Behind the Mask

by Matthew Dennison

  ‘It goes without saying that a book by the author of “The Edwardians” is ably written, that every part of it, taken singly, is good, and that it holds the interest,’ wrote Basil Davenport in his review of The Dark Island in the Saturday Review on 24 November 1934. ‘But it holds the interest only to disappoint it; the new “Wuthering Heights” is still unwritten, and the self-tormenting sadist still awaits his genius.’

  On 10 October 1934, the Hogarth Press printed a first edition of 10,590 copies of what would prove to be Vita’s last novel for almost a decade. By the end of the year only half had sold, 4,000 of them ahead of publication and a raft of mostly ambivalent reviews.144

  The Dark Island is the most disturbing of Vita’s novels. It tells the story of a marriage between Shirin, a woman who, like Vita, prefers ‘harshness to sentimentality’, and Davenport’s ‘self-tormenting sadist’, her husband Venn. Venn too resembles Vita: he has been shaped by his childhood, ‘too well trained by his own temperament, and by Storn [his ancestral home], always to choose the more cruel, more dangerous path’.145 At some length Vita examines the angry and self-destructive emotional make-up of her handsome protagonists. She summarised her melodramatic plot as ‘the trouble which ended in two persons losing their lives and in one criminal receiving an expression of sympathy from the coroner instead of a sentence of death from the judge’. It is brooding, intense stuff played out against a backdrop of equal intensity.

  The dark island of the title is Storn, crowned by a Norman castle, the home of the le Breton family. Both husband and wife are more in love with Storn than one another; like Vita’s feelings for Knole, their passion for the island exceeds simple love and overrides other loyalties. Like Vita’s Sissinghurst, Storn is a retreat from the world: Shirin relishes ‘the bliss, the release of living for ever on Storn away from people’.146 For husband and wife, Storn is their journey’s end: physically and metaphorically it lies ‘at the end of that path of sunlight, symbol of all romance and of all escape from the humdrum weariness of life, from its meannesses, its falsity, and its pain’.147 Their tragedy is to take into that path of sunlight their own meannesses and falsity. Despite its vigorous emotions, The Dark Island is a novel by an older, wearier, less sanguine Vita.

  On delivery of Vita’s manuscript, Leonard Woolf described the novel to Virginia as ‘perilous fantastic stuff, a woman flagellated in a cave’.148 Astutely he questioned how much of Vita’s lurid Grand Guignol the public would stand. Harold, Nigel and Ben, who designed the dust jacket, combined in disliking The Dark Island; Harold protested that it was ‘morbid and distressing’. Sexual violence and calculated cruelty were curious subjects for a popular writer of bestsellers in 1934. Where recently Vita had wooed a large, middle-class readership with a story of Edwardian aristocratic amorality, in The Dark Island she exposed to their bewildered gaze unlovely subtexts drawn from her own atypical experience of upper-class life, conflicts centred on inheritance, territorialism and the inequalities of men and women. The tragic story of Shirin le Breton offered Vita’s readers no picturesque distractions from an uncertain decade. The violence that in The Dragon in Shallow Waters had appeared simply stirring here acquires a darker, more lingering impact, which made for uncomfortable reading. The Times Literary Supplement acclaimed the novel as a work of ‘fervid’ imagination: it was that very fervour which alienated other readers. Virginia suggested Vita was too close to her material. Afterwards she acknowledged that the emotional revelations contained within the novel made her jealous and lessened her enjoyment.

