In search of an author
Peter Conrad
Violet Trefusis: Life and Letters Philippe Jullian and John Phillips (Hamish Hamilton £5.75) For Whom the Cloche Tolls Angus Wilson and Philippe Jullian (Penguin 60p)
The artist is too busy making art to bother behaving artistically: that affectation he leaves to the aesthete, the consumer and the collector. The artist has imagination, the aesthete only temperament and taste. He transposes the artist's creative rage into the Wilful staging of emotional 'scenes', and the artist's formal skill into finicky precision about dress, decor, table-manners and brand-names. Two such jewelled parasites are Violet Trefusis and Maisie Blade. One existed: Violet was the daughter of Edward VII's mistress, the lover of Vita SackvilleWest, and a celebrated hostess. The other is the invention of Angus Wilson's brilliant Pastiche: the daughter of a toothpaste king, a frenetic party-goer and dispenser of welfare to senescent gigolos, mockingly given walk-on parts in the literature of the twenties—an affluent chinchilla woman in Katherine Mansfield, a fertile monster in Aldous Huxley, a figure of 'curiously coarse happiness' in Virginia Woolf. But this is a quibbling difference: Violet, who spent her life transforming herself into a 'character', armouring herself with eccentric imposture, Is in the end as fictitious as Maisie.
Besides, the ladies have Philippe Jullian in. common. He has written his friend Violet's biography, while another of her courtiers, John Phillips, has made a selection from her correspondence with Vita; he illustrates Angus Wilson's necrological scrapbook For Whom the Cloche Thils, in which Maisie's relatives sourly memorialise her. The frilly emaciation of hls drawings, lean but fussily decorative, exactly catches the confusion of sexual categories as Maisie penitentially slims to fit Into the boyish costumes of 1923, or her Willowy son is at once seduced and converted. by a priest in a gondola. Mr Jullian's Spindly, tentacular style misled him in his illustrations to A la Recherche du Temps Perdu: Proust's characters are all conjectural, ambiguous interior, with no surface to be. drawn, and Mr Jullian made them look Ilk. e the prancing exquisites of Firbank. But Ins gracefully frantic sketches are perfect for Angus Wilson's mannequins.
his other capacity, Mr Jullian is less ylolet's biographer than a portraitist obliging his subject by painting her notion of herself. like Reynolds dressing up Mrs Siddons s the tragic muse. Violet needed to validate ner emotions by fictionalising them. During
their affair, she and Vita collaborated on a novel about it. Her manner of dealing with people was to imprison them in impersonations. Her husband Denys was Loge, Wagner's flame-like ironist, though when he fled from her to Russia she recast him as the picaresque Lohengrin. One of her Italian lovers was the magician Klingsor, and she his succubus Kundry. Valhalla became a wardrobe of costumed personae: Violet could leave living to her servants and occupy herself with performance. Mr Jullian remarks that she 'used her rooms as sets against which she could act out the luxurious scenarios of an imagination overtaken . .. by a veritable mythomania'. Like a theatrical entrepreneur, he is forever suggesting new fictional assumptions for her: when she elopes with Vita, he treats them as characters from Firbank ; quarrelling at the Paris Ritz, they re-emerge as vixenish lesbians from Proust.
But Mr Jullian is more than a tame portraitist or couturier, designing new fancydress for Violet. He sees that it was a miserable insufficiency which led her to trust to fictions as her way of holding the indifferent, brutal Vita: unable to win her affection, she could at least demand from her the aesthetic virtue of consistency by writing a part for her to play. Violet's fictions were a sympathetic magic, hoping to amend the frustration of human relationships which, one of her letters laments, must always be 'incomplete and unsatisfying'. As a hostess she exercised a similar ineffectual magic. Her parties were a protest against loneliness (those who reject offers of love will still accept invitations to dinner) and against time. Mr Jullian comments that 'she invited her friends to lunch almost daily, as though entertaining again might somehow prolong her life from day to day'. He also notices the shaming degeneration of fictions which marked the collapse of the affair with Vita. Their impersonations, like those of Milton's Satan, became ever shabbier and nastier. Enmeshed in their own lies, they 'abandoned the dignified robes of Shakespeare for the deshabille of Feydeau'. Pursued through France by their anguished husbands, who had hired a plane for the chase, Violet and Vita were reduced to staging their dramas of remorse and recrimination in railway waiting-rooms and buffets, like impoverished actors on tour.
Self-indulgence sags into self-parody. The decline ought to surprise no one: the irony of Violet's longing for 'the completely and utterly Beautiful' is that there is no more vulgar creature than the aesthete. Wilde's seedy final incarnation as Sebastian Melmoth, James's rapacious prurience, the en
vious rudeness of Virginia Woolf, all declare it. Sensitive overcultivation does not refine but coarsens. Exquisite taste like Violet's is the perfection of greed. For all her aristocratic pretension, she was as lush and gross a creature as Angus Wilson's Maisie, whom she would certainly have banned from her parties. Mr Jullian even catches her bribing a French minister, with gruesome crassness, in the hope of receiving a state honour.
Like Maisie, she trusts to manners to redeem morals: the bribe offered was a rococo silver cafetiere. Violet's passage from amoralism to the grand manner of the hostess and honour-seeker is the most interesting aspect of her psychological history. John Phillips remarks on the paradox of her conquest of 'the society which she had thought to reject'. The vestal virgin revering beauty ages into a tawdry worldling. The rebel turns into a snob. Mr Phillips explains the change by suggesting that Violet was destroyed by her passion for Vita, and forced into a reincarnation; but the transitions are natural enough. An early letter to Vita declares that 'the only real joy resides in things, not people': Violet the hostess completed the aesthete's work by turning people into decorative things. The compulsive hostess is the least sociable of people, as the libertine is the least sensuous, because they mortify natural functions into chilly art. The libertine's conquests are sacrifices to his ego, not his senses; Violet's parties were ceremonies of possession, at which guests were acces
sories necessary to show off the porcelain, the silver-gilt and the cut crystal. Don Giovanni's sexual history takes the aesthetic form of a catalogue of acquisitions; so did Violet's social history, in her guest-book at Saint Loup. The rebel and the snob are also secretly allied. Both are misanthropes, differing only in their principles of exclusion. Violet first longed to abandon the world in Vita's company, and their joint novel is set on a remote island; later she re-constituted that island in her villas outside Paris and Florence, and for the lost Vita substituted a select company of diplomats, politicians, royalties and poetasters.
Violet gave up sex, it might be said, for gossip. She was more aroused, Mr Jullian discloses, by intimate speculation about others than by her own affairs. Her most impassioned letters to Vita are self-regarding and self-analytical. She is preoccupied with what the erotic obsession has done to her, and quite soon learns to convert this into the chaste safety of self-love: 'the only really happy people are the egotists—who give nothing and receive nothing, or the egotists in art, who live in and for art alone'. Gossip is the egotist's ugly version of altruism, and it was as close to love as Violet allowed herself to approach. Scandalmongering and meddlesome match-making at least confess a need for other people: but, characteristically, as objects, to be moved about with none of the troublesome reciprocity entailed by human relationship.
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