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.