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, Grim­thorpe 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. “He can fact, been consummated. Vita went “half who has read them, “were the negotia- succumbed to sequel-itis — in not turn- have no illusions left,” Violet wrote. But mad with pain” and was pulled away from tions she made between this love and the ing their story into a film. Their passion Vita kept Violet’s letters, more than 500, a clinging Violet by ­Denys. Harold then rest of her life.” makes Henry and June look lame, and, in and one biographer wrote of them, “For dutifully “guarded” his quarry. In a final Explaining, in part, why Violet has al- the role of chronicler, Anaïs Nin should be sheer ruthless, persistent passion I have fillip, Denys proceeded to perjure him- ways taken the supporting role to Vita, afraid of Virginia Woolf. never come upon their equal.” self to the suffering Vita on the trip back Holroyd offers a friendly — but cutting Both Vita and Violet themselves, how- “I revel in your beauty, your beauty of to England by telling her that he had not — jab at the “Vita camp” of people who ever, were also industrious scribblers, form and feature,” Violet wrote. “I exult slept with his wife. (Got it? No? Make an- have insisted both directly and through and in their respective romans à clef they in my surrender. . . . I love belonging to other chart.) sometimes brutal insinuation that Violet even provided, between them, the script. you — I glory in it, that you alone . . . have “I feel it is something legendary,” Vita was simply nuts. Nigel Nicolson, Vita’s Vita wrote “Challenge” during their af- bent me to your will, shattered my self-­ wrote of the “bond which unites me to Vio- son, laid the groundwork in his famous fair, with considerable input from Violet, possession, robbed me of my mystery, let, Violet to me.” Violet was the more pas- “Portrait of a Marriage,” and Harold Ac- and the characters were named Julian made me yours, yours.” Vita wrote insight- sionate dreamer of the two, the romantic ton (who Holroyd says was “remorseless- and Eve. Vita’s mother paid the British fully of Violet’s sexual yielding: “I hadn’t idealist with a gypsy heart and thick, wild ly hostile” to Violet), Nancy Mitford and publisher to cancel the book for fear of dreamt of such an art of love. . . . She let hair to match. Her letters charge through even Victoria Glendinning, Vita’s great scandal, and it first appeared in print in herself go entirely limp and passive in my time, slicing convention open like a sword, biographer, all did much to paint Violet as America in 1924, not receiving a British arms. (I shudder to think of the experience rendering, indeed, her love “legendary.” dismissible, certifiable, secondary. release until 50 years later. Violet in turn that lay behind her abandonment.)” In their letters, Vita was “Mitya,” and “Whatever vessel set hesitantly out wrote, in French, the delightfully venge- Violet was the lush “Lushka”: “My poor from the Trefusis harbor,” Holroyd writes, ful “Broderie Anglaise” (“English Em- u t of the bedroom and into reality Mitya, they’ve taken you and they’ve “appeared to her enthusiasts to be im- broidery”), in which Vita is Lord Shorne, we find the mothers — Lady Sack- burnt your caravan. . . . They’ve pulled mediately captured by the enemy.” He Violet is Anne Lindell, and Virginia Woolf Oville and Alice Keppel — an unstop- down your sleeves and buttoned up your suggests kindly — though his intrinsic au- — who had since become Vita’s other, pable pair of doyennes (calling Vanessa collar! They’ve forced you to sleep be- thority demands — that “a reassessment” more famous lover — is the acidic Alexa Redgrave and Maggie Smith), banding neath a self-respecting roof with no chinks of her work is in order, so that “a legiti- Harrowby Quince, “one of those women,” together and wrangling their wayward to let the stars through. . . . Come away, mate place” may yet be found “in Europe- Violet writes, “who, having no bloom to daughters to the ground, re-establishing Mitya, come away. . . . I’ll wait for you at an literature for the name Violet Trefusis.” lose, improve with age.” Ouch! The book respectability and the matriarchal order. the crossroads. . . . Ah, Beloved!” Holroyd will be 76 on Aug. 27, having was published in France in 1935 but not But not before their girls — their mothers’ survived several years of aggressive can- translated into English until 1985. And daughters to the core — put up the fight of cer treatment that has left him, he says, of course Virginia wrote the spectacular their lives for each other, a fight that de- “ludicrously pragmatic.” “Now, as in a “Orlando,” with Orlando as Vita and Sa- fined their lives, especially Violet’s. film,” he writes toward the end, “I can sha, a Russian princess, as Violet. How Never has such a cast of beauty, brains bring back the characters who occupy the ironic that the most sexually reticent and female potency been assembled: pages of this, my last book.” And so he an- lady of the three should write not only Lady Sackville, an aristocratic