Behind the Mask Read online

  Tartly, Violet wrote to Vita within weeks of publication of Poems of West and East, ‘I simply can’t get on without a periodical glimpse of radiant domesticity.’ With greater sincerity she added: ‘We are absolutely essential to one another, at least in my eyes!’53 It was a statement of that obsessive single-mindedness which had characterised Violet’s thinking about Vita for the better part of a decade. As it happened, and quite by chance, Violet’s timing was fateful.

  Vita’s diary notes the Nicolsons’ departure for Knebworth in Hertfordshire, home of Lord Lytton, parliamentary secretary to the Admiralty, on 28 October 1917. It records too a post-dinner session of planchette, the wooden board on castors used for automatic writing and in séances. Vita made no note of the ‘messages’ received during that planchette session: they would, anyway, have paled beside Harold’s revelations in the aftermath of the weekend’s party.

  On 6 November, Harold told Vita that, during their stay at Knebworth, he had contracted a venereal infection. That admission inevitably involved further disclosures. It was, potentially, a watershed moment. Harold was upset and afraid. He struggled to convince Vita of the unimportance to their marriage of his homosexuality. The next day Vita set off for Oxford and the home of a married friend, Irene Pirie. In the space of twenty-four hours, three letters from Harold pursued her: ‘Let’s face it together and bravely,’ he begged her.54 Vita was the braver of the two. She responded to Harold’s pleading with a reassuring telegram. Relieved, Harold acclaimed her as his ‘saint’, his ‘true angel’.55 Vita confined her real response to her novel. In Heritage, Mrs Pennistan offers: ‘It’s hard, isn’t it, to see into people’s hearts, even when you live in the same house with them?’56 For the moment that thought applied in equal measure to Vita and to Harold.

  Vita herself had not been infected by the disease, which Harold had caught from a fellow guest or a Knebworth servant. Nor, in the short term, did the disease or Harold’s revelations significantly estrange husband and wife. Within less than a fortnight Vita’s diary includes a vignette of companionable domesticity incompatible with marital breakdown: ‘Read “Heritage” right through with Hadji [Harold]; so happy.’57 Harold’s doctor ordered a six-month hiatus in their sex lives, to which Vita appears to have agreed without remonstrating; Harold was the more regretful of the two. Yet the cessation of that six-month term would not be marked by a return to conjugal felicity. Instead, two days before the date earmarked by Harold’s doctor for the all-clear, Vita embarked on the most passionate sexual encounter of her life.

  It would last, on and off, for three years. At the height of his disillusionment and unhappiness, Harold described it as a ‘scarlet adventure’; at other moments, he attributed it more flaccidly to liver. Vita was at first clear about her motives, if disingenuous. ‘You are wrong. I don’t want that sort of adventure, having you,’ she wrote; ‘It is real Wanderlust I have – the longing for new places, for movement, for places where no one will want me to order lunch, or pay housebooks.’58 Four years into her marriage, the girl who had struggled so hard to demonstrate her boyish qualities had rebelled against the minutiae of a woman’s life. It was not, of course, the whole story.

  Vita’s affair with Violet Keppel has been recounted before. As Vita’s mother noted, it contains all the elements of a sensational novel. It contains, as well, the temporary realisation of aspects of Vita’s character and her particular brand of boldly coloured storytelling, which had been present since childhood: cross-dressing, a swaggering male alter ego, foreign travel and exotic escapism, emotional heroics (not to mention histrionics), jewels pawned, reputations tarnished – and all for love.

  The truth, though every bit as melodramatic, is also darker. Prevented at this stage from satisfying powerful homosexual urges within any visible relationship – a conflict she later resolved by conducting discreet lesbian affairs behind the shield of her marriage to Harold – Vita indulged in emotional role play. It resembled a form of short-term schizophrenia and was sometimes conscious, at others not. She ceased to be the ‘gentle’ Vita of the early-married days in Constantinople and became instead someone more brutal, whom she and Violet christened ‘Mitya’ or ‘Julian’. Her sense of herself as possessing a ‘dual’ nature – the English half continent, married and decorous; the Spanish half passionate, homosexual and reckless – enabled her to justify indulging contraband desires while exonerating herself from blame. ‘It is so neat, the division in me, more neat than you’ll ever know,’ she insisted.59 She would find that she was wrong and that it was impossible to live a life of divided selves with any degree of happiness or equanimity. Her internal struggle, when it came, ought not to be dismissed as self-indulgence: it imposed a severe strain on Vita as well as those around her. Vita emerged bruised from her affair with Violet: a part of her retreated further within herself. ‘To me, who knows her pretty well, she is a “beautiful mask”,’ Victoria wrote in 1922. ‘She has put on a thicker mask since the distressing V[iolet] affair.’60

