Behind the Mask

by Matthew Dennison

  Vita’s upbringing had taught her the egotism of love. She learned too an idea of the selfishness of sexual gratification, particularly male sexual gratification. Jack could be excused on grounds of his youth. Not so Campbell. Within Vita’s family circle were examples of men behaving badly. The Sackville succession case had inevitably drawn attention to the different consequences for Vita’s grandfather and Pepita of their illicit love. Lord Sackville, as part-time lover, received unlimited sexual access and devotion: in provincial nineteenth-century Spain, Pepita forfeited respectability and her dancing career. She made herself ridiculous by adopting the title ‘Countess West’, and she died giving birth to the seventh of Lord Sackville’s children. Despite her best efforts, she failed to shield those children from the implications of their illegitimacy. In the case of Vita’s parents, Lionel does not appear to have worried over explanations for Victoria’s sexual withdrawal; forgotten were the ecstasy of first infatuation, her exclamations of delirium, his tender lover’s, ‘Was it nice, Vicky?’70 Instead Lionel sought consolation elsewhere. To Victoria’s evident distress, he allowed his emotions to keep pace with his libido. In time Lionel and Victoria’s physical separation eroded their relationship entirely.

  Vita was young when she discovered that Knole could never belong to her. A male entail promised house and estate instead to her cousin Eddy, son of Lionel’s brother Charles. Nine years younger than Vita and a gifted pianist from an early age, Eddy was in every way her inferior in fighting and war games and cricket and boyish bluster. If Vita was hardy and masculine, Eddy was soft and girlish (and afterwards homosexual). The cruelty of this reversal was not lost on Vita. ‘I used to hate Eddy when he was a baby and I wasn’t much more, because he would have Knole,’ she explained to Harold in 1912.71 Gender was an accident of birth, but maleness – even Eddy’s unconvincing, panstick-and-rouged, velvet-clad maleness – was rewarded. ‘Knole is denied to me for ever, through a “technical fault over which we have no control”, as they say on the radio,’ she wrote.72

  As with inheritance, Vita decided that in relationships the male role was that of taking, not giving: an unthinking assumption of the upper hand. It was a role she herself would play. In her novel All Passion Spent, Vita’s octogenarian heroine Lady Slane questions a life that has been devoted to her husband: ‘She was, after all, a woman … Was there, after all, some foundation for the prevalent belief that woman should minister to man? … Was there something beautiful, something active, something creative even, in her apparent submission to Henry?’73 Certainly Vita thought at length on the contrasting roles of men and women. For the most part she was clear about her answers to such questions: she was incapable of discerning the beauty of submission. She devised a solution to suit herself. As with much in her life, her ‘feminism’ was self-serving. It consisted of a refusal to compromise anything touching her self-identity. That identity, as we have seen, embraced both masculine and feminine.

  Sackville history included examples of formidable women, independent-minded and financially independent. Chief among them was the seventeenth-century matriarch Lady Anne Clifford. In 1923, Vita edited Lady Anne’s diary for publication. Occasionally she likened herself to her indomitable forebear. Among other things, Lady Anne shared Vita’s taste for solitude: ‘though I kept my chamber altogether yet methinks the time is not so tedious to me as when I used to be abroad’.74 But the forebears who appealed to Vita as a child were not women like Lady Anne; rather, they were associated with tales of cavalier adventure and derring-do. In the history Vita loved, it was men who played the hero’s part. Unconsciously or otherwise, she determined to take the same part, and Vita was often selfish in her relationships, not only with her lovers but within her family too. She excused it as her ‘happy-go-lucky … everything-will-turn-out-right-if-you-don’t-fuss-about-it’ nature: in practice it meant she left the fussing – and the fallout – to other people.75 Her life in retrospect is a wholesale rejection of the idea that sexual gratification exists as a masculine prerogative. Twice she turned down proposals of marriage from a young man who wooed her with a Christmas present of a bear cub; ‘He has the worst temper of anyone I know. He is cruel,’ she wrote of Ivan Hay.76 Correctly she estimated the unlikelihood of his indulging her need for dominance. In a rare instance of humour she christened the bear cub ‘Ivan the Terrible’. With Rosamund she was photographed for an illustrated paper, walking baby Ivan in the gardens at Knole. The paper captioned its photograph ‘Beauty and the Bear’.77 Irritated by Vita’s debutante success, from which she felt herself excluded, and laconic in her sarcasm, Violet Keppel commented that ‘bears had taken the place of rabbits’.78

