Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  In the new year of 1933 Violet sent her ‘a vast nodding bunch of lilac’. ‘No, I’m not spending the New Year between her and Mme. de Polignac,’ Virginia wrote to Vita. ‘I wave the banner of chastity and cry upward.’

  Violet hoped that Virginia Woolf, through the Hogarth Press, would publish her novel Tandem, written in English, about the relationship of two Greek sisters from 1900 until an imagined 1962 (the year Vita was to die). This did not happen. The doors of Bloomsbury and Kent were closed to her. She was not to be acknowledged seriously. She was Eve, Sasha, fox, squirrel, siren, panther.

  Broderie Anglaise was published in France in 1935. In March that year Virginia perceived her love affair with Vita as over:

  Not with a quarrel, not with a bang, but as ripe fruit falls. No I shant be coming to London before I go to Greece, she said. And then I got into the car.

  Neither Virginia nor Vita read Violet’s book. It was not mentioned in their correspondence. There was no copy of it among Vita’s books when she died. Virginia Woolf did not read in French. It was not dedicated to either of them or translated into English until 1968 when both were dead. It caused no stir, offended no one, its truths and half-truths curtained by fiction, a foreign language and the passing of time.

  EIGHTEEN

  Violet’s account of herself in Broderie Anglaise was fictional too. A refutation not a correction. She was not Princess Sasha in Orlando, Eve in Challenge, nor the straightforward Anne of her roman à clef. She did not have a husband, child and peace of mind in France. Toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire.

  Within five years of her exile she created a distinguished life. In Paris she went to first nights of concerts and plays, to private views of exhibitions. In her novels, light malicious commentaries on aristocratic preoccupations, she wrote with equal style in French and English. She was invited to the supper parties of Jean Cocteau and of Anna de Nouailles. Francis Poulenc was a friend. They shared a liking for beautiful houses and good food. She would visit him at his house beside the Loire, he was often at St Loup. Colette called her Geranium, not Violet, thought her tower at St Loup beautiful in a gothic way ‘and the cushions in all kinds of pink. And the woods full of wild strawberries.’

  St Loup was the home Violet would like to have had with Vita whom she called ‘the tallest feather in my immodest cap’. Vita visited twenty years later and said the place gave her a ‘queer feeling … almost as though I belong there’.

  But alone there Violet’s vulnerability and identity became masked by façade. With satirical flourish she adopted the values of the world she had said she despised. As time passed she seemed more her mother’s camp understudy than the bohemian spirit to which she had aspired. She was châtelaine, and hostess, with a butler, chauffeur, cook, a maid who dressed her and did her hair.

  In her twenties she had written to Vita: ‘I have shown myself naked to you, mentally, physically and morally … I have added curtains to my manners for other people’s benefit, but for you there are no curtains, not even gossamer ones.’ The curtains became embroidered, her manner strange. To many she seemed quirky, unknowable. The diarist Peter Quennell wrote of her:

  the relationship between Violet and the truth was always a flirtatious, loosely knit alliance rather than a firmly faithful bond. She did not conceal or distort facts as much as lightly play with them, doing her best to redeem their intrinsic banality by adding a touch of fiction here and there. What should have happened interested her far more than the humdrum march of real events.

  To furnish St Loup she brought statues from Italy, blackamoors, elaborate silver. The place seemed geared for grand romance. Visitors were told to ask at the Paris Ritz and the concierge would arrange a car. Those not on private incomes felt deterred. Guests slept in canopied beds in turret rooms with chandeliers, mottled mirrors in magnificent frames, wall hangings of coats of arms or mythical birds. One bedroom she called ‘chambre Louis XIV. It boasted a fourposter bed of that period, some high-backed tapestry chairs’. She gave extravagant attribution to pedestrian antiques, appeared not to care what was real or imitation, the truth or a lie. The Louis XIII dining-room chairs were upholstered in mauve velvet. The vermeil dessert spoons had belonged, she said, to Catherine the Great. The faïence lions either side of the Gothic fireplace had belonged to some king.

