by Jane Rule
Much less would be known about Vita Sackville-West if her son, Nigel Nicolson, had not recently published Portrait of a Marriage, part of which is a manuscript he found in his mother’s study after her death, an autobiographical fragment of eighty pages written in the seventh year of her marriage about her violent love affair with another woman, Violet Trefusis. The remainder of Portrait of a Marriage is Nigel Nicolson’s description of the long relationship between his parents. “Their marriage not only survived infidelity, sexual incompatibility and long absences, but it became stronger and finer as a result.”2
In that autobiography, Vita described her childhood at Knole when she “made a great ideal of being hardy, and as like a boy as possible.”3 She did not get on well with other children, was rough and cruel to them, enjoyed her own company much more, and devoted hours of each day to reading and writing. In school she was fiercely competitive and very successful academically. “I’ve got a scholarly turn of mind, let me face that damning truth.”4 But there was no question of her going on to university, of course. She must come out and take her place in society. A mind as strong and well disciplined as Virginia Woolf’s could overcome the handicap of a limited formal education. Vita Sackville-West tried, but her biographies are often flawed by her lack of scholarly competence and uncontrolled personal involvement. There is something unfortunately silly as well as charming about her interjecting that she would like herself to dry the tears of Anne-Marie Louise d’Orléans, the subject of Daughter of France, or her assertion “As I can never understand my own finances in 1958 I don’t see why I should be expected to understand Mademoiselle’s in 1660.”5 But since for her being scholarly at all was a “damning truth,” those womanly flutters probably seemed to her in some measure redeeming in her work.
Vita Sackville-West did not think of herself as an attractive girl or young woman. Her portraits beautifully deny her own assessment, as does her disdained success in the marriage market. What she was aware of even more than being too tall, too scholarly, too impatient of developing her own charms was the fact that “men didn’t attract me.” “Women did.”6 Her first great love was Rosamund, about which for some time she felt relatively innocent. “I realized vaguely that I had no business to sleep with Rosamund, and I should certainly never have allowed anyone to find out, but my sense of guilt went no further than that.”7 Though they never actually made love, the relationship for Vita was “almost exclusively physical” because she found Rosamund “a boring and stupid companion.”8 At eighteen, when Vita met Harold, she was still very much involved with Rosamund and continued to be so all through Harold’s courtship.
From the beginning, Vita discovered with Harold the side of her nature which had been left undeveloped in childhood; “he was the best actual playmate I had ever known.”9 Her love for him “was so fresh, so intellectual, so unphysical, that I never thought of him in that aspect at all.”10 He was away a great deal during the years of their courtship, and she did not really miss him, absorbed in Rosamund, her “pure” love for Harold not as real as “my perverted nature, which loved and tyrannized over Rosamund.”11 But, when she did marry, the loss she felt was not Rosamund, but Knole. In fact, she felt rescued from Rosamund or, at any rate, from the self she was with Rosamund, “from everything that was vicious and violent.”12 “Although I never knew the physical passion I had felt for Rosamund, I didn’t really miss it.”13 She had not with Rosamund ever really satisfied that passion, probably because neither of them had known how, and it must certainly have been a relief to leave it behind for a companion in all other ways so delightful to Vita. She lived in that state of calm pleasure for four or five years, during which time she bore three sons, one of whom was stillborn.
All of these details are offered in the autobiography as background to the love affair with Violet, who had been, aside from Rosamund, Vita’s only important girlhood friend, younger than Vita by two years but as intelligent, as passionate, and far more daring. Because Violet had been an erotically disturbing person even when Vita was absorbed with Rosamund and was rude about Vita’s marriage, Vita did not wholeheartedly welcome her reappearance. Harold was away when Violet came to visit. At first her restlessness annoyed Vita, happily settled into a life of tending her children, gardening, and writing, but one day Vita put on what were called in those war years “women-on-the-land” clothes, breeches and gaiters. “I went into wild spirits; I ran, I shouted, I jumped, I climbed, I vaulted over gates, I felt like a school boy. …”14 Violet, who had been in love with Vita for years, seduced her that night.
