Behind the Mask

by Matthew Dennison

  Despite her ‘muddles’, Vita had done her best to make good her return to ‘my house, my garden, my fields, and Harold’ following her ‘scarlet adventure’. She had published Orchard and Vineyard, with its poems about her relationship with Violet, including ‘Bitterness’, in which a lover is reluctantly ‘rescued’ from his mistress: ‘Let your heart heal. Forget!/ She was your danger and your evil spirit’;96 she had published The Dragon in Shallow Waters, with its investigation of her own double nature and its dedication to Violet. Then she appeared to turn her back on rebellion. She wrote the history of Knole, the house she longed to call ‘mine’, and followed it with an edition of Lady Anne Clifford’s diary; she wrote a love story, The Heir, about the joy of inheritance, and elevated the ecstasy of possession above sexual ecstasy: ‘He suddenly stretched out his hands and passionately laid them, palms flattened, against the bricks.’97

  In both subject and style, Vita’s books proclaimed her return to the fold. Seven poems from Orchard and Vineyard were included in the fifth and final volume of Georgian Poetry, published in November 1922. They confirmed Vita’s aesthetic credentials as those of a traditionalist and a conservative. When, the following year, her novel Grey Wethers appeared, with its rebellious heroine Clare Warrener who, ‘like a hobbled colt … wanted to kick herself free’ of conventional expectations,98 no one but Harold would have understood Clare’s struggle between acceptable love, represented by Calladine, and unacceptable love, in the person of Lovel, as an image of Vita’s own life so recently at a crossroads. Only Harold knew that Vita was simultaneously Clare and Lovel and that each was characterised by incompleteness. He told Vita that ex-Viceroy Lord Curzon had described Grey Wethers as ‘a magnificent book. The descriptions of the downs are as fine as any in the language. Such power! Such power! Not a pleasant book of course! But what English!’99 Husband and wife avoided talking about the novel’s ending, when Clare abandons her husband for her lover. For it is Clare, not Lovel, who suggests escape: ‘“We had better go,” she said, inviting him.’100

  ‘It’s no use writing novels which are only the observations of life,’ Harold had told Vita at the height of her unhappiness in September 1921, ‘the point is to write books which are the explanation of life.’101 Like The Dragon in Shallow Waters, and so much of her writing, Grey Wethers endeavoured to explain Vita to herself. It was not necessarily what Harold had intended, and confirmed his anxiety about Vita’s weakness for striking heroic attitudes: ‘No poet is a hero to himself (except my Vita who is a heroine to everyone including her own darling self).’102 Uniquely Harold recognised the nature of Vita’s inner struggle. With his dislike of confrontation, he mostly veered away from addressing the issue, save occasionally in his letters. Instead, between 1921 and 1924, he concentrated on his own writing. He wrote a novel, Sweet Waters, about diplomatic life in pre-war Constantinople; in the character of Eirene, it included a loose fictional sketch of Vita. He also wrote a clutch of literary biographies (of the poets Verlaine, Tennyson and Byron). He did so without as yet any intention of resigning from the Foreign Office.

  In Harold’s absences, and missing Violet, Vita spent time with her mother. The final unravelling of Lionel and Victoria’s marriage was protracted and painful. For all his surface courtesy, Lionel did little to mitigate Victoria’s unhappiness at his lost love. In November 1917, Victoria had discovered that Lionel had removed from his room her two portraits, which had hung there since 1889. She interpreted their removal correctly as symbolic and began to look about for an alternative house of her own.

  She found the answer in a large townhouse in Sussex Square in Brighton. ‘It was a huge house,’ Vita remembered, ‘a great echoing mausoleum of a house, with vast naked staircases and still vaster drawing rooms, large enough to accommodate four generations of descendants.’103 Victoria was enchanted. Greedily she acquired the two neighbouring houses, both of equal size, and set about remodelling the charmless pile. The process was a costly one – airily Victoria estimated she had spent something in excess of £50,000 – but the result was a house of twenty-four bedrooms which, she explained to Vita, would make an ideal holiday house for Ben and Nigel. Vita was forced to acknowledge that there was something ‘ripping’ about the sheer scale of her mother’s folly. Her own room, decorated in 1918, was papered in metallic emerald green, with sapphire blue doors and curtains, furniture painted the same bright blue and an apricot ceiling, a vigorous scheme inspired by the Ballets Russes settings of Léon Bakst, designer of Scheherazade. It was a far cry from the ‘flowers, chintz and Jacobean furniture’ of Long Barn, a dramatic and theatrical space closer to Violet’s sultry eroticism than Vita’s life of elkhounds and climbing roses; a last exercise in the decorative artifice of Vita’s rooms at Knole and Hill Street in the years before her marriage and a window on to something unresolved in Vita.

