Behind the Mask
Page 22
Up to a point, Vita recognised her careful illusion for what it was. She also came to see that the Knole she had lost was in the process of being lost in another sense; that knowledge was anything but a comfort. On 30 May 1929, she recorded in her diary a trip to London with Eddy. He told her about the imminent sale of Hoppner’s portrait of the three children of the 3rd Duke of Dorset to Thomas Lamont of New York for £65,000. There would be other sales and other losses, including the Flemish tapestries depicting scenes of the Passion of Christ from Knole’s Chapel. Hoppner’s portrait had inspired page and bridesmaid costumes for Vita’s wedding: it was among her favourite of the Knole paintings. The tapestries had served as the backcloth to her marriage to Harold on a bright October afternoon two decades earlier. It was as if Vita’s memories were being dismantled, the stage-set of her life plundered and dispersed. For all its criticism of turn-of-the-century moral vacuity, The Edwardians celebrates an unpillaged Knole, an idyllic vision unsullied by rich New Yorkers or the outstretched arms of American museums (on 3 October 1929 the tapestries entered the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston).
In the mud of Sissinghurst, in a tract of Wealden Kent unspoiled by ‘too many people … too much industrialism’, Vita found a new focus for her romanticism. For her, Sissinghurst was indeed ‘the Sleeping Beauty’s castle with a vengeance’: she hoped it would never awaken to the full horror of the present, and its attraction lay in its ability to transport her into its timeless dream world. It became the tower she had told Victoria she longed for, somewhere to be alone with her books; like St Barbara’s tower, it became her sanctuary. Sissinghurst was a refuge from a world in which even Knole was vulnerable, a world of chicken farms and invasive new developments, a surrogate but not a replacement for the home of which she claimed as late as 1943 to be ‘too greatly moved by the merest thought of it to write or think of it with … objectivity’.11 It was an appropriate setting for an existence Vita repeatedly rationalised through her own private myth-making and fables. As Vita would later describe gardening in wartime, her engagement with Sissinghurst was an exercise in ‘daring to find a world in a lost world,/ A little world, a little perfect world’.12 Vita’s tower acquired the status of metaphor made reality. In a review of her Collected Poems, published by Leonard and Virginia in 1933, the New Statesman described Vita’s poetry as ‘a frontier tower on the border of a land that we are leaving behind. That land is the England which is vanishing; the England of a ripe and comely rural civilisation.’ Vita’s agreement was unqualified; in her tower she would hold on to her own (part-fictionalised) version of vanishing England.
Vita acted quickly. The next day, 5 April, she took Harold and Ben to inspect; two days later, she and Harold returned alone. Externally there was no garden, nothing but an old quince tree with ‘flat, pink-white blossoms’ and a ‘shrubby, woody old rose’.13 They discovered a nutwalk and Harold’s enthusiasm grew. The buildings which became the Nicolsons’ house were ruins. Euphemistically the sales particulars described them as ‘picturesque’: at first sight Harold labelled them ‘big, broken down and sodden’. The only liveable space on offer was mid-Victorian: Castle Farmhouse, with ten bedrooms, ‘well-matured grounds with lawn and rhododendrons’, walls ‘well-clothed with choice creepers’ and views of ‘the Towers of Sissinghurst Castle in the background’.14 It never crossed Vita’s mind to live there. Castle Farmhouse was ‘that horrid farmhouse’ in which she refused to sleep even during Sissinghurst’s restoration.15 For Vita the background became the foreground.
