Behind the Mask

by Matthew Dennison

  In a letter to Harold that evening, Vita described the morning’s events with as much calmness as she could muster; her diary is laconic. At lunch with Raymond Mortimer afterwards, she drank half a bottle of Champagne. She spent the afternoon at London Zoo with a supportive Virginia. In the evening, for the first time, Vita broadcast live for the BBC. It was an unsettling preliminary to this important new development in her career.

  Vita fell in love at the BBC. As with other béguins, her fancy was generously rewarded. The relationship she embarked on with Director of Talks Hilda Matheson took a familiar course: obsession, physical rhapsody, letters, concealment, a holiday abroad, friendship after the damping of the flames. Hilda’s self-effacement prevented it from becoming a ‘muddle’. ‘I want you to love me – to have me – to possess me utterly – I want to give myself to you,’ Hilda wrote to Vita on 15 January 1929; she offered Vita adulation, devotion, submission. Her love was physical as well as emotional: ‘My body is yours as my heart is yours … sometimes I want you so terribly physically that I can hardly bear it.’165 Hilda fell in love with a private Vita, ‘the most beautiful person that’s ever swept across my horizon’; she loved the public Vita too, the acclaimed novelist and poet, the Vita who, in April 1930, after the death of Robert Bridges, was considered for the position of Poet Laureate.166 Vita called Hilda ‘Stoker’ (Virginia claimed the name was Harold’s). It suggested the hard-working stoker men of steam engines, an appropriate moniker for Hilda, who shunned the limelight, happiest in reflected rays. And Vita returned Hilda’s love. Then the moment passed and Hilda the lover became Hilda the friend.

  They met on 18 April and again on 4 June, when Vita read passages from The Land. Hilda wrote to congratulate Vita on that broadcast; Vita returned the compliment three weeks later after listening ‘with the tears pouring down my face’ to Robert Harris read Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.167 Hilda invited Vita to discuss broadcasting poetry; Vita invited Virginia to accompany her to the BBC. Hilda spent a weekend in July at Long Barn: in Vita’s diary she was still ‘Miss Matheson’.

  On 2 October, Vita broadcast the first of six talks on ‘Modern English Poetry’. By the following May she had begun the fortnightly radio reviews of new fiction that would continue until December 1931 (after which, for the next year, Vita shared with former literary editor of the New Statesman, Desmond MacCarthy, a half-hour-long slot, ‘Literary Criticism’). Vita received ten guineas a broadcast, with an additional payment for subsequent publication in the Radio Times or The Listener. Hilda was Vita’s producer; the women met regularly and often. Elaborating her invitation to Vita to ‘contemplate a fortnightly review of new novels’ in January 1929, Hilda wrote: ‘It would be so perfect from my point of view – excuse for your coming to my office, benefit untold to my listeners, prestige of the most exalted kind for the BBC.’168 By then, for both of them, the first reason carried the day.

  They became lovers in December 1928. Vita broadcast a discussion on ‘The Position of Women Today’ with novelist Hugh Walpole who, a decade earlier, had loaned Vita and Violet his cottage in Polperro. Hilda and Hugh spent the preceding weekend at Long Barn; broadcast over, Vita spent the night in Hilda’s flat in South Kensington. The morning after, Hilda stayed with Vita, too faint to go to work. The same day she sent Vita her first love letter. ‘I love you more than ever I can tell you … it’s the most completely comprehensive sweep I ever dreamed of, all of me, in every sort of different way. I bless you and Heaven and creatures generally for having made it possible for this to happen; and you in particular … for being so perfect and so good to me, and most of all for loving me.’169 Wholeheartedly, Vita returned Hilda’s love. It was obvious even in her letters to Harold. It was also obvious, and a source of disgruntlement, to Dottie, whom Vita continued to see regularly. Hilda wrote to Vita and Vita, with her customary zeal, wrote back, fifty letters in a matter of weeks.170 Following Vita’s departure on 19 December for Berlin and Christmas and the New Year with Harold and the boys, Hilda wrote up to three times a day. Their intimacy then was a novelty. ‘Here we are writing to each other every day, without any apparent barriers or obstacles or reserve … I have this incredible feeling of naturalness and absence of shyness or reserve or anything towards you,’ Hilda marvelled.171 As Vita had predicted, in the short term they came to know one another better on paper than in person.

