Looking Round
It was the best of times. ‘I have no hesitation in saying it was the happiest day of my life,’ Violet wrote, remembering the day in 1946 she travelled back to France. ‘Sight by sight, sound by sound, the Past was returning; it was really like a reincarnation … I was back in Paris! … France had been restored to me.’
She dreaded finding out what had been done to St Loup by the occupying German army. ‘Nothing is more unpleasant than the knowledge that one’s home has been occupied by the enemy.’ Their favourite game, she was told, had been dressing-up in her underclothes and strutting up and down the catwalk of her dining-room table – a pornographic parody of Violet’s fancy-dress parties. Although some of the furniture had been crippled, many of her books were gone, several pictures damaged, the walls covered with graffiti, ‘the place gave the impression of vitality increased, rather than diminished’. Over the year St Loup was ‘patched and painted [and] began to recall its past’.
In Paris, too, she set about recapturing the past. She stayed at the British Embassy as the guest of the Ambassador Duff Cooper and his wife Lady Diana Cooper (who, as Lady Diana Manners, before the First World War had presented Eve Fairfax with her extraordinary visitor’s
book). She had given Violet money to live on during the war and Violet was to repay her in various ways, leaving her son (much to his surprise) a handsome sum of money in her Will, and then another sum by making it a condition, in the event of St Loup’s new owner John Phillips selling the house, that he pay Lady Diana or her heir half the sale price.
Diana Cooper gave a grand party for Violet at the Embassy to which she invited ‘my friends before the war’. She also entertained Alice Keppel and her husband when, more cautiously, they returned to Europe. In Florence, Alice Keppel soon began renovating the Villa dell’Ombrellino and ‘my mother and I made lovely plans for the future’.
But Mrs Keppel had no future. She was suffering from cirrhosis of the liver and had only a few months to live. ‘The terrible routine of illness set in,’ Violet wrote. The contrast between the sunlight of Florence and the hushed climate of her mother’s bedroom (like the interior and exterior scenes in Echo) grew unbearable. But Violet was impressed by her mother’s serenity and the way in which the lines on her face, those channels of old age, were mysteriously fading. ‘She will make a success of her death, was my involuntary thought,’ Violet remembered. She stayed in her mother’s bedroom reading to her as long as she could – far longer than she had been able to stay with Denys Trefusis. Mrs Keppel died on 11 September 1947. ‘Yet, I wasn’t with her when she died … When I came in, her head, with its blunt white curls, was buried like a child’s in her pillow.’
In the account of her mother’s last illness in Don’t Look Round, Violet wrote of having bent over her despairingly towards the end, asking if there was anything she wanted, and hearing the whispered answer: ‘You. You.’ The final chapter of her memoirs is a eulogy of her mother. She has greatly changed. ‘My mother never tried to influence me,’ she writes; ‘the result was that, in point of fact, she was the only
person who did.’ She recalls her mother’s religious sense, her charity, unselfishness, humility. In all her life, Violet tells us, she had never ‘let anyone down’. And she concludes: ‘there is no limit to my debt.’ It was no surprise that her father consented to die soon afterwards. Violet, too, had no strong wish to survive. ‘What has happened to me since is but a postscriptum.’
‘Something comparable to a landslide took place in me,’ she wrote. In this fallen and infertile landscape she lives a postscriptum life in the sense that it is not a novel-writing life. She can no longer look round and use aspects of her past to create imaginative fiction. So much of her fiction had, by implication, been a criticism of her mother’s way of life – and that is no longer permissible. There is almost no mention of her novels in Don’t Look Round. But she had another twenty-five years to get through. In 1960 the mildly amusing Memoirs of an Armchair written by Violet and Philippe Jullian (who also illustrated it) was published. It is a device that enables the authors to escape from the present and give us intimate glimpses of whatever events in history they choose. This aristocrat among chairs was made in Paris in 1759 and takes us on adventures from the royal apartments at Versailles (where it supported Louis XV) to episodes in Regency London and ‘the roaring twenties’ in the United States. We have brief encounters with Voltaire, Talleyrand, Balzac, Byron, Lady Hamilton, Diaghilev and others. It is a party-game book.
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:
At l’Ombrellino she wandered beneath the cypresses like an exiled queen who could entrust her confidences only to the statues 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.