A Book of Secrets

by Michael Holroyd

  Twenty years later, when the mist had cleared and she was writing her memoirs, Violet refined this draft obituary. ‘He had all the ballad-like qualities I most admire,’ she wrote, ‘I, all the defects it was most difficult for him to condone. Nevertheless, there was a great link between us, we both loved poetry, travel, being insatiably interested in foreign countries. We were both Europeans in the fullest sense of that term. The same things made us laugh, we quarrelled a lot, loved not a little. We were more to be envied than pitied.’

  Alice Keppel would certainly have approved of this poetic union – one of adventure, laughter and affection overcoming small domestic differences. A less enviable glimpse of the marriage may be seen in a novel published in France shortly before Denys died.

  8

  Emergency Exits

  In her memoirs, Violet described Sortie de Secours as ‘a mediocre little book, a patchwork affair, aphorisms, maxims, annotations, loosely woven into the shape of a novel. It … was a loophole, an outlet, above all, a piece of blotting paper which absorbed my obsessions.’ She looked round at her life through this novel and, not liking what she saw, decided to purge her past. ‘I am forced to admit that I do not have any good or bad qualities which make love flourish,’ says the central female character Laure. ‘Happiness comes to me from things, not people.’ It is as if Violet has floated up from one of those dark oubliettes at St Loup and decided to pass the rest of her life giving parties in the dining room above. ‘In every person there is an emergency exit; a self-interest which in its various forms allows one to escape … The disadvantage is that one cannot always come back.’

  Laure is a comparatively wealthy young woman whose charming and handsome lover Drino is growing increasingly distant. Diana Souhami neatly summarises the painful games of love Laure plays: ‘Because she loves him so much he withdraws. Because she fears betrayal she finds it … Because she finds someone else Drino is jealous.’ Finally, when she believes she has found true love, she is let down. Violet juggles aspects of her life in this story: but however she plays her cards, the game comes out badly.

  Sortie de Secours was never translated into English. An early draft was dedicated to Denys, but Violet removed his name leaving no dedication in the published volume. She would not have wanted it read in Britain for fear of arousing unpleasant memories in her mother (with whom she was now on good terms).

  Sortie de Secours cleared the ground for her more sophisticated novels. In her forlorn days, while writing ‘Battledore and Shuttlecock’, she had admitted to an inability to express herself. ‘I don’t know English well enough, I can’t analyse, I can’t reason, and am altogether too stupid,’ she had confessed to Vita. She found more encouragement in France and was soon to discover more oblique methods of orchestrating her thoughts and feelings in the French language. There is a recurring tension between the social life these novels describe and their emotional undercurrent, a battle between past and present, culture and morality.

  ‘Sortie de Secours led to Echo,’ Violet noted briefly in her memoirs. This second novel came within one vote of winning the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize (it was awarded that year to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de Nuit). It is a miniature Gothic story, which culminates in a fatal seduction. The formidably uninviting Scottish castle called Glendrocket where it opens is sparsely populated by a comic opera cast of Scottish characters. Since the death of her sister, the sixty-five-year-old Lady Balquidder has been nervously bringing up her untutored orphan twins, Malcolm and Jean. They are Rousseau’s ideal primitives.

  Into this wild and anachronistic world comes the twenty-eight-year-old Sauge de Cervallon: a great beauty and a very French Frenchwoman, she is well married, often silent, always mysterious, the subject of much speculation. Each year she feels an urgent need to leave Alain, her husband, and travel abroad for a few weeks. When the story opens she is feeling sweetly disposed to him because she is about to leave for Glendrocket where she is to meet her cousins. Never having been to Scotland, she imagines it as the dream of someone who has been reading Walter Scott and sees around her the antique world of Rob Roy or The Heart of Midlothian: ‘a completely different planet’.

