Sissinghurst, an Unfinished History

by Adam Nicolson

  ELEVEN

  Admiration

  At the end of the season at Sissinghurst, the gardeners always find spots on the lawns where visitors have stood and gazed at a particularly seductive rose or luscious wisteria, and under their feet the grass has withered and the lawn gone slightly bald. They call these ‘Admiration Patches’, and they need to be aerated and revived each autumn. There is no doubt that in the history of Sissinghurst the period from my grandparents’ arrival in 1930 until Vita’s death in 1962 is one of those exaggeratedly looked-at and slightly worn patches, the most famous moment in ten thousand years of Sissinghurst’s existence.

  The story of their arrival and life at Sissinghurst has been told over and over again, in private and public. This fame was nearly all due to my father’s persistence in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. An element of it was commerce. He knew in his parents’ story there were valuable publishing properties. He knew, too, that the National Trust was anxious that when Vita and Harold died, the interest in Sissinghurst would wane and its financial basis would collapse.

  The world of Bloomsbury in the 1960s was, if anything, a little old-hat. Virginia Woolf was not yet the icon of modern feminism she would become. Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant and all the lesser stars of the Bloomsbury firmament – including, at its very edges, Vita and Harold – were yesterday’s story: too old to be interesting, not old enough to be interesting again.

  My father became, in the last forty years of his life, Sissinghurst’s custodian, librarian, archivist, publicist and entrepreneur. All through the peak of the Bloomsbury boom, he carried on an enormous and global correspondence with scholars and fans. He edited his father’s diaries and letters in three fat volumes, sponsored two different histories of the garden and its history, helped and encouraged separate biographies of each of his parents and, as the culmination of this campaign, wrote Portrait of a Marriage, published in 1973 simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. It told the story of Vita and Harold’s many love affairs, almost exclusively homosexual, and sent shivers of outraged delight around the world. You could tell, each year, where the latest foreign editions had appeared, as first American and French, then German, Dutch and Danish, Latvian and Russian, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish and, finally, Japanese and Korean enthusiasts for Sissinghurst and its literary-lesbian-hortico-aristocratic amalgam arrived at the gate to drink at the shrine. My sisters and I used to stand there trying to spot the territories my father’s publishing campaign had recently conquered.

  But if this was canny, it was not cynical. It was also a form of honouring his parents’ memory. Nothing in his life mattered more to him than them, and Sissinghurst became in effect a portrait of their marriage. They framed his life and he remained their perpetual son, bound to them both, but in polar-opposite ways. His relationship with his father was one of overwhelming love and admiration. Harold played with him, told him stories, drew him pictures, empathised with him as he made his way into the world, understood his nascent homosexuality, urging him to keep it in perspective, and always pressing on him the central virtues of a civilised life: tolerance, kindness, energy, civility, integrity. They discussed everything all the time. ‘He always claimed,’ my father wrote of him, ‘that it was impossible for a father to transmit experience, but in fact he did so, for his advice was always practical, and by understanding the exact nuances of our dilemmas, he dissipated them.’ My father felt he lived not in his father’s shadow but in his light.

  Towards the end of his life, my father sold nearly all of his parents’ letters to American universities, but before he died, he told me that if I were to sell anything, as he imagined I might, the one thing he would like to remain at Sissinghurst for ever was the file of letters that his father had written to him and his brother Ben during the war. It is a thick typewritten folder which contains what is, in effect, a manual of fatherhood: of love, anxiety for his children, a flattering ease in the telling of news and the testing of opinions, a fascination for the world, a brilliant play across anything that amused, stirred or worried him, in his life or theirs, written from the House of Commons where he was an MP or from the Ministry of Information, where for a time he was a junior minister in Churchill’s government, to the battlefields of North Africa and Italy, page after page drenched in a form of love that was so strong it could be easy, funny, courteous, dignified, articulate and challenging without ever losing its undernote of deep and passionate affection. My father kept this file in his bedroom until he died.

