Both derived more pleasure from the marriages of their sons: Nigel in 1953 to Philippa Tennyson-d’Eyncourt; Ben in 1955 to Luisa Vertova, a Florentine art historian. Both marriages would end in divorce, in Nigel’s case not until after the death of both his parents. In a letter written before they met, Harold told Philippa: ‘You will find us shy, eccentric, untidy, but most benevolent. You will find Sissinghurst the strangest conglomeration of shapeless buildings that you ever saw, but it is an affectionate house and very mellow and English.’126
An American visitor to Sissinghurst in the summer of 1954 described her first impressions of Vita. ‘Her hair … is now short, drab and uncared for – Her eyes are blue and rather prominent, her complexion ruddy – In her youth she must have been handsome, perhaps beautiful … I don’t think I ever met a woman who cared less. She was dressed in a mustard-coloured blouse, brown skirt and dark red corduroy jacket. I might say that she was absolutely oblivious to her personal appearance, if it hadn’t been for the fact that from time to time she pulled out an orange … lipstick and did her lips. She smokes … and the only touch of luxury about her was a thin gold cigarette case.’127 Photographs of Vita taken in the fifties show ghost trails of former beauty, the darkness of the hooded Sackville eyes; stronger is the resemblance to her poet ancestor, Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, painted by Kneller. Time imposed on Vita the sexlessness Virginia gave to Orlando. There is an iconic quality to Vita’s appearance in old age, the result of her uniform of breeches, gaiters and the ever-present cigarette of Cypriot tobacco. The beauty of her soft, rich voice survives in radio recordings, which she continued to make sporadically until the year before her death. Of the smouldering physical beauty that, forty years earlier, inspired Violet Keppel with a species of madness, nothing remained.
Yet Vita was recognisably the same person. ‘We know enough, I think, of her robust and ardent nature to argue that whatever she undertook she would not do by halves; no one who wrote with so vigorous a pen could be lethargic in the affairs of life,’ she had claimed for Aphra Behn in 1927.128 Vigorously Vita had devoted her middle age to gardening; she had gathered honours and awards; like her father before her she had embraced public service: the Committee for the Preservation of Rural Kent, local magistracy, even the Cranbrook Poetry Society; further afield she had lectured for the British Council. For a long time, Sissinghurst had consumed the bulk of her energies. Thanks to The Garden, her Observer ‘sticklebacks’ and Rose Mortibois’s engagement with Anstey in The Easter Party, gardening had all but overwhelmed her writing too. Briefly displacing it, there would be one last love for Vita. Appropriately, the object of her last béguin was herself a gardener.
It was a relationship with some of the characteristics of old-fashioned drawing-room comedy. Alvilde Lees-Milne was married to James, Harold’s former lover. Striking, chic and forceful, she was also a lesbian. Among her own former lovers was an ex-lover of Vita’s ex-lover Violet Trefusis. Princess Edmond de Polignac was American sewing-machine heiress Winnaretta Singer, her wealth matched only by her ugliness. Parisian rumour dressed her in leather top boots and an ancient dressing gown and whispered of sado-masochism. Winnaretta de Polignac had been Violet’s literary patroness and purchaser of St Loup; she gave Alvilde a house too, at Jouy en Josas near Paris. Alvilde bought her own house in France, at Roquebrune, in the mountains between Menton and Monaco.
In June 1951, in Harold’s absence, Vita entertained James and Alvilde to dinner at Sissinghurst. ‘Alvilde baffles me: I can’t find the key to her. I can’t believe that marriage will, in the long run, be a happy one,’ she reported to Harold.129 Nevertheless, in November, Harold and Vita were witnesses at the Lees-Milnes’ registry office wedding in London.
Four years later, Vita came closer to finding the key to Alvilde. Alvilde was one of a quartet of women friends who visited Vita regularly; unlike Bunny Drummond, Violet Pym and painter Edith Lamont, she did not live locally. Alvilde shared Vita’s passion for gardening and would become in time a distinguished garden designer. Visiting Vita their friendship grew. As unpredictably as in the past, Vita found herself victim to one of her ‘fancies’. Like erstwhile béguins, its duration would be finite. Her letters about Alvilde written to Harold later in the decade reveal the extent of Vita’s subsequent withdrawal; in 1961 she described her as ‘much improved – softened’.130
Yet while it lasted, it was every bit as exciting as earlier loves. Alvilde asked Vita to stay in Roquebrune; Vita resumed writing poetry; she described herself, in words reminiscent of those she had used repeatedly before, as ‘head and heart in a whirl’. They discovered shared tastes, among them fast cars. Alvilde took pains to disguise their relationship from James; Vita worried about Harold and the proper focus of her loyalty. Once Harold had been entirely separate from her affairs; now Vita found that the thought of Harold affected her and governed her behaviour in a way she would previously have thought impossible. ‘I have treated him badly enough in the past and must make it up to him now,’ she told Alvilde.131 Into her letters she poured all the writerly passion the women were mostly denied in the flesh. Vita declined Alvilde’s invitation to France; instead she crossed the Channel with Harold. With Alvilde she travelled more prosaically to the Cotswolds. At home the letters resumed. Vita’s desire for discretion matched Alvilde’s. In the event, her customary caution was sharpened by a suspicion that her letters to Alvilde were being tampered with. Exposure terrified Vita. Not since the summer of 1919 had she wanted to rebel in public.
