Behind the Mask

by Matthew Dennison

  The night before her wedding, Vita wrote a poem in a different vein. It gives us as clear an indication of her feelings as the moment the following day when she set off for her honeymoon, wrapped in the leopard furs that were Victoria’s parting gift and accompanied by her dog but having temporarily forgotten her husband. Vita called her poem ‘To Knole’ and subsequently included it in her first published collection. Written after an hour of crying, from which only Rosamund could shake her, it was a love letter to the house which had dominated her life. For all its self-indulgence ‘To Knole’ is among the most powerful of Vita’s verse, evocative and perceptive too. Vita admits her anthropomorphism of Knole, which had begun unconsciously in her childhood, and the extent to which she had permitted the house to usurp or replace more conventional relationships. Forcibly she demonstrates that she had never felt, and never would feel, that realisation which Virginia Woolf attributes to her fictional Vita in Orlando: ‘Chairs and tables, however richly gilt and carved, sofas, resting on lions’ paws with swans’ necks curving under them, beds even of the softest swansdown are not by themselves enough.’132 At Knole they were enough for Vita in a way that newer chattels, newer homes, new lives and lovers, would not be. Unburdening herself of all that Knole had meant to her, she braced herself for departure: ‘Friend of years,/ I rose a stranger to thee on the morrow.’ That sense of enforced estrangement from Knole would permeate the remainder of Vita’s life. She herself was mostly powerless to conquer the feeling; nothing Harold said or did significantly lessened it. Vita might claim, ‘Our true and deep farewell/ Was spoken in the long preceding night.’ As both she and Harold would discover, her farewell to Knole took longer than a single night.

  If Vita’s departure from Knole was a bittersweet affair, that mood was quickly dispelled in the short term. Vita said that she had cried away all her regrets on the eve of her wedding and left none for the day itself. This did not prevent her from ending the day’s diary entry with the decidedly ambivalent: ‘So it has come to this conclusion!’133 She and Harold had driven to Somerset. Dorothy Heneage, described by Violet Keppel as resembling ‘a furry little animal out of one of La Fontaine’s fables’,134 had loaned the newlyweds Coker Court, near Yeovil. It was a house like Knole of fifteenth-century origins with Tudor additions. In the three days Vita and Harold spent there before their departure for Florence, ‘rapidly, overwhelmingly, everything changed’.

  In loosely fictionalised form, and in the third person, Vita described her wedding night in Marian Strangways. ‘She knew nothing save that she lay crushed in his arms in the fierce night … She knew that at last an irresistible cosmic force of nature, no longer to be denied, had flung their two lives together and shattered them into one … She now knew the truth of all voids in her life, and they were plenteously filled as with the rush of many springing rivers.’135 It was Vita’s version of Victoria’s diary accounts of ‘Baby’s’ antics twenty years ago. That the child of such highly sexed parents should have reacted so wholeheartedly to her sexual initiation is unsurprising.

  For four-and-a-half years Harold would fill all voids for Vita: she accepted what she regarded as irresistible and acquiesced in that cosmic force of nature which was in fact Harold’s love for her and her own craving for contact and companionship. In her autobiography, Vita described Harold in those first years of their marriage as ‘like a sunny harbour’. For the most part, ‘tamed’, her own response was equally sunny.136 Only later did she repent of her description of her fictionalised Harold as ‘her man and her master’: ‘in her awakening womanhood she desired nothing but that she might yield to him the most abased subjection’.137 Neither abasement nor subjection came naturally to Vita. In her novel, she adopted the idiom of contemporary women’s fiction: in practice it conjured up an unlikely guise for a young woman accustomed to independence and, latterly, the corrosive flattery of multiple admirers. Vita’s rebellion was slow at first. In time, like Calladine married to Clare Warrener in Vita’s novel Grey Wethers, Harold would find that ‘he had married an elf and not a woman’, a spirit impossible to confine.138 But that was all to come.