charmer nounces, with infinite poise and quiet hu- the best book, but the one that dares to who, like Eve Fairfax, sat for Rodin “fully mility, his retirement. Our loss. explore most deeply the profound subject décolleté,” and wrote of the experience, “This has been my exit from myself,” of amorphous gender. These three very “He keeps saying I am so beautiful, and Holroyd has said of his life’s work as a bi- different novels provide a fascinating yet the bust is perfectly hideous up to ographer. “I seek invisibility,” he writes, “Rashomon” of the Violet-Vita affair. now.” She referred to her son-in-law as “behind the subjects I am trying to bring The real-life story, that mystery called “little Harold” and lectured Vita on Vio- alive on the page.” But in this he fails mis- the truth, which Holroyd narrates so ex- let’s “sexual perversion,” neatly sidestep- erably: his heart and humor bounce in pertly, stars two brilliant, young, beauti- ping her own daughter’s “perversion.” vibrant rays off every hot-blooded, love- ful, rich, hypersexed lesbians. The film, of Alice Keppel “was shocked by the ap- lorn, crazy, jealous and joyous woman — course, would adhere strictly to the truth palling weakness of the two husbands,” and what enlightened being would have — please, no Portman-Kunis off-with-her- Holroyd writes, and told her daughter any woman be otherwise? — in his book. panties scenes; this coupling requires that if she were her “she would have Through his “exit” Holroyd is well found. some actual ardor. And Nicole Kidman killed herself long ago!” Keppel brought Enamored of a dream: Ernest Beckett at “A Book of Secrets” is a book of magic, a could don her Cyrano proboscis again the drama to a head, hiring a plane to send Villa Cimbrone, circa 1910. sleight of hand by a master conjurer sing- for a vital cameo, composing at her desk “little Harold” and tubercular, “What is a ing his swan song, sweetly, softly, with while the girls gallivant across the Conti- lesbian?” Denys to the hotel in Amiens Violet loved Vita — her whole life long, piercing wit and overwhelming compas- nent providing her with scandalous copy. where their wives had eloped for the ump- she claimed — so above and beyond what sion, his poetry in prose evoking a time Violet and Vita met as children, and al- teenth time. The confrontation was, Hol- society allowed that she was deemed past, with all its outrageous obsessions, ready the fire was lit, though it came to royd says, “truly dreadful,” dominated by crazy, as are most women who are obses- its illegal passions, its melancholy per- full blaze six years after Vita married the Violet’s vitriol to Denys, whom she humili- sively, wildly in love. Today Violet would fume. It is the scent, I believe, of violets distinguished, mostly homosexual Harold ated beyond even Vita’s belief. Any power be on a Lexapro cocktail with an Abilify that rises from these intoxicating pages. Nicolson (Colin Firth, slam dunk), while Harold might have had as cuckolded hus- chaser, Ritalin with some Ativan on the Holroyd likes this poem by Violet Trefu- Violet was forced into a marriage with band No. 2 was somewhat compromised side for particularly fiery outbursts, sis, a woman he elevates from feisty side- poor, handsome Denys Trefusis (Hugh by his own recent fling with the couturier while attending daily meetings of Sex kick to contender: Grant) in the midst of their affair. The Edward Molyneux. Addicts Anonymous after a few weeks question of conjugal consummation was “At this point, reader, I throw up my of inpatient therapy with Dr. Drew at My heart was more disgraceful, more out of the question — until it became the hands in despair at any of these charac- Almost-a-Celebrity Rehab. But instead of alone answer. Vita, right on cue, arrived in Paris ters behaving with proper consideration all this to rein in her emotional anarchy, And more courageous than the world during Violet’s honeymoon and whisked for their biographers,” our beloved biogra- she had the old-fashioned cure, a formi- has known. her away: “I treated her savagely, I made pher writes. “A tragic love story — for this dable mother. O passer-by my heart was like your love to her, I had her, I didn’t care, I only is what it is — has been made chaotic and But even Alice Keppel could not prevent own. wanted to hurt Denys.” incredible by the tumult of contradictions.” her daughter’s writing, the great outlet, Denys had apparently, until his honey- Suffice it to say that the negotiations came the great revenge, and Violet wrote at And in this final offering, this small book moon, not “heard of lesbianism,” so he to an end only when Harold whispered to least nine books and numerous columns, bursting with the tremendous generosity got a quick, hands-off lesson. Eventually, his wife what Denys had told him on their though her Wikipedia page has yet to of its author, one feels that courage. Sir sadly, he destroyed Vita’s letters to Violet, flight over: the Trefusis marriage had, in know it. “Her novels,” writes Holroyd, Michael, I curtsy before you. h

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