Behind the Mask

by Matthew Dennison

  Vita’s reputation as a novelist reflects in the same way her avoidance of formal experimentalism, her sensationalism and her particular brand of non-realism, alongside her perceived fixation with the ramifications of class. Posterity has mostly disdained Vita’s prose fictions. Her son Ben described her as ‘a remarkable writer manqué’, her ‘true quality’ concealed beneath her ‘snobbery, the assumptions of superiority’; but Ben, whose relationship with Vita was latterly vexed to the point of collapse, is a highly subjective commentator.70 Vita was only concerned for her poetry. In her own mind she was quite clear about the different spheres occupied by poetry and fiction. ‘A poet’s dream costs nothing; yet is real,’ she wrote in The Garden.71 In response to a letter from a member of the public protesting about the secondary role accorded to poetry in her radio broadcasts, Vita wrote gratefully on 9 May 1930: ‘I would gladly exchange novels for poetry, but what about the great British Public which enjoys the former more than the latter? … I get plenty of letters, but few people ask for more poetry. That’s their loss.’72

  At her best, in prose as well as poetry, Vita wrote with insight, verve and colour. Her lingering descriptions of landscape and nature, described by a contemporary reviewer in the Daily Telegraph as a ‘generous glow of enthusiasm for beauty’,73 retain an intensely visual, sensuous and moving quality; in her ‘Country Notes’ for the New Statesman, she categorised herself as someone in whom ‘the love of nature and the natural seasonal life [had attained] the proportions of a vice’.74 ‘I looked out of my porthole and saw … the dawn scarlet behind a range of hills,’ Vita wrote of her first sighting of India. ‘Small craft were dotted about; kites swept over the placid surface; yellow lights ringed the water’s edge; rigging pencilled the flaming sky. Here was all the business of land again, albeit a land unawakened as yet.’75 Vita’s description separates colours into the blocks of an artist’s palette; unravels the different threads; builds up its picture simply but lingeringly.

  In her examination of character and motive she is sometimes intrepid and often unpredictable; necessarily discreet, given the climate of the time, her lesbian explorations contribute an element of tension, even subversion. Vita had a storyteller’s instinct and, as Leonard Woolf saw, enough honesty, romance and sentimentality to capture the popular imagination.76 These qualities came to fruition in all three of her best-known novels, within narrative formats which in each case offered opportunities for the self-exploration that consistently shaped Vita’s fiction. What’s more, she wove her tales, with their often startling effects – sado-masochism in The Dark Island and life after death in Grand Canyon – with a minimum of writerly fuss and consistent ease; as Virginia described her: ‘Vita … writing another novel; but as careless about it all as ever.’77 On the debit side is an inclination to purple prose and a taste for improbably heightened emotionalism. ‘How marvellously well she writes … She carries into her writings the quiet tranquillity of manner which is so characteristic of her,’ her mother wrote in 1927. Modern readers may reach the opposite conclusion. Vita’s style is invariably in keeping with that of popular fiction of its time: as she wrote in 1929, in her short biography of seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell, ‘so strong, so instinctive, is the habit of mind of one’s own age’.78

  It is not necessary to second Virginia Woolf’s dismissal of Vita’s ‘pen of brass’, a critique of her commercial instinct and ready facility, those ten, twelve or fifteen pages Vita wrote sometimes in a day, her assessment of The Edwardians as ‘not a very good book’,79 or her generalised disdain for what she termed Vita’s ‘sleepwalking servantgirl novels’.80 Vita herself made no claims for her early fiction, ‘the vile indiscretions of youth’, as she labelled them in 1927.81 Even Virginia agreed that ‘never was there a more modest writer’.82 It would not have occurred to Vita to suggest parity with Virginia’s writing. As we have seen, her acknowledgement of Virginia’s pre-eminent talent was a cornerstone of their relationship: Virginia enforced the gap by labelling Vita ‘Donkey West’. Vita enjoyed the act of writing: her novels were bread-and-butter undertakings, her purpose material gain. Reflecting Virginia’s influence, Vita told an interviewer in October 1930 that she wished she could ‘make a bonfire of all my novels … I particularly dislike my novels. The only one I can tolerate at all is Seducers in Ecuador.’83 The following year she summed up her literary achievements in a flippant doggerel obituary as ‘a few cheap novels as bad as sin/ And some honest lines of verse’.84 Her self-criticism was unnecessarily bleak. Virginia herself claimed that ‘all creation is the result of conflict’.85 There was no shortage of conflict either in Vita’s writing or her life. The ultimate weakness of Vita’s writing is that its autobiographical dimension too often stopped short of self-revelation; her instincts for concealment and privacy were too great. ‘Those things which are felt, and those things which are seen … are not the business of words,’ she once wrote, a curious, if revealing, statement for any writer.86