Primitive and derelict, the castle itself – last remnants of a large Tudor house built around a courtyard – had most recently offered patchy shelter to families of farm labourers. Vita’s assessment did not spare their feelings. ‘The slum-like effect produced by both man and Nature, was squalid to a degree. There was nothing but a dreadful mess of old chicken houses and wire chicken runs; broken down … fences; rubbish dumps where cottagers had piled their tins, their bottles, their rusty ironmongery and their broken crockery for perhaps half a century; old cabbage stalks; and a tangle of weeds everywhere.’16 The central gateway and the tower which today symbolise Sissinghurst were described by the agents as in passable repair;17 photographs show broken windows on the first floor of the tower but little other evidence of decay. Referring to this assortment of mismatched, apparently purposeless, structures, the surveyor instructed by Meynell & Pemberton, the Sackville solicitors, stated: ‘I understand that Mrs Nicolson proposes to occupy [these].’18 The dominant note was one of astonishment. Unlike Vita, the surveyor did not see the resemblance to Knole, with its courtyards, arches and towers, its leisurely unfolding of views, its promise of enclosure, of gates barred against the world; did not see, as Virginia and Leonard used to say to Vita, that she was ‘only really comfortable in a castle’.19
Vita and Harold spent most of April debating their purchase. Although Vita’s decision was instinctive, Harold vacillated. The shocked reaction of his mother, visiting in a downpour, proved a setback. Subsequently other early visitors would echo Lady Carnock’s reservations. Harold’s lover Raymond Mortimer remembered thinking Sissinghurst ‘a gloomy place in hideous flat country, with commonplace cottages and no view, [we] couldn’t think why they wanted it’; Virginia Woolf described ‘Vita’s tower; lovely pink brick; but like Knole, not much view, save of stables’.20 For Vita, by contrast, acquisition was reflexive. It was Harold who rationalised the arguments for and against. Amid the rusting bedsteads and broken tools, the chicken wire, barbed wire and discarded fencing, the brambles, bindweed, bulrushes, couch grass and ground elder, Vita had glimpsed at once the vision of benign collapse in which creeping ivy bound together a tottering structure of chipped brick and crumbling casements, which she celebrated in her poem ‘Sissinghurst’, written that year: ‘Invading nature crawls/ With ivied fingers over rosy walls,/ Searching the crevices,/ Clasping the mullion, riveting the crack …’21
Vita felt something else besides: the tug of atavistic possessiveness. It was a pull like that she attributed to Peregrine Chase in The Heir, the novella she had written almost a decade ago. After spending his whole life in Wolverhampton, Chase finds that he rapidly becomes enmeshed in the house in the country which he has inherited from his last surviving aunt. In Vita’s romantic narrative, contrary to expectation, including his own expectation, Chase resists every (sensible) pressure to sell: he is motivated not by greed, acquisitiveness or snobbery, but drawn by ‘laws [that] were unalterable’ into ‘a rhythm that no flurry could disturb’,22 the unchanging rhythm of inheritance and single-family ownership. Chase has no choice but to remain at Blackboys: it is an act of fidelity and family piety occasioned by visceral promptings. Vita disguised her own greedy longing for all that she had decided Sissinghurst represented as similarly beyond her control. She was delighted when, on 6 May, her offer of £12,375 was accepted by telephone. At Victoria’s request the trustees were persuaded to advance £13,000 for the purchase. Victoria’s compliance was a sign of mother and daughter’s temporary amity.
For in Vita’s eyes Sissinghurst was a Sackville house. She and Harold discovered that the entrance arch was the work of Sir John Baker, purchaser of the site in 1533; the tower was a later addition by his more extravagant son, Sir Richard Baker. In 1554, John Baker’s daughter Cecily married Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset: their marriage forged a link between Sissinghurst and Knole. The Bakers went on to entertain both Mary I and her sister Elizabeth I at Sissinghurst. Knole too boasted Tudor royal connections. Lord Dorset was among Vita’s most distinguished ancestors, appointed by Elizabeth I High Steward and Lord High Treasurer of England; Vita described him as a ‘grave and solemn personage’.23 He was also the author, with Thomas Norton, of Gorboduc, a play of 1561 regarded as the first English drama written in blank verse. A political piece, it is concerned, like much of Vita’s writing, with questions of inheritance and female vigour: ‘Gorboduc, King of Britain, divided his realm in his lifetime to his sons, F
errex and Porrex. The sons fell to division and dissension. The younger killed the elder. The Mother that more dearly loved the elder, for revenge killed the younger.’
