Читать книгу Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West - Matthew Dennison, Matthew Dennison - Страница 15

‘Oh, what an awful word!’ said Juliet, her spirits suddenly reasserting themselves. ‘Wedlock! It makes me feel as though I had chains round my wrists and ankles, and a great dragging load of wood. Wed-lock! Locked-in!’

V. Sackville-West, The Easter Party, 1953

‘I SHALL NEVER forget it,’ Vita recorded of The Masque of Shakespeare, staged in the park at Knole on the afternoon of 2 July 1910. In a costume loaned to her by Ellen Terry, Vita took the part of Portia from The Merchant of Venice. Terry herself had worn the costume in 1875, voluminous robes of red velvet. It was Portia’s disguise as the ‘young doctor of Rome’, a celebrated instance of Shakespearean cross-dressing.

Vita was photographed and painted in her borrowed robes. She was eighteen and had grown into a beauty. ‘The knobs and knuckles had disappeared. She was tall and graceful. The profound hereditary Sackville eyes were as pools from which the morning mist had lifted. A peach might have envied her complexion.’¹ Victoria drew attention to the loveliness of Vita’s skin and her eyes, ‘with their double curtain of long lashes’.² Shyness appeared as aloofness: with ‘her sleek brown head, her glowing skin, her disdainful poise’, she resembled Ruth Pennistan in Heritage.³ Thanks to the Sackville succession case in February, Vita also possessed, in attractive measure, a degree of notoriety; newspaper reports had emphasised her connection to Knole, which possessed a glamour of its own. With her schooldays at Miss Woolff’s behind her, Vita would find that she had graduated from inspiring schoolgirl crushes to provoking a similar response in the young men she encountered. At eighteen, there was a soft and gentle quality to Vita’s beauty. Later this softness gave way to something more florid: a harder, bolder, more masculine appearance, ‘all rather heroic and over life-size; all on a big scale; no feminine charm at all’, as she herself described one of her fictional alter egos.⁴ The shift would reflect a change in her attitudes. For the moment, youthful curiosity had yet to be overwhelmed by the certainties of middle age.

Clare Atwood’s portrait of Vita as Portia, which today hangs in Ellen Terry’s former home of Smallhythe Place, suggests androgyny: Vita as a romantic Italian youth. Set against a medieval cityscape, she appears as she would have wished: as she described herself three years later, ‘essentially primitive; and not 1913, but 1470; and not “modern”’.⁵ For all its self-consciousness, it is a picture of a sitter without vanity, as if she disregarded her own looks. Victoria considered that a true assessment: she claimed that Vita was not in the least conceited. Unlike her mother, Vita at eighteen was not interested in feminine wiles; her interests lay elsewhere. Two years previously, in Le Masque de Fer, she had dressed up as the Man in the Iron Mask; a year ago, in her verse drama about doomed poet Thomas Chatterton, she was Chatterton himself, forger and Romantic hero, martyr to the written word. She wore a costume of breeches, white stockings, buckled shoes and a white shirt, which her maid Emily made for her in secret. Each time she played the part, learnt by heart and performed in an attic at Knole to an audience of abandoned trunks and cast-off furnishings, she reduced herself to tears: ‘Earth has been my hell,/ Another world must surely be my heaven.’⁶ Even at their most vulnerable, the men Vita chose for her alter egos were heroic. Her posturing arose from other impulses than vanity, but the element of self-association was potent. ‘Each time I burnt Chatterton’s manuscripts in the candle I felt I was burning my own,’ she remembered; ‘each time I died most uncomfortably on the oak settle, it was not only Chatterton but I myself who died.’⁷

On a rainy July day in 1910, in the guise of Portia masquerading as a lawyer in order to contrive her own happy ending, Vita continued that narrative of heroism and wish fulfilment she had begun in childhood – as Sir Redvers Buller, bold in khaki amid Knole’s flowerbeds, and as Cranfield Sackville in The King’s Secret, writing, always writing. This was Vita’s other life, the life of her imagination. In imagination, every Sackville was a conquering hero and each, as she described them in 1922, ‘the prototype of his age’;⁸ Vita was their latest incarnation. Her life would retain this element of fantasy. Repeatedly in her fiction she celebrated a male version of herself, because she associated maleness with control, possession, inheritance, fulfilment and love – as she invested ‘the bull’ in her poem of the same name, the ability to ‘stand four-square and lordly scan/ His grass, his calves, his willing cows,/ Male, arrogant, alone’.⁹ She is Julian in Challenge, buoyant with love for Eve; Peregrine Chase in The Heir, inheriting, and refusing to give up, the Tudor manor house of Blackboys; Sebastian in The Edwardians, handsome, fêted, secretive, heir to a fictional Knole; Nicholas Lambarde in her unpublished story ‘The Poet’, certain of his writer’s vocation, author of ‘a contemplative poem on solitude’ as Vita would be: ‘The only important thing in the world to him was poetry.’¹⁰ Most of all, and most revealingly, she is aspects of Miles Vane-Merrick in Family History. His house is a castle in Kent, based on Vita’s future home of Sissinghurst; his interests include poetry, farming and philosophy; his emotional requirements are specific and unyielding: ‘He wanted to retain his individuality, his activity, his time-table. He wanted to lead his own life, parallel with the life of love, separate, independent.’¹¹ For Miles, everything has its allotted place. His life is docketed, divided into compartments, but he relinquishes nothing. From early in her romantic career, the same idea appealed to Vita. She would prove herself mostly skilful at maintaining her independence, her ‘separateness’ from the life of love. Like Julian in Challenge, she learned to put things – people – aside until she wanted them: ‘not forgotten, not faded … but merely put aside, laid away like winter garments in summer weather’.¹²

