A Book of Secrets Read online

  According to Beckett’s daughter Muriel, there had previously been one or two periods of ‘coldness’ between her father and Eve. But this was a complete cessation of their relationship. The end came in the summer of 1905. Eve had been staying at Ernest’s house, Kirkstall Grange in Leeds, during the spring. She went to see Rodin in May that year and then on 22 August wrote telling him in some distress that ‘I cannot come to Paris perhaps for a long time’. She seems to have gone into a nursing home – and it was possibly then that she suffered from puerperal fever. On 3 September she wrote again, explaining that ‘I have had great difficulties these past months, nearly more than I can sustain but I always have courage. Your friendship has helped me so much and that will be the saddest thing of all if I will not be able to see you. No, that cannot happen.’ She proposed coming again to see him in Paris that November; but it was not until February the following year, when Rodin arrived in London, that they saw each other.

  During all this time there is no record of any communication from Beckett/Grimthorpe to Rodin. But in March 1908, he suddenly offered to call at Meudon with ‘two English women … who would like very much to meet the great man and see some of his creations’. He was pleased, he later wrote, that ‘you have not forgotten me because I treasure your friendship’. Regaining his early enthusiasm, Grimthorpe (as he now signed his letters) called Rodin ‘the greatest man who lives’ and in his last letter to Rodin in October 1911, he offered to bring to his studio ‘a young, beautiful, and rich American who … dances in the Greek style and I find the poses very artistic’. Eve had more difficulty in recovering her spirits. It became increasingly important for her not to lose contact with Rodin. He had written to say that he understood ‘I cannot see you now’. By this he meant not that he would never see her again following her separation from Beckett, but that there would be an interval before their next meeting. ‘Not hearing from you I am a little concerned,’ he wrote two days before Christmas. And she, answering at once, explained that ‘I have been ill and I could not write … I would like to see you very much dear friend … would you write me some words to make me happier.’ What he wrote, linking her features to the sculptures of Michelangelo, the ‘great magician’ whose influence on his work was powerful and unique, explained why she was important to him. ‘I regard you as a woman who resembles in expression as well as in form, one of the “faces” of Michelangelo.’ There was no greater compliment he could have paid her (in a different fashion he was to say something similar to Lady Sackville). ‘If you want me to come for more sittings tell me that and of the thought of your heart,’ Eve wrote early in the summer of 1906. ‘ … I am well but life is difficult and sad always, but it is the same for all the world with moments of joy. I would like to see you; that will be a moment of joy.’ In November the sittings began again. ‘I am so fond of you,’ she wrote from her hotel in Paris. ‘Then it is necessary that the bust be beautiful.’

  There are ten studies of Eve Fairfax in plaster and terracotta at the Musée Rodin recording his progress. Among four translations into marble, Marion J. Hare has identified two different portrayals, one ‘a subjective response to her beauty’ that was finished by the end of 1905, and the other, an ‘idealisation of her features’ based on the sittings in 1906 that was carved in marble in 1907. Several it seems were made out of the same marble block. In one she is wrapped in the marble as if in a womb, in another she arises from it, seen from the side like the outline of a swan – and there is the impression of a struggle to emerge and peacefulness attained. The Austrian poet Stefan Zweig saw how Rodin picked up a spatula and ‘with a masterly stroke on the shoulder smoothed the soft material so that it seemed the skin of a living, breathing woman’.

  In the late summer of 1907, six and a half years after she began sitting for him, Rodin presented Eve with one of these marble busts, choosing the idealised version, with its unfinished aspect, serene and remote – ‘the effigy of a wonderful woman,’ he called it. Eve was overcome with happiness. ‘It seems to me that it cannot be true that you give me my bust!’ she wrote. ‘You have made my heart full of joy … You have given me courage … I thank you with all my heart.’

