Behind the Mask

by Matthew Dennison

  Separately Leonard and Virginia Woolf wrote to Vita about the manuscript to express their delight: Virginia claimed she ‘read it like a shark swallowing a mackerel’.169 In private they accused Vita of consciously downplaying Victoria’s devilment: Virginia remembered too vividly the horror she had felt in 1929 when Victoria took it upon herself to enlighten Ben and Nigel about their parents’ sexual proclivities. In this case, Vita’s instinct for myth-making was stronger than the careful objectivity she had demonstrated in her biography of Joan of Arc. Again she plundered fairy tales for easy explanations: ‘The bad fairy who attended the christening of Sleeping Beauty must have attended my mother’s also. Gifts had been showered on her: beauty and charm and energy, abounding vitality, courage, determination … But the bad fairy ordained that she should fritter everything away.’170 Like much of Vita’s writing, it was an exercise in wish fulfilment. Her American publishers aligned it with her fiction. ‘Witty, frank, completely devoid of reticences,’ claimed Doubleday Doran, ‘this unconventional memoir of the extraordinary Sackville-West family could only have been written by the brilliant author of The Edwardians and All Passion Spent.’ The Hogarth Press published four editions in six months and, at the end of March 1938, paid Vita royalties on sales of 12,198 copies.

  Meanwhile, Vita had embarked on her first gardening book: Some Flowers was published by Cobden-Sanderson in November 1937. Despite her growing reclusiveness, she had made a new friend of Maidstone-based rose expert, Edward Ashton Bunyard, author of Old Garden Roses; she included four roses in Some Flowers, alongside crown imperials and the pomegranate, Punica granatum, which she had first seen a decade before growing untended in Persian myrtle groves. From the outset Vita’s horticultural writing betrayed an idiosyncratic quality. She offered commonsense advice and observations while celebrating favourite plants with the sensuousness typical of her writing. ‘It is improbable that we shall ever lie on a bed of roses, unless we are very decadent and also very rich,’ she wrote of Rosa gallica, ‘but we can imagine ourselves doing so when we hold a single rose close to our eyes and absorb it in an intimate way into our private heart.’171

  On 8 June 1937, Harold wrote to Vita: ‘Never has Sissinghurst looked more lovely … we have got what we wanted to get – a perfect proportion between the classical and the romantic, between the element of expectation and the element of surprise.’172 Up to a point those neat polarities represented Harold and Vita themselves; Vita’s romanticism took the form of the lavishness which she claimed was ‘an inherent part of my philosophy’, her principle of ‘cram, cram, cram’ that, as much as anything, hallmarked a distinctive Sissinghurst style.173 By the late 1930s, Vita and Harold’s complementary outlooks had sculpted Sissinghurst’s six acres into a richly satisfying aesthetic and horticultural mélange: in their garden they proved to one another that in their divergences lay much of their strength and each was touchingly eager to accord credit to the other. That Vita shared Harold’s assessment of Sissinghurst’s loveliness is indicated by her agreement the following summer to open the garden twice to paying visitors. The Nicolsons charged them a shilling a head. Over the course of two days they raised £25 14s 6d. The same year Vita made her first plantings in the Herb Garden and between them they completed the carpet of polyanthus in the Nuttery. Harold celebrated the success of their open days by giving Vita a plant token. In the unpublished poem she wrote to him in response, she linked plants’ growth with the growth of love and, reflecting on their marriage, resorted to her planting philosophy: ‘let us cram with flowers each threatened rift’.174

  The Sackville flag was hoisted at Sissinghurst for the first time in the second week of March 1939. It was Harold’s present to Vita. ‘The flag streamed out five minutes after I had passed under the porch and made me feel awfully grand,’ Vita wrote in her diary on 24 March.175 Later she told an American friend that it was Harold who valued the symbolism of the flag: ‘as Harold says of the flag I fly in the tower: “It grands the place up.”’176 It hardly matters. Bold above her tower, it was the pennant of her possession. In the fullest sense, Sissinghurst was Vita’s. The last of the ‘fragments of an age gone by’ that she had described in her poem ‘Sissinghurst’ had been ‘assembled’. From now on possession would be reversed: Vita would belong to Sissinghurst.

