Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

In the eyes of Vita’s mother, Harold’s parents Sir Arthur and Lady Nicolson were ‘very ugly and very small and very unsmart looking’.

From the beginning, Vita and her parents discounted Harold’s family. (Fifty years later, Vita forbad Harold to be buried alongside her in the family vault at Withyham on the grounds that he was not a Sackville.) They discounted Sir Arthur’s achievements as ambassador to Russia; they discounted Lady Nicolson’s Anglo-Irish connections and her sister’s marriage to the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin and Ava. (Lord Dufferin was an eminent Victorian whose record as a diplomat and public servant eclipsed that of any Sackville since the end of the sixteenth century, when Thomas Sackville served his cousin Elizabeth I as Lord High Treasurer of England. Lord Dufferin had an Irish estate at Clandeboye – the Sackvilles discounted that too.) After Lionel had failed his Foreign Office examinations in 1890 and given up on the idea of a career, the Sackvilles discounted the world of work entirely. Referring to Harold’s position as a junior diplomat in Constantinople, Sackville family gossip labelled him ‘a penniless Third Secretary’. Harold did not deny it. With a salary of £250 a year, he described himself as ‘supremely ineligible’;

he categorised his family background as that of a ‘landless tribe’ lacking ‘hereditary soil’.

There was the rub. For though the Nicolson baronetcy originated in the first half of the seventeenth century, and Sir Arthur would be created Baron Carnock in 1916, the Nicolsons were members of a service class which the Sackvilles had forgotten and forsaken. They could not lay claim to a Knole. Rather they lived at 53 Cadogan Gardens, supported only by Sir Arthur’s salary. Harold’s own salary contrasted poorly with that of his wealthiest competitors for Vita’s hand: the annual income of Lord Granby’s father, the Duke of Rutland, was somewhere in the region of £100,000,

while Lord Lascelles told Victoria that his father’s income was ‘£31,000 a year from his land alone, plus plenty of cash’.

With uncharacteristic understatement, Victoria wrote in her diary about the prospect of an engagement between Vita and Harold: ‘It is not at present a good marriage.’

Vita was as conscious as her parents of the discrepancy, however slight, between her own claim to elite status and Harold’s. It was a claim which counted for more then than now. Brought up as a child of the diplomatic aristocracy, Harold’s childhood memories included vignettes of the royal courts of Bulgaria, Spain and Russia, of the British embassy in Paris, with its powdered footmen and gilded opulence, and of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy life of his mother’s family and his Uncle Dufferin. He confessed a sense of ‘effortless superiority’.

It was an attitude of mind. That he chose to articulate this feeling at all suggests a degree of self-consciousness incompatible with effortlessness. Vita’s social outlook was more straightforward. Hers were the assumptions of an age-old landed caste; later in life she adopted a tag of Victoria’s about her attitudes having been formed before the French Revolution. Virginia Woolf would describe her as ‘very splendid’: ‘all about her is … patrician’. An upbringing at Knole, latterly smoothed by Seery’s generous handouts, had done little to cultivate ‘ordinary’ instincts in Vita. Only in middle age did she acknowledge that the Sackville glory days were long past: she never made such an admission to Harold. She ‘ought to be a grande dame, very rich’, Victoria wrote, ‘where she could do what she likes and not have to do anything against the grain’.

To Harold, Vita wrote: ‘I like having things done for me.’ It bored her to do things for other people.

She never learned to cook and, until her death, relied on servants in most areas of her domestic life. As a debutante she preferred ‘a very fine ball … with powdered footmen announcing duchesses’ to ‘those scrimmages at the Ritz’.

There was an opulence to Vita that was mostly uncontrived.

As Vita herself was aware, her own background was closer to that of the early suitors she rejected – Lord Granby and Lord Lascelles – than to Harold’s family, with its steady accumulation of diligent public service. On 6 June 1912, Vita attended a ‘100-years-ago’ ball at the Royal Albert Hall. She was dressed as a figure from one of the Hoppner portraits at Knole, in the very costume worn by the sitter, with ‘two tall grey feathers and a white turban’.