  It was a memory of their time together and ‘it becomes more beautiful each day’, she assured him a year later. But did this mean she would see him no more? She refused to countenance that – as she had refused before. Her friendship with Rodin, like a living branch from an otherwise dead tree, had grown and prospered, and her sittings for him were like moments of joy strung together in what seemed a life destined to be sad. Theirs was a loving friendship, an amitié amoureuse. It was not a sexual relationship – the marble busts, ‘délicieux, dans sa grâce virginale’ in the words of Frank Harris, were evidence of that. She knew that ‘Rodin liked me very much’ and this gave her confidence. Ruth Butler comments on Eve’s naivety in not realising that Rodin liked all beautiful women. But she does not quote the whole of what Eve said, which is recorded in Frederic V. Grunfeld’s Life of Rodin. ‘Rodin liked me very much, and I say it quite humbly. He found me refreshing because at the time he was very popular and many French women were running after him. I think I appealed to him because, unlike most other women at the time, I was not prepared to jump into bed with him at every occasion … The fact that I treated him rather indifferently made me different from all the others.’

  The words ‘at every occasion’ leave the reader wondering. She protests her indifference too much, too unconvincingly. Her letters are full of anxieties that he will forget her, full of plans to see him again, full of sorrow at leaving him. She begs him to send her his photograph and wishes she were able to write better French so that she could tell him what she feels – ‘but you understand how I love you – the feelings in my heart so poorly expressed.’ She goes to see him in September 1908, and again in March and April 1909. These are not sittings. She invites him to the theatre, tells him how happy she is in his company, goes for a ride with him in a car and apologises for being so silent during the drive ‘mais nous étions trés contents parce que nous étions dans grande sympathie n’est-ce pas?’. And surely they will have further drives together.

  Then, in the summer of 1909, comes another crisis. Eve, now aged thirty-eight and still unmarried, was destitute, unable to pay her debts, bankrupt. Twice she was summoned to court and pleaded that she did not have the money to do so. She had no home (almost all her letters to Rodin come from different addresses) and only one valuable asset: Rodin’s bust. In July that year she wrote to her ‘cher et grand ami’ asking whether he would mind her selling it to an art gallery that was being built in Johannesburg – and, if he agreed, what she should charge for it. Soon afterwards she went to Paris and explained her embarrassing financial circumstances. Rodin advised her to charge the equivalent of £800 if it went to a gallery and £1,000 if she sold it to an individual. He also promised to give her one of his plaster studies – what she called ‘la mère et son petit enfant’ – in memory of their special friendship. In October Eve sold the bust to Lady [Florence] Phillips, the wife of Lionel Phillips, both wealthy patrons in South Africa, for twenty thousand francs (that is approximately £50,000 a hundred years later). Lady Phillips presented it to the gallery and Eve, though she felt ‘tellement seule’ since it had been taken away, was delighted to hear how it was admired – particularly by the children who ‘throw their arms round the neck in high-spirited affection’, she told Rodin.

  ‘Il faut souffrir si on est pauvre,’ Eve had written to Rodin. But what really pleased her was that, when she came to see him that August, he had asked her to sit for him again: and she was happy. He had told the artist Jacques-Emile Blanche that Eve was ‘a Diana and a Satyr in one’. With ‘those planes and bony structure’ peculiar to English women and so useful to sculptors, she was a Diana in the sense of being a goddess of nature (‘you shine always as the virtuous goddesses,’ he had written to her in the summer of 1904). In his imagination she became a virgin goddess who might preside o
ver childbirth (as she now presided over his plaster model of ‘la mère et son petit enfant’). But Eve as a satyr is more difficult to understand – unless it is to be seen in the more sexual light that characterises the studies he made of her during 1909 and then cast in bronze. These are more intimate, taut, realistic than the marble busts. The profile has the enchantment and youthfulness that is consistent with all his studies of her; but the front and three-quarter views reveal a more experienced woman, the image recalling some of the words and phrases that Rodin used in his letters to her: the melancholy, the courage and patience as she waits for nature to provide a cure for her heartache and give her a sense of well-being. Some sense of that well-being arose from their partnership which, as he thought of it, was a partnership with nature: ‘the germ of your beauty and character that you had left in my heart to open out and blossom in its own time’.

