[Vwoolf] Feminize Your Canon: Violet Trefusis

[kathryn simpson]

Thanks, Gill!

K xxx

On Thu, 11 Oct 2018 at 08:09, Gill Lowe via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>
wrote:

> Virginia Woolf features here.
> All good wishes,
> Gill
>
>
>
> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/10/10/feminize-your-canon-violet-trefusis/
>
> Feminize Your Canon: Violet Trefusis
> Emma Garman <https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/author/egarman/>
>
> <http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/last-one-violet-letters.jpg>
>
> Young Violet Trefusis
>
> *Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon
> <https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/06/13/feminize-your-canon-olivia-manning/> explores
> the lives of underrated and underread female authors.*
>
> “O darling, aren’t you glad you aren’t *me*?” wrote Violet Trefusis to
> her pined-for lover, Vita Sackville-West, in the summer of 1921. “It really
> is something to be thankful for.” On the face of it, Trefusis—née
> Keppel—didn’t deserve anyone’s pity. At twenty-seven, she was brilliant,
> beautiful, and privileged beyond compare. Both her grandfathers had titles:
> an earl on one side and a baronet on the other. She had grown up in various
> grand homes with frequent foreign trips, spoke French and Italian fluently,
> and planned to be a novelist. Influenced by Oscar Wilde and Christina
> Rossetti, she was an aesthete whose god was Beauty. “If ever I could make
> others feel the universe of blinding beauty that I almost see at times,”
> she wrote, “I should not have lived in vain.”
>
> The only black mark on Trefusis’s illustrious background was the question
> mark over her father’s identity. As was then customary among the upper
> classes, her parents had an open relationship. All through Trefusis’s
> childhood her mother, Alice Keppel, was the mistress of Edward VII, whom
> the young Violet knew as Kingy. But he wasn’t her father: her birth
> predated the relationship, a fact that didn’t stop Trefusis dropping hints
> about her royal lineage. Nor was Alice’s complaisant husband, the Honorable
> George Keppel, the father. The likeliest contender was William Beckett, a
> banker and Conservative MP whose nose Trefusis apparently had. “Who was my
> father? A faun undoubtedly!” she joked to Sackville-West. “A faun who
> contracted a mésalliance with a witch.”
>
> Though monogamy wasn’t prized by the Edwardian nobility, marriage was
> obligatory. Shortly after her twenty-fifth birthday, in June 1919, Violet
> was all but frog-marched down the aisle. The groom, Denys Trefusis, was a
> tall, blue-eyed war hero who, at least in the eyes of society, was a
> peerlessly desirable match. Violet liked him well enough. But wifedom held
> little allure, especially since she had no sexual interest in men. She had
> two heartfelt wishes: to be with Sackville-West (for whom, she declared, “I
> would commit any crime … sacrifice any other love”) and to earn the world’s
> respect as a woman of letters. Life would provide only a tantalizing and
> inadequate taste of both. The young women’s affair, which began in 1918,
> was a histrionic saga featuring thwarted elopements, sojourns in multiple
> European cities, and floods of delirious love letters. After a few years,
> the determined intervention of their embarrassed husbands and redoubtable
> mothers prevailed. Yet the scandal overshadowed Trefusis’s entire life and
> fixed her in the public imagination, to quote the author Lorna Sage,
> “largely as a picturesque figure of scandal and camp tragicomedy.”
>
> While the Vita-and-Violet soap opera is firmly part of gay history,
> Trefusis’s highly accomplished books, which include seven short novels and
> two memoirs, are forgotten and out of print. In an irony she wouldn’t have
> appreciated, her literary immortality derives not from her own oeuvre but
> from her roles in other people’s fiction. In Virginia Woolf’s *Orlando*
> (1928) Trefusis is the devilish Russian princess Sasha; in Sackville-West’s
> *Challenge* (1923) she is the coquettish jilter Eve. Later, as an
> eccentric society hostess, she inspired Lady Montdore in Nancy Mitford’s *Love
> in a Cold Climate* (1949), a monstrous snob who, among other vanities,
> takes credit for putting India on the map: “Hardly any of one’s friends in
> England had ever heard of India before we went there, you know.”