  A century ago, Vita’s rejection of conventional gender roles in sex was more controversial than it is today. Like much in her life, she attempted to resolve the issue through writing. She created male protagonists who deliberately deny their sexual instincts and in this way forfeit the aggressor’s role, or, like Calladine in Grey Wethers, have their sex stripped from them by the author: ‘Mr Calladine was a gentleman, – she couldn’t call him a man, no, but a gentleman he certainly was, and she was even a little overawed by his gentility.’79 The private life of Sir Walter Mortibois in The Easter Party for example, is dominated by his suppression of his sexual appetite and his determination that his marriage to Rose remains platonic, uncompromised by love or desire. ‘A man isn’t born with wife and children, and if he acquires them he has only himself to blame,’ Arthur Lomax tells readers of Seducers in Ecuador. Explaining the particular outlook of Lester Dale in Grand Canyon, Vita wrote: ‘As for women … I took myself off whenever they threatened to interfere with me. If a woman began to attract me, even if the poor soul remained quite unaware of it, it constituted interference. It was all part of my settled policy.’80 The men in question are guilty of misogyny, but it is they, not the women associated with them, who in Vita’s narratives are the ultimate victims.

  Although Vita arrived at this philosophy over time – she may have been influenced by Otto Weininger’s equation of excessive intellectualism in men with insincerity, which she read in 1918 – there were implications for Harold Nicolson from the outset. In 1910, her homosexuality prevented her from thinking of Harold in ‘that way’. Harold’s apparent lack of vigorous physical desire for her, alongside her conviction that marriage was unavoidable, were factors that eventually recommended him to her. It soothed the wounds this daughter of Knole sustained as a result of her sex; it suggested a husband who was foremost a ‘playmate’ and a ‘companion’. ‘You and I are not grown-up,’ she wrote to Harold in 1912. ‘Nor ever will be.’81 This ‘childishness’, with its implied sexlessness, was the very prescription that would preserve their marriage long term. They were child-like together: they would pursue more ‘adult’ diversions separately, in time by mutual consent.

  The Masque of Shakespeare is one of numerous instances of role play which characterised for Vita the years preceding her marriage. She dressed up; she wrote herself into novels and plays; she sat for painters and photographers. She was not always aware of her motivation. She was experimenting with self-discovery, trying on and taking off a series of masks, adopting personae, as she would for decades to come. Implicit in her fantasy life was a rejection of that powerlessness which she saw as part and parcel of a woman’s conventional existence. She craved Knole; she would become a writer. Both were ‘masculine’ impulses, just as the writers she admired, and those Sackville heroes, were male. In its uncompromisingness, the act of self-creation was equally male.

  On 13 February 1910, Vita noted in her diary the first of seven sittings with fashionable Hungarian-born society portraitist, Philip de László. Today that portrait hangs in the Library at Sissinghurst Castle. Vita wears a large hat and furs. In this instance it was her mother’s idea. Artist and sitter had met before: at lunch with Seery in the rue Laffitte in May of the previous year, and in October 1908, when de László visited Knole to paint from photographs a portrait of the
recently deceased Lord Sackville. Vita recorded then: ‘I showed him the show rooms and he made me strike attitudes! saying that he would like to paint me in a Velasquez style!’82 Victoria had other ideas. The costume she chose for Vita consisted of a high-necked white blouse with a waterfall of ruffles and a black hat decorated with a large brooch. It was presumably not her intention that Vita should suggest a feminine Edwardian version of those portraits of Sackville cavaliers which lined Knole’s walls; she was equally unaware of the resemblance to Vita’s Chatterton costume. The palette of black, white and red emphasised the connection between de László’s image and family portraits by Larkin and Cornelius de Neve. Apparently this visual affinity was lost on Vita too. She wrote simply that ‘the picture is finished and, I think, good: anyway it is magnificently painted’.83 She changed her mind when she inherited the portrait after Victoria’s death. In the altered climate of the 1930s, she regarded it as ‘too smart’ and banished it to one of Sissinghurst’s attics.84 By then Vita had achieved sufficient sexual autonomy no longer to require this glossy objectification as limpid-eyed ingénue.