  There are letters missing from both sides of their correspondence, but what has survived shows them meeting each other in Paris or London up to September 1914. The previous year Eve had rented a small house in Rodin’s garden at Meudon. During her stay there he gave her a present: ‘ce beau dessin’ which she called ‘un souvenir de mon coeur’ and which ‘je garderai toujours avec amour’. She accidentally left in his house or somewhere in the garden ‘une petite casse pour la poudre’. Perhaps he would bring it to England when he came or she would retrieve it during her next journey to France. By the time war put an end to their meetings, they had been seeing each other for thirteen years. He was to die in 1917 in his late seventies and she, then in her mid-forties, lived on. What began as a professional relationship had grown into something significant for both of them. For Rodin she was a femme inspiratrice who gave rise to some of his best late work. For her this friendship, charged with emotion and deriving from the man she hoped to marry who had suddenly vanished, was unlike any other. It was the most lasting and tender experience of her life.

  What I did not know, as I walked through the empty rooms of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1970, was that Eve Fairfax was still alive and that I might have visited her at the Retreat, a Quaker home for the elderly and destitute, in York. In any event my enquiries were postponed by other books I was beginning to write, books that often took me abroad. But I did not forget Eve Fairfax and the haunting image of Rodin’s sculpture kept its place in my mind. Eventually, in the late 1990s, I recommenced my enquiries, and tried to discover more about her and Ernest Beckett, the equivocal Lord Grimthorpe. Their two families had lived not far from each other in Yorkshire and would invite one another to formal occasions: weddings, births and deaths. But the fortunes of the Fairfaxes were declining in the late nineteenth century as those of the Becketts rose. And it was less difficult, I found, to trace the contours of Ernest Beckett’s life than those of Eve Fairfax because he was a public figure, while her life seemed to have slipped beyond the horizon.

  He had started life under a different name. As Ernest William Denison he was born on 25 November 1856 at Roundhay Lodge in West Yorkshire, a few miles north of Leeds where his parents then lived. On the birth certificate, his father William Beckett Denison gave his occupation as banker (his wife Helen’s occupation was that of being a daughter of the second Baron Feversham). As Ernest grew up, his father’s occupations swelled impressively. He became the Conservative Member of Parliament for North Nottinghamshire and, though somewhat deaf, would (according to the Yorkshire Evening Post) ‘give an ear to any matters which his constituents thought fit to bring before him’. But his heart was not in politics – it was in banking. The son of a banker, he entered the family bank, Beckett’s Bank, in his twenty-first year, becoming senior partner on his father’s death in 1874 and eventually steering his three sons into banking. He was also a magistrate, deputy-lieutenant for the West Riding of Yorkshire, chairman and director of various companies and a stern supporter of church charities. He was the very model of what he wished his sons to be.

  Ernest was brought up in a succession of Yorkshire estates, the most forbidding by name being Meanwood Park at Leeds. His father (known for a time as ‘the Meanwood Man’) also owned a London residence at 138 Piccadilly, where he would stay when attending the House of Commons. In the 1870s he rented Nun Appleton Hall from the Milner family (the home of Eve Fairfax’s mother Evelyn Milner who had spent part of her childhood there). This was a red-brick mansion with a huge Gothic wing set in well-wooded parkland and approached from the village of Bolton Percy along an avenue of trees two miles long. The greater part of this house had been built in the nineteenth century on the site of a twelfth-century Cistercian nunnery, and it incorporated the old north front of General Fairfax’s seventeenth-century home where he had retired, a national hero, after resigning his position in the army. William Beckett Denison seems to have taken this house to raise his social position in the county (one of his daughters would later marry into the Milner family whose old money was running out).

  He sent his eldest son to Eton. Ernest was a natural schoolboy – perhaps a natural schoolboy all his life. He did well in his examinations and, more importantly, shone at games – cricket, rowing, and the arcane intricacies of the Eton Field Game and the Oppidan and Mixed Wall Games. He founded a house debating society and acted in the school’s dramatic society. As a mark of his success he was elected to Pop, the select Eton Society, which permitted him all manner of luxuries such as wearing brightly coloured waistcoats. From Eton he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where much was expected of him. But there he vanishes. This is something of a mystery, as was to be his removal years later from Beckett’s Bank and also his withdrawal from Eve Fairfax. It set a pattern. In each case there were rumours of scandal followed by silence and a spell overseas. He had arrived at Trinity College in May 1875 but did not last there beyond his first academic year. There is a mention of him as a non-rowing member of the 3rd Trinity Boat Club, but no mention of cricket or any other sport. His sole activity, apart from some acting, appears to have been speaking at a none-too-serious debating society called the Magpie and Stump, named after a local brothel. He took no degree. Instead he went abroad.

