Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West. Matthew Dennison
belief that woman should minister to man? … Was there something beautiful, something active, something creative even, in her apparent submission to Henry?’73 Certainly Vita thought at length on the contrasting roles of men and women. For the most part she was clear about her answers to such questions: she was incapable of discerning the beauty of submission. She devised a solution to suit herself. As with much in her life, her ‘feminism’ was self-serving. It consisted of a refusal to compromise anything touching her self-identity. That identity, as we have seen, embraced both masculine and feminine.
Sackville history included examples of formidable women, independent-minded and financially independent. Chief among them was the seventeenth-century matriarch Lady Anne Clifford. In 1923, Vita edited Lady Anne’s diary for publication. Occasionally she likened herself to her indomitable forebear. Among other things, Lady Anne shared Vita’s taste for solitude: ‘though I kept my chamber altogether yet methinks the time is not so tedious to me as when I used to be abroad’.74 But the forebears who appealed to Vita as a child were not women like Lady Anne; rather, they were associated with tales of cavalier adventure and derring-do. In the history Vita loved, it was men who played the hero’s part. Unconsciously or otherwise, she determined to take the same part, and Vita was often selfish in her relationships, not only with her lovers but within her family too. She excused it as her ‘happy-go-lucky … everything-will-turn-out-right-if-you-don’t-fuss-about-it’ nature: in practice it meant she left the fussing – and the fallout – to other people.75 Her life in retrospect is a wholesale rejection of the idea that sexual gratification exists as a masculine prerogative. Twice she turned down proposals of marriage from a young man who wooed her with a Christmas present of a bear cub; ‘He has the worst temper of anyone I know. He is cruel,’ she wrote of Ivan Hay.76 Correctly she estimated the unlikelihood of his indulging her need for dominance. In a rare instance of humour she christened the bear cub ‘Ivan the Terrible’. With Rosamund she was photographed for an illustrated paper, walking baby Ivan in the gardens at Knole. The paper captioned its photograph ‘Beauty and the Bear’.77 Irritated by Vita’s debutante success, from which she felt herself excluded, and laconic in her sarcasm, Violet Keppel commented that ‘bears had taken the place of rabbits’.78
A century ago, Vita’s rejection of conventional gender roles in sex was more controversial than it is today. Like much in her life, she attempted to resolve the issue through writing. She created male protagonists who deliberately deny their sexual instincts and in this way forfeit the aggressor’s role, or, like Calladine in Grey Wethers, have their sex stripped from them by the author: ‘Mr Calladine was a gentleman, – she couldn’t call him a man, no, but a gentleman he certainly was, and she was even a little overawed by his gentility.’79 The private life of Sir Walter Mortibois in The Easter Party for example, is dominated by his suppression of his sexual appetite and his determination that his marriage to Rose remains platonic, uncompromised by love or desire. ‘A man isn’t born with wife and children, and if he acquires them he has only himself to blame,’ Arthur Lomax tells readers of Seducers in Ecuador. Explaining the particular outlook of Lester Dale in Grand Canyon, Vita wrote: ‘As for women … I took myself off whenever they threatened to interfere with me. If a woman began to attract me, even if the poor soul remained quite unaware of it, it constituted interference. It was all part of my settled policy.’80 The men in question are guilty of misogyny, but it is they, not the women associated with them, who in Vita’s narratives are the ultimate victims.
Although Vita arrived at this philosophy over time – she may have been influenced by Otto Weininger’s equation of excessive intellectualism in men with insincerity, which she read in 1918 – there were implications for Harold Nicolson from the outset. In 1910, her homosexuality prevented her from thinking of Harold in ‘that way’. Harold’s apparent lack of vigorous physical desire for her, alongside her conviction that marriage was unavoidable, were factors that eventually recommended him to her. It soothed the wounds this daughter of Knole sustained as a result of her sex; it suggested a husband who was foremost a ‘playmate’ and a ‘companion’. ‘You and I are not grown-up,’ she wrote to Harold in 1912. ‘Nor ever will be.’81 This ‘childishness’, with its implied sexlessness, was the very prescription that would preserve their marriage long term. They were child-like together: they would pursue more ‘adult’ diversions separately, in time by mutual consent.
