A Book of Secrets Read online

  To Tiziana, who introduced me to the novels of Violet Trefusis,

  and to Catherine, who helped me to understand

  Ernest Beckett and Eve Fairfax

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Preface - The World Turned Upside Down

  PART I

  1 - The Importance of Being Ernest and Some Women of No Importance

  2 - Ernest Goes Abroad

  3 - All About Eve

  4 - With Catherine at Cimbrone

  PART II

  5 - Excitements, Earthquakes and Elopements

  6 - Women in Love

  7 - Ultraviolet

  8 - Emergency Exits

  9 - Looking Round

  Epilogue - Time Regained

  Acknowledgements

  Illustrations

  Additional Praise for A Book of Secrets

  ALSO BY MICHAEL HOLROYD

  About the Author

  Afterword - A History of the Books

  Postscript

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  Preface

  The World Turned Upside Down

  High above the Gulf of Salerno, some fifty miles south of Naples, is the medieval town of Ravello. Higher still and at the end of two meandering roads from Ravello, you find yourself in a place of fantasy that seems to float in the sky: a miraculous palazzo, now called the Villa Cimbrone, which answers the need for make-believe in all our lives.

  Upon Cimbrone’s natural and spectacular beauty have been imposed some strange excrescences of human nature that amuse or sometimes unsettle visitors. For a hundred years the place has offered people solace, escapism, opportunities, illusions. Though the legends which fill the atmosphere suggest that many famous people were drawn there, this is something of a mirage. Instead there are forgotten names with lost identities that still haunt the gardens and terraces. Not all the characters in this book came to Cimbrone: one died prematurely before her husband, in flight from his British creditors, travelled abroad and acquired it; another, who became engaged to this widower but for mysterious reasons did not marry him, never reached Cimbrone and, living to a great age, was left homeless. For them, perhaps, it represents the promise of happiness interrupted or denied.

  For the two dedicatees of this book, with both of whom I was at Cimbrone, it has had an equally powerful significance. It intensified an early quest for love in one, but left her with a sense of incompleteness, a lack of validity. The other dedicatee used it as a shrine where she could celebrate the memory of a dead woman whom she loved but had never met.

  Like the setting for a fable or fairy tale, it appears to give people what they wish – or what they believe they wish. These answered wishes are often hedged around with irony. The English aristocrat, who sought to create there a final dreamlike chapter to his life, did not pass his last year at Cimbrone but was to have his ashes interred beneath the stone floor of its temple. His illegitimate daughter, visiting Cimbrone only once to be briefly with the girl she loved, would write a novel laying bare the disastrous lure of Italian culture upon uprooted expatriates such as her never-to-be-mentioned father.

  The best-known characters in this book, those who have places in volumes of political, art and literary history – Lord Randolph Churchill, Auguste Rodin, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster – along with bankers and Members of Parliament during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (all of them men) occupy significant minor roles in this study of ‘lesser lives’ (all women). These women (a mistress of both Lord Grimthorpe and the Prince of Wales, Lord Grimthorpe’s abandoned fiancée who became one of Rodin’s favourite sitters, a rich young American girl who married into the Grimthorpe family and died giving birth to a male heir, and the alleged illegitimate daughters of the Grimthorpes) are among my principal characters. Unlike the men, they have no settled professions and their lives are fluid and vulnerable. They exist on the fringes of the British aristocracy; and yet, for all their privileged status, they were not wholly protected from the hardship and tragedy that, in other classes and a more familiar form, were to fuel the feminist movement.

  Thematically this is the third and final volume in a series that began with Basil Street Blues – a memoir in which I presented my years at school, in the army (as a National Serviceman) and as an articled clerk who never completed his articles. The book charted my erratic course towards becoming a biographer. If no one else employed me, I eventually decided, I would have to employ myself. The second volume, Mosaic, turned out to be an experiment in two forms of retrieval, exercising the powers of research and of memory, the one stimulating the other, as I attempted to recover and recreate the stories of my grandfather’s wayward mistress and an intense early love affair of my own. These two books mix biography with autobiography as I seek invisibility behind the subjects I am trying to bring alive on the page. They are the confessions of an elusive biographer.

