A Book of Secrets

by Michael Holroyd

  Ravello was wonderfully peaceful after Naples. In the precipitous mountains above Amalfi, with terraced gardens and wild flowers, the sea smooth and inexhaustibly blue a thousand feet below, he felt he was in heaven – or as near to it as you could reach on earth. Perhaps he could reconstitute and even rejuvenate the Bloomsbury Group in Ravello – Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s sister the painter Vanessa Bell, her fellow painter and lover (and Lytton’s lover too) Duncan Grant, who seems to have loved almost everyone at one time or another, including Maynard Keynes who must certainly come too, and of course Forster. Finally he would like to invite his brother James – but not Henry James, he thought, except perhaps for one weekend a year. ‘Don’t you think it would do very well?’ he asked Ottoline Morrell.

  His fantasy of replanting Bloomsbury in Ravello and along the Amalfi coast was not Virginia’s Woolf’s ‘death colony’ but a Utopian dream in which no one grew old and everyone enjoyed erotic adventures. This influence of Italy may be seen in Strachey’s last biography, Elizabeth and Essex, which has a place in his work equivalent to that of Orlando in the work of Virginia Woolf. Orlando was written shortly after Virginia Woolf returned from her spring travels in Italy. It is a novel, subtitled ‘A Biography’, which covers the sexual and social adventures of a historical make-believe – a young sixteenth-century nobleman who is transformed by the time the twentieth century arrives into a modern woman writer. This biographical pastiche is dedicated to Vita Sackville West whose son, Nigel Nicolson, was to describe it as ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature’. The spur to writing this novel – what Virginia Woolf called her ‘overwhelming impulse’ – was to catch the essential fantasy that mingles with the facts of our lives and follows us like shadows caricaturing our actions. The opening chapter of the novel is devoted to the overwhelming passion between Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis – the two of them were together in the early summer of 1913 at the Villa Cimbrone.

  Strachey had revitalised biography with Eminent Victorians. In Elizabeth and Essex he tried to transform the genre from a solid craft, built on a platform of factual research, into a poetic drama based on psychological instinct and conveyed in fast-moving narrative prose – rainbow and granite. In Pompeii he had imagined himself wandering in the past: ‘What a life it must have been! Why didn’t we live in those days?’ Writing in the mid-to-late 1920s of Queen Elizabeth I’s relationship at the end of the sixteenth century with the Earl of Essex, he saw a way of merging past and present, using human nature as his magic carpet and flying between an intense love affair of his own and that of his biographical subjects. His Elizabeth and Essex is an experiment with time – as Orlando is with time, gender and identity. Both are constructed round a love affair – Virginia Woolf’s with Vita Sackville-West, and Lytton Strachey’s with a young scholar ‘with a melting smile and dark grey eyes’ called Roger Senhouse. ‘You seem, on the whole, to imagine yourself as Elizabeth,’ Maynard Keynes wrote to him, ‘but I see from the pictures that it is Essex whom you have got up as yourself.’ Both assumptions are in a sense true: for Strachey tended to fall in love with people he wished to be and, in the act of love, for an illusory moment, he embraced that ideal. Virginia Woolf and others were bewildered by his passion for Roger Senhouse – as we often are by other people’s loves. By the time Elizabeth and Essex was published Strachey was already ill – he would die some three years later. His love affair with Roger Senhouse was a love affair with youth, an imaginative way of casting off the years and regaining his own youth – a youth he had never experienced in fact until he possessed it in retrospective fantasy.

  My illness had forced pessimism upon me like a heavy overcoat. To prepare for even a simple journey I found myself making numerous health-and-safety calculations in case cars or trains were late, and everything went awry. I have become ludicrously pragmatic. Otherwise I could be stranded without my travelling companions – the capsules, steroids, syrups and internal equipment I need for what are called ‘procedures’. For a journey abroad I had to pack up my troubles rather bulkily, as if for weeks rather than days. But I was reassured by Maggie who has become my memory, my compass, my sense of balance. By the time we finally set out we were both feeling quite excited.

