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. M
ight 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.’
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