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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ merely put aside, laid away like winter garments in summer weather’.¹²

      In the neverlands of her fiction and drama, Vita changed her sex as a means of taking control and a preliminary to action. It was a simple conceit. She continually rewrote her own history and, in swapping her sex, perfected what she regarded as imperfections. It enabled her for an instant to bypass those impediments to inheriting Knole which she could never overcome; it enabled her to love as she wished, unconstrained by social expectation; as Cranfield, Chatterton and Portia, using language with a lawyer’s skill, she staked her claim to be a writer in the face of parental resistance. The Vita of her books was never dispossessed and never without love: always the cynosure, never the pariah; always autonomous. In Seducers in Ecuador, the unreliable Miss Whitaker shares Vita’s fantasy: ‘her own stories were marvellously coming true. Indeed, to her, they were always true; what else was worthwhile? But that the truth of fact should corroborate the truth of imagination! Her heart beat.’¹³

      In fiction, imagination and reality merged: it was a mission statement for Vita. Even Shakespeare forced her into men’s clothing. She did not resist. Her desire to share in all the possibilities and perquisites of a man’s life shaped her. If, as she suggested, her role, like her forebears’, was to be the ‘prototype’ of the age, it is appropriate that this woman who was born into the smug certainties of aristocratic Victorian England, and who witnessed their collapse in the aftermath of the First World War, should in her life embrace areas of confusion and uncertainty. Added to which, she enjoyed dressing up. Events like the Masque, which included several of her friends, were a high point in that debutante life she decried as ‘distasteful and unsuccessful’. Deep down Vita’s real reservation, as at Miss Woolff’s, arose from her fear of not being liked.

      The Masque was a fundraising exercise. A theatrical performance showcasing many of Shakespeare’s best-known characters, it was intended, as the programme notes explained, to benefit ‘the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Fund, which is established to promote the erection and endowment of a Tercentenary Memorial to Shakespeare to take the form of a National Repository Theatre’. Vita had attended her first rehearsal at Apsley House on 10 June. Also taking part were Rosamund Grosvenor and Vita’s friend Irene Lawley, along with Lionel’s current mistress Olive Rubens, as well as professionals including Ellen Terry. A London performance on 30 June was abandoned midway because of rain. Three days later it rained at Knole, too, ‘torrents, but cleared up and we were able to finish it’.¹⁴

      In her diary, Vita makes no comment on her role. She lists rehearsal times and weather conditions for the outdoor performances; she records the loan of Terry’s costume. She does not reflect on Portia’s emotional dilemma – or her own. In Shakespeare’s Venetian comedy, Portia is the wealthy young woman whom suitors squabble over. Her father has set a riddle to determine the choice; her own choice is set on Bassanio. ‘The lottery of my destiny/ Bars me the right of voluntary choosing,’ Portia tells the Prince of Morocco. In the summer of 1910, Vita’s case appeared quite different. She was surrounded by choices. She understood her parents’ hopes for her, but estimated correctly that they would allow her to make up her own mind. To Victoria, Lionel wrote, ‘I see that it’s no good trying to force her.’¹⁵ To Vita, when the time came to choose between suitors, he made it ‘clear he had other dreams’. Even in his disappointment, Vita wrote, he was ‘sweet’.¹⁶

      Rosamund Grosvenor was still in love with Vita; only Vita’s engagement would painfully sever their tie. There was Violet Keppel, too, who had symbolically bound Vita to her with the gift of the Doge’s ring. At the end of October, departing for Ceylon with her mother in the aftermath of the death of Edward VII, Violet kissed Vita goodbye with all the (considerable) passion she could muster; Vita was disturbed by her passion and by her urgency. Violet wrote her love letters: ‘I love you, Vita, because you never gave me back my ring.’¹⁷ Later Violet wrote asking Vita not to get married before her return.

