main page, here
NIGEL NICOLSON (1917 - 2004) and his parents
Wednesday 23 February 2005
An endearing underachiever
Harold Nicolson
Reviewed by Philip Ziegler
‘I am beginning to see that brain counts for little but that character counts for everything,’ wrote Harold Nicolson, in one of those flashes of self-perception which from time to time brilliantly illuminated his life. ‘It is not a pleasant thought as my character is weak and easily influenced.’ He was only just 17 when he articulated that particular piece of self-deprecation; he would have said exactly the same 60 years later and been right on both occasions. His ability to diagnose his weaknesses, coupled with a total inability to do anything to rectify them, was one of his most endearing characteristics; it also explained why his various careers, in terms of what his talents entitled him to expect, were signal failures.
His flirtation with Oswald Mosley illustrated both his fundamental benevolence and his capacity for fatuity. Like many others, he admired Mosley’s energy and self-confidence and joined the New Party in the belief that it offered Britain a chance for regeneration which was not to be hoped for from any of the tired and traditional parties of the past. He deplored Mosley’s attitude towards the Jews but still felt a sneaking sympathy for the sentiments that underlay it: ‘Although I loathe anti-Semitism,’ he once admitted, ‘I do dislike Jews.’ But he shrank from the violent side of Mosley’s politics and soon found the party vulgar and slightly ridiculous. When Mosley asked for suggestions for a suitable uniform for his party members, Nicolson characteristically suggested ‘grey-flannel trousers and shirts’. He disengaged himself from the New Party before the going got too hot. Mosley had no political judgment, was his final verdict. ‘He believes in fascism. I don’t. I loathe it.’ But when Mosley was interned in May 1940 Nicolson was one of the few active politicians who risked his career by offering to visit him in prison. Fortunately the overture was rebuffed: Mosley did not like the tone of Nicolson’s patriotic broadcasts on the BBC and refused to receive him.
Nigel Nicolson’s brilliant and alarmingly honest description of the relationship between his parents in Portrait of a Marriage has left little room for a biographer keen to disinter savoury — or unsavoury — new material. Rose is anyway not disposed to undertake any such investigation. His analysis of the bond that linked Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West is sympathetic, dispassionate and wholly non-judgmental. Despite the propensity of both parties to conduct amatory escapades with members of their own sex, one is left in no doubt that they loved and appreciated each other and that each attached enormous importance to their union.
Norman Rose is a distinguished Jewish historian with studies of Vansittart, Weizmann and Winston Churchill to his credit and a profound knowledge of international politics. Though Nicolson himself would have thought these qualifications entirely appropriate, Rose was the wrong person to write this biography. He makes much of his subject’s Foreign Office career and his subsequent pronouncements on foreign policy, but though Nicolson wrote a few cogent memoranda and for a time impressed those in authority over him, his propensity to equivocate, to irritate those on whose goodwill he depended, to ignore the realities of power and energetically to promote worthy but hopelessly unattainable causes, ensured that he would never have got to the top or anywhere near it. What is of interest about Nicolson is his writing, his friends and his curious life-style — and on this Rose is less strong. Typically, he analyses at length Nicolson’s not very significant contribution to the formation of foreign policy during the first world war but says nothing about what it was like to work peacefully in Whitehall while one’s friends and contemporaries were one by one dying on the Western Front. Lees-Milne’s biography of Nicolson, though astute and perceptive, left room for a more detached and considered study. Rose has provided some useful raw material for such a book but has not himself filled the gap.
John Campbell
Nigel Nicolson, editor
THE HAROLD NICOLSON DIARIES, 1907 – 1963
460 PP. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £ 25
0 297 84764 3
Norman Rose
HAROLD NICOLSON
383 PP. Cape. £ 20
0 224 06218 2
“It’s rather sad”, Harold Nicolson lamented near the end of his life, “that of all my forty books the only ones that will be remembered are he three I didn‘t realise i’d written.” He meant his diaries, originally published in three volumes between 1966 and 1968, and now republished in a single abridged volume. In fact, his other books — biographies, novels, literary criticism and journalism — are second—hand, second-rate and now badly dated. His diaries remain original, vivid, fresh and timeless. the publishers of diaries regularly invoke be name of Pepys; but in this case, the comparison is justified. Nicolson’s diary is an enduring work of literature which should never be allowed to go out of print.
Nicolson is a great diarist because — unlike overpraised solipsists such as Alan Clark — he is endlessly interested in other people, not just in himself. He is also blisteringly honest about himself, with a disarming mixture of vanity and modesty. He has a painter’s eye for visual detail and a novelist’s fascination with character revealed in gestures, words and tone of voice, as well as a historian’s sense of the sweep of events behind the trivial interchange of daily life. Then, with all these attributes, luck gave him a ringside seat in interesting times.