  I made two journeys to the Villa Cimbrone. On the first, not finding what I wanted, the vision I had for a book I wished to write faded. On the second journey, seven years later, I rediscovered it in a different form. This is the book it turned out to be – the seeds of which had been planted unknowingly in me one evening a long time ago in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

  PART I

  1

  The Importance of Being Ernest and Some Women of No Importance

  In or about 1970 I was doing some research on Gabriel Enthoven whose passion for all things theatrical had led to the creation of the Theatre Museum in London. In those early days the museum was forever on the move. For some time it was lodged at Leighton House before settling uneasily for a period into the Victoria and Albert Museum where I was working. The archive was presided over by Alexander Schouvaloff, a legendary aristocratic figure with gleaming shoes, thick black hair brushed across his forehead and dark eyes that narrowed dramatically whenever someone spoke to him. It was rumoured that he had been recruited by Roy Strong who had then fallen out with him to such a degree that, in the Pushkin manner, Schouvaloff felt obliged to challenge him to a duel. The people I met were the deputy director Jennifer Aylmer, a grey-haired woman with bright pink lipstick who came from a well-known theatre family; and her assistant, a brilliant-looking young girl who quite dazzled me. I was still working there at closing time – after which we went out for a drink. My new friend often worked late and I would wait for her after the public had left the museum, wandering through the empty galleries and halls. It was during these evening promenades that I first saw Rodin’s bust of Eve Fairfax.

  It was a bronze bust cast in the early years of the twentieth century when she was in her mid-to-late thirties. Her face fascinated me. It appeared to change subtly depending on the angle and the distance from which I looked at it. Sometimes she appeared serene, sometimes she seemed clothed in a lingering air of melancholy and her sorrowful countenance gained a strange authority. Before long the sculpture began to exert a hypnotic effect on me and I started to make enquiries about Auguste Rodin and Eve Fairfax.

  On 24 February 1905 Rodin dined in London with a new benefactor Ernest Beckett (shortly to emerge, like a butterfly from its chrysalis, as the second Lord Grimthorpe). Beckett was introducing him to several members of the English aristocracy and had been involved in raising a subscription to purchase a major sculpture, his bronze Saint Jean-Baptiste prêchant, for the nation. This purchase was celebrated by a banquet at the Café Royal which marked, in the words of Rodin’s biographer Ruth Butler, ‘Rodin’s entrance into English Society’.

  A fortnight before their dinner, Beckett had written to Rodin with an enthusiasm bordering on incoherence, to say how much he was lookin
g forward to seeing ‘the bust of Miss Fairfax and I know that you work to make it a chef d’oeuvre and have heard it said that you have succeeded … I believe that your talent is yet more grand than the great appreciation that it has recognised at last in all the world. He had commissioned the bust of Eve Fairfax in 1901 to be, it was understood, a wedding present for her – he was a widower, his young American wife having died ten years previously, after giving birth to their son. He regretted that he could not afford the twenty-two thousand francs Rodin had asked and offered ten thousand francs or a delay of a year or two instead. It seems that Rodin preferred the delay. Meanwhile, Beckett ordered a small version of Rodin’s The Thinker and was encouraging others to contribute money to pay for his monument to Whistler in the allegorical form of a Winged Victory to be placed on Chelsea Embankment.

  Visiting his studio in February 1901, Ernest Beckett had described Rodin as ‘a man rather below middle height, with incisive gray blue eyes, a broad curving, downward-drooping nose, a shaggy beard, gray, with gleams of red in it’. Rodin had explained to him ‘in vigorous picturesque language the sense and meaning of his great creations’. And Beckett felt himself to be ‘in the presence of a man, who is not only an artist of supreme genius, but who is a poet and a philosopher as well’. What most appealed to him was the power of his sculpture – what he described as its ‘full-blooded prodigal abounding force’. He called Rodin ‘the Wagner of sculpture … with new capabilities and larger powers’. In March he had sent a laudatory article to Rodin who immediately recognised a new patron.

