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

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СКАЧАТЬ for Vita at Worth. As her eighteenth birthday approached, her mother had different plans for Vita, who that year had begun her reluctant career as a debutante. ‘Party in the evening at Lady Jane Coombe’s,’ Vita had written laconically in her diary on 25 January: ‘Hated it.’ For Lionel and Victoria, whose ambitions for Vita’s marriage were considerable, it was an ominous beginning to her first season. Vita would discover, as she had predicted leaving Russia, a stultifying sense of confinement about the life that was now expected of her at home: ‘How shall I ever be able to live in this restricted island! I want expanse.’¹³¹ In the short term she did not rebel. She wrote out her protest in a new novel. In Behind the Mask, a story of modern marriage set in France, she dismissed ‘the whole business’ of the marriage market as ‘coarse and vulgar’.¹³²

      On 5 October 1905, Victoria Sackville-West had decided to make a new will. She had visited the family solicitor, Mr Pemberton of Meynell & Pemberton, back in March 1897, in order to formalise her intention of leaving ‘everything to Lionel in trust for Vita, till she marries with his consent; then he will give her the income of the capital’.¹³³ On that occasion Vita was days short of her fifth birthday. By the time Victoria returned to the fray, her daughter was thirteen. Victoria explained her motives: ‘Now … I do not think I shall have another child, after all the precautions Lionel and I have taken.’¹³⁴

      Sexual intercourse ceased for Lionel and Victoria Sackville-West in 1904. Once it had formed the bedrock of this mismatched couple’s relationship. The decision was Victoria’s, her justification the weakness of her nervous system, as explained to her by her obliging physician Dr Ferrier. From now on, iron tablets rather than Lionel would be her medicine. Her husband was thirty-seven years old, active and highly sexed: previously Victoria had described him as ‘a stallion’, their lovemaking ‘delirium’. Lionel, for his part, had once thought Victoria ‘the very incarnation of passionate love’: ‘Her breasts are too delicious for words – round firm and soft with two darling little buttons which I adore kissing. She has the most magnificent hips and legs with the most ravishing little lock of hair between them which is as silky and soft as possible.’¹³⁵ During the early years of their marriage, Victoria’s diary is full of sex: when, where and how often. In the beginning, the naughtiness of ‘Baby’ (Lionel’s penis) is a constant refrain. Sex forced the couple to miss morning appointments; it inconvenienced the servants; it kept Victoria awake at night; it bound them together.

      Childbirth brought about the change. For Victoria, desire gave way to fear. Uppermost in her mind was the spectre of another unendurable confinement. In the aftermath of Vita’s birth, she claimed she would do anything to make Lionel happy, ‘even if it meant undergoing the horrors of childbirth’.¹³⁶ Then she persuaded him to adopt the rudimentary contraceptive practices of the time and did her best to avoid that very contingency.

      If abstinence appeared to reassure Victoria, its effect on Lionel was quite different. Victoria was volatile. In all her relationships she lacked self-control. In her marriage she positively embraced the Sturm und Drang of lovers’ quarrels. By contrast Lionel was peaceable, uncommunicative, too polite for histrionics: the more Victoria railed, the further Lionel retreated behind a carapace of good manners and watery dislike, and so on and on. Like Evelyn Jarrold in need of reassurance from Miles Vane-Merrick in Family History, ‘the more she saw that she was making herself a nuisance, the more of a nuisance she made herself’.¹³⁷ Despite their close blood relationship, the Sackville-Wests were remarkably ill-suited. For ten years, beginning around 1899, they no longer scrupled to disguise their differences. Vita witnessed this breakdown. She absorbed a highly distorted idea of marriage at a time when she was insufficiently emotionally mature to set it in context or to recognise the unusual starkness of her parents’ incompatibility. Instead she struggled to reach a solution through writing. In Behind the Mask, written between November 1909 and March 1910, her heroine renounces the man she loves in order to avoid the coruscating effects of marriage: ‘It is better for us to live apart and love each other all our lives, than to marry and quarrel after a few months.’¹³⁸ The extremes in her parents’ behaviour suggested to Vita an oversimplified equation of Englishness and equanimity on Lionel’s part and Victoria’s Spanish blood and emotional misrule, as well as a model of marriage in which love was doomed to fail. Increasingly she would choose to blame Victoria. As one of her later fictional heroines states, ‘I hate lack of control … I hate people who let themselves go.’¹³⁹

