A Book of Secrets

by Michael Holroyd

  Arriving there four months later, Erica Jong was to call this ‘one of the most beautiful spots on earth’ – though, standing on the balcony, the author of Fear of Flying suffered a dizzying attack of vertigo. She sees what we see: the seventeenth-century canvases, the Graeco-Roman head of Zeus, the first-century mosaic floor mounted as a wall piece and the sitting room with its framed pictures of Gore’s ‘old pal Princess Margaret’.

  We walk slowly to Ravello and have lunch in a restaurant on the edge of the town. Gore is greeted there as a great man, a ‘maestro’. They do not know the difference, he tells us, between one writer and another, but since he has done a television advertisement for vodka (he absolutely forgets which vodka) his reputation has risen steeply. The only other writer invited to do this was Salman Rushdie. Gore asks about him and his relatively new wife, Elizabeth, and I hear myself calling Salman my ‘foul weather friend’ meaning that I see more of him, and am closer to him, in his days of peril than in easier times.

  Gore strikes me as an American version of Winston Churchill. He is in his mid-seventies now and not in good health, but he remains full of bulldog energy. He likes high-class gossip, is well read both in the classics, in modern literature and politics, enjoys drinking and tends to dominate the conversation. He also seems vulnerable and, being interested in power, is conscious of his career and the careers of his contemporaries. He says that when he was young, Bernard Shaw had an immense reputation in the world: but where is it now? I believe he is reflecting on his own future reputation and wondering whether he has spread his interests too widely, too thinly. Catherine is amused by the way we congratulate each other (and therefore ourselves) on having come through without having gone to university. He realises that he cannot go on living in such a remote place and wonders whether he might leave it to St Alban’s School, his alma mater, as a place of study like Bernard Berenson’s I Tatti and Harold Acton’s La Pietra. He suspects the Vuilleumier family have their eye on the property and he doesn’t want them to have it. They are peasants, he says. There was a fire at the Villa Cimbrone the previous December, and who can say how it started? We have in fact seen the black marks, like strange inky shadows, at the top of the house and been told that the top floor was gutted. Giorgio informed us that some of the Grimthorpe papers have been singed. But Gore is contemptuous. How can papers have been singed? Either they are burnt or not burnt. In fact Giorgio has brought us envelopes which are blackened and unopenable (our hands are also black by the end of that session).

  Catherine is growing dejected by our slow and erratic progress at the villa, her nerves jangling during the intervals between one instalment and the next. She imagines Giorgio putting his arms into a chest of these family papers in the burnt-out attic and pulling out bits and pieces at random. If only we could look through the trunk ourselves. She longs for the day when she can walk from room to room searching drawers and cupboards. Is she not trusted because she is illegitimate? When she holds a letter in her hands that has a genuine connection with the Grimthorpes (some letters, for example, from Lucille’s sons), I see that more than once there are tears in her eyes. After the first day or two, I do not think she really expects to come across evidence of her paternal origins. But if she can gather some original Grimthorpe letters and return them to the family, this will give her satisfaction. No one then will be able to deny that she is a genuine messenger, someone who has carried out a family task that has been entrusted to her. Between these sessions, at restaurants in Ravello, she sometimes introduces herself as Lord Grimthorpe’s daughter who is staying at their old home, the Villa Cimbrone. I worry that waiters and maîtres d’hôtel might be embarrassed by this. But I am wrong again. They are delighted. They talk of the great benefit the Grimthorpe family has brought to Ravello and see that we have good tables, excellent service.

  At our next meeting I suggest to Giorgio that if he were to make photocopies of all the Grimthorpe archive in his possession then one batch could be held at the Villa Cimbrone, the other in Yorkshire – and there would be less danger from fire. He replies (via Catherine’s hectic translations) that he cannot take such a decision himself but must consult his mother to whom, he says, Lucille gave these papers. But when his mother comes in, he adds that it is a matter for the whole family and his two brothers must also be consulted. It strikes me as the Spenlow and Jorkins gambit, which Dickens uses to such effect in David Copperfield – the final authority always lies with someone who is absent. He finds this sudden interest in the family papers curious. Catherine explains that people often become more interested in the past as they grow older.