Walking round the hall in company with the heirs to dukedoms, she told Harold, ‘I could see “How suitable!” in people’s eyes as we went by.’

Her motive in writing in this vein was partly ironic; she may also have intended to rouse Harold to jealousy. In her complacency she overlooked Harold’s previous unofficial engagement – to Lady Eileen Wellesley, herself a duke’s daughter (as well as one of Vita’s fellow cast members in the Shakespeare Masque). If the Nicolsons lacked élan, they were not, as all acknowledged, what the Sackvilles termed ‘bedint’: middle class, vulgar or worse. Despite Vita’s family pride, the marriage of Harold Nicolson to Vita Sackville-West was no mésalliance.

Her sense of social superiority notwithstanding, Vita was ripe to fall in love. Remembering in 1920, she disparaged Rosamund’s intellectual limitations (in Challenge, where Rosamund appears loosely fictionalised as Fru Thyregod, Vita dismisses her conversation as a ‘babble of coy platitudes’

); their liaison undoubtedly made Vita happier than otherwise. It stimulated that streak of romance which inspired her to write; the same impulse affected the nature of her writing and some, but not all, of her relationships. It would never leave her. In 1913, in a poem called ‘Early Love’, she described a relish for ‘those fond days when every spoken word/ [Is] sweet, and all the fleeting things unspoken/ Yet sweeter …’.

She told Harold: ‘There is no fun equal to being quite at the beginning of things.’

A part of Vita was in love with the idea of love and would remain so.

Two centuries earlier, in his poem ‘Dorinda’s Sparkling Wit and Eyes’, Charles Sackville had written: ‘Love is a calm and tender joy,/ Kind are his looks and soft his pace.’ Vita had seen little of the calmness and tenderness, the kindness or softness of love. Calmness was so seldom a feature of Victoria’s relationships; and kindliness had long ceased to play a central part in Lionel and Victoria’s marriage. As a child, Vita had frequently lacked the easy reassurance of her parents’ love. Of those other adults in her life, Lord Sackville was costive in his emotional reticence and few of Vita’s governesses enjoyed more than a fleeting tenure. The departure of Miss Bennett, known as ‘Bentie’, when Vita was ten, caused her real distress. Vita admired her father and convinced herself (correctly) of the depth of their mostly unspoken bond: ‘You and I are so alike and are not always able to show these things,’ he would write to her later.

Indeed, she minded so much about her father’s good opinion that she prevented him from reading any of her early novels and plays. According to Victoria, Seery also thought of Vita as ‘like a daughter’;

along with Bentie, Ralph Battiscombe and her parents, he was a legatee in a will Vita compiled aged nine. The bequests to Seery included ‘my miniature, my claret jug, my whip’, in addition to the khaki suit in which Vita played at being Sir Redvers Buller. She was not troubled by the discrepancy in size between her nine-year-old self and twenty-five-stone Sir John: she regarded him, she would write, as ‘a mass of good humour and kindliness’.

By the time she met Harold Nicolson, Vita had limited but vexed experience of male libido. Her first sexual encounter occurred when she was eleven. It happened in Scotland, at Sluie, the Aberdeenshire estate overlooking the lower Grampians which Seery rented annually. Afterwards Vita remembered the place with something close to rapture: ‘those lovely, lovely hills, those blazing sunsets, those runnels of icy water where I used to make water-wheels, those lovely summer evenings’.

At Sluie, rules were relaxed: ‘I had a kilt and a blue jersey, and I don’t suppose I was ever tidy once, even on Sundays.’

Vita spent her days with the gillies; she accompanied Seery shooting, helping him over stiles and stone walls; she ran through beech trees, silver birches and pines, foraged in the heather and the bracken and the loch behind the house; she played with the children of the local farmer. It was a paradise for this tomboy with a taste for fresh air and disdain for conventional girlish pastimes; her time outdoors was enlivened by that element of easy companionship missing from so much of her childhood. In her diary for 29 August 1907, shortly after arriving at Sluie, she recorded her first meeting that year with the farmer’s children: ‘I think Jack and Phemie were pleased to see me.’