  With his mother, it was different. She had neglected him and his brother when they were children, leaving them for months on end when away with lovers or friends; and when, in the second half of her life, she returned from her adventuring, to embed herself at Sissinghurst, she was absent there too, in the Tower, and when in the Tower in the world of poetry, from which her children felt – and were – entirely excluded. Whenever my father wrote about her, that sense of exclusion, almost of expulsion, was the dominant note. She ‘withdrew into preferred solitude’. Poetry was ‘her secret life, the life of the tower, into which we never attempted to penetrate’. He was constantly anxious that he might wound her. There was a ‘gap between her and us. It had been there since we were babies’. If she talked to them or wrote to them, her tone was ‘constrained’. She ‘thought herself a failure as a mother, but it was as much our fault as hers. We never made the necessary effort to know her well.’

  This double emotional inheritance, of warmth and cold, transmitted through my father, has soaked into Sissinghurst. Its image has become fixed in a binary vision of the twentieth century here. Harold was classical, Vita romantic. Harold was kind and engaged, Vita distant and unintelligible. Harold was clever, Vita passionate. Harold was civility, Vita poetry. Harold my father knew; Vita he didn’t. Harold he loved, Vita he didn’t. These polarities became our governing myth.

  I knew the story of my grandparents’ lives from the moment I was conscious. My father used to stand on the dais at one end of the Big Room and tell it to visitors while I stood at his side. The climax would always be that, after his death, ‘Adam, and Adam’s Adam, and Adam’s Adam’s Adam’ would live here, far on into the unforeseeable future, words that would make me glow with significance and squirm with embarrassment while the people stared from three steps below us on the polished oak floor.

  The family mythology swirled around us, planets orbiting above our heads in ever wider and more distant circles. There was a Nicolson element, to do with generation after generation of public servants and military men, backed by layer on layer of Edinburgh lawyers, and going on beyond them, mistily, to chieftains of the clan in Skye and Assynt in the far north-west of Scotland. But the Nicolson story was not at the heart of Sissinghurst. It was never important enough. Two coats of arms stood on either side of the entrance arch: three Baker swans on the right and the chequers and bars of the Sackville-Wests on the left. It was Vita who had the money, who bought and owned Sissinghurst, who conducted negotiations with Captain Beale, the farm tenant, whose flag flew over the Tower, whose room in the Tower silently oversaw Sissinghurst and whose spirit infused the place. Under the Tower a memorial stone put up after she died remembers her as the person ‘who made this garden’. Harold is not mentioned.

  She dominated the present and behind her stretched an inheritance of pure glamour. Her mother had persuaded Sir John Murray Scott, the vast, five-foot-waisted, lonely owner of the Wallace Collection, to leave her half of it in his will. The legacy was contested by his relations (‘dumpy, dull and middle class’, according to my father), but as soon as Victoria Sackville established her claim, in a spectacular court case, she sold the collection en bloc to a Paris dealer, adding £270,000 to the £150,000 in cash Scott had left her too. These figures can be multiplied by at least fifty for their modern equivalents. Vita would inherit most of it; it became the fund on which Sissinghurst floated for Vita’s life. Her mother’s mother, Pepita, had been a Spanish gypsy dancer, whose hair was so long that it drag
ged on the floor behind her, with whom her grandfather, Lord Sackville, had fallen in love after seeing her dance onstage. Behind them lay receding avenues of Sackvilles going back towards Restoration, Cavalier and Elizabethan heroes, all set in the huge grey Kentish palace of Knole, the house in which Vita had been brought up and which, if she had been a boy, she would have inherited. Against this bouillabaisse of a story, the Nicolson aspect, the element of middle-class normality and sanity, was thin fare.