  Hilda’s letters punctuated a five-day visit to Berlin in the middle of January by Virginia and Leonard. They were joined by Duncan Grant, Virginia’s sister Vanessa Bell and her nephew Quentin. It was an unsatisfactory visit, pressed on Virginia by Vita. The day after Virginia’s departure, Vita began writing Gottfried Künstler, ‘a story about skating’ influenced by Virginia’s descriptions of the Great Frost in Orlando. Vita dedicated it to Hilda. It was all grist to the mill of Virginia’s jealousy.

  Virginia Woolf deplored Hilda Matheson as an ‘earnest middle-class intellectual … drab and dreary’.172 To Vita she wrote: ‘She affects me as a strong purge, as a hair shirt, as a foggy day, as a cold in the head.’173 She parried Hilda’s invitations that she too should broadcast for the BBC, gave in with all ill grace, delivered a talk on Beau Brummell in November 1929, claimed that Hilda had made her ‘castrate Brummell’ and, broadcast over, ‘poured … rage hot as lava over Vita’; she was determined not to be considered alongside Hilda and Dottie as part of Vita’s ‘second-rate’ schoolgirl clique.174 Vita admitted the validity of the criticism but remained loyal to the loyal Hilda.

  Hilda stayed at Long Barn in the spring, when Vita started writing Andrew Marvell, the first of a new series launched by Faber & Faber called ‘The Poets on The Poets’. Vita had begun collecting budgerigars: her diary records a gift of two birds from Deirdre Hart-Davis. For three days in the middle of April, Vita and Hilda made an aviary; after Hilda’s departure, Vita finished it with Ben. The next week Virginia was with Vita when she bought a pair of blue budgerigars. On a rainy night in May, Vita stayed with Hilda in London after broadcasting: she excused herself on grounds of the weather. A fortnight later it was Hilda, not Ben and Nigel, who inaugurated the new swimming pool built at Long Barn by Harold. In June, Vita’s first budgerigar chicks were born; her excitement was in line with her fondness for rabbits and dogs, derided by Violet. The radio discussion on marriage Vita broadcast in the middle of the month with Harold, who was briefly at home on leave, would also have provoked Violet to derision. Ditto a follow-up discussion on happiness, broadcast in April 1930.

  Vita travelled with Hilda to Savoie and Val d’Isère in July; clumsily she attempted to lessen Virginia’s jealousy by presenting the holiday as a last-minute decision. In France she wrote a pair of poems for Hilda. ‘Storm in the Mountains (Savoy)’ and ‘Peace in the Mountains (Savoy)’ are landscape descriptions like the poem she had once written for Pat, but lacking the earlier poem’s ambiguity: colourful, pictorial, postcards in verse. Vita was reading Ethel Colburn Mayne’s newly published The Life of Lady Byron, which thrilled her. It drew on previously unpublished sources, among them letters from Byron to different, jealous lovers; Vita’s diary does not record any train of reflection set in motion as a result. The high point of the trip had nothing to do with Hilda. ‘Came down in the morning and found a very exciting letter from Hadji saying he had been offered a job by Lord Beaverbrook,’ Vita reported.175 Four days later, Harold sent more details. On 1 August, having parted from Hilda, Vita met Harold in Karlsruhe for ‘endless discussions about Beaverbrook!’.176 She described the news to Virginia as ‘a happy bombshell’.177

  Lord Beaverbrook was the proprietor of the Evening Standard and the Daily Express. He offered Harold £3,000 a year to join the staff of the Standard. Harold requested a higher figure and his political independence and was granted the latter.178 Vita was delighted. In her diary the previous summer, she had written herself a memorandum: ‘Many discussions with H as to our future. He seems determined to remain in diplomacy, and quite cheerf
ully contemplates years spent in foreign capitals. Don’t think he realises in the least what this means to me – and I don’t want him to.’179 Virginia shared Vita’s pleasure. For his part, Harold suspected he was trading the certainty of an embassy for moonshine. It was a suspicion that would never leave him. He lamented ‘the tug always at my heart of diplomacy in all its forms’, but contemplated with pleasure a life in which there would be no more lengthy separations from Vita and the boys.180 His contract with Beaverbrook began on 1 January 1930. Harold would endure it for twenty months.

