A Book of Secrets

by Michael Holroyd

  Violet did little imaginative writing during these years in England. But she contributed two short stories to Horizon, Cyril Connolly’s review of literature and art. ‘The Carillon’ which appeared in June 1943 is a grim and powerful story set in the late winter of 1940. In her moth-pale room the Duchess goes through the list of those she most despises as she waits impatiently for death. She is ‘dying of rage, of humiliation, of despair, and frustration; also, incidentally, of the hereditary tumour, that had almost acquired heraldic significance’. The Duchess dies: and those whom she despised gather, like a swarm of black termites, for the funeral. There is a slight anti-German flavour to the story. How will France emerge from this darkness? ‘The carillon was like the soul of France, icily aloof, impregnable, enduring’ – all qualities Violet would need in the 1940s. Again Time passes: Violet’s world is vanishing and comfort slips away. She feels the rage, humiliation, despair and frustration of her Duchess whose fate foretells her own.

  Her second contribution to Horizon, which appeared in November 1943, was ‘Triptych’: three paragraphs listing, thesaurus-fashion, the qualities of England, France and Italy – something she enjoyed composing. It gave her licence to play with the similarly spelt and similar-sounding words she always liked to handle: ‘snubs and snobs’ (England); ‘forms and formality’ (France); ‘bells and smells, Quirinals and urinals’ (Italy). Perhaps it is a fiction, but it is not a story. ‘I could not work regularly,’ she admitted in her memoirs. ‘I had lost the rhythm.’

  Published not very long before the Germans began moving into unoccupied France, her novel Les Causes Perdues itself seemed something of a lost cause. It is a sombre book and it had come before the public in unhappy times.

  The novel is set in a small town near Poitiers. Each of the characters has a lost cause, which must have seemed something of an indulgence during the German occupation. The ageing coquette, Solange de Petitpas, has Violet’s juvenile outlook. ‘If this aged little girl has the stubborn cult for her childhood,’ she writes, ‘it is because it is the only thing that cannot be taken away from her. She shuts herself up in it more and more.’ The novel has many subplots and is full of violence. Mme de Norbières, the owner of a priceless collection of snuffboxes, is murdered in her bed. Solange’s maid shoots and kills her mistress mistaking her for an intruder. Adieu old age; adieu solitude. The pain of lost causes spreads through all the characters. Love itself is a lost cause and doing good to others the height of folly. No one is worth it; no one is lovable. This is Violet’s darkest book. The critic and translator Judith Landry likens it to Daisy Ashford’s ‘Young Visiters for adults’. Raymond Mortimer had written of Violet as having the wit to enjoy her privileged social life and the ability to make her readers share her enjoyment. Les Causes Perdues shows what bleakness underlies that patina of enjoyment. It was the last novel she wrote in French and it has not been translated into English.

  ‘My English friends would not like me any the less if I gave up writing (for some, it would be, if anything, rather a relief),’ Violet wrote. ‘ … had I lived all my life in England, not France, it is very doubtful whether I would ever have published anything.’

  Nevertheless she began another novel while in England, an early draft of which was typed by Harold Nicolson’s secretary (‘Well the pattern of life is odd,’ Vita remarked).

  Pirates at Play is a moral history of young women of Violet’s social class in England and Italy during the 1920s. It does not belong, as initially seems probable, to the romantic tradition of Charlotte Brontë, but follows the lead of Jane Austen, being a courtship novel, which plots a similar course to that of Pride and Prejudice. The watchword is patience (‘pazienza’), a quality that had been dramatically absent from Violet’s youth. We are shown how foreign culture, so superficially attractive when first encountered, acts on our instincts like a magnet on a compass, steering us away from ‘everything that makes life worthy living’. That seems a strange phrase for a reader expecting the words ‘worth living’ and it stirs a suspicion that Violet, who sprinkles French and Italian words so lavishly into her English narratives, might be suffering from the difficulty experienced by a minor French character in the novel: that of having ‘lived so long in England, that she could speak neither English or French’. And yet ‘worthy living’ is not an inappropriate phrase for a moral history.