  For her library she collected books of royal provenance. She bought them if they had belonged to Mme de Pompadour or bore the coat of arms of Henry VIII or Elizabeth I. From them she constructed royal genealogies for the Keppels and Edmonstones. She was Mrs Keppel’s daughter and, so she said, Edward VII’s too. As time passed she put on weight, cared overmuch about food, was outwardly sparkling and sharp while her eyes stayed sad.

  In her novels she mocked the attitudes with which she seemed to collude. She contrived slight plots, used brittle dialogue, took for her themes betrayed lovers, dominant mothers, mercenary old ladies making inventories of their jewels. When one of her characters complains her marriage is an empty parody her hostess replies, ‘still, you’ll be able to entertain.’

  To entertain … you’d have sworn that doors opened, that a glittering crowd thronged down a staircase out of Tiepolo; that musicians tuned their instruments, while liveried flunkies bowed to the very ground.

  ‘To entertain’ was the essence of life at the Ombrellino where Mrs Keppel ruled. She kept alive in microcosm Edwardian high life under southern skies. ‘Chips’ Channon – Sir Henry Channon, Conservative MP and diarist – visiting in 1934 described her as like a worldly Roman matron without the cruelty. She lived, he said, in a ‘super-luxurious villa full of treasures’ was ‘grey and magnificent and young in spirit,

  but she cannot resist lying and inventing, and saying anything that comes into her Roman head. It is a habit she contracted long ago when, to amuse the blasé King Edward, she used to tell him all the news of the day spiced with her own humour.

  From her mother Violet learned to embellish the truth to entertain eminent guests.

  Violet did not again quarrel with ‘men chinday’ over issues of verity. Banishment made her wary. She lost Vita, love, England, youth and was not going to risk losing Mother too. The Ombrellino became her second home. She preferred St Loup but moved between the two and acknowledged her debt:

  If I speak four languages fluently it is thanks to my mother; if I know anything about pictures, furniture, bibelots, it is again thanks to her. If I enjoy travel, good conversation, good company.

  All the social graces came from Mrs Keppel, if not integrity of heart. Violet seemed to forgive her mother, to concede to her values and style. She filled her time with writing, flirtations, travel, conversation, company. The days of Rebellion were over. As in her stories possessions triumphed over love. She was caught in a quest for status, a craving to impress. To her chosen country she brought the hedonism of her mother’s world, of the Edwardians whom she satirized but did not reject.

  Behind the mask she seemed ill at ease, her flirtations false. She was bright and sparkling in society, depressed in private. Phobic about being on her own, she spent inordinate time on the telephone, would not sleep in a house or apartment alone, yet could not say of what she was afraid. She was a chronic insomniac – ‘I am sleep’s beggar, grateful for a yawn’ – and said that in the small hours of the night the word ‘déclassé’ confronted her ‘like a gamekeeper’. She panicked about growing old, had her face lifted, her hair permed, coloured, curled, was for ever powdering her cheeks and painting her lips.

  She and her mother now wrote letters of devotion. Her mother called her ‘darling Titten’, ‘precious Luna’, sent her money, paid the bills. After a stay by her mother at St Loup Violet sent a love letter, cloying, adoring:

  Little love

  … I could not bear you to go, every minute we spent together was perfection. It is months since I have known such happiness. You can’t think how much I admire you, my own precious, you are all the world to me, and I could not live without you.<
br />
  God bless you and keep you, my sweet.

  Your adoring Titten

  Best love to Papa and Uncle Archie.

  Her mother referred to Violet’s novels as ‘writing’ in inverted commas. Literary and oblique and so often in French, she took scant interest in them. To readers they seemed inconsequential, like the slight relationships of lords and ladies who lived in grand mansions and fooled with love. Philippe Jullian said her characters came straight from her address book, ‘the rich and fashionable with their hangers on’. Her novels, he said, were like dinner parties in a rich mansion:

  During the evening the smartly dressed and witty guests from time to time let drop a remark that suggests that they too know what it is to love and suffer. But however intense their emotions it is hard not to think that a longish cruise or plans for a party or two would not lighten their mood.