  At Long Barn, Vita stumbled walking upstairs. Lumbago set in, acutely painful and debilitating; the condition would return at intervals until her death. She described herself to Virginia as ‘only able to hobble from room to room on two sticks, or else drag myself along the floor’; she was too incapacitated to broadcast.181 Hilda helped to nurse the thirty-seven-year-old invalid. With Harold set to return to Britain full time in December, she recognised now the curfew on their intimacy; she had always acknowledged Vita’s ‘other claims’: ‘You know I am the sort of person to whom you can always say without any kind of compunction – please keep away from Long Barn, or please after all don’t come tomorrow, or next weekend, or whatever it is.’182 For all her devotion, such selflessness occasionally cost her dear.

  Her back recovered, Vita spent three days looking for a London flat for Harold (she had sold the Ebury Street house in 1926). She found it at King’s Bench Walk in the Inner Temple, on 7 October. The next day advance copies arrived of King’s Daughter, proof to Vita as well as to Hilda of the changeability of the former’s affections. Vita organised ‘plumbers, painters, electricians’ for King’s Bench Walk; she chose chair covers and, in the second week of December, unpacked Harold’s cases from Berlin, hung pictures and arranged furniture. She even bought a painting by Duncan Grant, perhaps a sot to Virginia given Vita’s previous hostility to Bloomsbury painting. She hung it too in the new flat, which was within walking distance of the Standard offices; King’s Bench Walk would become Harold’s Monday-to-Friday home in his new existence. Before Harold left Berlin he was commissioned by the BBC to broadcast a series of talks called ‘People and Things’. Hilda Matheson would remain part of Vita’s life. Though there would be flashes of disillusionment and considerable pain in her loss of Vita’s love, Hilda mostly adjusted to her altered status with characteristic lack of recrimination. When internal politics at the BBC forced her resignation in 1931, she briefly licked her wounds with Vita and Harold, working as the equivalent of their personal assistant. ‘I respond unlimitedly to kindness,’ she had once told Vita.183

  In the novella Vita dedicated to Hilda Matheson, Gottfried Künstler ‘fall[s] on the back of [his] head on the ice’ and becomes a different person. He calls himself Klaus and finds a companion called Anna. Like Hilda, Anna is patient and ripe to fall in love. In his new life in the icy wilderness, Gottfried revels in the patterns that his ice skates slice into the surface of the frozen lake, ‘a scratch … that next day would turn to water’. His skating, the patterns in the ice, his progress across the lake with Anna are no more than ‘a gesture … that might break a limb, or a heart; and all for nothing … “As our life together,” [Anna] said, looking at him very sadly, and expecting perhaps some human reassurance, some warm contradiction; but he only said, with a philosophy that amounted to indifference, “Just so – as our life together.”’184

  PART V

  The Land and the Garden

  ‘The deepest roots of all are those one finds in one’s own home, among one’s own belongings.’

  Vita to Ben Nicolson, 25 March 1932

  ‘IT WAS THE Sleeping Beauty’s castle with a vengeance, if you liked to see it with a romantic eye; but if you also looked at it with a realistic eye you saw that Nature run wild was not quite so romantic as you thought,’ Vita wrote in the autumn of 1950.1 Her subject was her home of two decades, Sissinghurst Castle.

  Vita first saw Sissinghurst on 4 April 1930, with Dorothy Wellesley, whose land agent Donald Beale had alerted her to its sale, and a thirteen-year-old Nigel. It goes without saying that she saw it with a romantic eye. April habitually inspired Vita to eulogy. It was the month when the Kentish country, ‘my own county’, looked ‘absurdly like itself’: ‘Cherry, plum, pear and thorn whiten the orchards and the hedgerows; lambs frolic; the banks are full of violets and primroses; the whole landscape displays itself as an epitome of everything fresh and innocent.’2 Vita had recently bought four new fields at Long Barn; she had also learnt in March of a threat to Long Barn’s privacy in the form of a proposed chicken farm on land immediately adjacent.

