But what Vita had of course said was that if Virginia was not who she was, they would be spending not the day together but the night.
Orlando was Virginia’s gift to Julian, her way of being Eve. She intended it as a little book with pictures – about 30,000 words. When Vita heard she was writing it – in October 1927 – she was ‘thrilled and terrified’ and asked Virginia to dedicate it to her ‘victim’. Virginia wanted facts for the book. She asked for ‘some inkling’ of the quarrels Vita had with Violet and ‘for what particular quality’ Violet first chose Vita. ‘I want to see you in the lamplight, in your emeralds’. ‘Is it true you grind your teeth at night? Is it true you love giving pain?’
Short of heaven, Orlando was the ultimate gift to the aristocrat who has everything. It gave Vita Knole, a masculine and female identity, a lifespan of some hundreds of years. Time and gender are unconstrained. Orlando is a woman one century, a man the next. Knole can be Vita’s for she is a man. Violet can be hers for she is a man. Harold – Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine – can be hers for she is a woman.
No scandal attached to Orlando though it talked in its way of androgyny and lesbian love. Virginia Woolf treated the issue of sexual freedom with acceptable obliqueness and irony, acerbic disdain for ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, and with imagination. She sent the finished manuscript to Vita in a leather binding. Vita said it ‘was like a cloak encrusted with jewels and sprinkled with rose petals’. It made her laugh and cry. She read it in a day and was ecstatic, ‘completely dazzled, bewitched, enchanted, under a spell’. It was the ‘loveliest, wisest, richest’ book she had ever read. She said she felt like a wax figure in a shop window on which Virginia had hung ‘a robe stitched with jewels. Darling how could you have hung so splendid a garment on so poor a peg?’
Harold loved it too. ‘It really is Vita,’ he wrote to Virginia on 15 October 1928. ‘She strides magnificent and clumsy through 350 years.’ He said it filled him with ‘amazed excitement’. ‘I am deeply grateful to you, Virginia, for having written something so lovely and so strong.’ Nigel Nicolson called it ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’. But there was something mocking in Virginia Woolf’s tone. Orlando/Vita is slow-witted. He/she lives in a place that ‘is more like a town than a house’.
Lady Sackville was unimpressed. She regarded the book as an insult, called Virginia ‘that Virgin Woolf’ pasted a photograph of her in her own copy and captioned it:
The awful face of a mad woman whose successful mad desire is to separate people who care for each other. I loathe this woman for having changed my Vita and taken her away from me.
Virginia wrote Orlando at a time when Vita’s relationship with her mother had reached an all-time low. Lord Sackville died in 1928. Violet wrote Vita a loving note when she heard:
I know what a flawless companionship yours was, and often as a child was awed by your twin silences which I didn’t then realise arose from a perfect understanding of each other.
Lady Sackville became paranoid after his death and quarrelled with everyone. In the family lawyer’s office she screamed that Vita had stolen her pearls, she would stop every penny of her allowance, she wished her dead.
The following month Vita went alone to Knole in the evening and let herself in to the grounds with a master key:
I kept thinking that I should see Dada at the end of the long grass walks … But needless to say I saw nothing – nothing but the lilac in the dusk.
‘I must’ she wrote to Harold in a telling phrase ‘try to put Knole out of my heart as one puts a dead love.’
So Virginia’s gift of Orlando soothed. It took Knole and Violet out of Vita’s heart and put them on to the literary shelves. It was published to ‘great excitement’ in September 1928. Sales were ‘amazingly brisk’. By December it had gone into a third edition. In six months 8,000 copies were sold. It was a bestseller.
Publication coincided with the trial for obscenity of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Virginia offered to testify in its favour though she thought it a ‘meritorious dull book’. It is the forlorn story of Stephen Gordon a ‘congenital invert’ who sees herself as a man trapped in a woman’s body. Orlando, by contrast, is a free spirit who time and gender cannot constrain. ‘Sapphism’ was topical. Virginia allied herself with the cause by going away alone with Vita for a week in France.
For Violet the book was a laceration, the perpetrating of a lie the more painful because of Virginia Woolf’s reputation. Yet again Vita was the hero and she, Violet, the evil fox. Broderie Anglaise was her retaliation. She read in Orlando that English was ‘too frank and candid a tongue’ for her. In French she was frank, candid and disparaging. She took for her title an untranslatable French term for a kind of English embroidery that consists of decorating holes. Her novel, decoded, is a swingeing rebuttal of Vita’s version of their affair as published in Orlando. In Broderie Anglaise Violet tells the world that Vita loved her equally and that Vita, not she, was the one who reneged on the arranged wedding day.
