‘It is a tremendous story,’ Victoria Glendinning wrote of the Violet and Vita romance. But it ‘needed a new slant on old material’. Mostly it had been told from Vita’s point of view, and I wondered whether I could get a new slant by illustrating the effect it had on Violet’s writings. ‘We love only once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving … And on how that first great love-affair shapes itself depends the pattern of our lives.’ Violet marked this passage from Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave in red crayon. Her novels were the negotiations she made between this love and the rest of her life.
In the opinion of Harold Nicolson’s biographer, James Lees-Milne, Violet’s letters to Vita are ‘stupendous’. Most love letters bored him, ‘but not Violet’s’, he conceded. ‘For sheer ruthless, persistent passion I have never come upon their equal.’ In his diaries he admits that he did not really like Violet. But there is a grudging note of admiration when, in a review, he likens her correspondence to ‘those flaming yellow bulldozers which one meets tearing up road verges, hedgerows, concrete walls, asphalt roads and any and every obstacle that lies in their path …’.’ And for Vita’s biographer, Victoria Glendinning, she is troubled by ‘the flamboyant and brilliant’ figure of Violet and can’t help feeling pain on seeing her handwriting, which reminds her of the unhappiness she inflicted. Nevertheless, in the Times Literary Supplement, she acknowledges that Violet’s ‘letters to Vita, even as a young girl, are fluent, fanciful, multilingual, inspired. Vita’s, in comparison, are dull.’
‘For sixteen nights I have listened expectantly for the opening of my door, for the whispered “Lushka” as you entered my room, and tonight I am alone. What shall I do? How can I sleep?’ Violet wrote in the summer of 1918. ‘ … I don’t want to sleep, for fear of waking up, thinking you near my side, and stretching out my arms to clasp – emptiness! … we must once and for all take our courage in both hands, and go away together.’
At the end of April 1918, the two of them had left Long Barn and gone to stay at the novelist Hugh Walpole’s house at Polperro, in Cornwall, for ten days. ‘They have a sudden desire’, Harold obligingly explained to Walpole, ‘to see the sea.’ Here Vita began writing her novel Challenge (which Harold later nicknamed ‘Smuts’). They went again to Polperro for three weeks in July. ‘I hadn’t dreamt of such an art of love,’ Vita wrote in Portrait of a Marriage. It was seductive and sinister. Violet ‘let herself go entirely limp and passive in my arms’, Vita remembered. ‘(I shudder to think of the experience that lay behind her abandonment.)’
They also saw each other in London that summer and began a bold transvestite experiment, Vita dressing as a rather untidy young man called Julian and staying the night at a lodging house as Violet’s (or ‘Eve’s’) husband. ‘I felt like a person translated, or re-born,’ she wrote. It was fun, it was exciting, and it all seemed extraordinarily natural. Their escapade acted as a spur to Vita’s novel and a rehearsal for their adventures abroad. But it meant something more for Violet – not simply a passionate episode in their lives, but the promise of an entirely new life. All that August she advanced on Vita with those ‘flaming yellow bulldozers’ that were her letters.
Oh, Mitya, come away, let’s fly, Mitya darling – if ever there were two entirely primitive people, they are surely us … I have never told you the whole truth. You shall have it now: I have loved you all my life, a long time without knowing, 5 years knowing it as irrevocably as I know it now, loved you as my ideal, my inspiration, my perfection … And the supreme truth is this: I can never be happy without you … My days are consumed by this impotent longing for you, and my nights are riddled with insufferable dreams … I want you. I want you hungrily, frenziedly, passionately. I am starving for you … I will have you all to myself or not at all, so you can choose.