      The collapse of her parents’ marriage was one factor which convinced Vita of her own ‘duality’: that her nature combined conflicting elements or ‘sides’, the English and the Spanish, which both demanded satisfaction. She imagined those elements as opposites and therefore irreconcilable: propriety pitched against protest, conformity against self, kindness against cruelty, ‘a free spirit or a prisoner’;¹⁴⁰ or, as Violet Keppel explained it to Vita, purity and gravity on the one hand, dominance, sensuousness and brutality on the other. An inward struggle along these lines is often part of the experience of growing up. Vita never fully outgrew it because she regarded it as a quirk of her heredity rather than a passing phase; it further complicated her transition from childhood to adulthood. In her first published novel, Heritage, of 1919, she investigated the same dichotomy in the character of Ruth, a version of herself. Ruth is ‘cursed with a dual nature, the one coarse and unbridled, the other delicate, conventional, practical, motherly, refined …’.¹⁴¹ Another of her heroines likens such polarities to the two halves of an apple: ‘Was it impossible ever to keep the apple whole?’ she asks herself, ‘a globe to hold entire in the hand?’¹⁴² For Vita, the ‘coarse and unbridled’ side of her nature was every bit as appealing as its more refined opposite. On the eve of her first visit to Spain in 1913, a journey that took her from Madrid south to Granada, she wrote to her friend Irene Lawley: ‘I am going to SPAIN … If I write about it, my hand begins to shake, and my hair piles itself up on the top, like under a mantilla, with a comb, all of its own accord. So I won’t say any more.’¹⁴³ A kind of coarseness could excite Vita.

      Instead of steering a middle course, or choosing one way over the other, Vita indulged both inclinations separately. ‘My whole curse has been a duality with which I was too weak and too self-indulgent to struggle,’ as she explained in 1920.¹⁴⁴ ‘Nothing is foreordained./ I hold my liberty/ Unstained and unconstrained,’ Vita would write in her poem ‘Heredity’. In the event, the ‘stain’ of her parents’ marriage proved ineradicable. The desire to satisfy in full both facets of her make-up would shape key moments in her life.

      Lionel and Victoria had in common their devotion to Knole and to Vita: even that was at variance, different in origin, form and expression. A selfish and romantically uncomplicated man, Lionel was incapable of interpreting Victoria’s sexual withdrawal other than as a corresponding emotional withdrawal, so he sought satisfaction elsewhere. In transferring his desire he ended up transferring his affection. Victoria expended her energy on Knole and, with increasing frequency, on scenes of the sort guaranteed to drive Lionel further away. Unwitting it may have been, but Victoria’s first blind steps along the road to bitterness and disillusion were taken deliberately.

      Vita watched her and saw what she regarded as her mother’s ‘mistake’. It did not occur to her that Victoria’s behaviour was a cri de coeur. She had not read in her mother’s diary her desperate desire for warmth; she suspected nothing then of her frustration at the coldness first of Lord Sackville, then Lionel and even Vita herself, with her tendency to keep her feelings secret and resist confidences. Vita’s solution, explored through fiction, was a world in which partners simply deceived one another, concealing their true emotions beneath a smiling veneer, their motives self-protection and survival, the result a semblance of marriage in appearance only: legitimate mendacity in the interests of the greater happiness. Behind the Mask is among the most aptly titled of her books. ‘Is there anyone without the mask?’ she asks.¹⁴⁵ It was a pragmatic, cynical approach, and undesirable in a girl of eighteen on the brink of adulthood. She saw it very clearly: she was never wholly disabused of her theory. ‘Men СКАЧАТЬ