communism. He marshalled antipathetic arguments: it rewarded the unskilled and inefficient, sapped ambition and energy through lack of material incentive, encouraged widespread unemployment, exported goods in short supply at prices below production cost.

  He wrote of street hawkers, ‘careworn faces’, queues for food, no well-dressed people, and emblems of hammers and sickles replacing crowns and eagles. ‘Wealth has flown but poverty lingers.’ He complained that British royalty was mocked, as were Ramsay MacDonald, Winston Churchill and Austen Chamberlain. In the street, people fingered his clothes in envy. At a Trade Fair there was nothing to buy. The state monopoly on vodka was a third of the national budget.

  Theatres were full, he said, only because free seats were given to the Unions. The audience wore muddy boots, ate oranges, made no attempt at evening dress. State theatre conveyed the ‘ravings of an unbalanced mind tempered by hideous Bolshevik propaganda’. Ballet dancers were kept on long after they should have retired. Opera singers and sportsmen were second-rate.

  He did though enjoy his favourite sport, shooting capercailzie – a sort of wood grouse – in the spring:

  For 1½ roubles – 3 shillings – anyone can shoot throughout the USSR from the Baltic to the Pacific, from the Black Sea to the Arctic … I have never had the good fortune to kill a bear though I went after a fine specimen on one occasion.

  He also shot foxes, hares, blackgame, snipe, ducks and wild partridges.

  In March 1926 when Denys was getting away from his wife, deriding Bolshevism and shooting creatures, in Paris the play La Prisonnière by Edouard Bourdet at the Théâtre Femina caused ripples of interest. It was about the triangle of love of a young wife, Irène, her lover – an older woman – and her husband. The characters were said to be Violet, the Princesse de Polignac and Denys. Through the Princesse, Violet had become friendly with Bourdet’s wife, Denise. At the play’s end the lovers part and the older woman sends Irène a bunch of violets. Irène presses these to her lips and weeps. Lesbians in the audience showed solidarity by pinning violets to their lapels.

  Denys went back to Russia early in 1927. At a dinner at the British Embassy in Moscow he met Vita, travelling to Teheran with Dorothy Wellesley to see Harold. ‘Lord bless me!’ wrote Virginia Woolf. ‘Think of meeting your paramour’s husband. What did he say?’ Later that year he joined the Princesse de Polignac, Violet, Mrs Keppel, George and a ‘large party’ for a trip to the USA. ‘Denys vaguely toyed with the idea of finding a job there,’ Violet said. They had tea at the White House, went to Palm Beach, Florida, were guests of Winnaretta’s brother Paris Singer at the Everglades Club.

  In 1928 Denys made his last visit to Russia. ‘He went there’ Violet said ‘at the risk of his life. He was fundamentally restless … Russia never left him in peace for long…’ He travelled back to England via Vienna, Florence, Cannes and Avignon. With his sister Betty and his niece, in rain and mud he revisited the battlefields of Belgium, now fields of white crosses. In England he stayed with his other sister, Beatrice, a musician, at Buxted in Sussex. His tuberculosis was chronic. He had a permanent cough, was extremely thin, suffered from insomnia, mood swings, disturbing dreams that made him shout in his sleep. She nursed him while he completed his book.

  Back in Paris

  he continued to go to bed as late as ever, sometimes even neglecting to take an overcoat on the wildest winter night; precautions were not for him … Then, what was bound to happen, happened.

  Denys was thirty-nine. He had not tried to avert his death. His decade of civilian life had no particular direction. His scars of war were deep. He had not spoken to Violet of that war and all that he and relatively few others survived.

  Violet did not look after him for his last illness. His sister Betty travelled to Paris and arranged his admission to the American Hospital in Neuilly. His mother travelled over too. The Princesse de Polignac gave help to them all and visited. ‘I can only suppose they talked about music,’ Violet wrote, ‘as I was not encouraged to be present.’

  Violet, according to Denys’s niece, Phyllida Ellis, would

  put her head round the hospital door, say ‘Hello Denys’ in her deep voice. ‘Goodbye, I’m off to the south of France.’ Part of it was a horror of illness. But she was so selfish. That was a key word. She could never see anybody else’s point of view.

  He died on Monday 2 September 1929. ‘Heard from Pat that Denys was dead,’ Vita at Long Barn wrote in her diary. She had spent the day of his death with Virginia Woolf. They had a picnic under pine trees in Ashdown Forest. She visited Pat in London on 19 September and they talked about Denys’s death.

  Violet in the world’s eyes was a young widow, more socially acceptable than a divorcee. Her mother invited her to live at the Ombrellino. Violet preferred the ‘less obvious charms’ of her own house in France. After the funeral she wrote to Cyril Connolly in a way that circumvented feeling and romanticized the short life of a man whom she should not have married and to whom she had nothing to give:

  By now you doubtless know that Denys – my husband – is dead. He died nearly three weeks ago – and since I have been living in a sort of mist … My life is going through a series of revisions … More than anyone I know, he liked to live dangerously, his life was spent in impossible crusades. Russia was his Holy Land. His attitude towards life and towards death was magnificently condescending … I am writing hard at present with the fervour born of unhappiness.

