A Book of Secrets

by Michael Holroyd

  Violet was unaware of this. But she became aware that her mother was determined to put a stop to this scandal before it imperilled her daughter Sonia’s marriage. Incredibly Alice Keppel had rented another house even closer to Long Barn and then dispatched Denys Trefusis to the Riviera to bring back his wife to live in it. Vita persuaded her to return with Denys while she herself went back to Long Barn so that they could both prepare for their future together. Having told Harold that she and Violet were giving each other up for ever, Vita now notified him that their elopement had been the prelude to a lifelong commitment. He wept, begged her to change her mind: and she felt dreadful. ‘I hate myself,’ she told him. ‘ … I wish I were dead.’ Fifteen miles away Violet was telling Denys much the same thing.

  And at this point, reader, I throw up my hands in despair at any of these characters behaving with proper consideration for their biographers – Victoria Glendinning, James Lees-Milne, Diana Souhami, me. A tragic love story – for this is what it is – has been made chaotic and incredible by the tumult of contradictions. Lady Sackville, who was threatening to cut Vita out of her Will and come to the aid of ‘little Harold’, could not help observing (with a tinge of admiration) that it was ‘quite like a sensational novel’.

  Early in February 1920, the two women headed erratically for Dover. On the way Violet tried to tell Vita that on their last night together she had allowed Denys some degree of sexual intimacy. But Vita shut her ears to this. The very suspicion drove her crazy. The choreography of their story then grew wildly complex. Violet (who hated travelling alone and had never done so before) nervously crossed the Channel by herself and proceeded to Amiens. Vita, preparing to follow her next day from Dover, sent telegrams to her parents and Harold so that they should know her plans and be able to rescue her. Instead she was unexpectedly joined by Denys whom she hadn’t telegraphed. The two of them, who had recently wished each other dead, got along surprisingly well as they travelled to Calais together where, another surprise, they met Violet who, unable to be alone any longer at Amiens, had found her way back to Calais. The following day, after an evening in Violet’s hotel bedroom discussing French literature, the three of them hurried on by train to Amiens from where Denys, his entreaties all rejected, travelled back in despair to England.

  Denys was suffering from tuberculosis, but to Alice Keppel’s way of thinking this was hardly an excuse for his abysmal retreat from France – she had expected better from a decorated war hero. Quickly taking command, she procured an essential ingredient in a modern novel of sensation – a small aeroplane – and instructed Denys to fly back to Amiens. This development was much to the liking of Lady Sackville who enquired whether there was room in the plane for little Harold. There was: and the two husbands flew off together.

  The confrontation between Denys and Harold and Violet and Vita at the ruined town of Amiens was truly dreadful. Vita appeared shocked by the appalling abuse Violet kept shouting at Denys, who remained silent and pale as a ghost. ‘To my dying day I shall never forget the look on his face,’ she wrote. ‘ … If he had slipped down and died at our feet I should scarcely have been surprised.’ But it was what Denys had confided to Harold on their plane journey, and which Harold now whispered to Vita, that suddenly changed the direction of events. Vita already had her suspicions – though she had tried to stifle them. Had Violet allowed Denys to have sexual intercourse with her? Did she ‘belong’ to him? Denys refused to answer these questions even when Vita promised never to ‘set eyes on Violet again’ if the answer was yes. And when she questioned Violet herself she saw a look of ‘absolute terror’ pass over her face. That look gave her the answer and it was obviously yes. Yet she knew how limp and docile Violet was in bed, how passive she could be in someone’s arms, how she permitted anything being done to her, how her abandonment suggested masochistic tendencies. Could Denys have done to Violet some of those very things Vita herself had done? ‘I was half mad with pain,’ she wrote. Violet, now in tears, held ferociously on to her. ‘I couldn’t get away till Denys helped me,’ Vita remembered. Guarded by Harold, Vita began packing – then suddenly dashed through to kiss Violet before hurrying off with him. They took a train to Paris from where Vita was to continue her journey home. But Denys and Violet, travelling separately, unfortunately took the same train to Paris … And Denys, seeing Vita in hysterics ‘perjured himself’ (in Harold’s opinion) by assuring her that there had been no sexual relations between Violet and himself after all.

