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.
In her introduction to the first English-language edition of Broderie Anglaise, published in 1985, Victoria Glendinning makes the point that Violet uses her characters’ hair as a symbol of their sensuality. Lord Shorne’s name suggests that his hair has been closely sheared. Alexa’s hair is thin, scanty and ‘unenterprising’. She is a narrow angular figure with an elderly neck, contemplative, colourless, but with youthful eyes and beautiful hands.
There was not one detail of her person that was not famous from her nostalgic hats, medieval hands and timid expression to her little handbag that always ended up looking like a half-plucked
chicken. The vagueness, or, rather, the limpness, of her clothes lent her movements the undulation of a sea-anemone. She was fluid and elusive; a piece of water-weed, a puff of smoke.
Lord Shorne is in love with Alexa’s literary reputation; Alexa loves his aristocratic status. Violet parodies the historical romance of Orlando by leading the two of them into the Charles II bedroom at Otterways where (thinking they are unseen) they make love for the first time. Alexa is conscious of being ‘awkward as a mistress and incomplete as a woman’ and Lord Shorne wearily exploits her insecurity. ‘Why won’t you ever surprise me?’ he chides her. It is the business of this novel to show how eventually she will surprise him.
Alexa’s transformation comes about as the result of a meeting between her and Anne. Before their meeting, Alexa had hated the spectre of Anne, like an absent intruder who seemed all-powerful because wholly inaccessible, a ghost who could never be banished. Anne is a decade younger than Alexa, and was the childhood sweetheart of Lord Shorne. She has become a figure cloaked in legend: ‘the only one that mattered’, and is a ravishing beauty, says Lord Shorne. She is also the woman who mysteriously left him on what was to have been their wedding day and escaped to France (a re-enactment of Violet’s dream of being rescued at the altar and carried off abroad by Vita).
Yet the woman who comes to tea and eats Alexa’s chocolate éclairs is no great beauty after all. She is plumpish, with a turned-up nose, a large Asiatic red mouth and small eyes ‘full of veils’. But she has ‘a mass of thick springing hair, curly as vine tendrils, [which] stood up like a trodden-down bramble’. And then there is her voice: ‘soft, full of hidden depths, crepuscular’.
Violet entertainingly develops a surreal conversation that took place between Alice Keppel and Virginia Woolf. She uses this source to
emphasise the empty talk of her two protagonists. But as soon as the two women are left alone they say what’s on their minds. Both of them have ‘managed to breathe a semblance of life’ into Lord Shorne: and as such this handsome puppet lives in their imaginations. Anne confesses that she still loves him. Why then did she abandon him? She did not abandon him. The villain of their story is Lord Shorne’s mother.
‘There was something not quite right about this great lady,’ Alexa feels. She is ridiculous when seen ‘clad in a dirty old flannel dressing-gown [and] covered with jewels from head to foot’; but sinister and dangerous when likened to ‘a big spider in a web’ hanging over the plot of the novel, terrifying her son and frustrating the women who love him. This corpulent, calculating, inquisitorial character is Violet’s fictional portrait of Lady Sackville (more devastating but still recognisable as her description in Don’t Look Round where she is not mentioned by name or listed in the index). In Broderie Anglaise she joins Violet’s cast of matriarchal villains. She has room in her antique dealer’s heart for only one love: Otterways, a castle to which she is fanatically attached.
Having gained a measure of feminine understanding, Alexa emerges as a more sympathetic person. Anne has offered her insights about the politics of love, which is what she knows best. But what can Alexa exchange for this knowledge? It is a promise to help with Anne’s literary career – the sort of help that Violet had vainly hoped to gain from Virginia.
In the final paragraph, after Anne leaves with a present of Alexa’s flowers, Violet makes a silent play on her own name by having Alexa think of ‘the flower whose name must never be mentioned again because its scent was too powerful’. She breathes in the powerful knowledge she has been given. ‘People only love those things they’re never sure of,’ Lord Shorne told her at the beginning of the novel. He will never again be sure of Anne.