  We are held in a force field between two different cultures. Giorgio’s attachment to this archive is, in its way, as magical as Catherine’s though less deeply imprinted. But the case for a photocopying compromise is a powerful one, and we agree in principle that this should be pursued in due course. It may mean nothing, but we have played the long game as well as we can. Are there treasures here that will one day be discovered? I believe there are not. But there is a possibility that Lucille left Ernest Beckett’s love letters to Eve Fairfax here. So I, like Catherine, leave with a sense of something unknown and unsatisfactory. As for Catherine, it has been in some ways a sad quest. She feels that the Villa Cimbrone is part of her. The fire takes on a symbolic meaning: Cimbrone’s precious days, and all they stand for, have been consumed and are gone.

  We go out on our last evening to an expensive restaurant in the Hotel Palumbo, both feeling very tired. We order a bottle of wine and Catherine asks me what the label says. I put on my glasses and examine it closely. It says ‘Drink the lot!’ I tell her – and we both break into idiotic laughter.

  On our last day the Vuilleumier family give us a splendid lunch. Four generations of them are seated round two tables in what on one side is a cellar-kitchen with a blue-and-white tiled stove, and on the other a dining room with the sunlight streaming on to the cliff face and through the windows. A woman I take to be Giorgio’s grandmother has surfaced from her lair – an ageless woman – along with his two brothers (who sometimes visit to make complaints, Giorgio’s mother amiably tells us), and also his sisters and their children at the junior table. We are given a delicious meal of many courses: pasta, salad, local vegetables, fruit and cheese. Catherine is busy translating all over the place. She notes in her journal that I was ‘in sparkling form’, making everyone laugh, even those who understand almost nothing of what I am saying. She wonders whether I am happy to be leaving Cimbrone and ending our expedition. This is not so. I want us to leave on the jolliest of terms, presenting myself as a clown at the Grimthorpe Castle and demonstrating that we are not enemies. And indeed they behave very kindly, arranging for our baggage to be taken down to the car park and giving us lemons and (to Catherine’s dismay) bottles of lemon liqueur.

  I am anxious lest we miss the plane. Catherine has no such worries. She aims the car down the mountain and we surge along at terrible speed, taking at the last second all the correct roads. We get there finally with the last drop of petrol and in perfect time. Catherine makes a point of this, indicating that I needn’t have been so anxious. I explain that it is only perfect timing because our plane has been delayed. She maintains that we would have caught it anyway – and she is probably right.

  By the time we reach Gatwick and then Victoria we are both exhausted. We have become comrades, but Catherine observes that I keep my distance (most of her friends call her Katy but I still call her Catherine). Would she be surprised to know I see her as a female version of Don Quixote, while I, her cautious travelling companion, am the shrewd and credulous Sancho Panza? Our adventures have been full of hope: hope singed but somehow not extinguished.

  It seems to me that Catherine becomes more herself the further she travels away from Yorkshire, where she is most at home. A postcard will suddenly arrive from her in Azerbaijan, Kiev, Chernobyl and several stopping places along the Silk Road. She joins an international group riding small horses throug
h Mongolia where a gentleman from Singapore threatens to kill her. There are other occasional setbacks. ‘I forgot to tell you that my car, which you liked, was written off,’ she tells me. ‘Fortunately no one, not even Romney, was hurt.’

  Christopher Grimthorpe’s wife Skip has advised her to forget the unsolved puzzles of the past and concentrate on her future. It is wise but perhaps impossible advice. The guilt and ambiguity of having two fathers are branded upon her and she cannot forget or ignore this. In recent years the quandary could have been settled by a DNA test. Why then has the Grimthorpe family, who are her friends, not encouraged this? I believe it is because any such simple solution at this stage in her life, far from solving the problem of her dual identity, might aggravate it. Caught between two fathers, she is in no-man’s-land and has lost her natural confidence. She sees her past as being pitted with mistakes, though to my mind her adventurous life has been very far from a failure. But this view, like Skip’s advice, Catherine finds hard to accept.