  Even a sensational novelist would end the story here …

  There is, at any rate, an interval here for the second coming of Tiziana. I arranged for the two of us to give a presentation, ‘Rediscovering Violet Trefusis’, at the Charleston Summer School in Sussex and then at the Oxford Festival. Tiziana prepared a small publication, similar to her Ravello exhibition catalogue, containing pictures, poems, epigrams, two or three passages from Violet’s novels and occasional writings, for our audience.

  Tiziana shows me the printout of an academic eulogy she wishes to deliver. It is lovingly done. How can I persuade her to put aside something she has worked on so devotedly? I explain that the audience is expecting a conversation between the two of us into which, for the last fifteen minutes or so, they are invited to enter. They will not be won over by a monologue. She offers to reduce it to fifteen minutes or so. ‘Fifteen minutes!’ I cry. Is she absolutely merciless? Five minutes at most. We are both laughing now, but this is a real test as to whether she believes I have Violet’s best interests at heart. I suggest that we introduce Violet through three women: Alice Keppel, Vita Sackville-West and the Princess de Polignac under whose patronage in France she wrote her novels. Tiziana agrees to the first two women but not the last – possibly because there is something in the relationship she does not like, I cannot tell. But I agree. We will sketch out Violet’s emotional life, then discuss her novels showing to what extent they began autobiographically and developed into imaginative chamber pieces.

  The small lecture room at Charleston is crammed with an international audience, many from America. We are speaking from a slightly raised platform and, sitting in chairs for our conversation, the front rows of our audience can see us and the back rows merely hear us – as if we are on television for some and on radio for others. I introduce the event by telling everyone that Tiziana is someone who exemplifies very powerfully the effect Violet’s life and work can produce on a new young generation of readers.

  Our discussion is both serious and light-hearted. The audience laughs and listens, listens and laughs. What do they make of us? We seem to present something like a father-and-daughter exhibition match, full of jokes, quotes and references to the family of Bloomsbury in this Bloomsbury house. Then Tiziana stands to give her address. It lasts four minutes and I feel a stab of guilt at curtailing her so severely. But what she says is charming and leaves a sense that there is much more to be discovered. The audience claps enthusiastically. Maggie, one of our radio listeners at the back, chimes in with some pertinent questions and we come to an end. Tiziana is smiling. ‘We were a perfect match,’ she says delightedly.

  Back in London on the Sunday evening we have invited Primo Levi’s biographer, Carole Angier, to dinner. She and Tiziana break into rapid Italian – stopping occasionally to explain to me and Maggie (who understands much more than I do) their helter-skelter discourse. I can see that Tiziana is something of a puzzle to Carole who feels the pattern of Italian life to be somewhat rigid. The family protects its children, especially its daughters, until they are no longer children, until they are adolescents and even in their twenties or thirties if need be, protects them until they marry and can start protecting their own children to the same extravagant degree. Many Italians, in Carole’s view, fall into two categories: the protected and the protectors. But Tiziana does not fit neatly into either of these categories. She is not closely protected by parents, she has no children to protect. She has a circle of admirers but is obliged to protect herself. W
hen she speaks of Violet, speaks of London, England and Scotland, she seems extraordinarily young and romantic. She has some liberal-aesthetic views, but also holds the retaliatory judgements of someone who may be quite vulnerable within Italian culture. She has the apprehension of an old person who sees contemporary life as unattractive and possibly dangerous. Her optimism and sense of romance come alive when she takes on the virtual existence of Violet and assumes a life that has been renewed in the novels she is translating.

  She has brought her beautifully printed monograph, ‘Violet’s Rhapsody’, and gives us copies. ‘With a degree in English Literature and an MA in scriptwriting, her main interest is Violet Trefusis,’ a career note at the back informs readers. Above this is a description of Violet Trefusis as ‘a precocious romantic enfant terrible who felt alienated from English society [and] found her true place in artistic and literary Paris …’. There is an obvious crossover with Tiziana, who feels alienated from Italian society and wishes to find an acknowledged place in English literary society. She wants to improve her written English, she tells us, up to publishable standards. Meanwhile there is this little book. It is a love token: ‘Violet and I: a coup de foudre’. That is her opening statement and in a sense it tells the reader everything.

