Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

Predictably her happiness was shared by neither of her parents, both of whom disapproved.

At Knole, Vita wrote at a small wooden table in a summerhouse shaded by tall hedges. It overlooked the Mirror Pond and the sunken garden. Previously, it had served as her schoolroom. She did her lessons there: by the time she was ten, essays written in English, French and German on geography and history (Norway and Sweden, ‘L’Amérique du Nord’, Charlemagne, Charles I, William and Mary, Trafalgar), as well as exercises in creative writing (‘Un jour de la vie d’un petit Chien’). Vita cannot have enjoyed these lessons unreservedly: she remembered at moments of boredom or revolt gouging the table’s wooden surface with the blade of her pocketknife.

Initially she wrote what she subsequently described as ‘historical novels, pretentious, quite uninteresting, pedantic’.

She wrote plays, too, inspired by history or by plays she had seen or read and particularly enjoyed. She wrote at speed. Fully bilingual until her late teens, she was as comfortable in French as in English; she worked with an easy facility, as if writing were for her the most natural thing imaginable. Inspiration never failed her: ‘the day after one [book] was finished another would be begun’.

In 1927 she quoted a contemporary assessment of Aphra Behn: ‘her muse was never subject to the curse of bringing forth with pain, for she always writ with the greatest ease in the world’.

So it was, at the outset of her career, for Vita. Rapidly, the pile of lined Murray’s exercise books and foolscap ledgers mounted. All were neatly written in the clear, unselfconscious, undecorated handwriting that scarcely changed until her death. She dated her efforts, noting the days she began and ended. Sometimes a comment recurs in the margin: V. E. – ‘my private sign, meaning Very Easy; in other words, “It has gone well today.”’

From the outset Vita’s manuscripts were remarkable for their tidiness and the absence of large-scale corrections and alterations. She claimed that she began writing at the age of twelve and ‘never stopped writing after that’.

She identified as a catalyst Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.

When Vita first encountered it, Rostand’s play was relatively new: it was written in 1897. By her twelfth birthday seven years later, she knew all five acts by heart. It was a work custom-made for this proud, fierce, boyish but still, on occasion, sentimental young woman of gnawing insecurities, a story of a nobly born soldier-poet, swashbuckling by nature but crippled by self-doubt on account of his enormous nose: ‘My mother even could not find me fair … and, when a grown man, I feared the mistress who would mock at me.’ The play is set in seventeenth-century France. The teenage Vita followed Rostand’s lead and repeatedly returned to the grand siècle: in Richelieu, a 368-page historical novel she began in French in October 1907; Jean Baptiste Poquelin, a one-act comedy about Molière, also written in French the same year; and Le Masque de Fer, a five-act French drama about Richelieu and Louis XIII, written, like Cyrano, in a poetic form resembling alexandrines. At the time Vita’s favourite writers were historical novelists Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas: their shadows loomed large.

A portrait of Scott hung in Knole’s Poets’ Parlour, the room used by Lionel and Victoria as their family dining room. Vita’s early writing could never be anything but self-conscious. ‘She allowed her readings of … heroic romances to … flavour her interpretation of her hero with an air of classic chivalry,’ the mature Vita wrote of Aphra Behn’s story of thwarted love and racial prejudice, Oroonoko. ‘Oroonoko resembles those seventeenth-century paintings of negroes in plumes and satins, rather than an actual slave on a practical plantation.’

It was a criticism she might have levelled at her younger self. The teenage Vita admired heroism, grand gestures, the dramatic (and the melodramatic) impulse. ‘In our adolescence, I suppose we have all thought Ludwig [II of Bavaria] a misunderstood figure of extravagant romance,’ she reflected later; ‘in the sobriety of later years we see him to have been only an exaggerated egoist … who happened also to be a king.’

Twice as a young woman she wrote about Napoleon, a suitably leviathan figure – in a novel, The Dark Days of Thermidor, and a verse drama, Le roi d’Elbe, both written in 1908. Both are exercises in historic romanticism.

In the beginning Vita approached her writing in a spirit of earnestness and painful sincerity: she described her adolescent self as ‘plain, priggish, studious (oh, very!)’.

