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

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      The Masque of Shakespeare is one of numerous instances of role play which characterised for Vita the years preceding her marriage. She dressed up; she wrote herself into novels and plays; she sat for painters and photographers. She was not always aware of her motivation. She was experimenting with self-discovery, trying on and taking off a series of masks, adopting personae, as she would for decades to come. Implicit in her fantasy life was a rejection of that powerlessness which she saw as part and parcel of a woman’s conventional existence. She craved Knole; she would become a writer. Both were ‘masculine’ impulses, just as the writers she admired, and those Sackville heroes, were male. In its uncompromisingness, the act of self-creation was equally male.

      On 13 February 1910, Vita noted in her diary the first of seven sittings with fashionable Hungarian-born society portraitist, Philip de László. Today that portrait hangs in the Library at Sissinghurst Castle. Vita wears a large hat and furs. In this instance it was her mother’s idea. Artist and sitter had met before: at lunch with Seery in the rue Laffitte in May of the previous year, and in October 1908, when de László visited Knole to paint from photographs a portrait of the recently deceased Lord Sackville. Vita recorded then: ‘I showed him the show rooms and he made me strike attitudes! saying that he would like to paint me in a Velasquez style!’⁸² Victoria had other ideas. The costume she chose for Vita consisted of a high-necked white blouse with a waterfall of ruffles and a black hat decorated with a large brooch. It was presumably not her intention that Vita should suggest a feminine Edwardian version of those portraits of Sackville cavaliers which lined Knole’s walls; she was equally unaware of the resemblance to Vita’s Chatterton costume. The palette of black, white and red emphasised the connection between de László’s image and family portraits by Larkin and Cornelius de Neve. Apparently this visual affinity was lost on Vita too. She wrote simply that ‘the picture is finished and, I think, good: anyway it is magnificently painted’.⁸³ She changed her mind when she inherited the portrait after Victoria’s death. In the altered climate of the 1930s, she regarded it as ‘too smart’ and banished it to one of Sissinghurst’s attics.⁸⁴ By then Vita had achieved sufficient sexual autonomy no longer to require this glossy objectification as limpid-eyed ingénue.

      De László’s Vita is a young woman at a crossroads. Her clothes suggest the riches and excess of upper-class Edwardian England, but look backwards to a history of boisterous swagger that is bloodier, fiercer, less languorous. Her expression combines pride and wistfulness, conviction and uncertainty. The heaviness of her coat and hat, the lack of colour, the absence of ornaments save the red amber necklace, serve to throw into relief her slender femininity. Victoria surely intended Vita’s portrait, painted in the year of her first season, as a statement of her marriageability. Unsurprisingly, her daughter appears as if she is play-acting.

      Vita described the pneumonia she contracted that summer as ‘heaven sent’.⁸⁵ With Victoria she retreated to the South of France, to a large white villa, the château Malet, near Monte Carlo, where she remained from November until April the following year. Ever the social opportunist, Victoria took her for tea with Napoleon III’s widow, the Empress Eugénie. Among guests at château Malet during Vita’s convalescence were Rosamund Grosvenor, Violet Keppel, Orazio Pucci and Harold Nicolson. Each of them was in love with Vita; increasingly each was aware of his or her conflicting claims on her affection. It was not the restful interlude doctors had prescribed, but Vita enjoyed the distance between herself and the debutante world of ‘the little dancing things’; enjoyed too the tributes of those varied lovers whose suits she juggled with a degree of adroitness. She was instinctively proprietorial. The knowledge that one day she would lose Knole had long ago stimulated a strong possessive streak in Vita, and she does not appear to have questioned her right to the simultaneous admiration of Rosamund, Violet, Pucci and Harold.

      In January, Violet wrote in need of reassurance: ‘Do you know that you have ceased to be a reality for me? You are a mirage that recedes to the degree that one approaches it.’⁸⁶ Her letters were alternately loving and caustic, as she struggled to provoke a reaction in Vita. Violet was among Vita’s last visitors in France and presented her with a ruby she had bought in Ceylon. Pucci took the opportunity to propose again. Again Vita turned him down. By contrast, in January 1911, Harold’s departure from château Malet startled Vita on account of his apparent lack of regret. His behaviour provoked her in a way that neither Violet’s nor Pucci’s had. It was a revelatory response, her feelings strikingly at odds with Harold’s. Vita was approaching a point where she could no longer disguise from herself the necessity of reaching a decision about her future; she was approaching a point where that decision would make itself. It frightened her nevertheless. At intervals over the next eighteen months she would appear to long for and to fear marriage to Harold, to take control of the situation and to relinquish it. ‘I’m going to let everything be for a bit. Perhaps something will happen!!’ she wrote at a moment of particular hesitancy.⁸⁷