Vita, unlike most women who would rather be men (let alone men who would rather be women), had good reason to be discontented: had she not been a girl she would have inherited Knole. The house, given to Thomas Sackville by his cousin Elizabeth I, was, in its way, quite magnificent, with 52 staircases and one bedroom for each day of the year; seen from across the park, as Vita put it, it seemed ‘less a house than a medieval village’ (wandering into the Great Hall one day, she came face to face with a stag sheltering from the cold). Virginia Woolf didn’t think much of it (‘too little conscious beauty for my taste’), but for Vita it was the most fierce, and most lasting, of her many attachments. ‘I cannot bear to think of Knole wounded and me not there to be wounded with it,’ she told Harold Nicolson when she heard that the house had been hit by a bomb. It wasn’t simply that she thought she and Knole were the same thing, though she often did. The house also provided her with visions of herself extending back over hundreds of years. Glendinning makes the point that ‘she never wrote a fictional version’ of its loss: ‘Vita’s heroes are always in possession of their ancestral homes’ – but one could also make the point that her heroes always have ancestral homes to be in possession of.
Vita didn’t altogether dislike being a woman and wasn’t wholly a lesbian. ‘I don’t object to homosexuality,’ she said to Harold Nicolson several years after the end of her affair with Violet and at the beginning of her relationship with Virginia Woolf. She was talking about her cousin Eddy but it may leave one wondering what subtle category she had in mind for her own and her husband’s behaviour. As a young girl she had two relationships of the kind Glendinning calls ‘exciting’, one with Rosamund Grosvenor (‘what a funny thing it is to love a person as I love Roddie’), the other with Violet Keppel. By the time of her engagement to Harold Nicolson, in 1913, when she was 21, there were four or five women telling her that they loved her – ‘de tout mon coeur – and more every day, if that is possible’. It’s true that there were also young men, some described here as ‘unsuitable’ and some as ‘brilliant’, who seemed to want to marry her and whom she teased but kept at arm’s length. ‘Men did not attract me in what is called “that way”,’ she wrote in her ‘Autobiography of 1920’, first published in 1973 as part of Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage. ‘Women did. Rosamund did.’ ‘She and Rosamund,’ Glendinning explains, ‘shared a diffuse and sentimental sensuality, but never, then or later, did they technically “make love”.’ Apparently, ‘they did not think of it,’ but that kind of thing is hard to ascertain.
‘What fun,’ was Vita’s comment on meeting Harold Nicolson. In the three years between their meeting and their marriage she spent a lot of time worrying whether she wouldn’t have more fun with someone else, with Rosamund or Lord Lascelles, or ‘in a tower with my books’. Glendinning, always mindful of the possibility that readers may find Vita ‘unlikeable’ – she has some difficulty later on with her snobbery and her anti-Semitism – at this point nods wisely and remarks, ‘There is nothing peculiar to the modern mind about a vivid, clever, attractive, complex girl of twenty being unwilling to tie herself down for life,’ the implication being that if it isn’t peculiar now it must have been peculiar then. One could wish that Glendinning had said more about the context in which Vita led her wayward life. ‘Physical fidelity,’ she tells us apropos of Vita’s parents, ‘wasn’t greatly valued in the marriages of the British upper classes,’ but that doesn’t quite cover all of Vita’s behaviour. In 1960, when they had been married 47 years, Vita told Harold in a letter that everything that happened when they were young had been ‘partly your fault’:
I was very young and very innocent. I knew nothing about homosexuality. I didn’t even know that such a thing existed – either between men or between women. You should have told me. You should have warned me. You should have told me about yourself, and have 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.
She added for good measure that he wouldn’t even now like her letter: ‘you never like to face facts.’ But in her 1920 autobiography she knew enough to say that at the time she hadn’t thought it wrong that ‘I should be more or less engaged to Harold, and so much in love with Rosamund’. And what about the many affairs she had in middle age – with Hilda Matheson and Evelyn Irons and Olive Rinder and any number of other women (‘she falls in love with every pretty woman, just like a man,’ Virginia Woolf told Ottoline Morrell)? As for Harold’s homosexual friendships with young men, it seems he simply took them for granted. To Harold, as his son observed in Portrait of a Marriage, ‘sex was as incidental, and about as pleasurable, as a quick visit to a picture-gallery between trains.’ Another thing the British upper classes didn’t greatly value was the old idea of taking their secrets with them to the grave.