  Despite her expenditure and its size, Victoria meant at first to use the Brighton house only as a bolt hole. She took no more furniture from Knole than the bare minimum, transported in seven lorries. Events in April 1919, however, forced her hand. Victoria returned to Knole in the early evening. She went into the garden looking for Lionel, and discovered him with his mistress Olive Rubens. They were ‘under one of the tulip trees, O and L in each other’s arms and kissing!! Just like any soldier and his girl in the park. I got away as quick as I could and tore to the sycamore seat.’ The sight haunted her; she described it as an ‘evil day’ when Lionel fell in love with Olive; she returned to the memory again and again, unable to banish it: ‘Oh, shade of that tulip tree, where they were kissing and hugging and God knows what, as I did not stop long enough to look.’104 The final humiliation was Victoria’s certainty that Lionel had seen her. Her ‘Book of Happy Reminiscences’ demonstrates the extent, and the longevity, of her anger at Lionel’s betrayal. She exacted the only revenge left to her by mulishly refusing his repeated requests for a divorce.

  From the moment of Victoria’s final departure from Knole, on 19 May 1919, Vita’s challenging relationship with her mother would be further complicated by this angry disaffection, which never went away, and a coruscating loneliness for which Vita felt in part responsible. In 1923, Victoria sold the house in Sussex Square at a loss of more than £45,000; she dispersed many of its contents in an equally unsuccessful two-day auction. She moved to the smaller White Lodge, on a cliff at Roedean perched above the English Channel, where Vita visited her assiduously. Bar a brief flirtation with an ugly red-brick villa standing in five acres close to Streatham Common, Victoria remained at White Lodge until her death.

  Dottie was Vita’s companion on 20 January 1926. Together they travelled from London via Egypt, Port Said and Aden as far as Agra and New Delhi, before Dottie turned back and Vita continued alone up the Persian Gulf to Baghdad and thence to Tehran and Harold. Vita left behind her Ben and Nigel, at preparatory school at Summer Fields in Oxford, and Virginia, to whom she gave a copy of her latest manuscript of The Land. In her diary the latter noted: ‘I feel a lack of stimulus, of marked days, now Vita is gone; and some pathos, common to all these partings.’105 Vita travelled with her jewel case and her emeralds, a fur coat and fur hat against the cold, Harold’s statue of St Barbara, a flask of Dottie’s best brandy and another copy of The Land, which she had almost completed. She carried messages from Victoria to Lutyens, with whom she had tea in Bombay on 12 February; within her she carried the idea of Virginia. ‘I miss you horribly,’ she insisted on 29 January. From now on Geoffrey would vanish from her consciousness. Pat’s disappearance too was already becoming a memory; at intervals she wrote to Vita. Over time the list of former lovers who continued to write became a long one, proof of the strength of Vita’s hold on their affections for all that her béguins were transitory.

  On the SS Varela, from Bombay through the Persian Gulf to Baghdad, Vita fell ill with fever. It did nothing to diminish her sense of her journey as an adventure and, on 20 February, goaded into writing by envy at Virginia’s descriptions of pro
gress on To the Lighthouse, she recorded her start on ‘my new book’. It became Passenger to Teheran, a chronicle of Vita’s four-month odyssey, published by the Hogarth Press in November. An instance of her need to separate distinct aspects of experience, Vita discusses landscape, impressions of Egypt, India and Persia, Persian culture, the diplomatic life of the British legation and the coronation of Reza Shah, but makes no mention of Dottie. On the printed page Vita travels alone, hers as solitary a progress as Orlando’s. Dottie was understandably infuriated.

