Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West. Matthew Dennison
comedy about Molière, also written in French the same year; and Le Masque de Fer, a five-act French drama about Richelieu and Louis XIII, written, like Cyrano, in a poetic form resembling alexandrines. At the time Vita’s favourite writers were historical novelists Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas: their shadows loomed large.
A portrait of Scott hung in Knole’s Poets’ Parlour, the room used by Lionel and Victoria as their family dining room. Vita’s early writing could never be anything but self-conscious. ‘She allowed her readings of … heroic romances to … flavour her interpretation of her hero with an air of classic chivalry,’ the mature Vita wrote of Aphra Behn’s story of thwarted love and racial prejudice, Oroonoko. ‘Oroonoko resembles those seventeenth-century paintings of negroes in plumes and satins, rather than an actual slave on a practical plantation.’93 It was a criticism she might have levelled at her younger self. The teenage Vita admired heroism, grand gestures, the dramatic (and the melodramatic) impulse. ‘In our adolescence, I suppose we have all thought Ludwig [II of Bavaria] a misunderstood figure of extravagant romance,’ she reflected later; ‘in the sobriety of later years we see him to have been only an exaggerated egoist … who happened also to be a king.’94 Twice as a young woman she wrote about Napoleon, a suitably leviathan figure – in a novel, The Dark Days of Thermidor, and a verse drama, Le roi d’Elbe, both written in 1908. Both are exercises in historic romanticism.
In the beginning Vita approached her writing in a spirit of earnestness and painful sincerity: she described her adolescent self as ‘plain, priggish, studious (oh, very!)’.95 Her teenage notebooks include historical jottings, scene-by-scene breakdowns of her plays, and chapter summaries for novels. Heavily she puzzled over the nature of literature, the qualities necessary to write well and the purpose and requirements of art; essays from this time include ‘The difference between genius and talent’, and ‘The outburst of lyric poetry under Elizabeth’. ‘Sincerity is the only possible basis for great art,’ she offered sententiously;96 certainly her output lacked humour. Vita’s submergence in her self-appointed task was complete. She revelled in losing herself in an imaginary past; she was dizzy with the thrill of creation: here was an occupation to match her loneliness. Her adult self likened the experience to drunkenness. It was especially heady on those occasions when she turned her attention to family history.
Vita wrote her first ‘Sackville’ novel in 1906. The Tale of a Cavalier was inspired by Edward Sackville, 4th Earl of Dorset, for Vita ‘the embodiment of Cavalier romance’. His portrait by Van Dyck, in breastplate and striped vermilion doublet, hung in Knole’s Great Hall, constantly before her. The following year she wrote The King’s Secret. Its subject was Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, minor poet, rake, lover of Nell Gwyn, latter-day patron of Dryden and friend of Charles II (Victoria described it as Vita’s ‘Charles II book’). The 6th Earl was largely responsible for the appearance of the Poets’ Parlour in Vita’s childhood. In addition to Scott, its panelled walls were crowded with portraits of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Dr Johnson, alongside Sackville’s friends and contemporaries Dryden, Addison, Congreve, Wycherley and Pope. Such an illustrious visual compendium provided a powerful spur to Vita’s sense of vocation.
The King’s Secret included a self-portrait: ‘a boy muffled up in a blue scarf … scribbling something in a ponderous book … His pen flowed rapidly over the paper … He wrote from morning till evening.’97 She called her alter ego Cranfield Sackville, the first of numerous masculine fictional self-representations. He wrote ‘in a little arbour situated in the garden at Knole’.98 As she worked, Vita remembered, ‘the past mingled with the present in constant reminder’,99 the former as tangible as the latter, she herself in her own words a fragment of an age gone by.100 Victoria queried Vita’s self-portrait: Cranfield she considered ‘more open, less reserved’ than Vita. Plaintively she confided to her diary the wish that her daughter could ‘change and become warmer-hearted’.101 By chance, a visit to Dover Castle on 18 July, midway through The King’s Secret, brought Vita to the last meeting place of Charles II and his sister Henrietta. ‘This is interesting to me, as I am just writing about their meeting!’ she noted.102 Her earliest approaches to fiction were the literary equivalent of method acting.