The guilt Vita felt was sometimes in the next three years as fierce as her sexual passion. Writing about what happened, she did not try to justify herself ever. “I have never pretended to have anything other than a base and despicable character.”15 “My whole curse has been a duality with which I was too weak and too self-indulgent to struggle.”16 She justified writing about the affair at all because she wanted to tell the entire truth, because she knew of no other record of such a relationship, because she hoped that what she experienced would be better understood in the future. Her own explanation was this: “I advance, therefore, the perfectly accepted theory that cases of dual personality do exist, in which the feminine and masculine elements alternately preponderate. I advance this in an impersonal and scientific spirit, and claim that I am qualified to speak with the intimacy a professional scientist could acquire only after years of study and indirect information, because I have the object of study always at hand, in my own heart.”17
Her view of herself as a dual personality came from the great difference of experience between loving Harold and loving Violet. Of Harold she said, “He has complete power over my heart, though not over my spirit.”18 She was never possessive of him, jealous of him, and though she enormously enjoyed his company, missing him was never something that disturbed her writing solitude. She certainly did often treat him very badly during those three years, but she had no real desire to hurt him. His suffering was perhaps the greatest part of her guilt and grief. Through it all, though he sometimes bitterly protested, he never stopped loving Vita or supporting her emotionally. She wrote to him, “You have met and understood me on every point. It is this which binds me to you through every storm, and makes you so unalterably the one person whom I trust and love.”19 Harold’s own affairs with men certainly helped him to understand Vita’s nature, and, since he was a man not much disturbed by sexual passion, he could usually control his jealousy.
With Violet, Vita was a different person. “I am so harsh to her that I could put almost any strain of suffering upon her without feeling a qualm of pity—could and have.”20 She thought of herself as owning Violet. Violet also behaved very differently from Harold. “My house, my garden, my fields, and Harold, these were the silent ones, that pleaded only by their own merits of purity, simplicity, and faith, and on the other hand stood Violet, fighting wildly for me, seeming sometimes harsh and scornful, and riding roughshod over those gentle, defenseless things, but sometimes piteous and tragic, reduced to utter dependence upon me, and instantly defeated by any rough word of mine, until I really knew not where the truth lay.”21
Violet wanted nothing but to escape with Vita and live with her. Though Vita did not want to leave Harold, she did go off with Violet on a holiday which turned into a four-month absence. While with Violet, Vita dressed like a man and called herself Julian, a new identity that made her feel marvelously free. Enraged letters from her mother, telling her of the increasing scandal she was causing, threatening to give up the care of the children, did not touch her. There had been so much scandal in the family, not the least her mother’s own reputation, it could hardly have mattered to Vita. For the children during that period she obviously felt no more than detached affection. It was Harold who finally could persuade her to return.