  De László’s Vita is a young woman at a crossroads. Her clothes suggest the riches and excess of upper-class Edwardian England, but look backwards to a history of boisterous swagger that is bloodier, fiercer, less languorous. Her expression combines pride and wistfulness, conviction and uncertainty. The heaviness of her coat and hat, the lack of colour, the absence of ornaments save the red amber necklace, serve to throw into relief her slender femininity. Victoria surely intended Vita’s portrait, painted in the year of her first season, as a statement of her marriageability. Unsurprisingly, her daughter appears as if she is play-acting.

  Vita described the pneumonia she contracted that summer as ‘heaven sent’.85 With Victoria she retreated to the South of France, to a large white villa, the château Malet, near Monte Carlo, where she remained from November until April the following year. Ever the social opportunist, Victoria took her for tea with Napoleon III’s widow, the Empress Eugénie. Among guests at château Malet during Vita’s convalescence were Rosamund Grosvenor, Violet Keppel, Orazio Pucci and Harold Nicolson. Each of them was in love with Vita; increasingly each was aware of his or her conflicting claims on her affection. It was not the restful interlude doctors had prescribed, but Vita enjoyed the distance between herself and the debutante world of ‘the little dancing things’; enjoyed too the tributes of those varied lovers whose suits she juggled with a degree of adroitness. She was instinctively proprietorial. The knowledge that one day she would lose Knole had long ago stimulated a strong possessive streak in Vita, and she does not appear to have questioned her right to the simultaneous admiration of Rosamund, Violet, Pucci and Harold.

  In January, Violet wrote in need of reassurance: ‘Do you know that you have ceased to be a reality for me? You are a mirage that recedes to the degree that one approaches it.’86 Her letters were alternately loving and caustic, as she struggled to provoke a reaction in Vita. Violet was among Vita’s last visitors in France and presented her with a ruby she had bought in Ceylon. Pucci took the opportunity to propose again. Again Vita turned him down. By contrast, in January 1911, Harold’s departure from château Malet startled Vita on account of his apparent lack of regret. His behaviour provoked her in a way that neither Violet’s nor Pucci’s had. It was a revelatory response, her feelings strikingly at odds with Harold’s. Vita was approaching a point where she could no longer disguise from herself the necessity of reaching a decision about her future; she was approaching a point where that decision would make itself. It frightened her nevertheless. At intervals over the next eighteen months she would appear to long for and to fear marriage to Harold, to take control of the situation and to relinquish it. ‘I’m going to let everything be for a bit. Perhaps something will happen!!’ she wrote at a moment of particular hesitancy.87 To Harold himself, she pleaded: ‘I am only twenty.’88 Youth would be her excuse. It was only part of the story.

  As in most aspects of Vita’s emotional life, nothing was clear cut. With hindsight, knowing what we do of the mature Vita’s sexual tastes, it is easy to assume that she must have known her true course. Such an assumption would be mistaken. Vita’s self-knowledge was patchy. She understood herself as Cranfield Sackville. Already, convinced of her writer’s vocation, she understood herself as Chatterton: ‘A poet’s work is art, and art is beauty,/ And beauty goodness.’89 Behind these masks and this oversimplified moral scheme lay uncertainty. Rosamund wrote to her in 1912 of their relationship, ‘I like to think that “Men may come and men may go, but I go on for ever”, which is what it amounts to, isn’t it?’90 Short-term intimacy notwithstanding, Rosamund too was mistaken. To Vita, her dilemma was less simple, its solution less restrictive: Rosamund’s love was not enough. At moments she appeared overwhelmed by the scale of her confusion. She turned to Victoria for advice: she had no idea what it was she wanted. As throughout her life, Vita’s moods oscillated regularly – prone, as she would describe them in an early poem, to ‘vary with each variable day’.91

  It was a situation outside Victoria’s ken. Victoria was snobbish, materialistic and egotistical: twenty years earlier, her choice had been confined to selecting between rich, titled, adoring male suitors. By the end of 1911 Vita acknowledged her hope that Harold would propose to her. Nevertheless, the prospect inspired diffidence and scepticism, a surprising response given the extent of her romantic conquests.

