Behind the Mask Page 16
On 4 September, she conceived the idea that would become The Land: a single long poem celebrating the cycle of the agricultural year and the traditions of the English countryside. She did not begin her first draft until 6 June 1923. In the meantime, from ‘the things I know, the things I knew/ Before I knew them’139 and daily observation of husbandry close at hand, Vita gathered material for a poem which is a compendium of disappearing practices and, equally obviously, disappearing language; later she would work from the four-volume Encyclopaedia of Agriculture that Harold sent her in November 1925. In its first draft, The Land included a quotation from Hesiod’s Works and Days: ‘Work is no disgrace; the disgrace is in not working.’140 It was as Violet had foreseen. While she herself remained under a cloud, living in exile in Paris with Denys, Vita addressed the business of turning herself into a successful writer. Work was a way out of her ‘scarlet adventure’; it was also her atonement. With its portrait of dependable permanencies, The Land was a long way from a love affair so scandalous that Mrs Keppel worried it would jeopardise the engagement of Violet’s younger sister Sonia to Roland Cubitt, son of the immensely rich Lord Ashcombe. And Vita’s focus was more than agriculture: ‘All … dies in its season; all perplexities,/ Even human grief with human body dies,/ Such griefs that press so wildly on the heart/ As to crush in its shell.’141 At the sturdy Italian table in her sitting room at Long Barn, with its views over her garden and the landscape she had known all her life, Vita had reason to understand her own words.
At the end of June 1929, Vita cut from The Listener the two-page abridged version of the discussion on marriage she and Harold had broadcast on the radio, and pasted it into her cuttings book. She underlined a single sentence: ‘I think that the secret of a successful marriage is the capacity to treat disasters as if they were incidents, and not to magnify incidents into disasters.’142
PART IV
Orlando
‘Love in fantastic triumph sate,
Whilst bleeding hearts around him flowed,
For whom fresh pains he did create
And strange tyrannic power he showed.’
Aphra Behn, quoted by V. Sackville-West in Aphra Behn: The Incomparable Astrea, 1927
VITA WAS EMOTIONALLY promiscuous. In a poem called ‘Sometimes When Night …’, she imagined a couple content to ‘read, speak a little, read again’, an evening scene in a house in the country. Its tranquillity is shattered by the sound of a shot. ‘But we read on,/ Since the shot was not at our hearts, since the mark was not/ Your heart or mine, not this time, my companion.’1 The key words are ‘not this time’: next time may be different. About the soundness of her heart, Vita makes her companion no lasting promises.
Like her parents’, Vita’s was an intensely passionate nature. Sex, intrinsic to Julian’s mastery over Eve, played an important part in her relationship with Violet, as it would in future relationships. Her depiction of thwarted sexual desire in a late novel, The Easter Party, bears the hallmark of truth to experience. Vita pictures her heroine ‘pacing up and down her room at night, twisting her hands, throwing her head back, heaving her shoulders, breathing quickly and heavily, in an anguish … trying to regain control’.2
Vita’s choice of Harold over Violet did not mean that she had conquered or forsworn such urges, despite her earlier decision, in the face of Harold’s desire for another child, that sex would play no further part in their marriage. She forswore those urges only in relation to Harold: even in Harold’s case she occasionally relapsed in the early days. Instead Vita had determined to resist for a second time the complete physical and emotional surrender of her relationship with Violet: her motives were self-protection and belated loyalty to her marriage. ‘You know what infatuation is, and I was mad,’ was Vita’s final verdict on the affair to Harold, in December 1922.3 Other lovers would follow in Violet’s footsteps, all but one of them female. Although several sacrificed their own stable, long-term relationships in order to reciprocate feelings they misattributed to Vita, none again threatened the safety of her marriage. Harold referred to them glancingly as Vita’s ‘muddles’.