  For three years Harold kept faith with his errant wife. He did so by blaming everything on Violet Keppel, ‘that little tortuous, erotic, irresponsible, irremediable and unlimited person’. Memorably he likened her to a ‘fierce orchid, glimmering and stinking in the recesses of life and throwing cadaverous sweetness on the morning breeze’, and he wished her dead.61 Violet’s culpability has since become an established element of the story. This is partly because the story has been told most often from Vita’s point of view; it is partly because Vita chose ultimately to return to the trappings of her ‘English’ self – Harold, her children, material possessions, upper-class society. Her own rejection of Violet in favour of other, more pressing, claims seems to imply a value judgement. It could just as easily have been a failure of nerve. Vita and Violet were both dominated by their mothers: both Victoria Sackville and Alice Keppel played their part in the unravelling of this fantastical story. The irony is that Violet celebrated her mother’s relationship with Edward VII as the acme of romance: ‘I adore the unparalleled romance of her life … I wonder if I shall ever squeeze as much romance into my life as she has had in hers; anyhow I mean to have a jolly good try!’62 She ignored Mrs Keppel’s hard-headedness and her significant material gains as a result of her glittering liaison. For Violet it was Vita who became her ‘King’, but in Violet’s case, unlike that of her mother, the relationship was based solely on love. Vita by contrast came close to castigating her own mother as selfish and acquisitive (despite the income of the Sackville estates falling far short of Mrs Keppel’s ill-gotten £20,000 a year): she failed to appreciate the depth of Victoria’s love for Lionel. Condemning her mother’s emotional caprice, she herself behaved in a manner that was equally capricious. With Violet she lived out a fantasy life whose roots stretched deep into her childhood. Then she discarded Violet. She had damned the whole of London society, played out her rebellion and survived to the extent of later being invited by the BBC to give a radio broadcast with Harold on the ingredients of a successful marriage. Like Miles Vane-Merrick in Family History, she chose to return to ‘[her] own life, parallel with the life of love, separate, independent’. Her separation was from Violet. ‘The life of love’ remained central to Vita: never again did it overwhelm her to the same extent.

  Having made her choice, Vita believed she could retrospectively contain the affair. It became a youthful transgression and youth could not be protracted indefinitely. She saw this even as, with Violet’s help, she worked on Challenge, the novel that would become their own fictionalisation of their affair, begun while that affair was full of promise. ‘Were the years of youth the intuitive years of perception? Were the most radiant moments the moments in which one stepped farthest from the ordered acceptance of the world? Moments of danger, moments of inspiration, moments of self-sacrifice, moments of perceiving beauty, moments of love, all the drunken moments!’63 Afterwards she referred to Violet darkly as an ‘unexploded bomb’ whose destructive power terrified her. Vita would
continue to pursue ‘moments of perceiving beauty’ and ‘moments of love’: never again would she come so close to danger or self-sacrifice.

  Without her mother’s level-headedness, Violet became a tragic victim, destined never to achieve a fulfilling relationship. She had invested everything and lost. Truthfully she had told Vita, ‘I can never be happy without you.’64 Half a century later, she played out her final days as a parody of her mother. Queenly in jewels and Balenciaga, at the end of her life she ran her Florentine household like a miniature court with herself as exacting sovereign. ‘Across my life only one word will be written: “Waste” – Waste of love, waste of talent, waste of enterprise.’65 Vita, on the other hand, emerged from ‘Julian’s’ escapades to reclaim the spoils of war that had come to her on her marriage. She had tasted a new and different kind of love: with a string of partners that love remained a part of her life. It existed alongside Harold’s tolerant devotion, conventional family relationships with Ben and Nigel, houses in London and the country, a Rolls-Royce, a chauffeur, a cook, gardeners, jewels and Jacobean furniture from the attics at Knole.

