Behind the Mask

by Matthew Dennison

  As ever Vita signalled the direction of her thinking in her writing. With The Edwardians finished she quickly embarked on a novel which, like its predecessor, examines the nature of personal choice. The Edwardians had highlighted the inescapability of Sebastian’s destiny as Chevron’s heir: Vita’s focus in All Passion Spent is on Deborah Slane’s role as Victorian wife. ‘Even had she been in love with [Henry], she could see therein no reason for foregoing the whole of her separate existence. Henry was in love with her, but no one proposed that he should forego his.’38 Among the novel’s themes are renunciation of worldly riches and love for a house. Vita herself would never manage the former – in her writing, her diary, her letters and her speech she was continually possessive – ‘I’, ‘my’ and ‘mine’ pepper statements on everything from jewellery to England – but she could and did empathise wholeheartedly with the latter.

  Octogenarian widow Lady Slane is externally modelled on Harold’s mother: her character is closer to Vita’s. Following the death of her distinguished husband, a former viceroy of India, Lady Slane withdraws from her attentive but worldly family to the relative seclusion of a house in Hampstead with which she had fallen in love thirty years earlier (the house itself is inspired by Keats’s house, which Vita had visited with Virginia). Without regret she divests herself of jewellery and possessions, shedding the uniform of the wife of a great man; trophies and trinkets fail to move her. Her intensest emotion is reserved for her new house, which displaces not only former glories but her family too. Lady Slane’s challenge is to justify her choice of the Hampstead house over nearer ‘claims’. This passionate engagement with a building, added to a tendency to imbue it with human characteristics, is Vita’s own trait. Assessing her ecstatic response to the landscape of Persia four years earlier, Vita had admitted the extent to which places, not people, affected her: ‘These brief but frequent fallings-in-love gave me cause for serious anxiety; such vibrations of response ought, I felt, to be reserved for one’s contact with human beings, nor should nature have a greater power than human nature to excite and to stir the soul … The external world had too much importance for me; my appreciation was altogether too painfully vivid.’39 In consigning this response to the past, Vita misleads her reader: it remained indelibly part of her psyche. Disingenuously she refers to ‘cause for serious anxiety’; nothing in her subsequent behaviour suggests she repented of this tendency in herself. ‘The external world’ of landscape, building and place remained critically important to Vita. She allows the heroine of her novel to be overwhelmed by the small house in Hampstead just as she herself was overwhelmed by Knole and had since succumbed to Sissinghurst; the novel invites the reader’s judgement of those who criticise Lady Slane: ‘Duty, charity, children, social obligations, public appearances – with these had [Lady Slane’s] days been filled.’40 It was the very formula Vita herself had resisted in her marriage to Harold the diplomat, the formula Harold’s mother had more successfully embraced. Within the context of the novel, it is as much a plea for individual freedom as a feminist manifesto. In the emotions to which it gives rise and its symbolic place in her affections, Lady Slane’s house in Hampstead is another Knole, another Sissinghurst.

  Work at Sissinghurst began on Vita’s tower, a clear statement of priorities. Against its walls Vita planted a climbing rose called ‘Richmond’ and clumps of rosemary. Even before contracts were signed, she had made sorties from Long Barn; invariably this proprietorial woman planted something during her visit, staking out her territory in lavender bushes. But it was inside the tower rather than its surrounds where work started in earnest; in the short term, garden plans were confined to ‘large paper sheets ruled into squares’.41 On 12 July, Vita recorded her decision to use the room on the first floor of the tower as her writing room. Once the dividing wall between the two spaces had been knocked through, she saw that she could accommodate a small library in the octagonal turret adjoining it (initially referred to by Vita as ‘the oratory’42).

  Bookshelves were built along the two window walls of Vita’s writing room and a working fireplace across a corner; there was a single radiator. The majority of her books were housed in floor-to-ceiling shelves in the turret. Here, once the dust had settled, she kept her notes and manuscripts, including those exercise books filled with neat, hand-written drafts of the unpublished novels and plays of her childhood. There were books of Elizabethan history, literary criticism and literary biography, Vita’s growing collection of gardening books and books about sexuality and gender, including, by 1937, seven volumes of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which Harold also read.43 Most were inscribed ‘V.N.’ or ‘Vita Nicolson’. At the time of Vita’s purchase, walls of the tower room were papered. Vita’s first act of beautification at Sissinghurst was to strip away the layers of ‘hideous’ Victorian wallpaper and replace it with distemper. The distemper was never applied. ‘I found the old brick so pretty that I left it all rough as it was, the colour of pot-pourri,’ Vita explained, ‘a sort of half-pink, half-grey, and mottled.’44 Aesthete Stephen Tennant, visiting in December 1945, described it as the colour of ‘squashed ripe pomegranates’.45 And so it remained, unchanged until her death. When builders mistakenly plastered the walls of her bedroom in the South Cottage, Vita insisted they strip off the plaster to reveal the ancient brick beneath.