Violet likened herself and Vita to two gamblers, both eager to win, each nervous of playing a card ‘unless the other throws his at the same time’. But this was not quite true. Violet had only one chip to hazard; Vita (though her capital may have been no greater) had several smaller chips and could play a more tactical and patient game. Violet tried to unsettle Vita’s patience by provoking her jealousy – telling her of the love letters she was receiving from a romantic officer in the Royal Horse Guards named Denys Trefusis, handsome, golden-haired and piratical, a decorated war hero with whom she had been flirting and whom her mother wished her to marry – it was rumoured that they were unofficially engaged. She insisted that Vita was jealous of Denys Trefusis because he ‘is like you’. And it was true that when Vita met him she liked him very much: ‘I see his tragedy – for he is a tragic person,’ she recorded in Portrait of a Marriage. In case Vita was not sufficiently jealous of Denys, Violet also told her of a dreadfully attractive young lady she met who had ‘long almond-shaped eyes, the aquamarine colour I’m so fond of, sometimes blue, sometimes green … and quite the loveliest red mouth I have ever seen’.
But in truth it was Violet who felt penetrated by jealousy because, unlike Vita, ‘it is impossible for me to care for more than one person at a time. You will never know how jealous I am of you till the Day of Judgement.’ She was even jealous of ‘the insurmountable Nicolson’ who she had felt confident would have politely disappeared by now; and she made Vita promise never to have sexual relations with him again. Even then she hated having to address her letters to ‘Mrs Harold Nicolson’, a conjugal label that was prematurely investing Vita with middle-aged habits. Vita had sacrificed her freedom, it seemed, for this diplomatic nonentity and was in danger of sacrificing her love for Violet whose resentment was developing into a disease that ‘will kill our love as surely and remorselessly as cancer gets its victim in the end’.
Realising, to his surprise, that Violet wanted to destroy his marriage, Harold went and complained to Lady Sackville. At about the same time Violet also had a long talk with Lady Sackville, confiding to her that Vita was not at all attached to Harold now that she was beginning a serious literary career – and speaking of her own excitement over the prospect of marrying Denys Trefusis. It seems she was imagining a magical trinity in which she and Denys should share their lives with Vita – he as a good friend to them both, they as lovers (Harold in this dream was nowhere to be seen). But her conversation with Lady Sackville took an unexpected turn. On the point of separating from her unfaithful husband, Lady Sackville had grown fond of scatological stories and coarse sexual anecdotes of horrifying male lust. What she said opened Violet’s eyes to what married life with Denys might entail. For though emotionally so alert, Violet seems to have been ignorant of the facts of heterosexual intercourse – until Vita’s mother made the details of men’s sexual habits ‘dirty and hideous’ to her. ‘Thank goodness, I have been spared this horrible knowledge for much longer than most people,’ Violet wrote. ‘No wonder I have always lived in a world of my own – or as much as possible … no wonder I have always preferred fairy-tales to facts.’
To keep alive her fairy-tale life, she needed to escape abroad where (she presumed) they ordered things differently. ‘O Mitya, come away with me! Let’s go to Paris, the Riviera, anywhere. What do I care, so long as we are out of England!’
Their flight became more practical after 11 November, Armistice Day. ‘I am so busy getting peace terms ready,’ Harold informed Vita from the basement of the Foreign Office in London. ‘It is rather fun, though I feel oddly responsible.’ He also made himself oddly responsible for getting Vita and Violet passports and spent ‘a tiresome day on 24 November trying to explain to Lady Sackville why her daughter – his wife – was suddenly leaving for France with Violet. He was finding some difficulty in explaining it to himself.
The two women arrived in Paris a couple of days later. Denys Trefusis also happened to be there and he was allowed to take Violet out to meals during the day, while Vita, dressed as a wounded soldier with a bandage round her head, attracted heart-warming compliments as she roamed the streets. Sometimes the three of them would dine together
and it must have seemed to Violet that her dream of a magical trinity was coming true. But for Harold it was becoming a nightmare. ‘You have been in Paris nearly a week without a word to me as to when you were going south or where,’ he complained to Vita. ‘ … I put it all down to that swine Violet who seems to addle your brain.’ As if spurred on, Vita and Violet set off for Avignon the next day and then went on to Monte Carlo. They were to spend some twelve weeks there dancing tête-à-tête, losing money gambling (Harold forwarded Vita £130 to help out) and continuing to write Challenge. ‘Monte Carlo was perfect, Violet was perfect,’ Vita wrote. Rumours of these adventures, including their ‘scandalously indiscreet caresses’ in public, soon reached England. ‘Damn! Damn! Damn! Violet. How I loathe her,’ exclaimed Harold who had gone with the British Delegation to the Peace Conference in Paris. But though he deplored anything ‘vulgar and dangerous’, he was so busy pursuing peace it grew difficult for him to sustain his anger and he was soon apologising for his ‘cross letter’. The fact was that he could not comprehend the strength of the two women’s feelings for each other and attributed everything to Violet’s flattery. ‘Every silly ass woman is bowled over by flattery,’ he told Vita. ‘How I hate women.’
