Behind the Mask

by Matthew Dennison

  Vita did, as Virginia feared, bury her friends under. Not completely and not all the time, but the contact became sporadic. At the outset of their marriage, Vita and Harold had spent half the year in London and the warmer months at Long Barn, visited by a large circle of friends and acquaintances. By the end of the Thirties, Vita compressed her London life into three days before Christmas. She stopped buying clothes (the single evening dress remaining in her wardrobe at the time of her death had been bought in 1927); she was careless about her hair. Until a severe attack of pleurisy in 1938 resulted in her losing two-and-a-half stones, Vita had grown significantly heavier, ‘more matronly and voluptuous than ever’, as Virginia described her in October 1937.33 Virginia regretted the dark shadow of a moustache and puffy cheeks which hid her eyes. Vita lost her unselfconsciousness about her looks and, doing nothing to address the cause, became nervous about the impression her appearance created. Poet and biographer Peter Quennell remembered an encounter in 1936: ‘From beneath the brim of a hard black Spanish hat sprang locks of wiry black hair. Her eyebrows were heavy; her eyes were very dark; her cheeks had a vivid carmine tinge; and she made no effort to disguise the perceptible moustache … She had all the impressiveness that surrounds an archaic cult statue.’34 Memorably, if unkindly, the breeches- and gaiters-clad Vita was compared to Lady Chatterley and her lover rolled into one.

  Much to Harold’s annoyance, Vita refused to attend a banquet at Buckingham Palace in March 1937; she refused a similar invitation in November 1938, to a banquet in honour of the King of Romania. On both occasions she blamed her lack of a suitable dress. Explaining her second refusal, she told Harold: ‘I am writing this letter with my jewels littered all around me – emeralds and diamonds, just taken out of the bank – and they make me feel sick. I simply can’t buy a dress costing £30 or wear jewels worth £2,000 when people are starving.’35 She had discovered that white evening gloves cost £2 a pair, that shoes and suitable underwear would add another £10. Behind the well-meant principle were self-consciousness and fear of exposure: she admitted to Harold: ‘I hate the idea of being examined under electric lights.’36 Vita had changed in the twenty-five years since she announced to Harold how much she preferred ‘un bal un peu propre … powdered footmen announcing duchesses’ to ‘scrimmages at the Ritz’.37 The change was more than surface deep. As her desire for solitude grew, her confidence in herself socially declined steeply. She told Harold she felt decreased by people. And so she avoided them and so the fear grew. With the loss of Knole came a degree of severance from the world of powdered footmen and duchesses, a realignment of her identity.

  Harold’s concern lay in what Vita had once labelled ‘the family failing of unsociability’.38 He was afraid, given time, that Vita’s inherited tendency to reclusiveness would extend even to himself and the boys. That Vita initially felt differently is clear in her portrait of their marriage outlined in Grand Canyon, the novel she completed in March 1942 and which Leonard Woolf turned down for the Hogarth Press on account of its wartime defeatism and variable quality. In this instance, Vita’s marriage to Harold, with its degrees of separation and consenting independence, appears in the description of an ideal platonic friendship between heroine Helen Temple (another exercise in fictional self-portraiture: a woman who loves silence and solitude) and safe, sexually neutral Lester Dale. The picture Helen draws resembles in every particular that of Vita and Harold’s marriage during the Sissinghurst years as preserved in their letters and their diaries. ‘His company gave her a curious sense of completion, and when he was not there she felt that something was lacking, that something had gone cold and grey and would return to life only when he reappeared. They did not always talk much. Their conversation came in bursts which might last for hours, since there seemed to be so much they could talk about, and so many by-ways of communication down which they wanted to stray, so that their talk was always inconsistent, rich and variegated, as though they never finished one subject before they were darting off on another; but equally they could sit silent for hours, or meander together through the incredible kingdom they had been given to explore, roving without fatigue or effort in a contentment that neither of them had ever known.’39 Helen’s reflections constitute a love letter from Vita to her absent husband. They are also an explanation. Their ‘incredible kingdom’, the Grand Canyon itself, was, like Sissinghurst, another Eden. Loving Vita as he did, Harold understood Helen Temple’s needs, above all those ‘times when the human voice made her want to put her hands over her ears’.40