  The book contains two of Violet’s poems: one is a call to her ally, Nature, to ‘Fight for me’; the other an invitation to ‘Come with me!’ followed by what she promises those who do – as if she herself is a force of nature. Tiziana does not quote the poem I particularly like which, its last line echoing Yeats, Violet wrote shortly before her death:

  My heart was more disgraceful, more alone

  And more courageous than the world has known.

  O passer-by my heart was like your own.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet ‘How do I love thee?’ is printed as the book’s epigraph and reading it I silently count the ways that bind Tiziana to Violet. There is an intense emotional need as well as a sense of purpose – almost the pull of destiny. I see her searching for a new identity, a reinvention of herself, a rebirth and transformation: all this to be achieved through a dedicated pattern of work – the ‘passion put to use / In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith’. Tiziana has already testified that she first came across Violet at a time of grief, and it was love at first sight. She uses the sonnet to affirm that it will be love everlasting: ‘I shall but love thee better after death.’ This is an all-consuming commitment, an imaginative ideal. Her ambition, she says, is to ‘write a biography that could survive me after my departure from this silly world’. This silly world is a dark place, but the possession of Violet’s novels, her rekindled life, has become a luminous source of happiness. And this part of my book is now part of her world.

  7

  Ultraviolet

  ‘As soon as one had left her one wanted to go back to her,’ Vita wrote in her novel Challenge, ‘thinking that this time, perhaps, one would succeed better in seizing and imprisoning the secret of her elusiveness.’ And so, after a few weeks apart, they met at Avignon and travelled on together to Bordighera, San Remo and Venice. They were quarrelling now, promising one thing, threatening another – and then Violet fell ill with jaundice, ‘a most unromantic complaint’. They could no longer be happy together or apart. ‘We are invited to Happiness,’ Violet wrote, ‘and we don’t answer the invitation.’ But the invitation date had passed, Vita believed. ‘We weren’t happy – how could we be?’

  ‘We hardly see each other now,’ Violet complained after they returned in the spring of 1920. This was partly the result of severe policing by Alice Keppel. The scandal circulating round her elder daughter was by now extreme and the family was in danger of becoming, Mrs Keppel feared, ‘the laughing stock of the country’. Already decent families were refusing to invite Violet to their houses. It was essential that no further odium be added to the wretched business before Sonia married the affluent Hon. Roland Cubitt. As the date of Sonia’s marriage approached, and afterwards the news came of her pregnancy, Alice Keppel’s treatment of Violet grew harsher. ‘Her undisguised hatred of me is a terrible thing,’ Violet told Vita. ‘ … She says that her affection for me is dead, and that after Sonia’s baby is born, I may do what I like.’

  Might Vita even now rescue her? ‘I can’t live any longer without seeing you,’ Violet wrote. She tried to jump out of a window but was prevented by Denys, though he had advised her, since she set no value on life and was making everyone wretched, that suicide might be the ‘most decent thing one can do’. Mrs Keppel was inclined to agree. ‘Mama made me cry and cry last night,’ Violet wrote to her friend Pat Dansey. ‘She said that if she had been me she would have killed herself long ago!’

  Feeling there was no one else who cared what happened, she still relied on Vita. ‘I want to reconquer all I have lost,’ she declared. The correspondence between them was crowded with resolutions, evasions, misgivings, sadness. Violet paraded her helplessness and appealed to Vita’s sense of power. It was an awful year with short haphazard meetings that opened up old wounds on parting. ‘We wanted far too thirstily to be uninterruptedly together,’ Vita explained. And so, defying everyone, they absconded one more time, staying in Hyères and Carcassonne from January to March 1921. It was, as it always had been, like ‘two flames leaping together’. But this journey was, in the words of Harold Nicolson’s biographer Norman Rose, ‘the last flickering of a blazing fire’. The fire never quite went out. Meeting again some twenty years later, Vita warned Violet that ‘we must not play with fire again’.

  When they got back from France, Violet was escorted to Italy, guarded like a prisoner by a ‘garrison-governess’ and forbidden to write to or receive letters from Vita. She had vaulted over such obstacles before, but there were two factors this time of which she was unaware. The first was Vita’s confessional, which she finished writing at the end of March 1921. It was as if the writing of this love journal gave her control over events and a release from them.