Four years previously, the same Jack had told Vita he loved her. He told her so again when Vita was thirteen.

It happened the first time in the shadow of the gillie’s hut. Despite what Vita described as his crippling awareness of the social gulf that existed between himself and the object of his affections, Jack took it upon himself to suit the deed to the word. His intention, Vita concluded years later, was to rape her: only ‘his inborn respect, his sense of class’ prevented him.

Instead he sought relief in masturbation, a hand on Vita’s thigh. At the same time he forced Vita ‘to take hold of his dog’s penis and work it backwards and forwards until “the dog reached the point where he came and squirted his semen all over my shoes, and I was alarmed by this manifestation”’.

That ‘alarmed’ sounds an understatement. With hindsight Vita sought to minimise the oddness of this encounter by explaining her lack of childish squeamishness about sex: she was a country child, with a country child’s knowledge of birds and bees. She denied that either Jack’s masturbation or his dog’s ejaculation had troubled her.

More distasteful were the unwelcome attentions of her godfather. The Hon. Kenneth Hallyburton Campbell, stockbroker son of Lord Stratheden and Campbell, was twenty-one years Vita’s senior, a friend of Seery’s, called by Victoria ‘Kenito’. This affectionate diminutive proved misleading. Campbell first tried to rape Vita when she was sixteen, in her bedroom at Knole. On that occasion only the appearance of a housemaid carrying hot water saved her. ‘Frequently after that’ he renewed his attempt.

Campbell’s position of trust exacerbated the gravity of his offences, which Vita grew practised at evading. Later, like Jack, he told Vita he loved her. In her diary she confided her sense of horror. Later still, when his marriage to Rosalinda Oppenheim turned out badly, Campbell complained to Vita of his unhappiness.

Vita’s upbringing had taught her the egotism of love. She learned too an idea of the selfishness of sexual gratification, particularly male sexual gratification. Jack could be excused on grounds of his youth. Not so Campbell. Within Vita’s family circle were examples of men behaving badly. The Sackville succession case had inevitably drawn attention to the different consequences for Vita’s grandfather and Pepita of their illicit love. Lord Sackville, as part-time lover, received unlimited sexual access and devotion: in provincial nineteenth-century Spain, Pepita forfeited respectability and her dancing career. She made herself ridiculous by adopting the title ‘Countess West’, and she died giving birth to the seventh of Lord Sackville’s children. Despite her best efforts, she failed to shield those children from the implications of their illegitimacy. In the case of Vita’s parents, Lionel does not appear to have worried over explanations for Victoria’s sexual withdrawal; forgotten were the ecstasy of first infatuation, her exclamations of delirium, his tender lover’s, ‘Was it nice, Vicky?’

Instead Lionel sought consolation elsewhere. To Victoria’s evident distress, he allowed his emotions to keep pace with his libido. In time Lionel and Victoria’s physical separation eroded their relationship entirely.

Vita was young when she discovered that Knole could never belong to her. A male entail promised house and estate instead to her cousin Eddy, son of Lionel’s brother Charles. Nine years younger than Vita and a gifted pianist from an early age, Eddy was in every way her inferior in fighting and war games and cricket and boyish bluster. If Vita was hardy and masculine, Eddy was soft and girlish (and afterwards homosexual). The cruelty of this reversal was not lost on Vita. ‘I used to hate Eddy when he was a baby and I wasn’t much more, because he would have Knole,’ she explained to Harold in 1912.

Gender was an accident of birth, but maleness – even Eddy’s unconvincing, panstick-and-rouged, velvet-clad maleness – was rewarded. ‘Knole is denied to me for ever, through a “technical fault over which we have no control”, as they say on the radio,’ she wrote.

As with inheritance, Vita decided that in relationships the male role was that of taking, not giving: an unthinking assumption of the upper hand. It was a role she herself would play. In her novel All Passion Spent, Vita’s octogenarian heroine Lady Slane questions a life that has been devoted to her husband: ‘She was, after all, a woman … Was there, after all, some foundation for the prevalent belief that woman should minister to man? … Was there something beautiful, something active, something creative even, in her apparent submission to Henry?’

