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.
Over fifty years later, when the book was finally published in Britain, there appeared to be ‘nothing here for the prurient’, Paul Theroux wrote in a review for The Times, ‘ … one is left wondering why it was suppressed for reasons of delicacy.’ But it would have shocked Lady Sackville’s friends because they knew the dramatis personae. Had Vita made the protagonists two women, the novel might have gained a place in the history of lesbian literature as a predecessor to Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (which Vita thought ‘loathsome’). When it was eventually published in 1974, it sold well as a romantic pendant to Portrait of a Marriage. But the social climate had changed from one of deference before the aristocracy to one of incredulity. ‘The literary merits of the book are strong,’ Nigel Nicolson stated in his foreword. But reviewers were unable to discover this literary merit. Today Challenge merely emphasises the contrasting achievement of Orlando. It is an inanimate book – with an interesting subtext.
Violet meanwhile had been struggling with a novel called ‘Battledore and Shuttlecock’. In June 1919, four days before her marriage, she had made a resolution to use her unhappiness as a spur to writing:
both an assuagement of grief and a weapon raised against her enemies. ‘I will write the most mad, obscene, relentless book that ever startled the world,’ she announced. ‘It shall be more than a book. It shall be all passion, insanity, drunkenness, filth, sanity, purity, good and evil that ever fought and struggled in human anguish …’ But she could write only when she was comparatively happy and she could not be happy when she was alone – and she had to be alone in order to write. This was a complicated knot to unravel. It seemed unlikely that she could sustain a narrative beyond the length of a novella or reach beyond the roman-à-clef. Her chief limitation, she believed, was her single-mindedness. ‘I only see my side of the question; I am blind to the other person’s … If it turns out to be rotten it will really break my heart,’ she admitted. ‘I have so little confidence in myself.’ But though writing was ‘so difficult it makes my brain reel’ her desire to write grew. And in 1922 she began another novel.
This was a romantic tragedy called The Hook in the Heart. ‘It’s an awful temptation to make books end badly,’ she had written to Vita in the summer of 1920. Challenge had ended badly with Julian’s betrayal by Eve who drowns herself on the final page. That novel had been their stillborn ‘love-child’; Violet’s novel was a lamentation. Cecile, a young and innocent girl, who is Violet’s portrait of herself, finds that ‘her love of love had bred disgust of love … she cursed passionate love, the hook in the heart that you cannot tear out without tearing out the heart also’. The melancholy plot is manipulated by a sinister mother figure – an amalgam of Lady Sackville and Mrs Keppel. Rejected by everyone, Cecile is confronted at the end by what Violet most feared: solitude.
The Hook in the Heart reflects Violet’s bitter state of mind between 1922 and 1923. The manuscript is fluently written and has the vitality of her letters. But she has not yet clothed herself in the dark comedy
of manners that could subtly convey what she needed to say. She did not try to get the novel published, probably because it was too nakedly self-revealing. In 1923, however, her life was to change dramatically.
At the end of her journal, on 28 March 1921, Vita wrote in great unhappiness of ‘Violet’s doom, which she herself has consistently predicted’. But in Violet’s polite volume of memoirs, written thirty years later and distinguished by the skill with which she interweaves her omissions like lace depending on the pattern of its spaces, she covers this time with ease. She had not been the only girl, she tells us, to ‘set her cap’ at the slim and elegant figure of Denys Trefusis. It was impossible to withstand his charm. Once they settled down in France, ‘we were able to establish a modus vivendi … Denys was given a job in Paris … we were by no means unhappy there … In 1923 we found the home we had always longed for; a diminutive house in Auteuil, facing full south … I tried to pick up the threads of the life I had lived as a jeune fille.’ There had been some arguments between them, she recollects, but ‘we both rather enjoyed these Noel Coward episodes’. This is a framework of their lives: the frame without a picture. Violet’s novel contains more truth than this ‘non-fiction’; Vita’s journal more truth than her fiction. There are no rules in these matters.
But scattered through Violet’s memoir are glimpses of her frustration: ‘I liked many of Denys’s friends, but cared not for their nocturnal peregrinations.’ He was, she adds, ‘the darling of the Caveau Caucasien and other night-clubs and … I was jealous … the wasp-waisted Caucasian dancers had probably more in common with him than I had … I had no intimate friends … No, I had no intimate friends.’