  Using a comic dexterity similar in some respects to Dryden’s Marriage-à-la-Mode, Violet manipulates her two overlapping plots so that they both arrive simultaneously at a happy ending – the first and only absolute happy ending in all her novels. The story involves two families and two heroines, Ludovica (Vica), the only daughter among six children of the Pope’s dentist; and Elizabeth (Liza), the daughter of insular fox-hunting English parents, Lord and Lady Canterdown. They send their daughter to complete her education in Florence (instead of Taunton), though naturally they will not countenance having ‘an ice-creamer for a son-in-law’.

  Both girls are appallingly good-looking. Vica, with her topaz eyes and hypnotic voice, is a frightening beauty – likened to a runaway horse. She has the ability to play many roles (‘One day I am Lucrezia Borgia, another day I am Isabella d’Este’) and has begun to sense the power her beauty brings, finding it ‘fun to carve one’s initials on people’s hearts’: then ‘give them no further thought’. She is not, as she confides in a moment of unhappiness, ‘a nice person’.

  Liza is less sophisticated. She does not suspect the poetic licence given to beauty, but has at her command a disarming directness, interrupted by bursts of boyish laughter (though no marks of humour crease the solemn beauty of her face). ‘Everything about Liza shone; her hair, eyes, teeth, skin. She was made of gold.’

  Vica and Liza belong to different worlds and in this comedy of errors both look on the other as ‘a necessary stage in her education’. The two girls, ‘so different, yet completed each other’. Their education takes a turn on the amorous merry-go-round of Violet’s novels: it is fuelled by jealousy and malice; by idealised snobbery and subtle miscalculation; and exploitation by the powerful, the apprehensions of those exploited, and also the dangers of sibling love. And what they learn is how to separate powerful secondary considerations from what is primary and genuine. Violet’s melancholy is represented by the one ugly, unappreciated brother in Vica’s handsome Florentine family. Rigo is the jester at court, a wise fool who is licensed to speak the truth, a creature resembling Caliban, dwarf-like, freakish, lovelorn and lonely, with exuberant gifts as a comedian and an imaginative musician who plays from behind a curtain as Cyrano de Bergerac speaks from behind a tree.

  The Violet Trefusis who wrote this novel is no longer in the shadow of Vita. In a letter to Pat Dansey written at the beginning of May 1921 when, exiled from England and under constant surveillance in Italy, she was prevented from communicating with Vita, she described Florence as ‘a pestilential place’. Again, in mid-June, she writes: ‘As for Florence – !!! I have never hated a town so much … One day, if I’m still alive, I shall write a book about Florence. It will be vitriolic.’ Pirates at Play, published almost forty years later, is that book. Violet’s early memories have not entirely faded, particularly her memories of the ageing English governess who, under Mrs Keppel’s instructions, kept watch on her in Florence all those years ago (a governess referred to as Miss and pronounced ‘Mees’ by the Italians). She hands down her long-delayed sentence of justice, the justice of revenge, on the British colony of Florence.

  The ancient flower-maidens, wedded to Florence since they first saw the light, nearly half a century ago, making do on a miserable pittance, cutting down everything except their tea! Year by year as they grow older, their hats get younger, more floral, more desperately girlish … they continue to admire what they were told to admire when first they came to learn, or to teach … . . . Every indigent Florentine family keeps a tame ‘Mees’, like some curious pet. The ever-increasing children are taken to see her, as they would be shown a giraffe in t
he Zoo. They gape at her … Never have they seen anything so flat, so barren, so limitless … . . . Sometimes letters would arrive bearing the postmark of Bournemouth or Sevenoaks. For a few minutes, the voluntarily exiled blue eye is reclaimed by the memory of a certain herbaceous border in June, or a windy walk on the pier, then she catches sight of the ubiquitous Duomo from her window, and all else is blotted out. She sinks back reassured. Yes, it was worth it!