  The key, as always, lay within Vita herself. Soon after her return from America, she had fallen in love with her sister-in-law. Gwen St Aubyn was one of two grown-up bridesmaids at Vita and Harold’s wedding. The Dark Island is dedicated to Gwen and Gwen is the inspiration for its heroine, Shirin; Storn is St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, which Gwen’s husband Sam would inherit on his father’s death. Even Shirin’s name, Persian for ‘sweet’, was Vita’s pet name for Gwen; it was more appropriate in Gwen’s case than that of the fictional Shirin. As Vita’s son Ben recognised, the novel is a double portrait of Gwen and, in the guise of old Lady le Breton, Victoria. It also, of course, encompasses images of Vita herself, a fragmented reflection divided between several characters. The Venn who whips the chained and naked Shirin in Andromeda’s Cave is an adult version of the nettle-thrashing Vita of those Boer War games with the Battiscombes; like Vita, Venn is torn between his hatred of democracy and mistrust of privilege. Shirin shares Vita’s obsessive belief in the redemptive power of place; like Vita, she is casual in her approach to romantic conquest, studiedly without regrets and secretive. Vita’s description of Shirin’s friend Cristina suggests self-portraiture, ‘with her tawny appearance and her big limbs; her large gestures, her large generosity, her love of bright colours, her coltish way of striding about, her impatient way of pushing her hair back, her strong square hands, her direct speech – all rather Wagnerian’.149 Cristina’s affection for Shirin clearly transcends the ordinary bounds of friendship. She admits that she wants ‘the whole of Shirin greedily’,150 a statement in itself to account for Harold’s dislike of the novel. In her ponderous ratiocination, Cristina repeatedly resorts to horticultural imagery. In The Dark Island, Vita wears many masks.

  On 18 August 1933, Vita had written to Virginia, ‘I’ve got my sister-in-law staying here, and she’s been ill, and I am supposed to provide the cure. Country rustication and all that.’151 Gwen was Harold’s only sister, ten years his junior, four years younger than Vita. Despite a strong sibling bond, she had played little part in the Nicolsons’ lives since 1913, although she and her husband rented Vita and Harold’s Ebury Street house early in their marriage. It was a motor accident involving serious head injuries that brought her to Sissinghurst to convalesce. Her arrival provoked a mixed response in Vita. The women were not close. Gwen and her husband led safe, predictable lives in county society, accepting its values and shibboleths; Gwen mostly appeared preoccupied with bringing up her large family of five children. At the time of her accident, she was working on a book, The Family Book, subtitled: ‘A comprehensive guide to family life from before marriage to the adolescence of children: primarily for parents’. Both title and subject seemed to confirm Gwen’s conventionalism.

  Vita’s letter to Virginia suggests the way the wind was blowing. She described her pleasure in looking after Gwen as increased by Gwen’s work on The Family Book: ‘We sit on the steps of the tower discussing why some women get their physical satisfaction interiorally or exteriorally, and what connection there may or may not be between the inner part of the nerve and the outer – and what connection there may be between perversion and normality – and so on. A very interesting question.’152

  Gwen had reached a crossroads in her life. More important to her than The Family Book was her long, thoughtful spiritual journey towards Catholicism. That change represented a move away from the solid certainties of St Aubyn county life; in the aftermath of her accident Gwen embraced a larger-scale questioning of the building blocks of her existence. Vita, who had warned Harold during their engagement that she was incapable of submission, interpreted this development as a rejection of Gwen’s former docility in marriage and encouraged her rebellion. The women’s friendship grew. Gwen’s doctor insisted she needed at least a year’s full convalescence: with her husband’s acquiescence, and in the absence of guest rooms, she moved in to a room at the top of Vita’s tower at Sissinghurst that was specially prepared for her. With intervals she would continue to live with Vita and Harold until 1942.

  Following an operation in January 1934, Gwen was taken by Vita to Portofino to recover. Harold expressed concern at his ‘poor cracked sister’ travelling so soon, but no other uneasiness.153 The women stayed in Castello Brown, the small sixteenth-century hilltop castle perched above the harbour, which had inspired Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel of the previous decade, The Enchanted April. In ironic vein, Harold wrote to Vita: ‘Well, I am all for that
sort of thing, as you know. I liked being turned out of my dear little suburban home [Long Barn] and made to sleep in a ruined tower on a camp-bed [Sissinghurst]. And I see no reason why, in the present state of our finances, you did not buy the Castello outright … It all comes from Gwen reading … the works of Elizabeth Russell [von Arnim].’154

