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

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СКАЧАТЬ Vita was thirteen, Rosamund seventeen. When their relationship progressed beyond girlish friendship, Vita was clear that, as far as she was concerned, its root was physical attraction: Rosamund was fatally uninterested in books.

      Hero worship, and a tendency she could not resist to regard Vita as the living incarnation of centuries of Sackville swank, characterised Rosamund’s love. She revelled too in Vita’s Spanish blood, an association of exotic glamour which Vita herself exploited. Vita provoked a similar response in Violet Keppel: ‘All this, and a gipsy too! My romantic heart overflowed.’¹¹⁷ Rosamund addressed Vita as ‘Princess’; for Violet, Vita was her ‘Rosenkavalier’.¹¹⁸ Both names imply status, desirability, a prize.

      Violet’s novel Broderie Anglaise offers a version of her relationship with Vita, whom she reimagines as a youthful peer, John Shorne. There is ‘a languid grace’ about Shorne, ‘a latent fire’. Like Vita, he bears a strong resemblance to his family portraits. His ‘face recalled so many others seen in frames and surrounded by a ruff, a jabot or a stock, a face that had been a type since 1500 … a hereditary face which had come, eternally bored through five centuries’.¹¹⁹ Like Rosamund, Violet romanticised Vita. Yet while Rosamund’s affection had the puppyishness of first love, Violet’s, even as a child, was characterised by an obsessive decisiveness. It was not, Vita insisted, ‘the kind of rather hysterical friendship one conceives in adolescence’:¹²⁰ there was nothing exploratory about Violet’s feelings. Her emotional precocity was matched only by her determination. If Rosamund’s love for Vita resembled the blushing passions of a girls’ school story, Violet’s possessed from the beginning a more adult quality. Her decision that Vita was her destiny was virtually instantaneous and never rescinded. Decades later she underlined in her copy of The Unquiet Grave Cyril Connolly’s statement that ‘We only love once, for once only are we perfectly equipped for loving.’¹²¹ She had not needed a book to tell her that. Even at the end of her life, fragile and lonely in the Villa Ombrellino in Florence, Violet spoke of Vita in adulatory tones. When it happened, she became Vita’s lover through force of will. Vita was a mostly willing participant, but it was Violet who contrived their collision.

      Their first meeting took place on a winter afternoon: Mayfair, 1905, a tea party of sorts for a girl friend with a broken leg, who remained in her bed. The only fellow guest Violet noticed at the bedside was Vita. Vita was thirteen, tall for her age, ungainly and unmannerly (Lionel had recently complained of her abruptness and her roughness). Violet was two years younger. Vita rebuffed her conversational gambits, Violet inwardly criticised Vita’s dress. Both were evidently curious. Violet persuaded her mother to invite Vita to tea; Vita’s mother was delighted and Vita went. Again their conversation was at cross purposes. Violet described Paris while Vita enlarged on her rabbits. They found common ground in inventorying aloud lists of their ancestors: as Vita explained later, in upper-class Edwardian society ‘genealogies and family connections … formed almost part of a moral code’.¹²² On Vita’s departure, Violet kissed her. At home Vita congratulated herself on having made a friend – this was so unusual that she sang about it in the bath – while Violet embarked on what would become a lengthy and at times inflammatory sequence of letters. Vita responded with more news of her rabbits and also her dogs: an Aberdeen terrier called Pickles and an Irish terrier predictably known as Pat. Nothing daunted, Violet poured out what Vita labelled ‘precocious letters on every topic in a variety of tongues, imaginative exceedingly, copiously illustrated, bursting occasionally into erratic and illegible verse’.¹²³

      Between letters Vita visited Violet at her parents’ house in Portman Square; Violet was invited to Knole. Portman Square, where Violet’s mother, Alice Keppel, played host to Edward VII as his mistress, suggested sex at its most discreet and profitable; Knole, with its whispering galleries of Sackville history, imparted romance, a thrill of derring-do glittering in dust motes. Vita’s shortcomings as a correspondent notwithstanding, for Violet it was a perfect combination. ‘I fell in love with John when I was eleven and a half – I swear that’s the truth – and for eight years I never stopped thinking about him,’ she wrote of Vita–John in Broderie Anglaise.¹²⁴ In another novel, Hunt the Slipper, she suggested that ‘one never loves more passionately than at the age of ten’.¹²⁵

