A Book of Secrets

by Michael Holroyd

  Violet’s last book was From Dusk to Dawn. It has her name on the title page though it was also written by Frank Ashton-Gwatkin, a retired diplomat (who added a hagiographic introduction), and it carries a dedication to him (‘my companion, my guide and my own familiar friend’). It is a not very amusing mock-Gothic novella and was published a few months after Violet’s death.

  Violet’s memoirs take her up to her fifty-ninth year when Don’t Look Round was published. ‘By craning a little, I can see into the sixties,’ she wrote. She saw herself: ‘rich and blue of hair, hostessy, successful’. But at another level they were ‘less successful’ years, indeed awful, these ‘secretly obscene sixties … hiding their revelatory passports like a crime … Haggard, hunted sixties, terrified of missing something, rubbing themselves superstitiously against the topical, the fashionable, men and women of the day … this sad crowd … rich in experience and indulgence … Extreme old age is as lonely as God. It has no one to talk to … Survival is the ultimate satisfaction’ – unless, like Solange in Les Causes Perdues, you can make yourself believe that you will see your loved one after death.

  Coming at the end of a great tradition of the novel as social tragicomedies of manners, Violet had added a penetrating and authentic minor variation to the genre, which might be called flirtatious tragedy. She combined French wit with English seriousness and relied, not simply on customs belonging to a social milieu that no longer exists, but on the way human nature operates in highly mannered and amoral circumstances. She was a chronicler of the human heart. The writer who worked alone for two or three hours each morning went about her business ruthlessly dissecting the woman who would occupy the rest of the day so emptily in smart society ‘not caring a damn for anyone’. Unable to write by the end, she is stranded: ‘utterly lost, miserably incomplete, condemned to leading a futile, purposeless existence’, as she had predicted in one of her letters to Vita.

  ‘Is St Loup a comfort?’ Winnaretta Polignac wrote to her. ‘I hope so. I don’t like to think you are sad and dépaysée [disenfranchised].’ But this is how she was. Alice Keppel had left Violet a lifetime’s tenancy of the Villa dell’Ombrellino, but none of the furniture, almost all of which her sister Sonia insisted on selling. Violet would spend the spring and autumn in Florence, and the rest of the year at St Loup, being chauffeured between the two houses, the car rattling with acquisitions. In 1958 she added a new complication to her life by buying an apartment in Paris. It was the wing of a mansion in the rue du Cherche Midi that had once belonged to the Duc de Saint-Simon (and was later bought by Andy Warhol). She decorated the enormous drawing room, the conservatory and bedrooms with marble busts, Aubusson rugs, Louis XV chairs and eighteenth-century portraits. From here it was no distance to London where Violet would stay, as her mother had done, at the Ritz Hotel. Wherever she went she travelled with her chauffeur and her maid. She could not be alone and yet, however chaotically crowded her life, ‘I was the cat that walked by itself.’

  At one place and another she commanded an army of servants: cooks, gardeners, butlers … She treated them unceremoniously, seldom letting them know how many people were coming to lunch or whether she was going out for dinner. She would dismiss them, employ others, then sack them and engage more. But there was one exception to this disorder. Madame Alice Amiot, her chic flirtatious maid, was, so Violet claimed, Proust’s cousin. She had been the mistress, it was rumoured, of a grand duke. And she had the same first name as Violet’s mother. Her presence became very necessary to Violet who behaved like a tremulous and demanding child, often going to Alice’s bedroom and waking her at night. Vita visited St Loup after Mrs Keppel’s death and was shocked by the way Violet spoke to this maid. ‘It’s really more than a little mad,’ she told Harold. Alice complained that her health was breaking down under this treatment and Vita predicted that ‘Alice really will go’ after which Violet would be miserable. But Alice did not go. It was a strange game they played. Alice treated Violet as if she were royalty, though, at a practical level, she herself was in command of everything. She became ‘her surrogate mother, nursemaid, confidante and lady-in-waiting’, Diana Souhami writes.