  Vita’s first night at Sissinghurst was spent not in her bedroom, where the builders also uncovered ‘the most lovely, huge, stone Tudor fireplace’, but in the turret room. By mid-October it was wired for electricity; cardboard sheets shielded the windows from wind and rain. Vita took her dogs with her from Long Barn. The following night Hilda joined her and gardened all day, the next night Harold. Weeks later Vita and Harold spent their first night in the South Cottage.

  That night Harold’s lack of enjoyment, coloured by the all-pervasive anxiety he felt as a result of unhappiness with his change of career (Harold quickly decided he loathed working for the Evening Standard), contrasted with Vita’s bluffness in the face of overwhelming discomforts. Harold made light of the night’s experiences in a humorous radio broadcast made soon afterwards; his diary tells a different story. Vita’s character dominates the broadcast. Harold calls her ‘Edith’: she is commanding, capable and dismissive of his difficulties. Without apparent regret, he presents himself to listeners as a man ‘not born to be a settler’s husband’: damp logs, fragile crockery, a well reluctant to yield water and his least favourite picnic food successively defeat him. Edith–Vita, by contrast, revels in ‘the mellow light of candles’ and provides soda water with which to clean their teeth; Harold mislays the syphons. Edith–Vita is forthright, decisive, controlling. Harold fails in every task he attempts, including preparing their simple breakfast of coffee and boiled eggs. Edith–Vita is sanguine: neither Harold nor Vita flourished in the absence of domestic help (Vita once protested at ‘being asked to produce various domestic utensils which I do not even know by name’46) and, as Vita had written earlier, she required few creature comforts to feel at home: ‘my own house, dogs, and servants; my luggage … unpacked. The icebox … in the kitchen, the gramophone on the table, and my books … on the shelves.’47 Affection between the couple is at best implicit. Beneath the humour are suggestions of role reversal and an easy assumption of mastery on Vita’s part. It was not the whole truth. Later Harold dismissed himself as ‘the most incompetent man since Noah’.48

  Vita did not immediately sell Long Barn, despite its drain on the couple’s diminished resources once she had renounced her allowance from Victoria. To Virginia she wrote of the cost of Long Barn’s upkeep, but Virginia was puzzled by the Nicolsons’ inability to retrench. For two years, Vita, Harold, Ben and Nigel lived between the two houses: they moved into Sissinghurst on 9 April 1932. Two years later Vita sold Long Barn to Victoria for £8,000 (Victoria would return it to Vita in her will). The house was let. On a visit in October 1934, Vita noted with sadness the first tenant ‘making every room as hideou
s as possible’.49 Nine years and several tenants later, in the winter of 1943, Vita sold the house, along with many of its contents, including three thousand books. Harold regretted its loss. In his diary he associated it with ‘all the happy days of youth’.50 He was fifty-seven years old. Given his marked unhappiness during much of Vita’s affair with Violet, his memory played him false. Although she did not know it at the time, during the sale Vita lost her key to the garden gate at Knole.

  By the spring of 1932, restoration work on Sissinghurst, though unfinished, had progressed apace, and Vita and Harold were able to start laying out the garden they had been planning throughout what Vita called the ‘impatient’ intervening period. Much of their first two years had been devoted to clearance work. The moat wall was revealed hidden under rubbish. They laid rudimentary paths, sited a handful of borders and planted trees. In 1932, they increased their tree planting. ‘We had to get on with the hedges. We planted hornbeam where we couldn’t afford yew; and we also planted an avenue of young limes in a rough place and left them to look after themselves.’51