  It was not easy for Violet to get letters to her. To outwit her jailers and keep the forbidden correspondence half alive, she had chosen her friend Pat Dansey as a go-between. ‘I have been more than touched by her efforts to bring us together,’ Violet confided to Vita. ‘ … She has been an absolute angel … the most forgiving and generous person I know … Pat has placed herself unreservedly on our side.’ Pat Dansey was apparently Violet’s closest friend during this period. A lesbian herself, she had been fascinated by the passion between the two women, not liking Vita at first but being carried towards her by the fierce current of this passion. With Violet’s letters, which she addressed and forwarded to Vita, she inserted her own unseasonable messages. ‘She [Violet] is such a monkey … I was working entirely on your side … Please, Vita trust me … I think she will get round you … I hate the way she tricks and deceives people … I simply fail to see why people don’t see through her. Love from Pat.’ Instead of bringing them together as Violet believed, Pat insisted that ‘the best way of helping Violet is to make a complete break’. In this belief she may have been sincere. But there was another agenda. ‘If you happen to be in London and have a spare second, do come and see me,’ she invited Vita. ‘ … I spent the whole night dreaming about you. I expect it was because I had taken your poems to read in bed. Queer dream it was too …’ At the beginning of 1922 Vita had a brief fling with Pat Dansey – the sort of passing intimacy that did not disturb Harold (who had been enjoying an undisturbed relationship with Comte Jean de Gaigneron, a society wit and aesthete whom he used for his pen portrait of ‘the Marquis de Chaumont’ in Some People – and who in later years became an escort of Violet’s in Paris).

  ‘I think we have got something indestructible between us … a bond of childhood and subsequent passion, such as neither of us will share with anyone else,’ Vita wrote to Violet over twenty-five years later. Violet had always believed this to be true. But by March 1921, when Vita was finishing her narrative of their affaire and wondering in
‘great unhappiness’ whether she might ‘never see Violet again’, Violet already knew the answer: ‘You have chosen, my darling; you had to choose between me and your family, and you have chosen them.’

  Reading Challenge you can feel Violet’s presence as Vita herself experienced it. She describes the drowsy tone of her voice, her irresistible red mouth, her strange shadowy eyes, deep-set and slanting upwards, alive with mockery yet sometimes inexpressibly sad. Spoilt, childlike in many ways, she seemed destined to ‘grow into a woman of exceptional attraction, and to such women existence is packed with danger’. She used secrecy, the provocative mystery of her person disguised under a superficial expansiveness, as a ‘shield and a weapon’, sensing that ‘existence in a world of men was a fight, a struggle, a pursuit’.

  Vita had more difficulty in portraying herself as Julian who is described in the British publisher’s blurb as ‘a young, Byronic Englishman who led a group of islanders in revolt against their masters in the mainland’. Violet was unremittingly helpful. What about those ‘heavy-lidded eyes, green in repose, black in anger’? Could he not also be likened to a young Hermes, the god of eloquence and good fortune, the patron of travellers and thieves? (A bronze copy of Hermes at Rest stood in the garden of the Villa Cimbrone.) And surely there should be more about his grace, strength and sensuality – all fine pagan virtues. ‘“Julian was tall,” let us say, and “flawlessly proportioned”,’ she suggested. ‘ … Julian’s hair was black and silky. Eve found herself wondering what it would feel like to stroke, and promptly did so; she was amazed to feel a sensation akin to pain shoot up her fingers and lodge itself definitely in the region of her heart.’

  In his foreword to the novel, Nigel Nicolson likens Julian to Sir Philip Sidney, the Elizabethan poet and adventurer. Had she been born a boy (and she always regretted not being born a boy), this is the person Vita would have wanted to be – also the son she would have liked and (Nigel Nicolson wryly adds) never did have. Of Eve, she writes: ‘Whatever she touched she lit.’ The other characters inhabit the shadows. Rosamund Grosvenor, who appears as Fru Thyregod, is a blatant young woman, without any of Eve’s instinctive shrewdness, whose conversation is a petulant ‘babble of coy platitudes’. The politicians and diplomats who worked with Harold in the Foreign Office are seen as a pretentious and unattractive crew who enact foreign policy as if it were part of their family business.