Behind the Mask Page 18
Pat had no intention of quickly fading away, however. She was deeply in love, humiliated and vengeful. She had flattered Vita in her careful fantasy of the Dark Man, knowing from Violet Vita’s susceptibility to appeals made to her conviction of her own duality. And now she had been defeated by the flipside of Vita’s posturing, ‘your obsession that you are a romantic young man who treats women badly’.55 Like Violet, Pat threatened suicide; unlike Violet she consulted a lawyer and told Vita she would take her story to the newspapers: ‘I shall tell the despicable way in which you treated me throughout … How you dropped me when it suited you.’56 She accused Vita of playing her off against Dorothy Wellesley. Violet had accepted Vita’s abandonment, continuing to love her even after Vita chose Harold, Ben, Nigel and Long Barn in her stead: Pat’s love was not so selfless. ‘You have always only considered your feelings, your wishes, your wants,’ she spat.57
On 8 March, Vita described Pat inadequately as ‘very cross’. It was a dramatic encounter. Pat produced a pistol; with a fight Vita wrenched it from her. ‘If it had been loaded it was bound to have gone off,’ Pat wrote afterwards of their rough, clumsy fight.58 In the face of melodrama worthy of one of her own novels, Vita maintained commendable sangfroid in her diary: ‘Pat came in the morning … suggested blowing her brains out and leaving a letter to be read at the inquest saying it was all my fault for having been so unkind to her – but melted finally – and we parted friends, me wiping the sweat of surprise off my brow.’59 Pat may have regarded their ‘friendship’ in a different light. She herself had manipulated Vita through storytelling, bolstering the legend of the Dark Man; she is unlikely to have been swayed by more words. Notwithstanding the gun, it was typical of the way Vita shirked resolving romantic conflicts which she had entered voluntarily. With hindsight her grounds for surprise seem slender. In her assessment of Vita’s focus on what she described as ‘your feelings, your wishes, your wants’, Pat hit upon a truth of all Vita’s short-term relationships. Vita admitted other considerations only in her relationships with Harold, Victoria and the boys – and in her long and loving friendship with Bloomsbury writer Virginia Woolf.
Virginia Woolf admired Vita Sackville-West’s legs and her ancestry; she considered her a second-rate writer. Vita for her part admired Virginia Woolf unreservedly, while remaining ambivalent about Bloomsbury, which she labelled ‘Gloomsbury’: ‘She had the warmest and deepest and most human of affection for those she loved. They were few, perhaps, and she applied alarmingly high standards, but her love and humanity were real, once they were given.’60
Vita conceded Virginia’s superior artistry: she attributed to her a ‘mysterious power … to make certain words, – perhaps quite ordinary words – start up out of the page like partridges out of a turnip field, getting a new value, a new surprise’, a power she knew that she herself did not possess.61 Virginia was exhilarated by Vita’s forcefulness as a presence, her ‘full-breastedness; her being so much in full sail on the high tides’.62 Insisting on her intellectual superiority – she labelled Vita and Harold ‘both incurably stupid’ within weeks of meeting them63 – Virginia admitted inferiority in other areas. In that way her relationship with Vita adopted the model of mastery and submission that characterised Vita’s affairs with Violet, Dottie and Pat. Unlike her predecessors in Vita’s affection, Virginia did not relinquish control completely.
Vita and Virginia’s nineteen-year correspondence is notable for a degree of self-dramatisation on both sides. Their epistolary flirtation was energetic and imaginative, their physical intimacy gentler and of shorter duration. Vita told Harold that she and Virginia slept together only twice. Given Virginia’s nervous fragility, it is unlikely that Vita exaggerated their abstemiousness. Both women recognised the danger to Virginia’s mental stability of any full-scale physical awakening. Virginia’s inspiration for Vita was cerebral rather than sexual, ‘a mental thing; a spiritual thing … an intellectual thing’, as Vita explained to Harold:64 her influence is clearest in Seducers in Ecuador and, to a lesser extent, Gottfried Künstler, allusive novellas that are indebted to Virginia’s writing thematically and stylistically.