Broderie Anglaise is an ingenious and original link to Orlando though there is no evidence that Virginia Woolf read it. Unlike Orlando, unlike Challenge, this novel has no dedication. It is a postmodern work, the work of a writer in exile. It was not translated into English for fifty years when, as Victoria Glendinning writes, it joined ‘those other books that celebrate, satirize, justify, construct and deconstruct’ the life and work of Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis herself. These associations enrich a narrative that is nevertheless strong enough to stand on its own.
Violet had now liberated herself from the roman-à-clef and wrote in English what is my favourite among her novels. Hunt the Slipper contains three traditional characters: the husband, his wife and her lover. Sir Anthony Crome is the dry, over-refined, good-looking husband, a man who leads ‘the negligently luxurious life of the British aristocracy’ and treats any display of natural emotion as vulgar. The critic Lorna Sage likened him to Meredith’s egoist Sir William Patterne, or even Henry James’s Osmond in Portrait of a Lady insofar as ‘he shares their deadly capacity to translate art and sexuality into the stuff of lists, objects ordered and paid for (preferably, of course, by previous generations)’. To Violet’s mind this habit was intellectually and spiritually embedded in the English aristocracy.
Five years before the novel opens Sir Anthony has married the young Caroline Trude, choosing her because she comes from a good county family, is presentable and, he believes, obedient. She will look well, he thinks, wearing the family jewels and will go well with the furniture in his Georgian house. He is essentially a curator and his house a museum. Caroline is part of his collection. But she is beginning to feel dismay at the prospect of spending the rest of her life opposite this desiccated man.
To her astonishment, she falls in love with a friend of her husband, the stocky, snub-nosed, forty-nine-year-old Nigel Benson who, to his dismay, falls in love with her. His character, with its limitations and potential, is cleverly delineated. He belongs to another sort of Englishman, one easily bored with men and dominated by women. He is not quite of the whole blood, his powerful grandmother having been French (he sometimes refers to himself as being ‘half-French’, which in Violet’s dictionary means half-sympathetic). He has never married and lives with his sister Molly who has also never married because ‘there would be no one to look after him’ if she did. Both of them still love their dead mother, preferring her to anyone else dead or alive. Nigel ‘passionately loved Caroline, but her love for his mother was different’. It is mothers like this who see to it that their children never grow up. None of the three main characters in the novel is really adult: not Anthony who collects furniture and pictures as a boy collects stamps or lead soldiers; nor Nigel who has been brought up ‘amongst photograph albums, potted palms and gushing little trifles’ and is helpless ‘to the point of genius’ in a larger world. His love for Caroline is his chance of growing up.
Caroline is also immature: but discontentedly so, like an unhappy child eager to get to the next stage of her life. She is one of Violet’s most adventurous heroines, longing for risks, exposure and a hardening of the muscles, as she plots her escape from a world that, as Lorna Sage observes, bows to the ‘power of places and things to collect the people who think they collect them’. Her brothers and her mother, like her husband and her lover, are all collectors of things: coins, keys, birds’ eggs, Venetian glass. But Caroline is a changeling and the treasure she hunts is love. Will she find Cinderella’s glass slipper? And if she does, will it fit? Anthony does not have the capacity for loving, but Nigel may have. Violet expertly guides him through
the uneven landscape of love. (A masochistic feature, mentioned several times, may derive from Violet’s relationship with the Princess de Polignac. ‘Never you fear, you’ll get beaten right enough,’ Nigel assures Caroline, but she fears he is too kind for beating her, too conciliatory, too familiar with compromise.)
As in Echo, Violet uses letters sent and unsent, read and not read, to hide and then expose layers of this landscape. Caroline possesses all Violet’s intransigence – she has no qualms about leaving her daughter as well as her husband to be with her lover. She wants, so she says (not very convincingly), to have Nigel’s child. One can overhear the insistent ring of Violet’s early letters when Caroline tells Nigel: ‘I want to throw everything away for your sake. I wish you weren’t so well-off. I could easily dispense with luxury.’ Can Nigel meet the challenge Caroline sets him?
In a letter to Vita, Violet had written of the difficulty in finding an authentic happy ending to a serious novel. In the final two pages of Hunt the Slipper she reproduces the text of a letter that Nigel has delayed opening – a letter that gives a fertile twist to the plot and hands the ending of this tragicomedy to us, its readers.