  On his return to England, under the watchful eye of his father, he settled down into what appears to have been a conventional life, joining the family bank in Leeds, and establishing the foundations for an affluent career. He was to join a number of fashionable London clubs – the Reform and the National Liberal Club, the Marlborough, Brooks’s, St James’s, Turf. He also took up golf and shooting, and began collecting works of art for his new London apartment in Ebury Street. George Moore, author of Conversations in Ebury Street, met him several times and was to describe him in a letter to Lady Cunard as ‘London’s greatest lover’.

  In the spring of 1882 he journeyed through France to Italy. ‘Not at any moment have I experienced such sensations of delight, such an intense enjoyment of existence as I had at Naples,’ he wrote to his mother towards the end of his tour. But ‘to rush about madly guide book in hand from place to place seeing everything and taking in nothing is neither profit nor pleasure’, he protests, ‘though I have felt in duty bound to act as the tourist.’ His eye is constantly being distracted from important buildings by the sight of pretty girls. He had been to the Baths of Caracalla on his travels after leaving Cambridge, but they were still ‘completely new to me’ because on that first visit he was in the company of a ‘Miss P.’ and ‘I was looking into her eyes instead of at the Baths’. He struggles to confine himself to the strait and narrow tourist routes, with their long procession of churches and museums, but he is diverted wherever an eye-catching girl shows herself. At the Hotel Bristol in Rome, for example, he saw ‘a very beautiful and very celebrated woman … Madame Bernadocki [Bernadotti], a Russian [who] used to be a flower girl and was married to a Russian gentleman and speedily became famous in all the capitals of Europe including London where she was much sought after by H.R.H. [the Prince of Wales]. To my eyes she is of a more superb beauty than any of our professional be
auties, and has a fascination in every place and in every movement.’ Turning away, he feels irritated by the multitude of churches confronting him. ‘I never wish to see another in the Italian style. I am tired to death of them, and do not believe there is one, not even St Peter’s, as grand as York Minster.’ He comes out strongly against the ‘corrupt religion of Rome’ and tells his mother that ‘the pictures, the ornaments, the decoration, the candles, the incense and all the paraphernalia of the Roman Catholic religion continually offend one’s eyes and one’s taste … For the life of me, except for the fact they substitute the Virgin for Venus, I can’t see much difference between the ceremonies of the Roman Catholics and those of the Pagans. No, give me the Gothic temples and the pure and beautiful religion of England . .

  But, he tells his mother, ‘I have been rather lucky in the people I have met and the acquaintances I have made in Rome especially of the fair sex, and they have made my time here very pleasant … The Storys (the great sculptor and his family) have been very kind to me, and have asked me to all their parties, and last night to dinner.’ William Wetmore Story was a wealthy expatriate Bostonian-American lawyer turned sculptor whose work had become famous after Nathaniel Hawthorne put his statue of Cleopatra into an Italian novel, The Marble Faun (1860). He lived in an extraordinary, seventeenth-century, yellow-marble building on the slope of the Quirinal in the Palazzo Barberini. With its liveried servants, its chain of almost fifty rooms, many of magnificent and gloomy grandeur (its mysterious upper floors lit by candles), the place had a theatrical atmosphere recalling ancient scenes from papal Rome; while Wetmore himself, tall, handsome, with a grey pointed beard, contrived the archaic look of a Renaissance princeling. Henry James, who visited him several times in the early 1870s, observed that he had ‘rarely seen such a case of prosperous pretension as Story’ and concluded that his ‘cleverness is great, the world’s good nature to him is greater’. Ernest was part of that well-disposed world. He wanted his father to buy some of what Henry James called his ‘endless effigies’. Story clothed what were essentially sensuous nudes in suggestive marble costumes, making them a popular soft pornography among the Victorians (Henry James called his muse a ‘brazen hussy’). He was a sculptor utterly unlike Rodin – ‘almost fatally unsimple’ in James’s words – who led his craftsmen, amid a chaos of female-shaped marble, like a conductor leading his orchestra. Henry James was to describe Story’s career as ‘a beautiful sacrifice to a noble mistake’. But the twenty-five-year-old Ernest concluded rather wistfully that ‘the life of an artist seems a very pleasant one’.