  Her style sparkled with cleverness, irritated and concealed. She littered her prose with foreign quotation. Her readers did not know that she coded into her work her experience of lesbian passion, emotional betrayal, self-division, riches as rivals and the leitmotiv of lost love. She dealt in word games, paradoxes, conundrums and parried and played with the lies and truth. ‘Trust no one,’ she said in old age to her friend and executor John Phillips.

  After Broderie Anglaise she again wrote in English. In Hunt the Slipper her hero has Nicolson names – Nigel Benson. He is middle-aged, ‘feminine’, married, safely adulterous. Caroline, his lover, wants to break the secret, cause a scandal. ‘She had none of the frivolity of the older generation,’ Violet wrote with a swipe. ‘Latent in her mind was the theory that the world was well lost for love’s sake.’

  ‘I want to throw everything away for your sake,’ her alter ego says:

  I could so easily dispense with luxury … You think that the lover has the romantic part. You’re wrong: a lover … is a convention. But what is not a convention is a husband who is also a lover.

  Violet knew the convention of infidelity well: from the King despite the pomp and promises of royal marriage; from her mother in her boudoir of flowers, there with the King while her husband was out. With Vita she had hoped for unconventional fidelity, for a partner who was also a lover.

  In conversation and writing she switched with facility from French to English and weakened her style by intertwining the two – Broderie Anglaise and Echo in French, Hunt the Slipper and Tandem in English. She interlaced her unimportant plots and slight characters with epigrams and apophthegms – a sort of conversational spice:

  ‘I wish we could have children without the mothers. A kind of masculine virgin birth.’

  ‘She is the last representative of a milieu to which she never belonged.’

  ‘Her bones were joss-sticks, her eyes were by Fabergé, her heart, made out of Venetian glass, was a pretty toy.’

  But she moved into a cultural limbo, her books not translated, her worlds divided, her print runs small, her readership split. She had no need to make her writing pay. She said she wrote each morning for a couple of hours but as the day passed her brain went woolly. She thought of herself as naturally indolent, without particular talent, deferred to Vita – a bestselling author – as the better writer, though her own style was sharper, her wit quicker, her intelligence more acute.

  In 1930 Vita with her mother’s money bought Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, a parallel to St Loup. It was a ruin set in seven acres of land. Its single intact fragment was a high square tower with adjoining turrets. The place, said Vita, ‘caught instantly at my heart and imagination. I saw what might be made of it. It was Sleeping Beauty’s castle.’

  The creation of Sissinghurst and its gardens was her shared enterprise with Harold. He stayed the week in London and caught the Saturday train to Kent. In letters to each other they wrote of its reconstruction: moat walls, ponds, Tudor fireplaces, courtyards. But the tower was her citadel, sequestered, closed to her family. In thirty years her son Nigel visited her there twice. ‘Chacun sa tour,’ Violet said when she saw it.

  ‘I will not pretend,’ Violet wrote after Denys’s death, ‘that after a year or two had elapsed I was not seriously tempted by the thought of remarriage.’ It was one of her teasing sentences, not quite a lie. She was tempted by the thought and display of it, but steered clear of the fact. Her declared suitors were gay, rich, titled and playing the same game. Often they proved spiteful about her in memoirs and letters. One or two had been lovers of Harold’s. She went through a charade of wooing, spoke always of who was in love with her, never of whom she loved.

  She boasted that Max Jacob proposed to her. He was painter, poet, a friend of Picasso’s, had a lover, Maurice Sachs. She met him through the Princesse de Polignac and Jean Cocteau:

  He called on me one afternoon dressed, he imagined, for the part of a suitor. A small dapper Punchinello, he wore a top hat, white spats, gloves the colour of fresh butter. He hung his hat on his stick which he held like a banner between his legs. He was irresistible. I longed to take advantage of his proposal which was couched in terms that sounded as though he had learned them out of a book on etiquette. We examined the pros and cons. St Loup, far from being an asset, proved a stumbling block.

  ‘Je déteste la campagne,’ said Max, ‘tout y est trop vrai! The nearest I ever get is the Bois, and that is bad enough because it reminds me of the country.’

  ‘What about travel?’