In the neverlands of her fiction and drama, Vita changed her sex as a means of taking control and a preliminary to action. It was a simple conceit. She continually rewrote her own history and, in swapping her sex, perfected what she regarded as imperfections. It enabled her for an instant to bypass those impediments to inheriting Knole which she could never overcome; it enabled her to love as she wished, unconstrained by social expectation; as Cranfield, Chatterton and Portia, using language with a lawyer’s skill, she staked her claim to be a writer in the face of parental resistance. The Vita of her books was never dispossessed and never without love: always the cynosure, never the pariah; always autonomous. In Seducers in Ecuador, the unreliable Miss Whitaker shares Vita’s fantasy: ‘her own stories were marvellously coming true. Indeed, to her, they were always true; what else was worthwhile? But that the truth of fact should corroborate the truth of imagination! Her heart beat.’¹³

In fiction, imagination and reality merged: it was a mission statement for Vita. Even Shakespeare forced her into men’s clothing. She did not resist. Her desire to share in all the possibilities and perquisites of a man’s life shaped her. If, as she suggested, her role, like her forebears’, was to be the ‘prototype’ of the age, it is appropriate that this woman who was born into the smug certainties of aristocratic Victorian England, and who witnessed their collapse in the aftermath of the First World War, should in her life embrace areas of confusion and uncertainty. Added to which, she enjoyed dressing up. Events like the Masque, which included several of her friends, were a high point in that debutante life she decried as ‘distasteful and unsuccessful’. Deep down Vita’s real reservation, as at Miss Woolff’s, arose from her fear of not being liked.

The Masque was a fundraising exercise. A theatrical performance showcasing many of Shakespeare’s best-known characters, it was intended, as the programme notes explained, to benefit ‘the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Fund, which is established to promote the erection and endowment of a Tercentenary Memorial to Shakespeare to take the form of a National Repository Theatre’. Vita had attended her first rehearsal at Apsley House on 10 June. Also taking part were Rosamund Grosvenor and Vita’s friend Irene Lawley, along with Lionel’s current mistress Olive Rubens, as well as professionals including Ellen Terry. A London performance on 30 June was abandoned midway because of rain. Three days later it rained at Knole, too, ‘torrents, but cleared up and we were able to finish it’.¹⁴

In her diary, Vita makes no comment on her role. She lists rehearsal times and weather conditions for the outdoor performances; she records the loan of Terry’s costume. She does not reflect on Portia’s emotional dilemma – or her own. In Shakespeare’s Venetian comedy, Portia is the wealthy young woman whom suitors squabble over. Her father has set a riddle to determine the choice; her own choice is set on Bassanio. ‘The lottery of my destiny/ Bars me the right of voluntary choosing,’ Portia tells the Prince of Morocco. In the summer of 1910, Vita’s case appeared quite different. She was surrounded by choices. She understood her parents’ hopes for her, but estimated correctly that they would allow her to make up her own mind. To Victoria, Lionel wrote, ‘I see that it’s no good trying to force her.’¹⁵ To Vita, when the time came to choose between suitors, he made it ‘clear he had other dreams’. Even in his disappointment, Vita wrote, he was ‘sweet’.¹⁶

Rosamund Grosvenor was still in love with Vita; only Vita’s engagement would painfully sever their tie. There was Violet Keppel, too, who had symbolically bound Vita to her with the gift of the Doge’s ring. At the end of October, departing for Ceylon with her mother in the aftermath of the death of Edward VII, Violet kissed Vita goodbye with all the (considerable) passion she could muster; Vita was disturbed by her passion and by her urgency. Violet wrote her love letters: ‘I love you, Vita, because you never gave me back my ring.’¹⁷ Later Violet wrote asking Vita not to get married before her return.

Her letter was prescient. On 29 June, only four days before the Masque, Vita met the man she would marry. The occasion was a dinner party before a trip to Conan Doyle’s The Speckled Band at the Adelphi Theatre. The young man was subsequently invited to Knole for the Masque. With Rosamund and a small party, he stayed for the weekend. Victoria took the chance to show him over the house. Vita felt a degree of curiosity, no more. On 29 June, the first words she had heard the young man utter were ‘What fun!’. She liked at once ‘his irrepressible brown curls, his laughing eyes, his charming smile’:¹⁸ these were not necessarily lover-like attributes. He appeared boyish and light-hearted. These, too, were not lover-like traits but they appealed to Vita – even as they contrasted with the vigorous, troubadour quality that distinguished the men she herself impersonated in her writing and her daydreams. It was not love at first sight when Vita met Harold Nicolson, though she would later recycle the scene in Family History: ‘Miles came to fetch [Evelyn]. He was especially gay. What fun, he said in his most boyish way.’¹⁹

