Vita Sackville-West Read online

  Violet was able to state, in her purple lyric style, exactly what Vita represented for her. Vita was, she wrote, like “the wild hawk and the windswept sky … splendid and dauntless, a wanderer in strange lands.…”5 Who, made like Vita in body and mind, could resist being the wild hawk rather than the faithful wife? Violet could write in scorn of what she despised and claim loudly what she admired: “Heaven preserve me from littleness and pleasantness and smoothness. Give me great glaring vices, and great glaring virtues, but preserve me from the neat little neutral ambiguities. Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be an anarchist, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity’s sake be it to the top of your bent. Live fully, live passionately, live disastrously. Let’s live, you and I, as none have ever lived before.”6

  Radclyffe Hall, the author of The Well of Loneliness, a celebrated lesbian novel, so determined to break all the rules, had never managed, alas, to write like this, but then Violet, like Vita, was nourished on Baudelaire and the romantic poets. On and on went the affair, with Vita dressing as a young man, in London, in Paris, in Monte Carlo. Vita would wear a khaki bandage around her head, browning her face and hands, and all were deceived. She would present Violet as her wife and wondered in delight if anyone would recognize in “the slouching boy with the bandaged head … the silent and rather scornful woman” they might have met at dances or dinners.7 In many of Vita’s novels, such as The Dark Island, the dark romantic figure is Vita herself, doomed to love a place and to figure an unusual destiny.

  When Violet was about to be married to Denys Trefusis, Vita fled to Paris, terrified of what she might do—interrupting the service or worse. Just before the marriage took place on June 16, 1919, Violet wrote a one-sentence note: “You have broken my heart. Goodbye.” But of course it was not goodbye, for their affair continued, and they in fact eloped to France in 1920. The husbands came after them in a small airplane: All her life, Vita remained much impressed with Harold’s energy in undertaking the trip. She returned to Paris with Harold, already exhausted with Violet, who fled south through France, telephoning Vita from various places, her voice becoming faint as the distance grew between them. It all ended badly, as we read in Vita’s diary entries: “My God, what a day. I am broken with misery, and if things were as bad as I at first thought I should put an end to myself … I had to go, I should have killed her if had stayed an instant longer. I have told her I cannot even see her for two months. She calls this banishment—it is not, it is simply the impossibility of bringing myself to see her for the present.”8

  What remains of that long-lasting affair is a florid collaborative novel by the two women: Challenge. It had originally been called “Rebellion,” then “Enchantment,” then “Vanity,” and at one point “Foam,” as well as a few other things. The prolonged hesitation over the title seems to me symptomatic of the fascination both of them found in the experience of this writing, and the writing of this experience. This novel is the fullest expression of the Julian/Eve relationship in its tormented excitement. When the novel was already in proof, Vita’s mother objected forcefully to the publication (shame on the family, the children, etc.), so when the book finally broke into print, it sank without a trace. Doran in New York published it in 1924, and it reappeared in 1975, with a preface about the affair by Nigel Nicolson. The scandal is long gone, the book long forgotten; but the entire last part is included here as the intimate and creative witness of the famous affair.

  Vita’s double nature continued to get her into “muddles,” as she and Harold called the messes she would make of others’ lives and marriages. This was an important factor in Vita’s life; to put it delicately, she did not have a green thumb with the marriages she became involved with. Vita devastated the emotional lives of many women, notwithstanding her essential modesty, benevolence, and that magnanimity that Virginia Woolf felt hovering about her. From early to late, from the longer-lasting to the briefer, Vita’s loves were numerous. Vita’s quite amazing number of amorous adventures and her secrecy about them mingled with her ability to keep many things going at once, and her erotic exploits, while maintaining her dignity, make her a heroine to many, in spite of the hurt her affair with Violet and her other involvements caused in others.

  A partial list of her involvements, with the beginning dates simply and very roughly documenting one of the years in which the particular relationship mattered, would include many women and far fewer men. (For details, see Victoria Glendinning’s thorough and engrossing 1983 biography, Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West.) As a general reference point, these names may suffice with the initial dates of the affairs, which petered out over time, or more suddenly, as Vita would tire of the complications and jealousies:

  Kenneth Campbell, 1908

  Rosamund (“Roddie,” “Rose”) Grosvenor, 1909–1911

  Orazio Pucci, 1909

  Violet Trefusis (Eve, Mitya), 1918–1920

  Dorothy (Dottie) Wellesley, 1921

  Margaret (Pat) Dansey, 1922

  Geoffrey Scott, 1924

  Virginia Woolf, 1925

  Mary Campbell, 1927

  Margaret Goldsmith Voigt, 1928

  Hilda Matheson, 1929

  Evelyn Irons, 1931

  Olive Rinder, 1931

  Christopher (Christabel Marshall) St. John, 1932–1934

  Gwen St. Aubyn, 1934

  Violet Pym (Vi), 1947

  Edith Lamont, 1947

  Bunny Drummond, 1947–1952

  Vita’s multitudinous love affairs are never explicitly discussed in her diaries or her writings but only referred to in passing. However, the many traces of them and the personalities involved are as easily detected as Violet Trefusis in the florid writing of Challenge or Gwen St. Aubyn in the highly melodramatic novel Dark Island. Of course, apart from her lifelong and devoted relationship with Harold, Vita’s most crucial involvements were with Violet Trefusis and then Virginia Woolf. In her affair with Virginia, she is scarcely loquacious, even to herself. Melodramatic she is not. Here are her diary entries for a few days during 1925:

  November 7. Long Barn. A lovely warm golden day. Sat in the sun all the morning. Went to tea with Eddy—Leonard went back to London, Virginia remained.