  Echo is cleverly told by means of letters between Sauge and her husband in France – letters sent and not sent. The unsent letters tell a disturbing psychological truth, the sent ones are largely pragmatic. The novel is full of dark omens. Sauge remembers a fairy tale she read as a child in which, as at Glendrocket, the interior and exterior mises en scène are in conflict. In this story ‘the trees grew almost into the windows; the man encouraged them, called them to him; a branch from his favourite tree, a horse-chestnut, climbed inside the room; encroaching ever further, its arms approached nearer and nearer to his bed. One morning he was found dead from strangulation.’ The lesson Sauge learns from this story is a recurring one in Violet’s novels: ‘Objects seemed so much more alive than people in this weird place.’ This was the condition Violet sought, the condition she criticised in her novels and celebrated in her memoirs. In Echo the landscape of Perthshire and the rooms within the castle have become extensions of the characters: of the twins and Lady Balquidder. The danger lies in bringing the twins indoors and encouraging them to lose their innocence.

  A more potent omen is suggested by a dream that Sauge has in which she meets again her long-dead first love. ‘She could hardly breathe; her heart was in her mouth. Expecting only to feel the shadow of her love, she was staggered to see him in the flesh, rising from his bed, as active and vigorous as the day she had first met him. And then little by little, all faded … She awoke in deathly sadness.’ The predicament in which Sauge finds herself would be familiar to those who knew the Violet – Vita story, especially Vita’s side of it. ‘Sauge was prey to constant unease … The more she felt attracted to others, the more she needed Alain … Did she love Malcolm? Yes, if she could keep Alain; no if she had to lose him …’

  We have been warned of the danger Sauge will create if she wakes from the torpor of Parisian society. The twins who adored each other before she came to Glendrocket are soon made bitter rivals and the plot is hastened to its tragic end by a series of inevitable accidents. What had begun as comic opera concludes as a tragic ballet, a version of Petrushka in which Sauge becomes the magician and the twins puppets who succumb to her experiments.

  By giving her novella the title Echo, Violet invites the reader to find a lingering note in it of her intimacy with Vita. ‘The whole of humanity finds its echo in me, brought through pain,’ she had written to Vita. Then she had been unable to express any person’s point of view other than her own. In Echo she ingeniously sidesteps this problem by discovering aspects of herself within several of her characters and sometimes merging them with memories of Vita. The identical twins, who may be seen as androgynous aspects of a single bisexual person, encounter Sauge at a place reminiscent of Duntreath Castle in Scotland where the sixteen-year-old Violet had first invited the eighteen-year-old Vita. She had gone to Vita’s bedroom, they had heard the ‘incessant tick-tick of pigeon feet upon the roof, and the jackdaws flying from turret to turret’ and afterwards Violet had declared her love. ‘I am primitive in my joy as in my suffering.’

  Ghosts from the past rise up from time to time and haunt the story. It is they, as it were, who render the anonymous Scottish ballad, repeating two of its lines:

  For me and my true love

  Will never meet again

  And on hearing this, ‘sudden intense pain made her close her eyes …’

  Echo belongs to island literature in which sophisticated travellers, their baggage full of knowledge and culture and apparently excellent intentions, spread disease through the noble islanders – those Johnsonian inhabitants of the ‘Happy Valley’ also sought by Melville’s characters in Typee and idealised by Rousseau in his Discours.

  Ideally this is a novel for younger readers: but I first read it in my seventies and it has imprinted itself on my imagination as if I had known it
all my life.

  ‘Echo brought a lot of new friends in its wake,’ Violet wrote in Don’t Look Round. ‘I realised I was a self-made woman and also, in spite of appearances, a lonely one.’ Having two older women, Winnaretta Polignac and Alice Keppel, to look after her in Italy and France seems to have made her doubly childlike and she flirted with the notion of having a man to protect her. In her memoirs she presents herself, after Denys’s death, as being besieged by male admirers. Max Jacob ‘called on me one afternoon, dressed, he imagined, for the part of suitor. A small dapper Punchinello, he wore a top hat, white spats, gloves the colour of fresh butter. He hung his hat on a stick which he held like a banner between his legs.’ He told her that he had waited forty years before proposing to anyone and that he possessed the great advantage, in a husband, of being twenty years older than Violet. ‘He was irresistible,’ she writes. And she had no difficulty in resisting him. Like so much else, it was a charade. She tells us that Max Jacob was a ‘poet, painter, libertine, dandy, wit’, but not that he was the current lover of the writer Maurice Sachs.

