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

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СКАЧАТЬ me truly and completely happy.’⁸⁷ Predictably her happiness was shared by neither of her parents, both of whom disapproved.

      At Knole, Vita wrote at a small wooden table in a summerhouse shaded by tall hedges. It overlooked the Mirror Pond and the sunken garden. Previously, it had served as her schoolroom. She did her lessons there: by the time she was ten, essays written in English, French and German on geography and history (Norway and Sweden, ‘L’Amérique du Nord’, Charlemagne, Charles I, William and Mary, Trafalgar), as well as exercises in creative writing (‘Un jour de la vie d’un petit Chien’). Vita cannot have enjoyed these lessons unreservedly: she remembered at moments of boredom or revolt gouging the table’s wooden surface with the blade of her pocketknife.

      Initially she wrote what she subsequently described as ‘historical novels, pretentious, quite uninteresting, pedantic’.⁸⁸ She wrote plays, too, inspired by history or by plays she had seen or read and particularly enjoyed. She wrote at speed. Fully bilingual until her late teens, she was as comfortable in French as in English; she worked with an easy facility, as if writing were for her the most natural thing imaginable. Inspiration never failed her: ‘the day after one [book] was finished another would be begun’.⁸⁹ In 1927 she quoted a contemporary assessment of Aphra Behn: ‘her muse was never subject to the curse of bringing forth with pain, for she always writ with the greatest ease in the world’.⁹⁰ So it was, at the outset of her career, for Vita. Rapidly, the pile of lined Murray’s exercise books and foolscap ledgers mounted. All were neatly written in the clear, unselfconscious, undecorated handwriting that scarcely changed until her death. She dated her efforts, noting the days she began and ended. Sometimes a comment recurs in the margin: V. E. – ‘my private sign, meaning Very Easy; in other words, “It has gone well today.”’⁹¹ From the outset Vita’s manuscripts were remarkable for their tidiness and the absence of large-scale corrections and alterations. She claimed that she began writing at the age of twelve and ‘never stopped writing after that’.⁹² She identified as a catalyst Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.

      When Vita first encountered it, Rostand’s play was relatively new: it was written in 1897. By her twelfth birthday seven years later, she knew all five acts by heart. It was a work custom-made for this proud, fierce, boyish but still, on occasion, sentimental young woman of gnawing insecurities, a story of a nobly born soldier-poet, swashbuckling by nature but crippled by self-doubt on account of his enormous nose: ‘My mother even could not find me fair … and, when a grown man, I feared the mistress who would mock at me.’ The play is set in seventeenth-century France. The teenage Vita followed Rostand’s lead and repeatedly returned to the grand siècle: in Richelieu, a 368-page historical novel she began in French in October 1907; Jean Baptiste Poquelin, a one-act comedy about Molière, also written in French the same year; and Le Masque de Fer, a five-act French drama about Richelieu and Louis XIII, written, like Cyrano, in a poetic form resembling alexandrines. At the time Vita’s favourite writers were historical novelists Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas: their shadows loomed large.

      A portrait of Scott hung in Knole’s Poets’ Parlour, the room used by Lionel and Victoria as their family dining room. Vita’s early writing could never be anything but self-conscious. ‘She allowed her readings of … heroic romances to … flavour her interpretation of her hero with an air of classic chivalry,’ the mature Vita wrote of Aphra Behn’s story of thwarted love and racial prejudice, Oroonoko. ‘Oroonoko resembles those seventeenth-century paintings of negroes in plumes and satins, rather than an actual slave on a practical plantation.’⁹³ It was a criticism she might have levelled at her younger self. The teenage Vita admired heroism, grand gestures, the dramatic (and the melodramatic) impulse. ‘In our adolescence, I suppose we have all thought Ludwig [II of Bavaria] a misunderstood figure of extravagant romance,’ she reflected later; ‘in the sobriety of later years we see him to have been only an exaggerated egoist … who happened also to be a king.’⁹⁴ Twice as a young woman she wrote about Napoleon, a suitably leviathan figure – in a novel, The Dark Days of Thermidor, and a verse drama, Le roi d’Elbe, both written in 1908. Both are exercises in historic romanticism.

