Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter, Diana Souhami [the ebook reader TXT] 📗

the original dedication which read ‘with gratitude for much excellent copy to the original of Eve’ to

ACABA EMBEO SIN TIRO, MEN CHUAJANI; LIRENAS, BERJARAS TIRI OCHI BUSNE, CHANGERI, TA ARMENSALLE

which meant not a lot to most. Translated from Julian and Eve’s Romany language it read: ‘This book is yours, my witch. Read it and you will find your tormented soul, changed and free.’

Pat Dansey gave Violet a copy of the American edition. Violet underlined passages she believed showed Vita’s love. The book was not published in Britain until 1973, a year after her death. Vita’s son and executor Nigel Nicolson returned the manuscript to its original publisher, Collins, their schedule interrupted by fifty years. In a foreword he wrote of Eve:

The subtlety of Challenge is that an odious girl is made convincingly lovable. Eve, like Violet, is … a seductress who risked time and again her victim’s love by indifference, insult, and finally by betrayal. Eve is the portrait of a clever, infuriating, infinitely charming witch.

Eve/Violet makes Julian/Vita lose his upright manly head with her wanton ways. And because she is a witch and full of feminine wiles, she betrays him. Challenge was the stuff of Hollywood psychodrama. ‘In the end,’ said Greta Garbo in 1922 of her role in The Temptress, ‘I have to fall through the ice so the show can go on.’ Similarly Eve drowns so that Julian can shape up, the expedient fate for bewitching sirens.

Through Pat Dansey Violet heard of Vita’s burgeoning relationship with Virginia Woolf, Bloomsbury’s leading woman novelist. Orlando: A Biography was published in 1928, the year before Denys died. Openly dedicated to Vita and about her, it showed photographs of her décolletée with ropes of pearls, and with her dogs at Long Barn. Violet knew every allusion, every characterization in the book. By publishing it Virginia Woolf declared intimacy with Vita’s life. Violet had lost any such intimacy. Even trivial contact was denied. She was punished, exiled, silenced, for her manifestation of love. ‘I ache with the sense of the appalling unfairness,’ she had written to Vita. ‘You are as guilty as I.’

She is cast as Princess Sasha and rooted in the usual tyrannies of her sex. Orlando calls her Sasha after a white Russian fox he had as a boy ‘a creature soft as snow, but with teeth of steel, which bit him so savagely that his father had it killed’. She and Orlando meet on the ice which melts under their passion. She talks ‘so enchantingly, so wittily, so wisely (but unfortunately always in French … English was too frank, too candid a tongue for her’. ‘In all she says and does’ there is something hidden ‘she never shone with the steady beam of an Englishwoman’.

Her rank is not as high as she would like, she flirts, there is something coarse about her, she is ‘deceitful’, ‘faithless’, ‘mutable’, ‘fickle’, a ‘devil’, ‘adulteress’, ‘deceiver’. She abandons Orlando on the very day when they had agreed to elope together. By the time she is forty she is fat, lethargic, befurred ‘marvellously well-preserved, seductive, diademed, a Grand Duke’s mistress’.

Violet had not met Virginia Woolf. This was Vita’s account, as fed to Virginia, of her character and part in their relationship. It was as Violet saw it one more distortion, another betrayal, a reversal of what had happened, a blackening of her name.

Vita assured Harold that Violet was ‘a madness of which I should never again be capable … a thing like that happens once and burns out the capacity for such a feeling’. She confided to him – up to a point – her same-sex affairs with Pat Dansey; Dorothy Wellesley; Mary Campbell, wife of the poet Roy Campbell; Margaret Voigt; Evelyn Irons; Hilda Matheson, Director of Talks at the BBC. Her relationship with Virginia Woolf was of a different ilk.

‘These Sapphists love women; friendship is never untinged with amorosity,’ Virginia wrote of Vita in her diary on 21 December 1925. She did not consider herself one of ‘these Sapphists’, though she was interested enough in women who loved each other. She described herself as ‘sexually cowardly’, ‘valetudinarian’, with a ‘terror of real life’. Mentally fragile, afraid of loss of control, she preferred to hold hands, exchange glances and ideas: ‘But what I want of you is illusion – to make the world dance.’ She and her husband Leonard had, early on, some sexual endeavour which Vita said ‘was a terrible failure and was abandoned quite soon’. She gained her hold on the world by writing things down.

Vita reassured Harold that here was a ‘soul friendship. Very good for me and good for her too.’ Virginia she said was not accustomed to ‘emotional storms’:

She lives too much in the intellect and imagination … I look on my friendship with her as a treasure and a privilege … I shan’t ever fall in love with her, padlock, but I am absolutely devoted to her.

She admired the originality of Virginia’s mind, her perspicacity, depth, wit and gift – the excellence of her prose. She deferred to what she perceived as true talent, was flattered and honoured by Virginia’s interest in her, found her ‘dowdy but beautiful’ and was ‘scared to death’ of any sexual exchange. She did not want to precipitate a psychotic or depressive attack. Sex with Virginia, Vita reassured Harold, was a fire with which she had no wish to play. ‘Probably I would be less sagacious if I were more tempted, which is at least frank.’ They went to bed together twice which was often enough.

Vita could write to Virginia

It is incredible how essential to me you have become … oh my dear! I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you; I love you too much for that. Too truly.

And Virginia could take it on board for it was on paper, contained, without danger.

Vita’s aristocratic ‘splendour’ inspired Virginia’s love and satire and informed Orlando:

she shines in the grocers shop in Sevenoaks with a candle lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung …