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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ age, she was nourished and sustained by Knole’s accumulated memories: swaggering, picturesque, tragic or simply humdrum. The history she learned she read in its tapestries and portraits. In the first instance it was companionship Vita sought in the cavernous house: the romantic distraction of the past came next. ‘I knew all the housemaids by name … [and] was on intimate terms with the hall-boy … The hall-boy and I used to play cricket together.’⁵⁷ They also indulged in wrestling bouts, for which Vita was punished by being made to keep her diary in French. But the hall-boy’s name is lost and we question the intimacy of those terms.

      Day by day Vita absorbed an inflated, erroneous sense of Knole’s importance. Its place in British life – the prestige of her own family – overwhelmed her imagination. That sense persisted. A novel written when she was fourteen included the question, from father to son, ‘And you can bear that name, the name of Sackville, and yet commit a disgraceful action?’⁵⁸ In fact, in the 850 years since Herbrand de Sackville had journeyed from Normandy with William the Conqueror, the Sackville achievement had been middling. Knole suggested otherwise, and it was Knole’s version of her family history that the young Vita unquestioningly imbibed and the mature Vita avoided revising.

      As a child events conspired to delude her. In 1896, after Lord Sackville had persuaded the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, to make Lionel a temporary honorary attaché to the British embassy in Moscow, Lionel and Victoria set off from Knole to the coronation of Nicholas II of Russia; on the eve of departure their neighbours flocked to admire Victoria’s dresses and her jewels laid out for display like wedding presents. Two years later, the Prince and Princess of Wales lunched at Knole, in a party that included the Duke and Duchess of Sparta, heirs to the throne of Greece. Photographs show Vita and the Princess of Wales holding hands, an intimacy few six-year-olds could rival; they had stood side by side at the inevitable tree-planting ceremony. In his thank-you letter written afterwards, the prince admired Knole as ‘so beautifully kept’, a state he attributed to ‘the tender care “de la charmante Chatelaine!”’.⁵⁹ In the summer of 1897, Victoria had recorded in her diary the visit to Knole of ‘Thomas the Bond Street jeweller’. She had summoned him to examine the silver. ‘He said that we had not the largest, but the best collection of silver in England.’⁶⁰ Her life at Knole turned Victoria’s head. Knole turned Vita’s head too. In Vita’s case she knew no alternative.

      The child shaped by parental absenteeism, maternal whim and her extraordinary surroundings was all angles and corners, ‘all knobs and knuckles’, ‘with long black hair and long black legs, and very short frocks, and very dirty nails and torn clothes’.⁶¹ She regarded her mother – indeed everyone outside the closed Knole–Sackville circle – with unavoidable hesitancy. Like the Godavarys in her later novella, The Death of Noble Godavary, she mistrusted any alien element within the family circle. From an early age, she took on her grandfather’s role of showing the house to visitors: the task exacerbated a tendency to unsociability. Although by modern standards Knole’s visitor numbers were low – on a ‘busy’ August day in 1901, the tally reached twenty-seven⁶² – Vita’s guide work stimulated her sense of possessiveness towards the house that would never be hers, and a rigid, atavistic pride in its glories. Showing the house was an exercise in showing off. Even as a teenager, travelling through Warwickshire en route to Scotland, Vita measured everything she saw against Knole’s yardstick. Of Anne Hathaway’s cottage she noted only its ‘very small, low rooms’, and she poured scorn on the idea that ruined Kenilworth Castle, covering three acres, had any claim to be considered ‘enormous’: ‘Knole covers between four and five acres.’⁶³

      The ‘tours’ she led even as quite a young child sealed the imaginative pact Vita made with Knole. She was reluctant and unskilled at making friends, sullen and shy confronted by unknown visitors, hostile and bullying to local children to the extent that ‘none of [them] would come to tea with me except those who … acted as my allies and lieutenants’.⁶⁴ Knole superseded Clown Archie as her childhood love; perhaps it precluded – or prevented – other intimacies. ‘Vita belonged to Knole,’ Violet Keppel remembered; ‘to the courtyards, gables, galleries; to the prancing sculptured leopards, to the traditions, rites, and splendours. It was a considerable burden for one so young.’⁶⁵