  PART VI

  All Passion Spent?

  ‘When I came into the country, and being seated among silent trees and meads, and hills, had all my time in my own hands, I resolved to spend it all, whatever it cost me, in search of happiness, and to satiate that burning thirst which nature had enkindled in me from youth. In which I was so resolute, that I chose rather to live upon ten pounds a year, and to go in leather clothes, and feed upon bread and water, so that I might have all my time clearly to myself …’

  Thomas Traherne, quoted in ‘Buying a Farm’, by V. Sackville-West, New Statesman, 15 April 1939

  VITA DESCRIBED SEX as ‘the arch-deceiver’. In a diary poem she claimed ‘sex deludes one into the belief that one has attained real contact with another person;/ And since the horrible loneliness of the soul makes one crave for some contact,/ One turns gratefully to sex as a short-cut to contact’.1

  Vita knew at first hand the deceits of sex. She knew from her béguins the potential elusiveness of real contact with another person. At moments throughout her life she had known ‘the horrible loneliness of the soul’. In Solitude, published in 1938, she dismissed the ‘lure’ of the flesh, suggesting its ‘cheap unworthy tricks’ failed to satisfy.2 In vain Hilda wrote to Vita to protest, hurt to be likened retrospectively to a trick, even by implication.

  In middle age, Vita did not forswear the romantic impulses that had directed so much of her life: those energies found a more certain outlet, a fuller satisfaction, in Sissinghurst. Previously, in novels and plays, she had transformed herself into the Sackville cavalier of her imagination; in the same guise she had wooed friends and lovers. In her last – and best – act of creation, she channelled that heroic bravado into her garden. ‘Dare/ Th’ unorthodox; be always bold; be prince;/ … Fail if you must …/ But gloriously fail: the dream, the brag,/ No prudent pose,’ she wrote in The Garden.3 It was, for Vita, characteristic rhetoric, with its insistence on unorthodoxy, glory, a vaunting dream and the combined suggestions of masculinity, power and status in the injunction: ‘be prince’.

  Sissinghurst had provided solace and distraction for Harold, battling rising debts, unhappiness at the Evening Standard and the sense of futility that followed his departure from the Foreign Office. It would provide the same solace – and significant excitement – for Vita. Leonard Woolf wrote that, ‘in the creation of Sissinghurst and its garden [Vita] was, I think, one of the happiest people I have ever known, for she loved them and they gave her complete satisfaction in the long years between middle age and death’.4 Vita’s work on her garden was a retreat and recognised as such by those nearest to her. On 9 March 1938, Harold concluded a letter discussing the threat of Nazi Germany with: ‘My dearest, do not worry about these things but cultivate your lovely garden.’5 Like the purchase of Sissinghurst itself, Vita’s immersion in gardening represented a running away in order to ‘sink down through centuries to another clime,/ And buried find the castle and the rose’.6 That immersion was imaginative as well as physical. Her garden became Vita’s final act of defiance. She approached it, as ever, in vigorous spirit. ‘Come, flame; come, tongue of courage; scorch me, sear,’ she entreated in The Garden, ‘Better, I swear, to be consumed entire/ Than smoulder, knowing neither zest nor fear.’7 But her withdrawal into horticulture was also the symbol of something akin to defeat. In 1929, writing about Victorian essayist Leigh Hunt, Vita had claimed ‘he could not stand back and estimate the taste of his own day in any detached perspective’.8 As she must have known, any suggestion of ambivalence about one’s own times applied equally to her. ‘One ought to be able to adapt oneself – and not struggle to go back to, and live in, an obsolete tradition,’ she lamented
in December 1944.9 Vita’s efforts were half-hearted and predictably failed. Later, in her dream diary, she wrote a heading: ‘Vita’s Book of a Thousand Pities’; among her suggestions for pities were committees, clothes, politics, relations, socialists, society and voices. At Sissinghurst, Vita would live life at a remove.

