Waving not shrinking
Harold Acton
VIOLET TO VITA: THE LETTERS OF VIOLET TREFUSIS TO VITA SACKVILLE-WEST edited by Mitchell A. Leaska and John Phillips Methuen, £16.99, pp. 303 Burn this! Promise,' Violet Trefusis implored her sweetheart Vita Sackville- West. And again, years later: 'please des- troy all my letters.' Yet here they are printed in a book for the curious public to gloat over. The original 'holograph sheets, a few written in ink but most of them in pencil, and all in varying degrees of legibil- ity' were deposited in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and Professor Mitchell A. Leaska of New York University was granted sabbatical leave of absence to complete his work on this volume. Profes- sor Leaska's introduction summarizes the complicated story so clearly that the actual letters come as an exhausting anti-climax. Those not written in French are inter- spersed with Italian, German and French phrases and Spanish Romany dialect, for Violet was a versatile linguist as well as a brilliant mimic.
Would Violet have resented their pub- lication in this more tolerant age? I fancy not, for she always craved attention. Memories of her distinguished parents, Colonel and Mrs George Keppel, haunted me while I perused the hectic pages: how horrified they would have been!
A pretty, precocious child, cosseted by her glamorous mother, Violet's adolesc- ence was indefinitely prolonged. A girlish 'crush' developed into a lifelong passion. The personality of her beloved was pre- dominantly masculine and remained so even after her marriage to Harold Nicol- son. Wedlock was regarded as the social obligation of every girl of her class but in Violet's case this proved indeed a padlock. Vita's marriage to Harold Nicolson turned out well in spite of divagations, but Violet came to detest the gallant Denys Trefusis. Both ladies suffered from overbearing mothers whom they glorified.
Eventually, like her parents, Violet set- tled in Florence, where I often met her. In a spacious villa on the hill of Bellosguardo she bombinated in her aura of luxurious fantasy. Considering her constant animad- version on the city this seems perverse. To her confidant Pat Dansey she wrote from Florence in 1921:
This is a pestilential place, smug little hills dotted over with villas, and museums and churches that have been so much photo- graphed and written about that one is fed up to the eyes with them long before one sets foot inside. It amuses me that I have been brought here to be 'reformed'. The Italian Society here is the most corrupt I have ever run across, except perhaps Rome. They are mercenary, vicious, lewd, stupid. If one lived here long enough, I tremble to think what one would become. So much for the Italian set. The foreign set — Russian, Greek, French, American, English — is worse.
Yet after her mother's death she gravitated towards Florence till her melancholy de- mise in 1972.
According to the prevalent doggerel, 'Violet Trefusis/ Never refuses/ But often confuses.' As Professor Leaska puts it, she lived 'increasingly in an imaginary world of her own making.' For me that was her principal charm. She was a Ronald Firbank character, not to be taken too seriously. 'The frothy world of make-believe' can be very entertaining in spite of the heartache that oozes from these unburnt letters.
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