Behind the Mask Read online

  Unlike Rosamund, Violet had not followed Vita to Constantinople. She had remained with her formidable mother, entered into and broken off a ‘suitable’ engagement to Gerald Wellesley, future Duke of Wellington, and accompanied Mrs Keppel in the lavish entertaining, and equally lavish travel, which were the latter’s preferred means of denying the passing of her Edwardian glory days. There would be other sham flirtations for Violet, including with the homosexual writer Osbert Sitwell. Misleadingly she described her motives in these pretences as ‘compassion, curiosity, boredom, physical attraction’.10 Behind the empty manoeuvres of Violet’s public romantic life lay fear of Mrs Keppel.

  In the summer of 1914, Vita and Harold returned to Britain for Vita’s confinement. They swiftly rowed with Victoria. Taking baby Ben and his nursemaid with them, they moved to a rented house in London, at 182 Ebury Street; among their neighbours was the Irish novelist and poet George Moore. The following spring they bought a house in the country. Long Barn was an amalgam of fourteenth-, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century elements, reputedly the birthplace of William Caxton and lately restored by the wife of a local vicar: it cost Vita £3,000. Thereafter they spent winters in London, summer in the country. Meanwhile, Vita wrote. Long Barn was two miles from Knole, in the village of Sevenoaks Weald, which contained a number of estate cottages. Vita walked regularly between the two houses; among the recommendations of ‘untidy and tinkly’ Long Barn was Vita’s sense of it as home from home.

  Victoria suffered a nervous breakdown in September 1914. The suicide of her brother Henry in Paris, Lionel’s call-up with the West Kent Yeomanry following the outbreak of war, and Harold’s choice of the latter’s mistress Olive Rubens as godmother to baby Benedict all contributed to her unhappiness. In her diary, Victoria admitted to ‘feeling depressed enough to take my own life’;11 there were no further diary entries for ten months. Following her recovery in July 1915, her relations with Vita regained a semblance of normality. That equilibrium proved precarious, and Vita’s eventual fictional portrait of her mother revealed the depth of her ambivalence: ‘This old woman, beautiful and wicked and good, with a power of charm beyond reason, holds more danger and wickedness, beauty and goodness and wisdom in her than anyone I have ever met.’12 In November, Vita gave birth to a stillborn son. ‘It clouds everything,’ she wrote, ‘and I can’t be happy.’13 The agony of her grief made her dread being alone and she virtually stopped writing. In time, angrily, she would place that sorrow within a larger context of women’s lives: it rooted her, she saw, in ‘that anonymous crowd … of the women with the wasted lives, … women who had lost children or lovers, … women who had borne the long, mute burden of uncertainty’.14

  In February 1916, Victoria loaned Vita the purchase price of the Ebury Street house. Vita’s diary records the progress of her home-making with Harold: a ‘jolly dessert service’ bought on 6 January; a full-scale rearrangement of the entire house undertaken by the two of them on 7 February: ‘Get dirty, tired, and rather cross; but quite successful on the whole.’15 The birth of their second son, Nigel, on 19 January 1917, went some way to easing memories of Vita’s stillborn child.

  For her birthday in 1916, Harold presented Vita with a field at Long Barn; in the summer, at a cost of £700, Victoria purchased neighbouring Brook Farm. It increased the space around the house and guaranteed the Nicolsons a degree of privacy. It also went some way towards satisfying Vita’s need, which she considered a birthright, for land ownership. With little prior knowledge, Vita began gardening. Later she commented that she ‘took to gardening quite late in life: I must have been at least twenty-two’.16 Previously she had grown handfuls of vegetables for her grandfather at Knole. She ordered pink and white thorn bushes for hedging, emulating a mix she had admired in Constantinople, and her first climbing roses, ‘American Pillar’ and ‘La Guirlande’; both reminded her of the flower-laden tresses of Rosa banksiae in the garden at Dhji-han-Ghir.17 Armed with catalogues from nurserymen and seed merchants, her first essays in gardening were predictable, straightforward: ‘We planted rose and daffodil,/ … We planted yellow hollyhocks/ And humble sweetly-smelling stocks/ … We planted wallflowers in a row.’18 She employed two gardeners; Victoria paid for one of them and also introduced Vita to Gertrude Jekyll. Miss Jekyll’s example spurred Vita on to further rose plantings: to climbers ‘American Pillar’ and ‘La Guirlande’ were added ‘Albéric Barbier’, ‘W. A. Richardson’ and ‘Gloire de Dijon’, a handsome livery of creamy yellow and buff for Long Barn’s crooked walls.19 The old noisette climber ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’ would eventually entirely embower Vita’s bedroom windows. In addition, Victoria gave Vita and Harold a Rolls-Royce.

