Behind the Mask

by Matthew Dennison

  Against this backdrop, Violet re-entered Vita’s life. Following Denys Trefusis’s death in 1929, she had remained in France. Like Vita she lived in a tower – at St Loup de Naud, eighty kilometres from Paris on the road to Provins in the Ile de France. Violet’s feelings for her tower mirrored Vita’s for Sissinghurst: she considered St Loup ‘both romantic and mysterious. It could even lay claim to a certain magic all its own.’63 In the summer of 1940, the Fall of France drove Violet from her tower back to England. The magic of St Loup was not enough to safeguard it against occupation by German soldiers.

  Violet telephoned Vita. Caught between hesitancy and muzziness, Vita proposed a visit to Sissinghurst. Violet accepted and Vita wrote to tell Harold. On 28 August, the day Vita expected her, Violet cancelled. Instead she suggested 31 August: ‘I lost my head and said yes,’ Vita explained to Harold.64 On the 31st, Violet cancelled for a second time. Vita was relieved and disappointed and wrote Violet a letter in which she jumbled up persuasion and discouragement. ‘We must not play with fire again,’ she warned, and she described memories they shared, as if to underline former intimacy. ‘The very sound of your voice on the telephone upsets me,’ she wrote.65 Her letter proved the extent of that upset. For weeks Vita and Violet held one another at bay. No arrangement was made, but their letters returned them to life for one another. They resumed the old names of Lushka and Mitya, referencing love, insisting without conviction that love was in the past. ‘I was so worried about you when France collapsed,’ Vita wrote a fortnight after their cancelled meeting. ‘I couldn’t bear to think of you in danger and distress.’66 Violet suggested meeting anywhere but Sissinghurst: Vita demurred; it was their own version of the Phoney War. News that the Germans had overrun St Loup in mid-October brought another expression of sympathy from Vita. Violet’s halfway meeting point won the day. Vita agreed to meet her on 15 December, almost four months after their letters began, at The Red Lion in Pulborough, Sussex.

  Their meeting was a success. The same evening, Vita wrote to Violet: she admitted her fear of falling in love again. ‘I don’t want … to become involved with you in a way that would complicate my life as I have now arranged it,’ she explained. ‘You and I can’t be together. I go down country lanes and I meet a notice saying “Beware unexploded bomb” so I have to go round another way. The unexploded bomb is you, Lushka.’67 The letters continued. Vita declined to visit Violet in her rented house, the Manor House at East Coker, decorated by Dorothy Heneage with paintings by Titian and Van Dyck, Chippendale furniture and Chinese lacquer in the manner of Mrs Keppel’s London houses; she resisted any resumption of regular contact. She repeated her fear of Violet as an unexploded bomb, her attachment to the orderliness of the life she and Harold had evolved. ‘I don’t want you to explode. I don’t want you to disrupt my life.’68 Violet remained in Somerset and Vita proved incapable of ignoring her.

  By the summer of 1941, Vita felt able to pass the buck. Ben was stationed near Yeovil, Violet was his godmother: they would meet at Dorothy Heneage’s house, Coker Court. Vita prepared her son for their meeting, describing Violet’s charms and her snares, like an epicure remembering a favourite meal. To Harold, she worried that Ben would fall in love with Violet. The suggestion is revealing. Harold attributed it to Vita’s muzziness and correctly trusted Ben’s good sense. For all her protests, Vita allowed herself the indulgence of falling in love with Violet a second time – through Ben, who had already told both his parents he thought he was gay (a conclusion he would subsequently reconsider).

  Two years later, the women arranged to meet at Sissinghurst. Again Violet cancelled. She arrived a week later, on 11 May 1943, and stayed a single night. After some deliberation, Violet slept in Vita’s room, Vita in Harold’s room. Both women admitted their embarrassment and the visit passed successfully. Afterwards Vita described the experience as ‘shattering’, an indication of the effort it cost her.69 There were no repercussions nor any sense of resolution. Violet went on to London, where more than once she and Harold found themselves at the same dinner party. Harold surprised Vita by calling Violet ‘a good old sort’, but deprecating her laborious wit.70 After the war, Vita wrote to Violet again: ‘I think we have got something indestructible between us, haven’t we? … It has been a very strange relationship, ours; unhappy at times, happy at others; but unique in its way, and infinitely precious to me and (may I say?) to you … our love has lasted for forty years and more.’71 In a roundabout fashion it constituted an apology.

