Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West. Matthew Dennison
embarked on what would become a lengthy and at times inflammatory sequence of letters. Vita responded with more news of her rabbits and also her dogs: an Aberdeen terrier called Pickles and an Irish terrier predictably known as Pat. Nothing daunted, Violet poured out what Vita labelled ‘precocious letters on every topic in a variety of tongues, imaginative exceedingly, copiously illustrated, bursting occasionally into erratic and illegible verse’.123
Between letters Vita visited Violet at her parents’ house in Portman Square; Violet was invited to Knole. Portman Square, where Violet’s mother, Alice Keppel, played host to Edward VII as his mistress, suggested sex at its most discreet and profitable; Knole, with its whispering galleries of Sackville history, imparted romance, a thrill of derring-do glittering in dust motes. Vita’s shortcomings as a correspondent notwithstanding, for Violet it was a perfect combination. ‘I fell in love with John when I was eleven and a half – I swear that’s the truth – and for eight years I never stopped thinking about him,’ she wrote of Vita–John in Broderie Anglaise.124 In another novel, Hunt the Slipper, she suggested that ‘one never loves more passionately than at the age of ten’.125
Vita and Violet shared dancing and Italian lessons. In the spring of 1906 they were in Paris at the same time. In the apartment in the rue Laffitte, in front of an audience of Lionel and Victoria and Sir John Murray Scott’s French servants, they staged Vita’s play about the reign of Louis XIII, Le Masque de Fer. Vita took the part of the Man in the Iron Mask and was delighted when Seery’s cook burst into tears. Less competent a French speaker than Vita (she did not have the benefit of a French-convent-educated mother), Violet took French lessons. They began to talk to one another in French. There was a special excitement to the intimacy of addressing each other as ‘tu’. That sense of intimacy grew. In the spring of 1908, Violet told Vita she loved her, ‘and I,’ wrote Vita, ‘finding myself expected to rise to the occasion, stumbled out an unfamiliar “darling”’.126 Violet sought to make a pact of the exchange by presenting Vita with a ring when next they met. The ring had been a reluctant present to Violet from the Bond Street art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen when Violet was six. It was carved from red lava with the image of a woman’s head and had belonged to a Venetian Doge of the early Renaissance. The sixteen-year-old Vita composed a special entry in her diary and kept the ring lifelong.
Vita’s relationship with Violet Keppel changed the course of her life: she was slow to respond fully to overtures which, on Violet’s part, contained a sexual dimension almost from the start. This was not, Vita would claim, because she mistook Violet’s intentions. Violet was always unique among Vita’s friends: colourful and sophisticated; her ‘erratic’ friend, as she introduced Violet to Harold Nicolson; ‘this brilliant, this extraordinary, this almost unearthly creature’, as Vita described her at the height of their affair in 1920;127 the friend whose love she argued she had recognised immediately. She said that she had understood Violet’s early feelings for her as she had understood those of Rosamund, whom she had admitted she loved by the time she was fifteen. Her mother’s diary challenges such assertions of sexual maturity. ‘Vita and I had begun together The Woman in White,’ Victoria wrote on 21 September 1904; ‘I dropped it as the child’s mind is still too young and I am careful to keep her very pure-minded.’ She had confiscated The Count of Monte Cristo for the same reasons.
If Vita was aware of the nature of Rosamund and Violet’s feelings, she ought to have recognised that they were rivals. In the event she admitted no need to arbitrate between them. In this way, at the outset of her romantic career, she established a pattern which would continue, juggling multiple lovers with no apparent sense of conflict or disloyalty. ‘All love is a weakness … in so far as it destroys some part of our independence,’ says Sebastian in The Edwardians.128 For Vita, invariably more loved than loving, love would seldom compromise her independence. She exercised freedom of choice both romantically and sexually, countering Silas’s statement to Nan in her early novel The Dragon in Shallow Waters that ‘freedom goes when the heart goes’.129 Invariably she retained a clear conscience, and she did not often lose her heart.