This new edition, once again edited by his son Nigel, adds some fresh material from the years before 1930 and a few entries after 1962. The new title is strictly inaccurate since letters to his wife, Vila Sackville-West, are freely mixed in with the diary, as before. But the book is only a third of the length of the original three volumes, which themselves contained only one twentieth of the whole diary. So there is still a vast amount of unpublished material.
Simultaneously there appears a new biography by Norman Rose. This is substantially shorter, more modern in tone and less literary in style than James Lees-Milne’s two volumes published in 1980—81. Rose, as one might expect, is somewhat franker than Lees-Milne about Nicolson’s homosexuality, and also about his unappealing traits, notably snobbery, racism and anti-Semitism, extreme even by the standard of his time. In fact on the sexual front neither biographer had much left to expose to the wake of Nigel Nicolson’s astonishingly candid account of his parents’ marriage which appeared in 1973. But, given the shelf life of books today, a new biography is welcome, and Rose does the job more than adequately —though for a professor of international relations his coverage of diplomatic affairs is oddly sketchy.
In spite of some vicious prejudices which are hard to take today Nicolson contrives to remain curiously sympathetic. Reading him as a student thirty years ago I identified with his fragile self-confidence and his nagging sense of never being quite at the centre of things. Coming back to him again after a long gap I still find much of the same empathy, yet find it hard to admit. What is most admirable is precisely Nicolson’s honesty about himself, his contradictions and his underlying decency. (“You know how I hate Negroes But I do hate injustice more.”) There is something infinitely appealing about a man of great gifts and considerable achievements who knew and constantly acknowledged that ultimately he was not of the first rank.
Nicolson was virtually born into the Foreign Office -- his father, Sir Arthur Nicolson, became Permanent Secretary the year after Harold joined — but his rise within it was rapid and merited. After spells in Madrid and Constantinople he played a precociously important role as a thirty-two-year-old Third Secretary redrawing the boundaries of Eastern Europe at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, but found the experience disillusioning. (“Darling, it is appalling, those three ignorant and irresponsible men cutting Asia Minor to pieces as if they were dividing a cake.”) He continued climbing the diplomatic ladder in the 1920s until be blotted his copybook first by writing too frank a memorandum from Tehran about the sham of British policy in Persia, and then by publishing in 1927 an autobiographical novel which contained indiscreet portraits of recognizable individuals. He resigned in 1930 to strike out on his own.
Nicolson had, in fact, already carved out a second career as a writer: Some People was his sixth book. Of course he wrote too much and too quickly. His literary biographies (Paul Verlaine, Byron etc) are forgotten, and his ambition to be “the Proust of England” was far beyond his reach. But Some People mixed fact and fiction in an original way and is still in print. His three books of contemporary diplomatic history — Lord Carnock (a life of his father), Curzon: The last phase and Peacemaking, 1919— are still important eyewitness reflections on their period; while towards the end of his life his official biography of George V was path-breaking in its day.
Nicolson left the diplomatic service partly to break out of his comfortable predestined rut, partly to please Vila, who hated his official life and refused to follow him abroad. He was lured by Lord Beaverbrook’s money to become a gossip columnist on the Evening Standard, to which he was grotesquely unsuited. Then he became involved with Oswald Mosley’s New Party and edited the party newspaper, though to his credit he broke with Mosley as soon as he turned to Fascism. Finally, seeking to go into politics, he joined Ramsay Macdonald’s National Labour Party — the rump of Labour placement who had followed the turncoat Prime Minister in 1931 — and, by undeserved good fortune, be squeezed into Parliament in 1935 as Member for West Leicester. Though he despised his constituents, a wafer-thin majority secured him the perfect vantage point for the next ten years to observe the passing show of great events and to describe them in his diary.
The fourth strand which provides the private background to his public life was his extraordinary open marriage — open in the sense that while remaining emotionally faithful to one another both be and Vila fell free to indulge in a succession of homosexual affairs: mainly casual on Harold’s part, passionate on hers. There were some crises — notably Vita’s farcically tempestuous elopement with Violet Trefusis, which strained Harold’ s patience almost to breaking point at the very time he was fully engaged with the Paris Peace Conference. Their self-consciously aristocratic mutual tolerance would be harder to sustain in today’s more straitlaced climate. But as Vila once acknowledged, it was the fact that each was unfaithful with their own sex that made ii possible. “If you were in love with another woman, or 1 with another man it would inevitably rob our relationship of something. As it is, the liaisons which you and I contract don’t interfere.” Their frankness about one another’s extramarital needs — they stopped sleeping together soon after the birth of their two sons - is eye-opening even today. Yet with the private honesty went public hypocrisy: in 1929 the Nicolsons made a wireless broadcast on the BBC about the secret of successful marriage, and in 1932 they toured America — which they loathed – lecturing on the same subject.
