Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West. Matthew Dennison

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СКАЧАТЬ in armour and men’s clothing: brave, zealous, uncompromising. ‘One wonders what her feelings were, when for the first time she surveyed her cropped head and moved her legs unencumbered by her red skirt,’ Vita mused.⁷⁴

      Throughout her life Vita would appear easy with the inevitability of inflicting pain. There was a thoughtlessness to much of her cruelty, just as there was to Victoria’s. From Victoria, Vita had learnt that pain and suffering were implicit in the complicated experience of love. ‘Pain holds beauty in a fiery ring/ Much as the wheelwright fits the hissing tyre/ White-hot to wooden wheel,’ she wrote later.⁷⁵ In a short poem, ‘The Owl’, she admired a similar combination: ‘Such beauty and such cruelty were hers,/ Such silent beauty, taloned with a knife.’⁷⁶ All the principal relationships of Vita’s life – with her mother, with her husband Harold Nicolson, with Violet Keppel and a host of subsequent lovers, as well as with Knole – included this negotiation between positive and negative. The surprise is that she herself remained highly sensitive and easily wounded.

      In keeping with her cruelty and her sensitivity, Vita also retained the habit, learnt in childhood, of secrecy. ‘Secrecy was my passion,’ she confessed.⁷⁷ She later suggested that the passion for secrecy was the natural state of childhood.⁷⁸ She avoided punishment as a small child by hiding under the pulpit in Knole’s Chapel, which lay within easy reach of her bedroom; as a teenager she resorted to code for those parts of her diary she meant to be private; later, in order to foil her mother, she wrote her diary entirely in Italian. Secrecy was Vita’s retreat: it inspired neither guilt nor reflection. Instead she excused it on grounds of heredity: ‘it’s a trait I inherit from my family. So I won’t blame myself excessively for it.’⁷⁹ But while the family she referred to meant Lionel and the Sackvilles, the secretive impulse she developed as a child arose in response to the non-Sackville aspect of her upbringing, Vita’s understanding of her mother’s uncontrolled, unmannerly ‘Spanish’ emotionalism, which frightened and, over time, alienated her and forced her to keep her own counsel. For all her unwitting cruelty, Vita was seldom histrionic. The instinct for concealment, her dislike of ‘scenes’, were legacies of her childhood. As one future lover would remember, ‘She did demand peace and quiet … no rows. Certainly no inquisitiveness …’⁸⁰

      It seems surprising that Vita claimed subsequently that her memories of her childhood were hazy. As early as February 1912, weeks short of her twentieth birthday, she wrote to her future husband Harold Nicolson a selective description of her growing up that excluded more than it confided. It revealed what we know already, that like all children of her class, Harold included, Vita had led a double life: that of her parents’ daughter and that of the girl entrusted to a shifting cast of nurses and governesses. In addition, in Vita’s case, was the interior life of an only child who, inspired by her home and by loneliness, absented herself into daydreams and make-believe. As she grew older, while her parents travelled, Vita mastered time travel. She spirited herself into moments of Knole’s past, at one with the portraits and historic artefacts which surrounded her: the silver furniture made for James I in the King’s Room; the paintings by Holbein, Frans Hals, Van Dyck and Gainsborough; the heraldic leopards which prompted her to verse (‘Leopards on the gable ends, Leopards on the painted stair’); the white-painted rocking horse belonging to the 4th Duke of Dorset, an object doubly endowed in Vita’s eyes since the duke’s tragic early death in the hunting field had resulted in Knole’s inheritance by his sisters, a period of female ownership spanning half a century. Her spirited reveries excluded her parents. Often she dressed up, as in those Boer War games with the Battiscombes, fought in trenches among the rhododendrons; actually and metaphorically she would go on dressing up for much of her life. At the outset, the performance was for herself, Vita as player and Vita as audience.