Her teenage notebooks include historical jottings, scene-by-scene breakdowns of her plays, and chapter summaries for novels. Heavily she puzzled over the nature of literature, the qualities necessary to write well and the purpose and requirements of art; essays from this time include ‘The difference between genius and talent’, and ‘The outburst of lyric poetry under Elizabeth’. ‘Sincerity is the only possible basis for great art,’ she offered sententiously;

certainly her output lacked humour. Vita’s submergence in her self-appointed task was complete. She revelled in losing herself in an imaginary past; she was dizzy with the thrill of creation: here was an occupation to match her loneliness. Her adult self likened the experience to drunkenness. It was especially heady on those occasions when she turned her attention to family history.

Vita wrote her first ‘Sackville’ novel in 1906. The Tale of a Cavalier was inspired by Edward Sackville, 4th Earl of Dorset, for Vita ‘the embodiment of Cavalier romance’. His portrait by Van Dyck, in breastplate and striped vermilion doublet, hung in Knole’s Great Hall, constantly before her. The following year she wrote The King’s Secret. Its subject was Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, minor poet, rake, lover of Nell Gwyn, latter-day patron of Dryden and friend of Charles II (Victoria described it as Vita’s ‘Charles II book’). The 6th Earl was largely responsible for the appearance of the Poets’ Parlour in Vita’s childhood. In addition to Scott, its panelled walls were crowded with portraits of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Dr Johnson, alongside Sackville’s friends and contemporaries Dryden, Addison, Congreve, Wycherley and Pope. Such an illustrious visual compendium provided a powerful spur to Vita’s sense of vocation.

The King’s Secret included a self-portrait: ‘a boy muffled up in a blue scarf … scribbling something in a ponderous book … His pen flowed rapidly over the paper … He wrote from morning till evening.’

She called her alter ego Cranfield Sackville, the first of numerous masculine fictional self-representations. He wrote ‘in a little arbour situated in the garden at Knole’.

As she worked, Vita remembered, ‘the past mingled with the present in constant reminder’,

the former as tangible as the latter, she herself in her own words a fragment of an age gone by.

Victoria queried Vita’s self-portrait: Cranfield she considered ‘more open, less reserved’ than Vita. Plaintively she confided to her diary the wish that her daughter could ‘change and become warmer-hearted’.

By chance, a visit to Dover Castle on 18 July, midway through The King’s Secret, brought Vita to the last meeting place of Charles II and his sister Henrietta. ‘This is interesting to me, as I am just writing about their meeting!’ she noted.

Her earliest approaches to fiction were the literary equivalent of method acting.

But it was from a less picturesque source that Vita drew her first literary income. In July 1907, she was one of five winners of an Onlooker competition to complete a limerick. Her prize was a cheque for £1. In her diary, fifteen-year-old Vita put a characteristically heroic spin on events: ‘This morning I received the £1 I had won in the “Onlooker” verse competition. This is the first money I have got through writing; I hope as I am to restore the fortunes of the family that it will not be the last.’

She resorted to code to record her intention of restoring the family fortunes. A fitting ambition for this ardent Sackville scion, it was not one she intended to expose to her mother’s watchful gaze.

Predictably, opposition came from close to home: Vita’s parents. Lionel was too conventional to embrace the idea of a daughter whose writing was more than a diversion. Like the majority of upper-class Englishmen of the time he mistrusted intellectualism, particularly in women: Vita described life at Knole as ‘completely unintellectual … analysis wasn’t the fashion’.

Lionel had sown his wild oats in marrying his illegitimate cousin; in the short term, there would be no further public transgressions. Even the eventual breakdown of his marriage was managed with relative decorum on Lionel’s part. In her diary Victoria noted the physical resemblance between father and daughter and Lionel’s pride in Vita; his only plan for her was marriage into a family like his own, preferably to an eldest son. More than anything he longed for her to embrace ‘normal and ordinary things’, among which he did not count writing.

On the surface, Victoria showed more sympathy. Victoria was Vita’s chosen reader. ‘How marvellously well she writes!’ she admitted later. ‘Reading her calm descriptions fills me with admiration … No one can beat her at her wonderful descriptions of Nature, or analysing a difficult character.’