      Vita and Violet shared dancing and Italian lessons. In the spring of 1906 they were in Paris at the same time. In the apartment in the rue Laffitte, in front of an audience of Lionel and Victoria and Sir John Murray Scott’s French servants, they staged Vita’s play about the reign of Louis XIII, Le Masque de Fer. Vita took the part of the Man in the Iron Mask and was delighted when Seery’s cook burst into tears. Less competent a French speaker than Vita (she did not have the benefit of a French-convent-educated mother), Violet took French lessons. They began to talk to one another in French. There was a special excitement to the intimacy of addressing each other as ‘tu’. That sense of intimacy grew. In the spring of 1908, Violet told Vita she loved her, ‘and I,’ wrote Vita, ‘finding myself expected to rise to the occasion, stumbled out an unfamiliar “darling”’.¹²⁶ Violet sought to make a pact of the exchange by presenting Vita with a ring when next they met. The ring had been a reluctant present to Violet from the Bond Street art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen when Violet was six. It was carved from red lava with the image of a woman’s head and had belonged to a Venetian Doge of the early Renaissance. The sixteen-year-old Vita composed a special entry in her diary and kept the ring lifelong.

      Vita’s relationship with Violet Keppel changed the course of her life: she was slow to respond fully to overtures which, on Violet’s part, contained a sexual dimension almost from the start. This was not, Vita would claim, because she mistook Violet’s intentions. Violet was always unique among Vita’s friends: colourful and sophisticated; her ‘erratic’ friend, as she introduced Violet to Harold Nicolson; ‘this brilliant, this extraordinary, this almost unearthly creature’, as Vita described her at the height of their affair in 1920;¹²⁷ the friend whose love she argued she had recognised immediately. She said that she had understood Violet’s early feelings for her as she had understood those of Rosamund, whom she had admitted she loved by the time she was fifteen. Her mother’s diary challenges such assertions of sexual maturity. ‘Vita and I had begun together The Woman in White,’ Victoria wrote on 21 September 1904; ‘I dropped it as the child’s mind is still too young and I am careful to keep her very pure-minded.’ She had confiscated The Count of Monte Cristo for the same reasons.

      If Vita was aware of the nature of Rosamund and Violet’s feelings, she ought to have recognised that they were rivals. In the event she admitted no need to arbitrate between them. In this way, at the outset of her romantic career, she established a pattern which would continue, juggling multiple lovers with no apparent sense of conflict or disloyalty. ‘All love is a weakness … in so far as it destroys some part of our independence,’ says Sebastian in The Edwardians.¹²⁸ For Vita, invariably more loved than loving, love would seldom compromise her independence. She exercised freedom of choice both romantically and sexually, countering Silas’s statement to Nan in her early novel The Dragon in Shallow Waters that ‘freedom goes when the heart goes’.¹²⁹ Invariably she retained a clear conscience, and she did not often lose her heart.

      Vita did not return to Miss Woolff’s school in the autumn of 1909. Instead she went abroad with her mother and Sir John. Her extended visit to the Continent took in Germany, Austria, Poland and Russia. At Antoniny in the Ukraine, Vita experienced a last gasp of the ancien régime, staying with Count Joseph Potocki, ‘riding, dancing, laughing; living at a fantastic rate in that fantastic oasis of extravagance and feudalism, ten thousand horses on the estate, eighty English hunters, and a pack of English hounds; a park full of dromedaries; … Tokay handed round by a giant; cigarettes handed round by dwarfs in eighteenth-century costumes’.¹³⁰ Potocki’s estate covered a hundred miles. Dazzled by splendour, aware of the poverty endured by all bar her host, Vita recognised an alternative, and disturbing, version of the tale of inheritance she had imbibed as Knole’s child. The inequalities shocked her. ‘That experience was really СКАЧАТЬ