A Book of Secrets

by Michael Holroyd

  I was particularly interested to see in Tiziana’s Cimbrone exhibition two photographs of Ernest Beckett, the second Lord Grimthorpe (Violet’s father, Luie Tracy Lee’s husband, Eve Fairfax’s fiancé and Catherine Till’s grandfather). In the first photograph, taken in England, we see him clothed in all his dull misleading respectability. He wears a dark suit with heavy imprisoning waistcoat, and carries, as tokens of his probity, a top hat and a walking stick. This is the allegedly reliable Yorkshire banker who harbours extravagant political ambitions. Years later, freed from his abortive career in Britain and looking younger, His Lordship is elegantly perched on a terrace of the Villa Cimbrone. He has blossomed into a rather dashing, bohemian figure with gleaming co-respondent’s shoes and a rakishly tilted bow tie.

  I was to deliver my talk on Lytton Strachey from a pavilion in the upper reaches of the garden at the Villa Cimbrone, the audience seated among the statues and flower beds before us. Only there was no audience. No one was surprised by this. Italian time is more elastic than English time and there was no urgency in the atmosphere. Above us passed occasional growling helicopters, like monstrous wasps, carrying bags of water to deposit gently on the unresponsive mountain fires. Meanwhile the audience wandered slowly in from all parts of the grounds. Half an hour after I was due to begin, I began.

  They do things differently abroad – and so do we. I had never thought of delivering Lytton Strachey’s words in a falsetto voice in Britain. But in Italy, who was there to stop me? The answer is that there was Maggie, seated next to a statue of a faun. I looked away, raised my voice and was on my way. Gabriella Rammarione, my translator, had the notion of compensating for this unexpected treble by lowering her voice to a special contralto when translating Strachey’s words. And the audience responded, particularly to the more serious passages, with waves of laughter drowning out the periodical growl of the helicopters.

  Both Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf had momentary dreams of relocating Bloomsbury in Italy. It was up to us, I said, to recreate memories of them here – and hope their spirits looked benignly down on us. I looked across at Maggie and saw her smiling. I had got away with it.

  Next day Tiziana and the Italian film director Lina Wertmüller (who was about to celebrate her eighty-first birthday at Ravello) gave a performance dedicated to Violet Trefusis and based on her letters to Vita Sackville-West. It seemed to me that Forster and Lawrence, Strachey and Woolf were all investigating in their books new possibilities of human conduct – which Violet Trefusis also explored. I sat in the garden with Maggie and listened to the talk from the same pavilion I had occupied the previous day. The beauty of the place and their voices, like a serenade mingling old age and youth, were such that I was never bored by my lack of understanding. But Maggie did understand and afterwards told Tiziana how impressed she had been by her advocacy, which made Violet no longer seem merely ‘the other woman’ but someone of interest in her own right. Tiziana stretched out her arms and hugged her with delight.

  6

  Women in Love

  That autumn, back in London, I set myself to read Violet Trefusis’s novels and was struck by their quality. In the public mind these books had been almost wholly submerged by Violet’s notorious love story with Vita Sackville-West. There seemed to me two ways of approaching Violet: through her fiction (and the fiction of other writers into which she had been absorbed): or through her autobiography and correspondence. These two routes of fact and fiction, like the two steep paths up to Cimbrone, intertwine and, meeting at the same destination, could be charted together.

  Biographers often struggle to escape the prison of chronology before resigning themselves to opening with a birth. Violet Keppel was born in London on 6 June 1894. The most influential figure in her life appears to have been her mother Alice Keppel. In 1952, five years after her mother’s death, Violet published a volume of memoirs, Don’t Look Round, dedicated ‘To the memory of my beloved mother’. As a child she had been wrapped in the resplendent warmth of her mother’s love – ‘luminous … like golden armour’. She embellishes this armour with many brilliant accessories: intelligence, humour, courage, style. Above all, her mother ‘excelled in making others happy’. Violet omits her greatest achievement, which lay in making the Prince of Wales, King Edward VII, happy. Alice Keppel was a woman of almost obscene discretion; and Violet tailors her book of ‘selected moments, hand-picked’ to match this discretion. It is deceptively well camouflaged.