  Illegitimacy is a word with several meanings. Ernest’s wife Luie was to die in her twenties producing a legitimate heir to the Grimthorpe title. Eve Fairfax was illegitimate in the sense that, not marrying Ernest, she lost her legitimate place in society. Her Book is a unique testament to the enduring pride that kept her afloat. And then there is Ernest’s extraordinary illegitimate daughter Violet who, exiled from England, was to compensate for her outcast state by claiming the King of England as her father. Such fantasies were a balm for the pain of lost love. But fact and fantasy are held in subtle equilibrium in the best of her novels, which may yet find a legitimate place in European literature for the name Violet Trefusis.

  PART II

  5

  Excitements, Earthquakes and Elopements

  It was a surprising invitation. Would I fly to Ravello in the summer of 2007 and give a lecture at the Villa Cimbrone, as part of a festival there? It was seven years since I had been there with Catherine.

  Due to illness I had not been able to travel abroad for two years. But I was gradually recovering and, to escape the prison of ill health, regain some freedom and self-confidence, I said yes. I vividly remembered the Villa Cimbrone. It was like a castle reached, as in a fairy story, by two steep and wandering paths leading from the square at Ravello and finally opening on a dream garden that overlooked the Mediterranean far below.

  The festival, lasting from June to September, was now ‘in its sixteenth edition’ and the ‘keynote’ in 2007 was to be ‘La Passione’. I was curious as to my own place in this programme. It seemed to have its origins in a film-and-music evening dedicated to Greta Garbo ‘whose visit to Ravello in 1938 was the occasion of a famous liaison with the conductor Leopold Stokowski’. The word liaison, combined with the theme of La Passione, brought into the frame the Bloomsbury Group whose members, I was surprised to read, frequently visited Ravello. The programme promised ‘films based on famous novels by Woolf and Forster … and an exhibition in the Villa Cimbrone featuring the writer Violet Trefusis, daughter of Alice Keppel and possibly of Ernest Beckett, the second Lord Grimthorpe, who had owned the Villa Cimbrone’.

  The person responsible for this literary part of the festival, ‘Bloomsbury in Ravello’, was Tiziana Masucci, the Italian translator of Violet Trefusis’s novels. I could picture ‘Professor Masucci’ very clearly: a stout and serious scholar – elderly and with a pince-nez perhaps, somewhat bent, as if weighed down by the awful labour that fell on her declining years of academic endeavour. My incredulity was heightened by some lines from Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám that appeared in the Cimbrone brochure imagining the moon rising over the garden while the author speculates on the shortness of life. These lines had been attributed to D. H. Lawrence. But did Lawrence actually stay at the Villa Cimbrone? Had Forster, Strachey or Virginia Woolf ever gone there?

  I began my research by looking through Virginia Woolf’s published letters and diaries. In the spring of 1927, travelling through Rome, Palermo and Syracuse, she told her sister Vanessa Bell that she was ‘rapidly falling in love with Italy … Undoubtedly I shall settle here – it surpasses all my expectations … if I had my way I should live here for ever.’ All her friends, she decided, should do so now they were getting old – they could form ‘a death colony’ there. But I could find no mention of Ravello. I was beginning to regret having accepted this speaking engagement. But then Tiziana Masucci invited my wife Margaret Drabble to come out to Ravello with me and I felt grateful for this kindness. Maggie had endured an appalling eighteen months or more spending long hours in the hospital and looking after me between operations. These few days in Italy would be an unexpected treat, a small thank you for all she had done – and besides I would feel more secure with her there. So I continued my research.

  I decided to turn my attention to an enemy of Bloomsbury, D. H. Lawrence – and found him at the Palazzo Cimbrone. In March 1926 he was walking through the Cimbrone gardens with his friend, the painter Dorothy Brett (with whom, over a couple of nights, he had unsuccessfully tried to have sex). The Palazzo Cimbrone itself he thought ‘a bit too much of a good thing’. The hot sun and cold wind among the mountains unsettled him. It ‘feels earthquaky’, he told his friend Koteliansky.