  On 31 December 1932, Virginia recorded in her diary: ‘Vita is on the high seas, sailing to America.’87 Two days previously, Vita and Harold had left Sissinghurst for a four-month lecture tour of the States. With Harold still without a job, their motives were financial.

  Both had published well-received novels during the course of the year – Vita’s Family History and Harold’s Public Faces; in May, American publishers Doubleday, Doran & Co. had also issued a collection of Vita’s stories, Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour. The title story was her fictional recreation of Seery’s apartment in the rue Laffitte; ‘Elizabeth Higginbottom’ concerned ‘a severe and serious person’ who ‘attained the age of forty before romance entered her life’; ‘The Poet’ offered an up-to-date variation on the death of Chatterton, which had so absorbed the teenage Vita, and revisited the themes of plagiarism and artistic fraudulence that underpinned the earlier drama. All engaged with characteristic foibles and preoccupations. In the title story, Vita reimagined Seery’s apartment as belonging to her great-grandmother, a means retrospectively of asserting her possession of it and claiming it as an ‘ancestral mansion’. In ‘Elizabeth Higginbottom’, Vita’s unlikely heroine yearns for marriage in order to escape from her maiden name, the reverse of Vita’s own outlook. She blames her parents for her dissonant surname and is eventually made ridiculous in her one misguided attempt at passion, as if her unfortunate name had fixed her destiny, much as Vita’s own destiny was shaped by heredity. Nicholas Lambarde’s claims to greatness in ‘The Poet’ are exposed as a sham when the narrator recognises that his best poems are unwitting copies of other men’s work; only his picturesque death moves the reader. Several of the stories in the collection had previously appeared singly in magazines. The publishers described them as ‘eight stories, brilliant, fantastic, exquisite, by the author of “All Passion Spent”’ and paid Vita $500.

  A well-oiled publicity machine, orchestrated on Vita and Harold’s behalf by a public-speaking agency called the Colston Leigh Bureau, ensured that, even at the height of the Great Depression, as many as possible of the book-buying American public were aware of the couple and their work. From the moment of their arrival in New York on 5 January, they found themselves objects of fascination. Reporters described Harold as ‘one of the cleverest men in England’; Vita’s connection with Knole and the long roll call of her Sackville ancestors inspired a degree of New World dizziness.88 Testily Harold dismissed the ‘slushy adulation’ that pursued them.89 Vita’s attitude, by contrast, was consistently one of wry amusement. ‘There were several descriptions of my personal appearance,’ she told Harold in February, referring to newspaper reports in Minneapolis. ‘My eyes, you will be pleased to hear, are (1) blue, (2) deep blue, (3) brown, (4) hazel. So you can take your choice. They got very puzzled as to what my name was, and there is a touching reference to my modesty in preferring to be called Miss S-W instead of Lady “which is her rightful title”. I think they thought I was being tactful in a democratic country.’90

 
Vita had first been published in the States in August 1919, when George H. Doran brought out an American edition of Heritage. Doran’s publicity material had claimed then that ‘in its passion, its pervading sense of beauty and detached pity, [Heritage] is reminiscent of Conrad and – strange to say – of Wuthering Heights’, an assessment of suitably exaggerated hyperbole that nevertheless attributes to Vita’s first novel characteristics more fully realised in her life: emotionalism, a pervading sense of beauty and, in terms of the lovers she abandoned so easily, detached pity. In the intervening period, all Vita’s books except Poems of West and East, Orchard and Vineyard and Andrew Marvell had been published in the States. Vita’s American following was considerable; both she and Harold found that they were better known there than in Britain, despite their radio broadcasts for the BBC, large sales and Vita’s early notoriety as Kidlet.