>
> Trefusis’s fictionalized self-portrait in her razor-sharp 1935 novel, *Broderie
> Anglaise*, weaves a dizzying pattern of intertextual connections with
> *Orlando* and *Challenge*. When Sackville-West began writing *Challenge*,
> her affair with Trefusis was at its height, and they joyfully collaborated
> on the Greek isle–set story. Showing a modicum of discretion,
> Sackville-West cast herself as the male hero. Still, her mother blocked
> publication for fear of the gossip it would spark. The publisher, Collins,
> was paid by Lady Sackville-West to pulp the book, whose dedication was to
> be “with gratitude for much excellent copy to the original of Eve.”
> Trefusis was incensed by the suppression, which she called “absurd,
> disloyal to me, and useless.” Some solace came four years later, when
> *Challenge* was published in the U.S., with a dedication in a Romany
> dialect that, translated, said: “This book is yours, my witch. Read it and
> you will find your tormented soul, changed and free.” A UK edition didn’t
> appear until 1973, after both women were dead.
>
> When Trefusis dreamed up *Broderie Anglaise *(her fourth book, and
> written in French), she had read *Orlando* and knew that Sackville-West,
> Woolf’s then lover, had inspired its gender-shifting, centuries-spanning
> hero/ine. And it would have been obvious that Woolf had mined their
> conversations about Trefusis to draw Sasha. In Trefusis’s witty response of
> a novel, an esteemed novelist named Alexa Quince (a thinly veiled Woolf) is
> embroiled in a tortured dalliance with a handsome young aristocrat, John
> Shorne (Sackville-West in male guise), who longs for his former fiancée,
> Anne (Trefusis). John has “a hereditary face which had come, eternally
> bored, through five centuries,” as well as Sackville-West’s Mediterranean
> ancestry and a tyrannical, overbearing mother. Lady Shorne, who emerges as
> the tale’s true villain, is characterized with words identical to those
> applied, in Trefusis’s memoir *Don’t Look Round*, to Lady Sackville-West:
> a woman of “about fifty,” with a plump face and an “admirable mouth” that
> is also “cruel.”
>
> The engine of *Broderie Anglaise* is John’s unhealthy obsession with
> Anne. Her sexual magnetism and physical charms, including hair that
> “resists repose,” take on mythic proportions. Alexa’s own “straight,
> unenterprising hair,” meanwhile, is so unresistant to repose that the ivory
> hairbrushes on her dressing table “had acquired the sulky expression of
> objects kept for ornament rather than use.” More cerebral than corporeal,
> Alexa has nevertheless been corrupted by the sybaritic environment of
> John’s ancestral home, where she discovers
>
> that sensual pleasures did not reside, as she had supposed, in just one
> time-honoured act. It could exist in everything—in the way someone lit a
> cigarette or peeled an apple. Sensual pleasure is an atmosphere, not an
> incident; a diffused, continuous state; a lens which is added to your
> vision at birth and which never leaves you until you die.
>
> Alexa’s best-selling novel, *Conquest*, features a character based on
> Anne—or rather, as with *Orlando*, based on her ex’s slanted portrayals
> of her. The tense denouement of *Broderie Anglaise* occurs when, at last,
> the two women come face to face. In an exhilarating plot somersault,
> *Conquest*’s secondhand depiction is exposed as inaccurate, all three
> main characters are cast in a surprising new light, and the apparent target
> of Trefusis’s score-settling shifts. The legendary Anne, it turns out, is
> all too human and certainly no great beauty. Alexa feels “as if her
> artistic imagination had been insulted, and she naturally blamed John, the
> source of her delusion. She felt intuitively that he would have given Anne
> an equally flattering portrait of her, out of conceit and vainglory.” We
> are all, in Trefusis’s cynical perspective, mere accessories to one
> another’s self-protective fabrications—one of which, of course, is *Broderie
> Anglaise* itself.
>
> Alexa and Anne’s psychologically charged encounter was modeled on a visit
> Trefusis paid to Woolf in 1932. She wished to submit a novel, *Tandem*,
> to Woolf’s Hogarth Press, and to see in the flesh the woman who had
> captured her Vita’s heart. “Lord what fun!” Woolf wrote to Sackville-West.
> “I quite see now why you were so enamoured—then; she’s a little too full,
> now; overblown rather; but what seduction!” *Tandem*, however, came out
> the following year from William Heinemann: Woolf wasn’t as seduced as all
> that.
