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

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СКАЧАТЬ She reported that Vita had become ‘so charming, so pretty and so clean! and quite tidy, and not a bit of a prig or a bore’.²⁶ Her tone of surprise indicates her previous assessment. For her part, Vita explained simply that, until she married Harold, she had ‘scarcely understood the meaning of being young’.²⁷ Grenfell himself, like several of Vita’s would-be suitors including Edward Horner and Patrick Shaw-Stewart, died in the First World War. Before that he was caught in a downstairs cloakroom with Violet Keppel.

      Yet even as Vita failed to feel any quickening of the pulse in the company of her most notable suitors – Lord Granby, heir to the Duke of Rutland, ‘a curious rather morose person’,²⁸ and Lord Lascelles, future Earl of Harewood, whom she considered ‘rather dull’ – she realised she would have to marry someone. She never seriously considered the possibility of an unmarried life, or a life restricted to female admiration of the sort Rosamund and Violet offered her. Meeting Harold Nicolson did not persuade her to give up such admiration, however. Harold’s on-and-off, three-year courtship of Vita was conducted against a background of Rosamund’s constant companionship; constrained by his work, Harold himself was more often absent than present. From the summer of 1911, Rosamund had her own bedroom at Knole. It was next door to Vita’s, overlooking the Pheasants’ Court. Vita described the two of them as ‘inseparable’. She also claimed that they were ‘living on terms of the greatest possible intimacy’.²⁹ A letter written by Rosamund during a separation from Vita appears to corroborate that statement: ‘I do miss you, darling, and I want to feel your soft cool face coming out of that mass of pussy hair.’³⁰ Vita, however, denied that they made love: she admitted only that she was so overwhelmingly in love with Rosamund, that ‘passion … used to make my head swim sometimes’.³¹

      Also asserting her claim on Vita’s heart long distance was Violet Keppel, who travelled from Ceylon to Italy and Germany. ‘You won’t tell me you love me, because you fear (wrongly, most of the time) that I will not make the same declaration to you at the same moment!’ she wrote from Bavaria.³² Since Vita’s side of their correspondence has not survived, we do not know exactly what she said or did to inspire such an outburst. Having been sustained by the thought of Vita through her ‘exile’ in Ceylon, Violet had decided already on the course of their relationship. In the end, as in all her relationships, it was Vita who would make the crucial decision. If Vita was slow to fall in love with Harold, and untouched by the attentions of men like Granby, Lascelles, Grenfell, Horner and Shaw-Stewart, it was because her heart was otherwise occupied, her physical appetites fully stimulated and mostly satisfied.

      Harold’s recommendation to Vita was unusual. She regarded him as an ideal companion, a ‘playmate’ (her own italics) and someone with whom she could ‘talk about anything without minding, quite brutally’.³³ He corresponded exactly to her description of the hero of Behind the Mask, which Vita began that year: ‘a playmate, clever and gay, with whom she feels an effortless affinity’;³⁴ in another unpublished novel, Marian Strangways, of 1913, Vita described feelings of ‘companionable love … half-friendship, half-playfellowship’.³⁵ Harold would remain all of these things for half a century; these commendations survived the crises in their marriage. Vita did not base her choice on sexual attraction. Portia tells Bassanio, ‘In terms of choice I am not solely led/ By nice direction of a maiden’s eyes.’ The same was true for Vita. Physical attraction characterised her relationship with Rosamund Grosvenor, whom she first admired in her bathing costume when she was thirteen; her relationship with Violet Keppel subsequently represented a more intense infatuation. Vita knew already that these feelings were different from those which men inspired in her; she admitted that she did not think of men ‘in what is called “that way”’.³⁶ Where men were concerned she remained as she was at eleven, when a farmer’s son in Scotland ‘told [her] a great many things he oughtn’t to have told [her]’ about sex: she was ‘neither excited nor interested’ by his revelations.³⁷ His subsequent demonstration of the physical differences between boys and girls provoked a more dramatic response. Deeply shocked, Vita fled.³⁸