  Although their worst ‘misdemeanours’ were committed abroad, both women came close to social ostracism. Yet while Violet retained an aura of transgression, Vita rehabilitated herself, knowledge of her peccadilloes afterwards confined to a small, mostly discreet inside circle. It was as Violet foresaw in the summer of 1918: ‘what is so killing is that you will probably … become a celebrated poet/novelist and I shall [achieve] nothing but disreputability!’66 Violet described them both as ‘absolutely indifferent to the world’s opinions’: Vita’s response has not survived. Vita did indeed become a respected, prize-winning and commercially successful literary figure and, in time, a horticultural authority; later still, she was appointed Companion of Honour by George VI. Few members of the reading public recognised her portrait in Little Victims, a novel written in 1933 by a former lover of Harold’s, Richard Rumbold: ‘She speaks like a man in a deep bass voice … She is horribly ugly … and gives lurid, detailed accounts of her affairs. She started at sixteen and has kept going pretty well ever since.’67 Although she repented the unhappiness she had caused Harold, Vita did not regret the adventure of her wanderlust. It was her riposte to the hypocrisy of Edwardian double standards. In her short biography of the playwright Aphra Behn, written in 1927, Vita offered a triumphalist endorsement of her subject’s mores: ‘in her private life she followed the dictates of inclination rather than of conventional morality’.68 It was, ever after, as Vita would live her own life. Such was the prize she had coveted and won.

  The story of Vita Sackville-West’s affair with Violet Keppel is one in which everyone is a victim: Harold, Vita, the Nicolson children, Violet and, as we will see, Violet’s husband Denys Trefusis. But there are degrees of victimhood. While Harold and Vita recovered from the cataclysm, Violet, Ben, Nigel and Denys Trefusis all remained scarred by a sense of abandonment, misuse or both that none fully understood. All, in their different ways, were hostages to fortune.

  It was Violet who fired the opening salvo. On 25 January 1918 she wrote a letter to Vita that was more than usually calculating. Formerly she had appealed to the would-be indomitable strain in Vita – the Vita who liked to think she never yielded, never capitulated. Now, in the aftermath of Poems of West and East, Violet appealed to Vita’s sense of herself as an artist. She described an artist as ‘the supreme luxury that the gods toss to the world’ and, pointedly, as one who ‘must necessarily belong to both sexes, his judgement is bisexual, … he must be able to put himself with impunity in the place of either sex’. She couched her appeal in the form of a parable: ‘Once upon a time, there lived an artist and a woman, and the artist and the woman were one.’ Inevitably, the artist-woman – Vita – surrendered a side of herself to become a wife and mother: ‘The artist was temporarily forgotten: wrapped in comfortable torpor, the artist slept, and the woman gloried in her womanhood and in the happiness she could give …’69 No matter that it was not true. Vita had not forgotten the artist nor was her artistry asleep; she had written poetry and a novel; she had received happiness as well as giving it. Violet laid her cards upon the table. Since 1913, she had watched and waited, excluded from Vita’s life, angry and hurt. Now she intended her letter as a wake-up call to Vita. In combination with Harold’s revelations and the temporary halt to Vita’s sex life, it served its purpose.

  On 18 April 1918, Violet had already been at Long Barn for five days. She was bored, playing her waiting game. Vita, too, anxious to be writing, chafed at the restraints of her company, a sign of the gulf between them. The previous month, at Thornton Manor on the Wirral, Vita had stayed with another of Victoria’s wealthy admirers, Sunlight Soap magnate Lord Leverhulme. ‘Go over the soap works at Port Sunlight, great fun,’ she recorded in her diary.70 A seed was sown. It would grow into the novel that, in 1921, became The Dragon in Shallow Waters, a violent, darkly melodramatic story that begins with a description of a soap factory and culminates in a gruesome death by immolation in a vat of boiling soap; throughout its inception Harold and Vita referred to the novel simply as ‘Soap’. Vita was writing poetry too. Her second collection of verse, Orchard and Vineyard, would also be published in 1921 (by then it included a number of poems about Violet and about Vita’s fleeting moods at moments in their affair). In this orderly routine there was no room for Violet’s wiles.