>
> <http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/vita-violet-vriginia.jpg>
>
> Vita Sackville-West (left), Violet Trefusis (center), and Virginia Woolf
> (right)
>
> Inevitably, knowing the background of *Broderie Anglaise* adds a layer of
> intrigue. But in its charm and originality the book stands on its own.
> Indeed, it was required to do so upon its original publication in France,
> where readers were innocent of the simmering subtext. As far as anyone can
> tell, neither Woolf nor Sackville-West read the novel. It goes unmentioned
> in their letters and diaries, and the English translation by Barbara Bray
> did not appear until fifty years later, in 1985. By then read as a frank
> riposte to *Orlando*, it was admired for its literary qualities
> regardless. The novel “comes to life not because Trefusis is dealing with a
> real-life affair,” adjudged Nicholas Shakespeare in the *Times *of
> London, “but because she succeeds in showing how passion totters on some
> very flimsy pedestals.” The *Guardian*’s critic compared Trefusis to the
> nineteenth-century sensationalist Ouida, which he considered “no mean
> praise.”
>
> Trefusis’s next book is another mordantly funny take on a doomed romance,
> this time written in English. *Hunt the Slipper* (1937) follows the
> adventures of forty-nine-year-old Nigel Benson, an idle upper-class
> bachelor and ladies’ man. His finely honed seduction techniques are “both
> Latin and pre-war (compliments, flowers, letters)” and generally
> successful, despite his being neither tall, nor slim, nor handsome in the
> English fashion. “Seemliness demanded,” muses the narrator, “that he should
> inherit either his father’s aquiline nose or his mother’s corn-colored
> hair.” But seemliness was outdone by a Bordelaise grandmother’s powerful
> genes, and Nigel has black curls and a snub nose. A collector of pictures,
> he is “feminine” and fluent in French, even though “it looks fishy to speak
> French too well—for a man at least.”
>
> Nigel’s sister and regular companion, Molly, doesn’t share his
> “Frenchness” and is “perpetually amused” by it. In France, she notices, he
> naturally blends in, and even his clothes, which in England always look
> wrong—“either too smart or not smart enough”—seem just right. In this Nigel
> reflects the author: Trefusis wanted to be French from the age of ten, when
> she got a French governess and visited her beloved Paris for the first
> time. “Most girls of my generation were ‘finished’ in Paris,” she writes in *Don’t
> Look Round*. “I was begun there.” The artist Jacques-Émile Blanche
> recalled that, as a child, Trefusis talked “in Paris slang like the urchins
> of Montmartre.”
>
> Nigel’s serene voluptuary existence is disturbed when he falls in love
> with a friend’s young wife, Caroline. His interest is piqued not at their
> first meeting, in an English drawing room, but at a Paris nightclub, where
> he spies her dancing with Melo Gabilla, a “beautifully made” Chilean
> playboy:
>
> She looked dangerous and vigilant, as though she were pursuing some secret
> plan, as though she were bent over some chained missal in forbidden
> archives. Then suddenly she laughed up at her partner and her laugh
> triumphantly routed the purpose of her face, setting it at naught, putting
> you and it in the wrong. One saw then that she was in love with him.
>
> Trefusis’s merciless descriptions of Melo are among the wryest lines in
> this novel brimming with Wildean aphorisms. “Snobbishness, in one of its
> most primitive forms—the form that most readily attacks the
> ingenuous—thrived on him like a fungus … He was as careful as a film star
> about his circumference and only drank in public … He had misgivings about
> his chin, which was apt to become too emphatically blue from two o’clock
> onwards.”
>
> Though it is “chic in his circle” to have an English mistress, Melo is put
> off by Caroline’s lack of guile. She is too sincere, and too English, to
> affect the pose of heartlessness he deems essential to flirtation. Thus
> commences Nigel’s multiphase ordeal. He agonizes until he gets what he
> wants: an affair with Caroline. Then he suffers from the “strain of always
> appearing youthful and full of ‘go.’ ” More torture comes when Caroline
> wants to divorce her husband and marry Nigel, who can’t face upending his
> well-ordered life. In the twisty climax to this ruthless comedy of manners
> and errors, everyone is robbed of happiness. As in *Broderie Anglaise*,
> and in Trefusis’s own life, romantic love is both perilous and chimerical.