  Passenger to Teheran is an account of a love affair. Out of sight of Virginia and Dottie, disentangled from Geoffrey and Pat, as sanguine now as she would ever be where Violet was concerned, Vita fell in love with Persia. She thrilled to its visible reminders of a past that, compared with English history, seemed infinitely distant; she noted the features of Persian gardens, with their flowering Judas trees and peach blossom, and water rills lined with rich blue tiles; and she rejoiced, outside the legation compound, in the open spaces, the expansiveness of a landscape that extended infinite possibilities of solitary escape. ‘One is allowed to be lonely … in more civilised communities no one is allowed to be lonely; the refinement of loneliness is not understood.’106 The same impression stirred Vita to poetry: ‘Are there not hearts that find their high fulfilment/ Alone?’ she asked, anticipating her own future reclusiveness; in the poems she wrote about Persia, Vita celebrated isolation as ‘pure’.107 When she came home, she wrote verses about a migrating English swallow glimpsed against the red rocks of the Persian desert; so long as she remained away, she found it impossible to acknowledge the reality of England.108

  Like all Vita’s affairs, first love for Persia was intense but brief. She returned early in 1927, before Harold’s final departure; together they journeyed into the Bakhtiari mountains to visit the tomb of Cyrus the Great. Their expedition formed the substance of Twelve Days, Vita’s second Persian travel book. While both books include passages that are among Vita’s best – lyrical, insightful and colourful – the later account also records the disillusionment that seized her when she saw the Abadan oilfields and confronted face to face the unromantic reality of Persia’s future: an end of sorts to the affair.

  In February 1926, Vita stayed in Baghdad with Arabist and archaeologist Gertrude Bell. Bell took her to tea with the King of Iraq, whom Vita reimagined in her own image as her classic fictional hero: ‘a tall, dark, slim, handsome man, looking as though he were the prey to a romantic, an almost Byronic, melancholy’.109 She acquired a Saluki puppy, ‘a marvel of elegance, – long tapering paws, and a neck no thicker than your wrist’,110 and met Harold in Kermanshah; at the very end of Vita’s life, Harold singled out ‘the great moment at Kermanshah’ as a shining nugget of happiness. Husband and wife travelled the last 300 miles of the journey together, the yellow Saluki curled on Vita’s knee. On arrival, Vita dismissed Tehran as squalid; she reacted predictably to the prescriptive formalities of European life in the compound and what she described to Virginia as the ‘eventless weeks’,111 but she was happy in her reunion with Harold and fascinated and delighted by Persia as a whole. With an appearance of good grace, if limited anticipation of enjoyment, she accompanied Harold to entertainments connected with the forthcoming coronation of the new shah; she shared the Persians’ excitement at celebratory fireworks. There were moments of freedom too. Every morning at seven, Vita and Harold went riding, dazzled by ‘the freshness and beauty of the morning’, and to Virginia, Vita described ‘days of going into the mountains, and eating sandwiches beside a stream, and picking wild almonds, and of coming home by incredible sunsets across the plain’.112

  There was a makeshift quality to diplomatic life in Tehran, and indeed to Reza Shah’s monarchy, that surprised Vita: ahead of the coronation, she found herself mixing paints in the great hall of the Gulestan Palace and advising on the peach-coloured distemper of the throne room walls. She was invited to see the crown jewels. ‘Knowing too well by now the shabby condition of everything in this ramshackle country, I was not very much excited at the prospect of seeing the treasury of imperial Iran.’113 The experience astonished her. Green and gold, it glittered in her memory. It would remain vivid in its otherworldliness, a direct appeal to that side of Vita that had revelled in Scheherazade and decorated her room in Brighton in jewel-like, Bakst-inspired colours. She likened the treasury to Aladdin’s Cave: in Persia, fact and fable merged. ‘I am blind. Blinded by diamonds,’ she wrote. ‘Sacks of emeralds were emptied out before our eyes. Sacks of pearls. Literally. We came away shaking the pearls out of our shoes. Ropes of uncut emeralds. Scabbards encrusted with precious stones. Great hieratic crowns. All this in a squalid room, with grubby Persians drinking little cups of tea … It was simply the Arabian Nights, with décor by the Sitwells.’114

