Behind the Mask

by Matthew Dennison

  Lionel and Victoria had in common their devotion to Knole and to Vita: even that was at variance, different in origin, form and expression. A selfish and romantically uncomplicated man, Lionel was incapable of interpreting Victoria’s sexual withdrawal other than as a corresponding emotional withdrawal, so he sought satisfaction elsewhere. In transferring his desire he ended up transferring his affection. Victoria expended her energy on Knole and, with increasing frequency, on scenes of the sort guaranteed to drive Lionel further away. Unwitting it may have been, but Victoria’s first blind steps along the road to bitterness and disillusion were taken deliberately.

  Vita watched her and saw what she regarded as her mother’s ‘mistake’. It did not occur to her that Victoria’s behaviour was a cri de coeur. She had not read in her mother’s diary her desperate desire for warmth; she suspected nothing then of her frustration at the coldness first of Lord Sackville, then Lionel and even Vita herself, with her tendency to keep her feelings secret and resist confidences. Vita’s solution, explored through fiction, was a world in which partners simply deceived one another, concealing their true emotions beneath a smiling veneer, their motives self-protection and survival, the result a semblance of marriage in appearance only: legitimate mendacity in the interests of the greater happiness. Behind the Mask is among the most aptly titled of her books. ‘Is there anyone without the mask?’ she asks.145 It was a pragmatic, cynical approach, and undesirable in a girl of eighteen on the brink of adulthood. She saw it very clearly: she was never wholly disabused of her theory. ‘Men have two natures,’ she wrote later, ‘and one of them they keep concealed.’146 At another level, her conviction that each of us presents to the world a mask which conceals as much as it reveals explained the impossibility of ever fully knowing anyone but ourselves, another theme she would explore in her fiction. ‘When you see a person, a body, marvellous casket and mask of secrets, what do you think?’ she asked in Heritage.147

  Unsurprisingly, Victoria proved incapable of wearing any sort of mask. As her relationship with Lionel worsened, she took up with Seery instead. As an added distraction, she opened a shop on South Audley Street, selling lampshades, waste-paper baskets, boxes, blotters and ashtrays decorated with epigrams and mottoes, including her favourite: ‘A camel can go for nine days without water, but who wants to be a camel?’ She called the shop Spealls, an anagram of the name of its first manageress, and harried Vita to think up similar mottoes and short verses; Vita failed. Spealls enabled Victoria to visit London frequently. Her relationship with Seery grew closer; it was peppered with rows and reconciliations. Seery resented Spealls and its call on Victoria’s time; the shop provided further grounds for differences. Then, sporadically, Seery threatened to cut Victoria out of his will. To both of them this constant negotiation and renegotiation of the terms of their relationship was the breath of life. Even as a teenager, such tempestuousness appalled Vita. After witnessing a particularly acrimonious quarrel between Seery and her mother on 22 March 1910, Vita wrote: ‘I thought they would quarrel for good, but he became apologetic and they have half patched it up, though it can’t ever be as before. It was all very unpleasant, and they called each other names and I hated it.’148

  For Victoria, such incidents were a game, a form of self-affirmation. They proved her continuing ability to dominate a man completely. With Seery in the role of cavaliere servente, there was no unwelcome complication of sex. Vita’s own self-affirmation would take different forms, though, like Victoria, her ‘Spanish’ side revelled in the world of feelings: like the narrator of Heritage, ‘Spanish’ Vita believed that ‘the vitality of human beings is to be judged … by the force of their emotion’.149 In the decades to come, her own emotions, alongside her attitude to sex, would give rise to numberless complications.

  PART II

  Challenge

  ‘Oh, what an awful word!’ said Juliet, her spirits suddenly reasserting themselves. ‘Wedlock! It makes me feel as though I had chains round my wrists and ankles, and a great dragging load of wood. Wed-lock! Locked-in!’

  V. Sackville-West, The Easter Party, 1953

  ‘I SHALL NEVER forget it,’ Vita recorded of The Masque of Shakespeare, staged in the park at Knole on the afternoon of 2 July 1910. In a costume loaned to her by Ellen Terry, Vita took the part of Portia from The Merchant of Venice. Terry herself had worn the costume in 1875, voluminous robes of red velvet. It was Portia’s disguise as the ‘young doctor of Rome’, a celebrated instance of Shakespearean cross-dressing.