Violet and Denys occupied the same house but led separate lives. ‘No one loves me or lives with me,’ she wrote to Vita. ‘ … I should not lead the life of chastity.’ The interim modus vivendi they established
was her agreement not to object to his affaires or his long journeys into Russia; and his agreement to encourage her writing (she began attending lectures at the Sorbonne).
It was Alice Keppel who arranged for Denys’s job at a bank and bought their house at Auteuil. She would continue to support them financially so long as they remained married and lived in exile with at least a patina of respectability. And that patina is what Violet gives the readers of the memoirs she dedicated to the memory of her mother. What she did not know was that her mother was using Pat Dansey to report on her way of life in Paris and that Pat Dansey was forwarding stories about her to Vita. In Violet’s memoirs, Pat Dansey is described in terms of a quirky animal: ‘small and quick and done in various shades of brown, her hair was the colour of potato chips, her eyes like bees, her face had the texture and hue of a pheasant’s egg. I have made her sound edible, but she was too brittle and furry to make really good eating. She had a stutter that sounded most incongruous in her small neat person, for it gave one the impression she was slightly intoxicated. ’ This was the deprecating camouflage under which Pat Dansey plotted her manoeuvres. In her letters to Vita she attributed secret amours to Violet (‘her falseness simply appals me … She’s a hopeless woman’). She wished to make sure that Vita would not become attached to her again and impede Pat’s own relationship – which nevertheless ended explosively in the winter of 1923 – 4 after Vita told her she had fallen in love with the writer Geoffrey Scott.
‘Russia was his Holy Land,’ Violet was to write of Denys. But for Violet herself the Holy Land was France. On her first visit to Paris at the age of eleven she had announced: ‘When I’m grown up, I’m going to live in Paris.’ Her technique of living, she believed, was acquired in France. Now, at the age of twenty-eight, she decided to reinvent her life there. Paris must make up for everything: love abandoned,
friendships fallen into disuse. ‘I was intimate with Paris, which replaced them … Paris, failing people, could give me all I craved.’
It was Denys who helped her find a new beginning. He was ‘extremely, and, a trifle pedantically, musical’, Violet explained. ‘ … His Egeria was Princess Edmond de Polignac.’ In 1923 he introduced Violet to the Princess who became the third significant woman in her life.
Violet described this immensely rich and remarkable woman as being ‘inscrutable’. She ‘hung over life like a cliff; her rocky profile seemed to call for spray and seagulls; small blue eyes – the eyes of an old salt – came and went; her face was more like a landscape than a face, cloudy hair, blue of eye, rugged of contour … . Like all fundamentally shy people, she was infinitely intimidating. People quailed before her.’ She had been born Winnaretta Singer, one of the many children of the American sewing-machine multimillionaire Isaac Singer. Her first marriage, a distressing experience involving an umbrella, had to be annulled. Her second, to the homosexual Prince Edmond de Polignac, was a marriage of convenience uniting their passion for music and aligning his great social position with her great wealth. His tremendous funeral in 1901 was used by Proust to describe the funeral of Saint-Loup.
Edmond de Polignac had been thirty years older than his wife; his widow (aged fifty-eight) was almost thirty years older than Violet when they met. Violet gives a sketch of the spectacular salon for musicians, writers and artists which the Princess had created at her house in the avenue Henri-Martin and which Proust describes in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. She mentions some of the writers she met in the 1920s: the elegant, crane-like Giraudoux; Anna de Noailles so ‘tiny, brilliant, restless’; Paul Valéry ‘mumbling almost unintelligible epigrams beneath his chewed moustache’; and, perhaps her favourite, Colette whom she called ‘a genius in the art of loving, and in the art
of living and of describing those arts’. According to Colette’s husband Maurice Goudeket, the two women understood each other well but were very different – ‘one of them earthy, always in direct contact with everything; the other ethereal, seeing everything through a prism’. Certainly Violet does not follow Colette’s example in her writing. She does not tell us that the Princess fell in love with her, or reveal that she was an implacable lesbian with sadistic tastes. There is a story Duff Cooper told his wife Diana of a friend who was mistaken one morning for ‘the lady who was expected’ and shown to a room ‘where she was greeted by the old Princess in a dressing gown and top boots. On a sofa in another part of the room she saw Violet Trefusis with another woman, both stark naked and locked in a peculiar embrace. She ran from the room in terror.’ According to Harold Acton, Princess ‘Winnie’ taught Violet discretion – ‘it was rumoured with a whip – so her subsequent liaisons with ladies were less advertised’.
