Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West. Matthew Dennison
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.
Vita’s upbringing had taught her the egotism of love. She learned too an idea of the selfishness of sexual gratification, particularly male sexual gratification. Jack could be excused on grounds of his youth. Not so Campbell. Within Vita’s family circle were examples of men behaving badly. The Sackville succession case had inevitably drawn attention to the different consequences for Vita’s grandfather and Pepita of their illicit love. Lord Sackville, as part-time lover, received unlimited sexual access and devotion: in provincial nineteenth-century Spain, Pepita forfeited respectability and her dancing career. She made herself ridiculous by adopting the title ‘Countess West’, and she died giving birth to the seventh of Lord Sackville’s children. Despite her best efforts, she failed to shield those children from the implications of their illegitimacy. In the case of Vita’s parents, Lionel does not appear to have worried over explanations for Victoria’s sexual withdrawal; forgotten were the ecstasy of first infatuation, her exclamations of delirium, his tender lover’s, ‘Was it nice, Vicky?’70 Instead Lionel sought consolation elsewhere. To Victoria’s evident distress, he allowed his emotions to keep pace with his libido. In time Lionel and Victoria’s physical separation eroded their relationship entirely.
Vita was young when she discovered that Knole could never belong to her. A male entail promised house and estate instead to her cousin Eddy, son of Lionel’s brother Charles. Nine years younger than Vita and a gifted pianist from an early age, Eddy was in every way her inferior in fighting and war games and cricket and boyish bluster. If Vita was hardy and masculine, Eddy was soft and girlish (and afterwards homosexual). The cruelty of this reversal was not lost on Vita. ‘I used to hate Eddy when he was a baby and I wasn’t much more, because he would have Knole,’ she explained to Harold in 1912.71 Gender was an accident of birth, but maleness – even Eddy’s unconvincing, panstick-and-rouged, velvet-clad maleness – was rewarded. ‘Knole is denied to me for ever, through a “technical fault over which we have no control”, as they say on the radio,’ she wrote.72
As with inheritance, Vita decided that in relationships the male role was that of taking, not giving: an unthinking assumption of the upper hand. It was a role she herself would play. In her novel All Passion Spent, Vita’s