Viola Tree’s Castles in the Air is one of the best memoirs of the Edwardian period without a doubt. Written in 1926, she looks back to the two years pre WWI she spent studying opera in Italy. That you know that she didn’t eventually triumph makes it not one bit less heartening. She excerpts from her diary, comments on herself looking back, and includes letters from her famous father, from GB Shaw, her then-fiancee, drama critic-to-be Alan Parsons, Prime Minister Asquith, et. al.
The title page tells us it’s published by “Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press.” Well, I mean, of course it is.
Viola had a ripping career as actress before and after opera; you can see her in some movies of the ’30s. Unfortunately she died not very old in 1939.
Viola was also co-author of The Dancers,in which Tallulah debuted in London in 1923
Co-author with the great actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, who also starred.
In 1994, I talked over the phone to Viola’s son David, who remembered his mother very fondly. And, if you can believe it, he then sent me one act of The Dancers in ms that he had in his possession. Later I read the entire play script at the British Library.
When Bankhead and Du Maurier are reunited in act 4 after years of separation and heartbreak, Tallulah now a famous dancer in the French music halls, Tallulah’s “Maxine” tells Du M’s “Duke of Chievely”:
“Don’t let’s talk of how we’ve arrived to where we have arrived, we can give each other our Press Notices to read and that will save time. Let’s say how much we have loved people, and how much of [us] was happy, and whether as we grew we struck the right shoots of ourselves.”
You have to love Viola Tree.