  The substitution of hornbeam for yew on grounds of cost was important. That year the continuing loss of Vita’s income from the Sackville estates, added to the shortfall caused by Harold’s decision in 1931 to leave the Standard (‘that urinal of futility’, as he dismissed it) in order to edit Action, the newspaper of Sir Oswald Mosley’s New Party, combined to create an unaccustomed and, to Harold, deeply troubling hole in their finances. The New Party journal folded after the party’s disastrous electoral defeat in October 1931, leaving Harold unemployed. In her role as secretary-cum-manager Hilda Matheson pointed out the acuteness of the problem. At £6,000 a year, the couple’s outgoings were double their income. Harold himself also owed £3,000 in income tax, with further debts of another £800.52 At the beginning of 1932, Vita and Harold had £300 in the bank between them to support two houses in the country, the flat in King’s Bench Walk and two boys now at Eton. Happily the discovery of Sissinghurst had coincided with a burst of creative energy on Vita’s part, which showed no sign of abating. Although her literary earnings could not rival Victoria’s giving power, the period proved both fertile and lucrative. For diversion there would be gardening. Vita took comfort from her conviction that gardening was ‘the daughter of painting’; that association raised it ‘from the rank of a fiddle-de-dee hobby to the royal dignity of a serious pursuit’.53

  As Vita had intended, The Edwardians, published on 29 May 1930, became a bestseller. On 27 June, in its roundup of ‘the books most in demand from the Times Book Club’, the Spectator placed The Edwardians at the head of its list. It sold 30,000 copies in its first six months and netted for Leonard and Virginia, its publishers, a profit of £2,000 in the first year. For the Woolfs, this boon came on top of a doubling of Virginia’s literary earnings since publication of Orlando two years previously.54 On 13 August 1931, Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell described to a friend the improvements made to Monks House with revenues from Orlando and The Edwardians: ‘Monks is now a place fit for socialists to live in – electric light, central heating, a Frigidaire and two WCs. And all paid for by Virginia and Vita which makes it more romantic.’55

  For their part, in December 1930, Vita and Harold had allocated £125 of recent income to make a lake: the money was spent on damming the nearby stream and flooding two meadows to the south of the house. ‘It was a creation romantic beyond my hopes,’ Vita wrote. ‘Extravagantly I ordered a boat from the Army and Navy Stores.’56 They found they were able to cut corners. The wisterias they planted that year were sent over from Victoria’s house in Streatham, which she would shortly leave; foxgloves came from the nearby woods, tracked down by Harold and transplanted in an old pram. For Harold, Sissinghurst’s garden, and its all-consuming demands on his time and energy, provided a necessary distraction. On 20 March 1932, of a morning devoted to the usually uncongenial task of weeding the delphinium bed, he wrote: ‘I cannot get a job and am deeply in debt. I foresee no exit from our financial worries. Yet Vita and I are as happy as larks alone together. It is a spring day. Very odd.’57 It was as Vita would claim at the beginning of her second long poem, The Garden, written during the Second World War: ‘Small pleasures must correct great tragedies.’ Thinking of her own gardens at Long Barn and Sissinghurst, she described a garden as ‘a miniature endeavour/ To hold the graces and the courtesies/ Against a horrid wilderness’. In the summer, the Nicolsons plundered Vita’s royalty cheques to pay for a family holiday in Italy. In five days in Portofino, Harold returned to his continuing preoccupation with diplomacy. He wrote a comic play about diplomatic life, The Archduke, which was never performed. Later, the joint proceeds of The Edwardians and All Passion Spent contributed substantially to Ben and Nigel’s school fees.58

  ‘We must not forget the unparalleled prestige the aristocracy enjoy among the middle and working classes in England, even today,’ Violet Trefusis wrote in her novel Broderie Anglaise; ‘nor the eagerness with which those classes seize upon everything the privileged class does, applauding and admiring all their exploits, like a child at a circus.’59 So it proved not only with The Edwardians but its successors All Passion Spent and Family History, published in successive years. Though the later novels did not match The Edwardians’ undilutedly aristocratic flavour – nor the scale of its commercial success – both offered Vita’s readers snapshots of a world that was uniquely her own, in the case of Family History a portrait of Vita’s elder son Ben in the guise of the seventeen-year-old Dan and a fictional castle that resembles Sissinghurst in every essential: ‘They passed through an archway beneath the tower and came out on a cleared space with an old orchard beyond. The dark shape of a cottage rose up, and other walls, all of the same Tudor brick. Miles’ castle seemed to consist of isolated buildings, connecting walls and the dark background of the country lands. It was very lonely.’60 In 1931, All Passion Spent sold 15,000 copies in its first year and earned the Hogarth Press £1,200. Leonard described it as the best novel Vita ever wrote. On 12 October 1932, Virginia wrote to Vita with the news that 6,000 copies of Family History had been sold pre-publication. ‘My God! And my fingers are red and wheeled with doing up parcels incessantly … Orders pouring in – we all working till 7.30 – thought we were just finished – then a last batch of orders discovered hidden in a drawer another hours work – clerks panting – telephones ringing carriers arriving – parcels just finished in time to catch the vans – Oh Lord what it is to publish a bestseller …’61 From now on the bulk of Vita’s income from writing would be diverted towards Sissinghurst.