  Vita and Harold arrived in Constantinople after a month. Their journey had taken them first to Florence and afterwards via Cairo, where their host was an uncongenial Lord Kitchener. They travelled with Vita’s maid Emily, who four years previously had made her Chatterton costume, and Harold’s valet, Wilfred Booth, called Wuffy. Vita wrote frequent letters to Rosamund, caught sunstroke, lost her voice; she suspected Emily and Wuffy of an unseemly intimacy. Egyptian sightseeing fell flat (in one of her novels Vita described the Sphinx as ‘a most overrated object’139). The length of their journey bored Harold as well as Vita. Rosamund failed to respond to Vita’s letters and Vita wrote a crabby, one-sided poem called ‘Disillusion’ about replies that never come: ‘I waited, and the counted day/ Fruitlessly came and went.’ Vita struggled with misgivings concerning both the diplomatic life and Constantinople itself (‘beastly’ was her pre-judgement of the latter): only the former proved well founded. For all her reservations, the lure of the exotic East inspired her. Her Uncle Bertie lived in Constantinople, employed by the Ottoman Public Debt Office. Anticipation went some way to salving her homesickness for Knole and her irritation at Rosamund’s unexpected coolness. ‘It is home which drags the heart; it is the spirit which is beckoned by the unknown,’ she wrote. ‘The heart wants to stay in the familiar safety; the spirit, pricking, wants to explore.’140 Her heart for the moment content with Harold, Vita followed the pricking of her spirit.

  From her first ‘rose-shaded’ daybreak, Vita adored Constantinople. ‘She has an early morning of her own,/ A blending of the mist and sea and sun/ Into an indistinguishable one,’ she wrote delightedly.141 She and Harold found a house to rent in Cospoli and servants to staff it (including ‘a beautiful Montenegrin’ as a footman). It provided separate sitting rooms, a drawing room and, in keeping with upper-class practice of the time, separate but adjacent bedrooms. To Rosamund, Vita described the neglected building with its long views as ‘the most attractive house you have ever seen. It is a wooden Turkish house, with a little garden and a pergola of grapes and a pomegranate tree covered with scarlet fruit, and such a view over the Golden Horn and the sea and Santa Sophia! And on the side of a hill, a perfect suntrap!’142 She was apparently unaware that her description of the garden at 22 Dhji-han-Ghir corresponded closely to one of her ‘Italian’ decorative schemes for her room at Knole. ‘Never in our existence/ Had life seemed brighter before!’ Vita exclaimed with unaffected joy in the poem about the house she dedicated to Harold.143 Again and again in the poems she wrote then she returned to the theme: ‘Love hung about the rooms like smoke.’144

  From Knole arrived furniture, paintings, and objects to fill the unfamiliar rooms; there were wedding presents too and in the bazaars Vita and Harold bought Persian pottery, coloured glass and white jade, revelling in their home-making as later they would revel in their joint creation of a garden. Vita’s income of £2,400 a year from her marriage settlement enabled them to live up to ‘an alarming reputation for originality and “art treasures”’, which they found had preceded them.145 Among Victoria’s shipment from England were watercolour views of Vita’s room at Knole. Like time spent in the company of her Uncle Bertie, these souvenirs of the recent past were occasionally counterproductive. Vita’s mood oscillated; she missed Rosamund, Knole; the life that had suited her so well. In a poem of that period, ‘Convalescence’, she wrote: ‘The thought of England, fresh beneath the rain,/ Will rise unbidden as a gentle pain.’ Those were the days when Vita ignored Harold on his return from his work, when ‘you used to go on writing with your pretty little head over your table refusing to turn round’, as Harold reminded her later; when she withdrew from sunny domesticity into her other fiercer world of writing, building her tower around her even at this early stage.146 Those were the days when she set aside her rapturous feelings about Constantinople, Dhji-han-Ghir, even Harold: it was
in such a mood that she wrote ‘Resolution’, about her writer’s vocation and her struggle to bring to fruition her ‘struggling art’: ‘I see the work of others, and my heart/ Sinks as my own achievement I compare.’ For the most part, and for the only time in her married life, Vita accepted diplomatic life with a semblance of good grace, successfully presenting herself, as she remembered with scorn, as ‘the correct and adoring young wife of the brilliant young diplomat’.147

  Her performance of those empty social duties which meant so little to her thrilled her admiring husband. In her own eyes – and to her subsequent surprise – Vita was ‘gentle, self-sacrificing, chaste’;148 Harold called her ‘little spirit of gentleness and love’.149 On the flyleaf of her diary for 1914 she even inscribed the name ‘Vita Nicolson’. Given her attachment to her maiden name and her disdain for Harold’s family, it was a symbolic gesture. Harold’s liveliness and good humour overwhelmed her taciturnity. His example taught Vita how to set aside her priggishness and enjoy simply being young. She described the first years of her marriage as unsurpassed ‘for sheer joy of companionship’.150

