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To Tiziana who introduced me to the novels of Violet Trefusis. And to Catherine who helped me to understand Ernest Beckett and Eve Fairfax.
Cover
Welcome Page
Dedication
Contents
Epigraph
List of Illustrations
Preface: The World Turned Upside Down
Part I
Chapter 1: The Importance of Being Ernest and Some Women of No Importance
Chapter 2: Ernest Goes Abroad
Chapter 3: All About Eve
Chapter 4: With Catherine at Cimbrone
Part II
Chapter 5: Excitements, Earthquakes and Elopements
Chapter 6: Women in Love
Chapter 7: Ultraviolet
Chapter 8: Emergency Exits
Chapter 9: Looking Round
Epilogue: Time Regained
Afterword: A History of the Books
Preview
Family Trees
Select Bibliography
Plates
Acknowledgements
About A Book of Secrets
Reviews
About Michael Holroyd
Michael Holroyd’s Memoirs
Biographies by Michael Holroyd
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
‘September 1, 1939’
W. H. Auden
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, – I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! – and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
XLIII, Sonnets from the Portuguese Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1 Auguste Rodin’s bronze bust of Eve Fairfax, c.1909 (courtesy of V&A Images).
2 Eve Fairfax in her late twenties and late nineties; Luie Beckett with her daughters, c.1890, painted by Edward Hughes (courtesy of Lady Feversham); Ernest Beckett at the Villa Cimbrone, c.1910 (courtesy of Tiziana Masucci).
3 The frontispiece from Eve’s Book; Swinburne’s ‘Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)’ copied out by Lord Grimthorpe, 1915.
4 The Villa Cimbrone around 1910; and the Villa Cimbrone today (both courtesy of Tiziana Masucci).
5 Michael Holroyd and Catherine Till at the Villa Cimbrone in 2000; Tiziana Masucci in London in 2008.
6 Violet Trefusis on 16 June 1919, taken on her wedding day (courtesy of NPG Images).
7 Jacket image of the first edition of Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicolson, 1973; Philippe Jullian’s jacket of Pirates at Play by Violet Trefusis, published in 1950 (courtesy of Tiziana Masucci).
8 Poem written jointly by Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West on a Monte Carlo hotel telegram form, 1918–19 (courtesy of the National Trust).
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.
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 looking 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.
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 over 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 the 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 beauties, 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’.
The Storys were leaders of an American colony in Rome and it was at one of their musical evenings the following year (1883) that Ernest met the young American girl he was to marry.
Lucy Tracy Lee, whom everyone called Luie, had passed much of her childhood and adolescence at Ondeora, the family farmhouse in Highland Falls, a large estate near the American military academy, West Point, in upstate New York. These early years were radiantly happy. There were parties and picnics and tennis and dances (at which it didn’t matter if you fell over) and hilarious amateur theatricals and, above all, riding her beloved pony all over the country. But when she was aged thirteen her father suddenly died and, to help Luie overcome her grief, her cousin, the financier Pierpont Morgan, took her away for a six-week tour of England and France with his daughter Louisa (Luie’s closest friend). They had embarked on the White Star Liner Britannic shortly before Easter 1879 and passed much of their time shopping in London and Paris. ‘Cousin Pierpont’, Luie decided, ‘is certainly the dearest, kindest man in this whole world.’
She was a naturally happy young girl, lively and good-hearted, and she became ‘an almost legendary figure of perfection to our generation’, one of her younger cousins remembered. ‘All the little events of her life were kept polished as precious relics.’ She was an only child, perhaps rather spoilt by her mother, sometimes a little lonely and increasingly bewildered by the prospect of life before her. As she grew up, a spirit of discontent began to rise within her. So many things that had pleased her just a year or two before now bored her in this ‘quiet stupid life at West Point’. In the autumn of 1881, at the age of seventeen, she began keeping a journal to record ‘how the world goes with me, so that these pages may bring back some of the pleasant times as well as the bitter’. She remembered with pleasure and an aftertaste of bitterness her journey to England: ‘How much better and more easily one can live in Europe than… in this horrid little out of the way place.’ She was surprised to learn that some of the Highland Falls community thought her affected – and then she decided to take this as a compliment. ‘I was, I know myself, very, very English,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘and did not care, or was rather pleased.’ She found this stiff English manner useful when meeting people she disliked. It concealed her vulnerability.