The attraction between Violet and the Princess was strong and instantaneous. ‘From the start the two women exercised a hypnotic fascination for each other,’ wrote Michael de Cossart. ‘ … Winnaretta was bowled over by Violet’s beauty, vivacity and apparent availability.’ (Denys had left for a prolonged visit to Russia shortly after introducing them.) It is easy to understand her attraction for the sensuous twenty-nine-year-old Violet – for what Sylvia Kahan calls her ‘dramatic dark looks’, her ‘quick wit’ and ‘alluring spontaneity’. But Violet’s attraction to the rough-cast Winnaretta was, as Arthur Rubinstein observed, more ‘complicated’. She admired her strength, gained entry into her wonderful court of musicians and writers, and abandoned the life of chastity.
The Princess’s majestic patronage was welcomed by Mrs Keppel. For both women the appearance of social respectability was essential to their way of life, and Winnaretta always invited Violet’s parents and
husband to her soirées. This arrangement was a variation of Mrs Keppel’s own discreet, extramarital arrangements with Ernest Beckett and later the Prince of Wales. They were a distinguished group: the Princess and her good friend Denys Trefusis with his wife and her mother and father. During the 1920s and early 1930s they travelled together to Egypt, Italy, Greece, Algeria, Cuba, the United States (where they were invited to the White House) and Spain (where they met King Alfonso XIII).
In 1924 Alice Keppel left Britain (though keeping a furnished suite at the Ritz) and bought the Villa dell’Ombrellino, an imposing fortress of a house on the Bellosguardo overlooking Florence. This new home, with its spacious view, its formal terraced garden, was Mrs Keppel’s version of Ernest Beckett’s Villa Cimbrone: a place she could fill with memories of a royal past and revive a grand epoch of England that no longer existed. She never learnt Italian – she did not need to. There were her servants to do that for her and there was her daughter who picked up languages with the ease of an accomplished mimic.
Violet acquired a new house too. In Don’t Look Round she writes of a luncheon party at which she met Proust not long before his death. He advised her, she remembers, to visit St Loup de Naud, on the road to Provins some eighty kilometres from Paris. He had used the name for Robert, Marquis de Saint-Loup-en-Bray, the effeminate womanising career officer in his novel, who marries Gilberte Swann, is killed in action and buried at Combray. Violet adds that rereading Proust a few years later, the name Saint Loup ‘smote me like a reproach’ and she set out to find the place. Asking the patron of a restaurant where she had lunch if there was any property to be bought in the neighbourhood, she was told that there existed ‘an ancient tower, but it is very dilapidated’. She bought it.
In Violet’s memoirs the truth is located in hidden places: the people
are concealed within them. With its haunted bedrooms, its Gothic atmosphere, St Loup was ‘not a reassuring place’, Philippe Jullian wrote, ‘beneath the dining room are many oubliettes.’ The picture of St Loup that Violet gives is a form of self-portrait. The house could ‘lay claim to a certain magic spell of its own’, she wrote. ‘ … It was passive, immutable, like sensuality – a climate, not an episode. It lay coiled within the massive walls like a snake, which only rears its head when trodden on … the character of St Loup cannot be described as “nice”. It is sensuous, greedy … ruthless, vindictive. If it takes a dislike to you, you are done … If, on the other hand, you have the good fortune to please St Loup, it is equally unscrupulous. No scène de séduction is too crude, no posture too audacious. It beckons, importunes, detains.’
What she does not tell the reader is that St Loup was actually bought for her by her lover, the Princess de Polignac, who restored the fifteenth-century tower with its big rooms containing canopied beds, tapestries and vast looking glasses ‘whose mottled depths turned anyone who gazed into them into an old portrait’. She also added a more comfortable wing (where Violet slept) and helped to furnish it for her.