Sissinghurst’s connection to Dorset and the Sackvilles through Cecily Baker enabled Harold to legitimise Vita’s decision to buy the house that, he recognised from the outset, would prove a costly and impractical drain on their resources; he estimated restoration costs at £15,000 on top of the purchase price. ‘It is most wise of us to buy Sissinghurst,’ he wrote to Vita on 24 April, after presenting all the arguments against its purchase (mostly financial or relating to the absence of amenities like hot water: in fact Sissinghurst in 1930 lacked mains drainage). ‘Through its veins pulses the blood of the Sackville dynasty. True it is that it comes through the female line – but then we are both feminist, and after all Knole came in the same way. It is, for you, an ancestral mansion.’24 In April 1930, Vita’s concurrence was wholehearted. Sissinghurst, she remembered, ‘caught instantly at my heart and my imagination’;25 it acquired a magic quality too, ‘the ivory tower/ Like a tall lily in the moonlight risen’.26 Her fervour for the house included a measure of need: here at last was her distraction from her severance from Knole. That she could trace a line of descent from the house to herself and therefore claim it as a Sackville legacy, hers ‘by birthright far from present fashion’, made good the illusion.27
For Vita as well as for Harold, Sissinghurst would become the joint venture of their lives. Its garden gave both immeasurable pleasure at the same time as providing an ideal arena for their distinct but complementary talents: Vita as plantsman, Harold as designer. Vita’s earliest motives, even if she did not pause to analyse them, were personal expediency. As in all things, her craving for ‘an ancestral mansion’ took no account of the Nicolson side of her marriage. Flanking the restored entrance arch she would display two coats of arms, those of the Sackville-Wests and the Bakers; Nigel Nicolson later described wheelbarrows, tools and farm equipment as ‘indelibly’ stamped with her own initials ‘V.S-W’. In all aspects of her life, Vita enjoyed possession, an affirmation of herself in the inarguability of ownership or the unquestioning loyalty of friends and lovers. To have enfranchised Harold’s family, however symbolically, and shared her possession, would have destroyed the version of Sissinghurst Vita first created for herself.
Harold is similarly absent from Vita’s poem about the house, in which she imagines it as a secret place lost in time, ‘where stirs no wind and penetrates no sound’; she dedicated the poem to Virginia. At times that comprehensive exclusion would extend to Harold in reality as well as in verse. If Vita’s writing was autobiographical, it was also frequently egotistical. As in her writing, so in her outlook. It was part of the cruel side of her nature inherited from Victoria, the side that loved dominance. Later, similar feelings found an echo in her portrait of Louis XIV’s cousin, Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, ‘La Grande Mademoiselle’, the subject of Vita’s last biography. ‘There was a touch of the bully in her, perhaps especially provoked when her feudal feeling for her provincial properties was involved.’28 In Vita’s case it was unwitting, but nevertheless thoughtless.
At Long Barn, Vita and Harold had perfected first essays in fragmented family living: separate bedrooms, separate sitting rooms, separate studies or working rooms, a large, family drawing room and the shared space of the garden, with its tennis court and the swimming pool that Harold made out of a pond. The house was shaped by the same ideas that governed Vita and Harold’s marriage, as described in Vita’s last novel, No Signposts in the Sea: ‘Mutual respect. Independence … both as regards friends and movement. Separate bedrooms – no bedroom squalor … Separate sitting rooms if the house is large enough. Separate finances.’29 Ben and Nigel had slept in a separate cottage a hundred yards from the main house, the cottage later borrowed by the Campbells: as young children, they joined their parents at six o’clock each evening in the company of their nanny or governess.
Sissinghurst would enforce a further degree of separation. Having discarded Castle Farmhouse, Vita and Harold found that they had bought nothing resembling a conventional house – as Nigel had said to Vita on 4 April 1930: ‘There’s nowhere to live.’30 Instead there were two small cottages: the Priest’s House, once the Elizabethan garden banqueting house, and the South Cottage; the entrance range, in which, within the Tudor stables, they eventually recreated Long Barn’s Big Room in the form of the Library; and the tower, which became for Vita a domain-within-a-domain, her own private sanctuary, mostly, but not exclusively, barred to other people.
