8. John Francis Mordaunt, c. 1921.
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
‘September 1, 1939’
W. H. Auden
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, – I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! – and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
XLIII, Sonnets from the Portuguese
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Additional Praise for A Book of Secrets
“Michael Holroyd is a great biographer, but his most lasting works will be his less monumental efforts: those creative smaller works that often star the biographer rather than the subject. None is better than A Book of Secrets, a romance of the biographer’s quest.”
—The Wall Street Journal, “Best of Biography”
“A series of delightful cameo portraits and a dexterous meditation on the art of biography itself.”
—Newsweek, “10 Books That You Might Have Missed but Shouldn’t”
“Virtuoso insights connect the dots among his characters as he intertwines the lives of Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, and Violet Trefusis, the illegitimate daughter of Grimthorpe. Holroyd himself finally arrives center stage … . A Book of Secrets demonstrates the gifts of great biographers for uncovering past lives, ultimately showing us themselves at the same time.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Elegant and quietly powerful.”
—The New Yorker
“Holroyd has earned the right to move great literary figures across the landscape of his imagination … . A Book of Secrets combines memoir and biography to reveal a glimmer of the lives of people who lived and visited Cimbrone … . Holroyd chases these ghosts around the grounds of the palazzo like a character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Holroyd is one of the eminent biographers working today … . [In A Book of Secrets] he tells the story of a place instead of a person: the Villa Cimbrone, an impossibly scenic estate on the coast of southern Italy.”
—Time
“Now in his mid-seventies, Michael Holroyd is on to a form of nonfiction narrative that rustles and slithers and uses first-person asides—about love and work and aging and the logic of research … . A short, stylish book, it deals with a few Englishwomen in the twentieth century and who they knew and what they left behind.”
—Ben Ratliff, The New York Times,
“Editors and Critics Pick Their Favorite Books of 2011”
“In this engaging volume, Holroyd acts as erudite gadfly and prober of secrets, bringing together disparate strands of memory and research to show the interwoven ‘comedy of life.’”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A Book of Secrets is itself mysterious … . It is full of haunting images, starting with the magical Villa Cimbrone, palace of dreams, floating like a mirage in the sky. And underneath the charm and humor it is … melancholy and moving.”
—Carole Angier, The Independent (London)
“A gem of a book … The terrain where aristocracy and bohemia mingle is one of which Holroyd is a past master. Here, he has given us the distilled essence of biography and a fitting end to what he evokes as the ‘comedy of life.’”
—Lisa Appignanesi, The Guardian (London)
“A Book of Secrets is a meditation on the relationship between biographers and their subjects, and, finally, it is Holroyd’s farewell to the craft of life-writing.”
—The Post and Courier (Charleston, South Carolina)
“A striking, poignant work, and the meditations Holroyd intersperses on his own experiences as a biographer are not to be missed.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“Elegantly written … Charming.”
—The Providence Journal
“It’s a testament to Holroyd’s dexterity that this big, densely populated canvas never feels cluttered or confusing … . As is always the case with Holroyd, the reader comes away equally inspired, equally curious, and lavishly entertained by a storyteller of the first rank.”
—The Scotsman (Edinburgh)
“Richly evocative and beautifully written … Holroyd’s skills as a researcher and detective are fully deployed, in miniature; and only a master could pull off such a book.”
—The Spectator (London)
ALSO BY MICHAEL HOLROYD
NONFICTION
Hugh Kingsmill
Unreceived Opinions
Lytton Strachey
Augustus John
Bernard Shaw
Basil Street Blues
Works on Paper
Mosaic
A Strange Eventful History
FICTION
A Dog’s Life
AS EDITOR
The Best of Hugh Kingsmill
Lytton Strachey by Himself
The Art of Augustus John (with Malcolm Easton)
The Genius of Shaw
The Shorter Strachey (with Paul Levy)
William Gerhardie’s God’s Fifth Column (with Robert Skidelsky)
MICHAEL HOLROYD is the author of acclaimed biographies of Bernard Shaw, the painter Augustus John, Lytton Strachey, and Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, as well as two memoirs, Basil Street Blues and Mosaic. Knighted for his services to literature, he is the president emeritus of the Royal Society of Literature and the first nonfiction writer to have been awarded the David Cohen British Prize for Literature. His previous book, A Strange Eventful History, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography in 2009. He lives in London with his wife, the novelist Margaret Drabble.
Afterword
A History of the Books
In 1973 Nigel Nicolson published Portrait of a Marriage and the name Violet Trefusis, which had been largely forgotten in England, surfaced again and re-acquired its notoriety.
As he read Vita Sackville-West’s hidden love journal after his mother’s death in 1962, Nigel became convinced that she wished it to be posthumously published. ‘She could have destroyed it,’ he wrote. ‘It presumed an audience.’ But Violet Trefusis and Nigel’s father, Harold Nicolson, were both still alive. He was chiefly concerned about his father and, when Harold died in 1968, only Violet stood in his way. He had lent Vita’s precious manuscript to a number of his friends, most (though not all) of whom advised him to publish it. ‘It is one of the most remarkable things that your mother ever wrote,’ Peter Quennell answered. ‘You need not fear damage to her reputation. It might have been so in 1950 or 1960. But not now. And don’t worry about V[iolet] T[refusis]. She is among the stupidest and most conceited women I have ever come across, and I suspect that she would be highly flattered.’