  On 17 May 1940, Winston Churchill invited Harold to become parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Information; in time Harold served as unofficial link between Churchill’s government and de Gaulle’s Free French. Vita’s war work was of a more local character, concerned with the Women’s Land Army. She wrote The Women’s Land Army in 1944, at the invitation of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, and donated her royalties to the Women’s Land Army Benevolent Fund; from early in the war she helped the Kent Committee with recruitment and administration, not always with a good grace. Her letters to Harold include details of ‘bad land girls giving a good deal of trouble’; ‘this afternoon I must go touring after land girls, blast them’; in The Women’s Land Army, she permitted herself only cautious criticism: ‘Of course it would be absurd to pretend that … the conduct of every girl had been model, heroic, and in every way beyond reproach.’41 Despite the flamboyance of her driving, Vita was also enlisted as an air-raid ambulance driver. Ben joined an anti-aircraft battery outside Rochester as a private, afterwards serving as an officer in the Intelligence Corps in the Middle East; Vita overlooked the extent of his unwillingness to fight. Nigel became an officer cadet at Sandhurst, was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards and saw action in North Africa and Italy. Both survived. Six months after it was first hoisted, Vita and Harold lowered the Sackville flag on Vita’s tower for the war’s duration. Vita’s flock of white pigeons, endowed with a sixth sense, flew away.

  With all but one of Sissinghurst’s gardeners called up, Vita was helped by the epileptic William Taylor and a single Land Girl. After his call-up to the RAF in 1941, she had agreed with new head gardener Jack Vass to do her best to keep the hedges in order. ‘I hated those hedges when I looked at my blistered hands,’ she remembered.42 Much of the garden fell victim to the conflagration: its unkemptness, and her inability to reverse the trend, intermittently overwhelmed Vita. ‘It reverted to the wildness in which we had found it in 1930,’ she wrote in 1950.43 At the time her depression prevented her from writing: Grand Canyon became ‘my bloody book’.

  The outbreak of war inspired powerful feelings in Vita: outrage, anger and deep wells of sadness. She described ‘the alternations between the dreadful troughs and the tiny crests, the muted anguish with which one met bad news, the piteous optimism with which one greeted good, trying not to be lifted up, not daring to hope, still less daring to despair’.44 She was frequently unsettled. In a ‘Country Notes’ column, she recorded one sleepless night when, in inky darkness, she walked down to the lake in search of peace. She took out the boat and rowed across the black expanse to cut water lilies. Overhead, she watched the fighter planes, listened to a fox bark at the disturbance, admired the eerie phosphorescence of the unwieldy white flowers. Afterwards she struggled, but failed, to transform this experience, which she likened to ‘a fable curiously up to date’, into any sort of written coherence.45 She oscillated between certainty of defeat and a Churchillian belief in British greatness; from the former conviction arose the premise of Grand Canyon, which Vita explained in her Author’s Note: ‘Germany, by the use of an unspecified method of attack, is assumed to have defeated Great Britain.’ For the most part her belligerence was marked, Boudicca in gardening gauntlets.

  Harold instructed her to have the car always ready for escape by the back roads to his brother’s house in Devon in the event of a German invasion of Kent. He suggested she pack her jewels, his diaries and the statue of St
Barbara; Vita’s own list of essentials included her sables, gardening clothes and cigarettes; her current manuscript, an annotated copy of her Collected Poems, Roget’s Thesaurus and her spectacles; and the suicide tablet that Harold had obtained for each of them.

  As at the beginning of the First World War, Vita’s complicated feelings inspired her to poetry. In July 1941, the Hogarth Press published her Selected Poems. It was slighter than the Collected Poems of 1933, with only excerpts from The Land, but included five new poems, among them ‘September 1939’. On and off she continued to toy with The Garden. Although it would not be finished until after the war, the thought of it became Vita’s answer to brutality and destruction: ‘the gardener in little way/ Maintain[s] the bastion of his opposition/And by a symbol keep[s] civility’.46 True to that philosophy, at Sissinghurst Vita continued to plant for the future: more than 10,000 bulbs in the first six months of the war alone and a Japanese cherry tree with greenish-white flowers which she imagined her grandchildren admiring. She wrote to Harold: ‘Let us plant and be merry for next autumn we may all be ruined.’47