      As a writer, Vita seldom dwelt on the subject of childhood. Even the stories she wrote as a child focused on adults. Her poetic description of ‘children taken unawares’, ‘Arcady in England’, is an outdoor scene as much concerned with the lushness of an idealised autumn day as the particular nature of the children who catch the poet’s eye. For Vita’s upbringing was one in which, unusually alone, she learnt above all to observe; she forged few childish relationships, even within her family. Some things she saw clearly: the wonders of the great house that captivated her from infancy, ghosts of the past, the power of genius loci. Others she struggled to discern with any clarity throughout her life, among them her mother’s oscillation between absence and presence, affection withheld and affection lavishly bestowed, spite and charm. As in every childhood, happiness was balanced with unhappiness for Vita. As an adult she quoted one of her favourite forebears, Lady Anne Clifford: ‘the marble pillars of Knole in Kent … were to me oftentimes but the gay arbours of anguish’.⁸¹

      Vita’s response to her dilemma was creative: she mythologised an existence she only partly understood. It was her own version of her mother’s ‘Quel roman est ma vie!’, but lacked the unqualified exuberance of Victoria’s joyful exclamation. For Vita, she and Knole and its whole population of relatives and servants became characters in a fable. She described her grandfather as ‘rather like an old goblin’. Contemptuously she listened to her mother ‘making up legends about the place, quite unwarrantable and unnecessary’, but acknowledged that ‘no ordinary mother could introduce such fairy tales into life’.⁸² Stalwartly and in silence, she worshipped her long-suffering father whom she imagined not as an individual but a type, ‘a pleasing man’⁸³ – as Virginia Woolf described him, ‘the figure of an English nobleman, decayed, dignified, smoothed, effete’.⁸⁴ Even the buildings themselves had an unreal quality, like a theatrical backcloth: ‘my little court [is] so lovely in the moonlight. With its gabled windows it looks like a court on a stage, till I half expect to see a light spring up in one window and the play begin.’⁸⁵ When at length Vita devised a role for herself, she existed in a mythical tower, part heroine, part observer. At Sissinghurst thirty years on, she made good that pretence. Her sense of life as a performance – theatrical and containing elements of make-believe – began much earlier.

      Victoria rejoiced in a reality that surpassed any romantic novel: Vita transformed the reality of her unsatisfactory childhood into a personal fiction. It was one way of placing herself centre stage and making sense of her fellow actors; the process also implied distance. These impulses of mythomania and detachment would remain part of Vita’s psyche until death. Early on, albeit subconsciously, she resorted to fiction to clarify the business of living: later she recycled her own reality as the principal element of her fiction, and all her novels contain fragments of autobiography. Despite this, Vita was an honest child and naturally affectionate. For the most part, those traits too would endure.

      Vita Sackville-West described the childhood of the Spanish saint, Teresa of Avila, in The Eagle and the Dove, published in 1943. Identifying Teresa’s favourite childhood pastime as ‘tales of adventure’, she warmed to her theme. Throughout her youth, Vita wrote, Teresa, along with her brother Rodrigo, ‘could think of nothing but honour and heroism, knights and giants and distressed ladies, defeated evil and conquering virtue; they even collaborated in composing a story of their own, modelled on these lines’.⁸⁶

      Vita’s was a life of storytelling. Aspects of her poetry, the fiction she wrote in order to make money, her nonfiction and much of her journalism have a strong narrative content; ditto her diary, in which events, appointments and people take the place of analysis or self-searching. Honour, heroism and conquest – sometimes metaphorical, sometimes reimagined – all find a place within the stories Vita spun; invariably she projects herself into the person of her hero. She glimpsed an echo of these vigorous heroics in the youthful St Teresa, a fiery and imaginative aristocratic teenager sent to the Convent of Santa Maria de Gracia after suspicions of a lesbian affair. It was this swashbuckling quality that endeared Teresa to her: similar feelings coloured Vita’s interpretation of seventeenth-century writer Aphra Behn and French saint Joan of Arc, whose biographies she also wrote. Vita’s juvenilia, written in her teens, includes ‘tales of adventure’: so too the more fanciful of her mature fiction, for example, Gottfried Künstler and СКАЧАТЬ