Luie was not what connoisseurs like Ernest would have rated a professional beauty. ‘I do not think I have the first element of a belle,’ she noted in her journal. Yet people were strongly attracted to her. Her vitality was especially winning. She was tall and athletically built, had blue eyes and long horizontal eyebrows that gave the upper part of her face a mature look beyond her years. ‘They say I am old enough to be 21,’ she wrote while still seventeen, ‘and I certainly feel old enough to be any age that people choose to call me.’ Her mouth was like a baby’s, but the line to her chin gave an impression of determination – and, being highly strung and of a romantic temperament, she needed determination to navigate the difficult passage that lay ahead. Living with her mother and grandfather, and with poignant memories of her recently dead father, she seemed poised between ‘happy, happy times past and the sad days to come’. Uncertainties crowded in on her. ‘Oh, I wonder, I wonder, I wonder! How will all this end? Love and pain go hand in hand as do emotions and tears in a maid of seventeen, Uncle Charlie says.’
Her heart and mind appeared to be in constant conflict. She was not unambitious. ‘Later in my life I may be thrown with people who will be historical,’ she predicted. ‘I should hate to be a wallflower.’ At the same time she was possessed by ‘a most uncomfortable longing for I don’t know what. Something unattainable.’ She was horrified to hear that some people considered her a flirt. And how was she to solve the painful mystery of men? On her seventeenth birthday, she had received her first proposal of marriage: and was revolted by the memory of it. ‘If all the rest I have in my life are as thoroughly disagreeable to me as that one was I shall surely remain in the virgin state until the end of my days,’ she decided. ‘…I thought it perfectly disgusting… I could hardly endure the sight of him afterwards.’ She had one or two men friends who were ‘a very good influence on me I think, but I do not mean so much morally as mentally’. Yet none of them really excited or attracted her – until she met Henry McVicker. ‘He fascinated me more in half an hour… than any other man I think I have ever met,’ she admitted. ‘…He is good looking, almost handsome, with round black eyes and an awfully good figure, very tall and nice… How easily a maid of seventeen is won. He aroused all my most intense emotions… I was fascinated and felt that he too was just, oh so little, but still a little fascinated too! But he is so much of a flirt, I could not imagine whether he meant a quarter of what he said then or afterwards…’ She continued seeing him until their meetings began to cause her Aunt Kitty so much alarm that she was obliged to speak very sternly to Mr McVicker, making him so angry that he left the house. And then Aunt Kitty explained to Luie that he probably did like her very much but that he was a womaniser who amused himself at young ladies’ expense. After that Cousin Pierpont, who had become like a father to her since her own father’s death, told her that he felt ‘quite provoked at my going out so much and at my being allowed to know Mr McVicker who… is a scelerat [villain]. I suppose he knows, but still no one seems to think him so… They say he is not nearly as bad as his sisters but – that might easily be true and he not at all moral.’ It was perplexing and she felt rather angry with everyone. But she did not forget Henry McVicker. ‘I wonder what he really did mean… To me he is a perfect enigma.’
For the first time Luie began to reflect that a simple moral compass might not after all direct her to the right man for marrying. Perhaps ‘a man who has been wild and then really loves a pure, true woman, will make a far better husband than one who has never had any great temptations and has seen but little or nothing of a world which women, true women, should know positively nothing about’. Knowing and experiencing so little herself, she started observing engaged couples, trying to tell whether they were marrying for love, money or position. And she examined the behaviour of married couples such as ‘a most amusing woman married to a German Baron whom she hates while the poor man adores her. She treats him horribly and he looks so very sad. It is a horrible state of things, these people who do not care one bit for each other and are yet tied together for life.’
How could she be certain of avoiding such ties herself ? Was she a pure, true woman any more, with this new liking she had developed for men with a taste of excitement in their lives? ‘I do not think we love people because they have few faults,’ she reasoned. A year earlier, at the age of sixteen, she would not have believed it possible to be lost in such a complex sexual-moral maze. ‘I wonder if life always disappoints one as mine has lately. If I could only learn not to set my heart on anything… perhaps we make our own disappointments… I do think life is not worth living and if one could give up the struggle I think it would be a relief… I know sometime that this dreadful longing and sorrow will be over & I shall care again for someone in the years to come but now it is all so hard… When I am left alone I just cry my eyes out… I don’t think I care for a soul besides Mamma in this world… I feel horribly restless and wish I could get rid of that constant trying companion, Self.’
Her melancholy was intensified by the death of her grandfather who lived with them at Highland Falls. She had been very fond of him; and she had seen him die. Once again Pierpont Morgan stepped forward and suggested taking Luie, her mother and aunt off for a tour of Europe and North Africa. But this time he planned for them to be abroad much longer – perhaps for as long as two years.
This plan provoked a crisis in Luie, turning upside down many of her thoughts. ‘It is a dreadful break and there will be some chains that will be very very hard to unclasp,’ she wrote. The ‘quiet stupid life’ at West Point seemed painfully desirable to her now that she was leaving it ––au couleur de rose–‘’‘’‘’‘’‘’’What Katy DidWhat Katy Did Next