  There was nothing fresh at Sissinghurst in the meagre sunshine of that April afternoon: it was cold and muddy and wet. It had been for sale for two years: the rot had set in long before. In an instant, Vita fell ‘flat in love’. ‘Contact with beauty, for me, is direct and immediate,’ she wrote.3 Transfixed by a tower of pinkish Tudor brick, ‘like a bewitched and rosy fountain [pointing] towards the sky’, she told a sceptical Nigel that here was somewhere they would be happy.4 She telephoned Harold ‘to say she [had] seen the ideal house – a place in Kent near Cranbrook’, some twenty miles from Long Barn and Knole.5 For the simple reason that she did not see it like that, she did not describe to him with any accuracy the two tired cottages, the tower shorn of the adjoining buildings it had once adorned, the entrance arch with its shabby flanking ranges, the rusty bicycles and iron bedsteads that choked the moat, the woodland dark and overgrown. Her affections would never waver.

  Vita was in a mood to fall in love with Tudor ruins. The emotional tumults of the last decade were fleetingly quelled; in her romantic life she had achieved stasis, a moment of calm. In all her relationships – with Violet, Dottie, Virginia, Mary and Hilda – intoxication lay behind her; Geoffrey Scott had died of pneumonia the previous August, alone in New York. Her attachment to Virginia ran deepest. Now, as she had written to Mary in a different context, Vita had begun to crave privacy above all: she described it as constantly under attack from ‘myriads of noisy urgencies’.6 ‘I shun all voices, shrink from every task,’ Vita had written in a sonnet to Mary included in King’s Daughter. She wanted to be alone. Where better than in a tower, surrounded by 450 acres of Kentish greensward?

  Four weeks earlier, Vita had finished The Edwardians. Two years had passed since her father’s death and her final departure from Knole. Her novel was a symbolic undertaking, though she did not reflect on it as such and we should resist assuming that its completion provided her with closure or resolution; there would be no resolution to Vita’s misery at Knole’s loss. The Edwardians was a paean of sorts to an idealised version of her own upbringing. It celebrated not only the setting of her childhood in its fictionalised Knole, complete with heraldic leopards, faded tapestries and broad expanses of roof, but its ideological landscape too: that ‘good system’ of ‘a good understanding between class and class’, a feudal order of inherited overlordship described by Sebastian in reactionary mode as currently being destroyed by ‘too many people … too much industrialism’.7 Sebastian surely spoke for Vita.

  Like much of her fiction, The Edwardians was an exercise in make-believe. She had spent busy days researching in the London Library; diligently she had applied herself to recreating the below-stairs hierarchies she remembered so vividly; she had plundered her memories of corsets, jewels and table settings, of Christmas presents for the estate children and even of George V’s coronation, which she had attended with her father – all in the interests of verisimilitude in this novel inspired by Orlando. But in the end, while Orlando offered its admiring audience a celebration of Vita, The Edwardians attempted instead no more than a picturesque divertissement and, again, an explanation of Vita for Vita’s benefit. The novel began as a whim – ‘Such a joke it will be,’ Vita told Virginia in February 1929:8 she proved incapable of taking either Knole or herself less than seriously. Writing was not an act of exorcism: Vita was as much in thra
ll to Knole as she had ever been. As Eddy Sackville-West wrote in his novel, The Ruin, published the following year, the house exercised a peculiar power over its children: ‘The pictures – the countless pictures – the china, the carving, the silver, the gold, the furniture – all possessed a composite soul with which to rule their masters.’9 Later The Edwardians embarrassed Vita. Even with the solace of Orlando, it did nothing to lessen the pangs she felt about expulsion from her personal Eden.

  On publication, however, The Edwardians did increase Vita’s spiritual ownership of the great house she had lost for ever on Lionel’s death. In the minds of the reading public, it reaffirmed her ‘possession’ of Knole, which she had established with Knole and the Sackvilles and Virginia had consolidated with Orlando. The novel also offered a partial verdict on her relationship with Violet. Vita was thinking of Mrs Keppel and Victoria when she described the older generation as ‘envious, spiteful and mercenary; arrogant and cold. As for us, their children, they leave us in complete ignorance of life, passing on to us only the ideas they think we should hold, and treat us with the utmost ruthlessness if we fail to conform.’10