  Vita had been lonely as a child. She had looked with a sceptical eye at the Edwardian indulgences of her mother’s friends, fell in love with poetry as a girl, and more than that with Knole and with the romance of its stories. She was wooed by the great heirs of Edwardian England, could have had dukedoms and county-covering estates for the asking, but never stooped to that. She refused the giant houses offered her by Lord Lascelles (Harewood) and Lord Granby (Haddon Hall and Belvoir), largely perhaps because Knole was greater than either, not in the gilded richness of its rooms, but in something less articulate: the pale grey simplicity of its ragstone walls; its succession of courtyards and the buried secrets they promised; the way you could push into Knole, uncovering layer after layer, one court folding out from another, linked by intricate route-ways, through flagged back halls and into other high, narrow spaces, where the windows of the surrounding galleries looked down blankly from above, suddenly coming by chance at the foot of a stair on a cupboard full of gilded porcelain or the delicious eighteenth-century statue of a duke’s mistress, nude and prone on her velvet blanket, her body resting on cushions as luscious as herself.

  Knole is more maze than house, a private coral reef of accumulated riches, where under its four acres of roof, and within layers of encrustation, its long galleries are filled with the pictures still hanging in the order in which they were inventoried in the seventeenth century, furnished by successive Sackville Lords Chamberlain, who brought down to Knole everything rejected by each change of fashion at court. It is the most beautiful beach in England, thick with the successive tidelines of English taste. It would be difficult to imagine a more powerful stimulus to the imagination than this: Knole, loneliness, the flamenco brilliance of the Spanish-gypsy-dancing gene, dusty brocades, the looming portraits, the charm and volatility of her seductive, plutophile, intemperate mother, the mulch of Englishness, the badge of illegitimacy only a generation back, a sense of herself as the heir to this slow, deep river of fading beauty, something which poured over and through her as if she were more weir than heir.

  As a young woman, Vita added to all this a love of Italy and the jewelled life of the Renaissance, the scents and tastes of the Mediterranean world. Benozzo Gozzoli, Venetian colours, cistus and rosemary, almond and apricot blossom all combined to intoxicate her as a teenage girl. She began to feel in herself what she thought of as the fire of her own Spanish blood, mixed with Kentish earth, and began to sense even in her earliest poems her own self to be strung between these poles. Nothing in her was ever parochial or limited, but that exoticism, and a wilful streak of selfishness and dominance, played over a deep and almost stagnant bed of Kentish rootedness. Richness and melancholy joined hands across her own inner divide.

  Instead of one of the grandees of aristocratic England, she married a young Third Secretary in the Foreign Office, who came, in his own description, from a family of ‘impecunious high civil servants’. He was a matching combination of contradictory talents: high minded, with a belief in the central role public service should play in a man’s life; homosexual, with an almost unassuageable appetite for clever and beautiful young men; a brilliantly witty and delighted describer of the world around him; multilingual, passionately internationalist, in love with the civilisations of Greece and France; and above all filled with curiosity for anything that life might bring. Only one man in a thousand is a bore, he told my father, and my father quoted repeatedly to me, and he is interesting because he is one man in a thousand.

  Again and again my father would tell me when I was young about his father’s comparison of his life and career to an alpine meadow, spotted and lit with flowers, and how preferable that was to a single crop of maize or lucerne. But this multiplicity, and the love of the shimmering surface, was always to be allied to work, love and loyalty. Harold longed for rootedness himself. ‘I wanted to feel autochthonous, the son of some hereditary soil,’ he wrote. These desires and interests, and this appetite for a life that combined wide horizons with a sense of enriched belonging, were what made their marriage. They felt, immediately, mutual. When he and Vita were married, at Knole in 1913, and lived first in Constantinople, where Harold was attached to the embassy, and then at Long Barn, a cottage outside Sevenoaks, which they called their ‘little mud pie’ and could have fitted inside one of Knole’s courtyards, they thought of each other as playmates, self-consciously innocent, young and happy.

  All of these threads would, in time, find their way into Sissinghurst, but after the end of the Great War, two devastating events changed this happy, pretty picture of their early lives. The effects of both could have been foreseen; neither was; both left them changed; and both became, in opposite ways, shaping influences at Sissinghurst.