>
> <http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/9521225_124172942147.jpg>
>
> Violet Trefusis
>
> When *Hunt the Slipper* was published, Trefusis had been living in France
> for nearly two decades, in exile from polite British society. Her marriage
> to Denys, which was sometimes civil, sometimes contentious, but generally
> empty, had ended with his death in 1929. At only thirty-nine, he had
> succumbed to chronic tuberculosis. During his final months he and Trefusis
> saw little of each other, and as a widow her life didn’t much change. As
> well as a flat in Paris, she had a country house—a medieval tower in the
> village of Saint-Loup, about fifty miles outside the city—where she
> entertained friends such as Jean Cocteau, Francis Poulenc, and Colette. She
> also spent time at her parents’ vast house in Florence, the Villa
> dell’Ombrellino, which she would inherit (and where she would die, at age
> seventy-seven). From L’Ombrellino, writes Trefusis’s biographer Henrietta
> Sharpe, there are “endless photographs in Edwardian house party style, of
> glamourous and long-forgotten socialites, deposed royals about whom now few
> know, and fewer care, visiting Infantas and flowerlike debutantes with
> housemaid names, ‘Cora,’ ‘Peggy.’ ”
>
> Behind all the cosmopolitan hedonism, contentment proved elusive for
> Trefusis. Her status was always murky, her identity uncertain. She was a
> member of the English aristocracy who didn’t know who her real father was;
> she was a widow whose scandal-tainted *mariage* was probably *blanc*—unconsummated;
> she was a lesbian obliged to conduct only discreet liaisons. Her most
> notable affair, after Sackville-West, was with Winnaretta Singer, the
> American sewing-machine heiress and French princess via marriage who had,
> quipped Woolf, “ravished half the virgins in Paris.”
>
> The one identity Trefusis was determined to embrace was writer. “I had
> been put into the world to write novels,” she once said. But her vocation
> brought her scant acclaim. The closest she came to glory was in 1931, when
> her second French novel, *Echo*, sold well and was nominated for the
> prestigious Prix Femina. The elliptical and gemlike tale of a young
> Parisian woman’s visit to her relatives’ Scottish castle, it lost by one
> vote to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s *Vol de nuit*. The appeal of
> Trefusis’s fiction was limited, perhaps, by its unusual blend of frivolity
> and darkness (she wasn’t fond of happy endings) and its satirizing of a
> milieu—the British aristocracy with their country estates, ossified social
> attitudes, and oblivious entitlement—that was more commonly romanticized
> and revered. Her mischievous caricaturing of heterosexual courtship and
> undercurrents of androgyny may not, in the early twentieth century, have
> been as appreciated as they would be today. “Her readers did not know,”
> writes her biographer Diana Souhami, “that she coded into her work her
> experience of lesbian passion, emotional betrayal, self-division, riches as
> rivals and the leitmotiv of lost love.”
>
> In the opinion of Trefusis’s friend and executor, John Phillips, her
> writing has never been taken as seriously as it deserves because of inverse
> snobbery: “If she had been a coal miner’s daughter, people would have said
> she was magnificent.” This may be partly true, although Nancy Mitford, the
> daughter of a baron, is widely regarded as one of the greatest comic
> novelists of the twentieth century. Trefusis, who was jealous of Mitford’s
> success, is not quite on her level. But in the market cornered by
> Mitford—subversive tragicomedies on romance’s wretchedness, against which
> privilege is no buffer—Trefusis merits an enduring share. Instead she has
> fallen into the oblivion she feared when, struggling to finish her first
> novel, she wrote, “Across my life only one word will be written: ‘waste.’
> Waste of love, waste of talent, waste of enterprise.”
>
> *Emma Garman has written about books and culture for *Lapham’s Quarterly
> Roundtable*, *Longreads*, *Newsweek*, *The Daily Beast*, *Salon*, *The Awl
> *, *Words Without Borders*, and other publications. Read her
> previous Feminize Your Canon
> <https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/columns/feminize-your-canon/> columns,
> about Violette Leduc
> <https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/08/09/feminize-your-canon-violette-leduc/#more-128385>, Dorothy
> West
> <https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/07/11/feminize-your-canon-dorothy-west/>,
> Rosario Castellanos
> <https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/09/17/feminize-your-canon-rosario-castellanos/#more-129374>,
> and Olivia Manning
> <https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/06/13/feminize-your-canon-olivia-manning/>.*
>
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