  Vita was photographed and painted in her borrowed robes. She was eighteen and had grown into a beauty. ‘The knobs and knuckles had disappeared. She was tall and graceful. The profound hereditary Sackville eyes were as pools from which the morning mist had lifted. A peach might have envied her complexion.’1 Victoria drew attention to the loveliness of Vita’s skin and her eyes, ‘with their double curtain of long lashes’.2 Shyness appeared as aloofness: with ‘her sleek brown head, her glowing skin, her disdainful poise’, she resembled Ruth Pennistan in Heritage.3 Thanks to the Sackville succession case in February, Vita also possessed, in attractive measure, a degree of notoriety; newspaper reports had emphasised her connection to Knole, which possessed a glamour of its own. With her schooldays at Miss Woolff’s behind her, Vita would find that she had graduated from inspiring schoolgirl crushes to provoking a similar response in the young men she encountered. At eighteen, there was a soft and gentle quality to Vita’s beauty. Later this softness gave way to something more florid: a harder, bolder, more masculine appearance, ‘all rather heroic and over life-size; all on a big scale; no feminine charm at all’, as she herself described one of her fictional alter egos.4 The shift would reflect a change in her attitudes. For the moment, youthful curiosity had yet to be overwhelmed by the certainties of middle age.

  Clare Atwood’s portrait of Vita as Portia, which today hangs in Ellen Terry’s former home of Smallhythe Place, suggests androgyny: Vita as a romantic Italian youth. Set against a medieval cityscape, she appears as she would have wished: as she described herself three years later, ‘essentially primitive; and not 1913, but 1470; and not “modern”’.5 For all its self-consciousness, it is a picture of a sitter without vanity, as if she disregarded her own looks. Victoria considered that a true assessment: she claimed that Vita was not in the least conceited. Unlike her mother, Vita at eighteen was not interested in feminine wiles; her interests lay elsewhere. Two years previously, in Le Masque de Fer, she had dressed up as the Man in the Iron Mask; a year ago, in her verse drama about doomed poet Thomas Chatterton, she was Chatterton himself, forger and Romantic hero, martyr to the written word. She wore a costume of breeches, white stockings, buckled shoes and a white shirt, which her maid Emily made for her in secret. Each time she played the part, learnt by heart and performed in an attic at Knole to an audience of abandoned trunks and cast-off furnishings, she reduced herself to tears: ‘Earth has been my hell,/ Another world must surely be my heaven.’6 Even at their most vulnerable, the men Vita chose for her alter egos were heroic. Her posturing arose from other impulses than vanity, but the element of self-association was potent. ‘Each time I burnt Chatterton’s manuscripts in the candle I felt I was burning my own,’ she remembered; ‘each time I died most uncomfortably on the oak settle, it was not only Chatterton but I myself who died.’7

  On a rainy July day in 1910, in the guise of Portia masquerading as a lawyer in order to contrive her own happy ending, Vita continued that narrative of heroism and wish fulfilment she had begun in childhood – as Sir Redvers Buller, bold in khaki amid Knole’s flowerbeds, and as Cranfield Sackville in The King’s Secret, writing, always writing. This was Vita’s other life, the life of her imagination. In imagination, every Sackville was a conquering hero and each, as she described them in 1922, ‘the prototype of his age’;8 Vita was their latest incarnation. Her life would retain this element of fantasy. Repeatedly in her fiction she celebrated a male version of herself, because she associated maleness wi
th control, possession, inheritance, fulfilment and love – as she invested ‘the bull’ in her poem of the same name, the ability to ‘stand four-square and lordly scan/ His grass, his calves, his willing cows,/ Male, arrogant, alone’.9 She is Julian in Challenge, buoyant with love for Eve; Peregrine Chase in The Heir, inheriting, and refusing to give up, the Tudor manor house of Blackboys; Sebastian in The Edwardians, handsome, fêted, secretive, heir to a fictional Knole; Nicholas Lambarde in her unpublished story ‘The Poet’, certain of his writer’s vocation, author of ‘a contemplative poem on solitude’ as Vita would be: ‘The only important thing in the world to him was poetry.’10 Most of all, and most revealingly, she is aspects of Miles Vane-Merrick in Family History. His house is a castle in Kent, based on Vita’s future home of Sissinghurst; his interests include poetry, farming and philosophy; his emotional requirements are specific and unyielding: ‘He wanted to retain his individuality, his activity, his time-table. He wanted to lead his own life, parallel with the life of love, separate, independent.’11 For Miles, everything has its allotted place. His life is docketed, divided into compartments, but he relinquishes nothing. From early in her romantic career, the same idea appealed to Vita. She would prove herself mostly skilful at maintaining her independence, her ‘separateness’ from the life of love. Like Julian in Challenge, she learned to put things – people – aside until she wanted them: ‘not forgotten, not faded … but merely put aside, laid away like winter garments in summer weather’.12