But it was from a less picturesque source that Vita drew her first literary income. In July 1907, she was one of five winners of an Onlooker competition to complete a limerick. Her prize was a cheque for £1. In her diary, fifteen-year-old Vita put a characteristically heroic spin on events: ‘This morning I received the £1 I had won in the “Onlooker” verse competition. This is the first money I have got through writing; I hope as I am to restore the fortunes of the family that it will not be the last.’103 She resorted to code to record her intention of restoring the family fortunes. A fitting ambition for this ardent Sackville scion, it was not one she intended to expose to her mother’s watchful gaze.
Predictably, opposition came from close to home: Vita’s parents. Lionel was too conventional to embrace the idea of a daughter whose writing was more than a diversion. Like the majority of upper-class Englishmen of the time he mistrusted intellectualism, particularly in women: Vita described life at Knole as ‘completely unintellectual … analysis wasn’t the fashion’.104 Lionel had sown his wild oats in marrying his illegitimate cousin; in the short term, there would be no further public transgressions. Even the eventual breakdown of his marriage was managed with relative decorum on Lionel’s part. In her diary Victoria noted the physical resemblance between father and daughter and Lionel’s pride in Vita; his only plan for her was marriage into a family like his own, preferably to an eldest son. More than anything he longed for her to embrace ‘normal and ordinary things’, among which he did not count writing.105
On the surface, Victoria showed more sympathy. Victoria was Vita’s chosen reader. ‘How marvellously well she writes!’ she admitted later. ‘Reading her calm descriptions fills me with admiration … No one can beat her at her wonderful descriptions of Nature, or analysing a difficult character.’106 But Victoria too mistrusted the intensity of Vita’s involvement with her writing. Pepita’s daughter was too parvenu to condone such evident disregard for the conventional preoccupations of the society she had married into. (Vita afterwards condemned these preoccupations as limited to parties and investments, pâté de foie gras and the novels of E. F. Benson.) Two years earlier Victoria had confided to her diary her relief that Vita was ‘getting a little more coquette and tidy’, suggesting a growing interest in clothes and appearances to match her own; it was a chimera. On 16 July 1907, while she continued to work on The King’s Secret, Vita’s parents finally made their feelings plain: ‘Mama scolded me this morning because she said I write too much, and Dada said he did not approve of my writing … Mother does not know how much I love my writing.’
Vita was mistaken. Both her parents saw the extent of her passionate engagement with her writing. They noted, for example, that the majority of her thirteenth birthday presents were books: as a counterbalance, their own present consisted of sumptuous squirrel furs.107 Yet, despite their disapproval, they did little to redirect Vita’s energies. By 1907, confronted by overwhelming evidence of Lord Sackville’s mismanagement, they had embarked on a course of unwelcome financial retrenchment which only the Scott bequest would resolve; Victoria’s troublesome siblings continued their carping demands for money and title which afterwards erupted into the succession case of 1910. Above all, Victoria and Lionel knew now that their marriage was broken beyond repair. If Lionel’s response was one of courteous indifference, Victoria’s emphatically was not. She was angry, hurt, uncomprehending. There would be no resolution. Their days of acting in unison were running out. For her twenty-first birthday, Victoria presented Vita with the Italian desk which remains today in her writing room at Sissinghurst.
On 8 April 1908, an ebullient Vita recorded in her diary, ‘We had the results of the exams at Miss Woolff’s. I am first in French literature, French grammar, English literature and geography, and I won the prize essay. Brilliant performance!’ Later that year she consolidated her position. ‘Prize essay day at Miss Woolff’s,’ she wrote on 16 December: ‘I won it (“Reminiscences of an Oak Tree”). I was also first