  Vita discovered a different story in Persia, too, though sharing an element of transformation: that of nineteenth-century French archaeologist’s wife and cross-dresser, Jane Dieulafoy. She recounted her history in Vogue: ‘“What,” said the Shah, “is that boy a woman?” On being assured that it was so … Why, he enquired, was she not dressed in the long skirts and garments of European ladies? Jane replied that she found man’s dress more convenient.’115 At the beginning of April, Vita wrote teasingly about Madame Dieulafoy to Virginia: an arrow shot in their extended, long-distance flirtation. She labelled her simply ‘a ravishing character’.116

  Vita began her fortnight-long journey home on 4 May. With her she carried iris and tulip bulbs plundered from the Persian plains. She potted them up in Dottie’s greenhouse at Sherfield and wrote to Harold on 12 October to report on their progress. The previous month she had sent Harold his own consignment of spring bulbs: tulips, scilla and Iris reticulata, which she instructed him to plant in a shallow bowl to flower in February. In return she asked for cuttings of wild broom, sage and pink-flowered lavender, packed in damp moss and sealed in a biscuit tin. She sent him Passenger to Teheran in proof form and a copy of The Land, which Heinemann published on 30 September; she had written the last ten lines in Isfahan in April.

  Harold praised both books generously, though he was hurt by The Land’s dedication to Dottie, who is also the subject of the poem’s best-known section, ‘The Island’, about the gardener of the manmade island in the lake at Sherfield, ‘laughing at her flowery escapade’.117 ‘It is such a lovely thing, darling, so beautiful a thing,’ Harold wrote on 7 November. That opinion was echoed by The Land’s reviewers. Fellow poet John Drinkwater claimed in the Observer that ‘it contain[ed] some of the loveliest verse written in this century’;118 on the strength of a similar review, Vita announced in her diary that she had ‘started writing a poem about gardens’ (the partner poem to The Land, which would eventually be published in 1946 as The Garden).119 But it was Virginia’s view that resonated loudest. She had read The Land while Vita was in Tehran and written that it lacked ‘a little central transparency: Some sudden intensity.’120 In November, she suggested that the absence was in Vita as much as in her writing, a void, ‘something reserved, muted’.121 This verdict haunted Vita. At the end of the year, despite Heinemann ordering a reprint of the poem and indications (which would be proved right) that it would win her the Hawthornden Prize, Vita sat down to write a poem that reveals the extent of her uncertainty about her abilities. ‘What have I gathered?’ she asked in ‘Year’s End’, weighing up not only the passing year but her working life in its entirety. The only answer she could give herself was ‘one unprofitable naught’. Despondently the poem ends with a question: ‘Shall I not clear my goods and quit the ring?’122 It was a markedly different Vita from the woman who had told Virginia she would always be ready to pick up any glove thrown down. She did not quit the ring, though she set aside The Garden. Throughout the following summer her letters to Virginia increased their provocative, teasing note. If she could not triumph as a writer, she would insist on her superiority as a woman.

  A string of blue Persian beads bought for sixpence
coiled on Vita’s writing table at Long Barn. ‘Now, in a bowl, in exile, they/ Speak Persia to an English day,’ she wrote in ‘A Bowl of Blue Beads’. She added that the beads proved ‘that Persia is no lovely lie/ For me, but sharp reality’.123 Except in her relationships with Harold and Virginia, it was physical proof that for Vita kept love alive. The idea of Persia remained a powerful one, even if her excursion to the Bakhtiari mountains shattered some illusions. At the time of her death, among the debris on Vita’s desk was a packet of seeds: Sutton’s wallflowers, Persian Carpet.124

  In the winter of 1927, a young woman with raven hair and pale skin was painting a picture of Long Barn. It is a truncated image which simplifies the outline of Vita and Harold’s garden and reduces in length the barn that had become the Big Room.

  Her name was Mary Campbell. Physically she resembled Ruth Pennistan in Heritage, an untamed Romany beauty invariably dressed in coloured breeches and a velvet cloak; hers was a restless, rebellious, unconventional nature. The eldest of nine children of a wealthy Midlands doctor, she had studied art at Heatherleys and, six years previously, in a long black dress and golden veil, married penniless South African poet Roy Campbell. Vita met her in the post office in Sevenoaks Weald on 22 May. Roy was there too: tall, thin, blue-eyed. He was also hard-drinking and intemperate, but Vita could not have known that on first meeting. Vita invited them to dinner the following day.