  ‘That is different, the place doesn’t belong to me, there are no responsibilities. C’est comme si je mangeais au restaurant.’

  A great advantage, he pointed out, was his being about twenty years older than me. ‘I have waited forty years before proposing to anyone. I am not likely to propose to anyone else.’

  Another great advantage was that it was no proposal at all. It was a way of parodying heterosexual necessity, of attracting attention, of seeming to be sexual, an in-joke for the circles in which she moved. She entertained her conquests at St Loup and flaunted them at the Ombrellino. True partnerships were not revealed and, as time went on, not made.

  Gerald Berners was another of her fiancés for a day. He composed, painted, was amusing and liked his lovers young and male. He had a house in Rome overlooking the forum, another in London in Halkin Street and the eighteenth-century Faringdon Hall in Berkshire. On his desk there he kept a little clockwork pig. Wound up, it danced on its trotters. He called it Violet.

  In autumn 1933 he visited St Loup. He was taking pep pills bought from a chemist at the Place Blanche in Paris. Violet suggested they marry and pool their assets. By the end of the evening they were engaged. News of it appeared next day in the London papers. Violet received congratulatory telegrams. ‘Lord B. is marrying V. Trefusis (whom you once knew) because they both like poached eggs,’ Virginia wrote to Vita. Mrs Keppel thought it all in poor taste and published a denial. Berners said he sent The Times a note: ‘Lord Berners has left Lesbos for the Isle of Man.’

  Such games were not the same as being candid. They were a camp version of Edwardian duplicity. Violet dismissed her suitors with a quip and an anecdote. ‘Happiness for me lies in things, not people,’ she has one of her characters say:

  You could say that my irresponsible and evasive nature can’t support the heavy trappings of love … it becomes as grotesque as a little girl dressed in grown-up finery. It knows what’s expected and wanted; flattered, for a little while it will turn grown-up … but the result is caricature.

  She had told Vita and Denys that she was not attracted to men but she flaunted her quasi-seductions. Mrs Keppel was said to deter some of the fortune-hunting young men who hovered round. Comte Stanislas de La Rochefoucauld ‘a witty though fatuous young man’ had a title, an actress wife of whom he was tired and a small inheritance. He lost interest in Violet when Mrs Keppel told him English marriage customs precluded a widow receiving money from her parents if she remarried. ‘I wonder how much Violet still has,’ she is supposed to have said. ‘She’s such a child.’

  Com
te Jean de Gaigneron, with whom Harold had an affair in 1919, was another of the gay men with whom Violet made a sexual parade. And then there was Comte Louis de Lasteyrie who knew Proust, owned a medieval chateau and was great grandson of the Marquis de Lafayette … And the Marquis de Chavannes who was once married to the Prince de Polignac’s niece and to whom Violet proposed on account of his title. He said he resisted because she wanted him to shave his moustache.

  The games she played with her princes and beaux were part fantasy, part parody and in part pathological. There was desperation behind the charade. It was as if her mother’s warning about not having a husband had frozen her heart.

  Like her mother she admired and flirted with men of rank. She had some kind of affair with the statesman Paul Reynaud Premier of France in 1940. In her memoir she wrote of a lunch party with him and her mother at ‘Lapérouse, the world-famous restaurant on the Quai des Grands Augustins’.

  My mother chaffed him in a way to which he had certainly not been accustomed; they parted in amused and mutual esteem. After that, I was constantly to meet Paul Reynaud.

  It was not clear whether Reynaud wanted mother, daughter, neither or both. ‘You have two wives,’ Violet is supposed to have said to him, ‘it’s time you had a mistress,’ and offered herself. And then there was Comte Jean Ostrorog, son-in-law of the munitions’ manufacturer Sir Basil Zaharof who had propositioned her in London in the 1920s … And for a winter in Budapest the Regent’s son Horthy Estvan…:

  No wonder I fell in love … He had eyebrows like swallows’ wings, and the figure of a Caucasian dancer. No wonder I took a rococo house in Buda which might have belonged to the Rosenkavalier … night after night we would dance … Up and down outside the detectives would pace for Horthy’s escapade with an Englishwoman was not approved of. It was lovely while it lasted.