  Violet signalled her acceptance by contacting Vita whenever she returned to England. In January 1952, from her suite at The Ritz, she dispatched to Vita at Sissinghurst what the latter described as a ‘shower of Madame de Vilmorin’s books’ and made an arrangement to meet for lunch two weeks later.72 Louise de Vilmorin’s latest novel, Madame de, told the story of a wife destroyed by her inability to keep from her husband the secret she is determined not to share. There would be other, safe, amicable meetings, including visits by Vita to St Loup and by Harold and Vita to l’Ombrellino, the large, part-fourteenth-century villa on the top of the Bellosguardo hill south-west of Florence that Violet had inherited from Mrs Keppel.

  With the end of the war Vita’s half-empty glass began to refill. Ben came home in March 1945, suffering from head injuries, and remained at Sissinghurst to recover. On 21 April Vita told a friend: ‘I have to go and fetch my boy who has just emerged from the hospital at Tunbridge Wells – free and unplastered.’73 Harold joined Vita and Ben later in the spring, before returning to Leicester for summer electioneering; in the meantime he and Vita continued work on their joint poetry anthology, Another World Than This, which was published in December and sold 10,000 copies within the month. To celebrate VE Day, Harold, Vita and Ben unfurled the Sackville flag and hoisted it on Vita’s tower. On 17 June, Nigel also returned to Sissinghurst.

  In January 1946, after a five-year absence, Jack Vass was back at work as head gardener. Vita described him as ‘a gardener after my own heart … only I think it is a good thing to be behind him to check his love of over-neatness with my own more romantic and more untidy view of what the garden should be’.74 Jack Copper reclaimed his job of handyman-chauffeur and Mac returned from overseas duties with the Queen Alexandra Nursing Service for another eight years as Vita’s secretary; by mutual consent she would reduce her workload to three days a week.

  Harold lost his West Leicester seat in the general election of July 1945 by 7,215 votes. Three days later he learned that he had also lost his rooms at King’s Bench Walk: bomb damage to the Inner Temple meant they were needed for practising barristers; Vita shielded him from the news during the final days of campaigning. ‘I feel as if chapter after chapter was being closed, finished, put away,’ he confided to his diary; he minded badly about both losses.75 Vita had warned Harold that Churchill’s wartime performance could not be counted on to win the election, and with less sensitivity than she had shown over King’s Bench Walk, swept aside his public life of the last decade. ‘Why on earth you want to go and get mixed up in politics when you could stay here and write books passes my comprehension. Idiot!’76 She overlooked the political aspect of any number of Harold’s books.

  Anticipating the worst, Harold had written to Nigel ahead of polling day, ‘If I learn that my political career is over (perhaps for ever), I shall accept it with philosophic resignation and devote such years as may remain to me to serious literary work. I have a domestic retreat of the utmost felicity and a second string to my bow. My God! what right have I of all men to complain?’77 His resignation proved less philosophical than he had imagined and he made no plans to return permanently to his felicitous domestic retreat. Harold found that he was not ready yet to retire from public life. He longed to return to Parliament, either through a by-election or, via a peerage, to the House of Lords. As a consolation prize he set his sights on chairmanship of the British Council. In all three ambitions he was thwarted. A suspicion that he made a fool of himself in his manoeuvrin
g to obtain a peerage would add to the unhappiness of his post-war mood.

  Harold made plans to live in London with Ben and Nigel. The former resumed his pre-war position as Deputy Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, while Harold retained his governor-ship of the BBC and remained, after fourteen years, a committee member of the London Library; later Ben left the Royal Household to edit the Burlington Magazine. They found an ugly Victorian house in Neville Terrace, South Kensington, which Harold hated from the outset. He called it Devil Terrace, but remained there until the summer of 1952, when he moved into a shared set in Albany with Nigel, who had recently been elected Conservative MP for Bournemouth East. Harold wrote a weekly column for the Spectator and continued to contribute to French newspaper Le Figaro accounts of ‘British events of interest to the French public’, as he had since 1934. Having joined the Historic Buildings Committee of the National Trust in 1944, in 1947 Harold became vice chairman of the Executive Committee, a position he retained until 1961; Vita sat on the Trust’s newly formed Gardens Committee. It was not enough. With a degree of misgiving Harold joined the Labour Party and stood as candidate in the North Croydon by-election on 11 March 1948. Though he increased the Labour vote, he lost to a large Conservative majority. Vita hoped electoral defeat would pave the way for Harold’s long-awaited peerage. Like Harold, she hoped in vain.