‘Love as Evelyn saw it was an entire absorption of one lover into the other,’ Vita had written in Family History.132 She did not delude herself that her ‘love’ for Alvilde was more than a fleeting infatuation. It seemed as if she had moved beyond absorbing herself in anyone but Harold now: their love was too settled, too intimately bound up with every aspect of Vita’s life. To Harold, on their forty-fourth wedding anniversary in October 1957, she wrote: ‘[I] love you even more now than I did then (which is saying a lot) and please forgive me all my trespasses.’133 Vita had allowed herself one more trespass; she was anxious to make atonement. ‘She is or seems absolutely devoted to Harold, but there is nothing whatever sexual between them,’ Victoria had written in 1922. Time had proved Victoria right.
Vita and Harold’s feelings for one another were coloured by their acute awareness of the passage of time and its depredations. ‘My days are haunted by the thought of something happening to you. I simply couldn’t bear you to be hurt,’ Vita told Harold the winter before her death.134 Harold had convinced himself he would die in 1956; both had been prey to health scares. At the relatively young age of sixty, Vita was already becoming bent with arthritis; Harold worried about his growing deafness and, in 1955, suffered a slight stroke. That winter, after an operation for an impacted wisdom tooth, Vita’s recovery was sluggish; she caught flu, her temperature escalated, she was bedbound for weeks. She suffered a mild heart attack at the end of 1958; in April 1959 she was diagnosed with viral pneumonia. Again her recovery was frustratingly protracted. She and Harold did not much discuss their health. They concentrated on their writing and their garden. After minor disagreements, Jack Vass left Sissinghurst in January 1957 and was replaced as head gardener by Ronald Platt. At the end of Platt’s two-year tenure, Vita employed two young women as joint head gardeners: she called them ‘the Mädchen’. Pam Schwerdt and Sibylle Kreutzberger stayed at Sissinghurst for more than thirty years. The garden’s visitor numbers hit 6,000 in 1959: they would continue to rise.
A birthday present to Harold decided the course of Harold and Vita’s last six winters together. Quite unexpectedly, on 21 November 1956, Harold received a cheque for £1,370, a joint donation from 255 of his friends to celebrate his seventieth birthday. The decision to spend the money on a cruise was almost instantaneous; jointly Harold and Vita decided against a greenhouse. Instead they went to Indonesia on the Willem Ruys, a cruise liner noted for its luxury. They spent their days in separate cabins, re
ading and writing, joining one another for meals and shore visits. Harold described it as ‘a halcyon existence’; at last Vita settled down to writing Daughter of France, the biography of La Grande Mademoiselle that she had vaguely intended to write for some time. More than forty years had passed since she had written to Harold telling him of a fancy dress ball at the Albert Hall in June 1913: ‘I am in the Louis XIV court as La Grande Mademoiselle; such good clothes, orange velvet and black, a riding dress with high boots and a cravache [riding whip], and if you look in the illustrated papers you will find me probably.’135 Something of those high spirits survives in Daughter of France. Vita considered it a bad book – ‘I am not imagining this: I know it is bad,’ she confided to Harold136 – but her portrait of sincere self-delusion succeeds in capturing both Mademoiselle herself and something of Vita, too. ‘What I really surmise,’ she wrote, ‘is that dear Mademoiselle was a bore, and it is worse to be a bore than to be a worry.’ She labelled her a ‘virginal, rough, boyish, generously unsophisticated witling’.137
Vita and Harold’s cruises took them to Indonesia, the West Indies, the Far East, South Africa and South America. Vita paid, even if it meant plundering last remnants of Seery’s splendid munificence: she sold £4,000 worth of silver from the rue Laffitte and bronze urns from the gardens at Bagatelle. On the journey to South Africa in 1960, she wrote her final novel, No Signposts in the Sea. It takes the form of a shipboard diary of a dying man, Edmund Carr. Edmund falls in love with Laura, who is Vita’s only overt mouthpiece for lesbianism in her writing: Laura describes the ‘concord’ between two women in an ideal relationship as ‘approaching perfection’. Edmund fails to realise that Laura nevertheless returns his love. Instead they engage in an extended dialogue about love and marriage, both unable to read between the lines. Laura tells Edmund: ‘I have come to believe that even the strongest, the most self-sufficient, need one other person in their lives from whom nothing is concealed, neither the most important things nor the most trivial. Someone with whom at the end of the day one can sit over the fire and talk or be silent as the fancy moves one.’138 It is the very picture she had once conjured in her poem ‘Sometimes When Night …’, that couple content to ‘read, speak a little, read again’. Now, approaching the end, there is nothing to shatter their tranquillity.