  ! [in circle]

  V. told me about re-reading the first 30 pages of “To the Lighthouse” & how she had had to rewrite them.

  November 8. Virginia stayed till the evening. Such a wet day.

  November 10. Spent the evening with Virginia, dinner with the Drinkwaters. Very dull.

  November 24. Went up to see Virginia.… After to a party at Vanessa Bell’s.

  November 25. Went to Virginia in the evening. Went afterward to Clive’s rooms, found Virginia there.

  November 27. Virginia came to Mount St. to see me.

  November 29. Spent the afternoon with Virginia.

  December 4. Long Barn. Virginia came.

  December 5. Alone all day with Virginia.

  December 6. Went up with V. in the evening.

  December 17. Alone.

  December 20. [X at top of page] Spent the afternoon with Virginia; dinner with her at Mount St.

  Virginia was eventually to see in Violet Trefusis what Vita had so cherished. When Violet went to see her about the Hogarth Press perhaps publishing her novel, called Tandem, Virginia wrote Vita: “I quite see now why you were so enamoured … what seduction! What a voice—lisping, faltering, what warmth, suppleness and in her way—it’s not mine … how lovely, like a squirrel among buck hares—a red squirrel among brown nuts. We glanced and winked through the leaves.”9 This encomium produced in Vita an instant disquiet. For Virginia’s friendship was, most likely, the deepest and most important of all those in Vita’s life, except for Harold’s, just as Vita’s friendship was the most important one in Virginia’s, except for those with Leonard and with her sister Vanessa. From the time of her first meeting with Vita, Virginia Woolf found the contrast between her aristocratic air and her
modest regard for her own talents as attractive as it was disarming. She took a flirtatious tone in many of her letters, issuing a warning to them both that was not entirely without some basis: “But you don’t see, donkey West, that you’ll be tired of me one of these days (I’m so much older).…”10 Virginia’s own point of view about their affair was that Vita, in her full-breasted and mature plenteousness and maternal protectiveness, was like rich fruit: “the grapes are ripe; and not reflective. No. In brain and insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this and so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always most wished from everyone…”11 Vita’s affair with Virginia was followed by a longstanding and close friendship in which each placed a high value on the other’s company. After their brief trip through Burgundy in 1928, much of which was taken up with their writing to and waiting to receive mail from their husbands, they remained friends; over the years, however, the degree of closeness varied. Writing in her diary entry of September 26, 1937, about a visit just paid to Sissinghurst Castle, Virginia speaks of Vita’s “silent goodness, and Harold too, a sense of the human understanding unspoken.…”12 And in 1940, when bombs were exploding around Vita’s house, and Virginia thought that “she might be killed any moment,” she was at once more forthrightly affectionate with this great friend. “What can one say—except that I love you and I’ve got to live through this strange quiet evening thinking of you sitting there alone.… You have given me such happiness.”13 And, writing to Vita on March 4, 1941, shortly before her suicide, Virginia says feelingly: “I suppose your orchard is beginning to dapple as it did the day I came there. One of the sights I shall see on my death bed.”14 And perhaps, in her dying moments, so far from a deathbed in the conventional sense, she did: Who is to say? Vita’s poem on Virginia Woolf’s death is included here as her final tribute to her friend.

  Vita and Harold

  Vita, so close to her land and garden and work, managed to live what one might call a happy married life, despite all her other involvements—or perhaps, seen from another angle, because of them she was able to value her relationship to her husband as greatly as she did. Writing to Harold in 1953, she says it succinctly, explaining their love of living and their intense dislike of growing older: “the real deep reason for us, you and me, is that we hate the idea of leaving Life, as we must, twenty to thirty years hence, and we both love life and enjoy it.”15

  They had two kinds of lives, of course, as Harold pointed out, just as Vita had the two parts of her being. What with Vita never even knowing what the League of Nations was, her world was a different one from his. And yet, in the long run, perhaps that saved their marriage, this nonconcordance of worlds that permitted their concord in salvaging the thing that mattered: their love and their marriage. Letter after letter makes the enduring quality of the love between Vita and Harold clear and authentically vibrant. Their quite remarkable relationship, documented by well over two thousand letters exchanged, seems never to have lessened in any impact: Over and over during their very long life together they express their gratitude for it.