  On the plane I showed Maggie some of the material I had collected on my previous journey to Ravello. She read that Vita Sackville-West, ‘a friend of one of Beckett’s daughters’, participated in the planning of the garden. But Vita actually visited the Villa Cimbrone only once, I explained, and that was not to plan a garden but to advance her love affair with Grimthorpe’s illegitimate daughter, Violet. It was as if the two girls belonged to the same family – almost as if, Violet conjectured, they were twins. But how could Vita pursue a love affair with Violet at the same time as planning a marriage to Harold Nicolson? Violet seemed to float in an illusory world of romantic ecstasy; Harold belonged to the solid world of facts. And Vita needed both fantasy and fact in her life. Violet Keppel (as she still was in 1913) had a little earlier ‘kissed me as she usually does not, and told me that she loves me’. Vita recorded that Violet came to her room one night and ‘stayed till I don’t know when; she has not repented of our last farewell, and loves me even more’.

  Vita sometimes doubted whether she could tolerate giving up her freedom for conventional wedlock. But after returning to England, she felt again the charm of Harold’s boyishness, his intelligence, sense of fun and excellent manners. The peace-loving Harold represented her father’s influence – and Vita was fond of her less dominant parent. She decided, if decision it was, that ‘almost I want to marry this year and get it over’. And having made this almost-decision – like Mac-beth’s ‘if it were done … then ’twere well / It were done quickly’ – something snapped in Vita’s mind and ‘I loved Harold from that day’.

  Yet Violet still possessed her heart.

  Maggie had got this far in the story when our plane landed at Naples. Then we were on our way, skirting Vesuvius and ascending into the dark mountains. We were not staying at the Villa Cimbrone or the Hotel Palumbo, but at a hotel which looked over a ravine to the Piazza del Duomo at Ravello, still alive with children and crowded cafés. We unpacked, looked out of our windows at the fires that were burning higher up in the mountains after a long drought, and decided to wander outside and get something to eat. There were no messages from Tiziana Masucci or her second in command, Valerio Ruiz, whom I imagined to be an elderly civil servant with a heavy moustache. But it was almost eleven o’clock and perhaps they were both safely in their beds.

  We went out and were walking through the piazza when there was a movement in the air and something happened – reminding me of those earthquakes D. H. Lawrence sensed. From nowhere two figures appeared in front of us. At first glance I mistook them for schoolchildren. But here were Tiziana Masucci and Valerio Ruiz. How they had discovered us in the middle of so many people I never knew. All I could see was their youth and happiness – not at all those of a retired professor or elderly civil servant I had led Maggie to expect.

  Valerio immediately charmed us both – he was so exquisitely polite. Tiziana was a far more mystifying figure. Throughout supper she seldom took her eyes off me (‘she adores you,’ Maggie remarked later that night). Did she, I wondered, carry within her the spirit of Violet Trefusis – that ‘unexploded bomb’ as Vita called her? She was eager for us to see an exhibition she had mounted, celebrating Violet, in the cloisters of the Villa Cimbrone. Dawn would not have been too early for her to take us there, but it had been a long day and we arranged to go there together at noon.

  We surprise ourselves by meeting at the agreed time and begin walking up one of the paths to the Villa Cimbrone. It is a hot day and, in the sun, I trudge rather stolidly upwards and even Maggie, who is an agile walker, is moving less quickly than usual. But Tiziana flies ahead; back and forth she goes like a miraculous bird, eager for us to reach our destination. And I suddenly find myself thinking of Eustace, the elf
in boy in Forster’s story, who careers ecstatically into the valley below. But Tiziana flies upwards as if gravity has little hold on her, as if her natural habitat is some high sphere of the imagination. We reach the entrance of the Villa Cimbrone, turn left into the cloisters: and there is her exhibition celebrating Violet Trefusis.