The Masque of Shakespeare is one of numerous instances of role play which characterised for Vita the years preceding her marriage. She dressed up; she wrote herself into novels and plays; she sat for painters and photographers. She was not always aware of her motivation. She was experimenting with self-discovery, trying on and taking off a series of masks, adopting personae, as she would for decades to come. Implicit in her fantasy life was a rejection of that powerlessness which she saw as part and parcel of a woman’s conventional existence. She craved Knole; she would become a writer. Both were ‘masculine’ impulses, just as the writers she admired, and those Sackville heroes, were male. In its uncompromisingness, the act of self-creation was equally male.
On 13 February 1910, Vita noted in her diary the first of seven sittings with fashionable Hungarian-born society portraitist, Philip de László. Today that portrait hangs in the Library at Sissinghurst Castle. Vita wears a large hat and furs. In this instance it was her mother’s idea. Artist and sitter had met before: at lunch with Seery in the rue Laffitte in May of the previous year, and in October 1908, when de László visited Knole to paint from photographs a portrait of the recently deceased Lord Sackville. Vita recorded then: ‘I showed him the show rooms and he made me strike attitudes! saying that he would like to paint me in a Velasquez style!’82 Victoria had other ideas. The costume she chose for Vita consisted of a high-necked white blouse with a waterfall of ruffles and a black hat decorated with a large brooch. It was presumably not her intention that Vita should suggest a feminine Edwardian version of those portraits of Sackville cavaliers which lined Knole’s walls; she was equally unaware of the resemblance to Vita’s Chatterton costume. The palette of black, white and red emphasised the connection between de László’s image and family portraits by Larkin and Cornelius de Neve. Apparently this visual affinity was lost on Vita too. She wrote simply that ‘the picture is finished and, I think, good: anyway it is magnificently painted’.83 She changed her mind when she inherited the portrait after Victoria’s death. In the altered climate of the 1930s, she regarded it as ‘too smart’ and banished it to one of Sissinghurst’s attics.84 By then Vita had achieved sufficient sexual autonomy no longer to require this glossy objectification as limpid-eyed ingénue.
De László’s Vita is a young woman at a crossroads. Her clothes suggest the riches and excess of upper-class Edwardian England, but look backwards to a history of boisterous swagger that is bloodier, fiercer, less languorous. Her expression combines pride and wistfulness, conviction and uncertainty. The heaviness of her coat and hat, the lack of colour, the absence of ornaments save the red amber necklace, serve to throw into relief her slender femininity. Victoria surely intended Vita’s portrait, painted in the year of her first season, as a statement of her marriageability. Unsurprisingly, her daughter appears as if she is play-acting.
Vita described the pneumonia she contracted that summer as ‘heaven sent’.85 With Victoria she retreated to the South of France, to a large white villa, the château Malet, near Monte Carlo, where she remained from November until April the following year. Ever the social opportunist, Victoria took her for tea with Napoleon III’s widow, the Empress Eugénie. Among guests at château Malet during Vita’s convalescence were Rosamund Grosvenor, Violet Keppel, Orazio Pucci and Harold Nicolson. Each of them was in love with Vita; increasingly each was aware of his or her conflicting claims on her affection. It was not the restful interlude doctors had prescribed, but Vita enjoyed the distance between herself and the debutante world of ‘the little dancing things’; enjoyed too the tributes of those varied lovers whose suits she juggled with a degree of adroitness. She was instinctively proprietorial. The knowledge that one day she would lose Knole had long ago stimulated a strong possessive streak in Vita, and she does not appear to have questioned her right to the simultaneous admiration of Rosamund, Violet, Pucci and Harold.
In January, Violet