  Such passages on the pitiful English expatriates exhibit what Tiziana Masucci calls Violet’s ‘eye for frailties, her sarcastic tongue’. But her tirade is not wholly aimed at Italy. ‘What do they know of Italy who only Florence know?’ Violet asks. Her contempt for this English detritus washed up on the smug little hills round Florence is outstripped by her diatribe against the English at home: an effete and undeveloped race without virility or imagination.

  … Everything is like English cooking, neutralized, asepticized, castrated. All the good natural juices have been squeezed out. Though they have the richest vocabulary in the world … they only use about five hundred words … Their vocabulary is not only restricted, it is cowardly. They refer to diseases by their initials, as though they were old schoolmates, T.B., V.D., etc. They cannot bring themselves to say someone is dead, they say he has ‘passed away’ or ‘gone over’ … Infantilism is carried to incredible lengths … . They are too lazy to hate, it is too much of an effort. The climate is one of affectionate indifference, they are not particularly interested in you, but neither are they particularly interested in themselves.

  This is Violet’s verdict on those English patriots who had gossiped about her and helped to throw her out of the country – though ‘revenge is dead sea fruit’. What is more remarkable is Violet’s concealed criticism of herself and her mother. Reading of the Princess Arrivamale’s preparations for a great dinner party at the Palazzo Arrivamale, we may catch a glimpse of Mrs Keppel’s social life at the Villa dell’Ombrellino (Arrivamale meaning the opposite of a welcome). The part the Princess most enjoyed, we are told, was ‘placing the cards on the dinner table. While submitting to the dictates of protocol, she was able nevertheless to distribute rewards and punishments; promoting Y, abasing Z. It gave her a delicious sensation of power.’

  The Princess’s cynical manipulation of the characters as she plots their unsuitable marriages is Violet’s version of her mother’s manipulation of her two daughters (Sonia Keppel had by now parted from her husband). The old lady reveals, too, some of the least attractive characteristics that Violet herself was acquiring in her late fifties, including the offhand treatment of servants.

  Pirates at Play is a subtle and crowded book. We are introduced in the first few pages to a bewildering number of characters who, after a few lines, seek their fortunes outside the novel – though these fortunes, when eventually revealed, contribute to its theme, which is kept steadily in focus. The style is orchestrated by that clash of similar-sounding nouns and adjectives which Violet loved to put together: anonymous /unanimous; muddler/meddler; monastic/scholastic.

  Lisa St Aubin de Teran describes Violet as a social pirate who specialised in the ‘constant sand-papering away of hopes and aspirations’ within Pirates at Play. ‘As the author schemes and the characters scheme, each to deceive, disturb or betray, the effect is of a world in microcosm, ruled by prejudice and by misconception which produces various states of alienation.’ But Violet has now gained the confidence, skill and authority to rescue her two heroines from the machinations of the plot, bringing them in from their outposts of alienation, manipulating her readers and making her characters too ‘enjoy being manipulated’, Lisa St Aubin concludes, ‘which is no easy task’.

  The autobiographical references in the novel are like request stops in a helter-skelter progress, which delighted Proust’s English biographer George Painter. ‘Her prose is as pure and glittering as an icicle shining in the sun,’ he wrote. ‘But it moves us in a smoothly hurtling course, with swift lurches and recoveries into slang, internal rhyme, one-word epigrams: so shall I compare the experience of reading it to being driven at 90 m.p.h. over an icefield, by a driver who knows how to skid for fun? … The beauty of the girls and the prose style introduce what might have been in total effect a cruel novel, a saving poignancy.’

  9

  Looking Round

  It was the best of times. ‘I have no hesitation in saying it was the happiest day of my life,’ Violet wrote, remembering the day in 1946 she travelled back to France. ‘Sight by sight, sound by sound, the Past was returning; it was really like a reincarnation … I was back in Paris! … France had been restored to me.’

