by Karen Karbo
November 11, 1918: Armistice Day. Harold was still working overtime at the Foreign Office in London, now busy brokering peace. In early 1919, he sent Vita off with Violet to Monte Carlo, where they spent several months swimming in the sea and gambling.*3 Vita couldn’t have been happier. Boys safe in Kent with their minders, husband safe in London working his head off, none the wiser, and Violet here with her. They got carried away and engaged in some public displays of affection; rumors of their indiscretion shot back to England and straight into the ears of their mothers—Lady Sackville, the aforementioned battle-ax, and Alice Keppel, the favored mistress of the now late king. Harold also managed to look up from his work long enough to register that Violet was trying to lure away his wife. None of this would do, at all.
Denys Trefusis was a handsome, diffident soldier in the Royal Horse Guards who’d taken a fancy to Violet. She couldn’t have been less interested, but once her mother got wind of the shenanigans with Vita in Monte Carlo, she ordered Violet to accept Denys’s marriage proposal. When Vita saw the engagement announcement in the paper in March, instead of flying into a jealous rage as most of us would, she thought this would make their lives easier. She and Violet would make a pact—no sex with their husbands, and as many holidays as Julian and Eve as possible, taking care not to start another scandal.
Meanwhile, Harold had begun his own affair, with fashion designer Edward Molyneux. He didn’t see any reason he and Vita couldn’t be allowed the occasional fling—which completely underestimated the depth of Vita’s feelings for Violet. Because who had ever heard of such a thing as two women deeply in love? (No one, as we know.) There were bitter rows between Vita and Harold, between Vita and Violet, between Violet and Denys. Diaries filled up. Letters were posted, sometimes two and three a day. (Violet was also a writer—did I mention that?) In the end, Vita got wind of the fact that Violet had, in fact, had sex with her husband (because, duh), and she flew into a jealous rage; the relationship careened downhill from there. Vita ended it in late 1921.
Vita would fall in love with many more women, and Harold many more men. But after the Violet “muddle” (as they referred to their infidelities), they refashioned their wedding vows to reflect what worked for them: to honor each other in a sex-free union, bound by mutual respect, shared intellectual interests, and warm companionship. They didn’t want to be unmarried. They enjoyed being husband and wife, even though they liked having sex with other people of their own gender. Was it a sham marriage? Or was it the perfect solution to a problem that remains intractable to this very day: maintaining a long-term happy marriage to someone you don’t want to have sex with, but whom convention insists you’re supposed to pretend you want to have sex with forever and ever? In any case, they made it work for them. How much better our intimate relationships would be if we fashioned them to suit ourselves, and not the expectations of our times?
One thing’s for sure: Their arrangement reduced marital quarrels and allowed for a steady production of novels from both wife and husband. In 1930, Vita and Harold purchased Sissinghurst Castle in Cranbrook, Kent. There, they worked together to create one of the most epic contemporary gardens in the world, now in the British National Trust. As someone who is pained to tug a weed, I find Sissinghurst to be no less an artistic achievement than the Sistine Chapel. Designed as a series of “rooms,” each garden is flat-out breathtaking: the cottage garden, the white garden, the blue flower bed. So vast is Sissinghurst that in 2009, BBC Four found enough material to fill an eight-part documentary detailing its evolution.
BY THE TIME VITA MET Virginia Woolf in 1922, she and Harold had been married for 13 years, and had found their marital groove. Vita was free to pursue Virginia to the degree she wished to be pursued. Vita wrote to Harold: “I’ve rarely taken such a fancy to anyone, and I think she likes me. At least, she asked me to Richmond where she lives. Darling, I have quite lost my heart.”
Virginia was married to Leonard Woolf, a graduate of Cambridge and former civil servant. Theirs was a great marriage of minds. They were a two-person literary band: Not only did they preside as de facto king and queen of the Bloomsbury Group, but in 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press, which published the writings of the group members (as well as an English version of Dostoyevsky’s The Devils, translated by Virginia, and the first edition of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land). When she and Vita met, Virginia was absorbed in her work and—as she would throughout her life—struggling with depression.
Virginia’s first great literary success, Mrs. Dalloway, was still several years in the future. She was 40 and set in her ways, equal parts attracted to and frightened of the whole sexy, eccentric, androgynous Vita Sackville-West package.
Vita wrote to Virginia from Milan on January 21, 1926: “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way.”
Virginia wrote to Vita, on January 26: “And ever since [Vita left] nothing important has happened—Somehow [it’s] dull and damp. I have been dull; I have missed you. I do miss you. I shall miss you. And if you don’t believe it, you’re a long-eared owl and ass.”
Then, on October 5, 1927, Virginia made a note in her diary about a new book: “And instantly, the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other.” The book was a critical and popular success, and for the first time in their lives, Virginia and Leonard Woolf were financially stable.
On the day Orlando was published, Vita received a package from Virginia. It contained a copy of the novel, fresh off the press, and the original handwritten manuscript bound in Niger leather, Vita’s initials tooled on the spine.