‘In her awakening womanhood she desired nothing but that she might yield to him the most abased subjection.’ Coming from Vita the remark, made in an unpublished novel written at the time of her marriage, may seem a little overstated, but no more so than many things she said of herself, especially in her fiction. She conceded that with Harold she ‘never knew the physical passion I had felt for Rosamund’, and was later to complain to her mother of his lack of sexual enthusiasm. (Her mother reported – poor man – that ‘H. is always sleepy and has her in a desperate hurry.’) On the other hand, he was, she said, ‘like a sunny harbour to me’. In the 1920 auto biography she wrote that ‘for sheer joy of companionship’ the first years of her marriage were ‘unparalleled or at least unsurpassed’, and in 1915 noted in her diary that ‘we are more in love than ever. I thank God I have known absolute happiness.’ A friend was proudly cited who had told her that ‘the doors of our house are like glimpses of paradise.’ Until late middle age Vita was either extremely happy or extremely miserable, or both at the same time.
The period of absolute happiness with Harold came to an end in the autumn of 1917 when he caught a venereal infection from one of his young men. Vita was not so much wounded as unleashed, and the long-drawn-out affair with Violet was the consequence. ‘I suppose I am too cultured and fin de siècle to impose my virility,’ Harold sighed, while she told him that she longed for ‘new places’ and had had enough of ordering lunch. On 10 February 1920 the two women eloped.
We will lead you such a dance
If in Belgium or in France,
But we aren’t going to trifle very long,
Vita wrote on the train from Boulogne to Amiens. On 14 February Harold and Denys Trefusis flew to Amiens in a two-seater aero-plane and reclaimed their respective wives. (‘Quite like a sensational novel,’ Lady Sackville noted in her diary.) The relationship didn’t really end until some time in 1922. Wild oats are all very well, Vita wrote to Harold, but not ‘when they grow as high as a jungle’.
Nigel Nicolson was three the year his mother eloped. Vita didn’t take much interest in her children until they were grown up and then took too much. ‘They rush after me whenever they see me, simply because they have nothing else to do,’ she complained to Harold when the boys were home from prep school or Eton. And when he reminded her that responsibilities were not something ‘to regard with shame’, she asked him how he would like to have entire charge of two children for four months of the year:
Supposing that someone – say Eddy – told you that he had to look after two boys and that it was too much of a good thing, you would instantly agree. It would never cross your mind to say he was being unreasonable. Why then is it different for me? Sex, I suppose. Well, I don’t see that it makes any difference, so there.
So there. Looking after her children came under the general heading of ‘Acid X’ – something she didn’t want to do but Harold (or the world) said she ought to. What concerned her mostly when she thought about them at all was whether she preferred Ben to Nigel or Nigel to Ben and which of the two was more like her.
One might have expected Nigel Nicolson to hold all this
against his mother. One might have expected it were it not for the habit that leads the upper classes to celebrate their own and each other’s bad behaviour. If Vita was cruel, he says of the episode with Violet, ‘it was cruelty on a heroic scale.’ Had the fault been more modest would it have been less admirable? Glendinning, untroubled by these distinctions, speaks of Vita’s ‘potential for criminal carelessness’. That, too, seems dramatic but certainly Vita came and went at her own terrible pleasure. Some years later she had an affair with the art historian Geoffrey Scott. Of this incident Nigel Nicolson writes: ‘Vita had not been kind to Geoffrey – she had smashed his life and finally wrecked his marriage – but what part does kindness play in love?’ No doubt the question doesn’t expect an answer but even Vita could on occasion express unease about what she saw as the ‘savage’ side of her character, though she was more afraid for herself than worried about the damage done to others.