Far from spanning centuries and landscapes of the mind, the entire action of Violet’s novel takes place in a single afternoon in the London drawing room of the house where the writer Alexa/Virginia lives with her pipe-smoking literary uncle, Jim/Leonard Woolf. She and Lord Shorne/Vita, who lives with his domineering mother, are having a lukewarm affair. On the day of the novel’s action, Alexa is to have a visit from Shorne’s former lover Anne/Violet, who now lives in Paris. Shorne does not know of this intended visit.
Alexa is an awkward lover, ‘incomplete as a woman’, ‘an old maid’, a virgin, her bed ‘so small and shy’ you can scarcely find it in the bedroom. Her hair is thin (Violet was often commended by Vita for her ‘truly beautiful hair’), she has an ‘elderly neck’, is of indeterminate age with ‘no bloom to lose’.
Everything about her is cerebral, famous, she has beautiful hands, but she is too thin, uninterested in food, wears dowdy clothes, is ‘very Oxford’. She is ‘a piece of waterweed’, ‘a puff of smoke’. A fifteenth-century Flemish painter would, Violet wrote, have ‘portrayed her with a caged goldfinch and a carnation spotted with dew’.
Shorne is flattered ‘to be the lover of one of the most distinguished women in England’. But Alexa lives only in her books, writes with her brain, not her heart, and there is not a prostitute or royal bastard among her ancestors.
Lord Shorne has plenty of prostitutes and royal bastards among his ancestors. Tall, with ‘perfect self-assurance’, he is attractive to women, has ‘languid grace’, ‘latent fire’, is easy with the servants and a Rolls-Royce waits at his door. Despite his foreign mother, his English ancestry prevails. He has that ‘hereditary face which had come, eternally bored, through five centuries’. ‘Down the years, this face, [the Sackville face], has been painted by Moro, Van Dyck, Gainsborough.’ Again and again for her heroes Violet used this description of Vita.
Shorne admires Alexa’s mind but does not desire her. They are awkward together when they travel abroad. ‘Alexa admired the wrists and ankles of the Medici Venus, Shorne admired those of the chambermaid.’ He pursues Alexa only because she is unavailable. A formula underpins all his love affairs: ‘I advance, you retreat. You retreat, I advance.’ It was elementary, as old as the hills.’
The true relationship of his life was with his cousin Anne/Violet, ‘who knew everything without having had to learn anything, and who had been as expert at fifteen as Alexa was at thirty…’. Shorne, on his nineteenth birthday, told Anne he loved her. Love, for him, is possession. He said it ‘as if he were handling some familiar object’. All other women are passing fancies. Anne was the one who mattered. She now lives in France, is witty, has a tendency to put on weight:
Would he never manage to banish that ghost? Never have done with that slow unfurling love which had sapped his youth, taking root in every recess of him like a perennial plant that blooms without any help from the gardener?
Alexa – what was she but a makes
hift? A wearisome substitute, founded on renunciation. ‘From the ruins of my palace have I built my cottage.’
In bed with Alexa, Shorne imagines he is with Anne. He has a recurring dream of piercing her heart with a sword. As this buries into her flesh
it sent up on either side of the wound a little spurt of white foam … it was at once horrible and delicious … he would wake up feeling cheated and drained.
(Violet had read her Freud.)
He lives with his mother in the ancestral home, Otterways/Knole. Alexa/Virginia is in thrall to the trappings of the aristocracy. The place is a ‘whole little town’. Even pats of butter on the breakfast tray are stamped with the family coat of arms. Shorne shows her portraits of his ancestors: ‘one who wrote a sonnet to Queen Elizabeth, another who died of wounds at the battle of Agincourt’. Alexa is overwhelmed. Her own family
consists of nothing but respectable middle-class citizens, much too learned and rather sexless. Our only flirtations have been with theses and all we’ve ever carried away is an audience.
