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Women in Love Women in Love AugustAugust 7, 2011 7, 2011 $2 Copyright © 2011 The New York Times Women In Love By Toni Bentley A Book of SecretS Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers. By Michael Holroyd. Illustrated. 258 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26. “Heaven preserve us from all the sleek and dowdy virtues, such as punctuality, conscientiousness, fidelity and smug- ness!” So wrote Violet Keppel in her unruly call to arms to the great ruling passion of her life, Vita Sackville-West. “What great man was ever constant? What great queen was ever faithful? Novelty is the very essence of genius and always will be. If I were to die tomorrow, think how I should have lived!” And in- deed, how this woman, this “unexploded bomb,” as Vita called her, “lived!” Sir Michael De Courcy Fraser Hol- royd, biographer supreme of Lytton Strachey, George Bernard Shaw and the painter Augustus John, among oth- ers, tells the much-told tale of Violet and Vita yet again, in “A Book of Secrets: Il- legitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers,” but with more depth and context than anyone has before. And he tells us oh so much more besides the fascinating story of “the three V’s” of Bloomsbury — for wherever go the glamorous and flamboy- ant Violet and Vita, Virginia, in her blue stockings, ambles nearby, pen at hand. Continued on Page 10 LeANNe SHAptoN t errence rAfferty: t AHe D y oF tHe zoMBIeS Pag e 17 | t ShomA JoneS: Rupe Rt MuRDoCH AND ‘SCoop’ AGp e 27 Women in Love Continued from Page 1 From the first page “A Book of Secrets” Pilgrim’s Progress.’ ” casts the spell of a time long gone, of loves Eve died at 106 in 1978, but Her Book re- endured and lost, expectations dashed on mains, and Holroyd, he tells us, has held the rocks of reality, of inner desires for- it, bringing her close. Most chilling of all ever stilled, casting their shadows into the hundreds of entries are lines by Swin- history. It is written with the kind of el- burne, transcribed by one Ernest Beckett, egance, ease and simplicity possible only the man who left her at the altar, render- from a master craftsman who has flown ing Her Book her life: far beyond any learning curve and is rel- ishing his free fall. He carries us as if on For the Crown of our life as it closes a magic carpet from one character to the Is darkness, the fruit thereof dust; next, and one time period to the next, with No thorns go so deep as the roses consummate grace. Holroyd is a kind of And love is more cruel than lust — Fred Astaire on the page, his many steps Time turns the old days to derision becoming one grand, profound design. Our loves into corpses or wives, The book evokes a haunted world of And marriage and death and division unsung women — a dead wife, a jilted fi- Makes barren our lives — ancée, an illegitimate daughter, a possible granddaughter and some seriously head- Ernest had deserted Eve when he fell in strong lesbians — and links them in an love yet again, this time not with a woman elaborate web of intrigue to, alas, a man, but with a dream, a place, a villa, a vision though one of little importance, named high upon a cliff in Ravello, on the Amalfi Ernest. Coast. He bought the exquisite Villa Cim- Ernest Beckett, on whom Part I of the brone around 1905 and spent his remain- book centers, became the second Lord ing years, and his fortune, expanding it, Grim thorpe in 1905, when his uncle, who decorating it, eccentrically, and, stupen- designed the clock mechanism for Big dously, adding numerous “statuosities”; Ben, died, on time, one presumes. Belying it is where his ashes reside. The Blooms- his, er, grim appellation, the good lord’s bury crowd frequently gathered there, “last urgent words” to his wife, Holroyd and it has recently become a hotel. So you says, “were reported as being ‘We are low can now, for a steep price (after a steep on marmalade.’ ” Thus the tone was set for drive), stay at the place that Gore Vidal his nephew’s less than distinguished ca- once wrote was the most beautiful spot reer of a little of this and quite a lot of that. on earth, specifically the view from the belvedere that Ernest built, the Terrace of “A man of swiftly changing enthusi- “What great queen was ever faithful?” Violet Keppel Trefusis. asms,” Holroyd writes, “a dilettante, phi- Infinity: “The sky and the sea were each landerer, gambler and opportunist. He so vividly blue that it was not possible to changed his name, his career, his interests lot’s arrival, across town, in rather more 10 alone at the Musée Rodin in Paris — re- tell one from the other.” and his mistresses quite regularly.” The genteel circumstances — the mother sulting in a platonic amitié amoureuse