In fact, Vita wrote, it was not until three years later, in the spring of 1913, that ‘something snapped, and I loved Harold from that day on’.²⁰ In her diary, she contradicts herself: she decided that she loved Harold as soon as he had kissed her. That was September 1912. Harold’s kiss took him more than two years. In his defence, he was away for much of that period: in Madrid until September 1911, thereafter in Constantinople, where he served as a secretary at the British embassy. In the meantime for Vita there was Rosamund; a Florentine marquess called Orazio Pucci, who had fallen in love with her in Italy in 1909 and the following year trailed her halfway across Europe, even to Knole; and, in Pucci’s footsteps, a nameless artist encountered on a boat trip on Lake Como, whom Vita rejected lightly as ‘second coup de foudre!!!’.²¹ With beauty came the brittleness and casual unkindness of one growing rapidly accustomed to being pursued. On and off during that summer of 1910, Harold and Vita met, often at Victoria’s invitation at Knole. In November, in her first surviving letter to Harold, Vita asked him to accompany her to dinner and then a dance. Her letter was deliberately light in tone. She told Harold that she was not alone: Rosamund was with her, and one of Harold’s colleagues from the Foreign Office. Harold could not dance and disliked it as a pastime. He would learn that Vita was a poor dancer too.

Clearly, unlike Portia, Vita’s ‘destiny’ would not deny her ‘voluntary choosing’. Nevertheless, there were similarities as well as differences between the women’s predicaments. Like Portia, Vita too was squabbled over. Her own actions served to complicate rather than to simplify those squabbles and, at times, as we shall see, she actively encouraged jealousies among her lovers. The child who had spent so much time on her own, uncertain of her parents’ love, grew up to crave close, intense, intimate connections and, often, to need more than one person’s love at a time. Her parents intended Vita to make ‘a great match with a great title’. Vita balked; but her interlude as a debutante was a busy one, with four balls a week and lunch parties daily.

The young men Vita met did not attract her. She dismissed them disparagingly as ‘little dancing things in ballrooms’, ‘the little silly pink and whites’.²² Even dancing frequently left her unmoved: ‘All the dance tunes sounded much the same … Faintly lascivious, faintly cacophonous; a young man’s arm round one, a young man’s body surprisingly close, his breath on one’s hair, and yet a disharmony between oneself and him, or, at most, a fictitious temporary closeness which tumbled to pieces as soon as the music stopped.’²³ She made an exception for the clever Patrick Shaw-Stewart (and he was ‘so ugly’ that she dressed him up in her mind ‘in Louis XI clothes’²⁴ but omitted to think of him romantically) and for Lady Desborough’s tall son Julian Grenfell. Grenfell was ‘a Soul’, part of a pre-war set of thoughtful, poetic, politically minded aristocrats, and Vita liked Souls: ‘They are amusing and easy and not heavy to talk to.’²⁵

Given Vita’s literary aspirations, Lionel considered it a distinct, if troubling, possibility that she would marry a Soul. (Handsome Edward Horner, another Soul, was also attentive.) In the event Julian Grenfell may have been put off by his mother; Lady Desborough’s ambivalence is clear in a letter she wrote after Vita’s marriage to Harold. She reported that Vita had become ‘so charming, so pretty and so clean! and quite tidy, and not a bit of a prig or a bore’.²⁶ Her tone of surprise indicates her previous assessment. For her part, Vita explained simply that, until she married Harold, she had ‘scarcely understood the meaning of being young’.²⁷ Grenfell himself, like several of Vita’s would-be suitors including Edward Horner and Patrick Shaw-Stewart, died in the First World War. Before that he was caught in a downstairs cloakroom with Violet Keppel.

Yet even as Vita failed to feel any quickening of the pulse in the company of her most notable suitors – Lord Granby, heir to the Duke of Rutland, ‘a curious rather morose person’,²⁸ and Lord Lascelles, future Earl of Harewood, whom she considered ‘rather dull’ – she realised she would have to marry someone. She never seriously considered the possibility of an unmarried life, or a life restricted to female admiration of the sort Rosamund and Violet offered her. Meeting Harold Nicolson did not persuade her to give up such admiration, however. Harold’s on-and-off, three-year courtship of Vita was conducted against a background of Rosamund’s constant companionship; constrained by his work, Harold himself was more often absent than present. From the summer of 1911, Rosamund had her own bedroom at Knole. It was next door to Vita’s, overlooking the Pheasants’ Court. Vita described the two of them as ‘inseparable’. She also claimed that they were ‘living on terms of the greatest possible intimacy’.²⁹ A letter written by Rosamund during a separation from Vita appears to corroborate that statement: ‘I do miss you, darling, and I want to feel your soft cool face coming out of that mass of pussy hair.’³⁰ Vita, however, denied that they made love: she admitted only that she was so overwhelmingly in love with Rosamund, that ‘passion … used to make my head swim sometimes’.³¹

Also asserting her claim on Vita’s heart long distance was Violet Keppel, who travelled from Ceylon to Italy and Germany. ‘You won’t tell me you love me, because you fear (wrongly, most of the time) that I will not make the same declaration to you at the same moment!’ she wrote from Bavaria.³² Since Vita’s side of their correspondence has not survived, we do not know exactly what she said or did to inspire such an outburst. Having been sustained by the thought of Vita through her ‘exile’ in Ceylon, Violet had decided already on the course of their relationship. In the end, as in all her relationships, it was Vita who would make the crucial decision. If Vita was slow to fall in love with Harold, and untouched by the attentions of men like Granby, Lascelles, Grenfell, Horner and Shaw-Stewart, it was because her heart was otherwise occupied, her physical appetites fully stimulated and mostly satisfied.