      Unsurprisingly, given her surrounds, while her social instincts faltered, her imagination blossomed: her taste was for adventure. Vita was a scruffy, despotic, busy child. Her inclinations were starkly at odds with late-Victorian ideas about little girls. Victoria did her best. She commissioned elaborate fancy dress costumes, including a tinsel fairy dress, a May queen dress complete with a maypole made from wild flowers, and a flower-encrusted frock intended to transform Vita into a basket of wisteria (Victoria herself had been ‘very much admired’ when she wore a dress of similar design, with added diamonds, to a costume ball in 1897⁶⁶). It was not enough. Neither in appearance nor character would Vita achieve conventional prettiness and all that it implied; Victoria’s diary does not suggest she always troubled to sympathise with the daughter whose nature and instincts were so different from her own. Of a seaside holiday in August 1898, her mother recorded simply: ‘Vita was much impressed by seeing a runaway horse smashing a butcher’s cart.’⁶⁷ Victoria and Lionel’s presents to Vita that year included a costly tricycle and a balloon. Even Vita’s greedy passion for chocolates and bonbons challenged Victoria’s ideas of appropriate behaviour. Concerned for her daughter’s complexion, and the figure she would later cut in the marriage market, Victoria ‘put away mercilessly what I thought was bad for her’.⁶⁸

      Although she was not aware of it, Vita learnt cruelty from her mother. It was not simply that isolation bred introspection or that Knole itself made Vita a dreamer, uninterested in those outside her gilded cage. Victoria’s exactingness threatened to deprive those closest to her both of autonomy and their sense of themselves. Her unconditional love for her daughter, whose birth she had regarded as a ‘miracle’, an ‘incredible marvel’, ceased with Vita’s babyhood. In time Vita learned to fear the mother whose love was so contrary, ‘so it was really a great relief when she went away’⁶⁹: she never stopped loving her mother extravagantly. The family name for Victoria, ‘BM’ (Bonne Mama), contained no deliberate irony. ‘I love thee, mother, but thou pain’st me so!/ Thou dost not understand me; it is sad/ When those we love most, understand us least,’ Vita’s Chatterton exclaims in the verse drama she wrote about the doomed poet in 1909.⁷⁰ Vita wrote the part of Chatterton for herself. Like many who are bullied, she responded by becoming herself a bully. Children invited to Knole to play with Vita were left in little doubt of the value she placed on their companionship.

      Vita contributed a less-than-flattering anecdote to a volume of childhood reminiscences published at the height of her literary fame in 1932. It concerned the children of neighbours called Battiscombe, four girls and a boy, and happened at the beginning of the Second Boer War in 1899. Vita befriended the boy, Ralph. ‘The four girls were our victims’, forced to impersonate Boers. Together Vita and Ralph Battiscombe tied the girls to trees, thrashed their legs with nettles and blocked their nostrils with putty.⁷¹ Vita dressed for this activity in a khaki suit in which she masqueraded as Sir Redvers Buller, a popular military commander in South Africa and winner of the Victoria Cross. At her mother’s insistence, and much to Vita’s irritation, the suit had a skirt in place of trousers. The girls, she insisted in 1932, enjoyed their ordeal ‘masochistically’. She was equally clear about the sadistic pleasure she derived from her own part in this horseplay. For her seventh birthday that year, according to Victoria’s diary, Vita had received only presents of model soldiers. Within a year her toy box included guns, swords, a bow and arrow, armour and a fort for the soldiers. Seery bought her a cricket set. It ranked alongside her football among her prized possessions. ‘I made a great deal of being hardy, and as like a boy as possible,’ she wrote in 1920.⁷² She described a Dutch museum full of ‘all kinds of odds and ends: instruments of torture … old carriages’ as ‘a place where one could spend hours’.⁷³ Forgotten were Clown Archie and his fellows. She composed a single poem about a doll. It was written in French in 1909 СКАЧАТЬ