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

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      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 octogenarian heroine Lady Slane questions a life that has been devoted to her husband: ‘She was, after all, a woman … Was there, after all, some foundation for the prevalent 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 СКАЧАТЬ