Harold’s recommendation to Vita was unusual. She regarded him as an ideal companion, a ‘playmate’ (her own italics) and someone with whom she could ‘talk about anything without minding, quite brutally’.³³ He corresponded exactly to her description of the hero of Behind the Mask, which Vita began that year: ‘a playmate, clever and gay, with whom she feels an effortless affinity’;³⁴ in another unpublished novel, Marian Strangways, of 1913, Vita described feelings of ‘companionable love … half-friendship, half-playfellowship’.³⁵ Harold would remain all of these things for half a century; these commendations survived the crises in their marriage. Vita did not base her choice on sexual attraction. Portia tells Bassanio, ‘In terms of choice I am not solely led/ By nice direction of a maiden’s eyes.’ The same was true for Vita. Physical attraction characterised her relationship with Rosamund Grosvenor, whom she first admired in her bathing costume when she was thirteen; her relationship with Violet Keppel subsequently represented a more intense infatuation. Vita knew already that these feelings were different from those which men inspired in her; she admitted that she did not think of men ‘in what is called “that way”’.³⁶ Where men were concerned she remained as she was at eleven, when a farmer’s son in Scotland ‘told [her] a great many things he oughtn’t to have told [her]’ about sex: she was ‘neither excited nor interested’ by his revelations.³⁷ His subsequent demonstration of the physical differences between boys and girls provoked a more dramatic response. Deeply shocked, Vita fled.³⁸

For all his boyishness and his bright eyes, the curly-haired young man invited to Knole for the Masque of Shakespeare failed to excite Vita physically. At no point in his undemonstrative courtship would he do so. Afterwards, Vita stated that it was Harold’s own fault. He was too ‘over-respectful’; his behaviour convinced her (correctly, in the event) that he was not ‘the lover-type of man’.³⁹ Until Harold’s kiss in September 1912, Vita’s response to him was like that of Gottfried Künstler, in her novella of the same name. As Gottfried grew closer to Anna Roche, we read, nevertheless ‘it never entered his head to fall in love with her’.⁴⁰ Unlike Vita, Gottfried did not blame Anna for his conduct. Her protest has a hollow ring to it. She later claimed of the period before Harold’s proposal, ‘People began to tell me he was in love with me, which I didn’t believe was true, but wished that I could believe it.’ Significantly she adds: ‘I wasn’t in love with him then.’⁴¹ Yet for reasons of her own – insecurity and confusion uppermost – she needed to believe that Harold loved her.

Harold almost certainly did fall in love with Vita, albeit his affection, like hers, lacked physical ardour. It was a conundrum rich in irony. At eighteen, Vita had yet to realise the implications of her feelings of arousal or non-arousal: she did not regard her ‘intimacy’ with Rosamund as any sort of disqualification from marriage or, more surprisingly, disloyalty to Harold. ‘It never struck me as wrong that I should be more or less engaged to Harold, and at the same time very much in love with Rosamund,’ she confessed in her autobiography.⁴² To Harold she wrote: ‘I love the Rubens lady [Rosamund], and somewhere in the world there is you.’⁴³ She did not think of herself as gay. Like the majority of women of her generation, she considered her long-term sexual choices as marriage or abstinence. Lesbianism, as understood today, did not exist as an option for Vita; the word itself had yet to enter common parlance. Later she told Harold that she had known nothing then of homosexuality. It was, anyway, a label she would have rejected. Rosamund provided affection, distraction and physical excitement during Harold’s lengthy absences. There was virtually no intellectual companionship between the women. In time, Vita would come to consider them temperamentally mismatched: ‘She is a stupid little thing, and her conventionality drives me mad.’⁴⁴ Regardless of her sexual feelings for Rosamund – or Rosamund’s apparently deeper feelings for her – Vita would shortly decide to marry Harold. Rosamund’s destiny, like Julian’s winter garments in Challenge, was to be ‘put aside’.

Six years her senior and a man, Harold was less naïve than Vita. He was aware that, despite his love for her, his sexual inclinations were predominantly homosexual and could not be satisfied by a wife. As recently as September 1911, he had been forced to leave Madrid under a cloud after contracting gonorrhoea from an unidentified partner. (Unaware of the nature of his illness, Vita described him sympathetically as ‘rather a pathetic figure wrapped up in an ulster’.⁴⁵) But he was not deterred. Throughout his life Harold treated his affairs lightly. They provided physical pleasure, they were divertissements, but they did not, in his own eyes, define him as a person. With few exceptions, they never overwhelmed him emotionally in the way that Vita was repeatedly consumed by her affairs. Intermittently Harold craved sex with another man: he avoided acknowledging any need for the larger commitments – and rewards – of a full-scale relationship. Marriage was still a conventional expectation in early-twentieth-century England: Harold Nicolson was a man of conventional background. He had chosen a conventional career and would pursue it with more or less conventional success until Vita’s intransigence knocked the wheels off the cart. In 1910, male homosexuality was a criminal offence. The need for secrecy in relation to this central aspect of his life surely shaped Harold’s behaviour in the summer he met Vita; the fact of his homosexuality partly accounted for the nature of his polite but dilatory courtship. As it happened, his chosen wife was every bit as secretive as he was. She allowed Harold to believe that her love for Rosamund was no more than an intensely loving friendship, while reciprocating Rosamund’s devotion and, up to a point, her desires. The courtship of this young man and woman already skilled in concealment, uncertain or dishonest about the nature of their sexual appetites and their emotional needs, was inevitably bound for choppy waters.