Certainly Vita thought at length on the contrasting roles of men and women. For the most part she was clear about her answers to such questions: she was incapable of discerning the beauty of submission. She devised a solution to suit herself. As with much in her life, her ‘feminism’ was self-serving. It consisted of a refusal to compromise anything touching her self-identity. That identity, as we have seen, embraced both masculine and feminine.

Sackville history included examples of formidable women, independent-minded and financially independent. Chief among them was the seventeenth-century matriarch Lady Anne Clifford. In 1923, Vita edited Lady Anne’s diary for publication. Occasionally she likened herself to her indomitable forebear. Among other things, Lady Anne shared Vita’s taste for solitude: ‘though I kept my chamber altogether yet methinks the time is not so tedious to me as when I used to be abroad’.

But the forebears who appealed to Vita as a child were not women like Lady Anne; rather, they were associated with tales of cavalier adventure and derring-do. In the history Vita loved, it was men who played the hero’s part. Unconsciously or otherwise, she determined to take the same part, and Vita was often selfish in her relationships, not only with her lovers but within her family too. She excused it as her ‘happy-go-lucky … everything-will-turn-out-right-if-you-don’t-fuss-about-it’ nature: in practice it meant she left the fussing – and the fallout – to other people.

Her life in retrospect is a wholesale rejection of the idea that sexual gratification exists as a masculine prerogative. Twice she turned down proposals of marriage from a young man who wooed her with a Christmas present of a bear cub; ‘He has the worst temper of anyone I know. He is cruel,’ she wrote of Ivan Hay.

Correctly she estimated the unlikelihood of his indulging her need for dominance. In a rare instance of humour she christened the bear cub ‘Ivan the Terrible’. With Rosamund she was photographed for an illustrated paper, walking baby Ivan in the gardens at Knole. The paper captioned its photograph ‘Beauty and the Bear’.

Irritated by Vita’s debutante success, from which she felt herself excluded, and laconic in her sarcasm, Violet Keppel commented that ‘bears had taken the place of rabbits’.

A century ago, Vita’s rejection of conventional gender roles in sex was more controversial than it is today. Like much in her life, she attempted to resolve the issue through writing. She created male protagonists who deliberately deny their sexual instincts and in this way forfeit the aggressor’s role, or, like Calladine in Grey Wethers, have their sex stripped from them by the author: ‘Mr Calladine was a gentleman, – she couldn’t call him a man, no, but a gentleman he certainly was, and she was even a little overawed by his gentility.’

The private life of Sir Walter Mortibois in The Easter Party for example, is dominated by his suppression of his sexual appetite and his determination that his marriage to Rose remains platonic, uncompromised by love or desire. ‘A man isn’t born with wife and children, and if he acquires them he has only himself to blame,’ Arthur Lomax tells readers of Seducers in Ecuador. Explaining the particular outlook of Lester Dale in Grand Canyon, Vita wrote: ‘As for women … I took myself off whenever they threatened to interfere with me. If a woman began to attract me, even if the poor soul remained quite unaware of it, it constituted interference. It was all part of my settled policy.’

The men in question are guilty of misogyny, but it is they, not the women associated with them, who in Vita’s narratives are the ultimate victims.

Although Vita arrived at this philosophy over time – she may have been influenced by Otto Weininger’s equation of excessive intellectualism in men with insincerity, which she read in 1918 – there were implications for Harold Nicolson from the outset. In 1910, her homosexuality prevented her from thinking of Harold in ‘that way’. Harold’s apparent lack of vigorous physical desire for her, alongside her conviction that marriage was unavoidable, were factors that eventually recommended him to her. It soothed the wounds this daughter of Knole sustained as a result of her sex; it suggested a husband who was foremost a ‘playmate’ and a ‘companion’. ‘You and I are not grown-up,’ she wrote to Harold in 1912. ‘Nor ever will be.’

This ‘childishness’, with its implied sexlessness, was the very prescription that would preserve their marriage long term. They were child-like together: they would pursue more ‘adult’ diversions separately, in time by mutual consent.

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!’

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’.

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.