A Book of Secrets

by Michael Holroyd

  But until Vita became her lover ‘the lady Violetta amused herself madly at the expense of others. Which is perhaps not altogether a good thing.’ It was not a good thing for the many men who, over the years, became entrapped by her seductive games. Gerald Wellesley, later the seventh Duke of Wellington, found himself rather tremendously in love and ‘half-engaged’ to be married to her; and Sir Osbert Sitwell’s engagement was broken off, she told friends, only by his insistence that, once married, they would be obliged to sleep at opposite ends of his gigantic medieval mansion, separated by many haunted rooms and state apartments (an arrangement that should have suited them both equally well). Then Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, the fourteenth Baron Berners, after lunching with Violet in Paris one day, read in the newspapers that he was shortly to marry her. (In retaliation he contemplated printing an announcement that he had ‘left Lesbos for the Isle of Man’.) And, among others, there was the handsome poet and athlete Julian Grenfell with whom she was embarrassingly discovered in a cupboard … Such escapades would end, she implied, once Vita was permanently with her.

  Meanwhile Vita had been the object of several odious proposals of marriage. ‘Men didn’t attract me,’ she wrote. ‘ … Women did.’ And the woman who first attracted her was not Violet, but Rosamund Grosvenor who had been at the same school in London as them both. Vita sought from her love affairs with women what she had failed to find in her relationship with her mother. ‘Mother used to hurt my feelings and say she couldn’t bear to look at me because I was so ugly,’ she wrote in Portrait of a Marriage. ‘ … She loved me when I was a baby, but I don’t think she cared much for me as a child, nor do I blame her.’ Vita saw herself as ‘plain, lean, dark, unsociable, unattractive – horribly unattractive! – rough and secret’. And in secret she set about ‘writing, always writing’, trying to create something beautiful her mother and the world would admire. In Rosamund Grosvenor she met someone of polished and curvaceous beauty, someone who passionately cared for her and whose presence soothed the injuries Lady Sackville had inflicted on her. ‘I was very much in love with Rosamund,’ she wrote. But though she worshipped Rosamund’s beauty, as a companion ‘she always bored me … she had a sweet nature. But she was quite stupid.’ They went to bed, hugged and kissed, ‘but we never made love’. Making love was something Vita would learn from Violet. With Rosamund, whom she called ‘the Rubens lady’, she was so excitingly close to beauty she almost possessed it. But with Violet, who admired her resplendent heavy-lidded looks, her tall strong figure, her peach-like complexion, she felt miraculously beautiful herself. And whereas Rosamund wasn’t interested in books, Violet established herself as a literary muse. She appeared to answer all Vita’s needs.

  And Violet challenged her too. She seemed to have no sense of fear, no apprehension of danger. ‘Follow me. Follow me!’ she urged. But to follow her meant rejecting everything Vita’s mother planned for her. Surely it was better to have everything and reject nothing.

  But then what a combative, compelling style Violet had acquired! ‘I love you, Vita, because I’ve fought so hard to win you,’ she wrote. ‘ … I love you because you never capitulate … I love you because you have the air of doubting nothing! I love in you what is also in me …’ There was no tyrannising over such a woman. They were, in their fashion, equals.

  The development of their relationship was delayed by two awkward historical events: the death of the King in 1910 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. ‘How people can do anything I do not know,’ Alice Keppel wrote to her friend Lady Knollys after King Edward VII’s death on 6 May 1910, ‘for life with all its joys has come to a full stop, at least for me.’ In the words of the historian Giles St Aubyn, she had been ‘the most perfect mistress in the history of royal fidelity’ and now, as the ‘unofficial widow’, she continued to act with perfect deportment. The King’s financial adviser Sir Ernest Cassel (nicknamed Windsor Cassel) had made her a very rich woman and she was able to move her family into an immense eighteenth-century mansion at 16 Grosvenor Street where the atmosphere of luxury suited what Osbert Sitwell called her ‘instinct for splendour’ – as it suited Violet’s too (though not Sonia’s). But Alice Keppel’s life had suddenly changed. Diana Souhami writes in her dual biography of Alice and Violet: ‘Without a role she [Alice] could not publicly parade her grief or continue as part of Palace life. She was cold-shouldered by Bertie’s son and rebuffed when she went to sign her name in the visitors’ book at Marlborough House.’ She had become an embarrassment to the royal family and decided to go abroad for a year or two. She announced this to the children like a character in one of Violet’s novels: ‘I have news for you, children. I am taking you to Ceylon for the winter. In my opinion no young lady’s education is complete without a smattering of Tamil … The boat leaves in four days, so you will just have time for your packing.’