In the second part of her memoirs called ‘Youth’, which reaches into the early 1940s covering her mid-forties, Violet is seen writing a series of articles for Le Temps. She is always on the move but obstructed by a series of accidents signalling the end of youth – ‘I seem to be what is called “accident-prone”,’ she wrote, after having nearly drowned in the Seine, broken her hip, fractured her leg and been left ‘with a slight limp for life’.
But she was becoming recognised as a novelist, publishing four novels in France within nine years, while her fifth, Les Causes Perdues, was due from Gallimard in 1941. There was a rumour that she was moving
away from the politics of love to politics itself – a rumour occasioned by her frequent companion during the late 1930s, the Minister of Finance, Paul Reynaud (a rumour revived during her last years by her friendship with François Mitterrand). According to Violet, Paul Reynaud ‘had a charming tenor voice; a quizzical eye, a caustic wit … He resented being short, and practically walked on tiptoe. His clothes were always ostentatiously neat … his wavy black hair was parted down the middle, and nearly rejoined his Mongolian eye-brows … What were his real convictions? He was, in point of fact, an homme du Centre, with little or no political backing. Excess was both alien and suspect to his frugal, fastidious mind.’ This is not a description by someone who has entered the political world. But by 1939 everyone was caught up by the overwhelming tide of European politics. Violet’s views were simple. ‘I, who have never been anything but a pessimist by nature … knew the Germans … It is fatal to give in to a bully, or a bluffer. The Germans are both. I knew we were “in” for it.’ (A dislike of Germany had been imprinted on her when she had been dumped down with her alien sister in Munich to complete her education far away from her mother and from Vita.)
‘I was at St Loup when war was declared,’ Violet wrote. ‘There was not much excitement; rather, a sombre resignation, an air of fatality, anti-climax … My home was on the direct line of the invasion …’
She joined the ambulance brigade of the Red Cross – ‘a somewhat quixotic gesture in view of the fact that she didn’t know how to drive,’ Philippe Jullian observed. She had finished Les Causes Perdues at the end of January 1940 and was in Paris when the German army pierced the French defences near Sedan and advanced towards Amiens and Arras. Paul Reynaud, who had become Premier in March, wanted to transfer the Government to North Africa but, none of his colleagues supporting him, he handed over to Pétain when the Germans entered Paris and was later imprisoned.
Violet was incensed when she heard that Pétain had petitioned for an armistice. ‘I could not believe my ears. France! It wasn’t credible. Of all countries the least compliant, the most refractory, the only country which takes itself for granted! … And this enfant terrible among nations, this spoilt child of Europe, with its impudence, cussedness, spunk, is to be surrendered without a murmur to the spirit breaker, the giant bully, the ostracised gatecrasher of Europe … What had possessed Reynaud to send for Pétain? Why hadn’t he tried a levée en masse: it was not too late?’ France appealed strongly to Violet – she identified with the country and felt it had much in common with her. But it would have been impossible for her to have joined the levée en masse she wished Paul Reynaud to lead, for she had already left St Loup and, wearing a mass of jewels like a covering of exotic armour, joined the hasty exodus from Paris.
‘I was anxious about my parents.’ Mrs Keppel was anxious about her money. ‘My darling, we must discuss our finances,’ she wrote. The Keppels left the Ritz in London during the spring of 1940 to negotiate with their bankers in Florence and Monte Carlo, and to place in safe storage many of their possessions at the Villa dell’Ombrellino. By the time Mussolini declared war on Britain, and under the protection of the British Consul, they had reached Biarritz. Violet gives a spirited account of what she did on behalf of her parents and herself to gain a safe passage to England. It shows all her stamina, initiative and determination, and also the complete uselessness of her desperate chase after Spanish and Portuguese visas compared with her mother’s superior influence in securing them all places on a Royal Navy troopship sailing from St Jean-de-Luz in July 1940.