On her side, Vita inspired Virginia romantically, imaginatively, historically; on and off their letters tingle with the idea of sex. ‘She is a pronounced Sapphist, and may … have an eye on me, old though I am,’ wrote the forty-year-old Virginia, at the outset of their acquaintance.65 ‘I lie making lovely plans, all firelit and radiant,’ Vita wrote to her on Christmas Day 1926. ‘My bed’s at least nine feet wide, and I feel like the Princess and the Pea, – only there is no Pea. It is a four-poster, all of which I like. Come and see for yourself.’66 Vita’s ‘radiance’, a byword for her easy sensuousness and commanding vigour, became a given between the two women; Vita labelled herself an ‘honest sensualist’67 and encouraged Virginia to project her fantasies on to her. In Virginia’s last novel, Between the Acts, she itemised Vita’s physical impact in her descriptions of Mrs Manresa: ‘goddess-like, buoyant, abundant, her cornucopia running over’.68
Virginia’s earlier novel Orlando is a celebration of what Vita meant to her. Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson called it an extended love letter: undertaken once the flush of first intimacy had passed, it is also the literary equivalent of a shackle. It was Virginia’s means of skewering Vita in print in order to possess at least a part of her in person and prolong indefinitely aspects of their closeness; she explained its inception as arising from an ‘overmastering impulse’.69 It is also a valediction, Virginia’s permission to Vita to stray sexually. ‘It was certain indeed that many ladies were ready to show [Orlando] their favours’; ‘he was excessively generous both to women and to poets, and both adored him’, Virginia writes: a nod from one woman to the other in this hybrid fantasy.70
Predictably Vita adored both Orlando and Orlando. She fell in love with a vision of herself that replicated in essentials personal fables stretching back to her childhood. As Virginia had read Challenge, which Vita loaned her in the summer of 1927, Orlando is partly inspired by Violet’s vision of Vita as Julian: lover, Byronic hero, gypsy leader. It is a refinement of the Julian/Mitya/Dark Man myths of Vita’s sexual history, coloured by the lascivious snobbery that Vita always stimulated in Virginia (‘it’s the breeding of Vita’s that I took away with me as an impression’, Virginia recorded of her first visit to Knole71). Orlando was the nearest Vita came to inheriting her father’s house. The novel imagines Vita–Orlando as the sum of all her ancestors, every Sackville rolled into one through three centuries, and returns Knole to Vita as hers by right of temperament as well as birth. For all these reasons – romantic, narcissistic, possessive, proprietorial – Vita loved not only the book but its creator.
They met for the first time on 14 December 1922, at dinner with art critic Clive Bell, while Harold was in Lausanne. Virginia’s diary betrays her curiosity about Vita; Vita’s diary is blank. Three weeks earlier, Vita had published Knole and the Sackvilles, her second book of the year, following The Heir. Of the two of them, as Virginia was aware, Vita was the better-known, bigger-selling, commercially more successful author and would remain so throughout their friendship. But it was Virginia, proprietor with her husband Leonard of the Hogarth Press, publishers of T. S. Eliot, who had the reputation for cleverness.
Virginia’s first impressions of Vita established from the outset the terms of their engagement: Virginia regarded her as a physical specimen and, under the influence of Knole and the Sackvilles, an embodiment of a social type; she dismissed her intellectually. Vita was ‘florid, moustached, parakeet coloured, with all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist … The aristocratic manner is something like the actresses [sic] – no false shyness or modesty … She is a grenadier; hard; handsome; manly; inclined to double chin.’72 Virginia was intrigued. Vita, she noted, made her ‘feel virgin, shy & schoolgirlish’; she observed that Vita knew ‘everyone – But could I ever know her?’ and accepted an invitation for the following
week. She marvelled at Vita writing ‘15 pages a day’ and clung doggedly to her conviction of her own superiority, however ‘schoolgirlish’, in the face of Vita’s creative facility, her ‘supple ease’ and ‘grenadier’ manner. On 15 January, she referred to ‘the new apparition Vita, who gives me a book every day’.73 Something of that sneering tone would persist, though she would find that Vita did not warrant so spiky a dismissal. Virginia did not reveal in her diary that it was she who had requested from Vita copies of Knole and the Sackvilles and Orchard and Vineyard, did not mention, as Vita reported to Harold with dismay, the orange woollen tights and pumps that she had worn to Clive’s dinner.
