Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West. Matthew Dennison
for Ceylon with her mother in the aftermath of the death of Edward VII, Violet kissed Vita goodbye with all the (considerable) passion she could muster; Vita was disturbed by her passion and by her urgency. Violet wrote her love letters: ‘I love you, Vita, because you never gave me back my ring.’17 Later Violet wrote asking Vita not to get married before her return.
Her letter was prescient. On 29 June, only four days before the Masque, Vita met the man she would marry. The occasion was a dinner party before a trip to Conan Doyle’s The Speckled Band at the Adelphi Theatre. The young man was subsequently invited to Knole for the Masque. With Rosamund and a small party, he stayed for the weekend. Victoria took the chance to show him over the house. Vita felt a degree of curiosity, no more. On 29 June, the first words she had heard the young man utter were ‘What fun!’. She liked at once ‘his irrepressible brown curls, his laughing eyes, his charming smile’:18 these were not necessarily lover-like attributes. He appeared boyish and light-hearted. These, too, were not lover-like traits but they appealed to Vita – even as they contrasted with the vigorous, troubadour quality that distinguished the men she herself impersonated in her writing and her daydreams. It was not love at first sight when Vita met Harold Nicolson, though she would later recycle the scene in Family History: ‘Miles came to fetch [Evelyn]. He was especially gay. What fun, he said in his most boyish way.’19
In fact, Vita wrote, it was not until three years later, in the spring of 1913, that ‘something snapped, and I loved Harold from that day on’.20 In her diary, she contradicts herself: she decided that she loved Harold as soon as he had kissed her. That was September 1912. Harold’s kiss took him more than two years. In his defence, he was away for much of that period: in Madrid until September 1911, thereafter in Constantinople, where he served as a secretary at the British embassy. In the meantime for Vita there was Rosamund; a Florentine marquess called Orazio Pucci, who had fallen in love with her in Italy in 1909 and the following year trailed her halfway across Europe, even to Knole; and, in Pucci’s footsteps, a nameless artist encountered on a boat trip on Lake Como, whom Vita rejected lightly as ‘second coup de foudre!!!’.21 With beauty came the brittleness and casual unkindness of one growing rapidly accustomed to being pursued. On and off during that summer of 1910, Harold and Vita met, often at Victoria’s invitation at Knole. In November, in her first surviving letter to Harold, Vita asked him to accompany her to dinner and then a dance. Her letter was deliberately light in tone. She told Harold that she was not alone: Rosamund was with her, and one of Harold’s colleagues from the Foreign Office. Harold could not dance and disliked it as a pastime. He would learn that Vita was a poor dancer too.
Clearly, unlike Portia, Vita’s ‘destiny’ would not deny her ‘voluntary choosing’. Nevertheless, there were similarities as well as differences between the women’s predicaments. Like Portia, Vita too was squabbled over. Her own actions served to complicate rather than to simplify those squabbles and, at times, as we shall see, she actively encouraged jealousies among her lovers. The child who had spent so much time on her own, uncertain of her parents’ love, grew up to crave close, intense, intimate connections and, often, to need more than one person’s love at a time. Her parents intended Vita to make ‘a great match with a great title’. Vita balked; but her interlude as a debutante was a busy one, with four balls a week and lunch parties daily.
The young men Vita met did not attract her. She dismissed them disparagingly as ‘little dancing things in ballrooms’, ‘the little silly pink and whites’.22 Even dancing frequently left her unmoved: ‘All the dance tunes sounded much the same … Faintly lascivious, faintly cacophonous; a young man’s arm round one, a young man’s body surprisingly close, his breath on one’s hair, and yet a disharmony between oneself and him, or, at most, a fictitious temporary closeness which tumbled to pieces as soon as the music stopped.’23 She made an exception for the clever Patrick Shaw-Stewart (and he was ‘so ugly’ that she dressed him up in her mind ‘in Louis XI clothes’24 but omitted to think of him romantically) and for Lady Desborough’s tall son Julian Grenfell. Grenfell was ‘a Soul’, part of a pre-war set of thoughtful, poetic, politically minded aristocrats, and Vita liked Souls: ‘They are amusing and easy and not heavy to talk to.’25
Given Vita’s literary aspirations, Lionel considered it a distinct, if troubling, possibility that she would marry a Soul. (Handsome Edward Horner, another Soul, was also attentive.) In the event Julian Grenfell may have been put off by his mother; Lady Desborough’s ambivalence is clear in a letter she wrote after Vita’s marriage to Harold. She reported that Vita had become ‘so charming, so pretty and so clean! and quite tidy, and not a bit of a prig or a bore’.26 Her tone of surprise indicates her previous assessment. For her part, Vita explained simply that, until she married Harold, she had ‘scarcely understood the meaning of being young’.27 Grenfell himself, like several of Vita’s would-be suitors including Edward Horner and Patrick Shaw-Stewart, died in the First World War. Before that he was caught in a downstairs cloakroom with Violet Keppel.
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