  SEVENTEEN

  La Tour de St Loup de Naud near Provins was where Violet wrote after Denys’s death. Provins is a medieval town eighty kilometres from Paris, the hamlet of St Loup ‘one steep Utrillo-like street, green or blue shutters closed because of the heat, zinnias outside the cottages’. Marcel Proust urged her to visit Provins, its Romanesque church and St Loup in 1922.

  The steep street led to a derelict tower which the Princesse de Polignac bought and renovated for Violet. ‘Romantic and mysterious’, it was a continuation from Duntreath, Berkeley and the romance of childhood. Like Duntreath it was ‘half medieval, half exotic’. Set in the ruins of an eleventh-century abbey, it had a monks’ refectory, ramparts, twenty acres of park and woodland.

  Violet disdained practicalities, derided the ordinary, preferred theatrical effect. Her tower was inaccessible and hard to maintain. The unwary tripped down the narrow stairs. Beneath the dining room were dungeons, the chimneys had so far to draw that fires in the bedroom grates smoked like ‘the last act of the Valkyries’, waterpipes burst in winter, the place was so exposed.

  Alone there Violet half-faced ambition. ‘I had been put into the world to write novels,’ she said in her self-deprecating way. If the truth was unacceptable she could admit experience in fictional guise. Broderie Anglaise, written in French, was her roman à clef, the third in a trilogy about herself
and Vita. The others were Challenge by Vita and Orlando by Virginia Woolf. (She did not know of Vita’s ‘confession’, written in 1920 and hidden away.)

  In 1924, four years after Challenge was pulped in Britain, it was published as a palliative in New York. American readers did not know why it had been previously withdrawn. Reviewers surmised it was because of risk of libel. Vita changed the original dedication which read ‘with gratitude for much excellent copy to the original of Eve’ to

  ACABA EMBEO SIN TIRO, MEN CHUAJANI; LIRENAS, BERJARAS TIRI OCHI BUSNE, CHANGERI, TA ARMENSALLE

  which meant not a lot to most. Translated from Julian and Eve’s Romany language it read: ‘This book is yours, my witch. Read it and you will find your tormented soul, changed and free.’

  Pat Dansey gave Violet a copy of the American edition. Violet underlined passages she believed showed Vita’s love. The book was not published in Britain until 1973, a year after her death. Vita’s son and executor Nigel Nicolson returned the manuscript to its original publisher, Collins, their schedule interrupted by fifty years. In a foreword he wrote of Eve:

  The subtlety of Challenge is that an odious girl is made convincingly lovable. Eve, like Violet, is … a seductress who risked time and again her victim’s love by indifference, insult, and finally by betrayal. Eve is the portrait of a clever, infuriating, infinitely charming witch.

  Eve/Violet makes Julian/Vita lose his upright manly head with her wanton ways. And because she is a witch and full of feminine wiles, she betrays him. Challenge was the stuff of Hollywood psychodrama. ‘In the end,’ said Greta Garbo in 1922 of her role in The Temptress, ‘I have to fall through the ice so the show can go on.’ Similarly Eve drowns so that Julian can shape up, the expedient fate for bewitching sirens.

  Through Pat Dansey Violet heard of Vita’s burgeoning relationship with Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury’s leading woman novelist. Orlando: A Biography was published in 1928, the year before Denys died. Openly dedicated to Vita and about her, it showed photographs of her décolletée with ropes of pearls, and with her dogs at Long Barn. Violet knew every allusion, every characterization in the book. By publishing it Virginia Woolf declared intimacy with Vita’s life. Violet had lost any such intimacy. Even trivial contact was denied. She was punished, exiled, silenced, for her manifestation of love. ‘I ache with the sense of the appalling unfairness,’ she had written to Vita. ‘You are as guilty as I.’

  She is cast as Princess Sasha and rooted in the usual tyrannies of her sex. Orlando calls her Sasha after a white Russian fox he had as a boy ‘a creature soft as snow, but with teeth of steel, which bit him so savagely that his father had it killed’. She and Orlando meet on the ice which melts under their passion. She talks ‘so enchantingly, so wittily, so wisely (but unfortunately always in French … English was too frank, too candid a tongue for her’. ‘In all she says and does’ there is something hidden ‘she never shone with the steady beam of an Englishwoman’.

  Her rank is not as high as she would like, she flirts, there is something coarse about her, she is ‘deceitful’, ‘faithless’, ‘mutable’, ‘fickle’, a ‘devil’, ‘adulteress’, ‘deceiver’. She abandons Orlando on the very day when they had agreed to elope together. By the time she is forty she is fat, lethargic, befurred ‘marvellously well-preserved, seductive, diademed, a Grand Duke’s mistress’.

  Violet had not met Virginia Woolf. This was Vita’s account, as fed to Virginia, of her character and part in their relationship. It was as Violet saw it one more distortion, another betrayal, a reversal of what had happened, a blackening of her name.