The ability to remain unharmed by emotional and sexual entanglements points to a capricious quality in Vita’s make-up. Novelty aroused her, so too pursuit, seduction, dominance. Narcissism sharpened her pleasure: the realisation of that image of herself in the male role of conqueror that Violet had recognised, ‘the abandonment of mastery and surrender in the hours of night’, as she described it in Challenge. Most of her believed, as she wrote in her diary, that ‘love makes everyone a bore, but that the excitement of life lies in the béguins [infatuations], and the “little moves” nearer to people’.4 Those feelings were necessarily fleeting; Vita told her mother that her béguins lasted a matter of days and left no imprint. ‘Few delights bear the strain of investigation,’ she wrote in a different context in 1926; ‘they bruise, as tender fruits after handling. It is safer not to know too much.’5 She enjoyed and needed sex, enjoyed the anticipation of fulfilment: she learnt to separate this need from all but temporary emotional involvement. Vita never accepted any lover’s argument that sex implied commitment. That refusal became her means of preserving herself and her marriage. Its consequence was that Vita hurt anyone who felt more strongly than she did.
In her biography of Aphra Behn, begun on 7 June 1927, Vita itemised Behn’s images of love. Her focus is illuminating: ‘there are in the quiver of the god a great many different darts; some that wound for a day, and others for a year; they are all fine, painted, glittering darts … but the wounds they make reach the desire only, and are cured by possessing’.6 Vita recognised her own desire as a chimera but necessary, and accorded it a corresponding place in her priorities. For much of the time, she accepted Behn’s assertion that there are higher aims than physical fulfilment: ‘’tis that refined and illustrious passion of the soul, whose aim is virtue and whose end is honour, that has the power of changing nature …’.7 Couched in terms to satisfy a latter-day Sackville cavalier, this was the ‘passion’ that Vita ultimately realised in her platonic marriage to Harold. More than her relationship with Violet, her decision that her marriage should succeed irrespective of her own physical desires set the course of Vita’s life. Inevitably, at intervals, she fell short of her own lofty resolutions, ‘swept by a sensation I cannot logically explain to others;/ … an irrational passion’.8
In the decade following the collapse of her relationship with Violet, Vita’s affairs resulted in three broken marriages, at least one career ruined, threats of legal action and the publication of a vicious satirical poem intended to expose to public outrage the unconventional (and in Harold’s case, illegal) nature of the Nicolsons’ proclivities. At the same time, Vita’s own marriage regained much of the serenity of the early years in Constantinople and at Long Barn. That the latter should have been possible is a tribute to Vita’s ability to compartmentalise her life and satisfy sexual desire without committing herself beyond the heady moment; a tribute too to Harold’s patient lack of jealousy. Vita reminded herself of the separation between her love for Harold, which she described as ‘real’ and ‘pure’, and what she later dismissed as ‘the cheap unworthy tricks that lure the flesh’.9 She quoted Khalil Gibran: ‘Fill each other’s cup, but drink not from one cup’, and pursued her quarry with a degree of discretion, a degree of detachment, while keeping faith with Harold in spirit. ‘The liaisons which you and I contract are something perfectly apart from the more natural and normal attitude we have towards each other, and therefore don’t interfere,’ Vita wrote to Harold in May 1926; she was wholly sincere.10 As she must have known, that statement was more true of Harold’s affairs, which avoided tempestuousness, than her own.
Vita first met Dorothy Wellesley, then Dorothy Ashton, called Dottie, in March 1914 in Constantinople. Dottie was engaged to Harold’s friend, Lord Gerald Wellesley, like Harold a secretary in the Diplomatic Service. Gerry Wellesley had recently been engaged to Violet; his sister, Lady Eileen We
llesley, was Harold’s former fiancée. On that occasion, Vita’s diary records only Dottie’s wealth (she had inherited an estate in Cheshire). She does not mention Dottie’s aspirations to be a poet or her striking appearance: ‘blazing blue eyes, fair hair, transparently white skin’.11 She also failed to notice the demons that lurked so close below the surface and, unsurprisingly, what another observer described on Dottie’s skull as ‘the three bumps of temper, pride and combativeness more developed than [in] anyone I have ever known’.12 Within a decade this triple endowment would combine to destroy Dottie’s marriage to Gerry, which took place the month after she and Vita met. Vita also played her part in the collapse of this marriage of friends.