Vita Sackville-West died of malignant abdominal cancer on 2 June 1962. She was seventy years old and failed to recover from an operation two months earlier. She lived long enough to hear of her Uncle Charlie’s death on 8 May and the decision of her cousin Eddy to return to his Irish estate. ‘Fancy inheriting Knole and leaving it!!!’ she wrote to Harold.139 That triplet of exclamation marks was a last huzzah of fighting spirit.
The order for her simple funeral service at Sissinghurst church included the best-known passage from The Land: ‘She walks among the loveliness she made.’140 Vita had written the lines a lifetime ago for Dorothy Wellesley, when the women were young and in love with flowers, gardens, poetry, one another; when Vita still believed in her gift for verse. They have become her own epitaph. Something of the loveliness she made survives today in her garden at Sissinghurst: Vita’s younger son Nigel, to whom she left the estate, agreed its transfer to the National Trust on 17 April 1967, thereby safeguarding its continuance. Harold Nicolson died the year after Sissinghurst’s transfer, on 1 May 1968. His diaries show that most of him died with Vita.
No Signposts in the Sea is a valedictory novel and Vita did not begin another. In the form of a quotation from a sixteenth-century sonnet, included in the text, Vita wrote her own farewell. She did so characteristically, donning for one last time the well-worn mask of courtly swain:
Who so list, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, alas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore
I am of them that farthest come behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the Deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.141
The words belong to Sir Thomas Wyatt; the sentiments are wholly Vita’s. She had chased the prize; she could run no further. But her travail had not been in vain and the effort of seeking to hold the wind in a net was, at moments, an heroic one.
PICTURE SECTION
In October 1908, the Hungarian-born society portraitist Philip de László told the sixteen-year-old Vita of his desire to paint her ‘in a Velázquez style’. Two years later he did so. His image of extravagant languorousness initially delighted Vita. Later she dismissed it as ‘too smart’ and refused to hang it.
Vita with her parents as a child at Knole. She wrote that what her difficult mother Victoria (above) meant to her was ‘a mixture of tragedy and – no, not comedy, but sheer fun’. Her bond with her father Lionel (below) was largely unspoken.
Knole, the love of Vita’s life. She claimed it possessed ‘all the quality of peace and permanence; of mellow age; of stateliness and tradition. It is gentle and venerable.’ It was also imbued with intense romance for Vita, who was a lonely and imaginative child.
In a hidden drawer in an ebony cabinet in the King’s Room, six-year-old Vita left a note: ‘Dada, Mama and Vita looked at this secret drawer on 29th April 1898.’
In 1913, Lionel and Vita were accompanied to court during the Scott case by Harold Nicolson and Rosamund Grosvenor. Both were in love with Vita.
‘Never before or since, have I felt so much like royalty,’ wrote Vita following Lionel and Victoria’s success in the Sackville succession case of February 1910.
For a fundraising Shakespearean masque in the summer of 1910, Vita, as Portia, borrowed the velvet robes worn by Ellen Terry in a production of The Merchant of Venice in 1875. Clare Atwood’s portrait depicts her as a romantic Italian youth.
Vita and her father’s mistress Olive Rubens in one of the Omar Khayyam tableaux staged by Viscountess Massereene in aid of war charities in June 1916.
‘When you see a person, a body, marvellous casket and mask of secrets, what do you think?’ Vita asked in her first novel, Heritage.
A young Harold Nicolson – in his own words ‘supremely ineligible’, in Vita’s not ‘the lover-type of man’, ‘a playmate, clever and gay’.
Among Harold’s contenders for Vita’s hand was Henry Lascelles (centre), heir to the Earl of Harewood and an income of ‘£31,000 a year from his land alone, plus plenty of cash’.
Violet Keppel in 1919, in a portrait by John Lavery. Vita described her as ‘this brilliant, this extraordinary, this almost unearthly creature’. Their affair changed the course of Vita’s life.
Vita as mother – with Ben (left) and Nigel (right) in 1924.
Vita’s lover Mary Campbell painted this view of Long Barn in the winter of 1927. Vita had bought the part-medieval, extended cottage for £3,000 in 1915.
Vita broadcast for the BBC for the first time on 18 April 1928. After embarking on an affair with Director of Talks Hilda Matheson, she became a regular and highly regarded broadcaster for the Corporation.
Nigel, Vita and Ben at Long Barn. Vita’s decorating included distinctive features of the rooms of her childhood: tapestries, seventeenth-century looking glasses and Jacobean oak furniture.
Vita ‘in the prime of life, an animal at the height of its powers, a beautiful flower in full bloom. She was very handsome, dashing, aristocratic, lordly …’
‘You do like to have your cake and eat it, – and so many cakes, so many, a surfeit of sweet things’, one lover teased Vita in 1932 of her habit of juggling multiple lovers. Among Vita’s lovers were (clockwise from top): Dorothy Wellesley, Hilda Matheson and Virginia Woolf.
At Sissinghurst, Vita realised her long-held fantasy of retreating into a tower with her books. Her writing room was on the first floor of the tower, with a small library in the adjoining octagonal tower.
Vita conceived the idea that would become the White Garden, beside the
Priest’s House, in December 1939. It has since become one of the most famous planting schemes in the world.
Behind the Mask Page 31