The love affair with Virginia (Vita seemed to have a weakness for women whose names began with V) lasted until 1935. Apparently Virginia got fed up with Vita’s libido and general promiscuity. In an essay examining the effect of the relationship on the literary output of the two women, scholar Louise deSalvo wrote “neither had ever written so much so well, and neither would ever again reach this peak of accomplishment.”
UPON VITA’S DEATH IN 1962, her son Nigel, whom Vita had named her literary executor, went through her papers in her office at Sissinghurst. He found 40 boxes of letters carefully stored in pinewood boxes, her own diaries, and the diaries of her mother, Lady Sackville. He found every letter his father had ever written his mother. He also found, in a corner of the room, a locked Gladstone bag. He sliced open the leather and inside discovered a notebook, in which Vita had written the story of her desperate love affair with Violet Keppel. It was roughly 80 pages long, written for future readers, for a time when “the psychology of people like myself will be a matter of interest.”
Nigel Nicolson sat on the manuscript for a while, waiting until he felt the time was right. In 1973 he published Portrait of a Marriage, a biography of his parents’ life together, with Vita’s story of her love for Violet at its center. “She fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men only women. For this she was prepared to give up everything…How could she regret that the knowledge of it should now reach the ears of a new generation, one so infinitely more compassionate than her own?” he wrote in the preface.
I read Portrait during my mad Virginia Woolf phase. Descriptions of the intoxicating Vita appeared throughout the letters and diaries, and Orlando was my favorite of Virginia’s novels so I had to read more. I remember thinking how modern it felt, and how adventuresome and daring Vita seemed, even then. It shouldn’t be an amazing act of courage for a woman to strive to be fully herself—and yet time and time again, we see that it is. Really, we shouldn’t be so timid. Look at Vita. Like us, she was a victim of the times in which she lived. But that didn
’t stop her from trying again and again to understand and express her needs and desires. Still, she wound up with a marriage for the ages, a son who had nice things to say about her after she was gone, a world-renowned garden and refuge of stupendous beauty, and a sense of having really, truly lived. Not too shabby, that. And a legacy that only a difficult woman could produce.
*1Why Virginia Woolf? The reasons are lost to time. Escapism, intellectual pretensions, bragging rights: I’ve read all of Woolf, even The Waves.
*2Vita would be disgruntled that I’m mentioning her books, and only the best known at that, in a footnote. They are The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931); her travel memoir Passenger to Teheran also holds up well. Though intrepid in matters of the heart, she was dull on the page. Her poetry was better, and in 1927 she won the Hawthornden Prize, the oldest major British literary award, for her pastoral epic The Land. She won it again in 1933 for her Collected Poems.
*3Have you ever noticed how long vacations were back in the day? Vita and Violet never seemed to go away for less than three months at a time.
CHAPTER 18
ELIZABETH WARREN
Persistent
LAST WEEK MY Elizabeth Warren tribute T-shirt arrived: “Nevertheless, She Persisted” emblazoned on the front. It’s one of the great things about the digital age: Someone, somewhere makes an incendiary remark, and an hour later the phrase appears on mugs, stickers, lawn signs, baseball caps, and fitted tees. I ordered mine in February 2017, about seven seconds after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell muzzled Elizabeth for violating Rule 19 during the confirmation hearings for Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
What, you may ask, is Rule 19? Technically, a little-used conduct rule employed to prevent senators from “impugning” one another. In this case, a little-used rule employed to get Elizabeth Warren to shut the hell up.*1 At least McConnell went to the effort of pretending there was an official reason for interrupting Elizabeth; mere months later when California Democrat Kamala Harris questioned Sessions before the Senate Intelligence Committee (that guy gets around), she was interrupted twice during the handful of minutes she had the floor. This time the unstated reason was: You’re a woman and you’re being annoying by being articulate and assertive.*2
Elizabeth, the pugnacious junior senator from Massachusetts, had been reading a 1986 letter, written by Coretta Scott King, in opposition to the nomination of then Judge Sessions to the federal bench in Alabama. The nine-page letter doesn’t have many flattering things to say about Sessions when it comes to his attitudes about voter equality. McConnell told Elizabeth to stop, but she kept right on going, forcing McConnell to proclaim, in an exasperated, superior tone: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
(McConnell’s tone was so familiar. It was patronizing, but also reminded me of how I address the dog when I discover that yet again she has gotten into the recycling, strewing scrap paper and take-out containers around the house. It’s a daily occurrence, and really, by this time the dog should know better.) Does it go without saying that women who keep talking after they’re “warned” are difficult? I’m saying it anyway.
Sessions was easily confirmed by the Republican majority, but the kerfuffle in the press caused King’s letter to go viral. Millions of people who would otherwise never have paid attention wound up reading the letter online, and Elizabeth’s Facebook Live reading of the letter received six million views. When Trevor Noah of the Daily Show asked if she’d realized in the moment how much McConnell had inadvertently helped her cause, Elizabeth dodged the question, as she often does. “What it’s done is to help us have a better democratic conversation,” she observed diplomatically.
