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

Чтение книги онлайн.

       Challenge

      ‘Oh, what an awful word!’ said Juliet, her spirits suddenly reasserting themselves. ‘Wedlock! It makes me feel as though I had chains round my wrists and ankles, and a great dragging load of wood. Wed-lock! Locked-in!’

      V. Sackville-West, The Easter Party, 1953

      ‘I SHALL NEVER forget it,’ Vita recorded of The Masque of Shakespeare, staged in the park at Knole on the afternoon of 2 July 1910. In a costume loaned to her by Ellen Terry, Vita took the part of Portia from The Merchant of Venice. Terry herself had worn the costume in 1875, voluminous robes of red velvet. It was Portia’s disguise as the ‘young doctor of Rome’, a celebrated instance of Shakespearean cross-dressing.

      Vita was photographed and painted in her borrowed robes. She was eighteen and had grown into a beauty. ‘The knobs and knuckles had disappeared. She was tall and graceful. The profound hereditary Sackville eyes were as pools from which the morning mist had lifted. A peach might have envied her complexion.’¹ Victoria drew attention to the loveliness of Vita’s skin and her eyes, ‘with their double curtain of long lashes’.² Shyness appeared as aloofness: with ‘her sleek brown head, her glowing skin, her disdainful poise’, she resembled Ruth Pennistan in Heritage.³ Thanks to the Sackville succession case in February, Vita also possessed, in attractive measure, a degree of notoriety; newspaper reports had emphasised her connection to Knole, which possessed a glamour of its own. With her schooldays at Miss Woolff’s behind her, Vita would find that she had graduated from inspiring schoolgirl crushes to provoking a similar response in the young men she encountered. At eighteen, there was a soft and gentle quality to Vita’s beauty. Later this softness gave way to something more florid: a harder, bolder, more masculine appearance, ‘all rather heroic and over life-size; all on a big scale; no feminine charm at all’, as she herself described one of her fictional alter egos.⁴ The shift would reflect a change in her attitudes. For the moment, youthful curiosity had yet to be overwhelmed by the certainties of middle age.

      Clare Atwood’s portrait of Vita as Portia, which today hangs in Ellen Terry’s former home of Smallhythe Place, suggests androgyny: Vita as a romantic Italian youth. Set against a medieval cityscape, she appears as she would have wished: as she described herself three years later, ‘essentially primitive; and not 1913, but 1470; and not “modern”’.⁵ For all its self-consciousness, it is a picture of a sitter without vanity, as if she disregarded her own looks. Victoria considered that a true assessment: she claimed that Vita was not in the least conceited. Unlike her mother, Vita at eighteen was not interested in feminine wiles; her interests lay elsewhere. Two years previously, in Le Masque de Fer, she had dressed up as the Man in the Iron Mask; a year ago, in her verse drama about doomed poet Thomas Chatterton, she was Chatterton himself, forger and Romantic hero, martyr to the written word. She wore a costume of breeches, white stockings, buckled shoes and a white shirt, which her maid Emily made for her in secret. Each time she played the part, learnt by heart and performed in an attic at Knole to an audience of abandoned trunks and cast-off furnishings, she reduced herself to tears: ‘Earth has been my hell,/ Another world must surely be my heaven.’⁶ Even at their most vulnerable, the men Vita chose for her alter egos were heroic. Her posturing arose from other impulses than vanity, but the element of self-association was potent. ‘Each time I burnt Chatterton’s manuscripts in the candle I felt I was burning my own,’ she remembered; ‘each time I died most uncomfortably on the oak settle, it was not only Chatterton but I myself who died.’⁷

      On a rainy July day in 1910, in the guise of Portia masquerading as a lawyer in order to contrive her own happy ending, Vita continued that narrative of heroism and wish fulfilment she had begun in childhood – as Sir Redvers Buller, bold in khaki amid Knole’s flowerbeds, and as Cranfield Sackville in The King’s Secret, writing, always writing. This was Vita’s other life, the life of her imagination. In imagination, every Sackville was a conquering hero and each, as she described them in 1922, ‘the prototype of his age’;⁸ Vita was their latest incarnation. Her life would retain this element of fantasy. Repeatedly in her fiction she celebrated a male version of herself, because she associated maleness with control, possession, inheritance, fulfilment and love – as she invested ‘the bull’ in her poem of the same name, the ability to ‘stand four-square and lordly scan/ His grass, his calves, his willing cows,/ Male, arrogant, alone’.⁹ She is Julian in Challenge, buoyant with love for Eve; Peregrine Chase in The Heir, inheriting, and refusing to give up, the Tudor manor house of Blackboys; Sebastian in The Edwardians, handsome, fêted, secretive, heir to a fictional Knole; Nicholas Lambarde in her unpublished story ‘The Poet’, certain of his writer’s vocation, author of ‘a contemplative poem on solitude’ as Vita would be: ‘The only important thing in the world to him was poetry.’¹⁰ Most of all, and most revealingly, she is aspects of Miles Vane-Merrick in Family History. His house is a castle in Kent, based on Vita’s future home of Sissinghurst; his interests include poetry, farming and philosophy; his emotional requirements are specific and unyielding: ‘He wanted to retain his individuality, his activity, his time-table. He wanted to lead his own life, parallel with the life of love, separate, independent.’¹¹ For Miles, everything has its allotted place. His life is docketed, divided into compartments, but he relinquishes nothing. From early in her romantic career, the same idea appealed to Vita. She would prove herself mostly skilful at maintaining her independence, СКАЧАТЬ