That Vita and Harold ever considered this curious agglomeration of unrelated living spaces as a home indicates a sea change in their approach to their own lives. As an adult Nigel Nicolson remembered Vita quoting from Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet: ‘Let there be spaces in your togetherness. Love one another, but make not a bond of love …’31 That philosophy would be fully realised at Sissinghurst. The arrangement Vita and Harold devised mirrored that of Long Barn in its ‘separations’, the ‘spaces in its togetherness’. So, too, in its staffing levels of two gardeners (three from 1937), a chauffeur, a cook, Vita’s lady’s maid Louise Genoux, under-servants and secretaries for both Vita and Harold; the longest-serving of Vita’s secretaries, Miss Macmillan, known as Mac, stayed for twenty years, including a period in 1938 as Vita’s lover.32 Only one important detail differed: there was no guest room at Sissinghurst. Vita’s desire to escape ‘noisy urgencies’ prevailed. In her diary Virginia reported Vita telling her, on 26 March 1931: ‘We want to turn those stables into guest bedrooms: & build a library across the courtyard’.33 In the event only the library was built, in 1935. The South Cottage would provide space for Vita and Harold’s bedrooms and Harold’s study; in the Priest’s House were separate sitting rooms for Ben and Nigel and a shared bedroom, a kitchen and the family dining room; Vita’s sitting room was in the tower, and the entrance range, in addition to the Library, accommodated Mrs Staples the cook and her family, and the family of Jack Copper, the chauffeur-handyman. And that was that. None of the buildings was connected: progress to and from meals, to and from bedroom, sitting room and dining room, was entirely at the mercy of the weather.
Vita and Harold had entertained extensively at Long Barn. After the weekend parties, the lunch and dinner parties, the stream of houseguests and Vita’s perpetuation in miniature of the Edwardian entertaining of Victoria’s Knole, Sissinghurst would embrace a different Knole. It was here, over the next thirty years, that Vita realised that fantasy of her father’s house she had described to Harold as long ago as 1912. ‘I am all alone here for the moment, and all this big house is mine to shut up if I choose, and shut out all the rest of the world by swinging the iron bars across all the gates. But instead of doing that I have locked all the doors of my own tower, and nobody will come near me till tomorrow morning, or even know whether I am still alive … And I think I have gone back five hundred years.’34 There would be lunch guests at Sissinghurst, guests who came for tea and garden visitors, including, after its first official opening through the National Gardens Scheme on 1 May 1938, paying members of the public, Vita’s ‘shillingses’ – ‘the people I most gladly welcome and salute’.35 Invitations to stay, which required Ben and Nigel’s absence, were altogether rarer. Sissinghurst became the symbol of Vita’s gradual withdrawal from the world.
It became the house in which Vita was able at last to ‘lose myself within a slumber/ Submerged’: dream made reality.36 It was a feature of the place she recognised from her first visits. Once, she had retreated into the past in her novels and plays. Within the coloured covers of Murray’s exercise books, she had imagined herself among vanished heroes, including members of her own family. On 20 June 1911, she had posed for the photographic company Speaight Ltd, dressed in a hybrid version of cavalier costume: gauntlets, an extravagant sash, puff sleeves slashed and laced. There had been tableaux, masques, the Persian play in Knole’s Great Hall, Shakespeare in the rain; Orlando
gave Vita the possibility of vicarious time travel at will. At Sissinghurst, Vita confined conscious historical role play to her biographies of Joan of Arc, St Teresa, Saint Thérèse, ‘La Grande Mademoiselle’. Given the objectivity required of nonfiction writing, her submersion was necessarily lesser. Instead, she contrived an illusion of past and present merging that she interpreted as intrinsic to the atmosphere of Sissinghurst. It resembled the feeling she had experienced at Knole as a child, alone by candlelight amid the long shadows and dusty glitter of galleries and state rooms. Vita considered Sissinghurst’s Tudor buildings timeless – as emblematic as Knole itself or the Avebury stones which dominate the physical and mental landscape of her novel, Grey Wethers. ‘The heavy golden sunshine enriched the old brick with a kind of patina, and made the tower cast a long shadow across the grass, like the finger of a gigantic sundial veering slowly with the sun,’ she wrote in the first novel she completed in her tower room.37 Like Knole, Sissinghurst existed for Vita as a physical presence, a force and powerful too.
In the decoration of the Library, as in Long Barn’s Big Room, Vita returned to the dark wood and Jacobean dash of the home of her childhood. With its Sackville portraits, candle sconces and seventeenth-century chairs of blackened cane and needlepoint, with its farm, its tenants, its ancient brewhouse and woodland Wealden setting, Sissinghurst became Vita’s new inheritance. It belonged to her alone: Harold never legally shared its ownership. On the cusp of her fortieth birthday, established in her tower like a spider at the centre of a web, Vita would exchange some of Orlando’s amorous skittishness for a role closer to that of Lady Anne Clifford, landowner and matriarch. As Virginia Woolf had noted, Vita was an astute and competent businesswoman; there were limits to her romantic spirit.