  Vita’s own post-war mood became unpredictable. For all her fantasy that Sissinghurst was Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, she could not herself take on the role of Sleeping Beauty: she needed the affirmation of specific contact with the outside world, an audience for her poetry, readers for her books. And so, as she had written in All Passion Spent, ‘one was happy at one moment, unhappy two minutes later, and neither for any good reason’.78 On 23 December 1944, the Times Literary Supplement published an extract about the Nativity from the ‘Winter’ section of The Garden. Three months later, Vita threw a birthday party at King’s Bench Walk. James Lees-Milne, a former lover of Harold’s and a friend since the early thirties, noted her ‘regal’ appearance and the absence of any ‘frolicsome’ qualities in Vita (in contrast to Harold).

  Vita’s token return to a social life of sorts may have laid ghosts and bolstered her fragile confidence. If so, these feelings would be of short duration. Vita resumed work on The Garden, and was assailed by doubts about its quality: ‘Flatness has come with increasing competence,’ she wrote.79 They were the same anxieties she had voiced twenty-five years before in relation to her second collection of poetry, Orchard and Vineyard, and perhaps typical of many authors’ responses to their work. As she wrote to Harold after completing The Eagle and the Dove, ‘I think it has some merit, but of course, as one always does, I wish that it were better.’80 The award of the Heinemann Prize by the Royal Society of Literature and a reprint six months after publication only partially allayed her anxieties. Vita spent the £100 prize money on azaleas for the Moat Walk (she determinedly ignored Harold’s objections to azaleas, as she overlooked his equally vehement dislike for red-hot pokers); she noted that both The Eagle and the Dove and The Women’s Land Army were more widely reviewed. With no new writing project, Sissinghurst was increasingly claiming her attention. In the spring of 1946, Vita would need all the healing balm of her garden.

  The Poetry Committee of the Society of Authors met under the chairmanship of Society Secretary Denys Kilham Roberts. A racing enthusiast and former contract law barrister, ‘DKR’, as he was known, had recently edited a five-volume anthology of British poetry, The Centuries’ Poetry. Its fifth volume, ‘From Bridges to the Present Day’, excluded Vita. It was a sign of things to come. The committee, of which Vita was a member, met in March 1946 to discuss a poetry reading on 14 May in the Wigmore Hall in the presence of the Queen and Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Henry Reed, who was also present, described it as a ‘rather fractious gathering convened to decide which verses in our language might not be too tedious or indecent for the young ears of the Royal Family’.81 A programme was compiled and poets chosen. Vita was not among them. It proved a defining moment.

  ‘The only inference to be drawn is that they didn’t think me worth putting up on the platform – in other words, my poetry wasn’t good enough,’ Vita wrote later. ‘It had the effect on me that I have never written a line of verse since then.’82 As his assistant Elizabeth Barber remembered, Denys Kilham Roberts enjoyed claiming that ‘he could use the “evil eye”. Every time that anyone died or was taken inexplicably ill after quarrelling with him, he took credit for it. It was a sinister side of his character that could not be underrated.’83 Vita’s fellow committee members included Louis MacNeice, Walter de la Mare and Edith Sitwell, who had once dismissed The Land as the worst poem in the English language; in 1938, at the invitation of Victoria’s troublesome sister Amalia, Edith Sitwell had embarked on (but not completed) a novel, Spring Torrents, intended to retell Pepita from Amalia’s point of view.84 The combined judgement of her peers had an effect on Vita very like the evil eye. ‘They destroyed me for ever that day in Denys Kilham Roberts’ rooms,’ she noted simply. Her nature was not of the sort to draw comfort from the view of The Times correspondent that, ‘if the second part of the programme, which was devoted to contemporary work, declined in splendour, it was more the fault of the poets than the poetry. Mr C. Day Lewis, Mr Louis MacNeice and Mr Thomas came off much better in reading their own work than Mr Walter de la Mare, Mr T. S. Eliot and Miss Edith Sitwell.’85