  Without Vita, Ceylon was in Violet’s words ‘a completely irrelevant interlude’. And it was full of anxious premonitions. In 1909 Vita had ‘come out’ and, though still in her ’teens, she was officially on the marriage market. Suddenly realising the significance of Vita being two years older than she was, ‘I ought to have foreseen that perhaps at your age [nineteen] a masculine liaison would have come about,’ Violet wrote desperately on 12 December 1910 from Ceylon. ‘ … I feel that I am about to say improper things … Do try not to get married before I return.’ She was acutely aware of the difficulty in luring Vita on to what she called ‘territory almost totally unknown’. She felt anxious over Harold Nicolson with whom Vita had started what she called a ‘rather childlike companionship’. He was such fun: rather shy, a charming smile, sympathetic and exuberant: the perfect playmate. Violet scented danger.

  Early in 1911 Violet and Sonia were ‘dumped down, like Babes in the Wood, in an exclusively German forest’ near Munich to complete their education while their mother hurried off to China. Meanwhile Vita seemed to be sleepwalking into marriage. What could Violet do? Vita was no longer looking into Violet’s eloquent eyes, listening to that seductively clandestine voice of hers or feeling her red lips pressed so disturbingly against her own: there were only Violet’s letters to enchant her – and they were not enough. In 1912 Violet returned to England. The time was filled by her own debutante dinner parties and a grand coming-out ball at Grosvenor House. It was not a process she appeared to be enjoying. She needed to see Vita all the more emphatically because the only other woman with whom she had felt an intense happiness, her mother, was manoeuvring her towards marriage, preparing to distance herself and lead a separate life. Violet could not bear the prospect of being alone.

  For Vita this passage of time apart from Violet was a mere interval in the inevitable drama between them. However baffling and elusive Violet might be, Vita felt confident of repossessing this brilliant, unearthly creature whenever the opportunity arose. ‘What that bond is God alone knows; sometimes I feel it is as something legendary,’ she later wrote. ‘Violet is mine, she always has been, it is inescapable.’ She had no ‘fear of losing her, proud and mettlesome as she was’. As for Violet, Vita added, ‘she knew it too.’ But they knew different things. Violet knew that following their love to its ultimate end meant having to renounce all other commitments – including friends, family and a privileged place in society. Vita saw no reason why their choice should be so absolute. Surely it was possible to enjoy a homosexual and heterosexual relationship in tandem – had she not in fact done so, up to a point, with Rosamund and Harold?

  The year 1913 began brilliantly and ended disastrously for Violet. ‘Violet Keppel and I gave a party,’ Vita told Harold in late February. ‘It was the success of the year … Violet and I acted afterwards, and ended up in each other’s arms.’ But Vita disguised from Harold her sense of proprietorship over Violet; nor did she tell Violet of her deepening sense of attachment for Harold. Forty years later, in Don’t Look Round, Violet was to write of this time: ‘She [Vita] married without letting me know. I had heard rumours of her engage
ment, but as long as she did not tell me herself, I attached small importance to them. I was stunned by what I took to be a piece of perfidy I did not deserve.’

  During the early years of the war they saw little of each other. Vita and Harold bought Long Barn, not far from Knole (‘too self-consciously picturesque,’ Violet decided, ‘ … like living under the furniture instead of above it’) and a house at Ebury Street in London (which struck Violet as depressingly middle-class and suburban). Between 1914 and 1917 Vita gave birth to two sons, Ben and Nigel Nicolson (another child was stillborn). The stormy side of her life, she felt, was over. ‘I saw Violet from time to time, but she was more alien from me than she had ever been.’