  I knew then what I suppose the general reader probably knows of Violet. I had read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and remembered from the first chapter of her novel the extraordinary appearance (though not the full reverberating name) of Princess Marousha Stanilovska Dagmar Natasha lliana Romanovitch, or ‘Sasha’ as Orlando calls her (echoing ‘Lushka’, the luscious name Vita Sackville-West used for Violet). Orlando was written partly in response to, partly guided by, two books: one by Vita Sackville-West and the other by her husband Harold Nicolson.

  Vita’s book was Challenge, a fictional account of her love affair with Violet who helped her in its composition between 1918 and 1919 – while the two of them were escaping from the conventional world on sexual and romantic adventures (Vita sometimes disguised as a man and transformed into ‘Julian’ from the novel, Violet evolving into the eternally feminine ‘Eve’). At the insistence of Vita’s mother Lady Sackville, who feared the scandal this novel would arouse, the British publication was delayed for over fifty years – until Vita and Violet were both dead, and after Vita’s narrative of their lesbian relationship had been made available by her son Nigel Nicolson in his famous book, Portrait of a Marriage. But Challenge was published in the United States in 1924 and it was this edition that Virginia Woolf took up and read during the summer of 1927 by which time she and Vita had grown very close.

  Vita’s sexual ambivalence changed Virginia Woolf’s awareness of her own sexual nature. But her literary imagination was caught the same month (June 1927) by Harold Nicolson’s Some People. ‘I can’t make out how you combine the advantages of fact and fiction as you do,’ she wrote to him. The day before, she had written to Vita about Challenge, politely calling Eve ‘very desirable’. She wanted to write her own make-believe pen portrait of Violet Trefusis – with all the freedom of fiction since they had never met. ‘I lie in bed making up stories about you,’ she had told Vita. She was planning to write a life of her that would be ‘all fantasy’. Later on she was to judge Lytton Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex a partial failure because it used personal experiences and fictional devices within his biography – and the craft of biography was too intractable to tolerate this. But Harold Nicolson, whom she rated a far less talented and original writer than Strachey, had (as she wrote in the New York Herald Tribune) ‘devised a method of writing about people and about himself as though they were at once real and imaginary’. This merging of biography and autobiography into a series of semi-fictional stories showed her that she must introduce a sprinkling of historical facts into her fantasy, reinforce it with some granite. Fiction had the suppleness to absorb this and convey sexual ambivalence with subtlety. And she could produce a parody of historical biography, making fun of its inflexible limitations. ‘I want to revolutionize biography in a night.’

  Harold Nicolson’s hybrid of a book became a useful compass for Virginia who saw Vita’s novel as a warning against making fiction plod too steadfastly in the shadows of the author’s real-life experience. Julian ‘is you’, Violet had written to Vita, ‘word for word, trait for trait’. As for ‘Eve’, had Vita not depended on ‘much excellent copy’ from Violet herself? The result of this self-indulgence was, in Lady Sackville’s words, ‘brilliantly dull’. As she read Challenge, Virginia became aware of a warning. ‘I want dreadfully to see you … you have become essential to me,’ Vita had written to Virginia early in 1927. But Vita was a serial lover, frequently overtaken by these essential sightings – and besides, Virginia was older and more sensitive as to how things might end. ‘I have to take my little precautions,’ she explained.

  Their love affair was nothing like so physically committed as Vita’s passionate involvement with Violet, but it gave Virginia as much sexual experience as her nature could accept and withstand. It was unique. In her review of Some People she wrote: ‘By the end of the book we realise that the figure which has been most completely and most subtly displayed is that of the author.’ In her magic mirror of Vita, Orlando also gives us a subtle reflection of the author behind her subject – revealing what attracts her and of what she must be cautious.

  Many years later, when asked whether Vita had really loved Virginia, Violet replied: ‘Not for a minute. Virginia ran after her, and she couldn’t get rid of her. She found her so sentimental.’ In fact it was Violet who ran after Vita – and Vita eventually got rid of her. Violet’s statement was one of jealousy and denial. Challenge had been written with what Virginia was to call Vita’s ‘pen of brass’ and, when eventually published in Britain during the 1970s, was eclipsed not only by Portrait of a Marriage but also by the enduring fascination of Orlando, Virginia’s love gift to Vita, in which Violet appears as a phantom that soon vanishes.