  She dreaded finding out what had been done to St Loup by the occupying German army. ‘Nothing is more unpleasant than the knowledge that one’s home has been occupied by the enemy.’ Their favourite game, she was told, had been dressing-up in her underclothes and strutting up and down the catwalk of her dining-room table – a pornographic parody of Violet’s fancy-dress parties. Although some of the furniture had been crippled, many of her books were gone, several pictures damaged, the walls covered with graffiti, ‘the place gave the impression of vitality increased, rather than diminished’. Over the year St Loup was ‘patched and painted [and] began to recall its past’.

  In Paris, too, she set about recapturing the past. She stayed at the British Embassy as the guest of the Ambassador Duff Cooper and his wife Lady Diana Cooper (who, as Lady Diana Manners, before the First World War had presented Eve Fairfax with her extraordinary visitor’s book). She had given Violet money to live on during the war and Violet was to repay her in various ways, leaving her son (much to his surprise) a handsome sum of money in her Will, and then another sum by making it a condition, in the event of St Loup’s new owner John Phillips selling the house, that he pay Lady Diana or her heir half the sale price.

  Diana Cooper gave a grand party for Violet at the Embassy to which she invited ‘my friends before the war’. She also entertained Alice Keppel and her husband when, more cautiously, they returned to Europe. In Florence, Alice Keppel soon began renovating the Villa dell’Ombrellino and ‘my mother and I made lovely plans for the future’.

  But Mrs Keppel had no future. She was suffering from cirrhosis of the liver and had only a few months to live. ‘The terrible routine of illness set in,’ Violet wrote. The contrast between the sunlight of Florence and the hushed climate of her mother’s bedroom (like the interior and exterior scenes in Echo) grew unbearable. But Violet was impressed by her mother’s serenity and the way in which the lines on her face, those channels of old age, were mysteriously fading. ‘She will make a success of her death, was my involuntary thought,’ Violet remembered. She stayed in her mother’s bedroom reading to her as long as she could – far longer than she had been able to stay with Denys Trefusis. Mrs Keppel died on 11 September 1947. ‘Yet, I wasn’t with her when she died … When I came in, her head, with its blunt white curls, was buried like a child’s in her pillow.’

  In the account of her mother’s last illness in Don’t Look Round, Violet wrote of having bent over her despairingly towards the end, asking if there was anything she wanted, and hearing the whispered answer: ‘You. You.’ The final chapter of her memoirs is a eulogy of her mother. She has greatly changed. ‘My mother never tried to influence me,’ she writes; ‘the result was that, in point of fact, she was the only person who did.’ She recalls her mother’s religious sense, her charity, unselfishness, humility. In all her life, Violet tells us, she had never ‘let anyone down’. And she concludes: ‘there is no limit to my debt.’ It was no surprise that her father consented to die soon afterwards. Violet, too, had no strong wish to survive. ‘What has happened to me since is but a postscriptum.’

  ‘Something comparable to a landslide took place in me,’ she wrote. In this fallen and infertile landscape she lives a postscriptum life in the sense that it is not a novel-writing life. She can no longer look round and use aspects of her past to create imaginative fiction. So much of h
er fiction had, by implication, been a criticism of her mother’s way of life – and that is no longer permissible. There is almost no mention of her novels in Don’t Look Round. But she had another twenty-five years to get through. In 1960 the mildly amusing Memoirs of an Armchair written by Violet and Philippe Jullian (who also illustrated it) was published. It is a device that enables the authors to escape from the present and give us intimate glimpses of whatever events in history they choose. This aristocrat among chairs was made in Paris in 1759 and takes us on adventures from the royal apartments at Versailles (where it supported Louis XV) to episodes in Regency London and ‘the roaring twenties’ in the United States. We have brief encounters with Voltaire, Talleyrand, Balzac, Byron, Lady Hamilton, Diaghilev and others. It is a party-game book.