  The article revealed Ernest Beckett as a man of great enthusiasms. More precisely he was a man of swiftly changing enthusiasms, a dilettante, philanderer, gambler and opportunist. He changed his name, his career, his interests and his mistresses quite regularly and on seeing Rodin’s work, which made the work of other artists seem ‘bound by the small, stiff, formal ideas’ of the past, he sold his collection of old decorative French objets d’art and sixteenth-century pictures, and commissioned Rodin to execute a portrait bust of Eve Fairfax. She would be travelling to Paris, accompanied by a chaperone, to study the French language and would visit Rodin’s studio carrying Beckett’s letter of introduction. What he wanted was ‘the head, the neck and the upper part of the shoulders, as you have done of the young French woman that so pleased me. I would also like this bust to have a pedestal from that same segment of marble.’ Rodin’s busts of men were usually done in bronze, those of women in marble – though he often worked initially with clay.

  The sittings, which stopped and started and went on in this intermittent fashion for over eight years, stopped almost before they had started when her chaperone was obliged to travel back to England and Eve, who as a prospective bride could not remain unaccompanied in Paris, also had to return. She eventually found other companions to escort her to Paris and the work recommenced in April. Beckett wrote to Rodin somewhat optimistically in the second week of May that he would be ‘very happy to see the bust of Miss Fairfax … [who] tells me that she will go to Paris in June in order to give you the final sittings’.

  From March 1901 until September 1914 one hundred and sixteen letters of Eve’s to Rodin survive and twenty-five from him to her. It was ‘an exceptional long period’, noted Rodin’s secretary René Cheruy, ‘ … there was a love story at the bottom of this.’ Eve was in her late twenties at the beginning of the sittings. Rodin initially treated the portrait of Eve as a commission from his new patron, and the correspondence between the sculptor and his sitter was formal. But gradually, as the Rodin scholar Marion J. Hare observes, their letters ‘become more personal and even intimate’. To justify spending so much time in Paris and learn some French, Eve attended a Dieu Donné school for young ladies.

  Eve writes in simple French, childlike and hesitant, her limitations of vocabulary and faltering syntax seeming to hint at tentative emotions. Her letters give a sense of possibilities just out of reach, half-remembered dreams – none of which she can quite catch and make her own. Rodin, too, is restricted in what he writes – yet occasionally, for a moment, breaking free from these restrictions. It is a polite explorative conversation from a distant age, with delicate implications: oblique and unsophisticated. But where will it lead?

  E.F.: I always think of you. Would you write to me?

  R.: I think also that you will come one of these days and I will put myself completely at your service.

  E.F.: I have been ill and the doctor tells me that I must take the electric baths … I am so sad that I cannot come at present but it is not my fault.

  R.: I am also sad to know you are ill. Alas my very dear model, you have great spirit and your body suffers from that … I await you at the end of July … and will be happy to greet you and to finish your beautiful and melancholy portrait.

  E.F.: Your letter made me so much better and gave me courage … it is the heart that makes the body suffer. Your great sympathy helped me a great deal … I am always sad to say good-bye to you … I think about you often … I would like so much to be again in your studio … you stimulate my heart.

  An undated letter to Eve from a woman friend suggests that she may have had puerperal fever. From this suggestion a rumour arose that her engagement to Ernest had come as the result of her pregnancy, but that she suffered a miscarriage (an alternative interpretation is that this happened later and signalled the end of their relationship). There is no certainty of this and little evidence in her correspondence.

  E.F.: I had wished to write something but could not find the French words to express all that I wished to say, thus the silence is always eloquent … I am certain that the bust will be a chef d’oeuvre and I wish so much to see it again and you also grand maître.

  R.: Your letter full of kindly feelings towards me restores me. Yes, I am tired of my life … Give me some letters when the inspiration takes hold of you. Your French is very good for me for it shows pluck and spirit.