  Harold was not an effeminate man but he had a strong feminine strain in his nature, which made him all the more attractive to Vita. But working in the Foreign Office he was increasingly engulfed by a masculine world that was of no interest to her and that Violet positively despised. And then another difficulty arose: after a casual homosexual affair in 1917 he caught a venereal infection and was advised against any sexual intercourse until after 20 April 1918. Violet was keeping watch on what she called Vita’s ‘radiant domesticity’. That spring Harold was away in London where the Zeppelin raids were taking place, working day and night at the Foreign Office during a crucial stage of the war. It was as if he had left a door temptingly open at Long Barn – and Violet walked in.

  She invited herself to stay for a fortnight early in April 1918. The first week passed unsatisfactorily, Vita absorbed in her writing, Violet terribly restless. Then, on 18 April (two days before Harold’s period of venereal infection ended), Vita put on some new clothes that the land girls were wearing and ‘I ran, I shouted, I jumped, I climbed … and Violet followed me across the fields and woods with a new meekness … never taking her eyes off me, and … I knew that all my old dominion over her had never been diminished … It was one of the most vibrant days of my life.’ That night, while Harold was working in London, the two women talked long and intimately, then went to bed and made love. For Vita it was a sense of extraordinary liberation.

  Violet wrote of her not long afterwards: ‘I revel in your beauty, your beauty of form and feature … I exult in my surrender … I love belonging to you – I glory in it, that you alone … have bent me to your will, shattered my self-possession, robbed me of my mystery, made me yours, yours … I exult in the knowledge of how little we have in common with the world.’

  At this crucial moment of my research (where Violet and Vita were transformed into Mitya and Lushka), Tiziana Masucci (or Tizy as she had now become in her playful emails to me) arrived from Rome to pursue her research in London.

  I ask her how she had first become interested in Violet. She had been given Portrait of a Marriage and read it ‘when I was feeling very sad’, she tells me. The book had fallen from the shelf while she was reorganising her library and on its open page was a picture of Violet. Those basilisk eyes gazed up at her – and she began to turn the pages. After that she got all Violet’s books, shut herself away with them and, when she emerged, started to reorganise her life around them. Violet had made another conquest. But whether Portrait of a Marriage had been a gift from the gods or a poisoned chalice who could tell? I ask her what the extraordinary appeal was – and she gives a great gesture of bewilderment. ‘Violet is me!’ she exclaims; and then, ‘I love Violet!’ Other people, living people, let you down. Violet is a shield against betrayal.

  In a legal-literary sense Tiziana has become Violet. She has bought Violet’s posthumous copyrights, lasting another thirty-five years (until 2042), and is full of plans and projects: plans to translate more of Violet’s books into Italian, plans to complete a stage play she is writing about Vita and Violet, also to make a film and then (why not?) a musical! She laughs as she says this. And of course she must prepare an edition of Violet’s letters, curate a large exhibition and also write her biography. This is a lifetime’s commitment. How old will she be when the copyright runs out? It does not bear thinking of – she dreads old age as Violet herself did. Sometimes she looks nineteen, sometimes thirty-five (her actual age). Sonia Keppel wrote that her sister Violet was born old and never became young during her childhood or adolescence. But after her affaire with Vita she began to grow younger and many people who met her in her twenties and thirties remarked on how childlike she was (Harold Nicolson, seeing her in Paris after the Second World War, observed that she looked seventeen). She seemed to defy the laws of age, to ricochet from girl to matron each day – and back again overnight. Then ‘nearing forty, she suddenly aged’, her friend and biographer Philippe Jullian wrote. It was as if a tragic muse had darkened the romantic spell that enveloped her. I notice something a little similar perhaps in Tiziana. She is part of a film and theatre world in Rome, and meets many people, but ‘I don’t belong to them’, she says. Under her high spirits there is a melancholy. She belongs to a dead woman whom she is bringing back to life. No wonder, in a crowded life, she is solitary. But because I have recently been reading books by and about Violet, we can have vicariously intimate conversations, full of concealed quotations, private jokes and allusions we both recognise. ‘I’ve got a friend,’ she exclaims, echoing what Vita wrote after first meeting Violet. But, she adds: ‘I’m faithful, Vita wasn’t.’ It is as if she, and not Vita, is Violet’s ‘twin spirit’.