      In the beginning Vita approached her writing in a spirit of earnestness and painful sincerity: she described her adolescent self as ‘plain, priggish, studious (oh, very!)’.⁹⁵ Her teenage notebooks include historical jottings, scene-by-scene breakdowns of her plays, and chapter summaries for novels. Heavily she puzzled over the nature of literature, the qualities necessary to write well and the purpose and requirements of art; essays from this time include ‘The difference between genius and talent’, and ‘The outburst of lyric poetry under Elizabeth’. ‘Sincerity is the only possible basis for great art,’ she offered sententiously;⁹⁶ certainly her output lacked humour. Vita’s submergence in her self-appointed task was complete. She revelled in losing herself in an imaginary past; she was dizzy with the thrill of creation: here was an occupation to match her loneliness. Her adult self likened the experience to drunkenness. It was especially heady on those occasions when she turned her attention to family history.

      Vita wrote her first ‘Sackville’ novel in 1906. The Tale of a Cavalier was inspired by Edward Sackville, 4th Earl of Dorset, for Vita ‘the embodiment of Cavalier romance’. His portrait by Van Dyck, in breastplate and striped vermilion doublet, hung in Knole’s Great Hall, constantly before her. The following year she wrote The King’s Secret. Its subject was Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, minor poet, rake, lover of Nell Gwyn, latter-day patron of Dryden and friend of Charles II (Victoria described it as Vita’s ‘Charles II book’). The 6th Earl was largely responsible for the appearance of the Poets’ Parlour in Vita’s childhood. In addition to Scott, its panelled walls were crowded with portraits of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Dr Johnson, alongside Sackville’s friends and contemporaries Dryden, Addison, Congreve, Wycherley and Pope. Such an illustrious visual compendium provided a powerful spur to Vita’s sense of vocation.

      The King’s Secret included a self-portrait: ‘a boy muffled up in a blue scarf … scribbling something in a ponderous book … His pen flowed rapidly over the paper … He wrote from morning till evening.’⁹⁷ She called her alter ego Cranfield Sackville, the first of numerous masculine fictional self-representations. He wrote ‘in a little arbour situated in the garden at Knole’.⁹⁸ As she worked, Vita remembered, ‘the past mingled with the present in constant reminder’,⁹⁹ the former as tangible as the latter, she herself in her own words a fragment of an age gone by.¹⁰⁰ Victoria queried Vita’s self-portrait: Cranfield she considered ‘more open, less reserved’ than Vita. Plaintively she confided to her diary the wish that her daughter could ‘change and become warmer-hearted’.¹⁰¹ By chance, a visit to Dover Castle on 18 July, midway through The King’s Secret, brought Vita to the last meeting place of Charles II and his sister Henrietta. ‘This is interesting to me, as I am just writing about their meeting!’ she noted.¹⁰² Her earliest approaches to fiction were the literary equivalent of method acting.

      But it was from a less picturesque source that Vita drew her first literary income. In July 1907, she was one of five winners of an Onlooker competition to complete a limerick. Her prize was a cheque for £1. In her diary, fifteen-year-old Vita put a characteristically heroic spin on events: ‘This morning I received the £1 I had won in the “Onlooker” verse competition. This is the first money I have got through writing; I hope as I am to restore the fortunes of the family that it will not be the last.’¹⁰³ She resorted to code to record her intention of restoring the family fortunes. A fitting ambition for this ardent Sackville scion, it was not one she intended to expose to her mother’s watchful gaze.

      Predictably, opposition came from close to home: Vita’s parents. Lionel was too conventional to embrace the idea of a daughter whose writing was more than a diversion. Like the majority of upper-class Englishmen of the time he mistrusted intellectualism, particularly in women: Vita described life at Knole as ‘completely unintellectual … analysis wasn’t СКАЧАТЬ