Behind the Mask

by Matthew Dennison

  As in all Vita’s writing, she herself was among her beneficiaries: in her Observer columns she held at bay her fears that she would be prevented from gardening by physical incapacity. In the winter of 1946, Harold twice discovered Vita reduced to immobility in the garden. On one occasion, leaning against a lime tree to support her back, she wept with combined pain and frustration. ‘May I assure the gentleman who writes to me (quite often) … that I am not the armchair, library fireside gardener he evidently suspects … and that for the last forty years of my life I have broken my back, my finger nails and sometimes my heart in the practical pursuit of my favourite occupation,’ she wrote in April 1957.91 There was a romantic quality to her self-sacrifice, grandeur in the wholeheartedness of her immersion.

  Eventually Vita protested against the unrelenting tyranny of her gardening articles, which she disparaged as ‘sticklebacks’: in the short term, the orderliness and discipline of a weekly column replenished her appetite for her work. On 8 January 1947, she told Harold she was ready to begin work on her biography of ‘La Grande Mademoiselle’, an idea of long gestation. ‘She isn’t quite my sort of thing, but there are some aspects of the story which I find interesting … Her own description of herself is fascinating as a psychological document. It is a study in self-delusion by a most sincere person. It is on these lines that I shall try to base my portrait of her.’92 In the event, years would pass before Vita applied herself to her ‘study in self-delusion by a most sincere person’, her final act of literary self-projection; she was still not ready for a project on such a scale. Instead, persuaded by the generous remuneration offered, she wrote what she described as an ‘absurd thriller story’ for an American magazine93 and satisfied a recent ambition. At the end of 1945, Stephen Tennant had encouraged Vita’s desire to write a thriller: ‘a detective story is the supreme relaxation and stimulant combined’.94 The Devil at Westease occupied Vita for no more than a month and earned her a welcome £3,000. It was published by Doubleday & Co. in the States on 8 May 1947; correctly judging its quality, Vita was adamant that it should not be published in Britain. ‘It is quite readable, and as I had completely forgotten it, I was able to read it quite objectively. But it is only a nonsense,’ she told Harold on publication.95 American reviewers agreed; and her story of a man intent on committing the perfect murder, who chose the vicar as his victim because he was ‘small and weak and would easily be overwhelmed’, failed to enhance her reputation. Vita’s narrator, Roger Liddiard, a wealthy ex-RAF man with a taste for seclusion and the quiet life of a remote country village, suggests aspects of her usual role play. She complicates the reader’s response to her story through her murderer’s insistence that he escape punishment, ‘since the work that I do is of importance to posterity’. The book was not reprinted, but appeared in several foreign language editions, proof of Vita’s prominence and her ongoing marketability.

  That prominence increased between the end of the war and Vita’s death in 1962, despite her producing fewer books than at any other point in her life. It was largely the result of her Observer columns, and increasing acknowledgement of the importance and status of the garden at Sissinghurst. There were tokens of official recognition too. Vita attached little significance to her appointment as Companion of Honour in the New Year’s Honours List in 1948 – Harold wrote that ‘my own beloved is a nit-wit about such things’; how differently he would have embraced a peerage in the same list.96 Her continuing unhappiness about the judgement of the Poetry Committee two years earlier diminished her pleasure in the ‘passionate admiration for The Land’ of the Prime Minister Clement Attlee that lay behind the award. But she did agree to undertake overseas lecture tours for the British Council. As much as the formal decoration, they signalled her position as an Establishment lion.

  Vita derived greater satisfaction from the letter she received on 15 November 1954, informing her that she had been awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal of the Royal Horticultural Society for services to horticulture. To Harold she described herself as ‘rather pleased but even more astonished’; the only fly in the ointment was her surmise that she had received the medal on the unworthy basis of ‘those beastly little Observer articles’.97 Her astonishment was as unwarranted as her misgivings about her own worth. Two years earlier, at an RHS dinner at the Society’s headquarters in Vincent Square, Vita had told Harold: ‘I was made rather a fuss of; they made me speak – but you know, Hadji, I don’t like it; I hate getting credit for the wrong things; and I felt that there I was, an amateur amongst real experts; and all because of my thin little Observer articles I had an undeserved reputation; and also because a lot of people in … the audience had been to the garden here. I felt a fraud.’98 Chivalrously Harold swept aside all her misgivings: he pointed out to her that the award was ‘like being made a Fellow of All Souls’.99 Once the news had sunk in, Vita told a friend: ‘I was rather pleased, but I was even more surprised than pleased as it generally goes to old gentlemen of over eighty, who have devoted the whole of their lives to horticulture.’100