  Vita’s poem about the house in Constantinople in which she would live for less than a year focuses on its abandoned garden: ‘For none had cared for its beauty/ Till we came, the strangers.’ She details the fruit trees growing there – pomegranate, quince and fig; the vines; roses, including the scrambling yellow Chinese Rosa banksiae; and the springtime carpet of daffodils and cyclamen naturalised in the grass, like the verdure in a medieval tapestry. Unlike the interiors they created in a spirit of companionable novelty, Vita and Harold did little gardening in Constantinople. Instead they stored up the memory of sun-drenched colour and successful natural pairings: the roses that twined through lilac bushes, the thick mat of cyclamen beneath the fig tree. Fecund, sunny and relaxed, their Turkish garden captured their own fleeting moods. For both of them, gardens would continue to possess this personal note.

  Vita discovered that she was pregnant the week before Christmas. Harold’s pleasure outstripped her own and she asserted her considerable force of will to compel him to silence on the subject outside the family. ‘I belong to the old-fashioned school that thinks a baby should not be mentioned until it is in its cradle,’ she once wrote.151 Together they made plans for their return to England the following summer. The first of Vita’s children, a son, was born at Knole on 6 August 1914. After fierce arguments with Victoria, he was christened ‘Lionel Benedict’. (Vita and Harold had wanted simply Benedict: Lionel was a sot to Victoria. They referred to him as ‘Detto’, an abbreviation of Benedetto, and afterwards as Ben.) Vita was twenty-two and had been married less than a year. Two days previously, Britain had declared war on Germany. Unlike the majority of Vita’s erstwhile suitors, Harold was exempted from fighting, transferred from the Diplomatic Service to the new War Department of the Foreign Office on 1 October. His battles would take a different form.

  PART III

  Invitation to Cast Out Care

  ‘Her face was not beautiful – a red, sulky mouth, rather wide; a short straight nose; dark eyes, and a pale complexion – but with her smooth, rounded grace … and her composure, she would surely draw the eyes of men away from the untidy prettiness of English women.’

  V. Sackville-West, The Death of Noble Godavary, 1932

  ONLY A CATACLYSM could have made Vita forfeit her reputation. When it came, that cataclysm appeared in the familiar guise of Violet Keppel.

  For Vita, though she seldom referred to it, the Scott lawsuit cast a long shadow. Its public parade of family secrets offended not only Edwardian double standards but her own innate Sackville reserve. Under the caption ‘Society folk at the big will case’, one newspaper printed a photograph of a woman arriving at court fashionably dressed and carrying a large cushion. The following week, on 16 July 1913, a painting of Vita in her Portia costume by Frank M. Bennett appeared on the cover of The Bystander. Neither Vita nor her parents enjoyed the experience of providing entertainment for their peers or the newspaper-reading public at large, much less being recipients of their sympathy or objects of speculation: afterwards Vita satirised ‘women all jewelled and scented/ Smiling false smiles with the little sharp word in between’.1 She described gossip as like thorns, ‘as tangled as a blackberry bush, and just about as spiteful’.2 ‘How passionately one minds the meanness of people, how it hurts to find there is no generosity, only suspicion and mistrust,’ she wrote later.3

  It was no ordinary provocation that brought about the change of heart that, in the summer of 1919, led Vita to write to Harold: ‘if you knew how it would amuse me to scandalise the whole of London! It’s so secure, so fatuous, so conventional, so hypocritical, … so cynical, so humbugging, so mean, so ungenerous, so self-defensive, … so well-dressed, so up-to-date, so hierarchical, so virtuously vicious, so viciously virtuous. I’d like to tweak away the chair just as it’s going to sit down.’4 She wrote a poem on the same theme and called it ‘Scorn’. Her rebellion was prompted by ‘madness’ – a combination of overwrought emotions and sexual exhilaration. The cause of both was her childhood friend, Violet Keppel.