  Harold referred to Long Barn as ‘our little mud pie’; he and Vita called it ‘the cottage’. On Vita’s instructions, Bentleys builders, of Tubs Hill, Sevenoaks, moved a sixteenth-century barn from Brook Farm and reassembled it at right angles to Long Barn to provide a fifty-foot-long drawing room, with bedrooms above. The Nicolsons called it the Big Room. Their extended cottage included seven bedrooms and four bathrooms, with separate sitting rooms for Vita and Harold, as well as Harold’s small study. Vita’s sitting room also served as her writing room. Placed centrally was the Italian desk that had been a twenty-first birthday present from Victoria. Windows on two sides of the room provided light and a view. Three indoor servants were employed. Virginia Woolf, visiting in 1927, noted an impression she characterised as predictably opulent: ‘butler, silver, dogs, biscuits, wine, hot water, log fires, Italian cabinets, Persian rugs, books … all the inherited tradition of furnishing, so that [the] house is gracious, glowing, stately, but without novelty or adventure’.20 Woolf overlooked the idiosyncratic element. Throughout Long Barn, floors sloped, oak beams extended at irregular angles, walls perceptibly tilted. It was recognisably the same house Vita described in her novel, Heritage, which she completed in first draft in November 1917: ‘The eaves were wide, and in them the martins nested year after year; the steep-tiled roofs, red-brown with age, and gold-spattered stonecrops, rose sharply up to the chimneystacks … the furniture was propped up by blocks of wood on the south side, and I learnt not to drop round objects on to my floor, knowing that if I did so they would speedily roll out of reach.’21 Vita explained current trends in interiors to readers of Vogue: ‘Everything that is fusty or fussy we eliminate; we like hard surfaces and absence of ornament; we prefer hard stones to sculptured wood, marble to plush, Empire to Rococo, severity to comfort.’22 In her own rooms she ignored changing fashions: she recreated as if unconsciously her memories of Knole. Typically it was a vision of Knole that excluded ‘the rooms that our parents thought beautiful … those crowded rooms full of footstools and knick-knacks’.

  In October 1917, Vita’s first collection of poetry was published. Poems of West and East contains twenty-one poems, eight of which had previously been privately printed at Vita’s expense in 1915. For the only time in her career, Vita appeared on the title page as ‘V. Sackville-West (The Hon. Mrs. Harold Nicolson)’. The Morning Post and the Observer printed favourable reviews. After her passionate apprenticeship, Vita was excited at first publication. She wrote a poem, ‘On seeing my first proof sheets’.

  Despite intermittent tensions in her relationship with Victoria, and the trauma of her stillborn child, the first four-and-a-half years of Vita’s marriage represented a period of contentment. For Vita, raised on stories of cavalier romance and the novelettish affair of Lord Sackville and Pepita, it came as a surprise. ‘How undull love can be, even though it is married and has a little boy, two little boys, of its own,’ she assured Harold.23 Replete with happiness, she anticipated it lasting for ever: ‘Let us to the road/ Which hides enchantment round each hidden bend,/ Our course uncompassed and our whim its end,’ she wrote in Poems of West and East.24 To her diary, on 31 May 1915, she exclaimed: ‘I thank God that I have known absolute happiness.’ Afterwards she concluded, ‘I should think it was hardly possible for two people to be more comple
tely and unquestioningly happy’ than she and Harold during this prolonged honeymoon period.25 She was sincere. She told Harold that he was ‘the only thing that counts in the world. You are the vessel which contains the wine of life.’26

  The war alone clouded the horizon. Harold’s working hours lengthened; in the autumn of 1915 Lionel departed for Gallipoli, Palestine and France. Deprived of footmen, gardeners and carpenters, Knole was partly shut up; the newspapers carried their roll call of lost friends (‘it required superhuman courage to open a newspaper,’ Violet remembered27). Vita wrote a war poem, ‘A Fallen Youth’, which was printed in the Observer. In keeping with other poetry of the first years of the war, it emphasised heroism and the cheerfulness of noble sacrifice: ‘laughing went he, till on that last day/ The hands stretched out to life were clasped by death’.28 In fact, the war scarcely impacted on Vita. ‘Noise of the Flanders guns quite distinct,’ she reported on 1 July 1916 from Long Barn; on the day John Lane published Poems of West and East, Vita’s diary noted without comment: ‘Ebury Street nearly bombed, two bombs fifty yards off. Raid expected in the morning but they are turned back.’29 Early in 1916, Vita had spent mornings working in an ‘office for [the] wounded and missing’. She did not stick at it; instead she preferred to write.