  Equally pleasurable was the visit to Sissinghurst of the recently widowed Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother on 4 June 1952. The Queen Mother described it as ‘all so simple and quiet’: Vita wore a skirt in her honour; Harold served his best wine and truffles, having taken advice on etiquette from Diana Cooper.101 Vita concealed from Harold a collapse brought on by heart trouble while she was deadheading lilacs only days ahead of the visit. Afterwards Vita responded to the Queen Mother’s letter of thanks: ‘May I be allowed to reply to Your Majesty’s most charming letter, and say how great a pleasure (as well as an honour) it was to Harold and myself to welcome you to Sissinghurst. It had always been my dream … for if I may venture to say so Your Majesty can have no subject whose devotion and admiration has been deeper than mine for many years.’102 Vita had dedicated The Women’s Land Army to the Queen in her role as patron. A romantic engagement with the idea of royalty had formed part of Vita’s psyche since her childhood encounter with the future Queen Alexandra at Knole and the appearance in her nursery of the beautiful Crown Princess of Romania, whom she later teased Virginia Woolf had first turned her thoughts to lesbianism. Royalty fitted Vita’s ‘pre-1792’ philosophy. Earlier Sackvilles had enjoyed close personal relationships with the Crown; in the Chapel at Knole during Vita’s childhood was the wooden Calvary that Mary, Queen of Scots presented to Thomas Sackville in gratitude for his tactful conveyance of news of her death sentence. The summer after the royal visit, moved by preparations for the Coronation and the spectacle of a beautiful young Queen, Vita wrote a poem for the Times Literary Supplement. In ‘June 2nd, 1953’, Vita concentrated on self-identity: ‘How strange to be your Majesty/How strange to wake in an ordinary bed/ And, half awake, to think “Now who am I?” …/ Am I Elizabeth or Lilibet?’

  From courtiers, Harold heard that the Queen Mother had described herself as ‘“soothed” by the beauty and happy atmosphere’ she found at Sissinghurst.103 It was an atmosphere generated by the love lavished on their garden by its owners and their perception of their garden as a monument to that love. As Harold wrote to Vita in May 1955, ‘What happiness you and I have derived from that garden – I mean real deep satisfaction and a feeling of success. It is an achievement – assuredly it is. And it is pleasant to feel that we have created a work of art. It is all your credit really. Mine was just rulers and bits of paper.’104

  Harold had told Vita on 11 December 1947 that he had asked the King’s private secretary Tommy Lascelles that the announcement of her award of the Companion of Honour be made in her maiden name rather than her married name. It was a measure of Harold’s generosity of spirit and his accurate assessment of Vita’s current state of mind. That summer Vita had finished work on proofs of the guidebook to Knole she had written for the National Trust, following her Uncle Charlie’s handover of the house. It proved, predictably, a painful experience, which she likened to ‘rodent teeth closing on one’s wrist’.105 She had refused to revi
sit Knole but wrote the book instead from memory, with a degree of accuracy indicative of the wholeheartedness of her continuing absorption. All her angry feelings of dispossession resurfaced. ‘I wake to the truth, “This is my Knole, which I love more than anything in the world except Hadji”, and then I can’t bear to go on reading my own short little bare guide-book about my Knole which has been given over to someone else, not us.’106 To Harold she confessed the irrational nature of her feelings and her inability to overcome them. ‘I can’t quite understand why I should care so dreadfully about Knole, but I do. I can’t get it out of my system. Why should stones and rooms and shapes of courtyards matter so poignantly?’107