  The first was Vita’s long love affair and elopement in 1918/19 with Violet Trefusis, the daughter of Alice Keppel, Edward VII’s mistress. It began in ‘a mad and irresponsible summer’, as Vita described its early phases, ‘of moonlit nights, and infinite escapades, and passionate letters, and music, and poetry. Things were not tragic for us then, because although we cared passionately we didn’t care deeply.’ Violet, according to Victoria Glendinning, was ‘a damaged and damaging young woman’; to Harold ‘some fierce orchid – glimmering and stinking in the recesses of life, throwing cadaverous sweetness on the morning’s breeze’. She undoubtedly wanted to destroy Vita’s marriage. Vita was more equivocal and, in letter after grief-stricken letter, wrote piteously of the love she had for a husband she claimed to be deserting.

  In 1920, as the affair’s fire was dimming, Vita wrote a long manuscript account of it, which she kept in a Gladstone bag, stamped with the gold letters V.N. It remained hidden first in her sitting room at Long Barn and then in her turret room in the Tower at Sissinghurst for the rest of her life. It was never shown to anyone. When she died in 1962, my father found the Gladstone bag in that turret. It was locked and the key was missing, so he cut the leather with a razor and reached inside, taking the manuscript to her desk. He didn’t stand up until he had read its 40,000 words. When it was finally published in 1973, after Violet and Harold had also died, it formed the central element of Portrait of a Marriage, a title in which he packed the pain and grief of this affair in the cushioning tissue paper of his parents’ lifelong, often-declared love for each other.

  I remember with great clarity the moment the book came out. He had written to me at school to warn me of the coming scandal. I now know, from his own papers, how anxious he was. The prospect of its publication left him ‘terrified by the reproach I might draw on myself’. He felt guilty,

  knowing that even if it was true that Vita wanted it published, Hadji [as all the family called Harold] would have deplored it. He was the figure that haunted me throughout. I argued that it was a confession which only a son could handle with delicacy and love, but this was an excuse. I wasn’t doing it out of love, but to set a new style in biography, of total honesty, to make a stir, earn me money, show that I was capable of taking a risk, – not only with my reputation but with Vita’s.

  He had justified it, he wrote in his own self-reproaching memoir, written twenty years later, as ‘a eulogy of marriage, [which] had lessons for other people who found themselves lesbians and homosexuals, but could still have a very happy marriage. It might “help” people, I wrote, but this was special pleading. I was finding excuses for my guilt. That guilt has still not dissolved.’

  Violet Trefusis’s sister, to whom Nigel sent the typescript, called it a ‘distasteful book’. ‘It seems incredible to me’, she
wrote to him, ‘that while professing to revere your mother’s memory, you are prepared to publicise for profit details of her infatuations of over half a century ago.’ Lord Sackville, who ‘had affection and great admiration for your mother’, told Nigel that ‘these feelings have been tarnished by your book’. Admiration poured in from much of the world but none of it ever quite washed away his own sense of betrayal. When the serialisation of the book started to run in the Sunday Times, he could not bring himself to look at it. ‘Ben knew’, Nigel wrote in his memoir, ‘that my love for Vita was very shallow, his shallower.’

  I was back at Sissinghurst the day the papers came with the reviews in them. He had been told that Bernard Levin had reviewed the book in the Sunday Times. The paper lay on the kitchen table unopened between us. My father finally steeled himself to look at it and turned to the review section. He leant over the pages with both elbows on the table and his head in his hands, reading between the protective grid of his fingers. Levin had fixed on what he saw as the narcissism and self-indulgence behind this story of late, luscious, moneyed romanticism, the urge of the wild ‘gypsy’ spirit to break free of the tedium of a civil servant husband, of children and normality. The skewering sentences, on which Levin fixed, were these:

  I saw Violet twice more. Once in my own house in London; she looked ill and changed; and once in the early morning at her mother’s house, where I went to say goodbye on my way to the station. There was a dreary slut scrubbing the doorstep, for it was very early, and I stepped in over the soapy pail, and saw Violet in the morning room. Then I went to Paris alone.