  Vita continued to submit morale-boosting ‘Country Notes’ columns to the New Statesman until October 1941, her first, most potent contribution to the war effort. Like The Land, they enshrined her belief in the wholesomeness of country life; like Jan Struther’s earlier Mrs Miniver columns for The Times, they offered readers a vision of Britishness worth defending. ‘How much one regrets that local turns of speech should be passing away!’ Vita lamented in January 1939, opening a window on to a different, older, less angry world. For the most part, the picture she drew for her readers was one in which renewal and rebirth retained the upper hand. In 1941, Vita wrote English Country Houses for the ‘Britain at War’ series of patriotic illustrated books, covering every aspect of British life from poetry to farm animals; the series was Hilda’s brainchild and Dottie was briefly a member of its editorial committee. In English Country Houses, Vita emphasised the spirit of place, the rootedness of great houses within a landscape: she presented the country house as a quintessence of Englishness. Inevitably she drew attention to Knole: she had always regarded it as pre-eminently an ‘English’ house, ‘no alien fabrication, no startling stranger seen between the beeches and the oaks. No other country but England could have produced it, and into no other country would it settle with such harmony and such quiet.’48 Vita’s was among the best selling of the 126 books in the series. She sounded similar notes in a trio of articles about Sissinghurst written for Country Life the following summer. She could not resist her own hobbyhorses: ‘it may, I think, fairly be claimed that the spirit of the place is very strong at Sissinghurst … The more instinctive visitor exclaims that it is like the castle of Sleeping Beauty.’49

  Despite Grand Canyon and her first misgivings about British military strength, Vita was determined not to give in to the war. From a secret radio station in Renby Grange near Tunbridge Wells, she recorded a number of broadcasts in French for Radio Paris between March and May 1940. The idea, like the ‘Britain in Pictures’ series, was Hilda’s – in this instance in her role as director of the Joint Broadcasting Committee with responsibility for media propaganda. On mainstream radio, Vita broadcast on the Women’s Land Army, ‘The English Countryside’, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry, and the poems of Andrew Marvell. She gave two readings from Virginia’s To the Lighthouse and a Home Service broadcast on Knole. Her airwaves contributions form a miniature compendium of her passions.

  Vita’s thoughts never strayed far from her garden. On 12 December 1939, she wrote to Harold: ‘The Lion Pond is being drained. I have got what I hope will be a really lovely scheme for it: all white flowers, with some clumps of very pale pink. White clematis, white lavender, white Agapanthus, white double primroses, white anemones, white camellias, white lilies, including giganteum in one corner, and the pale peach-coloured Primula pulverulenta.’50 The scheme was not carried out until after the war, and not on the site of the drained Lion Pond but beside the Priest’s House, in the old rose garden; a decade later Harold added suggestions for silver and grey foliage. Conceived as a statement of faith in the first months of fighting, her poet-gardener’s belief in the redemptive power of beauty, Vita’s White Garden would become one of the most famous planting schemes in the world.

  Hilda Matheson died suddenly on 30 October 1940, during an operation to remove part of her thyroid gland; Vita wrote an obituary for the Spectator. Virginia Woolf committed suicide on 28 March 1941; a shaken Vita wrote an obituary poem, ‘In Memoriam: Virginia Woolf’, published in the Observer. In 1942, Gwen St Aubyn, since her father-in-law’s death Lady St Levan, left Sissinghurst for Cornwall; Vita described her as ‘living at St Michael’s Mount in grandeur, but so far as I can make out in a perpetual gale straight off the Atlantic, so that on most days they can neither open nor shut the front door’.51 Dottie’s alcoholism escalated beyond Vita’s intervention. In 1943 she was prevented by drunkenness from taking part with Vita in a poetry reading in aid of the Free French in the presence of the Queen and Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. In July 1944, Vita’s first love, Rosamund Grosvenor, was killed when a bomb fell on the Savoy Chapel, London. ‘It has saddened me rather,’ wrote Vita, ‘that somebody so innocent, so silly and so harmless should be killed in this idiotic and violent way.’52

  The coterie of Vita’s girl friends that had incited Virginia to rancour all but disappeared, Virginia among them. In their place Vita made weekly visits to Katherine Drummond, an elderly, wheelchair-bound neighbour who shared her interest in gardening and to whom, in 1946, she dedicated The Garden. For Christmas 1939, Mrs Drummond had given Vita a weeping pear tree, Pyrus salicifolia ‘Pendula’, which was eventually transplanted into the White Garden; Vita in turn created for her a series of miniature gardens in pans and shallow bowls. Katherine Drummond became a temporary substitute mother: ‘I felt your love as a benediction/ In tranquil branches above me spread,/Over my sometimes troubled head.’53 She also introduced Vita to her daughter-in-law, Bunny, the latest in a line of married women to fall under Vita’s spell. Vita warned Bunny Drummond against playing with fire and maintained for the time being a careful, if kindly, distance.

