Behind the Mask Page 8
Yet even as Vita failed to feel any quickening of the pulse in the company of her most notable suitors – Lord Granby, heir to the Duke of Rutland, ‘a curious rather morose person’,28 and Lord Lascelles, future Earl of Harewood, whom she considered ‘rather dull’ – she realised she would have to marry someone. She never seriously considered the possibility of an unmarried life, or a life restricted to female admiration of the sort Rosamund and Violet offered her. Meeting Harold Nicolson did not persuade her to give up such admiration, however. Harold’s on-and-off, three-year courtship of Vita was conducted against a background of Rosamund’s constant companionship; constrained by his work, Harold himself was more often absent than present. From the summer of 1911, Rosamund had her own bedroom at Knole. It was next door to Vita’s, overlooking the Pheasants’ Court. Vita described the two of them as ‘inseparable’. She also claimed that they were ‘living on terms of the greatest possible intimacy’.29 A letter written by Rosamund during a separation from Vita appears to corroborate that statement: ‘I do miss you, darling, and I want to feel your soft cool face coming out of that mass of pussy hair.’30 Vita, however, denied that they made love: she admitted only that she was so overwhelmingly in love with Rosamund, that ‘passion … used to make my head swim sometimes’.31
Also asserting her claim on Vita’s heart long distance was Violet Keppel, who travelled from Ceylon to Italy and Germany. ‘You won’t tell me you love me, because you fear (wrongly, most of the time) that I will not make the same declaration to you at the same moment!’ she wrote from Bavaria.32 Since Vita’s side of their correspondence has not survived, we do not know exactly what she said or did to inspire such an outburst. Having been sustained by the thought of Vita through her ‘exile’ in Ceylon, Violet had decided already on the course of their relationship. In the end, as in all her relationships, it was Vita who would make the crucial decision. If Vita was slow to fall in love with Harold, and untouched by the attentions of men like Granby, Lascelles, Grenfell, Horner and Shaw-Stewart, it was because her heart was otherwise occupied, her physical appetites fully stimulated and mostly satisfied.
Harold’s recommendation to Vita was unusual. She regarded him as an ideal companion, a ‘playmate’ (her own italics) and someone with whom she could ‘talk about anything without minding, quite brutally’.33 He corresponded exactly to her description of the hero of Behind the Mask, which Vita began that year: ‘a playmate, clever and gay, with whom she feels an effortless affinity’;34 in another unpublished novel, Marian Strangways, of 1913, Vita described feelings of ‘companionable love … half-friendship, half-playfellowship’.35 Harold would remain all of these things for half a century; these commendations survived the crises in their marriage. Vita did not base her choice on sexual attraction. Portia tells Bassanio, ‘In terms of choice I am not solely led/ By nice direction of a maiden’s eyes.’ The same was true for Vita. Physical attraction characterised her relationship with Rosamund Grosvenor, whom she first admired in her bathing costume when she was thirteen; her relationship with Violet Keppel subsequently represented a more intense infatuation. Vita knew already that these feelings were different from those which men inspired in her; she admitted that she did not think of men ‘in what is called “that way”’.36 Where men were concerned she remained as she was at eleven, when a farmer’s son in Scotland ‘told [her] a great many things he oughtn’t to have told [her]’ about sex: she was ‘neither excited nor interested’ by his revelations.37 His subsequent demonstration of the physical differences between boys and girls provoked a more dramatic response. Deeply shocked, Vita fled.38
For all his boyishness and his bright eyes, the curly-haired young man invited to Knole for the Masque of Shakespeare failed to excite Vita physically. At no point in his undemonstrative courtship would he do so. Afterwards, Vita stated that it was Harold’s own fault. He was too ‘over-respectful’; his behaviour convinced her (correctly, in the event) that he was not ‘the lover-type of man’.39 Until Harold’s kiss in September 1912, Vita’s response to him was like that of Gottfried Künstler, in her novella of the same name. As Gottfried grew closer to Anna Roche, we read, nevertheless ‘it never entered his head to fall in love with her’.40 Unlike Vita, Gottfried did not blame Anna for his conduct. Her protest has a hollow ring to it. She later claimed of the period before Harold’s proposal, ‘People began to tell me he was in love with me, which I didn’t believe was true, but wished that I could believe it.’ Significantly she adds: ‘I wasn’t in love with him then.’41 Yet for reasons of her own – insecurity and confusion uppermost – she needed to believe that Harold loved her.
