There was a time when I would indiscriminately buy almost any book connected to the Bloomsbury Group. To a certain extent, that’s a book-buying era I’m still living – but I don’t seem to read them as voraciously as I used to. Still, I was glad to finally get to Don’t Look Round by Violet Trefusis, which I bought in 2011.
Violet Trefusis (also famed under her maiden name, Violet Keppel) is probably best remembered now for her long love affair with Vita Sackville-West, but that isn’t information you’ll get from this autobiography. Apparently Nancy Mitford once said that the book should be called ‘Here Lies Violet Trefusis’ – though I haven’t been able to find any source for that quotation – and there is a sense permeating Don’t Look Round that Trefusis is being cagey with the truth, if not outright dishonest. Indeed, the paragraph-long preface says ‘I have not lied, I have merely omitted, by-passed the truth, wherever unpalatable.’ And once you’ve accepted that, it’s a fun read on its own terms.
The thing that quickly becomes clear is that Trefusis is a very enjoyable writer and doesn’t mind poking fun at herself. She grew up in extraordinary privilege (which she takes for granted – there are stories of visiting relatives, all of whom seem to live in stately homes) but in other ways her experience of parental love is much the same as anybody else’s might be.
My parents spoiled me disgracefully. My mother began as an atmosphere, a climate, luminous, resplendent, joyously embattled like golden armour; it was only later that I became conscious of her as an individual.
I basked in the climate of her love without asking myself any questions, until I was about give. Very soon she hit upon the right technique in dealing with me. Once, when I was very small, and of the opinion that I was not getting enough attention, I announced that I was going to run away. “Very well, run then,” came the bland reply.
I started on a singularly flat fugue, pushing my little wheel-narrow in front of me. Nobody called. Nobody came. It was a complete fiasco. (In later life, other fugues were to be nipped in the bud by the same method.)
I love that bit in brackets at the end. Trefusis always writes with a wink. She might be coy in her autobiography, but it is a knowing coyness, that accepts a reputation she might have without being willing to add fuel to the fire.
Like so many autobiographies, the author has probably more interest in her childhood and youth than the reader does. I’m always impatient for them to get to the bits that actually made them famous. Trefusis’s stories from her early years are a combination of relatable and very much the reverse, and it’s all very enjoyable, but I wanted to get to the writing career – and this is something she writes surprisingly little about. She introduces her first novel as a sort of afterthought, that happened in the background of more significant events in her life, and races through Echo in a couple of pages (which I think is a marvellous novel). Others don’t seem to be mentioned at all. Perhaps this comes from humility, perhaps as a simple way of dodging how much the novels echoed (!) her own complex romantic life, from which she borrowed heavily.
But if she doesn’t write much about writing, she is very enjoyable on the literary scene. Trefusis has a talent for summing someone up in a handful of words – I noted down her description of Rebecca West, ‘who has a voice like a crystal spring and eyes like twin jungles’, which I thought oddly marvellous. She does write about Vita Sackville-West in a way that demonstrates her deep affection, even if she gives away little else. Her most moving descriptions are for her husband Dennys. Naturally, she does not write about the fact they apparently never consummated their marriage, or the reluctance with which they came together. Yet it is clear that there is regard rather than passion, and it is that regard which makes the most moving section of the book about Dennys’ early death.
In reading Don’t Look Round, though, the chief love affair of Trefusis’s life is clearly France. She lived there for a long time, and her first novels were written in French. Her passion for the language, history, sights and culture of France permeates a sizeable section at the centre of the autobiography. Even after moving back to England, at the outbreak of war, it feels like Trefusis has been forcibly removed from a lover.
Who would be in sympathy with one, who, though English and proud of it, looked upon England as exile? The only bone of contention between my darling mother and myself was France. She considered we had been let down disgracefully; the subject was taboo. I twisted this way and that, longing for some kind of outlet, someone with whom I would not have to conceal my yearning for France as though it were an unsightly disease.
And, similarly, there is more love and poignancy in her eventual return to France than in descriptions of many reunited lovers:
Hélène came to fetch me in a borrowed car. We drove around a miraculously intact Paris, more beautiful even than I remembered it. A great many of the houses were pitted with bullet holes. In the façade of the Ministère de la Marine a few balusters were missing, negligible, almost coquettish damage, like scratches received in a duel.
Trefusis’s love of France also leads to my real major qualm with Don’t Look Round. There is SO much untranslated French in this book. Whether quoting dialogue in France or expressing herself with French, Trefusis piles it on – probably a sentence or every page or two, particularly (of course) for the large section set in France. In my 1989 edition, there are no footnotes or translations anywhere. I have basic French, so could struggle through quite a lot of it, but there was plenty that I didn’t understand – and I’m sure the nuance of a lot of it was lost on me. In the 1950s, and the 198s0?, I suppose fluent French was taken for granted in readers – and if you can read French, then this is no drawback. But I found it pulled me out of the flow constantly, and even the bits I could understand took some time to piece together. If you don’t read French at all, it would be even more frustrating. Maybe more recent editions, if there are any, put the English in.
Trefusis would live another 20 years after Don’t Look Round was published, though she didn’t publish any more novels. If you’re looking for the unvarnished truth about her life, then look elsewhere – but if you want to enjoy the distinctively characterful and entirely selective memoirs of someone on the peripheries of the Bloomsbury Group, then this book is a fun and often moving read.