  Over these last years Violet entered ever more deeply into a make-believe world. When young she had been carried into a fancy-dress party in a carpet which, suddenly unrolling, revealed her as Cleopatra. Now she made her entrance with solemn grandmotherly tread as Queen Victoria. She was hedged about with the illusions of royalty. Lord Grimthorpe had faded in her imagination and the Prince of Wales, King Edward VII, took his place as her father. She told everyone, in strict confidence, that she was thirteenth in line to the English throne. Her royal identity, she confided to her friend John Phillips, was the reason for her sister’s sense of inferiority, which ‘in a way poisoned her life’. Sonia ‘cannot accept my being who I am’. But the unmentionable fact was that if anyone was the illegitimate daughter of the Prince of Wales it had been Sonia, born in 1900 while he and Alice Keppel were conducting their famous affaire. As if to lend credence to this hypothesis, it was Sonia’s granddaughter Camilla who, after another clandestine relationship, went on to marry Charles, her Prince of Wales, early in the twenty-first century.

  After the war, Violet continued collecting ‘fiancés’, one of the most daring, a celebrated bullfighter, enabling her to assume the role of Carmen. Many of her closest friends were homosexual men who, according to Vita, ‘all dislike each other’. (Vita herself had shown contempt for Harold’s ‘cheap and easy loves … Those rank intruders into darkest layers.’) It was to Vita, many years before, that Violet had declared how much she preferred heterosexual to homosexual men. Over homosexual men she had no power. But after her mother’s death she attained the power of wealth. She gathered round her people who dedicated their lives to amusing and admiring her. And she played games with them, turning their speculations and investments of time into charades. Who would inherit her apartment in Paris, her house at St Loup de Naud, her pictures and, above all, her parade of jewels? The wheel spun and the distribution changed, spun again and changed again. The game never ended till it came to a halt in a chaos of contradictory Wills.

  She had become a subversive snob. Strict rules of precedence and attire were observed at the Villa dell’Ombrellino. Everything was correct; everything mocked. Like royalty, she would approach the dinner table, once everyone had reached the appropriate place. She advanced, leaning on a stick and the arm of an elderly butler or some promoted favourite of the evening, and attended by Alice darting back and forth behind her with whispered instructions about handbags and handkerchiefs. During dinner she would, like an actress, make up her face a dozen times while her guests were eating (between meals she liked to touch up the photos of herself by Cecil Beaton and others – though she never took a paintbrush to her portraits by James Lavery, Jacques-Emile Blanche, Ambrose McEvoy and others). When she rose from dinner she would spread a cascade of crumbs around her. She liked to take aside some retired Italian diplomat or elderly member of the English aristocracy to express her political concerns: ‘China worries me,’ she would murmur. She kept alive the hostility her mother had formed with Bernard Berenson and made a new enemy of Harold Acton. But on bright days she was playful, generous, alert, amusing and irrepressibly flirtatious with the men she liked – her friends (who included her sister’s granddaughter Annabel, an art student in Florence) all used these words to describe her.

  Vita died in 1962, and Violet’s health deteriorated. It was the worst of times. All was waste: ‘waste of love, waste of talent, waste of enterprise’. In the Gothic atmosphere of St Loup, its great tower visited by migratory birds rising from the mist, traces of vanished lovers seemed to linger, their shades not entirely dispelled, registering unmitigated passions like distant cries from the dungeons. There is an evocative description of these last years by Philippe Jullian:9

  At l’Ombrellino she wandered beneath the cypresses like an exiled queen who could entrust her confidences only to the sta
tues lining the terraces. At St Loup, she climbed the tower to make sure all was in order in those charming rooms which sheltered charming friends but never, alas, the valiant lover … for whom she had longed … her faithful friends were part of the décor, walk-ons in the plays of the imagination in which Violet took the leading roles. With the onset of age, insomnia and illness, these roles became harder for her audience to follow, despite the fact that they were rehearsed again and again. They concealed the real Violet behind the clown’s make-up applied by a blind man. Her friends suffered as they watched … Approaching seventy, Violet looked eighty.