Nevertheless Nigel decided that he should not publish the journal while Violet Trefusis was alive. He was encouraged in this postponement by Violet’s sister, Sonia, who wrote to him coldly about ‘this distasteful book’ and was to cause him ‘great trouble with her [Violet’s] intellectual friends’ such as Cyril Connolly who ‘cut me dead’. But Connolly considered Vita Sackville-West ‘a damned outmoded poet’ – so perhaps this was no loss. He had met Violet Trefusis in the late 1920s, describing her as ‘very attractive, rather heavy and vicious-looking and the only person here [Florence] who one fee
ls is really modern’. Later he used her for the ‘wicked … fat red-head’ Geraldine in his novel The Rock Pool (1936), representing her as having a ‘rakish musical voice, a babyish prettiness’ and ‘the wide sensual mouth of a Rowlandson whore’. Connolly’s Geraldine is made for mischief and, though sometimes charming, she had the ‘trick of leading people on till she could make them in some way ridiculous’.
After Violet died in 1972, Nigel began preparing Vita’s journal for publication. He did not alter or suppress anything his mother had written, but the thirty thousand words he added to the book as co-author placed the Vita – Violet love affair, which in his estimate lasted hardly more than three years, against a marriage that lasted fifty years. And to make his agenda clear he called the book Portrait of a Marriage. His is the single name on the title page and he dedicates the book to someone he had greatly loved, S[hirley] A[nglesey]. The one event he concealed in his commentary was the venereal infection Harold Nicolson had caught in 1917 which, Nigel believed, had prompted Vita’s affaire with Violet. But ‘the crisis in the marriage made it all the more successful and secure,’ he wrote. His book demonstrated ‘the triumph of love over infatuation’.
Though he accepted that later in her life Violet Trefusis had changed in character and become the author of ‘some clever novels’, he hated the thought of her remorseless campaign to take Vita away from his father and the family. In his autobiography Long Life, he wrote that nothing could excuse Violet’s youthful selfishness. ‘She had attempted to destroy the happy marriage of her closest friend, and herself married a decent man, Denys Trefusis, with the sole intention of humiliating him. She despised marriage, thinking it a hypocritical façade for infidelity, like the marriage of her own mother, Alice Keppel …’ And, it is only reasonable to add, not unlike Vita’s infidelity-ridden marriage to Harold.
Vita had always put others before her sons in her emotional priorities. If her unsatisfactoriness as a mother, her awful absences, were to be traced back to any single person, it was not to Violet Trefusis but to Vita’s mother Lady Sackville who, being illegitimate, had to contend with her own difficulties – which became part of Vita’s inheritance. Under the cover of celebrating her marriage to Harold, the reader of Portrait of a Marriage is led into believing that their happy if unconventional union was seriously threatened by one person – and that person was Violet. Vita’s love for Violet was certainly the most intense passion of her life, and so perhaps Nigel was right to see her as a threat. But his motives in deciding to publish his mother’s manuscript were made more complicated by his knowledge that the book might be seen as a form of filial revenge. People who had liked Vita and knew little or nothing of her love for Violet would read Portrait of a Marriage and think less of her. (Lord Sackville, for example, who had ‘great admiration for your mother’, wrote to say that ‘these feelings have been tarnished by your book).’
Nigel Nicolson was as remote a parent as his mother had been. ‘My sisters and I orbited around the sad and central absence of our father,’ Adam Nicolson writes in Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History. Nigel had many sterling attributes, talents and virtues, yet there seemed some human quality lacking in him. ‘He is a cold man who wants to be warm,’ James Lees-Milne wrote, ‘and cannot be.’ And now he was about to risk embarrassing his children by opening a secret cupboard and letting out the family skeleton to dance for public entertainment and, as Violet’s sister Sonia accused him, ‘for profit’.
Yet who would have thanked him or felt he had acted nobly if he had simply destroyed his mother’s hidden manuscript? Would that not also have been construed as revenge? Whatever he did, guilt would descend on him.
But there was another motive for publishing Portrait of a Marriage. The way he had constructed the book was highly original: it evolved into an extraordinary hybrid like his father, Harold Nicolson’s, Some People. Each book has a secure place in the history of non-fiction and semi-fictional literature. Some People was praised highly by Virginia Woolf and influenced her writing of Orlando. Portrait of a Marriage provides an associated narrative, like a key to a secret language used in several interrelated stories including Violet Trefusis’s novel Broderie Anglaise, originally published in French in 1935 as a riposte to Orlando.
Nigel Nicolson, who was a publisher, appointed James Lees-Milne as his father’s biographer. Lees-Milne had had a brief amorous fling with Harold Nicolson and felt an enduring affection for him (his wife Alvilde had affaires both with Violet Trefusis and her two principal lovers, Vita Sackville-West and Winnaretta Polignac). More simply, Nigel chose Victoria Glendinning to write the life of his mother. They were excellent biographies (I reviewed them both) and by the beginning of the 1980s these formidable vessels sailed into publication while to one side, like a pirate boat, a television film by Penelope Mortimer appeared.