The affair with Violet was followed by the much more sober affair with Virginia Woolf. ‘Florid, moustached, parakeet coloured, with all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist’, Virginia Woolf noted in her diary for 15 December 1922. She had met Vita for the first time the previous evening. The Nicolsons were introduced into Bloomsbury by Clive Bell and generally considered a bad thing: ‘I mean,’ Woolf wrote, ‘we judged them both incurably stupid. He is bluff, but oh so obvious; she, Duncan thought, took the cue from him and had nothing free to say.’ Virginia never changed her mind about Vita’s intellectual capacities. Even when she and Leonard were making considerable sums of money out of her books – The Edwardians sold 800 copies a day – she would praise them to Vita’s face and describe them behind her back as ‘those sleepwalking servantgirl novels’. ‘Her real claim to consideration,’ she told Jacques Raverat, ‘is, if I may be so coarse, her legs.’ Harold warned his wife to be careful – ‘it’s like smoking over a petrol tank’ – and this time, more admiring, less engaged, she was: ‘I have gone to bed with her (twice) but that’s all.’ ‘Do you really like going to bed with women?’ Vanessa Bell asked her sister in a loud voice as they were buying some pills in a chemist’s shop. ‘And how d’you do it?’ That is one thing Glendinning alas doesn’t tell us. The two ladies went to the zoo together, they ate muffins in teashops, Vita taught Virginia how to drive and when passion faded they remained friends. Vita took up with Hilda Matheson and Virginia was consoled by Ethel Smyth.
After Hilda came Evelyn and Olive and Mary Campbell and all sorts of others; some were established lesbians with jealous partners, others, like Mary Campbell, had jealous husbands; several had never slept with a woman before. And so it went on, despite age and arthritis, till her death in 1962.
During all this time she and Harold never stopped being friends, never stopped saying (or Vita never stopped saying) that they loved each other more than any two people in the world: her love for him, she told him in 1929, was ‘immortal’. ‘All the gentleness and femininity in me,’ she wrote in her autobiography, ‘was called out by Harold alone.’ But she was not so wifely (or even, to be broad-minded, husbandly) as to show an interest in what he was doing. When the Foreign Office posted him to the embassy in Berlin she paid him a brief visit and came home. When he was invited to join the British delegation at the League of Nations she didn’t know what the League of Nations was. He would ask her to accompany him to Buckingham Palace: she wouldn’t go – ‘I shall just have to lie low, and you will have to lie high if anyone asks where I am.’ If she spent any time thinking about what he did it was only in her unrelenting effort to persuade him to give it up. ‘People like you who can write marvellously should not waste themselves in a lot of humbug and fubsiness.’ By ‘humbug and fubsiness’ she apparently meant the preliminaries to the Second World War. When eventually he left the Foreign Office he was miserable. (So miserable that he joined Mosley’s New Party. Vita, who disapproved, consoled herself by securing a job for one of her girlfriends’ girlfriends on Mosley’s newspaper.) ‘It would be an overstatement to say that Vita wrecked Harold’s career,’ Nigel Nicolson remarks. But in the overstatement there’s a statement of some kind. ‘I know that there is no such thing as equality between the sexes,’ Harold noted in his diary in 1934, ‘and that women are not fulfilling their proper functions unless subservient to some man.’ In that overstatement, too, there is a statement of some kind.
Book reviewed:
Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West by Victoria Glendinning
Sisters’ Keepers
Keeping women, like keeping horses, is one of the many things the rich can do that other people can’t. They may do it for reasons of financial prudence, but if so it’s the sort of prudence that only the rich can afford. One of the girls Edna Salamon talked to met her man in a lift: ‘I told him that I was really hard up and if he wanted to go out with me he’d have to pay me … He asked if £500 was enough.’ She said £50 would do and hasn’t been hard up from that day to this. There must be men who don’t find it easy to keep a mistress as well as a wife, but the ones Salamon met in the course of her researches generally claimed that ‘it made more economic sense’ than going through a divorce. ‘He didn’t want me to have any less luxury than his wife,’ a middle-aged Texan said of her lover: ‘I always had a new car to drive – lovely clothes – memberships at the best private clubs.’ The prudence may be as much emotional as financial: an abandoned wife whose former husband didn’t want her to have any less luxury than his girlfriend would have less reason to feel grateful. Or it may not be a matter of prudence at all. Even the nicest husbands must have more fun buying zippy cars for their doxies than sedans for their wives.
