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

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СКАЧАТЬ the eventual breakdown of his marriage was managed with relative decorum on Lionel’s part. In her diary Victoria noted the physical resemblance between father and daughter and Lionel’s pride in Vita; his only plan for her was marriage into a family like his own, preferably to an eldest son. More than anything he longed for her to embrace ‘normal and ordinary things’, among which he did not count writing.¹⁰⁵

      On the surface, Victoria showed more sympathy. Victoria was Vita’s chosen reader. ‘How marvellously well she writes!’ she admitted later. ‘Reading her calm descriptions fills me with admiration … No one can beat her at her wonderful descriptions of Nature, or analysing a difficult character.’¹⁰⁶ But Victoria too mistrusted the intensity of Vita’s involvement with her writing. Pepita’s daughter was too parvenu to condone such evident disregard for the conventional preoccupations of the society she had married into. (Vita afterwards condemned these preoccupations as limited to parties and investments, pâté de foie gras and the novels of E. F. Benson.) Two years earlier Victoria had confided to her diary her relief that Vita was ‘getting a little more coquette and tidy’, suggesting a growing interest in clothes and appearances to match her own; it was a chimera. On 16 July 1907, while she continued to work on The King’s Secret, Vita’s parents finally made their feelings plain: ‘Mama scolded me this morning because she said I write too much, and Dada said he did not approve of my writing … Mother does not know how much I love my writing.’

      Vita was mistaken. Both her parents saw the extent of her passionate engagement with her writing. They noted, for example, that the majority of her thirteenth birthday presents were books: as a counterbalance, their own present consisted of sumptuous squirrel furs.¹⁰⁷ Yet, despite their disapproval, they did little to redirect Vita’s energies. By 1907, confronted by overwhelming evidence of Lord Sackville’s mismanagement, they had embarked on a course of unwelcome financial retrenchment which only the Scott bequest would resolve; Victoria’s troublesome siblings continued their carping demands for money and title which afterwards erupted into the succession case of 1910. Above all, Victoria and Lionel knew now that their marriage was broken beyond repair. If Lionel’s response was one of courteous indifference, Victoria’s emphatically was not. She was angry, hurt, uncomprehending. There would be no resolution. Their days of acting in unison were running out. For her twenty-first birthday, Victoria presented Vita with the Italian desk which remains today in her writing room at Sissinghurst.

      On 8 April 1908, an ebullient Vita recorded in her diary, ‘We had the results of the exams at Miss Woolff’s. I am first in French literature, French grammar, English literature and geography, and I won the prize essay. Brilliant performance!’ Later that year she consolidated her position. ‘Prize essay day at Miss Woolff’s,’ she wrote on 16 December: ‘I won it (“Reminiscences of an Oak Tree”). I was also first in mythology!’ She won the same prize for the third time on 5 April 1909. The title on that occasion played to bookish Vita’s strengths: ‘Thoughts in a Library’.

      By 1909, Vita was in her fourth and final year at Helen Woolff’s School for Girls in London’s South Audley Street. She had first attended classes there at the age of thirteen and pursued her studies thereafter during the autumn and Easter terms. At the same time, until July 1905, Victoria retained the services of Vita’s French governess of ‘such an uneven temper’, Hermine Hall.¹⁰⁸ Vita continued to write outside school: her earliest surviving poems, along with fragments of poems, date from this period. Like Cyrano de Bergerac, Miss Woolff’s school was a catalyst in Vita’s life: it represented her first sustained participation in the world of her contemporaries outside Knole. Neither the curriculum studied nor Miss Woolff herself impacted significantly on her intellectual growth or her development as a writer. Nor did she much relish the company of her peers, dismissing in her diary ‘the average run of English girls’ as dull and stupid.¹⁰⁹ Meanwhile Victoria oversaw her cultural education: on 13 February 1909, Vita attended a matinée of The Mikado; on 16 February she went to an organ recital in Westminster Abbey given by Master of the King’s Musick, Sir Walter Parratt; on the following day she was present at ‘a most interesting lecture on Madame Récamier’.