In comes Lady Shorne, fat and fifty, with a cruel mouth and beauty in decline. She wears a dirty old flannel dressing gown pinned with the family jewels – rubies, diamonds and emeralds galore. On her head, ‘pushed slightly askew by her curlers’, is her tiara. There is ‘something not quite right about this great lady’. Not quite right at all. She alludes to intimate matters with a mixture of clinical curiosity and prudishness, talks in non sequiturs, waits for no answers, makes malicious asides and inventories of her jewellery.
She is a wicked old courtesan, her fists in the money bags, obsessed with power, a caricature of Mrs Keppel, Lady Sackville and all matriarchs who undermine their children’s lives. Shorne is afraid of her. Under her spell he is the Cheshire cat’s smile, the bird on the painted-glass picture caged by her eyes. When pregnant she viewed his birth as an immediate pleasure and a distant threat: a pleasure because she ‘could bring him up according to the sacred principles of her antique dealer’s heart’; a threat because he would one day challenge her power.
Safe in French Violet was as rude as she liked. All that she dared not say to or about her own mother, or mothers in general, she levelled at Lady Shorne. Her materialism and lust for power destroys her young. Her huge property is her passion:
Her exclusive and fanatical nature, hungry for a ‘mission’ embraced the cause of Otterways with a fervour which in earlier times would have been directed towards religion and heavenly rewards.
Otterways, like Knole, the Ombrellino, Grosvenor Street, is the forbidding palace, the status fantasy that accords grandeur to its owner but excludes intimacy and love. Shorne learned from an early age ‘not to touch glass cases and to be careful with petit-point chairs’. In Paris he was left alone in his mother’s huge apartment in the rue St Honoré. His childhood was lonely, sumptuous and punctuated by the appearances of this big spider who dispensed refusals and permissions, ‘the second even more frightening than the first’. His compensatory relationship is his love for his cousin which mother destroys. She spies on him, tells lies, pieces together letters he has torn up, throws away Anne’s photograph.
In a disconcerting scene, whether fiction or fact, Shorne seduces Alexa in the Charles II bedchamber at Otterways. The room is cold, musty and smells of camphor. Objects in it come ghoulishly alive. The Mortlake tapestry shows Joseph trying to escape the caresses of Potiphar’s wife. The figures have swarthy faces and fair curls and ‘looked sinister, like victims of the plague wearing wigs’. Shorne lights all the candles and tells Alexa to lie down on the bed:
fainting with pleasure, she obeyed. Shorne lay down beside her, impatiently brushing aside the little bags of camphor on the bolster.
Soon he was muttering incoherent phrases she could scarcely understand: ‘I’m the master here! I’ll show her! How dare she…’
With a frankness and candour not equalled by Orlando Violet implied Vita had a sexual score to settle with her mother: that she used women sexually to be revenged on her, that materialism and possession extend to people, too. The scene echoes the sexual exchange between Vita and Violet in that Paris hotel the day after Violet’s wedding in June 1919 when, Vita wrote in her Confession, ‘I had her, I didn’t care, I only wanted to hurt Denys.’
Mother spies through the keyhole while her son has sex. When Shorne wakes in the morning he does not know where he is or with whom. Pinned to the bedcover is a note from his mother: ‘Don’t worry – you won’t be disturbed. I’ll explain to the servants.’
Alexa/Virginia sets the scene for Anne’s/Violet’s afternoon visit. Shorne has told her Anne is ‘ravishingly pretty’ but overweight. Alexa hopes she will be huge, peroxided and painted. She rehearses topics of conversation, rejects gardens, sport and clothes and decides on cars. Buicks. (Cars, according to Violet, were talked about by her own mother and Virginia Woolf on the one occasion when they met for lunch in March 1932. ‘Neither knew a thing about motors; both thought they were on safe ground discussing a topic on which they could bluff to their hearts’ content.’
Alexa has used Shorne’s version of his affair with Anne in her bestselling book, Conquest. Anne, Shorne told her, was false, flighty and only wanted the opposite of what she had. Shorne wanted to marry her. ‘Everything was signed and settled.’ Anne was affectionate, ardent. Shorne suspected nothing. And then, without warning, she left him in the lurch, because of her horror of anything irrevocable, her inability to commit herself.
Anne arrives. She is of medium height, plump, her eyes small and mocking, her mouth too big, her hands small, square-fingered, slightly stained by nicotine. Her voice is her best feature, ‘soft, full of hidden depths, crepuscular’. That and her thick springy hair ‘curly as vine tendrils’. She has herself written two well-received novels. ‘Where was the siren Shorne had described?’