‘I was not the only one to have le coup de foudre for St Loup,’ Violet writes. ‘Denys was also subjugated: it was exactly the kind of house he could understand and appreciate; it was in keeping with his Shakespearian character. He came there often and willingly, but he was fundamentally restless.’ She does not reveal which Shakespearian character she had in mind – he should rightfully belong to Shakespearian tragedy. There was little understanding and appreciation over his last restless years, less coming often and willingly than Violet’s pages suggest. She did not detain him long.
But she did detain Winnaretta Polignac at St Loup. They were able to ‘pursue their relationship in tranquillity’, wrote Sylvia Kahan, ‘away
from the watchful eyes of society’. Winnaretta’s pet name for Violet was ‘Mouse’, suggesting a provocatively timid lover. But Violet was far from timid in society as if, by rebelling against this mother substitute, she was gaining revenge for battles lost against Mrs Keppel. Winnaretta feared the sort of gossip that Duff Cooper and others were picking up. At the start Violet’s flirtations with men (which had so misled Pat Dansey) helped to draw attention away from their liaison, but when the flirtations turned more aggressively towards married men and also other women, Winnaretta grew exasperated and finally lost patience.
The end of the affaire came after a stormy voyage to Morocco in 1933. Maybe Winnaretta had ‘trodden on’ Violet too much and, after ten tumultuous years together, she wished to escape. Her indiscretions certainly resembled a struggle for independence. Like a bored child, her ‘moaning and groaning defies description’, Winnaretta wrote. ‘ … Her mother scolds her uselessly’. By the time they returned to France the affaire was over.
Denys had been teaching in Russia before the Great War and had seen it then as a ‘land of mystery and enchantment’. Returning in 1926 with a friend who ‘was being sent to Russia on a mission’, he found the enchantment had vanished. Moscow was sunk in Dickensian squalor, its streets full of ragged child thieves ‘with the sly, furtive look of wild animals in search of prey’. In an unpublished narrative he wrote called ‘The Stones of Emptiness’, he deplored the new Bolshevik regime and the philosophy of communism: ‘Wealth has flown but poverty lingers.’
These post-war journeys into Russia are mysterious. ‘He knew he was suspect,’ Violet wrote. But of what was he suspected? Was he there on behalf of the bank that employed him? He seems to have spent little time in its office. Was ‘The Stones of Emptiness’ read by the British Government? ‘I have never taken any part whatever in espionage of any
sort or kind,’ he insisted. But he would not have classed his patriotic duty as spying. When he went there again in 1927 (meeting Vita at the British Embassy in Moscow) he was arrested and fined for ‘contravening the Labour Code’. He escaped over the border to Poland travelling under the seat of a train, convinced that if found he would be brought back to court and imprisoned.
Still suffering from chronic tuberculosis, it was unlikely he would have survived long in a Soviet prison. Nevertheless in 1928 he went back to Russia once more ‘at the risk of his life’, Violet suggested. On his return he stayed for a time in England recovering from a chest infection. Then he rejoined Violet in France. But his health deteriorated. ‘All day long,’ she remembered, ‘Denys lay gasping for breath.’ She wondered if it might be appropriate to carry him off to Switzerland. ‘But he was too ill to be moved.’ Denys’s sister came over and moved him into the American hospital at Neuilly. ‘One of the people whose visits he seemed to enjoy most was Madame de Polignac,’ Violet remembered. ‘ … I was not encouraged to be present.’
Denys died on 2 September 1929. He was thirty-nine. Violet had not liked to trespass into his thoughts and feelings during these last weeks of his life (she ignored a young Australian nurse who fell for him and later kept in touch with his family). Three weeks after his death she wrote to Cyril Connolly whom she had recently met in Florence: ‘I have been living in a sort of mist … D[enys] was a curiously sumptuous element in my life, like a tapestry brought out on fête days, precious because intermittent. I never got tired of him, he had all the freshness of a chance encounter. More than anyone I know, he liked to live dangerously, his life was spent in impossible crusades.’
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.