  In the neverlands of her fiction and drama, Vita changed her sex as a means of taking control and a preliminary to action. It was a simple conceit. She continually rewrote her own history and, in swapping her sex, perfected what she regarded as imperfections. It enabled her for an instant to bypass those impediments to inheriting Knole which she could never overcome; it enabled her to love as she wished, unconstrained by social expectation; as Cranfield, Chatterton and Portia, using language with a lawyer’s skill, she staked her claim to be a writer in the face of parental resistance. The Vita of her books was never dispossessed and never without love: always the cynosure, never the pariah; always autonomous. In Seducers in Ecuador, the unreliable Miss Whitaker shares Vita’s fantasy: ‘her own stories were marvellously coming true. Indeed, to her, they were always true; what else was worthwhile? But that the truth of fact should corroborate the truth of imagination! Her heart beat.’13

  In fiction, imagination and reality merged: it was a mission statement for Vita. Even Shakespeare forced her into men’s clothing. She did not resist. Her desire to share in all the possibilities and perquisites of a man’s life shaped her. If, as she suggested, her role, like her forebears’, was to be the ‘prototype’ of the age, it is appropriate that this woman who was born into the smug certainties of aristocratic Victorian England, and who witnessed their collapse in the aftermath of the First World War, should in her life embrace areas of confusion and uncertainty. Added to which, she enjoyed dressing up. Events like the Masque, which included several of her friends, were a high point in that debutante life she decried as ‘distasteful and unsuccessful’. Deep down Vita’s real reservation, as at Miss Woolff’s, arose from her fear of not being liked.

  The Masque was a fundraising exercise. A theatrical performance showcasing many of Shakespeare’s best-known characters, it was intended, as the programme notes explained, to benefit ‘the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Fund, which is established to promote the erection and endowment of a Tercentenary Memorial to Shakespeare to take the form of a National Repository Theatre’. Vita had attended her first rehearsal at Apsley House on 10 June. Also taking part were Rosamund Grosvenor and Vita’s friend Irene Lawley, along with Lionel’s current mistress Olive Rubens, as well as professionals including Ellen Terry. A London performance on 30 June was abandoned midway because of rain. Three days later it rained at Knole, too, ‘torrents, but cleared up and we were able to finish it’.14

  In her diary, Vita makes no comment on her role. She lists rehearsal times and weather conditions for the outdoor performances; she records the loan of Terry’s costume. She does not reflect on Portia’s emotional dilemma – or her own. In Shakespeare’s Venetian comedy, Portia is the wealthy young woman whom suitors squabble over. Her father has set a riddle to determine the choice; her own choice is set on Bassanio. ‘The lottery of my destiny/ Bars me the right of voluntary choosing,’ Portia tells the Prince of Morocco. In the summer of 1910, Vita’s case appeared quite different. She was surrounded by choices. She understood her parents’ hopes for her, but estimated correctly that they would allow her to make up her own mind. To Victoria, Lionel wrote, ‘I see that it’s no good trying to force her.’15 To Vita, when the time came to choose between suitors, he made it ‘clear he had other dreams’. Even in his disappointment, Vita wrote, he was ‘sweet’.16

  Rosamund Grosvenor was still in love with Vita; only Vita’s engagement would painfully sever their tie. There was Violet Keppel, too, who had symbolically bound Vita to her with the gift of the Doge’s ring. At the end of October, departing for Ceylon with her mother in the aftermath of the death of Edward VII, Violet kissed Vita goodbye with all the (considerable) passion she could muster; Vita was disturbed by her passion and by her urgency. Violet wrote her love letters: ‘I love you, Vita, because you never gave me back my ring.’17 Later Violet wrote asking Vita not to get married before her return.