Elizabeth Warren had never planned on becoming a politician, but here she is, kicking ass and taking names. Mother of two, grandmother of three, former Harvard law professor, she is the author of 11 books, including the 2017 best seller, This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class. She’s also one of those intensely charismatic public speakers who makes you want to go out and join up.
ELIZABETH HERRING was born in 1949 and grew up in Norman, Oklahoma. Her father sold carpet at Montgomery Ward and her mother stayed home and took care of Elizabeth and her three older brothers. They were a typical, post–World War II middle-class family; as long as nothing bad happened, they got by. Crossed fingers are not and have never been a safety net, and when Elizabeth was 12, her father had a heart attack. After he recovered, his old job had been filled. The medical bills piled up. The family station wagon was repossessed. Elizabeth’s mother, wearing her one nice dress, interviewed for a job answering phones at Sears. It paid minimum wage, but it kept the family afloat. Elizabeth babysat, waitressed, sold hand-sewn dresses, and even bred the neighbor’s elegant black poodle to her own dog and sold the puppies. The experience forced her to grow up there and then: She realized a person could work as hard as she possibly could and still never get ahead.
Elizabeth’s brothers went into the military; she was expected to find a husband. When she mentioned college, her mother said that money aside (they didn’t have any), a college education would make her less marriageable. I have no doubt her mother said this out of love, but it’s a good thing Elizabeth (then as now) persisted. She pretended to listen but went to the library and began researching colleges, and secretly sent away for admission packets.
Anyone who’s watched five minutes of Elizabeth on C-SPAN or read a day’s worth of her tweets won’t be surprised to learn that she was the star debater on her high school team. After being named “Oklahoma’s Top High School Debater,” she won a full debate scholarship (who knew that was a thing?) to George Washington University in 1965.
Culture shock followed on the heels of her arrival at Foggy Bottom. As she writes in her memoir, A Fighting Chance: “I had never been north or east of Pryor, Oklahoma. I had never seen a ballet, never been to a museum, never ridden in a taxi.” After two years, she reconnected with Jim Warren, her old high school boyfriend; when he proposed, she said yes and promptly dropped out of college.
In 1968, not every young person was turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” may have been blasting out of every car radio (see Chapter 27), but for a small-town Oklahoma girl like Elizabeth, chucking your scholarship to a prestigious university to marry literally the first guy who asked was a sensible move.
Jim Warren was an upstanding engineer. When he landed a job at NASA, the couple moved to Houston. For someone else, this might have been the Happily Ever After. But Elizabeth had a sharp, active mind and still wanted to finish college. After enrolling in the University of Houston, she graduated in 1970 with a bachelor of science degree in speech pathology. They moved to New Jersey soon afterward—again for Jim’s job. Elizabeth dutifully got pregnant, but after the baby was born, she simply wasn’t content to stay home. On some level, she knew that motherhood is not a one-size-fits-all situation. She loved her baby but was also a smart, ambitious young woman who longed to make her mark.
Elizabeth applied for and was accepted into Rutgers Law School. Difficult woman–style, she accepted her feelings of guilt and marched on anyway. After she graduated in 1978, she began lecturing at Rutgers. Then, when Jim was transferred back to Texas, she found a similar position at the University of Houston.
The law is lousy with women these days, but when Elizabeth began lecturing at the UH Law Center, she was “mistaken for a secretary, a student, the wife of a student, a lost undergrad who had wandered into the law school by mistake, and a nurse (blood drive day).” But she was too exhilarated by her life to get waylaid by stupid sexism. She had a husband, a pair of healthy, beautiful kids, and a challenging and fulfilling career. Without knowing it, Elizabeth was a Having It All trailblazer.
Her husband never complained, but it was clear as the years passed that having a working wife wasn’t what he�
��d signed on for. Even though she continued to do it all, when dinner was late, he would pointedly look at his watch. In 1978, they divorced amicably. Two years later, in a match that reflected her academic passions, she married law professor and legal historian Bruce Mann, who presumably does not look pointedly at his watch under any circumstances.
IN THE 1980S AND ’90S, Elizabeth became an expert in bankruptcy law. It was an arcane (boring) field in which legal scholars and change makers had little interest. Common wisdom held that only deadbeats who blew their paychecks on blow, strippers, and muscle cars were forced to declare bankruptcy. Elizabeth had other ideas, formed in her childhood, that made her think maybe things weren’t always that cut and dried. She launched an investigation into who, exactly, benefited from bankruptcy protection laws. She and her team interviewed bankruptcy court judges, attorneys, and debtors to discover, lo and behold, that many people who went bankrupt had jobs, sometimes two, and tried to pay their bills on time. She proved what we know today to be true: People in the middle class are all one job loss, divorce, or catastrophic illness away from bankruptcy.
In 1995, Elizabeth took a position lecturing at Harvard Law. The same year she advised the National Bankruptcy Review Commission, working to fight legislation restricting bankruptcy protection for consumers. She wrote extensively about income equality and the threat of predatory lending, long before it was on the national radar. She became the avowed enemy of the protective laws enjoyed by big banks and large financial institutions that allow them to squeeze middle-class families to improve their profit margin.