Violet was meanwhile being pressured by her family to marry. She had already broken more engagements than her reputation could stand, and, since she had no
independent means, she could not ignore her family completely. Denys Trefusis, a handsome, strange, and idealistic man, was deeply in love with her and willing to marry her on her own terms, which were that there would be no sexual relations between them and she could be free to spend as much time with Vita as she wanted. Vita was half persuaded that the marriage would give Violet greater freedom, but, as the time for it approached, Violet begged Vita to rescue her from it. Faced with the fact of marriage, Violet said, “I hate men. They fill me with revulsion, even quite small boys. Marriage is an institution that ought to be confined to temperamental old maids, weary prostitutes, and royalty.”22 It seems clear that for Violet the threat of marriage was only a means to force Vita to give up her own marriage for Violet. Vita, instead, escaped to Paris to be with Harold through the day of Violet’s wedding. Denys and Violet arrived in Paris the next day, and Violet went straight to Vita, who was in a frenzy of possessive jealousy. “I treated her savagely. I made love to her. I had her. I didn’t care.”23
Violet used that jealousy again and again to tempt Vita to her, saying that Denys was in danger of breaking his agreement. The thought of anyone else possessing Violet was unendurable to Vita, and finally she and Violet did plan to go away together. Not only her own but Harold’s mother now knew what was going on. Mrs. Nicolson, gentle and understanding, tried to persuade Vita not to go. “I only wanted to fly where I would not pollute their purity any longer.”24 The climax of the long melodrama occurred when both husbands arrived together in France to reclaim their wives. At that time Harold suggested to Vita that Violet was not being truthful with her, that she had in fact let her husband make love to her. This revelation so enraged Vita that she left with Harold, and even the later half denials and explanations from both Violet and Denys did not basically alter Vita’s determination to break with Violet though she was still “longing and aching miserably for someone in whom I had lost faith, that of loving to desperation someone in whose worth I no longer believed.”25 Of Denys Trefusis she wrote, “I now hate him more than I have ever hated anyone in this life, or am likely to; and there is no injury I would not do him with the utmost pleasure.”26 “I only hope he returns it in full measure; he has a hundred times more cause to hate me than I do to hate him.”27
What is remarkable about her account is that she never tried to rationalize her position. Given her own circumstance, her jealousy of Violet was hardly fair, but nothing in the experience involved reason or justice or even understanding. It is described far more like a natural disaster, as a result of which come inevitable regrets: “I regret that the person Harold married wasn’t entirely and wholly what he thought of her, and that the person who loves and owns Violet isn’t a second person, because each suits each.”28 Vita also regretted what she had learned of herself. “Of course I wish now that I had never made those discoveries.”29 She would ponder general cures: “Women, like men, ought to have their youth so glutted with freedom they hate the very idea of freedom.”30 Years later, she said to Harold, “You should have told me about yourself and warned me that the same sort of thing was likely to happen to myself. It would have saved us a lot of trouble and misunderstanding.”31 An unlikely hope, but Harold and Vita, having survived those years, never again faced any serious threat to their marriage. And apparently, after that grotesque beginning, Violet’s own marriage went on to be quite a happy one, she taking full blame for what had happened.
Vita did not stop falling in love with women, but she by then did understand herself better and knew that no one would ever come between her and Harold. The most written about of her relationships was that with Virginia Woolf, whose nephew in his biography speculates that there was probably some love-making between them. Nigel Nicolson offers letters exchanged between his parents to clarify the circumstance. Vita was very much in love with Virginia, but she was also extremely protective of her, aware not only that Virginia had never known physical passion but was also threatened with madness. “I am scared to death of arousing physical feelings in her, because of madness.”32 Harold was concerned at first that she might upset the balance of Virginia and Leonard’s relationship, warning her that not all marriages were as secure from such threat as their own, but Vita continually reassured him that she was being sensible. She mothered Virginia, and Virginia wanted mothering, drawn to Vita’s being “in short (what I have never been) a real woman.”33 The physical attraction did not last more than a year or so. The friendship continued until Virginia Woolf’s suicide. “When Virginia drowned herself in 1941, Harold came down to Sissinghurst at once to be with Vita, but during the whole of that long evening, Virginia’s name was never once mentioned by either of them.”34 She had been for Vita something far more than a lover, a friend with whom she shared her work and herself. Virginia Woolf understood her, and she wrote Orlando for her, a book Nigel Nicolson calls “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”35 “Virginia by her genius had provided Vita with a unique consolation for having been born a girl,”36 associating Vita with Knole, allowing her, in fantasy, a life as long as her own ancient family history, in which she was allowed to be a woman and a man by turns.