  In 1970 Alice Amiot died and Violet, appearing at parties as a ghostly and a ghastly figure (as she herself might have written and as Vita had foreseen), endured the humiliations that afflicted the Duchess in her Horizon story ‘The Carillon’. Ravaged by infirmities, treated with blood transfusions, almost incapable of walking, waiting for death, she sat among her audience of guests at St Loup like a damaged relic from a distant past, unable to eat yet still greedy for gossip, a living skeleton at the head of her table, fiddling with the bread – a more horrific version of Dickens’s Miss Havisham. Charades and fantasies made life bearable, kept her alive. ‘I do not cling to life,’ she insisted; but cling to it she did – she could not help herself. Arriving at the Villa dell’Ombrellino at the end of 1971, its fountains empty, dead flowers bent over the flower beds, she retired to her bedroom (once her mother’s bedroom), her Fabergé animals and jade statuettes round the walls – and starved to death on 1 March 1972.

  Epilogue

  Time Regained

  This book has its origins in the Villa Cimbrone from where I set out to rediscover some of the women in the life of its owner Ernest Beckett. In retrospect it appears in my dreams like a mirage, a place that exists but not quite where it seems to be. It belongs now to my imagination. As I was writing this book, the villa came to represent a challenge and an opportunity – an opportunity to meet the challenge to biography, in particular its intractability, set by Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando.

  Cimbrone is a place of beauty and relaxation; it is not a centre for archival research. Working on one of the terraces there in the evening sunlight, I came across a photograph of Eve Fairfax taken at the time she was engaged to Ernest Beckett (and was sitting for Rodin). But none of the love letters Ernest had written to her then, and which she had many years later given to Ernest’s daughter Lucille, has survived. Nor was there any record at Cimbrone of Ernest’s American wife Luie who had died so young – long before he retired to the villa (though he had transported other mementoes from his past). I did find a signature by his daughter Violet, but none of her books was in the library and I saw no evidence of her mother, Alice Keppel’s, love affair with him. And yet, though the villa provided me with almost no facts, no information, none of what Virginia Woolf called ‘granite’, my days at Cimbrone somehow increased my determination to reach these women and write, not so much a traditional ‘biographical’ narrative, as a set of thematically related stories. Of necessity there are many empty spaces marking what has been hidden or forgotten, lost or misunderstood – mysterious spaces, which have themselves become part of a recurring pattern in this recreation of their lives.

  In her novels, Violet Trefusis warns her readers against giving priority to places above people – as if falling in love with a place will protect you against the agony of grief. Cimbrone contained nothing that was obviously useful for Ernest’s granddaughter Catherine Till in her attempt to solve the problem of her parentage. But the spirit of this place had intensified her love for someone absent. There is nothing definitive at the villa, but the atmosphere appears to prompt speculation and bring back the past. And it seems to me that an intense involvement with absent people from the past is what moves biographers to write.

  As for Tiziana Masucci, there could not have been a better frame for her exhibition, dedicated to Violet Trefusis, than the cloisters of the Villa Cimbrone. And when she turned her hypnotic gaze on me it was not on her own behalf, but on behalf of someone who had taken possession of her. Nowhere else, I think, would I have been so receptive to her appeal to bring Violet and her writings into my book.

  This book has no settled agenda. I do not insist that women are superior to men or claim that the past was more glorious than the present – indeed the word ‘illegitimate’ is mercifully fading in our time and we content ourselves by expressing our moral indignation over other people’s behaviour with the bureaucratic and impotent word ‘unacceptable’. That, too, will fade.

  Go to the Villa Cimbrone today and you will see a rather different place with a helicopter landing pad, a swimming pool, a cocktail party lawn, polite teas and all the lavish paraphernalia of a five-star hotel. But it commands the same view over the Gulf of Salerno as it did for Ernest Beckett in 1905. Some of the garden remains as it had been and you may be confronted round any corner, behind any tree, by some Beckett eccentricity. The reclining golden statue of a plump and naked Eve, which D. H. Lawrence covered in mud, is still protected by its cage in the rock as it was when I first went there.

  At the villa I visited more than ten years ago there were no paying guests and, in those bright pretty rooms with their terrific furniture, it was easier to conjure up the Beckett family who had intermittently lived there for over half a century. It was as if the fire that broke out on the top floor had only recently consumed their troubled past and that the palazzo and its gardens were still occupied by shades from that past. I stood in the temple where Ernest Beckett’s ashes had been buried and thought of Luie and Eve and José and Alice and others who had for a time belonged to his world – as he did to theirs. On my second journey I delivered my talk in one of the garden pavilions summoning the spirits of Bloomsbury – Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and by association Vita Sackville-West, who had all played with time, fantasy and the transfer of identities.