  In London she took part in a number of wartime charitable entertainments of the Masque of Shakespeare variety. In June 1916, she appeared alongside Olive Rubens in one of the Omar Khayyam tableaux organised by Viscountess Massereene at a private house in Arlington Street. Sumptuously dressed in a turban and patterned silks, she carried a shield and an unconvincing bow and looked studiedly unmoved. The following year she appeared in a charity matinée at the Lyric Theatre in aid of the Concerts at the Front Fund. The programme included a ballet inspired by Swinburne, the decadent Victorian poet whose biography Harold would write in 1926. Vita appeared statuesque and anything but decadent. In fact Swinburne’s luscious romanticism suited her mood: ‘All I can give you I give./ Heart of my heart, were it more,/ More would be laid at your feet –’30 Two summers later, Violet quoted Swinburne to Vita in an attempt to bind the two women more closely together.

  At home Vita recorded Ben’s progress: height, vocabulary, his fondness for stories and picture books over toys. She decided that he was ‘independent, undemonstrative, obstinate’.31 Surprisingly, given her preoccupation with heredity, she made no comment on the origin of those traits. On the last day of 1916, she reported with wry humour: ‘Ben says practically anything he wants to now, though not very distinctly; he also recites “Little Bo-peep”, “Pat a cake” etc., not at all distinctly and leaving out all the smaller words.’32 For all her fondness, Vita brought a degree of detachment to motherhood. She described children as ‘quarrelsome, competitive, envious, cruel, herd-primitive and generally uncivilised’;33 ‘domesticity destroyed you in the end’, she wrote in an unpublished poem about a friend whose enthusiasm for motherhood she considered excessive.34 Following an operation on 12 April 1916, the twenty-month-old Ben was sent to Eastbourne to recuperate. He and Vita were not reunited until 17 July. In the intervening fourteen weeks, Vita visited her son three times. It was Harold who spoiled the boys. On 5 February 1917, he bought Ben ‘a gramophone which he adores’.35 In a discussion about women’s careers in the context of marriage, Vita subsequently denied ‘most emphatically’ that the loss of a woman’s career could be balanced by ‘the joys of motherhood’.

  ‘Love was all that ever grew,’ Vita had written in her short poem, ‘The Garden’, in the summer of 1915. In her own way she embraced domesticity; she gardened and she wrote. Together she and Harold decided that, in decorating, ‘flowers, chintz and Jacobean furniture were the happiest companions’.36 Harold’s interest was greater than Vita’s. Vita paid more attention to what lay outside the house, setting the pattern for the future. For Christmas 1916, Vita and Harold gave one another a fishpond; Vita reported Ben’s delight. She began, but did not always finish, a number of plays, including On the Road, an episode, set two days after the destruction of Pompeii and, on and off throughout 1916 and 1917, worked at her monumental history of the Italian States from 1300 to 1500. It was, she remembered, ‘full of murderous and probably inaccurate detail’. It was an undertaking born of love rather than inspiration or particular insight: an escapist venture. Of the relationship between Umbria and Rome, for example, Vita noted: ‘The nearness of Rome affects the politics of the province much as her nearness as the centre of Christianity would seem to cast the rays of religion into the narrow streets of Umbrian towns.’37 Later she attributed her enjoyment of the abandoned project ‘to the amount of research it involved, for I had not yet shed the priggishness and pedantry of my schooldays’.38 Having set aside her thousand-page-long uncompleted manuscript, Vita transferred her priggish, pedantic instinct to her commonplace book: she collected extracts from the works of authors including Chaucer, Dr Johnson, Balzac and Keats. Also included was Lionel Johnson, the Victorian poet who died of a stroke at the age of thirty-five: Johnson’s battle against his homosexuality had turned him into an alcoholic.

  Vita embarked on a new novel. ‘I was then twenty-five and old enough to know better, but prose was still only a contemptible stopgap for the days on which I couldn’t write poetry.’39 After a lengthy rewrite on the advice of George Moore, that novel, Heritage, became Vita’s first published work of fiction. It is notable among her novels for its use of a female rather than a male alter ego as the principal means of resolving aspects of her own character, in this case her perceived divide between Pepita’s unruly legacy and that of the Sackvilles: ‘the separate, antagonistic strains in her blood, the southern and the northern legacy’.40 By the time the novel was published, in May 1919, not only Vita but Harold and indeed Violet thought they knew the answer to this divide.