Vita had given Harold to understand that she would not be gone for long; and when she eventually did leave Monte Carlo, she let Violet believe that their separation was temporary. This habit of telling them both what they wanted to believe was like two sides of a coin made from what she called her ‘duality’, which continued to spin in the air, turning up now one side, now the other, displaying her divided loyalties.
It was at this stage that the two mothers, Victoria Sackville and Alice Keppel, re-entered the story. Both were determined that there should be an end to these embarrassing escapades. Lady Sackville gave Vita a long lecture about Violet’s sexual perversion, insisting that she break off her relationship with ‘that horrible girl’. Mrs Keppel meanwhile insisted that her daughter make the engagement to Denys Trefusis official – and on 26 March 1919 an announcement appeared in The Times. It seems Mrs Keppel believed that once her daughter was married, all this nonsense would cease – and if it didn’t altogether cease there would at least be a fig leaf of respectability to hide it. As for Violet, she found it almost impossible openly to defy her mother. Perhaps she still had dreams of a mariage blanc and a magical trinity with Vita. ‘All three of us are young,’ she told Vita, ‘absolutely indifferent to the world’s opinions, equally intolerant of treasured conventions.’ But the truth, as she began to discover, was that, though in many ways a romantic personality and physically frail after his war experiences, Denys Trefusis was far more conventional than any of them (he appears never to have heard of lesbianism). So Violet’s main hope appears to have focused on the belief that Vita would rescue her – perhaps sensationally at the door of the church. The two of them would then begin a new life together as nature intended.
Violet’s letters to Vita during the spring and early summer of 1919 grow increasingly painful. ‘In giving you up, I am giving up my whole life,’ she wrote. ‘ … Are you going to stand by and watch me marry this man? It’s unheard of, inconceivable. I belong to you, body and soul … My life – what is left of it – is just one raw, limitless bitterness … I am flooded by an agony of physical longing for you … All my life I have been lonely. I never knew what it was to have companionship till I met you … I feel trapped and desperate.’
Denys Trefusis was to destroy Vita’s letters to Violet over this period (those that Violet did not destroy herself), so there is no record of what exactly she wrote. But from Violet’s side of the correspondence it appears that she was being cautious, balancing Harold’s claims on her and those of her family and home, against Violet’s appeals to live permanently with her. The inadequacy of these letters filled Violet with rage and horror. ‘My God, Mitya, if I could kill you I would,’ she wrote. ‘ … The depths of duplicity in you make my hair stand on end … If I can’t have you, I’ll have my revenge … do you wonder I mistrust you? … Are you really only heartless and a coward?’ Violet was on the edge of a breakdown and in her state of depression began to loathe herself – her ungovernable anger, misery, vindictiveness. ‘Make allowances for great unhappiness,’ she telegraphed after one of her bleakest days.
The target for her most extreme anger was Denys. Her plan seems to have been to force him, if Vita failed her, to call off the marriage. But he was silent, inscrutable, a sphinx of a man. What Violet did not understand was the shocking effect of the war upon him – that was the tragedy Vita had seen. ‘He cares for me drivellingly,’ Violet wrote. She told him that her love for Vita was greater than any love she might have said she felt for him. But he did not really understand her, thinking this was premarital nerves and promising ‘never to do anything that should displease me – you know in what sense I mean’. But copying this to Vita was a mistake. On reading of their engagement in the newspapers, she had almost fainted, believing that Violet, like herself, must be to some degree bisexual. Now it seemed to her that if both their husbands agreed to do without sexual relations, then they would be free to go on further holidays as Julian and Eve. But Violet wanted more than holidays.