      Her letter was prescient. On 29 June, only four days before the Masque, Vita met the man she would marry. The occasion was a dinner party before a trip to Conan Doyle’s The Speckled Band at the Adelphi Theatre. The young man was subsequently invited to Knole for the Masque. With Rosamund and a small party, he stayed for the weekend. Victoria took the chance to show him over the house. Vita felt a degree of curiosity, no more. On 29 June, the first words she had heard the young man utter were ‘What fun!’. She liked at once ‘his irrepressible brown curls, his laughing eyes, his charming smile’:¹⁸ these were not necessarily lover-like attributes. He appeared boyish and light-hearted. These, too, were not lover-like traits but they appealed to Vita – even as they contrasted with the vigorous, troubadour quality that distinguished the men she herself impersonated in her writing and her daydreams. It was not love at first sight when Vita met Harold Nicolson, though she would later recycle the scene in Family History: ‘Miles came to fetch [Evelyn]. He was especially gay. What fun, he said in his most boyish way.’¹⁹

      In fact, Vita wrote, it was not until three years later, in the spring of 1913, that ‘something snapped, and I loved Harold from that day on’.²⁰ In her diary, she contradicts herself: she decided that she loved Harold as soon as he had kissed her. That was September 1912. Harold’s kiss took him more than two years. In his defence, he was away for much of that period: in Madrid until September 1911, thereafter in Constantinople, where he served as a secretary at the British embassy. In the meantime for Vita there was Rosamund; a Florentine marquess called Orazio Pucci, who had fallen in love with her in Italy in 1909 and the following year trailed her halfway across Europe, even to Knole; and, in Pucci’s footsteps, a nameless artist encountered on a boat trip on Lake Como, whom Vita rejected lightly as ‘second coup de foudre!!!’.²¹ With beauty came the brittleness and casual unkindness of one growing rapidly accustomed to being pursued. On and off during that summer of 1910, Harold and Vita met, often at Victoria’s invitation at Knole. In November, in her first surviving letter to Harold, Vita asked him to accompany her to dinner and then a dance. Her letter was deliberately light in tone. She told Harold that she was not alone: Rosamund was with her, and one of Harold’s colleagues from the Foreign Office. Harold could not dance and disliked it as a pastime. He would learn that Vita was a poor dancer too.

      Clearly, unlike Portia, Vita’s ‘destiny’ would not deny her ‘voluntary choosing’. Nevertheless, there were similarities as well as differences between the women’s predicaments. Like Portia, Vita too was squabbled over. Her own actions served to complicate rather than to simplify those squabbles and, at times, as we shall see, she actively encouraged jealousies among her lovers. The child who had spent so much time on her own, uncertain of her parents’ love, grew up to crave close, intense, intimate connections and, often, to need more than one person’s love at a time. Her parents intended Vita to make ‘a great match with a great title’. Vita balked; but her interlude as a debutante was a busy one, with four balls a week and lunch parties daily.

      The young men Vita met did not attract her. She dismissed them disparagingly as ‘little dancing things in ballrooms’, ‘the little silly pink and whites’.²² Even dancing frequently left her unmoved: ‘All the dance tunes sounded much the same … Faintly lascivious, faintly cacophonous; a young man’s arm round one, a young man’s body surprisingly close, his breath on one’s hair, and yet a disharmony between oneself and him, or, at most, a fictitious temporary closeness which tumbled to pieces as soon as the music stopped.’²³ She made an exception for the clever Patrick Shaw-Stewart (and he was ‘so ugly’ that she dressed him up in her mind ‘in Louis XI clothes’²⁴ but omitted to think of him romantically) and for Lady Desborough’s tall son Julian Grenfell. Grenfell was ‘a Soul’, part of a pre-war set of thoughtful, poetic, politically minded aristocrats, and Vita liked Souls: ‘They are amusing and easy and not heavy to talk to.’²⁵

      Given Vita’s literary aspirations, Lionel considered it a distinct, if troubling, possibility that she would marry a Soul. (Handsome Edward Horner, СКАЧАТЬ