There are over thirty pages in Don’t Look Round describing the five years Violet lived in England during the war and they are among the most charming and generous pages in her book. She wishes ‘to do
justice’ to all those who were kind to her – for she was on the edge of a breakdown and ‘looked upon England as exile’. It was a place of double exile: a country from which she had been expelled in the 1920s and where she was now incarcerated. Her melancholy surfaces in single sentences, or half-sentences, which appear within the telling of amusing anecdotes. ‘ … It was as though I were in mourning for an unmentionable relation … longing for some kind of outlet, someone with whom I would not have to conceal my yearning for France as though it were an unsightly disease … I was fundamentally sad and homesick … My nights were tormented …’
James Lees-Milne observed that she was losing her good looks, but people still fell under her spell, including the royal biographer Doreen Colston-Baynes, who confessed to being hopelessly in love with her.
Violet sought intermittent isolation in Somerset. ‘I have always loved the English countryside,’ she wrote, ‘its drowsy, hypnotic charm … like a cool hand on my brow … [but] what had I done to deserve the relative calm of the country? … I seemed singularly useless.’
She attempted to pick up old friendships where they had left off fifteen or twenty years earlier. It was an exercise in le temps retrouvé. ‘In the summer of 1941 I visited lovely Sissinghurst for the first time; was amazed to discover in Sissinghurst a contemporary pendant to St Loup. Chacun sa tour.’ After a passing reference, there is no further mention of Vita’s world.
She longed to summon back the happy days of her childhood, the loving days and nights with Vita. But the past plays terrible tricks on us. Alice Keppel was no longer the resplendent figure of the Edwardian age. Who would have guessed that this substantial, overdressed, antique woman, now in her seventies, with her backache, bronchitis and bottles of gin, had been the famous ‘Favorita’ of the Prince of Wales? Nor was she any longer the wonderful mother who had illuminated Violet’s early
years, but simply ‘your old sad Mor’ who was being punished, she thought, for the abuse of ‘too much’ privilege in her youth. The gods give, and the gods take away. Little of this is examined in Don’t Look Round, though Violet’s awareness of it was to give the book its title. One never recovers from one’s childhood. ‘Too happy, as in my case, it exhaled an aroma with which the present cannot compete,’ her epigraph reads, ‘too unhappy, it poisons life at its source. In either case, it is wiser not to look round.’
Momentarily, she did look round at Vita. Meeting again in their mid-forties, each felt nervous of the other, coming together, moving apart, hopeful, hesitant, like shadows of their past selves performing a ghostly dance. Might they, Violet wondered, write a book together, recalling past days? But the naive days of Challenge were long gone. Vita does not seem to have mentioned the secret love journal she had written, which would be published only after they were both dead. Violet does not appear to have given her Broderie Anglaise – there was no copy in her library at Sissinghurst. One danger was that they might disturb the past and damage their living memories of it. Another danger was that the past might be rekindled and consume the present. Violet feared that seeing Vita again would renew her mother’s antagonism. Vita feared seeing Violet might reignite feelings that would imperil her settled life with Harold and her successful literary career. She wrote of ‘her absurd happiness of having you beside me in the car … I was frightened of you … I don’t want to fall in love with you again … You and I can’t be together … You have bitten too deeply into my soul.’ And Violet had to be content with that.
Writing came to her rescue: but at a cost. She joined a society called the Fighting French and, feeling useful at last, gave talks for La France Libre at the British Broadcasting Corporation. She spoke of her travels while writing for Le Temps, of her love of France, of her literary
friends there and her Francophile friends in England: Osbert Sitwell, Duff Cooper, Raymond Mortimer. She also brings in Harold Nicolson (whose first book had been a biography of Paul Verlaine) stressing his ‘services to France’ and describing him as the ‘most eloquent of its interpreters who, by his temperament, his culture and his spontaneous spirit, is better able than anyone to understand the French’. Despite her embarrassing habit of repeating his jokes and getting them wrong in her attempts to improve them, she had become ‘a good old sort’, Harold confided to an astonished Vita (who was describing her, rather invitingly, in a letter to their son Ben as ‘one of the most dangerous people I know’). Much of what Violet broadcast overlaps with a collection of autobiographical pieces called Prelude to Misadventure dedicated to the ‘faithful French who have left their families in order to fight on our side’. The book was published by Hutchinson in 1942 and reviewed by Raymond Mortimer in the New Statesman. ‘She is remarkably sensitive to the genius of place,’ he wrote. ‘ … She has lived for twenty years in France; she evidently thinks more naturally in French than in her native tongue … [but] she remains incorrigibly English.’
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 the 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.’