Harold almost certainly did fall in love with Vita, albeit his affection, like hers, lacked physical ardour. It was a conundrum rich in irony. At eighteen, Vita had yet to realise the implications of her feelings of arousal or non-arousal: she did not regard her ‘intimacy’ with Rosamund as any sort of disqualification from marriage or, more surprisingly, disloyalty to Harold. ‘It never struck me as wrong that I should be more or less engaged to Harold, and at the same time very much in love with Rosamund,’ she confessed in her autobiography.42 To Harold she wrote: ‘I love the Rubens lady [Rosamund], and somewhere in the world there is you.’43 She did not think of herself as gay. Like the majority of women of her generation, she considered her long-term sexual choices as marriage or abstinence. Lesbianism, as understood today, did not exist as an option for Vita; the word itself had yet to enter common parlance. Later she told Harold that she had known nothing then of homosexuality. It was, anyway, a label she would have rejected. Rosamund provided affection, distraction and physical excitement during Harold’s lengthy absences. There was virtually no intellectual companionship between the women. In time, Vita would come to consider them temperamentally mismatched: ‘She is a stupid little thing, and her conventionality drives me mad.’44 Regardless of her sexual feelings for Rosamund – or Rosamund’s apparently deeper feelings for her – Vita would shortly decide to marry Harold. Rosamund’s destiny, like Julian’s winter garments in Challenge, was to be ‘put aside’.
Six years her senior and a man, Harold was less naïve than Vita. He was aware that, despite his love for her, his sexual inclinations were predominantly homosexual and could not be satisfied by a wife. As recently as September 1911, he had been forced to leave Madrid under a cloud after contracting gonorrhoea from an unidentified partner. (Unaware of the nature of his illness, Vita described him sympathetically as ‘rather a pathetic figure wrapped up in an ulster’.45) But he was not deterred. Throughout his life Harold treated his affairs lightly. They provided physical pleasure, they were divertissements, but they did not, in his own eyes, define him as a person. With few exceptions, they never overwhelmed him emotionally in the way that Vita was repeatedly consumed by her affairs. Intermittently Harold craved sex with another man: he avoided acknowledging any need for the larger commitments – and rewards – of a full-scale relationship. Marriage was still a conventional expectation in early-twentieth-century England: Harold Nicolson was a man of conventional background. He had chosen a conventional career and would pursue it with more or less conventional success until Vita’s intransigence knocked the wheels off the cart. In 1910, male homosexuality was a criminal offence. The need for secrecy in relation to this central aspect of his life surely shaped Harold’s behaviour in the summer he met Vita; the fact of his homosexuality partly accounted for the nature of his polite but dilatory courtship. As it happened, his chosen wife was every bit as secretive as he was. She allowed Harold to believe that her love for Rosamund was no more than an intensely loving friendship, while reciprocating Rosamund’s devotion and, up to a point, her desires. The courtship of this young man and woman already skilled in concealment, uncertain or dishonest about the nature of their sexual appetites and their emotional needs, was inevitably bound for choppy waters.