  And then there was the garden. Vita had previously worked outdoors in the long skirts and smock-like blouses that were accepted gardening apparel for women of her class. A photograph of 1917 shows her stripping lavender on the terrace at Long Barn with Harold and Ben. She is dressed in white, she wears a straw hat with a petersham ribbon and a white shirt with billowing sleeves. At the time of Violet’s visit she had just taken delivery of ‘clothes like the women-on-the-land were wearing’.71 Twenty years after Victoria vetoed trousers as part of Vita’s khaki suit for Boer War games with the Battiscombes, Vita had at last obtained practical, mannish clothes for her work outside, inspired by the costumes of the Women’s Land Army, formed the previous year. With Violet’s disconcerting presence preventing her from writing, Vita swapped her clothes, ‘and in the unaccustomed freedom of breeches and gaiters I went into wild spirits; I ran, I shouted, I jumped, I climbed, I vaulted over gates, I felt like a schoolboy let out on a holiday; and Violet followed me across woods and fields’.72

  In Vita’s account, the effect is instantaneous. Like a magic cloak in a fairy tale, the new clothes transformed her into the person she was always destined to become. Unexpectedly, unaffectedly, Vita’s Land Girl guise liberated something deep within her. It should not surprise us that this defining moment in her life occurred when she put on a ‘costume’ and embraced in real life a further instance of masquerade. Throughout her formative years she had found fulfilment and self-expression imaginatively, through just these means. On an April day in the last year of the war, ‘in the rich warm-blooded rush/ Of growth, and mating beasts, and rising sap’,73 the catalyst for Vita’s sexual epiphany was a uniform of breeches and leather gaiters. She would wear it for the rest of her life.

  As she ran across the Weald, bounding from garden to field, Vita described Violet ‘never taking her eyes off me, and in the midst of my exuberance I knew that all the old under-current had come back stronger than ever, and that my old domination over her had never been diminished’.74 Shedding the clothes of Harold’s ‘gentle’ wife, Vita was reborn in a new identity. Violet chased behind her, and to the exhilaration of freedom was added a frisson of sexual conquest. That night, Vita and Violet remained talking after the servants had gone to bed. They talked until two o’clock in the morning. Then they kissed. They then went to bed. For Violet it was the natural corollary to that night of owl song at Duntreath Castle. In this instance only Vita had spoken. ‘Violet had struck the secret of my duality,’ Vita wrote; she rationalised it as an alternate preponderance of ‘the feminine and the masculine elements’ in herself.75
In unravelling her duality aloud, Vita found that she had talked herself into becoming Violet’s lover. It was a moment of overwhelming excitement – as Virginia Woolf imagined Orlando–Vita’s dawning love for Sasha–Violet in Orlando, ‘the thickness of his blood melted; the ice turned to wine in his veins; he heard the waters flowing and the birds singing; spring broke over the hard wintry landscape’.76 In her diary, Vita wrote simply but feelingly: ‘How eventful a day!’77 Ten days later she and Violet ran away to Cornwall.

  There was no resumption of sexual relations for Harold on 20 April, nor would there be now. Now Vita had a different lover. After two nights in a ‘very primitive’ fisherman’s cottage, on 30 April she and Violet moved into a house belonging to novelist Hugh Walpole: it was Harold who, in an emollient gesture, had arranged for their use of it. Perched on a cliff above Polperro, it was remote, romantic, full of books and the tireless cry of gulls; noisily the sea crashed beneath its walls. They read, they walked the cliff path to Fowey and back, Violet filled the rooms with flowers. Vita was dominant and masterful as she had always longed to be. Violet compared her to ‘a dazzling Gypsy … a Gypsy potentate, a sovereign’: it was the illusion both craved.78 Together they began writing the novel that became Challenge. It tells the story of a wealthy Englishman called Julian (Vita), living on the Greek coast and torn between love for his mercurial cousin Eve (Violet) and the offshore island of Aphros (Harold). Julian inspires an uprising on Aphros: he himself becomes the island’s president. Challenge’s working titles included ‘Rebellion’, ‘Rebels’ and ‘Vanity’; Harold called it ‘Smuts’.