  Von Arnim had described the Castello as ideal for ‘those who Appreciate Wisteria and Sunshine’, a prescription calculated to appeal to Vita.155 She had also drawn a picture of women frustrated in marriage, temporarily abandoning their husbands. ‘A picture had flashed across her brain, and there were two figures in it sitting together under a great trailing wisteria that stretched across the branches of a tree she didn’t know, and it was herself and Mrs Arbuthnot – she saw them – she saw them.’156 Like Vita in 1918, von Arnim’s women reject the constraints of unrelenting domesticity. ‘There ought to be a break, there ought to be intervals,’ one exclaims, referring to the married woman’s monotony of ‘see[ing] about the dinner and the fish’. As in von Arnim’s novel, in which, within a fairytale scheme, wives are fondly reunited with their husbands against a backdrop of glittering Mediterranean, Harold joined Vita and Gwen in their harbourside eyrie. In this case, there had been no crisis. Vita had made her protest long ago and Gwen had no need to shirk domestic responsibilities, having already, as she said, entrusted all responsibilities to Vita.

  In 1940, Gwen published an account of her conversion to Catholicism, Towards a Pattern. It consists of letters written to an unnamed recipient, who is almost certainly Vita. In describing a mystical vision that appears to her while she is writing, Gwen tells her correspondent, ‘I heard your pen scratching as you wrote … The room, and you, were there, and so was I, but I was conscious of an enormous change in me.’157 That change in Gwen had begun before 1940. It began when Vita reimagined her as a flawed and tragic romantic heroine in The Dark Island and, in the way of Vita’s fiction, merged their two personalities in her picture of Shirin. In turn Gwen would influence Vita. At first those changes happened in small ways: Virginia noted with disapproval that Vita had begun to wear nail polish and lipstick, inexpertly applied. Afterwards Gwen’s preoccupations shaped both the subject matter of Vita’s writing and her handling of those subjects.

  The mysticism that characterises the biography of St Joan of Arc which Vita wrote during the period of her intimacy with Gwen St Aubyn arose out of the latter’s religious odyssey: it is already discernible in The Dark Island. Shirin succumbs to the ‘beauty and magic of Storn’: ‘like a faith, like an ecstasy, it transformed her, filling her with strength and purity and ardour, with a passion that transcended all material love’.158 Gwen’s journey towards spiritual renewal inspired similar questioning on Vita’s part: Vita described her as ‘you, who opened first my shuttered eyes/ To the first difficult and deep surmise’.159 The Hogarth Press promoted Vita’s long poem Solitude, written under Gwen’s influence and published in 1938, as ‘the poet’s intimate reflections induced by the solitude of night, reflections upon love, God and the universe, beauty and truth, life and death’, territory Vita would visit again, in different guise, in The Garden. In fact she was no newcomer to such questions. On and off throughout the last decade she had struggled to unravel a workable philosophy of living, most notably in ‘Reddín’, the long poem she finished in 1928, having previously attempted to write it as a novel, including during the trip to Italy with Dottie and Gerry in 1921.

  The poem is named after an architect who builds a temple that ‘compelled each man to find his way anew/ Round corners and by paths that no guide knew’.160 Reddín’s philosophy is explicitly non-Christian – ‘No vision of the martyr or the saint/ Shone down from domed mosaic’. It is a creed which, rather vaguely, embraces everyone: ‘all were welcome there,/ Since the great doors stood open’.161 In its vagueness lies both its strength and its weakness: after a decade the Vita who had once described herself as ‘disgracefully happy-go-lucky’ was still searching for answers.162 Solitude included her attempt at a fuller, more personal answer; she also offered images of transformation in Saint Joan of Arc and The Eagle and the Dove. After the cool critical reception of The Dark Island, Gwen’s example provided Vita with fresh inspiration and, in her biography of Joan of Arc, published by Cobden-Sanderson in June 1936, a popular commercial success. Vita’s mother, who read the book in manuscript form, lamented the absence of any love interest in her heroine’s life; her friends were caustic, and baffled by a development they regarded as out of character. No one who had read ‘Reddín’ or Vita’s assessment of Joan of Arc’s first dilemma – ‘the practical inconvenience of belonging to the wrong sex must be faced and overcome’163 – could fail to find the connection.

