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

There is … her capacity to take the floor in any company, to represent her country, to visit Chatsworth, to control silver, servants, chow dogs; her motherhood (but she is a little cold & offhand with her boys).

In literature, Virginia Woolf had comparable confidence, style and aristocratic splendour. She shines with candlelit radiance on the printed page. Vita, she thought, had a ‘pen of brass’ and no particular originality of mind (‘she never breaks fresh ground. She picks up what the tide rolls to her feet’). But she was, for Virginia, life. She was in awe of the ‘central vigour’ that prompted Vita to write fifteen pages a day, admired her manner – ‘striding; silk stockings; shirt & skirts; opulent; easy; absent; talking spaciously & serenely to the Eton tutor’ – the way she dominated the road as she drove her large blue Austin car. In her diary she wrote of the ‘opulence and freedom’ of Long Barn, ‘flowers all out, butler, silver, dogs, biscuits, wine, hot water, log fires Italian cabinets, Persian rugs, books.’ And when Vita took her to Knole, as Vita did with all the women she loved, she saw her living heritage, her links with the past:

Vita stalking in her Turkish dress, attended by small boys down the gallery, wafting them on like some tall sailing ship – a sort of covey of noble English life: dogs walloping, children crowding, all very free & stately: & [a] cart bringing wood in to be sawn by the great circular saw … They had brought wood in from the Park to replenish the great fires like this for centuries: & her ancestresses had walked so on the snow with their great dogs bounding by them. All the centuries seemed lit up, the past expressive, articulate; not dumb and forgotten … After tea, looking for letters of Dryden’s to show me, she tumbled out a love letter of Ld Dorset’s (17th century) with a lock of his soft gold tinted hair which I held in my hand a moment. One had a sense of links fished up into the light which are usually submerged.

Vita gave Virginia Challenge to read in June 1927. The gift stirred memories and on 11 June, she wrote, provocatively:

Do you know what I should do if you were not a person to be rather strict with? I should steal my own motor car out of the garage at 10pm tomorrow night, be at Rodmell [Virginia’s house] by 11.5, throw gravel at your window, then you’d come down and let me in; I’d stay with you till 5, and be home by half-past six. But, you being you, I can’t; more’s the pity. Have you read my book? Challenge, I mean. Perhaps I sowed all my wild oats then. Yet I don’t feel that the impulse has left me; no, by God; and for a different Virginia I’d fly to Sussex in the night. Only with age, soberness, and the increase of consideration, I refrain. But the temptation is great.

Virginia wired, ‘Come then’, to which Vita did not respond. Three days later she wrote to Vita:

You see I was reading Challenge and I thought your letter was a challenge ‘if only you weren’t so elderly and valetudinarian’ was what you said in effect ‘we would be spending the day together’ whereupon I wired ‘come then’ to which naturally there was no answer and a good thing too I daresay as I am elderly and valetudinarian – it’s no good disguising the fact. Not even reading Challenge will alter that. She is very desirable I agree: very.

But what Vita had of course said was that if Virginia was not who she was, they would be spending not the day together but the night.

Orlando was Virginia’s gift to Julian, her way of being Eve. She intended it as a little book with pictures – about 30,000 words. When Vita heard she was writing it – in October 1927 – she was ‘thrilled and terrified’ and asked Virginia to dedicate it to her ‘victim’. Virginia wanted facts for the book. She asked for ‘some inkling’ of the quarrels Vita had with Violet and ‘for what particular quality’ Violet first chose Vita. ‘I want to see you in the lamplight, in your emeralds’. ‘Is it true you grind your teeth at night? Is it true you love giving pain?’

Short of heaven, Orlando was the ultimate gift to the aristocrat who has everything. It gave Vita Knole, a masculine and female identity, a lifespan of some hundreds of years. Time and gender are unconstrained. Orlando is a woman one century, a man the next. Knole can be Vita’s for she is a man. Violet can be hers for she is a man. Harold – Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine – can be hers for she is a woman.

No scandal attached to Orlando though it talked in its way of androgyny and lesbian love. Virginia Woolf treated the issue of sexual freedom with acceptable obliqueness and irony, acerbic disdain for ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, and with imagination. She sent the finished manuscript to Vita in a leather binding. Vita said it ‘was like a cloak encrusted with jewels and sprinkled with rose petals’. It made her laugh and cry. She read it in a day and was ecstatic, ‘completely dazzled, bewitched, enchanted, under a spell’. It was the ‘loveliest, wisest, richest’ book she had ever read. She said she felt like a wax figure in a shop window on which Virginia had hung ‘a robe stitched with jewels. Darling how could you have hung so splendid a garment on so poor a peg?’

Harold loved it too. ‘It really is Vita,’ he wrote to Virginia on 15 October 1928. ‘She strides magnificent and clumsy through 350 years.’ He said it filled him with ‘amazed excitement’. ‘I am deeply grateful to you, Virginia, for having written something so lovely and so strong.’ Nigel Nicolson called it ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’. But there was something mocking in Virginia