  On 22 August 1945, Vita replied to a letter from the daughter of a friend, asking if she had a new book out in time for Christmas. ‘Alas the answer is no. I am trying to finish a long poem (a sort of sequel to The Land) but that won’t come out till next year. The only thing I can recommend to you, as a convenient Christmas present, is a little anthology which Harold and I have rather carelessly thrown together, called “Another World Than This”. The title may appeal to you, as I don’t think you like this world any better than I do?’10 In a letter to Ben, she had written: ‘You know I loathe the modern world quite as much as you do, if not more’; angrily she castigated it as ‘this horrible new world’.11 Vita had described herself as ‘worldly-sick’ in the dedication of Solitude to Gwen St Aubyn.12

  As long ago as 1924, Vita had recorded simple everyday occurrences guaranteed to make her happy: ‘walking on crisp snow; running a stick along railings; stamping on a nut; stripping the shell from a hard-boiled egg; writing with the really ideal nib; plunging into the sudden comfort of warm water on a cold night’.13 Each inspired a sensation she labelled ‘through leaves’ on the analogy of the uncomplicated pleasure inherent in kicking one’s way through dry leaves on an autumn walk. Though not intended as an inventory of personal fulfilment (Vita’s list omitted Harold, poetry, gardening, her houses, Ben, Nigel, dogs and intimate friends), it indicates something of the nature of her engagement with her world. In The Land, Vita claimed for herself the role of ‘scholar of simplicity’: she found that simplicity in fallen leaves, in nature and the cycle of the seasons.14 ‘I find my God alone in his creation,/ Magnificent or detailed, in the skies/ Or in the leaf unfolding to the spring,’ she concluded in Solitude.15 It was nature that moved her to a sense of wonder, awe and comfort. The pleasure of life in the country, she explained, lay in ‘the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live’.16 Those ‘evidences’ became the basis of the beliefs she articulated in The Garden, as near as she came to resolving her search for spiritual clarity. In country life lay both the simplicity and the reassurance Vita craved in middle age. It provided the background she needed for her life of the mind; she was always, and absorbedly, a creative artist.

  ‘The country habit has me by the heart,’ Vita asserts in The Land.17 She defined herself as countrywoman as much as daughter of Knole. In 1938 she began her ‘Country Notes’ column for the New Statesman. She recorded the visit to Sissinghurst of ‘metropolitan friends’ in ‘A Country Life’, published the following February. ‘They ask me if I have seen this or that play, these or those pictures, and I always find myself obliged to reply that I have not.’ But her composure was not ruffled: ‘They leave me feeling that I am getting more out of this short life than they, for all their agitations.’18 As at Long Barn, she bought additional parcels of land over a period of years, thrilled atavistically by her delight in landowning. There were acquisitions along Sissinghurst’s boundary with neighbouring Bettenham. Then, in November 1940, at a cost of £5,000, she added 110 acres at Brissenden, north of Sissinghurst. After the Bettenham purchase, she wrote a ‘Country Notes’ column entitled ‘Buying a Farm’: ‘I love the fields and the orchards so much that I want to feel them safely mine’;19 in a diary poem she referred with greedy hauteur to ‘my lands in Kent’.20

  Vita’s vision of country life was selective, possessive and idealised. In The Women’s Land Army, a short wartime account published in 1944, she imagined a farmhouse kitchen at suppertime: ‘The white tablecloth is spread under the lamp and the table is set with yellow plates, and there is a huge loaf and a bowl of tomatoes and jade-green lettuce in the centre. The fire glows behind the bars of the grate, the kettle bubbles gently.’21 Vita imagines the farmer and his family: the father reading the newspaper with his sleeves rolled up, mother in the scullery, well-behaved children, inevitably a dog. Certainly she did not, as she had written in August 1945, always like this world: as in so much of her life, Vita preferred her own version.

  Vita’s romantic engagement with the country arose in part from her poet’s vocation; the privileges of wealth also shaped her vision. Increasingly central to Vita’s country life was her solitariness. At Sissinghurst, as she had always intended, she realised her dream of a lonely tower full of books; in time her tower became home to a flock of white pigeons, which she fed on the steps every morning, a scene reminiscent of the Knole of her childhood.