In the eyes of Vita’s mother, Harold’s parents Sir Arthur and Lady Nicolson were ‘very ugly and very small and very
unsmart looking’.46 From the beginning, Vita and her parents discounted Harold’s family. (Fifty years later, Vita forbad Harold to be buried alongside her in the family vault at Withyham on the grounds that he was not a Sackville.) They discounted Sir Arthur’s achievements as ambassador to Russia; they discounted Lady Nicolson’s Anglo-Irish connections and her sister’s marriage to the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin and Ava. (Lord Dufferin was an eminent Victorian whose record as a diplomat and public servant eclipsed that of any Sackville since the end of the sixteenth century, when Thomas Sackville served his cousin Elizabeth I as Lord High Treasurer of England. Lord Dufferin had an Irish estate at Clandeboye – the Sackvilles discounted that too.) After Lionel had failed his Foreign Office examinations in 1890 and given up on the idea of a career, the Sackvilles discounted the world of work entirely. Referring to Harold’s position as a junior diplomat in Constantinople, Sackville family gossip labelled him ‘a penniless Third Secretary’. Harold did not deny it. With a salary of £250 a year, he described himself as ‘supremely ineligible’;47 he categorised his family background as that of a ‘landless tribe’ lacking ‘hereditary soil’.48 There was the rub. For though the Nicolson baronetcy originated in the first half of the seventeenth century, and Sir Arthur would be created Baron Carnock in 1916, the Nicolsons were members of a service class which the Sackvilles had forgotten and forsaken. They could not lay claim to a Knole. Rather they lived at 53 Cadogan Gardens, supported only by Sir Arthur’s salary. Harold’s own salary contrasted poorly with that of his wealthiest competitors for Vita’s hand: the annual income of Lord Granby’s father, the Duke of Rutland, was somewhere in the region of £100,000,49 while Lord Lascelles told Victoria that his father’s income was ‘£31,000 a year from his land alone, plus plenty of cash’.50 With uncharacteristic understatement, Victoria wrote in her diary about the prospect of an engagement between Vita and Harold: ‘It is not at present a good marriage.’51
Vita was as conscious as her parents of the discrepancy, however slight, between her own claim to elite status and Harold’s. It was a claim which counted for more then than now. Brought up as a child of the diplomatic aristocracy, Harold’s childhood memories included vignettes of the royal courts of Bulgaria, Spain and Russia, of the British embassy in Paris, with its powdered footmen and gilded opulence, and of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy life of his mother’s family and his Uncle Dufferin. He confessed a sense of ‘effortless superiority’.52 It was an attitude of mind. That he chose to articulate this feeling at all suggests a degree of self-consciousness incompatible with effortlessness. Vita’s social outlook was more straightforward. Hers were the assumptions of an age-old landed caste; later in life she adopted a tag of Victoria’s about her attitudes having been formed before the French Revolution. Virginia Woolf would describe her as ‘very splendid’: ‘all about her is … patrician’. An upbringing at Knole, latterly smoothed by Seery’s generous handouts, had done little to cultivate ‘ordinary’ instincts in Vita. Only in middle age did she acknowledge that the Sackville glory days were long past: she never made such an admission to Harold. She ‘ought to be a grande dame, very rich’, Victoria wrote, ‘where she could do what she likes and not have to do anything against the grain’.53 To Harold, Vita wrote: ‘I like having things done for me.’ It bored her to do things for other people.54 She never learned to cook and, until her death, relied on servants in most areas of her domestic life. As a debutante she preferred ‘a very fine ball … with powdered footmen announcing duchesses’ to ‘those scrimmages at the Ritz’.55 There was an opulence to Vita that was mostly uncontrived.
As Vita herself was aware, her own background was closer to that of the early suitors she rejected – Lord Granby and Lord Lascelles – than to Harold’s family, with its steady accumulation of diligent public service. On 6 June 1912, Vita attended a ‘100-years-ago’ ball at the Royal Albert Hall. She was dressed as a figure from one of the Hoppner portraits at Knole, in the very costume worn by the sitter, with ‘two tall grey feathers and a white turban’.56 Walking round the hall in company with the heirs to dukedoms, she told Harold, ‘I could see “How suitable!” in people’s eyes as we went by.’57 Her motive in writing in this vein was partly ironic; she may also have intended to rouse Harold to jealousy. In her complacency she overlooked Harold’s previous unofficial engagement – to Lady Eileen Wellesley, herself a duke’s daughter (as well as one of Vita’s fellow cast members in the Shakespeare Masque). If the Nicolsons lacked élan, they were not, as all acknowledged, what the Sackvilles termed ‘bedint’: middle class, vulgar or worse. Despite Vita’s family pride, the marriage of Harold Nicolson to Vita Sackville-West was no mésalliance.
Her sense of social superiority notwithstanding, Vita was ripe to fall in love. Remembering in 1920, she disparaged Rosamund’s intellectual limitations (in Challenge, where Rosamund appears loosely fictionalised as Fru Thyregod, Vita dismisses her conversation as a ‘babble of coy platitudes’58); their liaison undoubtedly made Vita happier than otherwise. It stimulated that streak of romance which inspired her to write; the same impulse affected the nature of her writing and some, but not all, of her relationships. It would never leave her. In 1913, in a poem called ‘Early Love’, she described a relish for ‘those fond days when every spoken word/ [Is] sweet, and all the fleeting things unspoken/ Yet sweeter …’.59 She told Harold: ‘There is no fun equal to being quite at the beginning of things.’60 A part of Vita was in love with the idea of love and would remain so.