  Vita assured Harold that Violet was ‘a madness of which I should never again be capable … a thing like that happens once and burns out the capacity for such a feeling’. She confided to him – up to a point – her same-sex affairs with Pat Dansey; Dorothy Wellesley; Mary Campbell, wife of the poet Roy Campbell; Margaret Voigt; Evelyn Irons; Hilda Matheson, Director of Talks at the BBC. Her relationship with Virginia Woolf was of a different ilk.

  ‘These Sapphists love women; friendship is never untinged with amorosity,’ Virginia wrote of Vita in her diary on 21 December 1925. She did not consider herself one of ‘these Sapphists’, though she was interested enough in women who loved each other. She described herself as ‘sexually cowardly’, ‘valetudinarian’, with a ‘terror of real life’. Mentally fragile, afraid of loss of control, she preferred to hold hands, exchange glances and ideas: ‘But what I want of you is illusion – to make the world dance.’ She and her husband Leonard had, early on, some sexual endeavour which Vita said ‘was a terrible failure and was abandoned quite soon’. She gained her hold on the world by writing things down.

  Vita reassured Harold that here was a ‘soul friendship. Very good for me and good for her too.’ Virginia she said was not accustomed to ‘emotional storms’:

  She lives too much in the intellect and imagination … I look on my friendship with her as a treasure and a privilege … I shan’t ever fall in love with her, padlock, but I am absolutely devoted to her.

  She admired the originality of Virginia’s mind, her perspicacity, depth, wit and gift – the excellence of her prose. She deferred to what she perceived as true talent, was flattered and honoured by Virginia’s interest in her, found her ‘dowdy but beautiful’ and was ‘scared to death’ of any sexual exchange. She did not want to precipitate a psychotic or depressive attack. Sex with Virginia, Vita reassured Harold, was a fire with which she had no wish to play. ‘Probably I would be less sagacious if I were more tempted, which is at least frank.’ They went to bed together twice which was often enough.

  Vita could write to Virginia

  It is incredible how essential to me you have become … oh my dear! I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you; I love you too much for that. Too truly.

  And Virginia could take it on board for it was on paper, contained, without danger.

  Vita’s aristocratic ‘splendour’ inspired Virginia’s love and satire and informed Orlando:

  she shines in the grocers shop in Sevenoaks with a candle lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung … There is … her capacity to take the floor in any company, to represent her country, to visit Chatsworth, to control silver, servants, chow dogs; her motherhood (but she is a little cold & offhand with her boys).

  In literature, Virginia Woolf had comparable confidence, style and aristocratic splendour. She shines with candlelit radiance on the printed page. Vita, she thought, had a ‘pen of brass’ and no particular originality of mind (‘she never breaks fresh ground. She picks up what the tide rolls to her feet’). But she was, for Virginia, life. She was in awe of the ‘central vigour’ that prompted Vita to write fifteen pages a day, admired her manner – ‘striding; silk stockings; shirt & skirts; opulent; easy; absent; talking spaciously & serenely to the Eton tutor’ – the way she dominated the road as she drove her large blue Austin car. In her diary she wrote of the ‘opulence and freedom’ of Long Barn, ‘flowers all out, butler, silver, dogs, biscuits, wine, hot water, log fires Italian cabinets, Persian rugs, books.’ And when Vita took her to Knole, as Vita did with all the women she loved, she saw her living heritage, her links with the past:

  Vita stalking in her Turkish dress, attended by small boys down the gallery, wafting them on like some tall sailing ship – a sort of covey of noble English life: dogs walloping, children crowding, all very free & stately: & [a] cart bringing wood in to be sawn by the great circular saw … They had brought wood in from the Park to replenish the great fires like this for centuries: & her ancestresses had walked so on the snow with their great dogs bounding by them. All the centuries seemed lit up, the past expressive, articulate; not dumb and forgotten … After tea, looking for letters of Dryden’s to show me, she tumbled out a love letter of Ld Dorset’s (17th century) with a lock of his soft gold tinted hair which I held in my hand a moment. One had a sense of links fished up into the light which are usually submerg
ed.

  Vita gave Virginia Challenge to read in June 1927. The gift stirred memories and on 11 June, she wrote, provocatively:

  Do you know what I should do if you were not a person to be rather strict with? I should steal my own motor car out of the garage at 10pm tomorrow night, be at Rodmell [Virginia’s house] by 11.5, throw gravel at your window, then you’d come down and let me in; I’d stay with you till 5, and be home by half-past six. But, you being you, I can’t; more’s the pity. Have you read my book? Challenge, I mean. Perhaps I sowed all my wild oats then. Yet I don’t feel that the impulse has left me; no, by God; and for a different Virginia I’d fly to Sussex in the night. Only with age, soberness, and the increase of consideration, I refrain. But the temptation is great.

  Virginia wired, ‘Come then’, to which Vita did not respond. Three days later she wrote to Vita:

  You see I was reading Challenge and I thought your letter was a challenge ‘if only you weren’t so elderly and valetudinarian’ was what you said in effect ‘we would be spending the day together’ whereupon I wired ‘come then’ to which naturally there was no answer and a good thing too I daresay as I am elderly and valetudinarian – it’s no good disguising the fact. Not even reading Challenge will alter that. She is very desirable I agree: very.