  It was not a new debate, either for Vita or Harold. Two years earlier, Vita had told Harold that of the three things that mattered most in her life – Knole, poetry and him – Knole remained her strongest attachment; Harold had to make do with second place, which was better than it might have been. Vita never succeeded in disentangling her vision of herself from Knole. The identity she had forged in her childhood of herself as Knole’s latest inheritor was too powerful. That vision had inspired Orlando; in time, unable to readjust her thinking, Vita had become Virginia’s victim as much as her heroine. Lacking Knole, she clung instead to her name, wrote her family history, bought Sissinghurst, Wealden farmland, orchards and woods, flew the Sackville flag. In 1921, Vita had instructed Heinemann on publication of Orchard and Vineyard that for publicity purposes her name must always appear as ‘V. Sackville-West’, never ‘The Hon. Mrs Harold Nicolson’. ‘My name is mine,’ she wrote in a diary poem, with a combination of defiance and self-importance; she called it ‘My own my personal name,/ The name my ancestors gave to me’ and insisted that she keep this name for herself.108 Later, in the aftermath of Lionel’s death and final exclusion from Knole, Vita attributed the same impulse to Rachel Godavary in her novella, The Death of Noble Godavary. Rachel refuses to change her name as it appears on her suitcase after her marriage. ‘Godavary she had been born and Godavary she would remain; it wasn’t an inheritance so readily thrown off.’109

  Harold was tolerant. Soothingly he told Vita that ‘Knole symbolises for you a great personal injustice’.110 He had spent his married life in Knole’s shadow, accepting this subservience as the price of Vita’s love. Vita never shielded Harold from this passionate disloyalty. ‘If only I had been Dada’s son, instead of his daughter!’ she wrote to him in December 1950, adding, with something approximating to an apology, ‘I hoped that I had damped down the fire into embers, but the embers blow up into a flame in one breath, so easily.’111 It was part of Harold’s forbearance and his overwhelming devotion to Vita that he sympathised with every outburst; he was incapable of sustained criticism of Vita. James Lees-Milne recorded an incident during a ten-day tour of National Trust properties in the West Country which he made with Vita and Harold in the summer of 1947. In Wells, Vita left Harold for the post office. Harold watched her progress, crossing a quiet street. He gripped Lees-Milne’s arm ‘like a vice, turned his head away, and practically sobbing, cried out, “Oh, Viti, Viti, she’s going to get run over. I know she’ll be killed. Oh God! Oh God!” Vita glided across the street, upright and leisurely. Having despatched her telegram, she returned unruffled and unscathed … He really did at that particular moment, and on … thousands of similar moments, go through real agony lest she might come to harm.’112 As remarkably, Vita’s feelings matched Harold’s. Their dependence, Lees-Milne concluded after ten days in their company, ‘transcended the normal relationship between a husband and a wife’. As Harold recorded in his diary ahead of Vita’s British Council lecture tour of Spain in 1949, ‘Viti packs all day, and that saddens me. After all, she is only going off for three weeks, I have plenty to do and shall be busy, and it is childish to need her so much. But I know that I could not endure at my age to be separated from her for very long. I just could not bear it, and will not consent to it.’113

  ‘No thinking man can be happy; all that we can hope for is to get through life with as much suppression of our misery as possible,’ Vita wrote in 1953.114 She attributed the sentiment to a character in her new novel, The Easter Party; it was characteristically her own (Harold described the Sackvilles as a ‘gloomy melancholic breed’). More than a decade had passed since the publication of her previous novel, Grand Canyon. In contrast to her early novels, which she completed in months, The Easter Party took Vita two years to write. ‘I have been writing all morning,’ she told Harold on 4 January 1951. ‘You know what ups and downs one has … One gets so easily dejected and then so readily elated, but the elation goes and the dejection returns.’115 The great thing, she realised, was to be writing. Weeks earlier she had written to Harold to tell him how happy her writing made her. ‘It makes the whole difference in life … I have been so miserable in the last two or three years, not being able to write; really worried I have been, thinking that it was gone from me for ever … It keeps me alive, living in an imaginary world which seems more real than the ordinary world. Of course I would rather write poetry. Perhaps that will also return to me one day.’116 To an American correspondent she explained simply that, in writing, ‘I really feel myself.’17