  Since their bedside meeting in 1905, Vita had failed to keep faith with Violet. There had been visits to Knole, meetings in London, in Paris and in Florence, play-acting, presents from Violet to Vita. Once, memorably, Vita stayed with Violet at Duntreath Castle near Loch Lomond – home of the Edmonstones, Mrs Keppel’s family. They sat up all night, intoxicated by the thrill of their closeness, as owls hooted from the pepperpot towers and velvet blackness obliterated the nearby hills of Dumfoyne and Dumgoyne. At dawn, peacocks shrieked; from across the castle courtyard a bell tolled. Violet knew then that she was in love with Vita. This impressionable and lonely girl fell victim to her own highly coloured dreams of romance. Her head was turned by Duntreath, which she regarded as worthy of the novels of Walter Scott: its ancient walls exuded historical fantasy; its distinctive scents of gunpowder, cedarwood and tuberoses made her dizzy. For her part, Vita was aware of a sensation in the darkness that troubled her. Violet worried that Vita would suspect her secret: in two years’ time, in October 1910, she told her herself. Written between the lines of that letter was a further confession: that Violet had seen through Vita, understood her posturing, her search for an identity, the emptiness behind the bravado. Vita accepted her tribute as flattery without recognising hidden meanings. So it would remain.

  Violet was infatuated, emotionally precocious, attuned to Vita’s secrets and her fears; Vita was heroic, though less so than she pretended, unaware at first that Violet had glimpsed the Sackville detachment, ‘part morgue, part melancholy’, and determined always to exert control. ‘I love you because you have never yielded in anything; I love you because you never capitulate. I love you for your wonderful intelligence, for your literary aspirations, for your unconscious coquetry. I love you because you have the air of doubting nothing! … I love you, Vita, because I’ve seen your soul,’ Violet wrote.5 It was as Vita would have wished to see herself.

  In the short term, neither Violet’s candour nor her percipience was rewarded. Vita was preoccupied with Rosamund Grosvenor, six years Violet’s senior. They saw one another daily and slept in adjoining rooms. In July 1914, a heavily pregnant Vita wrote to Harold outlining the dispersal of her possessions (mostly jewels, including two tiaras) in the event of her death in childbirth. There were bequests for Harold’s sister Gwen, Dorothy Heneage, Olive Rubens, Lady Connie, her maid Emily and a clutch of Vita’s aunts. The largest gift was for Rosamund: a diamond watch, the diamond hatpin that had been Lord Lascelles’ wedding present, and two of Vita’s rings. As an afterthought, following instructions about her manuscripts and her dog, Vita asked Harold to give Violet ‘my small sapphire and diamond ring’.6 She omitted the Doge’s ring entirely.

  On 13 January 1913, Vita had written to Irene Lawley in Florence, ‘Think of me (and pray for me) on Thursday night. In an attitude of apparent somnolence and unspeakable wellbeing, but a
state of mind of agitation not easily expressed, I shall be lying on a divan surrounded by lovely Houris who all make up to me while I vacillate lazily among their charms.’7 The occasion was a performance in Knole’s Great Hall of ‘a Persian play’, to which Victoria had invited ‘thousands of people’. ‘Here I am living in a litter of addressed envelopes and endless telegrams,’ Vita reported with some exasperation.

  Her own role was that of the Caliph, with blackened face. At the end of the play she died ‘in a realistic wriggle, which usually has something of genuine agony in it, as I have inadvertently fallen on my pipe or a pair of (very sharp, – I answer for that) cymbals’. Lightly she referred to her ‘incense-laden Harem’, which included Rosamund as a dancer called Zuleika, and Violet as a slave girl. Also taking part was the sister of a friend of Harold’s, Muriel Clark-Kerr: she too was in love with Vita. Vita came closer to the truth than she realised in reporting her lazy vacillation between her lovely houris: all three women in their different ways clamoured for her affection.

  From the first awakening of sexual maturity, Vita associated love and sex with choice. ‘Round her revolved several enamoured young men,’ remembered Violet of Vita during the years of Harold’s courtship.8 In Family History, Evelyn Jarrold asks, ‘Doesn’t everyone like to be loved? … One never gets enough love.’9 Vita had seen it in her parents’ lives. She was seven years old when Victoria first discovered a love letter from Lionel to Joan Camden; the same year, Victoria met Seery. A sense of sexual opportunity – and, in time, opportunism – would characterise Vita’s life. At intervals that metaphor of the ‘incense-laden Harem’ proved prophetic but also unhelpful. From Lionel and Victoria, Vita had inherited a vigorous appetite for sex: the harem, like the bordello, is a region of consumption free of emotional entanglements. It offers no training in fidelity; it insists on neither compassion nor consideration.