  Harold would calculate that by the end of their tour the couple had travelled 33,527 miles; in seventy-two different journeys they had crossed the length and breadth of America and visited fifty-three different cities. As Vita wrote to Virginia in March: ‘I never realised the size of this darn country till I came here.’91 It was a frequently gruelling experience, with repeated nights on sleeper trains; at Des Moines in February, Vita was so tired she fell asleep at the station, ‘on a wooden bench among my luggage, looking like an immigrant’.92 Occasionally they shared the stage for joint lectures, more often they were apart. Vita’s repertoire was larger than Harold’s. She discussed ‘Changes in English Social Life’, with references to The Edwardians; ‘Novels and Novelists’ and ‘The Modern Spirit in Literature’, amply supplied with material for both from her broadcasts for Hilda and her friendship with Virginia; less often she spoke about her Persian travels. Press attention followed her wherever she went – ‘Mummy is lionised like nohow. She is given orchids and met by groups of people at stations,’ Harold wrote to Ben at the end of their first week;93 she worked hard to ensure that her talks were well received. ‘Americans are easily and unexpectedly amused,’ Vita reported in her diary on 27 February. There were inadvertently entertaining incidents: ‘In the middle of my lecture a screen falls down on the heads of the audience but they do not appear to mind,’ she noted in Chicago.94 There were also a great many parties, invariably hosted by the local branch of the Women’s Club of America. ‘I don’t think I can stand many more women,’ Vita wrote to Harold at the midway point, ‘America is rapidly curing me of any weakness I may ever have entertained for my own sex.’95 At times Vita found both Americans in general and specific individuals trying. ‘It is awful how these people talk in trains,’ she noted;96 the following week, having been prevented from going to bed by an over-attentive host, she added ‘with all their kindness, these people have very little imagination’.97

  Vita retained her ability to inspire powerful responses of physical attraction in those she encountered, despite recent weight gain and the increasingly ruddy complexion which caused one photographer to request that she remove her rouge. Typically the press referred to her as ‘Juno-esque’, ‘Portia-like’ and ‘Orlando’;98 others reacted more idiosyncratically. At Cincinnati, Vita recorded in her diary: ‘A lady comes up afterwards and tells me she has had a vision during my lecture, and that I was Balkis, Queen of Sheba in a previous incarnation. Try to look suitably grateful.’99 She too was not wholly immune to her new acquaintances. In Columbus, Ohio, on 20 February, she was particularly struck by a Mrs Edmunds, ‘who is really lovely without a hat – lovely wide brows and a serene look; dark hair; a Madonna-like type’.100 At Northampton, Massachusetts, she found respite in the company of the wealthy Mina Curtiss. The latter’s farm in the Berkshire Hills reminded Vita for the first time on American soil of the way of life at Long Barn and Sissinghurst: pigeons colonised the roofs of the wooden buildings, in the meadows Jersey cows grazed.101 Vita felt a pang of homesickness and dedicated a poem to Mina, her thanks for a fleeting escape from ‘voices, cities, trains,/ … the clamour of a city street/ And vapid endless talk of books, books, books’.102

  Predictably Vita’s reaction to America itself was similarly varied. While dazzled by the South California desert, which reminded her of Persia, and the Grand Canyon, which would later form the centrepiece of her wartime novel of the same name (she described it to Virginia as ‘the most astonishing thing in the world’103), she was less impressed by American cities. ‘A large, elderly, Edwardian-looking lady called Mrs Thompson then drives me off to “see Pittsburgh – such a beautiful city”,’ she reported on 27 February. ‘It reminds me of Sheffield.’104 From the west coast she wrote simply: ‘Los Angeles is hell.’105 Publicly she was circumspect in her pronouncements to the American press. Her fury on 28 January at ‘a newspaper article saying we had been rude about America’ was justified: she defended herself on the grounds that she would not be so ill-mannered or so unintelligent.106 In return she inspired uniformly positive coverage in the American press. As Harold told her: ‘They adore your shy dignity, your regal modesty.’107