  As ever, Vita’s imaginary world was not wholly imaginary. The story of Walter and Rose Mortibois and their sexless marriage was a variant on Vita’s own marriage; as always she endowed both Walter and Rose with aspects of her own character. She suggested too her ambivalence about the compromises her life had entailed. Rose forswears physical fulfilment in order to marry Walter, whose dominant characteristic is self-control; Walter is determined not to fall in love with Rose. In return for her agreement to Walter’s conditions, Rose receives wealth, position, respectability and almost sublimates her desire. The unusually intense attachment of both Mortiboises to Walter’s Alsatian dog ‘Svend’ mirrored Vita’s own attachment to Martha, whose death inspired part of the novel’s plot, and Martha’s successor Rollo. Of Rose and Svend, Vita writes: ‘They were happy together, quite simply with no complications, both of them so forgetful as to forget even Walter, just enjoying themselves in the big expanse of Anstey, the great green grass slopes going down towards the lake.’118 Although Vita did not forget Harold, absent in his Monday-to-Friday London world but alive for Vita in their daily exchange of letters, her diary records companionable solitary walks with her succession of Alsatians; Harold noted his misgivings about Vita’s preference for a Sleeping Beauty world (his own words) in which only she, her dogs and a robin on her window ledge remained awake. The Easter Party is dominated by Walter’s family home, Anstey, a red-brick Queen Anne house of assertive Englishness surrounded by gardens that, like Dottie’s island in The Land, dazzle in the spring. The novel culminates with the house burning down, a dramatic set piece inspired by the destruction by fire five years earlier of Sissinghurst Place, the home of the Drummonds.

  The Easter Party is the novel Vita wrote in the long shadow of her rejection by the Poetry Committee and her continuing wretchedness at the loss of Knole; it is shaped by her reluctance, and her inability, to confide her unhappiness to Harold. As Walter’s brother Gilbert tells Rose: ‘We are all egotists at heart; or, to put it less unkindly, our own sorrows are just about as much as we have the strength to take on.’119 At first Vita’s devastation in 1946 prevented her from writing at all; afterwards it exacerbated her long-held conviction that her writing arose from facility rather than talent. ‘You know that I am not a good novelist – but at any rate it is exciting just doing it,’ she wrote.120 She had told Harold that writing kept her alive: deprived of Knole, out of love, Harold in London, her sons grown up, Virginia, Geoffrey, Hilda, and both her parents dead, she was not exaggerating. The novel ends with Walter Mortibois’s reaction to Anstey’s destruction. To Rose’s amazement, Walter seems almost pleased: ‘We have got the garden left, and I think that was what we both cared most about, at Anstey? Neither of us set much store by a large house, and parties?’121 In her penultimate novel, Vita ag
ain succumbed to an element of wishful thinking.

  Sales of The Easter Party were doubtless helped by the popularity of Vita’s Observer columns. Despite a poor review in the Observer itself, Michael Joseph published five editions in the novel’s first year, with sales at 13,000 within six months. With her customary level-headedness in business matters, Vita had refused to accept royalty payments of ten per cent: successfully she had insisted on fifteen per cent. She was intermittently concerned about money. The Sissinghurst wage bill, she explained to Harold, cost almost half her unearned income; she felt she needed her literary earnings. In 1950, she sold her emerald necklace. Happily, the number of Vita’s ‘shillingses’ visiting Sissinghurst had risen steeply since the garden’s first open days in 1938, with a corresponding rise in garden income: in 1954, entry fees amounted to the considerable sum of £1,394.122

  Harold, too, had reason to celebrate. With initial misgivings he had accepted an invitation, on 3 June 1948, to write the official biography of George V. Vita encouraged him to accept the commission as long as he retained a free hand over his material. The book took him three years and effectively prevented any attempted return to public life. It was published in August 1952 to a chorus of praise and earned Harold £4,000 within its first fortnight. It also earned him a knighthood in the form of the KCVO (Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order), an honour both Harold and Vita were anxious that he should refuse. To the King’s secretary Tommy Lascelles, Harold admitted ‘there is snobbishness, whether inverted or perverted, in our attitude of disinclination’.123 Accusations of snobbery have consistently dogged both Harold and Vita’s posthumous reputations. Invariably their social outlook betrayed their generation and backgrounds; both remained ‘Edwardian’ in outlook and Vita exacerbated Ben’s contempt as a result of what he regarded as her exaggerated concern with ‘breeding’. In their disdain for Harold’s knighthood, which they regarded as mediocre and middle class, were traces of their disappointment over the peerage he never got; Harold reasoned correctly that it would appear ‘churlish, snobbish and conceited’ to decline the sovereign’s personal gift, but continued to prefer the prospect of a dozen bottles of Champagne or a Regency clock.124 ‘A knighthood is a pitiful business, putting me in the third eleven,’ he wrote resignedly. A decade later he was still writing to Vita about a dream in which he found himself a peer: ‘people bowed to me as I passed. I bowed back rather shyly.’125 For her part, Vita forbad the servants at Sissinghurst to call her Lady Nicolson.