  Her parents competed in telling Violet stories when she was a child. Her mother’s stories were ‘a startling mixture of fantasy and realism’; her father’s ‘intrepid, if orthodox’. Don’t Look Round is, like her mother’s stories, a blend of make-believe and vitality, shaped like fiction, with plenty of dialogue and revelatory omissions.

  Alice Keppel was the dominating character in the marriage, its life force. Violet is careful to grant her father some modest abilities: he is kind-hearted, easily pleased, methodical, tidy – a large man of little consequence with a finely waxed moustache and an eye for classical works of art. Nowhere does Violet suggest that he might not have been her biological father. Her mother’s lover, Ernest Beckett, finds no place in her book.

  Another area of telling reticence is her pen portrait of Vita Sackville-West. Don’t Look Round was published over twenty years before the love affair between Violet and Vita became known to the public. Vita, with her ‘deep stagnant gaze’, is depicted as being a somewhat gauche and perpendicular figure. Both girls dream of romantic heroes from the upper echelons of history and literature. And they have one other property in common: powerful mothers.

  In her novel The Edwardians Vita was to describe Violet’s mother, Alice Keppel, as ‘a woman who erred and aspired with a certain magnificence. She brought to everything the quality of the superlative. When she was worldly, it was on a grand scale. When she was mercenary, she challenged the richest fortunes. When she loved, it was in the highest quarters. When she admitted ambition, it was for the highest power.’ Under the name Romola Cheyne, she is presented as a figure out of grand opera: not the virtuous heroine but an amoral schemer.

  It is when describing Vita’s mother, the oppressive Lady Sackville, that Violet looks round momentarily and abandons her caution.

  She was as intermittent, yet omnipresent, as the Cheshire Cat. Her daughter, who admired and distrusted her, was, up to a point, the Cheshire Cat’s plaything … In her too fleshy face, classical features sought to escape from the encroaching fat. An admirable mouth, of a pure and cruel design, held good … Her voluminous, ambiguous body was upholstered, rather than dressed, in what appeared to be an assortment of patterns, lace, brocades, velvet, taffetas. Shopping lists were pinned to her bosom. She kept up a flow of flattering, sprightly conversation, not unlike the patter of a conjuror, intent on keeping your mind off the trick he is about to perform.

  Lady Sackville was a formidable woman and a noted beauty in her day. She had also sat to Rodin, after meeting him at the dinner party given by Ernest Beckett in 1905, around the time Rodin was embarking on his bust of Eve Fairfax. Despite a number of invitations over the next few years, Rodin was not to visit Lady Sackville at Knole until 1913, when the place so impressed him that, according to her grandson Nigel Nicolson, he ‘had fallen in love with Lady Sackville’. Lady Sackville’s biographer, Susan Mary Alsop, suggests it was her ‘vanity and innocence’ that ‘led her to believe’ he loved her; while Rodin’s biographer, Ruth Butler, maintains that he ‘allowed himself to be drawn into a friendship with one of the most world-weary women alive’.

  Victoria Sackville was then in her early fifties and Rodin approaching his mid-seventies. Their negotiations, to and fro, over the next eighteen months had the exaggerated gestures of a ballet. After his visit to Knole, Rodin suggested that he make a portrait bust of Lady Sackville’s daughter Vita. But Victoria Sackville was adamant. She enjoyed having portraits made of her and had in the past commissioned them from John Singer Sargent, Charles
Carolus-Duran and others. She looked forward to being ‘done’ with a boa round her neck, she informed Rodin, since ‘at my age being almost a grandmother, one loses a bit of line in the neck’. What she hoped for was the repossession of those handsome classical features that were becoming engulfed in the fleshy casing of middle age. But perhaps it was already too late. She had been spectacularly beautiful when young but, as Violet observed, her famous ‘classical features’ were now swelling voluminously into an inflated balloon-like shape. Feeling curiously lonely since Vita’s marriage to Harold Nicolson (though hopeful it would put an end to her daughter’s scandalous relationship with Lord Grimthorpe’s daughter Violet Keppel), she sought to shed her world-weariness and enjoy an adventure or two abroad.