  The Second World War affected Vita and Harold seriously; each of them carried a small vial of poison, as did Virginia Woolf, in case of catastrophe. Vita’s reactions were clear-cut: she refused to attend a banquet at Buckingham Palace, not wanting to have to purchase the proper clothes; her difference from her mother’s delight in her jewels could scarcely be more radical. Vita: “I am writing this letter with my jewels littered all around me—emeralds and diamonds, just taken out of the bank—and they make me feel sick; I simply can’t subscribe any longer to the world which these jewels represent. I can’t buy a dress costing 30 pounds or wear jewels worth 2,000 pounds when people are starving. I can’t support such a farce when people are threatened that their electric light or gas may be cut off because they can’t pay their arrears.” Harold replied with admiration for how “sound” she was in her values.16

  By contrast, her mother thought nothing of spending those 2,000 pounds on a diamond necklace and then, directly after, would write on the toilet paper in Harrods’s Ladies Cloakroom, finding it was excellent for letters and writing to Vita (in French of course), and in how well it took the ink.17

  In one of her last published letters, Vita writes of seeing Harold out the window, in his blue coat and black hat: “It is the sort of sudden view of a person that twists one’s heart, when they don’t know you are observing them … I often think I have never told you how much I love you—and if you die I should reproach myself, saying, ‘Why did I never tell him? Why did I never tell him enough?”18 The truth is, as all lovers know, that enough is never enough in such a realm. And it is this that twists the heart.

  Her son Nigel, who has edited their letters and Vita’s autobiographical writing with discretion, courage, and love, states unabashedly his viewpoint about his mother. “I love her more, as my father did, because she was tempted, because she was weak.… She fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men only women. For this she was prepared to give up everything.”19

  Harold knew all about Vita’s duality and was always worried by the two parts of her personality: As he wrote to her, “The one tender, wise and with such a sense of responsibility. And the other rather cruel and extravagant.”20 He believed the first part was the essential one but was alarmed by the latter, always unfathomable to him. What in fact he emphasized, as Vita did, was the importance of their love and their marriage.

  On their last cruise together, when Vita was aware that she was seriously ill, she hid it from Harold, knowing how much pain it would cause him. He was always her primary concern, and their marriage, her primary reassurance along with their work in their garden at Sissinghurst and her constant devotion to her writing, particularly her poetry. Vita was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and then a Companion of Honour in 1948. She died at Sissinghurst Castle at the age of seventy.

  Garden and Tower

  Sometimes a tragedy can lead to a triumph for a strong person and writer. So it was with Vita Sackville-West. If she had her own private tragedy, it was no less a public and indeed a cultural tragedy, symbolic of tradition and what it can do. In her time and her country, women could not inherit the royal title and attendant lands of their family. Not being a man, Vita was deprived of her ancestral home at Knole, which she loved with the kind of original devotion that inspires not just our admiration but our compassionate complicity in her loss. Her cousin Edward (Eddy) Sackville-West inherited it, and even though she was finally given a key to it, she rarely used it. The trauma remained. Her dream book, which she called just that, is reprinted here, where it is noticeable that the single dream in which she is reconciled to Knole and feels no anguish at returning is prefaced by her remarking on that rare event. Writing Knole’s history and that of her family in Knole and the Sackvilles and creating her garden at Sissinghurst, which we might see as a substitute garden, scarcely sufficed to make up for what she should have had. She deserved it by her ancestral passion, loved it more than anyone else could have, and would have cherished it best.

  Given Vita’s passion for and extensive knowledge of French literature along with her acknowledged mastery of everything related to the art of gardening, it is doubly ironic to think, in relation to her life, of Voltaire’s Candide. His all-too-often quoted ironic statement and lament about this not exactly being the best of all possible worlds leaps to mind: “Il faut cultiver son jardin”—you do have to cultivate your garden, whichever one you happen to have or be allotted. So Vita Sackville-West worked in and thought about, year in and year out, her garden at Sissinghurst, which was obliged to replace what she might have cultivated at Knole. Her garden still flourishes, visited by an increasing number of persons every year. Indeed, Vita’s newspaper columns and her radio broadcasts about the cultivation of gardens far more fame than
did her writings on other topics, fictional and factual. Yes, she cultivated her garden, but in a sense it was the wrong one. The way in which she eventually made it the right one took great force of will and managed what we might call a translated passion.

  Vita Sackville-West did not mope about and shared neither her grief nor her work, which took place in her tower at Sissinghurst at a comfortable distance from the house in which everything else took place. The house, actually a castle, had no guest rooms. In Vita’s tower upon her desk, there remains the photograph of Virginia Woolf, where it always was. Her still-remembered and much-celebrated affair with Woolf yielded the triumphant and un Woolfian text of Orlando, whose hero/heroine is based on Vita, and in which Vita’s elegant and willful changeability, in personality as in costume, is rendered in different genders over the ages. And Vita’s brief Seducers in Ecuador, with its play on varying views dependent on the color of one’s glasses, is quite as Woolfian any of Woolf’s stories, short or long.

  Vita’s life was both busy and quiet. She wrote, lectured on literature and family life as well as gardening, and made radio broadcasts, but was eventually more at ease at Sissinghurst, in her tower and with her family and dogs, than out in the public arena. There she lived a casual life in her favorite costume: long pearls and silk shirts worn with pants and high boots. That is the way she would choose to be remembered, as well as in her fashionable hats and costumes for her public performances. Here too her double nature and chosen appearance was an intimate part of her being.