Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter by Diana Souhami (recommended books to read TXT) 📕

of V’s poems is to appear in print. Also she is doing what I think to be an extremely good portrait of me. Not that these two comparatively small achievements probably mean much in themselves, but what I greatly hope is that she will eventually find what she wants to do & then pursue it to the uttermost. I should like to see one really absorbing interest develop itself for her – I should be equally sorry to see whatever talent she has dissipated over a wide variety of subjects without any real devotion to one. If you agree about this please try & influence her in that direction, though perhaps there is no need to hurry her to any conclusion yet.

Meanwhile I am just reading your book. I would not presume to criticise even after finishing it, much less now – I will only say that it will be quickly read – and carefully.

    Yours

            Denys

I will not mention your letter to V, so you must not mention this!

Whatever he felt, he was not going to show it. Even before the war, in a letter to his sister in 1909, he described himself as ‘rigidly suppressed’. He said this was because of the ‘sausage machine’ public school system. A true Englishman, he said, after school was strong, healthy, honourable ‘but he has had all his personality squashed out of him’.

Denys avoided analysis of motive or mood, took his fiancée to the Ballets Russes, to the opera, escorted her at dinner parties, planned trips to Venice and Spain, behaved as a gentleman, however capricious her affections. But he floundered when she flailed at the institution of marriage and said it ‘ought to be confined to temperamental old maids, weary prostitutes and royalties!’ He told her to make up her mind whether she wanted to be an artist or to marry and bring up a family, ‘But whatever you do, don’t attempt to run both!’

Mrs Keppel was more emphatic. There were frequent rows and Violet felt trapped and stifled in her mother’s house. When she told her of the poem to which Denys referred, published in Country Life, Mrs Keppel said:

‘Really, how nice. How much are they paying you for it?’ And later in the day she remarked: ‘Of course it’s no use writing poetry unless you get paid for it.’… The point of view!… I nearly said: ‘It’s not possible that you should be my mother. I won’t, I can’t believe that we are any relations!

Violet said she wanted to burn to the ground St George’s Church in Hanover Square where her wedding was to be held. It was delayed for a fortnight – from 2 to 16 June – ostensibly because so many people would be at the races. ‘I don’t think any objection was made by Mrs K at the change of date,’ Pat Dansey wrote to Vita. ‘It was changed for purely convenience sake.’ (She would, she added, be ‘truly thankful’ when Vita came and sorted matters out.) Violet worked at the escape plan with Vita, whose equivocation took her to her wits’ end.

At the end of May she told Denys Vita meant more to her than anyone and that she would die if she ceased to love her. He said he felt sorry for her. When she threatened to back out of the wedding he feared the wrath of Mrs Keppel and the ‘appalling scandal’ that would follow. He promised when they were married she could come and go as she pleased, he would be content if she spent three months of the year with him and would try to be her ‘safe and loyal friend’. Pat Dansey, at Violet’s request, talked to him. He told her, too, that he would keep to the pact of protective friend, with no sex.

Like Harold he sought to shield his temperamental wayward woman. Perhaps he thought time and patience would change her. But Harold and Vita had built a life and had much to preserve. Denys had nothing with Violet but bright hopes and fragile promises. As these began to tarnish and break, he brought into play qualities that made him a good soldier and a good Englishman: courage, trustworthiness, self-sacrifice. ‘O Mitya,’ Violet wrote to Vita:

We are making a sort of brawling tavern out of what was once a Greek temple. Soon it will be ruined … There are no words strong enough for what has happened. I have ruined everything in my life … The only really effective thing would be for us to transplant our temple stone by stone and set it down in some new site … We can’t, Oh we can’t go on as at present. It makes me sick with disgust and self-loathing.

She needed a kind of help that was not on offer: disinterested advice and the chance to get away. She was learning hard lessons about her sort of love: society would not condone it, there was no context for it, it led to social ostracism, which led to self-dislike. Had her temperament allowed, she might have copied her mother, Vita, the King and Harold, and had sex with her lover while her spouse was out. But she had spoken the truth when she said that it was impossible for her to care for more than one person at a time. ‘When I say care, I mean it is impossible for me to be even fond of anyone but you or merely superficially interested.’ She was in too deep a mess to dissemble well.

On 6 May she had the worst of rows with her mother:

I nearly struck her she was so terribly unkind. But all the time I thought in three days I shall have Mitya and it didn’t seem to matter so much.

On 9 May she went with Pat Dansey to look at a house in the country for herself and Denys to live in when married. ‘I can’t, can’t have one with anyone but you,’ she wrote to Vita. In the train she felt faint