They talk, as prescribed, about gearboxes, shock absorbers and servo-brakes. It transpires that the fictional Violet has a husband and a little boy in Paris. She lives in a very old house by a stream and an old local woman cooks for her. ‘I’m so happy in France,’ said the languid voice. ‘If I hate England it may be because I’ve always been unhappy here.’ She tells Alexa she had not enjoyed Conquest, that the character of herself in it is ‘psychologically false’, ‘why make her into an intriguer, someone false and treacherous, when really she’s only an impulsive little animal?’
Violet retaliated against the portrait of herself in Orlando, the account of her relationship with Vita that the book broadcast, her chagrin that Challenge should have been censored by their mothers. Through Virginia as briefed by Vita she is described, she says in Broderie Anglaise, as
a brilliant, volatile, artificial creature, predictably unpredictable, a historical character, a du Barry who behaved like Lola Montez. In short a king’s mistress.
She had been turned by their combined efforts into ‘a family portrait worthy to hang in the Long Gallery beside Lely’s Nell Gwynne and Kneller’s Louise de Kéroualle’. It was, she implied, a portrait of a courtesan more fitting to her mother’s life. The very opposite of this portrait fitted herself. This was the role she had sought to avoid. She had wanted with Vita a life together, a marriage of the heart.
The public, with its taste for the romantic, loved Conquest/Orlando. It won enthusiastic praise from the critics and literary prizes. But it distorted Violet’s life.
Anne/Violet gives Alexa/Virginia her version of the broken ‘marriage’. The wedding was fixed for 11 April. Their cases were packed. Anne was waiting for Shorne to arrive. Shorne sent the chauffeur with a message: ‘The dreadful lying letter he wrote me! He didn’t even have the courage to tell me face to face.’ Lady Shorne has intercepted all their letters and forbidden him to marry. John Shorne is a coward with no assertion of his own. Anne was his victim, not the other way round. She asks Alexa if Shorne is still afraid of his mother. She ends the meeting by saying that, though betrayed, she still loves Shorne and always will. It is the abiding
theme of her life.
Too late for Conquest Alexa sees Shorne through Anne’s eyes. She sees his character as torn between his mother and father, ‘fatally divided … between two kinds of atavism’. Because of his mother he has ‘paltry affairs’, plays the role of libertine, wants to feel strong, masculine and brutal. But the other side of him is repressed, kind, solitary, lives for his dogs and fields.
Alexa sympathizes with Anne, and is contrite at having written ineptly about her using false information from Shorne. As Anne leaves she gives her all the flowers in the room and says she will read her books. She then confronts Shorne with Anne’s accusations. He defends himself, blames Anne, says she is ‘cunning personified’. Alexa then asks him one question:
‘Were you or weren’t you afraid of angering your mother by marrying Anne?’
‘Yes, but…’
‘That’ll do.’
* * *
It was on an autumn afternoon in November 1932 that the real Violet, over from Paris, called for tea in the London drawing room of the house where the real Virginia lived with her pipe-smoking literary husband, Leonard Woolf. Curiosity made her visit her rival – and she wanted impressions for her roman à clef. ‘Who d’you think came and talked to me t’other night?’ Virginia wrote to Vita
Three guesses. All wrong. It was Violet Trefusis – your Violet. Lord what fun! I quite see now why you were so enamoured – then: she’s a little too full, now, overblown rather; but what seduction! What a voice – lisping, faltering, what warmth, suppleness, and in her way – it’s not mine – I’m a good deal more refined – but that’s not altogether an advantage – how lovely, like a squirrel among buck hares – a red squirrel among brown nuts. We glanced and winked through the leaves; and called each other punctiliously Mrs Trefusis and Mrs Woolf – and she asked me to give her the Common R. which I did, and said, smiling, ‘By the way are you an Honourable, too? No, no,’ she smiled, taking my point, you, to wit. And she’s written to ask me to go and stay with her in France, and says how much she enjoyed meeting me; and Leonard: and we positively must come for a whole week soon. Also Mrs Keppel loves me, and is giving a dinner party solely for me in January. How I enjoyed myself! To be loved by Mrs Keppel, who loved, it is said – quite a different pair of shoes.
Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter Page 26