In the eyes of Vita’s mother, Harold’s parents Sir Arthur and Lady Nicolson were ‘very ugly and very small and very unsmart looking’.⁴⁶ From the beginning, Vita and her parents discounted Harold’s family. (Fifty years later, Vita forbad Harold to be buried alongside her in the family vault at Withyham on the grounds that he was not a Sackville.) They discounted Sir Arthur’s achievements as ambassador to Russia; they discounted Lady Nicolson’s Anglo-Irish connections and her sister’s marriage to the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin and Ava. (Lord Dufferin was an eminent Victorian whose record as a diplomat and public servant eclipsed that of any Sackville since the end of the sixteenth century, when Thomas Sackville served his cousin Elizabeth I as Lord High Treasurer of England. Lord Dufferin had an Irish estate at Clandeboye – the Sackvilles discounted that too.) After Lionel had failed his Foreign Office examinations in 1890 and given up on the idea of a career, the Sackvilles discounted the world of work entirely. Referring to Harold’s position as a junior diplomat in Constantinople, Sackville family gossip labelled him ‘a penniless Third Secretary’. Harold did not deny it. With a salary of £250 a year, he described himself as ‘supremely ineligible’;⁴⁷ he categorised his family background as that of a ‘landless tribe’ lacking ‘hereditary soil’.⁴⁸ There was the rub. For though the Nicolson baronetcy originated in the first half of the seventeenth century, and Sir Arthur would be created Baron Carnock in 1916, the Nicolsons were members of a service class which the Sackvilles had forgotten and forsaken. They could not lay claim to a Knole. Rather they lived at 53 Cadogan Gardens, supported only by Sir Arthur’s salary. Harold’s own salary contrasted poorly with that of his wealthiest competitors for Vita’s hand: the annual income of Lord Granby’s father, the Duke of Rutland, was somewhere in the region of £100,000,⁴⁹ while Lord Lascelles told Victoria that his father’s income was ‘£31,000 a year from his land alone, plus plenty of cash’.⁵⁰ With uncharacteristic understatement, Victoria wrote in her diary about the prospect of an engagement between Vita and Harold: ‘It is not at present a good marriage.’⁵¹

Vita was as conscious as her parents of the discrepancy, however slight, between her own claim to elite status and Harold’s. It was a claim which counted for more then than now. Brought up as a child of the diplomatic aristocracy, Harold’s childhood memories included vignettes of the royal courts of Bulgaria, Spain and Russia, of the British embassy in Paris, with its powdered footmen and gilded opulence, and of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy life of his mother’s family and his Uncle Dufferin. He confessed a sense of ‘effortless superiority’.⁵² It was an attitude of mind. That he chose to articulate this feeling at all suggests a degree of self-consciousness incompatible with effortlessness. Vita’s social outlook was more straightforward. Hers were the assumptions of an age-old landed caste; later in life she adopted a tag of Victoria’s about her attitudes having been formed before the French Revolution. Virginia Woolf would describe her as ‘very splendid’: ‘all about her is … patrician’. An upbringing at Knole, latterly smoothed by Seery’s generous handouts, had done little to cultivate ‘ordinary’ instincts in Vita. Only in middle age did she acknowledge that the Sackville glory days were long past: she never made such an admission to Harold. She ‘ought to be a grande dame, very rich’, Victoria wrote, ‘where she could do what she likes and not have to do anything against the grain’.⁵³ To Harold, Vita wrote: ‘I like having things done for me.’ It bored her to do things for other people.⁵⁴ She never learned to cook and, until her death, relied on servants in most areas of her domestic life. As a debutante she preferred ‘a very fine ball … with powdered footmen announcing duchesses’ to ‘those scrimmages at the Ritz’.⁵⁵ There was an opulence to Vita that was mostly uncontrived.

As Vita herself was aware, her own background was closer to that of the early suitors she rejected – Lord Granby and Lord Lascelles – than to Harold’s family, with its steady accumulation of diligent public service. On 6 June 1912, Vita attended a ‘100-years-ago’ ball at the Royal Albert Hall. She was dressed as a figure from one of the Hoppner portraits at Knole, in the very costume worn by the sitter, with ‘two tall grey feathers and a white turban’.⁵⁶ Walking round the hall in company with the heirs to dukedoms, she told Harold, ‘I could see “How suitable!” in people’s eyes as we went by.’⁵⁷ Her motive in writing in this vein was partly ironic; she may also have intended to rouse Harold to jealousy. In her complacency she overlooked Harold’s previous unofficial engagement – to Lady Eileen Wellesley, herself a duke’s daughter (as well as one of Vita’s fellow cast members in the Shakespeare Masque). If the Nicolsons lacked élan, they were not, as all acknowledged, what the Sackvilles termed ‘bedint’: middle class, vulgar or worse. Despite Vita’s family pride, the marriage of Harold Nicolson to Vita Sackville-West was no mésalliance.