  It is this strange atmosphere, in which Violet momentarily seems to come alive again, that Tiziana values even more than practical discussions as to how she might advance her crusade in Britain. But we do speak about registering her copyright, acquiring an agent in England and finding out if there are at the BBC Written Archives Centre any copies of some broadcasts Violet made from London to France during the war. Tiziana longs to hear her voice. She already has, on her mobile telephone, a recording of Vita’s voice reading an excised passage from Orlando – and also Virginia Woolf ’s voice, both from the British Library.

  We are invited to supper by Carmen Callil who, while chairing Virago Press, was one of the few British publishers to take an interest in Violet’s writing, bringing out her novel Hunt the Slipper in 1983 as a Virago Modern Classic, with an introduction by Lorna Sage. She tells us she had hoped to add several other titles to the Virago list (Pirates at Play was added thirteen years later) but there were copyright difficulties – and she welcomes Tiziana’s acquisition of Violet’s copyright. Over supper we talk about Violet’s talent and reputation. Carmen says she is tired of the Violet – Vita affaire and more interested in Violet’s writing. Tiziana agrees. I take a somewhat different line. Violet’s novels would not have been the disturbing light-and-dark comedies of manners they are, I argue, had she not lived in the shadow of grief amid all the bright lights of European society after her love affair ended. Tiziana then speaks out against Vita and the Nicolson family – those whom she blames for having caused that grief. Vita, she says, was a coward. She had threatened to scandalise well-dressed conventional London, but then put her dubious literary reputation, her gardening and the family (to which she was so regularly and in such a trivial manner unfaithful) before a unique and profound relationship. As for Harold Nicolson, Tiziana dislikes him for having written in 1918 that he wished Violet were dead. But if she denigrates Vita and Harold and reduces their worth, I reply, she will be left with a very one-sided drama; and besides, if Vita was so worthless does this not reflect badly on Violet for having singled her out as the love of her life?

  Maggie disagrees with this. If we are to be judged by the people we have loved during our lives, none of us would come out so well. It is not a valid way of appraising anyone. Each of us, I feel, agrees with the other’s opinions without quite renouncing our own. Tiziana reminds us that Violet wrote to Vita saying that they were like two people who had been caught stealing, and that one was put in prison and the other was not. The time has come, she declares, for Violet to be liberated. This sounds melodramatic, but it may be true that Violet has been immured in other people�
��s books – Vita’s and Virginia’s, Nigel Nicolson’s, Cyril Connolly’s, Nancy Mitford’s and Harold Acton’s books.7 Violet’s own novels are scattered over Europe like a leaderless and dispersed army. They are written in French or English as if she is vainly trying one key, then another, to set herself free. Can Tiziana free her? Can she give what Lorna Sage called Violet’s ‘sardonically lightweight, accomplished and comic’ novels a secure place in literature? She has extraordinary determination. But the thought comes to me that, while seeking to liberate Violet, she might be imprisoning herself.

  During these days, which are given over to the Tiziana – Violet phenomenon, you would not guess that Maggie is a novelist. She never mentions herself or her books – and she has taken care to read one or two of Violet’s novels beforehand and likes them. When we do talk of other things, Tiziana sometimes falls silent as if the world beyond Violet is a desert.8 Of course, English is not her first language. She is at the beginning of a quest to recover someone who is uniquely precious to her. After she has left for Rome, handing us both a heartfelt letter of thanks, I go up to her empty room. It is all precisely as it was before she arrived, so neat and tidy, almost untouched, as if no one has been there.