  Making a daughterly reconnaissance of Rodin’s ‘nice messy atelier’ in Paris at the beginning of 1913, Vita was impressed by the empty room into which she was shown. ‘It was rather dark and there were huge roughly-hewn lumps of marble and a chisel left on a chair where he had put it down, and nothing else,’ she wrote to Harold, ‘and the suggestiveness of it grew on me more and more as I waited.’ But when Rodin entered, she saw only ‘a rather commonplace French bourgeois … rather an unreal little fat man … and the whole thing was a reaction and a come-down from the massive white marbles all round’. Then he began talking of his work, caressing the marble, pointing out the lines with a sweep of his thumb: the commonplace old man vanished and there stood a genius.

  It was on this genius that Lady Sackville focused her mind as she sat for him that autumn. Over a fortnight during November 1913, she filled her journal with details of these sittings. ‘He wears a long cape and a big velvet Tam O’Shanter all the time, and never stops talking,’ she wrote.

  … I was fully décolletée, and felt quite shy over it! … He deplores the fact that I can’t always look after him, as I understand him well. He keeps saying I am so beautiful, and yet the bust is perfectly hideous up to now … He asked me to chuck everything this winter as he wanted me to come to the Riviera where the vile weather is driving him … he would do me all the winter and draw me doing my long hair, which he had heard was wonderful, and he had never had a model with long hair … Rodin made me sit on the floor while he was standing on a packing-case doing the top of my hair … He is such a dear old creature, so simple, so detached from everything.

  Victoria Sackville was a hard-headed woman, yet she was open to flattery and had warned Rodin before the sittings began that she needed his indulgence. So he indulged her and she copied down his compliments: he ‘got up and came to me with his hands full of terre glaise and knelt in front of me … it was very touching’. So the sittings went on, her Ladyship in the nude and the elderly sculptor kneeling before her.

  She allowed herself to be taken to his home in Meudon where she met his companion of fifty years, Rose Beuret. The frugality of their life shocked her. ‘They generally have some soup and a glass of milk,’ she noted.‘ … curious agglomeration of grandeur and of great discomfort.’ Rose was ‘very much nicer to me than she generally is to other visitors’. As for Rodin, though he never spoke to Rose (and seldom stopped speaking to Lady Sackville), ‘he is kindness itself and so gentle.’

  Victoria Sackville’s reanimated feelings shine through her letters from England. Before the end of February 1914 she joined Rodin and Rose Beuret in a villa they had rented near Roquebrune – ‘very dark and tiny’. The bust of her was by now ‘a horrible disappointment’. She gave him some money – far less than he usually charged – and Rose was furious ‘for some reason or other’. In the hope that he could make it less thick-lipped and unflattering, she agreed to go with him to Cap Ferrat. ‘He is utterly miserable,’ she noted in her journal. ‘ … I had to be very considerate … Mme Rose got on my nerves exceedingly.’ She was intolerably lower class and did nothing but grumble.

  The adventure was almost over. She sailed away for three months in Italy, saw other men, began new adventures. On her way back to England that summer, shortly before the First World War, she stopped in Paris and saw Rodin who complained that life with Rose was now unbearable (he was to marry her in 1917 shortly before his death). ‘I was so sorry for him that I forgot to speak about my bust.’

  Both Violet and Vita admired yet came to resent their extraordinary mothers. Violet adored what she called ‘the unparalleled romance’ of Alice Keppel’s life as ‘La Favorita’, the King’s mistress. ‘I wonder whether I shall ever squeeze as much romance into my life as she has had in hers: anyhow I mean to have a jolly good try!’ But in her early years she did not feel that she and her younger sister Sonia were ‘as lovable, or as good looking, or as successful as our mother. We do not equal, still less surpass her.’ And Sonia, who was much closer to her father, agreed that from earliest childhood their mother stood on a pedestal and was invested ‘with a brilliant, goddess-like quality’.

  Vita, too, felt she would have ‘murdered anyone that breathed a word’ against Lady Sackville. ‘I would have suffered any injustice at her hands.’ And injustice, she came to feel, was what she did suffer. The old lady was one of the few aristocrats who had refused the Prince of Wales’s wish to be accompanied by Mrs Keppel when he came for the weekend to Knole, the Sackville family’s three-hundred-and-sixty-five-room ancestral home. Like Queens on a chessboard, both mothers were to exercise much power over the desperate love game their daughters were destined to play.