      For all his boyishness and his bright eyes, the curly-haired young man invited to Knole for the Masque of Shakespeare failed to excite Vita physically. At no point in his undemonstrative courtship would he do so. Afterwards, Vita stated that it was Harold’s own fault. He was too ‘over-respectful’; his behaviour convinced her (correctly, in the event) that he was not ‘the lover-type of man’.³⁹ Until Harold’s kiss in September 1912, Vita’s response to him was like that of Gottfried Künstler, in her novella of the same name. As Gottfried grew closer to Anna Roche, we read, nevertheless ‘it never entered his head to fall in love with her’.⁴⁰ Unlike Vita, Gottfried did not blame Anna for his conduct. Her protest has a hollow ring to it. She later claimed of the period before Harold’s proposal, ‘People began to tell me he was in love with me, which I didn’t believe was true, but wished that I could believe it.’ Significantly she adds: ‘I wasn’t in love with him then.’⁴¹ Yet for reasons of her own – insecurity and confusion uppermost – she needed to believe that Harold loved her.

      Harold almost certainly did fall in love with Vita, albeit his affection, like hers, lacked physical ardour. It was a conundrum rich in irony. At eighteen, Vita had yet to realise the implications of her feelings of arousal or non-arousal: she did not regard her ‘intimacy’ with Rosamund as any sort of disqualification from marriage or, more surprisingly, disloyalty to Harold. ‘It never struck me as wrong that I should be more or less engaged to Harold, and at the same time very much in love with Rosamund,’ she confessed in her autobiography.⁴² To Harold she wrote: ‘I love the Rubens lady [Rosamund], and somewhere in the world there is you.’⁴³ She did not think of herself as gay. Like the majority of women of her generation, she considered her long-term sexual choices as marriage or abstinence. Lesbianism, as understood today, did not exist as an option for Vita; the word itself had yet to enter common parlance. Later she told Harold that she had known nothing then of homosexuality. It was, anyway, a label she would have rejected. Rosamund provided affection, distraction and physical excitement during Harold’s lengthy absences. There was virtually no intellectual companionship between the women. In time, Vita would come to consider them temperamentally mismatched: ‘She is a stupid little thing, and her conventionality drives me mad.’⁴⁴ Regardless of her sexual feelings for Rosamund – or Rosamund’s apparently deeper feelings for her – Vita would shortly decide to marry Harold. Rosamund’s destiny, like Julian’s winter garments in Challenge, was to be ‘put aside’.

      Six years her senior and a man, Harold was less naïve than Vita. He was aware that, despite his love for her, his sexual inclinations were predominantly homosexual and could not be satisfied by a wife. As recently as September 1911, he had been forced to leave Madrid under a cloud after contracting gonorrhoea from an unidentified partner. (Unaware of the nature of his illness, Vita described him sympathetically as ‘rather a pathetic figure wrapped up in an ulster’.⁴⁵) But he was not deterred. Throughout his life Harold treated his affairs lightly. They provided physical pleasure, they were divertissements, but they did not, in his own eyes, define him as a person. With few exceptions, they never overwhelmed him emotionally in the way that Vita was repeatedly consumed by her affairs. Intermittently Harold craved sex with another man: he avoided acknowledging any need for the larger commitments – and rewards – of a full-scale relationship. Marriage was still a conventional expectation in early-twentieth-century England: Harold Nicolson was a man of conventional background. He had chosen a conventional career and would pursue it with more or less conventional success until Vita’s intransigence knocked the wheels off the cart. In 1910, male homosexuality was a criminal offence. The need for secrecy in relation to this central aspect of his life surely shaped Harold’s behaviour in the summer he met Vita; the fact of his homosexuality partly accounted for the nature of his polite but dilatory courtship. As it happened, his chosen wife was every bit as secretive as he was. She allowed Harold to believe that her love for Rosamund was no more than an intensely loving friendship, while reciprocating Rosamund’s devotion and, up to a point, her desires. The courtship of this young СКАЧАТЬ