  Her letter was prescient. On 29 June, only four days before the Masque, Vita met the man she would marry. The occasion was a dinner party before a trip to Conan Doyle’s The Speckled Band at the Adelphi Theatre. The young man was subsequently invited to Knole for the Masque. With Rosamund and a small party, he stayed for the weekend. Victoria took the chance to show him over the house. Vita felt a degree of curiosity, no more. On 29 June, the first words she had heard the young man utter were ‘What fun!’. She liked at once ‘his irrepressible brown curls, his laughing eyes, his charming smile’:18 these were not necessarily lover-like attributes. He appeared boyish and light-hearted. These, too, were not lover-like traits but they appealed to Vita – even as they contrasted with the vigorous, troubadour quality that distinguished the men she herself impersonated in her writing and her daydreams. It was not love at first sight when Vita met Harold Nicolson, though she would later recycle the scene in Family History: ‘Miles came to fetch [Evelyn]. He was especially gay. What fun, he said in his most boyish way.’19

  In fact, Vita wrote, it was not until three years later, in the spring of 1913, that ‘something snapped, and I loved Harold from that day on’.20 In her diary, she contradicts herself: she decided that she loved Harold as soon as he had kissed her. That was September 1912. Harold’s kiss took him more than two years. In his defence, he was away for much of that period: in Madrid until September 1911, thereafter in Constantinople, where he served as a secretary at the British embassy. In the meantime for Vita there was Rosamund; a Florentine marquess called Orazio Pucci, who had fallen in love with her in Italy in 1909 and the following year trailed her halfway across Europe, even to Knole; and, in Pucci’s footsteps, a nameless artist encountered on a boat trip on Lake Como, whom Vita rejected lightly as ‘second coup de foudre!!!’.21 With beauty came the brittleness and casual unkindness of one growing rapidly accustomed to being pursued. On and off during that summer of 1910, Harold and Vita met, often at Victoria’s invitation at Knole. In November, in her first surviving letter to Harold, Vita asked him to accompany her to dinner and then a dance. Her letter was deliberately light in tone. She told Harold that she was not alone: Rosamund was with her, and one of Harold’s colleagues from the Foreign Office. Harold could not dance and disliked it as a pastime. He would learn that Vita was a poor dancer too.

  Clearly, unlike Portia, Vita’s ‘destiny’ would not deny her ‘voluntary choosing’. Nevertheless, there were similarities as well as differences between the women’s predicaments. Like Portia, Vita too was squabbled over. Her own actions served to complicate rather than to sim
plify those squabbles and, at times, as we shall see, she actively encouraged jealousies among her lovers. The child who had spent so much time on her own, uncertain of her parents’ love, grew up to crave close, intense, intimate connections and, often, to need more than one person’s love at a time. Her parents intended Vita to make ‘a great match with a great title’. Vita balked; but her interlude as a debutante was a busy one, with four balls a week and lunch parties daily.

  The young men Vita met did not attract her. She dismissed them disparagingly as ‘little dancing things in ballrooms’, ‘the little silly pink and whites’.22 Even dancing frequently left her unmoved: ‘All the dance tunes sounded much the same … Faintly lascivious, faintly cacophonous; a young man’s arm round one, a young man’s body surprisingly close, his breath on one’s hair, and yet a disharmony between oneself and him, or, at most, a fictitious temporary closeness which tumbled to pieces as soon as the music stopped.’23 She made an exception for the clever Patrick Shaw-Stewart (and he was ‘so ugly’ that she dressed him up in her mind ‘in Louis XI clothes’24 but omitted to think of him romantically) and for Lady Desborough’s tall son Julian Grenfell. Grenfell was ‘a Soul’, part of a pre-war set of thoughtful, poetic, politically minded aristocrats, and Vita liked Souls: ‘They are amusing and easy and not heavy to talk to.’25

  Given Vita’s literary aspirations, Lionel considered it a distinct, if troubling, possibility that she would marry a Soul. (Handsome Edward Horner, another Soul, was also attentive.) In the event Julian Grenfell may have been put off by his mother; Lady Desborough’s ambivalence is clear in a letter she wrote after Vita’s marriage to Harold. She reported that Vita had become ‘so charming, so pretty and so clean! and quite tidy, and not a bit of a prig or a bore’.26 Her tone of surprise indicates her previous assessment. For her part, Vita explained simply that, until she married Harold, she had ‘scarcely understood the meaning of being young’.27 Grenfell himself, like several of Vita’s would-be suitors including Edward Horner and Patrick Shaw-Stewart, died in the First World War. Before that he was caught in a downstairs cloakroom with Violet Keppel.