But Victoria too mistrusted the intensity of Vita’s involvement with her writing. Pepita’s daughter was too parvenu to condone such evident disregard for the conventional preoccupations of the society she had married into. (Vita afterwards condemned these preoccupations as limited to parties and investments, pâté de foie gras and the novels of E. F. Benson.) Two years earlier Victoria had confided to her diary her relief that Vita was ‘getting a little more coquette and tidy’, suggesting a growing interest in clothes and appearances to match her own; it was a chimera. On 16 July 1907, while she continued to work on The King’s Secret, Vita’s parents finally made their feelings plain: ‘Mama scolded me this morning because she said I write too much, and Dada said he did not approve of my writing … Mother does not know how much I love my writing.’

Vita was mistaken. Both her parents saw the extent of her passionate engagement with her writing. They noted, for example, that the majority of her thirteenth birthday presents were books: as a counterbalance, their own present consisted of sumptuous squirrel furs.

Yet, despite their disapproval, they did little to redirect Vita’s energies. By 1907, confronted by overwhelming evidence of Lord Sackville’s mismanagement, they had embarked on a course of unwelcome financial retrenchment which only the Scott bequest would resolve; Victoria’s troublesome siblings continued their carping demands for money and title which afterwards erupted into the succession case of 1910. Above all, Victoria and Lionel knew now that their marriage was broken beyond repair. If Lionel’s response was one of courteous indifference, Victoria’s emphatically was not. She was angry, hurt, uncomprehending. There would be no resolution. Their days of acting in unison were running out. For her twenty-first birthday, Victoria presented Vita with the Italian desk which remains today in her writing room at Sissinghurst.

On 8 April 1908, an ebullient Vita recorded in her diary, ‘We had the results of the exams at Miss Woolff’s. I am first in French literature, French grammar, English literature and geography, and I won the prize essay. Brilliant performance!’ Later that year she consolidated her position. ‘Prize essay day at Miss Woolff’s,’ she wrote on 16 December: ‘I won it (“Reminiscences of an Oak Tree”). I was also first in mythology!’ She won the same prize for the third time on 5 April 1909. The title on that occasion played to bookish Vita’s strengths: ‘Thoughts in a Library’.

By 1909, Vita was in her fourth and final year at Helen Woolff’s School for Girls in London’s South Audley Street. She had first attended classes there at the age of thirteen and pursued her studies thereafter during the autumn and Easter terms. At the same time, until July 1905, Victoria retained the services of Vita’s French governess of ‘such an uneven temper’, Hermine Hall.

Vita continued to write outside school: her earliest surviving poems, along with fragments of poems, date from this period. Like Cyrano de Bergerac, Miss Woolff’s school was a catalyst in Vita’s life: it represented her first sustained participation in the world of her contemporaries outside Knole. Neither the curriculum studied nor Miss Woolff herself impacted significantly on her intellectual growth or her development as a writer. Nor did she much relish the company of her peers, dismissing in her diary ‘the average run of English girls’ as dull and stupid.

Meanwhile Victoria oversaw her cultural education: on 13 February 1909, Vita attended a matinée of The Mikado; on 16 February she went to an organ recital in Westminster Abbey given by Master of the King’s Musick, Sir Walter Parratt; on the following day she was present at ‘a most interesting lecture on Madame Récamier’.

More compelling than anything Miss Woolff or Victoria offered was Vita’s unquenchable thirst for her writing. ‘There is writing, always writing,’ she remembered of this period:

her best days resembled those of Cranfield Sackville, at work undisturbed in his garden arbour. Vita was an autodidact. In every area she prized most highly, from poetry to gardening, she was partly self-taught. Writing had the added attraction of temporarily screening Vita from her parents’ world of acrimony and threats of litigation: she excluded from her first fictions anything unheroic in her Sackville heredity. In Orlando, her fictional ‘biography’ of Vita, Virginia Woolf describes Orlando’s hope ‘that all the turbulence of his youth … proved that he himself belonged to the sacred race rather than the noble – was by birth a writer rather than an aristocrat’.

Throughout her life, Vita thirsted for just such an acknowledgement. She was never brave enough to separate her two identities. At first an aristocrat who wrote, she became a writer whose work affirmed her own ideal of aristocracy. It was one of several conflicts in her nature.