Her sense of social superiority notwithstanding, Vita was ripe to fall in love. Remembering in 1920, she disparaged Rosamund’s intellectual limitations (in Challenge, where Rosamund appears loosely fictionalised as Fru Thyregod, Vita dismisses her conversation as a ‘babble of coy platitudes’⁵⁸); their liaison undoubtedly made Vita happier than otherwise. It stimulated that streak of romance which inspired her to write; the same impulse affected the nature of her writing and some, but not all, of her relationships. It would never leave her. In 1913, in a poem called ‘Early Love’, she described a relish for ‘those fond days when every spoken word/ [Is] sweet, and all the fleeting things unspoken/ Yet sweeter …’.⁵⁹ She told Harold: ‘There is no fun equal to being quite at the beginning of things.’⁶⁰ A part of Vita was in love with the idea of love and would remain so.

Two centuries earlier, in his poem ‘Dorinda’s Sparkling Wit and Eyes’, Charles Sackville had written: ‘Love is a calm and tender joy,/ Kind are his looks and soft his pace.’ Vita had seen little of the calmness and tenderness, the kindness or softness of love. Calmness was so seldom a feature of Victoria’s relationships; and kindliness had long ceased to play a central part in Lionel and Victoria’s marriage. As a child, Vita had frequently lacked the easy reassurance of her parents’ love. Of those other adults in her life, Lord Sackville was costive in his emotional reticence and few of Vita’s governesses enjoyed more than a fleeting tenure. The departure of Miss Bennett, known as ‘Bentie’, when Vita was ten, caused her real distress. Vita admired her father and convinced herself (correctly) of the depth of their mostly unspoken bond: ‘You and I are so alike and are not always able to show these things,’ he would write to her later.⁶¹ Indeed, she minded so much about her father’s good opinion that she prevented him from reading any of her early novels and plays. According to Victoria, Seery also thought of Vita as ‘like a daughter’;⁶² along with Bentie, Ralph Battiscombe and her parents, he was a legatee in a will Vita compiled aged nine. The bequests to Seery included ‘my miniature, my claret jug, my whip’, in addition to the khaki suit in which Vita played at being Sir Redvers Buller. She was not troubled by the discrepancy in size between her nine-year-old self and twenty-five-stone Sir John: she regarded him, she would write, as ‘a mass of good humour and kindliness’.⁶³

By the time she met Harold Nicolson, Vita had limited but vexed experience of male libido. Her first sexual encounter occurred when she was eleven. It happened in Scotland, at Sluie, the Aberdeenshire estate overlooking the lower Grampians which Seery rented annually. Afterwards Vita remembered the place with something close to rapture: ‘those lovely, lovely hills, those blazing sunsets, those runnels of icy water where I used to make water-wheels, those lovely summer evenings’.⁶⁴ At Sluie, rules were relaxed: ‘I had a kilt and a blue jersey, and I don’t suppose I was ever tidy once, even on Sundays.’⁶⁵ Vita spent her days with the gillies; she accompanied Seery shooting, helping him over stiles and stone walls; she ran through beech trees, silver birches and pines, foraged in the heather and the bracken and the loch behind the house; she played with the children of the local farmer. It was a paradise for this tomboy with a taste for fresh air and disdain for conventional girlish pastimes; her time outdoors was enlivened by that element of easy companionship missing from so much of her childhood. In her diary for 29 August 1907, shortly after arriving at Sluie, she recorded her first meeting that year with the farmer’s children: ‘I think Jack and Phemie were pleased to see me.’⁶⁶ Four years previously, the same Jack had told Vita he loved her. He told her so again when Vita was thirteen.

It happened the first time in the shadow of the gillie’s hut. Despite what Vita described as his crippling awareness of the social gulf that existed between himself and the object of his affections, Jack took it upon himself to suit the deed to the word. His intention, Vita concluded years later, was to rape her: only ‘his inborn respect, his sense of class’ prevented him.⁶⁷ Instead he sought relief in masturbation, a hand on Vita’s thigh. At the same time he forced Vita ‘to take hold of his dog’s penis and work it backwards and forwards until “the dog reached the point where he came and squirted his semen all over my shoes, and I was alarmed by this manifestation”’.⁶⁸ That ‘alarmed’ sounds an understatement. With hindsight Vita sought to minimise the oddness of this encounter by explaining her lack of childish squeamishness about sex: she was a country child, with a country child’s knowledge of birds and bees. She denied that either Jack’s masturbation or his dog’s ejaculation had troubled her.

More distasteful were the unwelcome attentions of her godfather. The Hon. Kenneth Hallyburton Campbell, stockbroker son of Lord Stratheden and Campbell, was twenty-one years Vita’s senior, a friend of Seery’s, called by Victoria ‘Kenito’. This affectionate diminutive proved misleading. Campbell first tried to rape Vita when she was sixteen, in her bedroom at Knole. On that occasion only the appearance of a housemaid carrying hot water saved her. ‘Frequently after that’ he renewed his attempt.⁶⁹ Campbell’s position of trust exacerbated the gravity of his offences, which Vita grew practised at evading. Later, like Jack, he told Vita he loved her. In her diary she confided her sense of horror. Later still, when his marriage to Rosalinda Oppenheim turned out badly, Campbell complained to Vita of his unhappiness.