In mid-April 1919 Violet spent three days with Vita at Knole. Then, feeling ‘terribly unhappy’, Vita went off to see Harold in Paris. With whom should she spend the rest of her life? The answer seemed to be with Harold – and Violet. ‘Oh darling I have suffered so, this long dark year,’ Harold appealed to her on 22 May, ‘have I got to go through another?’ The answer to this was yes: another year and then another. He promised to love and understand her ‘and let you do whatever you like’. And that is what she attempted to do. She agreed to Violet’s plan that they would bolt shortly before the wedding; and then arranged to be with Harold in Paris on the day of the wedding, and for him ‘to keep me under lock and key’.
Denys and Violet were married at St George’s Church, Hanover Square, on 16 June 1919. Nellie Melba sang Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’ as the two of them signed the register, and among the many wedding presents was an alabaster head of Medusa from Vita. That day Violet sent her a note in pencil: ‘You have broken my heart, goodbye.’
And surely that must signal the end.
But of course it did not. Vita knew that Denys and Violet were spending the first days of their honeymoon in Paris, and she knew that Harold would soon release her from custody and go back to work. So, once it was too late, she acted with fierce resolution, turning up at their hotel and carrying off Violet for an hour or two. ‘I treated her savagely, I made love to her, I had her, I didn’t care, I only wanted to hurt Denys …’ Next day there was another opportunity for hurting him when the three of them met at the hotel. ‘I can’t describe how terrible it was – that meeting …’.’ Vita wrote in Portrait of a Marriage. The two of them humiliated him, calling him impotent, telling him how they planned to elope. Then Vita joined Harold in Switzerland and Violet and Denys continued what was left of their honeymoon in the South of France.
Alice Keppel had thought it wise to rent a house for her daughter and son-in-law some twenty miles from Vita at Long Barn. Violet’s life there was one of quiet banality – she and Denys were scarcely on speaking terms. ‘I could kill myself, Mitya. I don’t know what prevents me,’ Violet insisted. What prevented her were Vita’s promises to elope again – this time for ever. But could Violet trust her? Or Vita trust Violet?
An element of farce was now entering the drama (wonderfully enacted by the two Nicolson children’s nanny striding into the village one afternoon attired as ‘Julian’ in one of Harold’s suits). Harold’s own position in all these negotiations was slightly compromised by an affaire he had begun with the couturier Edward Molyneux: ‘a funny new friend – a dressmaker with a large shop in the Rue Royale’. If only Vita could have taken her affaire in such a pleasant light-hearted manner. But what this showed her was not how extramarital, same-sex relationships should be conducted, but how dis
astrously Harold had misunderstood her devastating passion for Violet. ‘I don’t think you realise except in a very tiny degree what’s going on or what’s been going on,’ she apprised him. ‘I don’t think you have taken the thing seriously.’ In his fashion, he did take it seriously. But by convincing himself that Violet ‘has all the weapons and I have none’, he disarmed himself.
Alice Keppel was shocked by the appalling weakness of the two husbands. She herself was not weak and she refused to listen to her daughter’s pleas. Either Violet remained married to Denys and led a reasonably discreet and respectable life, or Alice would leave her penniless (or as Violet described it ‘jewel-less’). Only when mother and daughter went up to Duntreath Castle, the family home in Scotland, did they find any peace together. Here, where she had been happy in her childhood, Violet seemed to become a child once more, shedding the complexities of adulthood.
In her dual biography, Mrs Keppel and her Daughter, Diana Souhami writes that ‘Vita could neither commit herself to Violet nor reject her’. This is true. But she could do both. Violet was also in two minds. ‘I want adventure … I am completely reckless,’ she wrote to Vita in September 1919. They planned to go abroad on another adventure that autumn. But four days before they set off, Violet cautioned Vita. ‘I must absolutely implore you not to go unless you are unmoveably sure … This time you would absolutely do me in, and I swear I don’t deserve it at your hands.’
Nor did Harold deserve being done in. ‘If you think you can treat me like V[iolet] treats D[enys] T[refusis] you are wrong,’ he suggested to Vita. ‘I shan’t allow my life to be wrecked.’ Nevertheless he consented to their going off to Paris and Monte Carlo again and, to reassure him, Vita left a letter ‘packed with love’.
A Book of Secrets Page 16