      More compelling than anything Miss Woolff or Victoria offered was Vita’s unquenchable thirst for her writing. ‘There is writing, always writing,’ she remembered of this period:¹¹⁰ her best days resembled those of Cranfield Sackville, at work undisturbed in his garden arbour. Vita was an autodidact. In every area she prized most highly, from poetry to gardening, she was partly self-taught. Writing had the added attraction of temporarily screening Vita from her parents’ world of acrimony and threats of litigation: she excluded from her first fictions anything unheroic in her Sackville heredity. In Orlando, her fictional ‘biography’ of Vita, Virginia Woolf describes Orlando’s hope ‘that all the turbulence of his youth … proved that he himself belonged to the sacred race rather than the noble – was by birth a writer rather than an aristocrat’.¹¹¹ Throughout her life, Vita thirsted for just such an acknowledgement. She was never brave enough to separate her two identities. At first an aristocrat who wrote, she became a writer whose work affirmed her own ideal of aristocracy. It was one of several conflicts in her nature.

      Vita considered that she had worked hard at Miss Woolff’s. ‘I set myself to triumph at that school, and I did triumph. I beat everybody there sooner or later, and in the end-of-term exams, I thought I had done badly if I didn’t carry off at least six out of eight first prizes.’¹¹² Her triumph transcended examinations. She did indeed earn the reputation for cleverness she had deliberately cultivated. It went some way towards softening the blow of her unpopularity, which she attributed to her moroseness, pedantry, priggishness and savagery, as well as an appearance of aloofness that she was at a loss to explain. There were other discoveries too. Among her fellow pupils were girls who fell in love with Vita.

      As an adult, Vita seldom loved singly and was always, as one of her sons remembered, in love.¹¹³ Her childhood had been poor preparation for intimacy. Neither Victoria nor Lionel consistently gave her grounds to suppose herself the exclusive object of their affections. Victoria’s love was erratic, Lionel’s mostly implied. As Vita wrote of Shirin le Breton in The Dark Island, ‘It was not a particularly united family, and indeed was held together, as is the case in many families, less by the ties of affection than by those of convenience and convention.’¹¹⁴ Vita loved Knole and believed that Knole returned her love. Her attitude refuted that of Leonard Anquetil in The Edwardians: ‘Chevron [Knole] is really a despot of the most sinister sort: it disguises its tyranny under the mask of love.’¹¹⁵ Yet the house could not wholly replace more conventional relationships. When she was older, Vita wrote in one of the unpublished private poems she called diary poems: ‘The horrible loneliness of the soul makes one crave for some contact.’¹¹⁶ ‘Contact’ was not love, nor limited to a single donor or recipient. During her teenage years at Miss Woolff’s, Vita inspired, and partly reciprocated, the love of two classmates: Rosamund Grosvenor and Violet Keppel.

      She had known them both before. Rosamund Grosvenor was an old familiar, Vita’s first friend, a relation of the Duke of Westminster. They were ten and six respectively when Rosamund first visited Vita at Knole in 1899. In his capacity as commander of the West Kent Yeomanry, Lionel had departed for South Africa and the Boer War, and Victoria worried that Vita would be lonely. Rosamund stayed for three days: Vita remembered only that her neatness and cleanliness contrasted with her own grubbiness. Until 1908, when her family moved away from Sevenoaks, Rosamund shared Vita’s morning lessons at Knole. Initially, theirs was a milk-and-water relationship. Vita complained in private of Rosamund’s ordinariness and lack of personality; Rosamund fell under the combined spell of Vita and Knole. Despite her four years’ seniority, Rosamund learned to adopt the role of supplicant. It may have come naturally to her or she may have realised that the Vita who prided herself on her hardiness and her resemblance to a boy could only be conquered by weakness. Fortunately for Rosamund, who by her late teens was deeply in love, she had good looks on her side. Her soft, creamy curvaceousness earned her the nickname ‘the Rubens lady’. Eventually it was Rosamund’s body, not her СКАЧАТЬ