  Challenge had been dedicated to Violet – but she is not named. The dedication, citing her as an ‘honoured witch’ whose tormented soul would be changed and made free by reading these coded pages, was itself concealed in the Romany language. Recognising that Orlando would be a riposte to her novel, Vita asked Virginia to dedicate it to her. This she did, but omitted the hyphen in her name for the Hogarth Press edition of the book (and future editions in Britain) – perhaps an unconscious sign that a connection was missing.

  The opening chapter in Orlando focuses on two love affairs. The first shows what danger an older woman risks by loving someone younger. In Sally Potter’s film (1992), marvellously enhancing the merging of genders, Quentin Crisp is cast as the ageing Queen Elizabeth who, seeing the ‘strength, grace, romance, folly, poetry, youth’ of Orlando, ‘kept him near her … For the old woman loved him.’ This is the same theme, the coming together of age and youth, as Strachey had in mind while writing Elizabeth and Essex. One freezing day, Virginia Woolf tells us, the Queen catches sight of Orlando in a mirror kissing a girl. The illusion of repossessing youth through her own love of him is suddenly over and, stricken by the evidence of man’s treachery, she destroys the mirror that has witnessed this devastating truth.

  The girl whom Orlando will be kissing for the rest of this chapter is the ravishing Sasha. Though she will sail over the horizon and out of the story at the conclusion of its opening chapter, she evokes some of the most lyrical passages in the novel. During the Great Frost of 1608, time itself seems to stand still throughout the frozen landscape. Yet in this suspended world, Sasha and Orlando become wonderfully animated. As they skate to King James’s coronation carnival, the shoals of fish held in an icy trance below them and above them coloured balloons hanging motionless in the sky, it is as if, ‘hot with skating and with love’, they alone are alive. Sasha is a creature of many similes. ‘She was like a fox, or an olive tree; like the waves of the sea when you look down upon them from a height; like an emerald; like the sun on a green hill which is yet clouded …’ She speaks in perfect French, which no one but Orlando understands. ‘Yet perhaps it would have been better for him had he never learnt that tongue; never answered that voice; never followed the light of those eyes …’ As Virginia Woolf writes this, perhaps she is wondering if it would have been better for her never to have learnt the language of love, never answered Vita’s voice. Sasha’s voice, so voluptuous and enchanting, conceals something. There are no facts in her life: she is all fantasy. ‘What was her father? Had she brothers? … He [Orlando] suspected at first that her rank was not as high as she would like … What then did she hide from him?’

  The end of their love comes as a performance of Othello is given on the ice. Orlando has seen Sasha on the knee of a Russian sailor and is torn with grief and disillusion – as Queen Elizabeth had been on seeing him kiss a young girl. Everything ends in sexual jealousy. ‘The frenzy of the Moor seemed to him [Orlando] his own frenzy, and when the Moor suffo
cated the woman in her bed it was Sasha he killed with his own hands.’ Then the rain poured down, the ice cracked and retreated, and the ship of the Muscovite Embassy, released from its frozen moorings, gaining its freedom, sailed over the horizon with the faithless Sasha on board.

  How much truthfulness was encased in this fantasy? And would Tiziana’s exhibition of Violet Trefusis’s life and work at the Villa Cimbrone follow the implications of this story? The exhibition traced the connection between the three Vs – Violet, Vita and Virginia – in their lives and writings. Tiziana argued that whereas Virginia was a writer, tied to no specific time, whose novels might exist for all time, Vita belonged (even in her own time) to the past, and Violet was a European writer who represented her own time. Partly for that reason, Violet’s novels were more modern than Vita’s. She emerges like a figure from the pages of Proust.

  In her introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Tiziana describes Violet as ‘a literary thunderbolt that led me to a long and careful study about the life and works of this writer’. Something that became clear to me, as the three of us left the cloisters and went down to have lunch together in Ravello, was that Tiziana’s look of ‘adoration’ the previous evening had been a reflection of her love for Violet.