It was in the wake of all this commotion that the novels of Violet Trefusis were introduced into Britain – Echo and Broderie Anglaise were translated from the French for the first time. There were two reasons for this revival: the fact that Violet’s story was in the news; and a feeling that the recent non-fiction publications had come too exclusively from Vita Sackville-West’s side of the story. The books that set out to sea from the Trefusis anchorage were scattered and ill-assorted – and they had begun their journey in what seemed to be atrocious weather. ‘The “great affair” was surely one of the most absurd episodes in English literary and social history,’ wrote a reviewer in the Literary Review. He was reviewing one of Violet’s novels, not Portrait of a Marriage, which nevertheless dominated the climate in which these books were received. On collision course were two published versions of Violet’s letters to Vita. Both were packaged with short biographies and, in an unsuccessful effort to steer away from ‘the great affair’, one of these volumes changed its title between America and Britain, starting out as The Other Woman and ending as Violet Trefusis: Life and Letters (though carrying the subtitle: Including correspondence with Vita Sackville-West). A plan to reissue Violet Trefusis’s novels as Virago Classics with new introductions by contemporary novelists was interrupted by copyright complications. Her memoir Don’t Look Round was introduced in America by Peter Quennell (no friend of Violet’s to judge from his letter to Nigel Nicolson) – and he also wrote an entertaining if somewhat derisive picture of her in his volume of contemporary portraits, Customs and Characters. Victoria Glendinning contributed a good introduction to Broderie Anglaise, but surely she belonged to the Vita camp – Nicholas Shakespeare suggested in his Times review that ‘it was a story which packs much greater charge than Victoria Glendinning allows’. Whatever vessel set hesitantly out from the Trefusis harbour appeared to her enthusiasts to be immediately captured by the enemy: Sophia Sackville-West writing an appalling review of Echo, James Lees-Milne reviewing Diana Souhami’s fine double biography of Alice Keppel and Violet Trefusis, and Victoria Glendinning giving a kindly but understandably modest review of Henrietta Sharpe’s Life of Violet Trefusis in 1981 – which was greeted more aggressively by Harold Acton. ‘She [Violet] had a pathological dread of being left alone with her conscience,’ he wrote, adding that ‘Madame Trés Physique’, as she was nicknamed, reminded him as she grew older of ‘a poodle’.
Over the years Harold Acton had grown remorselessly hostile. At the beginning of one of his short stories called ‘Codicil Coda’, which appeared in a collection of his stories, The Soul’s Gymnasium (1982), we see Muriel, his fictional portrait of Violet, making her Will. Since her doctor told her she was ill, she has passed her days and nights renegotiating this Will. But her friends keep tiresomely dying – a coronary here, a fatal accident somewhere else – and Muriel is obliged to alter her codicils again, filling in the gaps. Muriel’s only other distraction is the writing of a sensational autobiography. ‘It was my vocation to become a legend,’ she informs her secretary. ‘ … I forget our precise connection with Charlemagne … Even in the cradle my cheeks were tickled by a royal moustache.’ But the poin
tlessness of this book, like the pointlessness of her life, eventually overwhelms her. By the end of the story all her friends are dead. She orders her maid to lay out the trays of jewels once more and painfully plants them all over her fragile anatomy, lying back in her bed ‘panting from the effort of her transformation’. She stares in the mirror at the barbaric idol she has become. ‘The wreck of her features amid the glitter of jewels was intensely dramatic.’ Her maid exclaims how beautiful she looks. And Harold Acton concludes: ‘Yes, Muriel made a beautiful corpse.’
Acton’s story focuses on Violet Trefusis’s last years. His memoir of Nancy Mitford, published in 1975, covers intermittently a longer period of Violet’s life. ‘Make allowances for great unhappiness,’ Violet had appealed to Vita. Harold Acton, usually a courteous writer, makes no allowances. He pities her and not her grief, seeing her as if she has always been what she became in her final, sad, postscriptum phase. The memoir contains a photograph of ‘Mrs Violet Trefusis, with her maid’, which shows an elderly figure, like a superannuated ballet dancer, poised on the pavement as if waiting for a bus, with her maid Alice Amiot a couple of paces behind looking directly at the camera as if, with a confiding wink, inviting us to laugh. Acton writes that there had been ‘a definite estrangement’ between Violet Trefusis and himself ‘owing to Violet’s extreme rudeness’. The book shows her as being socially unnegotiable. But this ‘need not have been commemorated’, Rebecca West observed, ‘in so many merciless passages’. We hear of her wearing ‘the ribbon of the Légion d’honneur night and day’, of her ‘supercilious ostentation’ and ‘fat independent income’ and are told that her writing was ‘no more than an exhibitionist exercise’. He adds that it was ‘fitting that Philippe Jullian, author of The Snob Spotter’s Guide [Dictionnaire de Snobisme], should write the biography of this super-snob for whom literature was a mere hobby’.
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