  The game began when they were children. Both of them recorded their early meetings. ‘I was twelve, she was two years younger,’ Vita remembered, ‘but in every instinct she might have been six years my senior …’

  We met at a tea-party by the bedside of a mutual friend with a broken leg, and she [Violet] made to me some remark about flowers in the room. I wasn’t listening; and so didn’t answer. This piqued her – she was already spoilt. She got her mother to ask mine to send me to tea. I went. We sat in a darkened room, and talked – about our ancestors, of all strange topics – and in the hall as I left she kissed me. I made up a little song that evening, ‘I’ve got a friend,’ … I sang it in my bath.

  Vita was ‘the worst person in the world at making friends’. But now she had one – for life it felt.

  In Violet’s account there is no counter-attraction of a mutual friend with a broken leg. She omits the darkened room and the kiss in her well-behaved memoirs. The two girls are painfully isolated children, lost in their tediously grand surroundings. Violet notices that Vita seems overwhelmed by the presence of Lady Sackville. ‘She was tall for her age,’ Violet writes, ‘gawky, most unsuitably dressed in what appeared to be her mother’s old clothes …’.

  I asked if I might have her to tea. She came … I thought her nice, but rather childish (I was ten). We separated, however, with mutual esteem. The repressions of my short life immediately found an outlet in a voluminous correspondence … Our friendship progressed all that winter.

  Violet had noticed her ‘family’s gratification’ on seeing her friendship with Lady Sackville’s daughter; and when she went to stay at Knole she understood the reason for their gratification. With its towers and battlements, its long gallery, its multitude of staircases, its chapel and courtyards and spacious parks, the Sackville family home was infinitely more majestic than anything to which the Keppels could aspire. Violet saw at once how much Vita loved this splendid house and wanted her to feel that they were both in its loving embrace. ‘How I adore that place!’ she later wrote to Vita almost in Orlando fashion. ‘Had you been a man, I should most certainly have married you, as I think I am the only person who loves Knole as much as you do! – (I do really) …’

  Over the first half-dozen years of their friendship, Violet and Vita saw each other fairly regularly in London and Paris, Scotland and Italy. ‘Went to tea with Violet, and stayed to dinner,’ Vita wrote in her diary in December 1908. ‘The King was there.’ The King was an anonymous, often invisible presence at the Keppels’ house in Portman Square, the empty one-horse brougham
waiting patiently outside, the butler whispering ‘a gentleman is coming downstairs’ as he steered Vita into a dark corner. All of which ‘added a touch of romance to Violet’, Vita remembered.

  Violet continued to visit Knole and Vita came up to stay with Violet at Duntreath Castle, the ancestral home in Stirlingshire where Alice Keppel had been born. This was a medieval toy castle, set in a lunar Scottish landscape with flaming sunsets seen against the hills and peacocks wandering through the grounds. Its exotic atmosphere, heightened with smells of cedar wood and gunpowder, stimulated the girls’ imaginations. Vita remembered how they dressed up, how Violet chased her with a dagger down a long passage, how they spent the whole night together talking, talking, ‘while little owls hooted outside’; and Violet remembered how, racing up and down the staircases, going from room to room, they ‘fled from terror to enchantment’. Duntreath was for her almost what Knole was for Vita.

  Both Violet and Vita felt houses to be living entities. But their feelings for Duntreath and Knole were not quite the same. Vita loved Knole all her life, wherever she lived, whomsoever she loved. She had great need of love, an urgent sexual appetite, and she spread her affaires around promiscuously. Her love for Violet was unique: no one else would occupy that special place in her heart; yet she could still take on other lovers who meant less or meant something different. Violet, on the other hand, saw Vita as the single supreme love in her life, someone who outshone even her mother. She could flirt and play and appear to be happy with others, but in fact she was never happy without Vita. To tell their story from Violet’s point of view it is necessary to eliminate everyone else except for those who impeded their love and were their enemies – just as she had eliminated her sister Sonia, who was born when she was aged six and immediately seen as a rival for their mother’s love. ‘I did not fancy her,’ Violet remembered. ‘ … I did not speak to her until she was ten.’ (And Sonia corroborated this: writing that her sister, ‘for the first ten years of my life, viewed me with an expression of unmitigated dislike’.) Ten years later Violet would express a similar dislike for anyone she saw as a rival for Vita’s love. ‘I am primitive in my joy as in my suffering,’ she told her. ‘ … We are absolutely essential to one another, at least in my eyes!’