  On her return to Sissinghurst, Vita described herself as ‘enriched’ in more than the financial sense. Harold, whose attitude to their host country was less benign, told Raymond Mortimer that, despite appalling living expenses, ‘we shall bring back a pretty pile’, a profit in the region of £2,000.108 Vita brought home, in addition, books, bogus native American trinkets of a sort she would later deride in Grand Canyon but which currently delighted her, and several large cowboy hats.

  During their absence, areas of woodland at Sissinghurst had been thinned and tidied. Vita and Harold would continue improvements to the garden that year with the addition of a covered terrace attached to the Priest’s House, in what is now the White Garden but was then the Rose Garden; they used it for outdoor dining. The Erechtheum is a pergola constructed of salvaged fragments of columns supporting a wooden trellis. Vita and Harold planted a vine to cover it and, prompted by Harold’s philhellenism, named it after the temple of Athena on the Acropolis that had once been plundered by Lord Elgin. The idea was not theirs exclusively, but had been suggested by architect Albert Powys (known as A. R. P.), secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, whose help at Sissinghurst Vita and Harold had enlisted.

  Vita’s diary for her American tour is engaging and funny. She seldom employed her diary for self-scrutiny and the entries for this period are no exception, but the woman who emerges from its pages during the first quarter of 1933 appears at ease with herself. She was ‘lapped in happiness and security … so ordered, rational’, as she described herself elsewhere;109 she was confident in her likes and dislikes, impatient perhaps but polite, hard working, mostly without cynicism, prepared to be amused, entertained and interested; at this point she was more open-minded than her ex-diplomat husband. The smooth surface of Vita’s American diary reveals no trace of the woman who, only months earlier, had written for the first and only time in her life: ‘Pass from my heart towards the heart of others;/ But in your passing, half-remember me.’110 In the spring of 1931, Vita had fallen in love again. The following summer, she learned that the object of her affections had fallen in love with another woman. It had never happened to her before and would never happen again. Vita would discover at first hand what it was to face rejection by a lover.

  She fell in love at a moment of unhappiness. Vita could not explain the cause of what Virginia called her ‘vague mood of depression’, and yet it hung, heavy, refusing to budge, darkening her final weeks’ work on All Passion Spent. ‘If I, who am the most fortunate of women, can ask What is life for?, how can other people live at all?’ she asked Virginia on 22 January.111 Neither woman could pinpoint an answer. Although Vita did not identify her as such, Virginia herself was part of the problem: their relationship had stalled through Vita’s fault, that cooling of ardour that sought distraction first with Mary, afterwards with Margaret Voigt then Hilda. Virginia revenged herself by making Vita jealous of her own new friendship with septuagenarian composer-turned
-writer, Dame Ethyl Smyth.

  As long ago as 1909, Vita had identified ‘the gnawing doubt of self’ as ‘worse than any outward suffering’:112 Virginia retained enough of a hold over Vita to challenge the careful balance of her self-confidence. At the same time, Harold and Ben were also unhappy. Harold jibbed against what he saw as his mistaken change of career – ‘I simply loathe writing for a newspaper, and have got an anti-vulgarisation complex’;113 as late as 1935 he was still dreaming he had been asked to return to the Foreign Office and waking to disappointment on discovering that his hopes were only dreams. As with Vita’s relationship with Violet, he refused to allow himself to blame her for his unsettlement. Ben was miserable at Eton. In the autumn of 1931 he suffered a nervous breakdown. Harold was too busy to visit him and Vita bore the brunt alone. On the plus side, Victoria underlined her ongoing (if temporary) truce with Vita by dispatching to Sissinghurst weekly grocery hampers from Selfridges and a drip feed of treasures from Knole. Among highlights of the latter was a copy of one of the two portraits by Kneller of Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, poetaster and hero of Vita’s early historical novel The King’s Secret.