Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West. Matthew Dennison
and so on and on. Like Evelyn Jarrold in need of reassurance from Miles Vane-Merrick in Family History, ‘the more she saw that she was making herself a nuisance, the more of a nuisance she made herself’.137 Despite their close blood relationship, the Sackville-Wests were remarkably ill-suited. For ten years, beginning around 1899, they no longer scrupled to disguise their differences. Vita witnessed this breakdown. She absorbed a highly distorted idea of marriage at a time when she was insufficiently emotionally mature to set it in context or to recognise the unusual starkness of her parents’ incompatibility. Instead she struggled to reach a solution through writing. In Behind the Mask, written between November 1909 and March 1910, her heroine renounces the man she loves in order to avoid the coruscating effects of marriage: ‘It is better for us to live apart and love each other all our lives, than to marry and quarrel after a few months.’138 The extremes in her parents’ behaviour suggested to Vita an oversimplified equation of Englishness and equanimity on Lionel’s part and Victoria’s Spanish blood and emotional misrule, as well as a model of marriage in which love was doomed to fail. Increasingly she would choose to blame Victoria. As one of her later fictional heroines states, ‘I hate lack of control … I hate people who let themselves go.’139
The collapse of her parents’ marriage was one factor which convinced Vita of her own ‘duality’: that her nature combined conflicting elements or ‘sides’, the English and the Spanish, which both demanded satisfaction. She imagined those elements as opposites and therefore irreconcilable: propriety pitched against protest, conformity against self, kindness against cruelty, ‘a free spirit or a prisoner’;140 or, as Violet Keppel explained it to Vita, purity and gravity on the one hand, dominance, sensuousness and brutality on the other. An inward struggle along these lines is often part of the experience of growing up. Vita never fully outgrew it because she regarded it as a quirk of her heredity rather than a passing phase; it further complicated her transition from childhood to adulthood. In her first published novel, Heritage, of 1919, she investigated the same dichotomy in the character of Ruth, a version of herself. Ruth is ‘cursed with a dual nature, the one coarse and unbridled, the other delicate, conventional, practical, motherly, refined …’.141 Another of her heroines likens such polarities to the two halves of an apple: ‘Was it impossible ever to keep the apple whole?’ she asks herself, ‘a globe to hold entire in the hand?’142 For Vita, the ‘coarse and unbridled’ side of her nature was every bit as appealing as its more refined opposite. On the eve of her first visit to Spain in 1913, a journey that took her from Madrid south to Granada, she wrote to her friend Irene Lawley: ‘I am going to SPAIN … If I write about it, my hand begins to shake, and my hair piles itself up on the top, like under a mantilla, with a comb, all of its own accord. So I won’t say any more.’143 A kind of coarseness could excite Vita.
Instead of steering a middle course, or choosing one way over the other, Vita indulged both inclinations separately. ‘My whole curse has been a duality with which I was too weak and too self-indulgent to struggle,’ as she explained in 1920.144 ‘Nothing is foreordained./ I hold my liberty/ Unstained and unconstrained,’ Vita would write in her poem ‘Heredity’. In the event, the ‘stain’ of her parents’ marriage proved ineradicable. The desire to satisfy in full both facets of her make-up would shape key moments in her life.
Lionel and Victoria had in common their devotion to Knole and to Vita: even that was at variance, different in origin, form and expression. A selfish and romantically uncomplicated man, Lionel was incapable of interpreting Victoria’s sexual withdrawal other than as a corresponding emotional withdrawal, so he sought satisfaction elsewhere. In transferring his desire he ended up transferring his affection. Victoria expended her energy on Knole and, with increasing frequency, on scenes of the sort guaranteed to drive Lionel further away. Unwitting it may have been, but Victoria’s first blind steps along the road to bitterness and disillusion were taken deliberately.
Vita watched her and saw what she regarded as her mother’s ‘mistake’. It did not occur to her that Victoria’s behaviour was a cri de coeur. She had not read in her mother’s diary her desperate desire for warmth; she suspected nothing then of her frustration at the coldness first of Lord Sackville, then Lionel and even Vita herself, with her tendency to keep her feelings secret and resist confidences. Vita’s solution, explored through fiction, was a world in which partners simply deceived one another, concealing their true emotions beneath a smiling veneer, their motives self-protection and survival, the result a semblance of marriage in appearance only: legitimate mendacity in the interests of the greater happiness. Behind the Mask is among the most aptly titled of her books. ‘Is there anyone without the mask?’ she asks.145 It was a pragmatic, cynical approach, and undesirable in a girl of eighteen on the brink of adulthood. She saw it very clearly: she was never wholly disabused of her theory. ‘Men have two natures,’ she wrote later, ‘and one of them they keep concealed.’146 At another level, her conviction that each of us presents to the world a mask which conceals as much as it reveals explained the impossibility of ever fully knowing anyone but ourselves, another theme she would explore in her fiction. ‘When you see a person, a body, marvellous casket and mask of secrets, what do you think?’ she asked in Heritage.147
Unsurprisingly, Victoria proved incapable of wearing any sort of mask. As her relationship with Lionel worsened, she took up with Seery instead. As an added distraction, she opened a shop on South Audley Street, selling lampshades, waste-paper baskets, boxes, blotters and ashtrays decorated with epigrams and mottoes, including her favourite: ‘A camel can go for nine days without water, but who wants to be a camel?’ She called the shop Spealls, an anagram of the name of its first manageress, and harried Vita to think up similar mottoes and short verses; Vita failed. Spealls enabled Victoria to visit London frequently. Her relationship with Seery grew closer; it was peppered with rows and reconciliations. Seery resented Spealls and its call on Victoria’s time; the shop provided further grounds for differences. Then, sporadically, Seery threatened to cut Victoria out of his will. To both of them this constant negotiation and renegotiation of the terms of their relationship was the breath of life. Even as a teenager, such tempestuousness appalled Vita. After witnessing a particularly acrimonious quarrel between Seery and her mother on 22 March 1910, Vita wrote: ‘I thought they would quarrel for good, but he became apologetic and they have half patched it up, though it can’t ever be as before. It was all very unpleasant, and they called each other names and I hated it.’148
For Victoria, such incidents were a game, a form of self-affirmation. They proved her continuing ability to dominate a man completely. With Seery in the role of cavaliere servente, there was no unwelcome complication of sex. Vita’s own self-affirmation would take different forms, though, like Victoria, her ‘Spanish’ side revelled in the world of feelings: like the narrator of Heritage, ‘Spanish’ Vita believed that ‘the vitality of human beings is to be judged … by the force of their emotion’.149 In the decades to come, her own emotions, alongside her attitude to sex, would give rise to numberless complications.
‘Oh, what an awful word!’ said Juliet, her spirits suddenly reasserting themselves. ‘Wedlock! It makes me feel as though I had chains round my wrists and ankles, and a great dragging load of wood. Wed-lock! Locked-in!’
V. Sackville-West, The Easter Party, 1953
‘I SHALL NEVER forget it,’ Vita recorded of The Masque of Shakespeare, staged in the park at Knole on the afternoon of 2 July 1910. In a costume loaned to her by Ellen Terry, Vita took the part of Portia from The Merchant of Venice. Terry herself had worn the costume in 1875, voluminous robes of red velvet. It was Portia’s disguise as the ‘young