As ever, Vita made up her mind quickly. ‘I simply adore Virginia Woolf, and so would you. You would fall quite flat before her charm and personality,’ she wrote to Harold five days after their first meeting. She described her as simple, ‘utterly unaffected’, ‘both detached and human’ and told Harold candidly: ‘I’ve rarely taken such a fancy to anyone … I have quite lost my heart.’74 Correctly she surmised that Virginia reciprocated her béguin; she was unaware of the extent of Virginia’s equivocation in private (even three years on, Virginia still characterised her feelings about Vita in her diary as ‘very mixed’75). ‘I like you a fabulous lot,’ Vita wrote to Virginia frankly and straightforwardly in August 1924.76 On both sides, albeit translated in time into a safely sexless tendresse, this fancy would endure.
Vita never doubted the importance of Virginia Woolf in her life. She swiftly came to occupy a place similar only to Harold’s – that of an enriching, devoted friendship. ‘I don’t think I have ever loved anybody so much, in the way of friendship; in fact, of course, I know I haven’t,’ Vita told Harold four years after she and Virginia met.77 Only Enid Bagnold, novelist and playwright, came close to offering Vita friendship that resembled her relationship with Virginia, and that on an altogether different, lesser scale: a mutually supportive understanding between women of shared literary aspirations, touched by love. In Enid’s case, she lacked Virginia’s literary genius; the love and admiration Vita felt for her were less pure, less selfless. For all Vita claimed, ‘I never loved you, Enid, save as a friend’, she may not have been wholly truthful.78 In 1933, she wrote to Enid of her ‘qualms … a sudden horror and dismay’ about including in her Collected Poems ‘that doggerel I once wrote to you, which seemed to me not so bad as I reread it, and not too terribly indiscreet either’.79 Vita’s friendship with Enid probably included unresolved sexual tension on Vita’s part; their closeness suffered after Enid’s marriage to Sir Roderick Jones of Reuters. By contrast, Virginia’s marriage to Leonard served to illuminate Vita’s understanding of their relationship; Vita was Leonard’s friend too. The sexual aspect of their friendship would be briefly but satisfactorily resolved without lasting damage to Vita, Virginia, Harold or Leonard; innuendo added liveliness to their correspondence, a shared joke, concord.
Vita had continued to work at her long poem The Land throughout the upheavals of her affairs with Geoffrey and Pat; along with The Portrait of Zélide, it formed part of the ‘glue’ of her affair with Geoffrey. Now she discussed it with Virginia. She divided the poem into four sections, named after the seasons of the year; within each season were stand-alone elements. In October 1923, the London Mercury printed ‘Bee-master’ from Spring and ‘Making Cider’ from Autumn; Dottie wrote to congratulate Vita on the former. It was prose, however, that Vita chose when Virginia invited her to contribute to the Hogarth Press. ‘I hope that no one has ever yet, or ever will, throw down a glove I was not ready to pick up,’ Vita wrote by way of reply on 16 July 1924. It was a characteristically grandiloquent response to what was in fact a commonplace request that a professional writer write; it echoed the masterful rhetoric of The Tale of a Cavalier and The King’s Secret. From such statements would Virginia build up her picture of Orlando’s swank. Vita was with Harold in the Dolomites, the walking holiday that had cut short Geoffrey’s visit to Long Barn; on her return she reshaped the holiday into an article for the Evening Standard. ‘You asked me to write a story for you,’ Vita wrote to Virginia. ‘On the peaks of mountains, and beside green lakes, I am writing it for you. I shut my eyes to the blue of gentians, to the coral of androsace; I shut my ears to the brawling of rivers; I shut my nose to the scent of pines; I concentrate on my story.’80 The result was Seducers in Ecuador, dedicated to Virginia, its contract negotiated – to his annoyance – without the intervention of Vita’s new agent Alec Watt of A. P. Watt and Son, and published to warm reviews on 30 October 1924 by the Hogarth Press.
To Alec Watt on 9 October, Vita called her novella ‘a very slight thing’.81 Virginia’s response was altogether more positive. She recognised her own influence in the fantastical tale of a man who retreats from reality behind coloured sunglasses, and preened herself that Vita had ‘shed some of the old verbiage, and come to terms with some sort of glimmer of art … and indeed, I rather marvel at her skill and sensitivity; for is she not mother, wife, great lady, hostess, as well as scribbling?’.82 (Over time Virginia would continue to marvel at Vita’s ability to keep ‘her hands loosely upon so many reins: sons; Harold; garden; farm’.83) Vita delivered her manuscript in person. Against the shabbiness of Monk’s House – the Woolfs’ white-painted, weatherboarded house in the Sussex village of Rodmell – Vita, with her smart car, expensive dressing case and nightdresses wrapped by her lady’s maid in sheets of tissue paper, appeared particularly splendid to Virginia.