  For as long as she could remember, Vita had aspired to renown for her poetry. She had grown up surrounded by poets, dining with her parents in the Poets’ Parlour at Knole. She counted poets and a playwright among those ancestors who meant so much to her. She had discussed prosody with Poet Laureate Robert Bridges and, on the evidence of her diary, the business of writing with Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, George Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, André Maurois, Aldous Huxley, Beverley Nichols, Hugh Walpole, Rudyard Kipling, W. B. Yeats and John Galsworthy. Five of her lovers – Violet, Dottie, Geoffrey, Virginia and Margaret Voigt – were published authors; she was also married to a writer. Her exclusion, in a ‘fractious gathering’ in March 1946, inflicted a devastating blow not only on Vita’s pride, for Vita the writer was essentially modest, but on her very sense of herself. So deep was that blow that she told no one for five years and never told Harold.

  Harold had spent the day of the poetry reading at Chelsea Flower Show. His letter, written that evening, must have gone some way to raising Vita’s bruised spirits. ‘I believe that before we die we shall make Sissinghurst the loveliest garden in Kent … There are certain things [i.e. plants] which are adapted to Sissingbags and those things should be improved and improved and improved until they reach the perfect standard.’86 With poetry closed to Vita, the pursuit of perfection at Sissinghurst would go some way to filling the void. By serendipity, she would shortly be given an opportunity to combine her love of her garden with her need to write.

  Vita’s gardening column for the Observer began on 29 September 1946; the following month Harold began a fortnightly book review for the same paper. It continued until February 1961, becoming a weekly fixture early in 1950. For more than twenty years, Vita had been a prolific and successful author. She enjoyed a high public profile as a result of her radio broadcasts, her glamorous association with Knole – which she had exploited – and her striking appearance. The columns she wrote for the Observer won her renewed and long-lasting popularity and acclaim of a different variety; she was photographed by Beaton, Hedgecoe, Snowdon. They also garnered an impressive mailbag – in excess of two thousand letters one bumper week. Vita replied to them all. This shy, remote, occasionally aloof woman recoiled from parties: ‘There are times when I cannot endure the sight of people./ I know they are charming, intelligent, since everybody tells me so,/ But I wish that they would go away,’ she wrote.87 Yet she mustered endless patience with her ‘shillingses’, the paying garden visitors to Sissinghurst, and, for the most part, the same patience with her Observer
readers. Her columns were friendly and confidential in tone. They offer a vision of that gift for intimacy which had beguiled a succession of lovers, and suggested in the minds of Vita’s readers warmth and sympathy to which they in turn responded. In May 1954, at a loss for a subject, Vita mentioned being ill: a flurry of ‘so many deeply concerned letters of sympathy and enquiry’ appalled Vita with a sense of her own fraudulence.88

  Vita’s lovers typically responded to her as maternal, dominant, richly imaginative: she brought the same attributes to her gardening columns. She was encouraging and inspiring. She resorted to an element of heroic daring to persuade the doubtful: ‘The only thing is to be bold; try the experiment; and find out.’89 True to her Sackville roots, she had a weakness for historic associations: she recommended medlar trees, the common quince and sweet woodruff, which Elizabethans used for scenting linen. Her column simultaneously increased Sissinghurst’s fame and benefited from it, though Vita resisted naming her own garden, careful not to forgo the inclusive quality of her advice. She never lost sight of those who gardened on a small scale. ‘Even the smallest garden can be prodigal within its own limitations,’ she trumpeted on 26 March 1950. It was a call to arms, a mission statement, an antidote to the privations and drabness of post-war Britain. She recycled earlier experience. Untended wartime gardens she had visited in her capacity as a Land Girl representative proved to her, she argued, the desirability of pruning roses only lightly. And she discussed her own gardening plans, beginning in January 1950 with ‘my grey, green and white garden’.90 ‘I cannot help hoping that the great ghostly barn-owl will sweep silently across a pale garden, next summer, in the twilight – the pale garden that I am now planting, under the first flakes of snow,’ she wrote in her cosiest novelist’s manner.