  To Victoria, Vita confided her desire to exist alone in a tower with her books, safe within an imaginary haven: ‘In her immature philosophy, the first tenet was to shut yourself away in a stony fortress and then to consider what system of bluff would best defend you against the importunities of the world,’ as she later wrote of one of her fictional heroines.92 Far from choosing between loving men and loving women – Harold on the one hand, Rosamund and Violet on the other – Vita seemed to suggest rejecting both. In her uncertainty, wrestling with what she came to describe as ‘this intricate I’,93 she preferred solitude, reading, writing, a ‘system of bluff’. She had not wondered, as she would, whether books encouraged her to ‘read life at second hand … content and withdrawn for a little hour from the dangers and fears’.94 Like St Teresa in The Eagle and the Dove, she found in books security and fulfilment. ‘So completely was I overmastered by this passion, that I thought I could never be happy without a book,’ Vita quotes Teresa as saying.95 In the case of both women, it was a statement of escape. At Sissinghurst in middle age, in her book-lined writing room in its red-brick Tudor tower, Vita would make good this aspiration; she leavened her solitude then with multiple affairs.

  There were towers at Knole, too. In Bouchier’s Tower, in Victoria’s bedroom, Vita struggled to make sense of the tangle she had inadvertently woven round herself. Nervously her fingers moved among her mother’s jewels as she talked, trying things on, setting things down. Most of all, Vita wanted to retreat to the safety of this great house, which she regarded both as friend and lover. In ‘Night’, the poem she dedicated to Harold, she celebrated her love for the country roundabout Knole: ‘My Saxon weald! … the very heart of me …/ Always returns and finds its inward peace,/ Its swing of truth, its measure of restraint,/ Here among meadows, orchards, lanes, and shaws.’96 Harold’s very landlessness added to his attractions. Unlike Lord Granby, Lord Lascelles or Pucci, Harold had no reason for taking Vita from Knole and the Weald of Kent either physically or emotionally. Knole’s pull was still stronger than Harold’s, for Knole was a known quantity: its secrets were Vita’s secrets. Harold was sensible enough not to fight it. Indeed he cultivated an admiration for Knole that he may not consistently have felt. ‘My family are in a perfect glow of enthusiasm about Knole,’ he told Vita tactfully in 1913.97

  On the morning of 18 January 1912, Vita received a letter from her mother in London with news of Seery’s death. Vita’s first reaction was one of panic. That evening, at a ball at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, she was certain that Harold would
propose to her. In six days’ time, he was due to depart for Constantinople. Despite her irresolution, Vita knew that she wanted the assurance of Harold’s proposal: it was imperative that mourning not prevent her attendance. Victoria understood. Vita wore a new dress and Harold asked her to marry him.

  They had spent the evening mostly apart. Alone on the second floor of the great Elizabethan treasure house, sitting on travelling trunks on a landing, Vita and Harold faced one another at midnight. Suddenly Vita’s ‘only idea was to prevent him from speaking’.98 She failed. Instead she asked Harold to wait a year, a compromise indicative of her state of mind. Harold did not kiss her and Vita avoided his eye. His uncertainty matched her own. One by one, Harold tore the buttons from his white gloves. In her fictional account of the scene in Marian Strangways, which differs from her diary account, Vita wrote: ‘He said, “I love you, I love you!” And all she could think was “Now I’m in for it”, and all she could say was, “Don’t, oh don’t”; and she gave him her hand, and he almost crushed it.’99 The spirit of that description is true to Vita’s feelings. She told Harold that she did not love him. In her diary she told herself all sorts of things. She tried to comfort herself: ‘at the bottom of my heart I know I’ll marry him’. Later her behaviour puzzled her, her refusal to commit herself one way or the other. ‘I don’t want to lose him, at least not yet. I am selfish and despise myself for it.’100 In Vita’s diary and in the fictionalised version of Marian Strangways, this stilted scene reminds us of the relative naivety of both partners. Uncertainty and guilty secrets placed each of them on the edge of an abyss. That knowledge robbed the moment of romance, of laughter or rejoicing.