Marriage or bust

In or around 1970 I was doing some research at the Theatre Museum, which then lodged rather uneasily within the Victoria & Albert Museum. I was helped in this work by an assistant curator whom I used to invite out sometimes for a drink. She often worked late, and I would wait for her after the public had left the building, wandering through the empty galleries and halls. It was during these evening strolls that I first saw Auguste Rodin's bust of Eve Fairfax. It was a bronze portrait cast in the early years of the 20th century, when she was in her mid-30s. 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. Before long the sculpture began to exert a hypnotic effect on me and I started to make inquiries about Rodin and Fairfax. Fairfax was born in 1871 and belonged to the family of Thomas Fairfax, whose parliamentary army had defeated Charles I at Naseby in 1645. She had grown up in Yorkshire in a world of horses. Her father (a lieutenant-colonel in the Grenadier Guards), a slim, wiry figure, was a keen rider to hounds and reputed to be the best-looking man in the army. His jaunts and jollities could have found an honourable place in the novels of Robert Surtees. But if there was a more adventurous rider to hounds it was his wife who, it was said, "had one of the finest seats in the county". Her exploits in the saddle delighted readers of the Yorkshire Post. Fairfax and her mother grew to dislike each other. "I wanted a petite dark girl – and look what I've got!" she heard her mother exclaim as, tall and fair at the age of 13, she entered a room full of guests. Her two brothers were sent to public schools, but little money was wasted on her education. She became enthusiastic about all sports – there was no alternative in the Fairfax household. She was "a champion of the ladies" at cricket, adding brightness to the scene in her scarlet petticoat and gypsy bonnet, and being admired for "her late cuts and fast runs". When her father died in 1884 at the age of 44, a large part of the land had to be sold to pay off his debts. His widow became increasingly fierce and eccentric after his death. It was said she used to go to bed with a piece of string tied to one of her toes, the other end of which hung out of the window. Each morning the gardener would pull the string to wake her up. But however early she started the day she had little time for her daughter. "I had a funny bringing up – nobody bothered about me much," Fairfax remembered. She did not marry. She was handsome in her mid-20s but still something of a tomboy – and perhaps there was pleasure to be had from thwarting her mother. In any event, within a year of her mother's death in 1901, Fairfax became engaged to Ernest Beckett. His family were prominent bankers and members of parliament in Yorkshire. Beckett was a widower with three children – his American wife having died in 1891 at the age of 26, a few days after giving birth to their only son. A close friend of Sir Randolph Churchill, he had appeared to have a promising political future. "He [Churchill] carries the Conservative party and its fortunes," Beckett wrote. "No one has done so much to mould it into its present shape. In all its words and works it bears the impress of his hand." But Churchill was not trusted by the Conservative party and, at the end of 1886, in the face of cabinet opposition to his budget, he resigned both as leader of the House of Commons and chancellor of the exchequer. In the biography of his father, Winston Churchill describes Beckett as an intimate friend of Randolph, one "who stood by him, worked with him and rendered many political services in the years that followed his resignation". These services, he adds, "were not extravagantly beloved" in the high places of his party. Beckett believed that Churchill would re-enter the cabinet and become prime minister. But in 1895 he died – of syphilis, some people whispered – and Beckett's bright future in politics faded. But he had other interests, other reputations. George Moore called him "London's greatest lover" – partly on account of his affair with Alice Keppel (later the mistress of the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII), with whom he was said to have had a daughter (Violet Trefusis, later to become well known as Vita Sackville-West's lover). But by his mid-40s, when he became engaged to Fairfax, his roving days were apparently over. He was a man of swiftly changing enthusiasms – a philanderer, gambler, opportunist and dilettante. He had recently met Rodin and felt himself to be in the presence of "a supreme genius" – a philosopher and poet as well as a sculptor. Responding to Rodin's "full-blooded prodigal abounding force", he described him as "the Wagner of sculpture". Selling much of his art collection, he commissioned Rodin to make a portrait bust of Fairfax as a wedding present. During the early spring of 1901, she began sitting for Rodin. At the start their letters to each other were formal, but gradually they grew more personal and almost intimate. They are like the polite explorative conversation from a distant age, oblique and unsophisticated. "I always think of you. Would you write to me?" she asks. And he promises: "I will put myself completely at your service." When she is ill, he comforts his "very dear model", telling her how happy he will be "to greet you and to finish your beautiful and melancholy portrait". "Your letter made me so much better," she replies. "I would so much like to be again in your studio . . . You stimulate my heart." In December 1903, Rodin reported: "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." In her reply Fairfax does not mention the sculpture. 