  Now, as in a film, I can bring back the characters who occupy the pages of this, my last book. I can imagine them arriving at the Villa Cimbrone I recognise, and hear them filling all those empty spaces in my narrative that I could not complete. Finally they will all meet one another, explain what had been inexplicable and learn with much amazement and the shaking of heads what they never knew before: and then, after a silence, the sound of laughter. So everything will be understood and what had been grief, and the avenging of grief, will at last be transmuted into the comedy of life.

  Acknowledgements

  I am particularly grateful to my two dedicatees, Tiziana Masucci and Catherine Till, who guided me so sympathetically and with such perseverance during the long, interrupted quest that grew into this book.

  Others who have helped me include Vivien Allen, Lucy Beckett, the late Sir Martyn Beckett, Michael Berry, Mary Rose Blacker, Simon Blow, Virginia Charteris, Judy Collingwood, Douglas Croft, Peter Dench, Charles Dodsworth, Paul Evans, the late Fiona Fairfax, James Fergusson, the Rev. Sir Timothy Forbes-Adams, Ken Giggal, Victoria Glendinning, the late Christopher Grimthorpe, Marion J. Hare, Felicity Harrison, Marjorie Harrison, Frances Holt, David Hughes, the late Lady Serena James, Judith Landry, Helen Langdon, Rupert Lycett-Green, Adam Nicolson, the late Nigel Nicolson, Suzanne O’Farrell, Roger Packham, John Phillips, the late Georgina Ratcliffe, David S. Rymer, Harvey Sachs, Anne Sidamon-Eristoff, the late Sir Reresby Sitwell, Diana Souhami, Alexander and Serena Sparks, Jean Strouse, Hugo Vickers, Gore Vidal, Giorgio Vuilleumier, Jane Wellesley, Ursula and David Westbury.

  I am also indebted to the following libraries, galleries and institutions: Eton College Library (archivist Penelope Hatfield), Fairfax House (Peter Brown), Johannesburg Art Gallery (Jillian Carman, Eleanor Lorimer and Thembinkosi Mabaso), Leeds Metropolitan Library (Professor Lori Beckett), The Retreat at York (chief executive Derek Thomson), Tate Library and Archive, Millbank (Lisa Cole, Gallery Records Assistant Curator, and John Langdon), City of York Library Service (local studies librarian Amanda Howard) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (Marjo
rie Trusted, deputy custodian, sculpture department, and Linda Lloyd-Jones).

  I would like to thank Caradoc King and Robert Lescher, my British and American literary agents, for having steered the text so tenderly towards publication. The book has benefited from the enterprise of my publisher Clara Farmer and the scrutiny of my editor Juliet Brooke at Chatto & Windus; also from the attention and encouragement of Jonathan Galassi and Courtney Hodell at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I am grateful to the eagle-eyed copy-editor Ilsa Yardley for saving me from various humiliations, and for the work of my jacket designer Nayon Cho.

  Finally I thank Margaret, my wife, for her patience and incredulous encouragement.

  Illustrations

  1. Auguste Rodin’s bronze bust of Eve Fairfax, c.1909 (courtesy of V&A Images).

  2. Eve Fairfax in her late twenties and late nineties; Luie Beckett with her daughters, c.1890, painted by Edward Hughes (courtesy of Lady Feversham); Ernest Beckett at the Villa Cimbrone, c.1910 (courtesy of Tiziana Masucci).

  3. The frontispiece from Eve’s Book; Swinburne’s ‘Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)’ copied out by Lord Grimthorpe, 1915.

  4. The Villa Cimbrone around 1910; and the Villa Cimbrone today (both courtesy of Tiziana Masucci).

  5. Michael Holroyd and Catherine Till at the Villa Cimbrone in 2000; Tiziana Masucci in Rome.

  6. Violet Trefusis on 16 June 1919, taken on her wedding day (courtesy of NPG Images).

  7. Jacket image of the first edition of Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicolson, 1973; Philippe Jullian’s jacket of Pirates at Play by Violet Trefusis, published in 1950 (courtesy of Tiziana Masucci).