  Vita was working at a considerable rate. Her three biggest-selling novels were produced at yearly intervals; Harold too wrote a book a year between 1931 and 1937. It was against this background of shared hard work that the garden at Sissinghurst was created. At the same time, although her position was increasingly precarious since Hilda’s departure from the BBC, Vita continued until October 1932 to review fiction and nonfiction for her radio broadcasts and to contribute articles to a range of publications. In addition to The Listener, these included the Spectator, Week-end Review, Life and Letters and the Graphic. ‘My own production has become simply terrific (in quantity I mean, not quality),’ she wrote. ‘I never stop writing stories and articles … I must make the most of it while the fit is on me – but they are cheap stuff.’62 Once he had agreed to take over its editorship in June 1931, Harold invited Vita to contribute ‘a weekly article containing hints to the amateur gardener’ to the New Party’s Action.63 Although her efforts were to be unpaid, it was the beginning of Vita’s horticultural journalism and led to a series of Friday evening gardening broadcasts for the BBC and, in the summer of 1938, a short radio series about the gardens of the West of England. Reflecting her own inclinations, Vita’s Action contributions included ‘Flowers that are like Dutch paintings’, ‘Irises possess every virtue but one’ and ‘Flowers you must sniff very closely’.

  She also continued to write poetry and
featured in numerous anthologies, among them Poets of Our Time and Younger Poets of Today, both published in 1932. The previous year Vita’s translations of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duineser Elegien were published as Elegies from the Castle of Duino and widely reviewed. Vita had conceived the idea during her visit to Harold in Berlin in the spring of 1928. She was encouraged in the project by the American wife of a Berlin-based British journalist, Margaret Voigt, who rapidly became Vita’s lover. Following Vita’s return, Margaret visited her at Long Barn: in this instance familiarity bred detachment on Vita’s part and Margaret’s fantasy that Vita was her aristocratic lover ‘David’ was of brief duration. Vita did not allow sexual disillusionment to interfere with her work. Instead she completed her translations in collaboration with her cousin Eddy. The book was published under both Vita and Eddy’s names, though Vita was the more highly regarded, commercially successful of the pair.

  Previously, discussing Aphra Behn, Vita had suggested ‘the fact that she wrote is much more important than the quality of what she wrote. The importance of Aphra Behn is that she was the first woman in England to earn her living by her pen.’64 Had she revisited those words in the early 1930s, Vita must have found in them a prophetic ring.

  Her output was prodigious: in the short term, quality kept pace with quantity. Struggling with the ending of Challenge during the turbulence of her relationship with Violet, Vita had confessed to Harold her conviction of her own limitations: ‘I shall never write a good book; at least, I might write dozens of quite good books, but I shall never write a great one. And to be great is the only thing that really counts, whether for books or people.’65 There is poignancy in the accuracy of this self-assessment, also in the vehemence of Vita’s characteristic longing for greatness.

  Vita won a large popular following both for her novels and her poetry. Orlando and her radio broadcasts conferred a degree of fame; her striking looks added to her distinctive appeal. Her appearance in the early 1930s as guest of honour at speech day at Tonbridge County School for Girls inspired cheering and autograph-hunting on the part of the assembled girls; a horrified headmistress lamented that ‘such unwarranted and vulgar scenes had never been witnessed at Speech Day’.66 Yet despite The Land’s award of the Hawthornden Prize, the Heinemann Prize in 1946 for The Garden, respectful and often enthusiastic reviews and impressive sales figures for a number of her books, Vita would stake no lasting claim to unequivocal greatness through writing. In 1922, the Spectator’s reviewer of Orchard and Vineyard claimed, ‘Miss Sackville-West has interesting thoughts, but she does not make very good poems out of them.’67 A decade later the same magazine reached a different conclusion: ‘Her poetry does not merely describe nature; it does not merely express her feeling: she describes, and in what she writes Nature and her feeling are one.’ Subsequent readers have tended to agree with the first assessment and much, though not all, of Vita’s poetry has failed to achieve longevity. Posthumously, as in the second half of her career, her reputation as a poet suffered as a result of her allegiance to the forms and focuses of so-called Georgian poetry: orderliness of rhyme and rhythm and an anti-modernist agenda of pastoralism, romance and detachment from the quotidian. She once described herself as ‘so out of touch with poetry as it is being written today’68 and, partly regretfully, as ‘a damned out-moded poet’.69