Vita Sackville-West became increasingly solitary, gardening and writing at Sissinghurst, enjoying weekends with Harold and visits from her sons. She died before Harold, and, though he suffered terribly from loneliness, his sons were probably more a consolation to him than they would have been to her, for she had never been more than a dutiful mother, sometimes less, something Nigel at least does not seem to resent, understanding her need for privacy. “The desire to be free from interruption, free from being available, was as real and painful to her as love or jealousy.”37
Even at the most intense moments of her life, she never neglected her writing. During the four months she spent with Violet, she was working on a novel called Challenge, whose pages she shared with Violet as she wrote them. When she had finished it, both families begged her not to publish it since the heroine was too obviously a portrait of Violet and would confirm all the raging gossip about the two women. Violet was very angry when Vita stopped publication. The book didn’t appear until five years later, and then it was brought out only in the United States. Challenge is not a good book, and it’s hard to imagine why Violet was so pleased with her own representation. Called Eve in the book, she is as beautiful and attractive as Violet was in real life, as spoiled by and flippantly cruel to men, with the exception of Julian, who is her cousin, Vita using the close family tie as a moral restraint for Julian to correspond with her own misgivings about overt lesbian love-making. Julian has a political dream of declaring independence for a group of small Greek islands, on which his family has large investments, and proclaiming himself as leader to give the native people a better life. Eve encourages him only because the break it will cause with his family will leave him free to be with her. Once he has achieved his goal and they are living among the natives of the island, Julian’s continued interest in the political problems of the island makes Eve jealous, and she betrays him. When Julian realizes that Eve is responsible for the successful invasion of the island, he tells her that she has destroyed not only his dream but his love for her. Though he then offers to marry her in responsible despair, she refuses and kills herself. Nigel Nicolson says the islands are a symbol of Harold and all he stood for. Since Julian constantly equates Eve and the islands, sees her and the dream of political freedom as parts of the same goal, it is more tempting to believe that Vita saw in Violet finally not only a threat to her marriage but also to her work, willing to betray not only anyone but anything to have Vita’s undivided attention.
The portrait of Eve, as well as her name, is classic, woman as temptress and betrayer, idealized and then despised, tyrannized over and protected and then cast off. And Julian is a classic of male chauvinism, not really interested in the freedom of the islanders so much as in his own magnetic power and importance, jealous and mistrustful and arrogant in his dealings with Eve. But neithe
r character is conceived to be criticized. They are to be granted tragic size and tragic fate. When Julian loses Eve, he loses a great vision: “Was it for Eve supremely, and, to a certain extent for all women and artists—the visionaries, the lovely, the graceful, the irresponsible, the useless!—was it reserved for them to show the beginning of the road?”38 Julian ends as an aging man, cynical, believing in nothing, a genuine philanthropist, with a proper sort of wife. Ah, better to hurl oneself into the sea and lose life itself! Well, fortunately Vita Sackville-West left a more troubling and requiring record of her love for Violet than this translation into bad politics and worse romance.
She wrote far better fiction as well. The Edwardians is a good period piece in which she examines the meaning and value of high birth and inheritance; yet, though she strives for detachment, there is still unresolved nostalgia for the masculine privilege she never had, for the high adventure she never risked.
All Passion Spent is a less ambitious, somehow truer, and therefore even more successful book in which Lady Slane, in her eighties, looks back on her exemplary life as the wife of a successful man, who became Prime Minister of England, and mother of a number of not very attractive or interesting children. She reveals that she never did want to marry. “For the thoughts which ran behind this delicate and maidenly exterior were of an extravagance to do credit even to a wild young man. They were thoughts of nothing less than escape and disguise; a changed name, a travested sex, and freedom in some foreign city.”39 She wanted to be a painter. Confronted with a proposal she doesn’t so much accept as fall silent before, she lets herself be carried into marriage on other people’s assumptions, thinking only “even had she been in love with him, she could see therein no reason for foregoing the whole of her own separate existence. Henry was in love with her, but no one proposed that he should forego his.”40 She did love her husband finally. That love “had been a straight black line drawn right through her life. It had hurt her, it had damaged her, it had diminished her, but she had been unable to curve away from it.”41 She envied young couples simply in love, without conflict, but at the same time she was repelled by “this intolerable masculine lordliness, this abject feminine submission.”42 Her conclusion about her choice is, “It had been terrible to live with, and to love, a being so charming, so deceptive, so chill. Henry, she discovered suddenly, had been a very masculine man; masculinity, in spite of his charm and his culture, was the keynote to his character.”43