In July 1920, dented in spirit and harried by their families, Vita and Violet told their story to novelist Clemence Dane, whom Vita had met with Mrs Belloc Lowndes. Among Clemence Dane’s novels was a girls’ school story, Regiment of Women, which Vita had read; ambiguously she likened Dane to the novel’s villain Clare Hartill. Regiment of Women has strong lesbian components, but ultimately endorses the desirability of marriage in preference to the hothouse emotional effusions it attributes to single-sex schooling. Dane’s response to Vita and Violet that last summer was consistent with the message of her novel: she suggested they give each other up. Confronted by the bleakness of this advice and Violet’s increasingly histrionic demands, Vita turned to Dottie for distraction. Dottie came to Long Barn; Vita discovered their shared interest in poetry, a bond. The same year, to lukewarm critical reception, Dottie published a collection of verse, entitled simply, Poems, which Vita read and advised on prior to publication. The last weekend in August, Vita went to Sherfield Court, the house Dottie had bought on the edge of her father-in-law’s Stratfield Saye estate. ‘I like Dottie but can’t stick smug Gerry,’ she recorded tersely in her diary.13 The women saw more of one another, their intimacy endorsed by Harold’s longstanding friendship with Gerry. Dottie accompanied Vita as her guest to a PEN Club dinner where they met the distinguished novelist John Galsworthy; the veteran author was full of praise for Vita.
The following autumn, on 14 September 1921, Vita, Dottie and Gerry set off for Italy; Harold joined them in Rome on 6 October. It was to be a holiday marred by the Wellesleys’ bickering and squabbling. At intervals Gerry left Vita and Dottie; the women pursued interests of their own. They were alone in Ravenna, Split, Ragusa, Cattaro. In Ravenna, Vita wrote, they ‘left the motor and went into the wood, and lay under the pines, and read snatches of the more obscure poets to one another. We said, “Here Dante, Boccaccio, Shelley and Byron walked,” and again, “Oh my God how the canal does stink.”’14 Vita wrestled with a new novel, but failed to make headway; later she abandoned it and rewrote it over a two-year period as her poem ‘Reddín’. Instead she wrote a short poem about Dottie at Long Barn. It is among her sunniest, and depicts an unnamed Dottie, exotically dressed, skipping in a moonlit Kentish lane.
The lightness of tone of ‘Full Moon’ reveals the scale of Vita’s unawareness of the situation into which she had blundered. She recognised Dottie as ‘a born romantic’, ‘a fiery spirit with a passionate love of beauty in all its forms, whether in flowers, landscapes or works of art’.15 In verse she acclaimed her whimsically as a ‘small impertinent charlatan’ and imagined her as a fey child; in person she called her ‘Aprile’. She did not see that, like Violet before her and, to some extent, Vita herself, Dottie was damaged and unhappy, the victim of a childhood that combined immense material privileges with emotional deprivation. Jointly and separately, Dottie’s commanding mother, Lady Scarbrough, and her elderly nanny, Wa-Wa, had treated her with cruelty and contempt. Remembering Wa-Wa, Dottie wrote in a tone of mounting hysteria in her poem ‘The Deserted House’: ‘There, there, was the bed,/ Where she beat me and shook me,/ When I cried with terror at night.’
Vita and Dottie became lovers. Afterwards one of Vita’s servants claimed to have seen them together ‘in a very amorous position, D with no clothes on’.16 But Dottie needed reliance and reassurance more than sex; she craved the care and attention that had formerly been withheld from her. Not for the last time, Vita found herself in the double role of lover and mother. The price she exacted, as always, was unquestioning devotion. For her part, she described her relationship with Dottie limply as ‘our casual journey’.17
By the time Harold expressed serious concern about the nature of Vita and Dottie’s involvement, the Wellesleys’ separation was only weeks away. Harold warned Vita that Gerry would be likely to look for a scapegoat: it was too late. At Christmas 1922, Gerry moved out of Sherfield. Seven weeks later, on 9 February, he inscribed beneath a photograph of Dottie three lines from an ode by Horace, translated by Dryden: ‘The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine./ Not Heaven itself over the past has power;/ And what has been has been, and I have had my hour.’18 For the next forty-six years, until its theft from a hotel bedroom, he placed beneath his pillow when he slept the watch that Dottie gave him in 1914.19
Harold blamed Dottie for the breakdown of the marriage. ‘I do think Dottie makes a mistake in trying to be at one and the same time the little bit of thistledown and the thistle,’ he wrote in his diary before the final split.20 As in Vita’s relationship with Violet, it was his way of avoiding blaming Vita. Vita herself implicitly acknowledged the part she had played: her reaction emphasises self-preservation over sympathy. To Harold she wrote: ‘I do not want people to say I have anything to do with her marriage having gone wrong, which probably they would be only too pleased to say … I do not want to be dragged into this, either for your sake or my own. We have had quite enough of that sort of thing, haven’t we?’21 But it was Vita whom Dottie repeatedly summoned to her aid, threatening tears in the face of Vita’s reluctance, Vita whom she chose to support her in her wretchedness. Vita responded to Dottie’s summons, though she would find an increasing number of draws on her time as the year progressed.