  That she came to spend Monday to Friday consistently alone for the last three decades of her life began, on 14 November 1935, as a result of Harold’s election to the House of Commons. Parliamentary duties kept Harold in London and his flat in King’s Bench Walk; he spent his weekends with Vita at Sissinghurst. Physical separation reflected profounder gulfs in Vita and Harold’s marriage. ‘I suppose Hadji and I have been about as unfaithful to one another as one well could be from the conventional point of view, even worse than unfaithful if you add in homosexuality,’ Vita commented.22 By 1935, they had learned to reconcile those differences. The conviction that they did so successfully, supportively and lovingly became key to the value each attached to their resilient marriage. As Vita wrote to Harold: ‘I swear no two people could love one another more than we do after all these years … I do think we have managed things cleverly.’23

  Harold became an MP with a majority of eighty-seven votes and a loan from Vita of £500 towards his campaign expenses. Vita offered no further support, resisting with considerable vehemence ‘the “Candidate’s Wife” stunt’ and refusing to make a single visit to the West Leicester constituency he was fighting.24 ‘Don’t run away with the idea that I “have never taken any interest,” as you said, in the things which mattered to you,’ Vita pleaded with him, following a disagreement on this score. ‘You know as well as I do … that this is an absurd contention!’25 It was not absurd to Harold, who came as close as he ever would to direct criticism of Vita over her lack of interest in this development in his career. Far from being flattered, he was irritated by her insistence that she had ‘always cared very very deeply about your writing and even your broadcasting’. As ever, Vita’s ‘care’ applied to those aspects of his career that matched her own. ‘My idea of heaven on earth would be for you to live here and bury yourself all morning and evening in your room and write, with perhaps one very interesting job that took you to London once every six months,’ Vita wrote in 1943.26 In the afternoon, they would garden together.

  In terms of party loyalty, Harold’s political affiliations were fluid and opportunistic. It was necessarily so: his beliefs, like Vita’s, were at odds with developments in contemporary politics. ‘I have always been on the side of the underdog,’ he wrote in 1940, ‘but I have also believed in the principle of aristocracy.’27 He claimed he had been brought up with a Victorian idea of ‘privileged classes with nice clean Sunday-school discipline for the poor’.28 He stood for the National Labour Party, formed to coordinate Labour support for Ramsay MacDonald’s Conservative-dominated National Government. His candidacy was suggested by Vita’s cousin, the suitably aristocratic Herbrand Sackville, 9th Earl De La Warr, known as ‘Buck’. Harold represented West Leicester for the next decade. Vita was never interested in politics and did not pretend, for Harold’s sake, to an interest she did not possess. Her outlook was that of the Edwardian grandee; in The Edwardians she sketched aspects of her preferred paternalism. Her feudalism was unapologetic and she shared Harold’s belief in the principle of aristocracy. In February 1945, a proposed new bus route skirting Sissinghurst woods roused her to a political credo: ‘I detest democracy. I hate la populace. I wish education had never been introduced. I don’t like tyranny but I like an intelligent oligarchy. I wish la populace had never been encouraged
to emerge from its rightful place. I should like to see them as well fed and well housed as T.T. [dairy] cows – but no more thinking than that.’29 His political life would rebuild for Harold the sense of purpose and self-worth he had forfeited by abandoning diplomacy; Vita’s experience of politics happened at second hand, in Harold’s daily letters. At Sissinghurst, Vita settled into a routine she would maintain until her death of writing, gardening and her dogs, Martin and Martha, both Alsatians; with her secretary Miss Macmillan, she occasionally drank too much sherry, a habit that would grow. The majority of her time she spent alone or with Gwen, who remained at Sissinghurst until 1942. After Gwen’s departure, Vita relied more and more on the companionship of her dogs.

  The more perceptive of Vita’s friends saw the warning signs. As long ago as June 1926, Vita had recorded in her diary an ideal Long Barn day: ‘Alone; gardened; wrote’;30 days later she spent an evening with Dottie ‘discuss[ing] solitude and eccentricity’.31 On 13 April 1934, Virginia wrote pointedly to Vita: ‘The week after next we go to Ireland … And there I may be windswept into the sea. But what would Vita care. “No,” she’d say, we had the Petulaneum Ridentis in that bed last year: we’ll try Scrofulotum Penneum there this.” So she’d bury me under, wouldn’t she Vita?’32