  A year later, while in Florence, he was asking the American expatriate painters Earl and Achsah Brewster who had leased Cimbrone from Ralph, the third Lord Grimthorpe and his sister Lucille, to invite him back there. Yet he was uneasy. ‘Ld. Grimthorpe’s house was so full of junk,’ he wrote to Richard Aldington shortly after leaving, ‘one felt one might turn into an antique (pseudo) along with it all.’ He wished that Brett’s sorrel horse had been there ‘to kick over a few statues’. Cimbrone was crowded with fakes and misattributions as if some practical joker had been let loose to wander the grounds by night. The best fun Lawrence squeezed out of his time there was imagining an auction that he and the Brewsters might hold in the piazza below of all Grimthorpe’s old junk – his furniture and pictures. How it would cleanse the place! Meanwhile he worked there on Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  Lawrence was always on the move as if to escape from the darkness of his childhood, his intermittent sense of social inferiority, his anxieties over his wife Frieda, his terrible tubercular illness. It was only while walking all day among the mountains that these anxieties and aggressions lifted. With the healing power of nature he became an imaginative poet and travel writer.

  I turned next to E. M. Forster. In the autumn of 1901, at the age of twenty-two, he set out for a year of travel through Italy. And his mother came too. By May 1902 they had arrived at Ravello and, as D. H. Lawrence was to do fourteen years later, they stayed at the Hotel Palumbo. It was in that month that Forster wrote ‘The Story of a Panic’. Lily, Forster’s mother, reported him as being ‘very quiet’. But underneath his quiet exterior something was erupting in Forster’s imagination. In the introduction to his Collected Stories, he remembered a walk he took near Ravello. ‘I sat down in a valley, a few miles above the town, and suddenly the first chapter of the story rushed into my mind as if it had waited for me there. I received it as an entity and wrote it out as soon as I returned to the hotel. But it seemed unfinished and a few days later I added some more until it was three times as long.’

  In Forster’s story a party of respectable English tourists having a picnic in the chestnut woods near Ravello are suddenly overcome with foreboding and sent into a stampede of ‘brutal, overmastering, physical fear’ – all except one, a pale, moody, fourteen-year-old boy named Eustace who is afterwards found lying on his back, his hand convulsively entwined in the long grass and rolling in a goat’s hoof marks, smiling and seeming so natural and undisturbed, yet unable to say what has happened. It becomes obvious that he has gone through some crucial change. He walks back ‘with difficulty, almost in pain’. That evening he throws his arms round a young fisher-boy who is a part-time waiter at the pension, and later that night stands in the garden wearing only a nig
htshirt marvelling at the power and beauty of nature. Finally he escapes from his aunts and their friends, leaping with a strange inhuman cry, like an elfin creature, down the hillside until at the end of the story, ‘far down the valley towards the sea, there still resounded the shouts and the laughter of the escaping boy’.

  The story was one of sexual awakening, but in the nature of a dream: and Forster slept on. It had been, to use D. H. Lawrence’s word, an earthquake deep in his unconscious, the reverberations of which only gradually reached the surface. ‘The Story of a Panic’ was a world away in time and language from Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence’s novel used anger and blatant sexuality to attack the inhibitions and restraints imposed by a rigid artificial class system. It was as if his internal problems, Lawrence’s social and sexual unease, grew until they became the problems of England. Though they had a common enemy and similar targets, Forster seems tepid in comparison with Lawrence. What nerved him to begin writing fiction, freeing him somewhat from his inhibitions and enriching his work, was journeying out of England: to Italy and then India. Lytton Strachey was similarly fortified by his love of France. His connection with Italy, which grew gradually over his life, was less obvious. He had crossed the frontier between France and Italy, travelling from Menton to Ventimiglia, in the winter of 1901 – 2 and soon became aware of a strange sense of danger lurking behind the beauty of the Italian landscape – like a disturbing echo from the Roman past – and this excited him rather as Forster had been excited.

  Early in 1913, Strachey set out on a miniature grand tour of Europe lasting some two months, armed with a camera and plenty of film to snap old buildings and young men. From Marseilles he sailed to Naples. ‘I try to take snapshots,’ he wrote, ‘but my hands shake so with excitement that no doubt they’re all failures.’ He also made an excursion to Pompeii. ‘It was an enchanting experience,’ he wrote. ‘The heat of an English July – can you imagine it – and the hills all round – and that incredible fossilisation of the past to wander in. What a life it must have been! Why didn’t we live in those days? Oh, I longed to stay there for ever – in one of those little inner gardens, among the pillars and busts, with the fountain dropping in the court … Some wonderful slave boy would come out from under the shady rooms, and pick you some irises, and then to drift off to the baths as the sun was setting – and the night! What nights they must have been!’