At the time, of course, homosexuality was criminal offence, at least for men. First as a diplomat, then as an MP, journalist and popular broadcaster (Nicolson was for years a member of the panel of the Brains Trust, Harold constantly risked ruin because of his promiscuity, though his snobbery reduced the risk of blackmail, since he usually confined his adventures to his social equals. (“The idea of a gentleman of birth an education sleeping with a guardsman is repugnant to me. "). Both Nicolsons — Vita in particu1ar—prided themselves on their bohemian indifference to bourgeois convention while at the same time clinging to the wealth and privileges of respectable social position. It is hard to know whether to condemn the hypocrisy or to admit the nerve with which they got away with it. In truth it is the conflict of these elements that makes Harold’s diary such a compelling human document: the rashness and the secrecy; outrageous private behaviour overlaid by outward respectability; niggling ambition undermined by a crippling lack of self-belief; sound political judgement one minute, contradicted by extraordinary folly the next; impeccable democratic sentiments vitiated by the most callous elitism. Ultimately it is for their human weaknesses that we love Pepys and Boswell; and Harold Nicolson belongs in their company.
Jonathan Cape, £20/£18 and Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25/£22.50
Harold Nicolson, by Norman Rose and The Harold Nicolson Diaries 1907-1963, Edited by Nigel Nicolson
Naive, snobbish and utterly compelling
By Richard Canning
Published : 31 March 2005
In the early 1930s, Harold Nicolson advised his teenage son Ben - the future art historian - not to worry if he turned out homosexual. He should "take the most natural line. As if you liked oysters done in sherry". Of Ben's relationship with "Jeremy" at Oxford, his father wrote to Vita Sackville-West, his wife and Ben's mother: "What a good thing! Ben can have all the fun he wants if he is quiet about it and does not dress like a tapette."
If Nicolson's guardianship of his two sons was unorthodox, this matched his and Vita's amorous pursuits. These were well-documented in their younger son Nigel's Portrait of a Marriage (1973). Just as unusual was Nigel's 35-year stewardship of his parents' reputations. He also wrote a biography of his mother's lover Virginia Woolf, and edited both Woolf's letters and Harold and Vita's correspondence.
Nigel's greatest work for his father were the three volumes of Diaries, prepared in consultation with their author. When he died last autumn, he had just seen into publication this revised single-volume edition. Supplemented by letters, they are franker in many respects than the original Sixties volumes.
The diaries offer a sharper and more diverting account of Harold than Norman Rose's new biography. Rose has an eye for detail and his judgment is sound. But his prose is somewhat dry, and he is more comfortable with Nicolson the politician, not the writer.
All political careers are said to end in failure. Harold Nicolson believed he had failed in both political and literary realms, and others besides. An early diplomatic career petered out; he was gauche and unpredictable. The best of his books, Some People (1927), was a collection of fictionalised sketches of diplomatic circles. A minor classic, it reads wonderfully freshly but in its time was seen as treachery.
The appeal of Nicolson's diaries lies not so much in their integrity or intelligence, but the converse. His judgments were often absurd or naive. In 1930, he announced from Berlin that "Hitler has missed the boat". After Yalta, he shared Churchill's view that Stalin was a man who kept his word. A snob who resented and distrusted democracy, he regarded everyone but the Sackville-Wests - and himself, by adoption - as plebeian. His grotesque anti-Semitism had the odd consequence of making him a thoroughgoing Zionist. A separate state might gather Jews together "as Butlin's collects all the noisy holidaymakers".
Nigel Nicolson is to be applauded for his brave and selfless dissemination of his father's childish, self-regarding views. They make bitter but essential reading.
The reviewer is writing a life of Ronald Firbank
October 20, 2010
Michael Holroyd
In 1973 Nigel Nicolson published Portrait of a Marriage and the name Violet Trefusis, which had been largely forgotten in England, surfaced again and reacquired 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 responded. “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] friends” such as Cyril Connolly who “cut me dead”. But Connolly also 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 feels 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 30,000
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. 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 thing 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, he wrote, “the crisis in the
marriage made it all the more successful and secure”. 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 characterize it 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 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 Some People by his father, Harold Nicolson. 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 own 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 with Violet Trefusis and with 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, appeared a television film by Penelope Mortimer.
It was in the wake of all this exposure 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 the US and Britain, starting out as The Other Woman and ending as Violet Trefusis: A biography (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 a 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 a poor 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 Très 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 the collection The Soul’s Gymnasium (1982), we see Muriel, his fictional version 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 pointlessness 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 had 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”. Acton adds that it was “fitting that Philippe Jullian, author of The Snob Spotter’s Guide [Dictionnaire du Snobisme], should write the biography of this super-snob for whom literature was a mere hobby”.