At thirty, Vita was beautiful. Even one of her less fanciful observers described her as being ‘in the prime of life, an animal at the height of its powers, a beautiful flower in full bloom. She was very handsome, dashing, aristocratic, lordly …’22 Her hooded eyes were dark and clear under attractively heavy brows, her nose long and straight, her profile strongly modelled. She was tall and often strikingly colourfully dressed, a ‘remarkable person in black and scarlet’ as she described herself in an unpublished short story she wrote about herself called ‘The Poetry Reading’.23 She still, at this point, made regular trips to the hairdresser, she wore dangling earrings, ropes of coloured beads or the pearl necklace Seery had left her; large rings crowded her fingers. Victoria took credit for her dazzling complexion, attributing it to the mercilessness with which she had prevented Vita from eating ‘chocolates and bonbons’ in childhood. ‘She must be grateful to me now that she is thirty, that her cheeks are like two ripe peaches, with a sun-kissed look and a bloom that is the envy and the admiration of everyone.’24 Victoria drew attention to Vita’s ‘dignity and repose’: there is a quality of stillness in the photographs of Vita taken by émigré German portraitist E. O. Hoppé at sittings in February 1923 and again in February 1924, as well as that easy confidence Strang had captured five years previously. Only Sir William Rothenstein, drawing Vita in 1925, missed her iconic allure. Rothenstein’s portrait, today in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, reimagines Vita as a pre-Raphaelite sleepwalker: heavy-featured, expressionless, apparently with a cast in one eye, stolid rather than statuesque. ‘Vita was a beautiful woman and this is an ugly one,’ Harold commented, when presented with the drawing years later.
None of these images suggests that the ‘virile’ quality in Vita, identified mischievously in 1923 by novelist Ronald Firbank, was yet visible in her appearance. In his novella The Flower Beneath the Foot, Firbank satirised Vita as Victoria Gellibore Frinton, the Honourable Mrs Chilleywater, ‘the sole heir of Lord Seafairer of Sevenelms, Kent’, writer of ‘lurid studies of low life (of whi
ch she knew nothing at all)’.25 ‘Virility’ was a part of Vita’s make-up – after her epiphany with Violet, Vita understood it as one half of her dual nature. To the casual observer it revealed itself only in a certain boldness of gesture and mannerism, the habit of striding that so struck Leonard Woolf, and outside her immediate circle Vita had no intention of advertising her duality further than in her choice of deliberately masculine hats. ‘Charlotte was … surveying Sackville-West,’ Vita wrote in ‘The Poetry Reading’; ‘she saw the dark felt hat, the heavy cream lambskin coat, black dress, scarlet earrings, scarf, and shoes, yet apart from these externals the quality that held the audience and Charlotte in particular was not the beauty of the rather tired face, but its exceptional sincerity.’26 In describing her own appearance, Vita chooses sincerity over virility, depth of feeling over physical forcefulness. As much as the swashbuckling characteristics of earlier self-fictions, it possesses a heroic dimension: Vita’s ‘sincerity’ in the story persuades the frustrated Charlotte to break free from the smothering influence of her elder sister, Amelia. As in fiction, so in Vita’s life. Without any idea of doing so, unaware even of her own power, the fictional Vita destroys the Pringle sisters’ bond. With equal sincerity would the real Vita destroy relationships in her path. It was never her intention. Nor did she take responsibility for fallout from her ‘béguins’.