Vita considered that she had worked hard at Miss Woolff’s. ‘I set myself to triumph at that school, and I did triumph. I beat everybody there sooner or later, and in the end-of-term exams, I thought I had done badly if I didn’t carry off at least six out of eight first prizes.’

Her triumph transcended examinations. She did indeed earn the reputation for cleverness she had deliberately cultivated. It went some way towards softening the blow of her unpopularity, which she attributed to her moroseness, pedantry, priggishness and savagery, as well as an appearance of aloofness that she was at a loss to explain. There were other discoveries too. Among her fellow pupils were girls who fell in love with Vita.

As an adult, Vita seldom loved singly and was always, as one of her sons remembered, in love.

Her childhood had been poor preparation for intimacy. Neither Victoria nor Lionel consistently gave her grounds to suppose herself the exclusive object of their affections. Victoria’s love was erratic, Lionel’s mostly implied. As Vita wrote of Shirin le Breton in The Dark Island, ‘It was not a particularly united family, and indeed was held together, as is the case in many families, less by the ties of affection than by those of convenience and convention.’

Vita loved Knole and believed that Knole returned her love. Her attitude refuted that of Leonard Anquetil in The Edwardians: ‘Chevron [Knole] is really a despot of the most sinister sort: it disguises its tyranny under the mask of love.’

Yet the house could not wholly replace more conventional relationships. When she was older, Vita wrote in one of the unpublished private poems she called diary poems: ‘The horrible loneliness of the soul makes one crave for some contact.’

‘Contact’ was not love, nor limited to a single donor or recipient. During her teenage years at Miss Woolff’s, Vita inspired, and partly reciprocated, the love of two classmates: Rosamund Grosvenor and Violet Keppel.

She had known them both before. Rosamund Grosvenor was an old familiar, Vita’s first friend, a relation of the Duke of Westminster. They were ten and six respectively when Rosamund first visited Vita at Knole in 1899. In his capacity as commander of the West Kent Yeomanry, Lionel had departed for South Africa and the Boer War, and Victoria worried that Vita would be lonely. Rosamund stayed for three days: Vita remembered only that her neatness and cleanliness contrasted with her own grubbiness. Until 1908, when her family moved away from Sevenoaks, Rosamund shared Vita’s morning lessons at Knole. Initially, theirs was a milk-and-water relationship. Vita complained in private of Rosamund’s ordinariness and lack of personality; Rosamund fell under the combined spell of Vita and Knole. Despite her four years’ seniority, Rosamund learned to adopt the role of supplicant. It may have come naturally to her or she may have realised that the Vita who prided herself on her hardiness and her resemblance to a boy could only be conquered by weakness. Fortunately for Rosamund, who by her late teens was deeply in love, she had good looks on her side. Her soft, creamy curvaceousness earned her the nickname ‘the Rubens lady’. Eventually it was Rosamund’s body, not her mind, which provoked a response in Vita. In her diary for 17 July 1905, she noted that Rosamund had gone swimming, noted too her appearance in a bathing costume ‘on the skimpy side’. Vita was thirteen, Rosamund seventeen. When their relationship progressed beyond girlish friendship, Vita was clear that, as far as she was concerned, its root was physical attraction: Rosamund was fatally uninterested in books.

Hero worship, and a tendency she could not resist to regard Vita as the living incarnation of centuries of Sackville swank, characterised Rosamund’s love. She revelled too in Vita’s Spanish blood, an association of exotic glamour which Vita herself exploited. Vita provoked a similar response in Violet Keppel: ‘All this, and a gipsy too! My romantic heart overflowed.’

Rosamund addressed Vita as ‘Princess’; for Violet, Vita was her ‘Rosenkavalier’.

Both names imply status, desirability, a prize.

Violet’s novel Broderie Anglaise offers a version of her relationship with Vita, whom she reimagines as a youthful peer, John Shorne. There is ‘a languid grace’ about Shorne, ‘a latent fire’. Like Vita, he bears a strong resemblance to his family portraits. His ‘face recalled so many others seen in frames and surrounded by a ruff, a jabot or a stock, a face that had been a type since 1500 … a hereditary face which had come, eternally bored through five centuries’.