His book has no reference to earlier days when Nancy Mitford enjoyed going to Violet’s parties. Nancy had likened her to Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda who “told such dreadful lies, / It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes”. And yet, she added, “one can’t help being fond of her”. This fondness is wholly absent from Harold Acton’s memoir. The Violet Trefusis we are shown is “quite off her old head” and irritates Nancy Mitford so much with her tiresome telephone calls when she is trying to work that “I’m really beginning to quite hate her”. Acton believed that this hateful figure regarded Mitford as a literary trespasser on her private property. Yet in Don’t Look Round Violet gave an admiring pen portrait of her, praising her for having “the courage to break with the familiar paraphernalia [of the novel], the decor, family jokes, even the vocabulary”. She describes her as “France’s wittiest conquest”. But there were to be few reciprocal civilities. Nancy suggested that Don’t Look Round should have been called Here Lies Mrs Trefusis.
Nancy Mitford used Violet Trefusis as the basis for Lady Montdore in her novel Love in a Cold Climate (Violet is “Lady Montdore exactly” she told the bookseller Heywood Hill). Mitford’s character had been born Sonia Perrotte, the handsome daughter of a country squire “of no particular note”. But her marriage to the cardboard figure of Lord Montdore had raised her unexpectedly high in a society she pretended to despise but which “gave meaning to her existence”. By the time we meet her in the novel she is aged sixty and has become known for her rampant vulgarity and proverbial rudeness. She is much disliked by people who have never met her and long to do so. She adores royalty and also has a weakness for bankers who may not be much to look at, but “one can’t get away from them”. Whoever invented love, she believes, “should be shot”. Everything is coated with a superficial charm and conveys what Nancy Mitford came to regard as the cold climate of the Keppels.
Lady Montdore has one daughter, the beautiful and unfeeling Polly Hampton. Scattered between the two of them are a number of Keppel characteristics enveloped by clouds of gossip – there is even a popular rumour that “Polly isn’t Lord Montdore’s child at all. King Edward’s”. Both mother and daughter are indifferent to children and when Polly’s child is stillborn, Lady Montdore remarks: “I expect it was just as well, children are such an awful expense, nowadays”. Polly’s long-held secret love for her lecherous uncle by marriage, to whom she proposes as soon as his wife “is cold in the grave”, is considered as “unnatural” as Violet’s love for Vita had been – she is described by one of the characters as an “incestuous little trollop”.
Polly had fallen in love with this “uncle” when she was aged fourteen, not knowing that he had previously been her mother’s lover. This secret love for a much older man made her indifferent to other men. She was an unresponsive debutante, unable to provoke eligible suitors to duels or play the game of stirring unsatisfied desire in married men and breaking up her friends’ romances – everything her mother had done before settling down to make a socially desirable marriage. The dramatic surprise of the plot comes with the arrival of “the awful offensive pansy Cedric”, hitherto dependent on the whims of barons and the temperament of a drunken German boy. He transforms Lady Montdore “from a terrifying old idol of about sixty into a delicious young darling of about a hundred”. And with this fate, the satire is complete.
Violet’s lesbian relationship with Vita has been well vindicated by Diana Souhami in Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter. But she did not make it her business to examine Violet’s novels. These novels have been described as period pieces in which the characters step directly out of her address book. The style is sardonically lightweight, high, comic and faintly camp, veering in places between the influence of Ronald Firbank and Angela Thirkell – and with a French ingredient taken perhaps from Paul Morand. She has been criticized for holding up her narrative with school essays on national characteristics, cluttering it with unnecessary cultural references, with travelogues, commentaries and vivid descriptions of furniture, food and buildings that advance from the background to take over the foreground. But these “faults” are part of an original tapestry.
A reassessment of her writing was begun by Lorna Sage, whose study of twelve twentieth-century women novelists, in the posthumously published Moments of Truth (2001), contains a fine essay on Hunt the Slipper and places Violet Trefusis in the company of Edith Wharton, Christina Stead, Jane Bowles and others. In her introductory note to this book, Sage wrote that Violet Trefusis “is mainly now remembered as a character in others’ books”. Her aim was to extract some of her novels from this punishing incarceration; and she hoped to publish a new translation of Violet’s dissenting roman-à-clef, Broderie Anglaise. I should like to pick up the baton Lorna Sage left and recommend Violet’s best novels – Echo, Broderie Anglaise, Hunt the Slipper, Pirates at Play – to readers’ attention before handing over this baton to a new generation.
The above is the Afterword to A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate daughters – absent fathers, to be published next month.
Michael Holroyd’s books include A Strange Eventful History, 2008, and A Book of Secrets, which is the final volume of a trilogy including Basil Street Blues, 1999, and Mosaic, 2004.