be- Coiling back in from the site of cerule- novelist George Moore informed Lady Cu- was at least married, though not to her tween artist and model that Holroyd says an infinity, Part II of “A Book of Secrets” nard that Beckett was undoubtedly “Lon- progeny’s father — the beautiful Alice was “the most lasting and tender experi- explores the Violet-Vita story and its don’s greatest lover,” constantly distract- Keppel gave birth to Ernest’s daughter ence of her life.” bodice-ripping affair — though Vita liked ed “by the sight of pretty girls.” Like his Violet, only three years after marrying In 1907 Rodin gave Eve a cast of the uncle, Ernest liked his jam jar brimming. look-the-other-way George Keppel. Violet, sculpture, and after Ernest disposed of Hold on, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. A apparently, was never sure of her pater- her before marrying her, the bust became ‘I revel in your beauty,’ few years after his American wife’s death nal lineage: “Who was my father? A faun her only asset — but at least it had been Violet wrote to Vita. ‘I exult following childbirth in 1891, Beckett’s undoubtedly!” she wrote to Vita, not too forged in marble by one of the great art- South African bombshell of a mistress, far off the mark. “A faun who contracted ists of the century. Destitute, Eve had to in my surrender. I love José (for Josephine) Brink, gave birth to a mésalliance with a witch.” A few years sell her sculpture, but the money did not belonging to you.’ Ernest’s illegitimate son, Lancelot Ernest after Violet’s birth, the ambitious Alice last long. She spent the rest of her life un- Cecil, a child burdened with somewhat moved far beyond Ernest and became “La married, a wanderer to her dying day. conflicting literary references. Favorita,” mistress to the Prince of Wales, In 1909 Lady Diana Manners (later to dress as “Julian” when they checked José had become the rake’s mistress at later King Edward VII. (Got it? If not, re- Cooper) gave Eve a large blank tome in- into hotels as husband and wife. “I felt like 19, explaining, “So much in love were we read, and make a chart. I did.) We are now tended as a diary. On the title page it read: a person translated, or reborn,” she wrote with each other that . I let him unclothe full circle to Violet again, where all roads “Eve Fairfax. Her Book.” But instead of of her transvestite forays. Theirs was a me.” Love has been known, on occasion, to in Holroyd’s book lead. writing in it herself, Eve had everyone she liaison dangereuse if ever there was one, lead to nudity. After Lancelot’s birth, Er- knew write in it, “the reverse of a visitors’ complete with all the operatic melodrama nest saw no point in marrying José as he u T first, another detour, for what book,” Holroyd says, “guests pinned like of “Tosca,” the vituperation of Edward Al- had promised. Two years before her son’s must surely be one of the most butterflies to its pages.” As the years accu- bee — though here, no one is afraid of Vir- birth, momentarily fed up with Ernest, Btouching cameos in the history of mulated, Her Book became a colossal col- ginia Woolf — all culminating in a Feydeau she took a twirl on the stage in a bit part abandoned brides, featuring the lovely, lection, bulging with added inserts, photos farce, complete with gender- bending, in a touring production of Oscar Wilde’s aptly named Eve Fairfax, who played, and notes, and Eve carried this evidence cross-dressing, occasionally bisexual les- “Woman of No Importance.” (I am not it was said, “an aggressive game of of her existence, “her pride and her pen- bians, their bewildered husbands, their making this up.) croquet.” ance,” for more than 50 years, ever home- outraged mothers and one small rented Less than nine months before Lance- Eve became Ernest’s new fiancée in less, depending on the kindness of friends airplane. The plot contains such frequent 1901, and he promptly dispatched her to sit and strangers. “Like an extraordinary scenes of sex, confrontation, cruelty and Toni Bentley is the author of five books, for Rodin in Paris, commissioning a bust tramp,” Holroyd writes, “she traveled the humiliation, set across Europe, from Corn- including “Winter Season: A Dancer’s he never paid for. The sittings went on for country between Castles, Halls, Granges, wall and London to Paris and Monte Carlo Journal” and “The Surrender: An Erotic over eight years, involving hundreds of Manors, Priories, Abbeys weighed down (for gambling, dancing and novelizing), Memoir.” letters and numerous studies — there are by its heavy load like a figure from ‘The that it suggests some Hollywood execu- 10 tive has been sleeping on the job — or has but not before reading every one.
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