  E.F.: Why are you sad; that causes me much pain.

  R.: Your generous cast of mind and of body, your genuine grandeur, has always touched me … Also I am so happy to tell you now that your bust will be worthy of you … After your departure my memories vigorously coalesced and in a moment of good fortune I succeeded … Voilà the bust.

  This exchange took place during 1903 and Rodin’s last letter was written on 24 December 1903. In her reply four days later, Eve does not mention the sculpture itself. The question that troubles her is, if the bust is indeed successfully completed, are the sittings completed too? And will she see Rodin again? She tells him that her heart is ‘full of affection’ and it makes her unhappy to think that ‘I cannot see you more often’. Nevertheless she asks him to write ‘me a line and tell me that you are well and that I am not forgotten’.

  Eve lived very intensely in Rodin’s imagination and they were to continue writing to each other and seeing each other at irregular intervals until the war. They gave each other energy. Sometimes when Rodin came to England they would meet, initially with Ernest Beckett and then on their own. Back in Paris Rodin continued working on Eve’s portrait, trying to define her beauty. ‘I always wait for you … I always hope for your visit,’ he wrote in the summer of 1904. ‘You are the sun and the sky in the supernatural order … Even when you do not speak your gestures, your restrained expression and desirable movements are of an expressiveness that touches the soul … I am always with you, through your bust which is not yet made as marble.’

  He had finished the clay model early in 1904 and this was gradually translated into marble during 1905. A second group of sittings began in May 1905. After Eve returned to England, Rodin wrote that he was continuing to work on the bust and ‘I have been thus with you without you knowing it’.

  The previous month, Ernest Beckett’s childless uncle, a vituperative ecclesiastical lawyer, horologist, amateur architect and mechanical inventor, died: as a result of which Ernest was raised to the peerage and became the second Lord Grimthorpe. His
uncle had been a marvellously rich eccentric, a scholar of clocks, locks and bells (best known for his design of Big Ben) and a champion of ‘astronomy without mathematics’. His last urgent words, addressed to his wife, were reported as being ‘We are low on marmalade’. Ernest must have expected to come into an invigorating fortune. But his uncle’s many controversies continued to be fought out after his death and, being enshrined in over twenty codicils to his Will, delayed probate for two years. Ernest, who had been in America at the beginning of the year, travelled to Italy for the spring and did not attend his uncle’s funeral (a little later, when asked if he intended to write his uncle’s biography, he replied from the Hotel Continental at Biarritz that he ‘had other more congenial work to do’). It was rumoured that after the death of his father in 1890 and now the death of his uncle fifteen years later, he was immensely rich – some mentioned the sum of £7 million. The scale of his expenditure seemed to verify this. He was travelling the world, he owned houses in Yorkshire, Surrey and London and, as Lady Sackville observed in her diary on 24 February 1905, had ‘done up his new house [80 Portland Place] in the Renaissance style, the mania that everyone has got in Paris now’. Unfortunately his father had left a mere £450,000 and, since he had not only a wife, but three sons, three surviving daughters and several grandchildren, his Will teemed with legacies, annuities and bequests. Ernest would have been fortunate to come into as much as £50,000. In addition to his salary as a banker this amount might have been enough for many young men, but Ernest had expensive and ever-changing tastes, as well as an instinct for losing money. He invested in Russian forestry in 1905, the year of the workers’ strikes, the abortive uprising and October Manifesto; and he speculated in property in San Francisco in 1906, the year of the earthquake. He was a financial liability. In 1905, the same year in which he had become Lord Grimthorpe, his two brothers decided to remove him as senior partner in the family bank. ‘I hate my title!’ he said later. ‘It has brought me nothing but ill-luck. I wish I could be Ernest Beckett again.’ It was soon after inheriting the title Lord Grimthorpe that he seems to have finally walked away from the agreement to pay Rodin for the bust of Eve Fairfax – and walked away from his promise to marry her. Instead he bought the Villa Cimbrone at Ravello.