Her splendour aside, and discounting the flatteringly imitative quality of Seducers in Ecuador, Virginia allowed herself to venture no further than a tentative ‘this might be a friendship of a sort’ in her diary.84 Virginia’s attitude to Vita continued to waver. Vita decided Virginia was ‘curiously feminist’: ‘She dislikes possessiveness and love of domination in men. In fact she dislikes the quality of masculinity. She says that women stimulate her imagination, by their grace and their art of life.’85 For all her womanly plenitude, Vita provided ample evidence of ‘the quality of masculinity’ in her possessiveness and love of domination; as Orlando proves, her stimulation of Virginia had little to do with grace. In Vita’s company Virginia was moved to ‘childlike dazzled affection’,86 roused by what she described in March 1926 as ‘the glow and the flattery’;87 in her absence a note of detachment, even reserve, asserted itself. Early in their friendship, Virginia was hurt when Vita accused her of ‘lik[ing] people through the brain rather than through the heart’;88 it was her means of maintaining her balance, but she worried that Vita would hold it over her. In that she misjudged Vita.
As with Geoffrey Scott, Vita’s decision to join Harold in Tehran acted as a catalyst on Virginia. In Geoffrey’s case, Vita’s departure provided final severance; in Virginia’s case, fear of that parting and its consequent loss of intimacy encouraged her to decisive action. Virginia had been ill for much of the summer and the women’s meetings had been few and brief. In December 1925, at Leonard’s suggestion, Virginia proposed herself for a visit to Long Barn. She stayed three days. Without any conscious effort Vita dazzled her guest physically – ‘she shines in the grocer’s shop in Sevenoaks with a candle-lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung’.89 Vita felt confirmed in the pleasure of Virginia’s company, but wrote to Harold that, while loving Virginia, she knew she would not fall in love with her. The next day she added that her affection contained no ‘backstairs’ (homosexual) element; the day after that she repeated her assurance that she was not in danger of falling in love with Virginia. So many emphatic denials might have worried Harold: he reassured Vita that he ‘was not really bothered about Virginia and think you are probably very good for each other’.90 On the second day of Virginia’s visit, Vita’s ‘goodness’ took the form of listening to her talk until three o’clock in the morning. ‘Not a peaceful evening,’ was Vita’s comment in her diary. Their conversation roved widely, flirtatiously, amorously. Subsequently Vita referred to ‘the
explosion which happened on the sofa in my room here when you behaved so disgracefully and acquired me for ever’; Virginia described it as ‘the night you were snared, that winter, at Long Barn’.91 Without meaning to, Vita had snared Virginia too.
Vita spent her last afternoon before her departure for Persia with Virginia, crossing London to be with her after her farewell lunch with Geoffrey. In the evening, at Ebury Street, she read over Harold’s latest letters. With her was writer Raymond Mortimer, himself a friend of the Woolfs and Harold’s lover since 1924. He and Vita read the letters together.
Harold did not have to go to Tehran. He chose it over the alternative of Peking for Vita’s sake. ‘Of all foreign posts it will be the one Vita will dislike least,’ he wrote in his diary.92 He was right. But Vita’s preferences were flimsy foundations on which to base important decisions about his career: her dislike of diplomacy was too marked, too unreasoned, her refusal to accompany Harold full time unorthodox in a diplomat’s wife and potentially damaging. The truth was that Vita wanted Harold to have no career but her own one of writing – she described it as his ‘legitimate’ pursuit93 – and her own pastime of gardening: ‘You love foreign politics. And I love literature, and peace, and a secluded life. Oh my dear, my infinitely dear Hadji, you ought never to have married me.’94 On the eve of another departure, Harold pleaded with her in vain that ‘being parted is only like standing back from the picture to see it better’.95 More successfully, in December 1925, he wrote requesting tulip and hyacinth bulbs, cuttings of rosemary and lavender for his new Persian garden. Vita dispatched a box of rosemary the week before Christmas.