Vita’s upbringing had taught her the egotism of love. She learned too an idea of the selfishness of sexual gratification, particularly male sexual gratification. Jack could be excused on grounds of his youth. Not so Campbell. Within Vita’s family circle were examples of men behaving badly. The Sackville succession case had inevitably drawn attention to the different consequences for Vita’s grandfather and Pepita of their illicit love. Lord Sackville, as part-time lover, received unlimited sexual access and devotion: in provincial nineteenth-century Spain, Pepita forfeited respectability and her dancing career. She made herself ridiculous by adopting the title ‘Countess West’, and she died giving birth to the seventh of Lord Sackville’s children. Despite her best efforts, she failed to shield those children from the implications of their illegitimacy. In the case of Vita’s parents, Lionel does not appear to have worried over explanations for Victoria’s sexual withdrawal; forgotten were the ecstasy of first infatuation, her exclamations of delirium, his tender lover’s, ‘Was it nice, Vicky?’⁷⁰ Instead Lionel sought consolation elsewhere. To Victoria’s evident distress, he allowed his emotions to keep pace with his libido. In time Lionel and Victoria’s physical separation eroded their relationship entirely.

Vita was young when she discovered that Knole could never belong to her. A male entail promised house and estate instead to her cousin Eddy, son of Lionel’s brother Charles. Nine years younger than Vita and a gifted pianist from an early age, Eddy was in every way her inferior in fighting and war games and cricket and boyish bluster. If Vita was hardy and masculine, Eddy was soft and girlish (and afterwards homosexual). The cruelty of this reversal was not lost on Vita. ‘I used to hate Eddy when he was a baby and I wasn’t much more, because he would have Knole,’ she explained to Harold in 1912.⁷¹ Gender was an accident of birth, but maleness – even Eddy’s unconvincing, panstick-and-rouged, velvet-clad maleness – was rewarded. ‘Knole is denied to me for ever, through a “technical fault over which we have no control”, as they say on the radio,’ she wrote.⁷²

As with inheritance, Vita decided that in relationships the male role was that of taking, not giving: an unthinking assumption of the upper hand. It was a role she herself would play. In her novel All Passion Spent, Vita’s octogenarian heroine Lady Slane questions a life that has been devoted to her husband: ‘She was, after all, a woman … Was there, after all, some foundation for the prevalent belief that woman should minister to man? … Was there something beautiful, something active, something creative even, in her apparent submission to Henry?’⁷³ Certainly Vita thought at length on the contrasting roles of men and women. For the most part she was clear about her answers to such questions: she was incapable of discerning the beauty of submission. She devised a solution to suit herself. As with much in her life, her ‘feminism’ was self-serving. It consisted of a refusal to compromise anything touching her self-identity. That identity, as we have seen, embraced both masculine and feminine.

Sackville history included examples of formidable women, independent-minded and financially independent. Chief among them was the seventeenth-century matriarch Lady Anne Clifford. In 1923, Vita edited Lady Anne’s diary for publication. Occasionally she likened herself to her indomitable forebear. Among other things, Lady Anne shared Vita’s taste for solitude: ‘though I kept my chamber altogether yet methinks the time is not so tedious to me as when I used to be abroad’.⁷⁴ But the forebears who appealed to Vita as a child were not women like Lady Anne; rather, they were associated with tales of cavalier adventure and derring-do. In the history Vita loved, it was men who played the hero’s part. Unconsciously or otherwise, she determined to take the same part, and Vita was often selfish in her relationships, not only with her lovers but within her family too. She excused it as her ‘happy-go-lucky … everything-will-turn-out-right-if-you-don’t-fuss-about-it’ nature: in practice it meant she left the fussing – and the fallout – to other people.⁷⁵ Her life in retrospect is a wholesale rejection of the idea that sexual gratification exists as a masculine prerogative. Twice she turned down proposals of marriage from a young man who wooed her with a Christmas present of a bear cub; ‘He has the worst temper of anyone I know. He is cruel,’ she wrote of Ivan Hay.⁷⁶ Correctly she estimated the unlikelihood of his indulging her need for dominance. In a rare instance of humour she christened the bear cub ‘Ivan the Terrible’. With Rosamund she was photographed for an illustrated paper, walking baby Ivan in the gardens at Knole. The paper captioned its photograph ‘Beauty and the Bear’.⁷⁷ Irritated by Vita’s debutante success, from which she felt herself excluded, and laconic in her sarcasm, Violet Keppel commented that ‘bears had taken the place of rabbits’.⁷⁸

A century ago, Vita’s rejection of conventional gender roles in sex was more controversial than it is today. Like much in her life, she attempted to resolve the issue through writing. She created male protagonists who deliberately deny their sexual instincts and in this way forfeit the aggressor’s role, or, like Calladine in Grey Wethers, have their sex stripped from them by the author: ‘Mr Calladine was a gentleman, – she couldn’t call him a man, no, but a gentleman he certainly was, and she was even a little overawed by his gentility.’⁷⁹ The private life of Sir Walter Mortibois in The Easter Party for example, is dominated by his suppression of his sexual appetite and his determination that his marriage to Rose remains platonic, uncompromised by love or desire. ‘A man isn’t born with wife and children, and if he acquires them he has only himself to blame,’ Arthur Lomax tells readers of Seducers in Ecuador. Explaining the particular outlook of Lester Dale in Grand Canyon, Vita wrote: ‘As for women … I took myself off whenever they threatened to interfere with me. If a woman began to attract me, even if the poor soul remained quite unaware of it, it constituted interference. It was all part of my settled policy.’⁸⁰ The men in question are guilty of misogyny, but it is they, not the women associated with them, who in Vita’s narratives are the ultimate victims.