  A bomb exploded close to Knole in February 1944: windows along the Green Court, the Stone Court and in the Chapel were broken. Vita told Harold she minded ‘frightfully frightfully frightfully’. Long Barn had also been hit. In the Observer, Vita published a poem called ‘Blast’: ‘This house lived; sparkled once; had eyes.’54 With no wartime supply of birdseed, the budgerigars in the Sissinghurst aviary died of starvation. The moat wall collapsed and weeds overwhelmed the flowerbeds.

  Knole and Long Barn were damaged, Sissinghurst overgrown, friends and lovers dead; Vita herself was suffering from arthritis of the spine, an advance on her former lumbago; in time it would affect her hands and her knees. She worried about ‘the weakness it brings to my limbs’ and her ability to go on gardening.55 She resorted to Benzedrine as a pick-me-up and stimulant, describing it to Harold as ‘rather like Champagne only less expensive. It makes your brain work like fun.’56 On other days she drank sherry to staunch pain that was emotional as well as physical. Vita’s post-war world would include significant omissions.

  As the toll of everyday unhappiness mounted, Vita struggled to find distraction in her writing. Although her work on The Garden stalled and Grand Canyon brought her limited satisfaction, not to mention a clutch of adverse reviews, in January 1943 she took up an idea she had conceived six years previously in Lisieux while holidaying with Gwen: a double biography of St Thérèse of Lisieux and St Teresa of Avila. She acknowledged the esoteric nature of her subject and made her case forcefully for a wartime examination of the advantages of the contemplative life. To some, Vita acknowledges, such contemplation ‘appears … as a form of escape from reality; almost as a form of self-indulgence, of selfishness, an evasion of responsibility, a withdrawal from the unpleasantness of a world which nevertheless is everyone’
s charge to help within their own range to run’; she sweeps aside such dismissals.57 Escape, self-indulgence and withdrawal from unpleasantness had always shaped Vita’s writing, with its inclination to fantasy and mythomania: in The Eagle and the Dove she defended herself thoughtfully, making her case for an alternative life of the senses. Vita told Harold how much her new book excited her. She claimed it absorbed her completely, and she wrote with the speed and relish she had feared she had lost. Occasionally aspects of her own experience break through her sensitively handled narrative: ‘No amount of recurrent personal experience, nor the recorded and similar experience of other people, can alleviate the soul in such accesses of despair.’58 Her new publishers Michael Joseph released the book on 8 November 1943; in December 1944 they issued a fourth reprint.

  Challenges to Vita’s equanimity were manifold. Even as she grieved for lost friends, Ben and Nigel remained overseas and in danger. She worried about Knole and about Sissinghurst, both in the flight path to London; to Harold she described a night-time air raid when ‘the whole of the South Cottage shook’ and the sky glowed red; the distant cry of doodlebugs was as noisy as Piccadilly Circus.59 Listlessly she watched nature’s sure-footed encroaching on her garden. Once soldiers with tanks occupied Sissinghurst’s woods and the lake at the end of 1944, Vita announced that both were spoilt for ever; her recurrent depression returned. ‘I shall never love the lake or the woods again in the same way as I used to … I mind more about this than you would believe. It was a thing of beauty now tarnished forever,’ she told Harold.60 It was an extreme reaction and probably unwarranted, but there had always been an extreme side to Vita’s nature. She herself only partly understood it. That lack of comprehension, and the fear it bred in her, accounts for the tenacity of her theory of her duality, Englishness versus Spanishness, with all that both terms came to signify for Vita. Previously she had channelled what Harold called the ‘rather cruel and extravagant’ side of her nature into her novels, satisfying vicariously what could not safely be satisfied any other way. Since The Dark Island, fiction had failed her. Harold had noted her increasing neurosis. He knew that Vita’s refusal to accept invitations, for example, arose from more than stubbornness, symptomatic of a deep-seated anxiety in the presence of anyone outside her immediate circle. ‘I cannot establish contact with anybody;/ They are all unreal to me, the charming intelligent people,/ And I daresay I seem as unreal to them,’ Vita wrote in a diary poem at the beginning of the war.61 Harold knew too about Vita’s drinking. The combination added up to what he called her ‘muzzy moods’, which he struggled to penetrate.62