Salamon is careful about the distinctions to be made between one man’s wealth and another’s – ‘to describe all the men as rich obscures the extreme variations possible’ – but she can only guess at the wealth of the men she came across: the rich are always eager to spare their interlocutors the embarrassment of knowing exactly how rich they are. There are extreme variations, too, in the currency in which these men expect to be repaid. One woman has met her lover every day in the middle of the day for the past 26 years. Another spends four weekends a year with her man, and for that he has so far paid out a quarter of a million pounds. It may be that for him, and for many of the men involved in these relationships, the greatest pleasure is simply the pleasure of spending their money.
That isn’t what they say, of course. Most of Salamon’s book is taken up with describing the different kinds of women who are, or who seek to be, kept but in her last chapter she compares what she has learned from them with what their lovers have told her. ‘Men,’ she says, ‘are much more likely to claim that their appeal to their partners is personal virility while women tend to play down the sexual side of the relationship.’ These men aren’t young: the man who spends four weekends a year with his mistress is in his sixties. However much they may boast about what they do in bed, their women see it differently and talk behind their backs about ‘middle-aged problems’ and the ‘male menopause’. Neither the men nor the women were happy to talk about financial arrangements. But it seems likely that for both keeper and kept money is a larger factor than what it can’t buy.
‘A cat wearing a jewelled choker does no more than reflect glory on the owner,’ Salamon (cattily) observes, and she has a point. The question is: what kind of glory? A man who goes out with a girl whom he has dressed in diamonds may think he is saying something about his virility, but the only hard evidence the diamonds provide is the evidence of hard cash. And the cash exercises its own kind of tyranny. The Texan woman whose boyfriend wanted her to live in the same luxury as his wife told Salamon that the only difficulty between them was that she wanted to have a career and ‘he wanted me to be free to do the things I wanted to do.’ The striking thing here isn’t his claim to know what’s best for her but his insistence that she should only want what money can supply. Salamon sometimes talks about these women sinking into a life of ‘conspicuous cons
umption’. One might also think in terms of the conspicuous presumption of the men they are involved with.
Salamon came to London from Canada in 1980 to write a thesis at the LSE about the reasons women stay with dreadful husbands, but finding it difficult to collect representative samples of every kind of marital disaster, she took her hairdresser’s advice and settled for the subject of kept women, of whom her hairdresser knew a great many. Her book is a shortened version of that thesis, dedicated to her supervisor but got up by her publisher to look like a box of chocolates. On the back there is a large photograph in which she looks very glamorous, her face half-hidden by all sorts of layers of curls. One can see that she might have occasion to visit her hair-dresser quite often and one can also see why some of the men she interviewed found the experience confusing. (One of them offered to take her to Acapulco for Christmas and added, presumably when he saw the look of horror on her face: ‘You don’t have to fuck me unless you want to.’) Unlike the majority of women who write about women, she doesn’t appear to do so out of a sense of personal discontent and though concerned to show that kept women are not necessarily less nice than other women, she isn’t her sisters’ keeper.
Heaven forbid. Salamon is a scientist and shares no one’s illusions. ‘I would argue,’ she says in the course of some remarks on the conservatism of kept women and their lovers, ‘that the sexual liberation of women is as authentic as the Loch Ness monster.’ Having got her PhD, she has gone back to Canada, where she teaches criminology at Simon Fraser University. Her subject, however, is unlikely to be crime, which, in university departments, has largely yielded to something called ‘deviance’. Kept women, for example, are ‘sexual deviants’ and so too, very nearly, are those who take an interest in them: ‘In writing on sexual deviance you are thought at least marginally deviant yourself,’ Salamon writes in her preface. ‘Adie! How could you!’ shrieked one of her friends. In this case the term is misleading, however, since what it signifies are not unusual acts (there is nothing out of the way about the things these women do in bed, no mirrors or funny underwear or ‘unnatural’ practices) but only an unusual social arrangement – which turns out not to be very unusual at all. Salamon asked one of her interviewees whether there was a part of London where mistresses tended to live. ‘If there was you’d never get in for the traffic,’ he replied. The trouble with ‘deviance’ is that those who study it may have an overdeveloped sense of what is being deviated from.
Human Relations and Other Difficulties Page 13