Although Vita arrived at this philosophy over time – she may have been influenced by Otto Weininger’s equation of excessive intellectualism in men with insincerity, which she read in 1918 – there were implications for Harold Nicolson from the outset. In 1910, her homosexuality prevented her from thinking of Harold in ‘that way’. Harold’s apparent lack of vigorous physical desire for her, alongside her conviction that marriage was unavoidable, were factors that eventually recommended him to her. It soothed the wounds this daughter of Knole sustained as a result of her sex; it suggested a husband who was foremost a ‘playmate’ and a ‘companion’. ‘You and I are not grown-up,’ she wrote to Harold in 1912. ‘Nor ever will be.’⁸¹ This ‘childishness’, with its implied sexlessness, was the very prescription that would preserve their marriage long term. They were child-like together: they would pursue more ‘adult’ diversions separately, in time by mutual consent.

The Masque of Shakespeare is one of numerous instances of role play which characterised for Vita the years preceding her marriage. She dressed up; she wrote herself into novels and plays; she sat for painters and photographers. She was not always aware of her motivation. She was experimenting with self-discovery, trying on and taking off a series of masks, adopting personae, as she would for decades to come. Implicit in her fantasy life was a rejection of that powerlessness which she saw as part and parcel of a woman’s conventional existence. She craved Knole; she would become a writer. Both were ‘masculine’ impulses, just as the writers she admired, and those Sackville heroes, were male. In its uncompromisingness, the act of self-creation was equally male.

On 13 February 1910, Vita noted in her diary the first of seven sittings with fashionable Hungarian-born society portraitist, Philip de László. Today that portrait hangs in the Library at Sissinghurst Castle. Vita wears a large hat and furs. In this instance it was her mother’s idea. Artist and sitter had met before: at lunch with Seery in the rue Laffitte in May of the previous year, and in October 1908, when de László visited Knole to paint from photographs a portrait of the recently deceased Lord Sackville. Vita recorded then: ‘I showed him the show rooms and he made me strike attitudes! saying that he would like to paint me in a Velasquez style!’⁸² Victoria had other ideas. The costume she chose for Vita consisted of a high-necked white blouse with a waterfall of ruffles and a black hat decorated with a large brooch. It was presumably not her intention that Vita should suggest a feminine Edwardian version of those portraits of Sackville cavaliers which lined Knole’s walls; she was equally unaware of the resemblance to Vita’s Chatterton costume. The palette of black, white and red emphasised the connection between de László’s image and family portraits by Larkin and Cornelius de Neve. Apparently this visual affinity was lost on Vita too. She wrote simply that ‘the picture is finished and, I think, good: anyway it is magnificently painted’.⁸³ She changed her mind when she inherited the portrait after Victoria’s death. In the altered climate of the 1930s, she regarded it as ‘too smart’ and banished it to one of Sissinghurst’s attics.⁸⁴ By then Vita had achieved sufficient sexual autonomy no longer to require this glossy objectification as limpid-eyed ingénue.

De László’s Vita is a young woman at a crossroads. Her clothes suggest the riches and excess of upper-class Edwardian England, but look backwards to a history of boisterous swagger that is bloodier, fiercer, less languorous. Her expression combines pride and wistfulness, conviction and uncertainty. The heaviness of her coat and hat, the lack of colour, the absence of ornaments save the red amber necklace, serve to throw into relief her slender femininity. Victoria surely intended Vita’s portrait, painted in the year of her first season, as a statement of her marriageability. Unsurprisingly, her daughter appears as if she is play-acting.

Vita described the pneumonia she contracted that summer as ‘heaven sent’.⁸⁵ With Victoria she retreated to the South of France, to a large white villa, the château Malet, near Monte Carlo, where she remained from November until April the following year. Ever the social opportunist, Victoria took her for tea with Napoleon III’s widow, the Empress Eugénie. Among guests at château Malet during Vita’s convalescence were Rosamund Grosvenor, Violet Keppel, Orazio Pucci and Harold Nicolson. Each of them was in love with Vita; increasingly each was aware of his or her conflicting claims on her affection. It was not the restful interlude doctors had prescribed, but Vita enjoyed the distance between herself and the debutante world of ‘the little dancing things’; enjoyed too the tributes of those varied lovers whose suits she juggled with a degree of adroitness. She was instinctively proprietorial. The knowledge that one day she would lose Knole had long ago stimulated a strong possessive streak in Vita, and she does not appear to have questioned her right to the simultaneous admiration of Rosamund, Violet, Pucci and Harold.

In January, Violet wrote in need of reassurance: ‘Do you know that you have ceased to be a reality for me? You are a mirage that recedes to the degree that one approaches it.’⁸⁶ Her letters were alternately loving and caustic, as she struggled to provoke a reaction in Vita. Violet was among Vita’s last visitors in France and presented her with a ruby she had bought in Ceylon. Pucci took the opportunity to propose again. Again Vita turned him down. By contrast, in January 1911, Harold’s departure from château Malet startled Vita on account of his apparent lack of regret. His behaviour provoked her in a way that neither Violet’s nor Pucci’s had. It was a revelatory response, her feelings strikingly at odds with Harold’s. Vita was approaching a point where she could no longer disguise from herself the necessity of reaching a decision about her future; she was approaching a point where that decision would make itself. It frightened her nevertheless. At intervals over the next eighteen months she would appear to long for and to fear marriage to Harold, to take control of the situation and to relinquish it. ‘I’m going to let everything be for a bit. Perhaps something will happen!!’ she wrote at a moment of particular hesitancy.⁸⁷