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 asks him to write her a line and "tell me you are well and that I am not forgotten". Fairfax 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. Sometimes when Rodin came to England they would meet, initially with Beckett, and then on their own. Back in Paris, Rodin continued working at her portrait, trying to define her beauty. "I always hope for your visit," he wrote to her in the summer of 1904. "I am always with you, through your bust which is not yet made as marble." A second group of sittings began in May 1905. The previous month Beckett's extremely rich and childless uncle, a vituperative ecclesiastical lawyer, horologist, amateur architect and mechanical inventor, had died, as a result of which Beckett was raised to the peerage and became the second Lord Grimthorpe. He must have expected to come into an invigorating fortune. But his wealthy uncle's many controversies continued to be fought out after his death and, being enshrined in 22 codicils to his will, delayed probate for more than two years. Nevertheless it was rumoured that Beckett was now a millionaire. In fact he had an instinct for losing money. He invested in Russian forestry in 1905, the year of workers' strikes, the abortive uprising and October manifesto; and he was to speculate in property in San Francisco in 1906, the year of the earthquake. In 1905 his two brothers decided to remove him as senior partner from the family bank. "I hate my title," he said. "It has brought me nothing but bad luck." Besieged by creditors, he finally walked away from paying Rodin for Fairfax's bust and walked away from his promise to marry her. Instead he left the country, sold his houses in England and bought the Villa Cimbrone at Ravello. "I cannot come to Paris perhaps for a long time," Fairfax told Rodin. She seems to have gone into a nursing home – and there were rumours that she had been pregnant and was suffering from puerperal fever. "I have had great difficulties these past months," she wrote to him in the autumn of 1905, "nearly more than I can sustain . . . 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." And it did not happen. "I regard you as a woman who resembles in expression as well as in form, one of the 'faces' of Michelangelo," he wrote. There was no greater compliment he could have paid her. "If you want me to come for more sittings tell me," she answered. And so the sittings began again. In the summer of 1907, six-and-a-half years after Fairfax began sitting for Rodin, he presented her with one of the marble busts, choosing a serene, idealised version – "the effigy of a wonderful woman", he called it. She was overcome with happiness. "You have made my heart full of joy," she told him . . . I thank you with all my heart." Her friendship with him, like a living branch from an otherwise dead tree, had grown and prospered, and her sittings for him were like moments of happiness strung together in what seemed to be a life destined to be sad. "There was a love story at the bottom of this," wrote Rodin's secretary, René Chéruy. But was it Beckett's love story or Rodin's? And was it Beckett's near bankruptcy or Rodin's intimacy that had ended Fairfax's engagement? "You understand how I love you," she confided to Rodin, "the feeling in my heart so poorly expressed." She continued to see him in Paris during 1908 and 1909, inviting him to the theatre, telling him how happy she was in his company, going for a ride with him in his car and apologising for being so silent during the drive. " Mais nous etions très content parce que nous etions dans grande sympathie, n'est-ce pas? " But in the summer of 1909 a great crisis overtook her. Then aged 38, she was still unmarried and had become destitute. Summoned to court, she had a bankruptcy notice served on her. The newspapers reported that this descendent of General Fairfax "of Cromwellian fame" had admitted to having no money to pay her debts. She owned only one valuable asset: Rodin's bust. She wrote to him asking whether he would mind her selling it to an art gallery that was being built in Johannesburg. Rodin advised her as to what price she should ask and she sold it for the equivalent of £50,000. She felt " tellement seule " after it was taken away, but happy again when Rodin invited her to start another group of sittings and gave her a plaster model of his La jeune mère et l'enfant. Their correspondence shows them meeting each other in Paris and London up to 1914. The previous year Fairfax had rented a small house in Rodin's garden at Meudon and accidentally left there " une petite casse pour la poudre ", hoping to retrieve it during her next visit. After 13 years, the war put an end to their meetings. Rodin was to die in 1917, in his late 70s, and she, then in her mid-40s, lived on. "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," she answered when asked about their relationship much later in her life. In 1909 Lady Diana Manners gave Fairfax an enormous empty volume in which to record her life. It was intended to be a diary, but she made it into something more bizarre: partly a social calendar, partly a volume of autographs, partly an eclectic anthology. It became an omnium gatherum following no order and having no chronology, theme or agenda. She was to carry this vast portmanteau of a book with her for more than 50 years, pinning people into it like butterflies. It grew increasingly unwieldy and irregular as she stuffed all sorts of letters, cards, bits and pieces inside it, until it came to resemble the huge, dilapidated saddle of a horse – the legendary Trojan horse full of people. This chaotic artefact became part of Fairfax's personality: an awful encumbrance to her as she dragged it from one place to another and a torment to others who were commanded to write something in it. Her book, with its undergrowth of clichés, its poems, pictures, photo parade of men and women on horses, of children and flowers, dogs and prime ministers, was her pride and her penance (there is a wicked description of it in Trefusis's novel Pirates at Play ). It is an eccentric form of autobiography from which Fairfax emerges like a character from The Pilgrim's Progress . Among the cards and correspondence she shoved in are a few of Rodin's letters; and then, in May 1915, two years before he died, Beckett, signing himself "Grimthorpe", wrote a devastating verse from Swinburne's "Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)": For the crown of our life as it closes Is darkness, the fruit thereof dust; No thorns go as deep as a rose's, And love is more cruel than lust. Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives; And marriage and death and division Make barren our lives. I did not realise while I was working at the V&A that I could have met Eve Fairfax. Her last seven years were passed in the Retreat, a Quaker hospital in York, which specialised in treating infirmity and providing mental health care. Various aristocratic families paid for her, including Beckett's grandson. She suffered from senile dementia and sometimes claimed to be Queen Elizabeth I (a part she had played in one of the York pageants). Her book was also kept at the Retreat. On 27 May 1978 she died, five months short of her 107th birthday. She had made a will with various dukes and barons as her trustees, but since she had no money it was not proved, and she died intestate. Michael Holroyd's A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers is published by Chatto & Windus (£16.99).