Two centuries earlier, in his poem ‘Dorinda’s Sparkling Wit and Eyes’, Charles Sackville had written: ‘Love is a calm and tender joy,/ Kind are his looks and soft his pace.’ Vita had seen little of the calmness and tenderness, the kindness or softness of love. Calmness was so seldom a feature of Victoria’s relationships; and kindliness had long ceased to play a central part in Lionel and Victoria’s marriage. As a child, Vita had frequently lacked the easy reassurance of her parents’ love. Of those other adults in her life, Lord Sackville was costive in his emotional reticence and few of Vita’s governesses enjoyed more than a fleeting tenure. The departure of Miss Bennett, known as ‘Bentie’, when Vita was ten, caused her real distress. Vita admired her father and convinced herself (correctly) of the depth of their mostly unspoken bond: ‘You and I are so alike and are not always able to show these things,’ he would write to her later.61 Indeed, she minded so much about her father’s good opinion that she prevented him from reading any of her early novels and plays. According to Victoria, Seery also thought of Vita as ‘like a daughter’;62 along with Bentie, Ralph Battiscombe and her parents, he was a legatee in a will Vita compiled aged nine. The bequests to Seery included ‘my miniature, my claret jug, my whip’, in addition to the khaki suit in which Vita played at being Sir Redvers Buller. She was not troubled by the discrepancy in size between her nine-year-old self and twenty-five-stone Sir John: she regarded him, she would write, as ‘a mass of good humour and kindliness’.63
By the time she met Harold Nicolson, Vita had limited but vexed experience of male libido. Her first sexual encounter occurred when she was eleven. It happened in Scotland, at Sluie, the Aberdeenshire estate overlooking the lower Grampians which Seery rented annually. Afterwards Vita remembered the place with something close to rapture: ‘those lovely, lovely hills, those blazing sunsets, those runnels of icy water where I used to make water-wheels, those lovely summer evenings’.64 At Sluie, rules were relaxed: ‘I had a kilt and a blue jersey, and I don’t suppose I was ever tidy once, even on Sundays.’65 Vita spent her days with the gillies; she accompanied Seery shooting, helping him over stiles and stone walls; she ran through beech trees, silver birches and pines, foraged in the heather and the bracken and the loch behind the house; she played with the children of the local farmer. It was a paradise for this tomboy with a taste for fresh air and disdain for conventional girlish pastimes; her time outdoors was enlivened by that element of easy companionship missing from so much of her childhood. In her diary for 29 August
1907, shortly after arriving at Sluie, she recorded her first meeting that year with the farmer’s children: ‘I think Jack and Phemie were pleased to see me.’66 Four years previously, the same Jack had told Vita he loved her. He told her so again when Vita was thirteen.
It happened the first time in the shadow of the gillie’s hut. Despite what Vita described as his crippling awareness of the social gulf that existed between himself and the object of his affections, Jack took it upon himself to suit the deed to the word. His intention, Vita concluded years later, was to rape her: only ‘his inborn respect, his sense of class’ prevented him.67 Instead he sought relief in masturbation, a hand on Vita’s thigh. At the same time he forced Vita ‘to take hold of his dog’s penis and work it backwards and forwards until “the dog reached the point where he came and squirted his semen all over my shoes, and I was alarmed by this manifestation”’.68 That ‘alarmed’ sounds an understatement. With hindsight Vita sought to minimise the oddness of this encounter by explaining her lack of childish squeamishness about sex: she was a country child, with a country child’s knowledge of birds and bees. She denied that either Jack’s masturbation or his dog’s ejaculation had troubled her.
More distasteful were the unwelcome attentions of her godfather. The Hon. Kenneth Hallyburton Campbell, stockbroker son of Lord Stratheden and Campbell, was twenty-one years Vita’s senior, a friend of Seery’s, called by Victoria ‘Kenito’. This affectionate diminutive proved misleading. Campbell first tried to rape Vita when she was sixteen, in her bedroom at Knole. On that occasion only the appearance of a housemaid carrying hot water saved her. ‘Frequently after that’ he renewed his attempt.69 Campbell’s position of trust exacerbated the gravity of his offences, which Vita grew practised at evading. Later, like Jack, he told Vita he loved her. In her diary she confided her sense of horror. Later still, when his marriage to Rosalinda Oppenheim turned out badly, Campbell complained to Vita of his unhappiness.