  Vita celebrated completing her new book by planting quantities of old-fashioned roses. In the same year, a large greenhouse and an orchid house were erected at Sissinghurst and Vita bought thirty new budgerigars for her aviary. The Lime Walk was planted and paved. It would become Harold’s particular suzerainty, referred to as ‘My Life’s Work’ or ‘MLW’; he employed his own gardener, Sidney Neve, for its upkeep and kept detailed notebooks on its progress.164 Gwen continued to help Vita in the garden. Together they rowed on the lake, gathered apples in the orchard, filled cushions with the ‘delicious silky floss’ contained in bulrush stems. Whenever they were at home, Ben and Nigel also helped their parents in the garden, part of Sissinghurst’s ‘monastic’ routine in which gardening formed the only alternative to writing. But it was not Saint Joan of Arc which so richly endowed Vita and Harold’s garden. On 30 January 1936, following a minor stroke or heart attack, Victoria died peacefully in her sleep at her house, White Lodge, near Brighton. She was seventy-three. In his diary Harold described Vita as ‘much harassed and shattered, but inwardly, I think, relieved’. Vita, who had rushed to her mother’s bedside, described herself as ‘stunned’. She felt fragile; the onset of the menopause exacerbated the uncontrollability of her responses. Eight days later, Harold returned to Brighton to bury Victoria, as she had requested in ‘a pathetic typewritten note’, by scattering her ashes out at sea, in sight of White Lodge. Vita did not accompany him.

  It was a vignette, like others in this story, which balanced sobriety with slapstick. More than twenty years after Victoria’s triumph in the Scott lawsuit, the Sackvilles remained noteworthy. Members of the press seized upon news of Victoria’s death. Vita and Harold took precautions. Victoria’s ashes were removed from the undertakers’ premises after cremation and entrusted to a local oyster seller, Mr English. English turned out to be a drunkard: only with difficulty was he dissuaded from keeping Harold company in his hired fishing boat. Assisted by the two sailors who owned the boat, Harold travelled two miles out to sea; also with him was Victoria’s last secretary, Cecil Rhind. Kneeling at the gunwale, the sailors and Rhind standing behind him, their hats in their hands, Harold tipped into ‘an angry brown sea’ the handful of Victoria’s last remains. In place of prayers was a simple valediction, hurled by Harold into the wind: ‘B.M. – all who love you are happy that you should now be at peace. We shall remember always your beauty, your courage and your charm.’165 Inevitably the wind changed direction. It threw the ashes back into Harold’s face. They settled in the seams and creases of his greatcoat.166

  Harold reported proceedings selectively to Vita. After death duties, the estate she inherited from Victoria provided her with an annual income of £5,000. There was also £1,000 a year each for Ben, now twenty-two and embarked on the first steps of his career as an art historian, and nineteen-year-old Nigel, at Balliol College, Oxford, where he had followed in Ben and Harold’s footsteps. Among Victoria’s possessions were garden benches designed by Lutyens which made their way to Sissinghurst. In the short term, Vita and Harold’s financial worries were over. Seery’s gift to his ‘chère petite amie’ extended its lifeline to a third generation.

  For Vita, Victoria’s death demanded resolution. She achieved it, as always, through her writing.
The following October she offered the public a careful, affectionate and misleading account of her relationship with her mother: what Victoria meant to her, she asserted, was ‘a mixture of tragedy and – no, not comedy, but sheer fun’.167 In a double biography of Victoria and Pepita, entitled simply Pepita, Vita imposed order on disorder and replaced questions with answers. She did so by presenting the lives of her mother and her grandmother as case studies in the Latin temperament. Pepita became Vita’s fullest exposition of her personal theory of her own duality. She rooted the ‘Spanish’ side of her nature in an inescapable maternal continuum and exploited national stereotypes to explain away troubling behaviour. Of Pepita’s mother (her own great-grandmother), Vita wrote: ‘Catalina lavished on her own daughter the fierce and possessive love which Latin women do often display towards their children, injudicious to a degree and mischievous in its consequences, but certainly not malevolent in its intention.’168 At a stroke, Vita appeared to solve the riddle of Victoria’s own approach to motherhood; the pattern she outlined came close to describing her own behaviour in her sexual relationships with other women. This pat quality to Pepita reassured Vita; it also trivialised more extreme aspects of Victoria’s bad behaviour. Its writing proved an act of exorcism. In none of her fiction written after Pepita did Vita explore with the same urgency and intensity the emotional and sexual ebullience of earlier fictions. She had settled the record.