  Don’t Look Round gives a superficially accurate impression of Violet’s social life during the 1930s. St Loup became a theatre and Violet ‘a stage director’, in Philippe Jullian’s words, who used her rooms there as ‘sets against which she could act out the luxurious scenarios’ of transference and surmise. These scenarios became sinister parodies of her mother’s Edwardian career: both a homage and satire of Alice Keppel’s way of life. Mother and daughter were by now almost unnaturally close to each other. ‘You are all the world to me, and I could not live without you,’ Violet confided to her mother. And Mrs Keppel reassured Violet (‘precious Luna’ as she called her – a name not so very different from Vita’s ‘Lushka’): ‘You know you are the person I love best in the world.’

  Violet’s gift for mimicry and love of costume balls made her social life at St Loup and the Villa dell’Ombrellino a camp version of heterosexual games-playing. She entertained many improbable fiancés: princes, counts, knights, prime ministers were her escorts but none of them her lovers. They were for decoration and also perhaps camouflage for loves of another order – though by the time Philippe Jullian met her after the war ‘Violet had conceived a positive distaste for Sapphic circles’.

  ‘I had been put into the world to write novels,’ she declared. Her novels explore individual loneliness and the search for close attachments within privileged circles of society. The success of Echo had given her fresh confidence and she wrote her next novel in English, taking it in the autumn of 1932 to Virginia Woolf with the intention of getting the Hogarth Press to publish it. Virginia Woolf makes no mention of meeting Violet in her diary and later on, after her own relationship with Vita had ended, she confided to Ethel Smyth that she ‘didn’t take to Trefusis’. But at the time she wrote excitedly to Vita: ‘Lord what fun! I quite see now why you were so enamoured – then; she’s a little too full now, overblown rather; but what seduction! What a voice – lisping, faltering, what warmth, suppleness … like a squirrel among buck hares – a red squirrel among brown nuts. We glanced and winked through the leaves; and called each other punctiliously Mrs Trefusis and Mrs Woolf – and she asked me to give her the Common R[eader] which I did … And she’s written to ask me to go and stay with her in France, and says how she enjoyed meeting me …’

  But the Hogarth Press did not publish Violet’s novel and ‘I think she’s been rather silly about it’, Virginia confided to Vita. Tandem, as it was called, was published by Heinemann in 1933. Graham Greene in the Spectator noted that almost all the characters had titles, sometimes spelt in the English way, sometimes in the French, and there was a strong period atmosphere conveyed ‘in a prose rather consciously spangled with felicities’. The motive for writing it he thought was ‘indiscernible, but it has wit and is easily read’.

  ‘There is in this book a great resemblance to the true course of people’s lives,’ the blurb of Putnam’s American edition reads. But this social pageant bears no great resemblance to Violet’s life. In order that it could be safely read by her mother (to whom it is dedicated), she was at pains to remove the characters and plot from anything that would prompt awkward memories. There is one significant minor figure from that period: a witchlike mischief-maker, the contriver and exploiter of love affairs, called Nancy, who is clearly based on Pat Dansey – though her origins are well concealed. The blurb informs readers that the author ‘is the daughter of the Honorable Mrs George Keppel’. Who her father was we are not told.

  It is called Tandem because, as the Times Literary Supplement reviewer explained, ‘though Madame Demetriades had three daughters, Marguerite whose perfect digestion was considered a little vulgar did not count’. Marguerite is a stolid, healthy, uninteresting woman married to a wealthy nonentity and devoted to her recipes and her children (reflecting Violet’s view of her sister Sonia).

  The other two sisters show us alternative lives Violet might have lived: one wholly in France, the other in England. The brilliant Penelope marries a French duke, and becomes with miraculous rapidity a successful writer and a grande dame famous for collecting books and admirers (though being sensuous rather than sensual, and not caring for physical relationships, all her ‘lovers’ – save of course the King – are merely social companions). Her gentler sister Irene marries Mr Gottingale and is carried off to England where she tries hard not to be afraid of horses but is thrown and killed while hunting. Her story is mainly told through letters and journals. ‘They know how to write, but no one has taught them how to live,’ says their mother.