Vita did not return to Miss Woolff’s school in the autumn of 1909. Instead she went abroad with her mother and Sir John. Her extended visit to the Continent took in Germany, Austria, Poland and Russia. At Antoniny in the Ukraine, Vita experienced a last gasp of the ancien régime, staying with Count Joseph Potocki, ‘riding, dancing, laughing; living at a fantastic rate in that fantastic oasis of extravagance and feudalism, ten thousand horses on the estate, eighty English hunters, and a pack of English hounds; a park full of dromedaries; … Tokay handed round by a giant; cigarettes handed round by dwarfs in eighteenth-century costumes’.130 Potocki’s estate covered a hundred miles. Dazzled by splendour, aware of the poverty endured by all bar her host, Vita recognised an alternative, and disturbing, version of the tale of inheritance she had imbibed as Knole’s child. The inequalities shocked her. ‘That experience was really like going back to France before 1789,’ she wrote in 1944. ‘It was horrible; it was revealing.’ The travellers wound up in October in Paris, where Victoria ordered dresses for Vita at Worth. As her eighteenth birthday approached, her mother had different plans for Vita, who that year had begun her reluctant career as a debutante. ‘Party in the evening at Lady Jane Coombe’s,’ Vita had written laconically in her diary on 25 January: ‘Hated it.’ For Lionel and Victoria, whose ambitions for Vita’s marriage were considerable, it was an ominous beginning to her first season. Vita would discover, as she had predicted leaving Russia, a stultifying sense of confinement about the life that was now expected of her at home: ‘How shall I ever be able to live in this restricted island! I want expanse.’131 In the short term she did not rebel. She wrote out her protest in a new novel. In Behind the Mask, a story of modern marriage set in France, she dismissed ‘the whole business’ of the marriage market as ‘coarse and vulgar’.132
On 5 October 1905, Victoria Sackville-West had decided to make a new will. She had visited the family solicitor, Mr Pemberton of Meynell & Pemberton, back in March 1897, in order to formalise her intention of leaving ‘everything to Lionel in trust for Vita, till she marries with his consent; then he will give her the income of the capital’.133 On that occasion Vita was days short of her fifth birthday. By the time Victoria returned to the fray, her daughter was thirteen. Victoria explained her motives: ‘Now … I do not think I shall have another child, after all the precautions Lionel and I have taken.’134
Sexual intercourse ceased for Lionel and Victoria Sackville-West in 1904. Once it had formed the bedrock of this mismatched couple’s relationship. The decision was Victoria’s, her justification the weakness of her nervous system, as explained to her by her obliging physician Dr Ferrier. From now on, iron tablets rather than Lionel would be her medicine. Her husband was thirty-seven years old, active and highly sexed: previously Victoria had described him as ‘a stallion’, their lovemaking ‘delirium’. Lionel, for his part, had once thought Victoria ‘the very incarnation of passionate love’: ‘Her breasts are too delicious for words – round firm and soft with two darling little buttons which I adore kissing. She has the most magnificent hips and legs with the most ravishing little lock of hair between them which is as silky and soft as possible.’135 During the early years of their marriage, Victoria’s diary is full of sex: when, where and how often. In the beginning, the naughtiness of ‘Baby’ (Lionel’s penis) is a constant refrain. Sex forced the couple to miss morning appointments; it inconvenienced the servants; it kept Victoria awake at night; it bound them together.
Childbirth brought about the change. For Victoria, desire gave way to fear. Uppermost in her mind was the spectre of another unendurable confinement. In the aftermath of Vita’s birth, she claimed she would do anything to make Lionel happy, ‘even if it meant undergoing the horrors of childbirth’.136 Then she persuaded him to adopt the rudimentary contraceptive practices of the time and did her best to avoid that very contingency.
If abstinence appeared to reassure Victoria, its effect on Lionel was quite different. Victoria was volatile. In all her relationships she lacked self-control. In her marriage she positively embraced the Sturm und Drang of lovers’ quarrels. By contrast Lionel was peaceable,