  Motherhood, the war and Harold’s work did not interfere unduly with the couple’s social life, which retained the exclusive quality of pre-war socialising. In July 1916, Vita won £12 playing poker in Lord Ribblesdale’s rooms at The Ritz; lunch guests at Ebury Street in February 1917 included Winston Churchill, a long-term favourite acquaintance, and Osbert Sitwell. Contemptuously Vita described herself and Harold at that point as ‘a nice young couple to ask out to dinner’; Harold was reliably good-humoured and an accomplished raconteur.41 Contentment made Vita relaxed and unaffected, and tempered her priggishness: afterwards she reflected that this was ‘the only period of my life that I achieved anything like popularity’.42 She labelled it a halcyon interlude. In January 1918, she wrote a poem describing a typical Long Barn day. ‘One Day’ is a study in contentment: a morning walk across the Weald, followed by gardening; a meal of eggs, bread, meat, an apple; poetry to read. ‘Joy have I had of life this vigorous day/ … Freedom I drank for my delirious wine,/ … What more could heart desire?’43 Looking back with new eyes in the aftermath of her affair with Violet, she seemed to see herself as a person sleepwalking, half awake, half fulfilled; she regretted the predictably ‘Edwardian’ aspect of their social lives. For one of Vita’s hungry and assertive appetites, such somnambulism could not satisfy indefinitely.

  ‘At her own sarcastic request’, Violet stood as godmother to Ben. Among fellow godparents was Vita’s own godfather Kenneth Campbell, who had first tried to rape her and then suggested marriage. Little wonder the experience of Ben’s christening, orchestrated by Victoria, was one of such acrimony that Harold told Vita they had no choice but to take measures against her mother’s ‘destructive personality’, ‘her vain empty insincere nature’.44 Victoria’s was not the sort of character measures could be taken against and neither Harold nor Vita successfully resolved her role in their lives; eventually Harold dismissed her as ‘not mad … just evil’.45

  Violet did not interest herself unduly in Ben’s infancy. She described Long Barn as ‘a Tudor cottage in Kent, very pretty in its way, but too self-consciously picturesque for my taste. Life in a Tudor cottage is like living under the furniture instead of above
it.’46 That tone of acerbic superiority was her defence against Vita’s domestic bliss; behind it lay bitterness and furious jealousy. As the war continued, Violet accompanied Vita to an occasional exhibition or to a matinée but did not renew her assertions of love. In late September 1917, she made a week-long visit to Long Barn before Harold and Vita’s return to London for the autumn; she visited again the following April. Her contempt for Vita’s married life grew with the degree of her exposure. She lampooned the narrowness of their interests, the predictability of their conversation: ‘At dinner, you will have the eternal furniture-decoration conversation, interlarded with scraps of Roman reminiscences, and conjugal badinage,’ she snapped in a letter to Vita.47

  Vita had not forsworn what Violet described as ‘the rackety element’ of herself. Happiness simply imposed a check on her ‘duality’, subduing a part of her nature. In time she came to see her life with Harold – ‘two little boys; a cottage; money; flowers; a farm; three cows’48 – as ‘only one side of the medal’.49

  Intimations of the Vita who had played at being Sir Redvers Buller, Cranfield Sackville, the Man in the Iron Mask and Chatterton, persisted, albeit confined to her imagination and, very occasionally, her writing. Her only visible outlet was the play-acting of the charitable tableaux, and that was of an exceedingly tame variety. Nevertheless, in a poem called ‘Nomads’, included in Poems of West and East, Vita had written: ‘with narrow bonds and limits never could we be content,/ For we have abolished boundaries, straitened borders have we rent,/ A house no more confines us than the roving nomad’s tent.’ This was the voice of that Vita with whom Violet had fallen in love when she was ten years old, but who, in Vita’s explanation, ‘had always repulsed her (when things seemed to be going too far), out of a sort of fear’:50 here was the refusal to yield, the failure to capitulate, ‘the air of doubting nothing’. Harold might dismiss this tendency, part gypsy and part aggressor, as ‘your bloody Sackville looniness’:51 he must have known that Vita would discard no part of herself that was recognisably ‘Sackville’. Even as she cherished the rich tranquillity of her emotional life with Harold, she was exploring in her writing something quite different. In Heritage, Vita described the relationship of Rawdon Westmacott and Ruth Pennistan as ‘not merely an idle, rural or cousinly flirtation. The man’s blood was crazy for her.’52