  But Penelope lives on. ‘Her nose had been bobbed, her eyes had been slit, and subsequently “taken in” again, her eyebrows had been plucked, her eyelashes had been artificially prolonged; her hair had been dyed over and over again …’ She is lonely: her literary reputation has become a thing of the past, her husband is dead, her only comforts are food and the Légion d’honneur.

  The Hogarth Press refusal of Tandem was a stimulus for Violet’s novel Broderie Anglaise. As Orlando had evolved from Vita Sackville-West’s Challenge, so Broderie Anglaise took its origins from Orlando – the three interconnected novels woven round the love affairs of the three women. ‘The balance between truth & fantasy must be careful,’ Virginia Woolf had noted in her diary while working on Orlando in 1927. There is a different balance in Broderie Anglaise. It is a contemporary novel, disquisitory and domestic. There are no outrageous tricks with time, though tremors of human drama reverberate from the past and disturb the present. The character of Alexa Harrowby Quince (rather a sour fruit – it is a surname given to a servant in one of her later novels) is Violet’s representation of Virginia Woolf. She is a bluestocking, well-known for her ‘gastronomic incompetence’, writing novels in a fussy Bloomsbury study, which contains an expensive counterfeit primitive from Siena and a genuine Roger Fry that ‘would have been all the better for being a counterfeit’. Aspects of Violet herself are present in Anne Lindell, a legendary figure from the past, the two women, like their originals, having the same first letter of their initial names.

  The novel is in part a branch of literary criticism (like Fielding wrote of Richardson’s Pamela or Cervantes’s Don Quixote was of Amadis of Gaul) and it contains some astute observations on Orlando. ‘From a comfortable anonymity,’ Alexa [Virginia] had used her novel to ‘focus on Anne [Violet] the spotlight of her lucidity … She already knew her as if she had created her – every feature, every tone of voice.’ But, we are told, Alexa ‘was sometimes afraid truth might hamper her imagination, which used to get on so well on its own’. Her book exhibited Anne (that is Violet dressed in the exotic plumage of Sasha, the Russian princess) as a ‘brilliant, volatile, artificial creature, predictably unpredictable, a historical character’. Alexa’s novel became a whimsical success. ‘The general public, with its taste for the romantic, loved the book. It also won enthusiastic praise from the critics, astonished to see Alexa depart from her usual austerity.’ />
  As Violet had collaborated in the writing of Challenge, so she imagines the first chapter of Orlando arising from stories Vita had told Virginia about their romance (Vita may also have shown Virginia some of Violet’s letters). In Broderie Anglaise it is upon a similar one-sided account – an account given to Alexa by her lover, the young Lord Shorne – that she based her book.

  Lord Shorne is the male equivalent of Vita Sackville-West. He is a taciturn young man, disdainful, self-assured, a Prince Charming with heavy dark eyelids and full prominent lips – ‘a hereditary face which had come, eternally bored, through five centuries’ of one of his country’s most illustrious families. A languid, sombre beauty, he has ‘a latent fire which turned this picture of idleness into a figure of rhetoric’. Both Anne and Alexa believed they could bring this latent fire alive, give content to his rhetoric and rescue him from himself – and his mother. For he is a man divided against himself. The good John Shorne, we are told, ‘was his father’s son; the bad John Shorne was the son of his mother’.

  His enormous castle called Otterways, ‘at once a palace and fortress’, is a fairy-tale setting with theatrical similarities to Knole. Alexa (now aged thirty-seven) had fallen in love at first sight with John Shorne (who is some eight years younger). This is her one-and-only love, her first sexual encounter. She is presented as a highly successful writer and ‘one of the most distinguished women in England’. But despite being so sure of herself on the page, under her monastic reserve she is still socially inept and sexually apprehensive: all mind and little body. Her manner with Lord Shorne is arch, sentimental, helpless. She seems determined to prove a victim. Several times Violet plays with Virginia’s name to emphasise Alexa’s lack of femininity. ‘It’s not a question of virginity,’ she protests, ‘nothing so simple. It’s an attitude.’ Something chosen.