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

Harold included, Vita had led a double life: that of her parents’ daughter and that of the girl entrusted to a shifting cast of nurses and governesses. In addition, in Vita’s case, was the interior life of an only child who, inspired by her home and by loneliness, absented herself into daydreams and make-believe. As she grew older, while her parents travelled, Vita mastered time travel. She spirited herself into moments of Knole’s past, at one with the portraits and historic artefacts which surrounded her: the silver furniture made for James I in the King’s Room; the paintings by Holbein, Frans Hals, Van Dyck and Gainsborough; the heraldic leopards which prompted her to verse (‘Leopards on the gable ends, Leopards on the painted stair’); the white-painted rocking horse belonging to the 4th Duke of Dorset, an object doubly endowed in Vita’s eyes since the duke’s tragic early death in the hunting field had resulted in Knole’s inheritance by his sisters, a period of female ownership spanning half a century. Her spirited reveries excluded her parents. Often she dressed up, as in those Boer War games with the Battiscombes, fought in trenches among the rhododendrons; actually and metaphorically she would go on dressing up for much of her life. At the outset, the performance was for herself, Vita as player and Vita as audience.

      As a writer, Vita seldom dwelt on the subject of childhood. Even the stories she wrote as a child focused on adults. Her poetic description of ‘children taken unawares’, ‘Arcady in England’, is an outdoor scene as much concerned with the lushness of an idealised autumn day as the particular nature of the children who catch the poet’s eye. For Vita’s upbringing was one in which, unusually alone, she learnt above all to observe; she forged few childish relationships, even within her family. Some things she saw clearly: the wonders of the great house that captivated her from infancy, ghosts of the past, the power of genius loci. Others she struggled to discern with any clarity throughout her life, among them her mother’s oscillation between absence and presence, affection withheld and affection lavishly bestowed, spite and charm. As in every childhood, happiness was balanced with unhappiness for Vita. As an adult she quoted one of her favourite forebears, Lady Anne Clifford: ‘the marble pillars of Knole in Kent … were to me oftentimes but the gay arbours of anguish’.⁸¹

      Vita’s response to her dilemma was creative: she mythologised an existence she only partly understood. It was her own version of her mother’s ‘Quel roman est ma vie!’, but lacked the unqualified exuberance of Victoria’s joyful exclamation. For Vita, she and Knole and its whole population of relatives and servants became characters in a fable. She described her grandfather as ‘rather like an old goblin’. Contemptuously she listened to her mother ‘making up legends about the place, quite unwarrantable and unnecessary’, but acknowledged that ‘no ordinary mother could introduce such fairy tales into life’.⁸² Stalwartly and in silence, she worshipped her long-suffering father whom she imagined not as an individual but a type, ‘a pleasing man’⁸³ – as Virginia Woolf described him, ‘the figure of an English nobleman, decayed, dignified, smoothed, effete’.⁸⁴ Even the buildings themselves had an unreal quality, like a theatrical backcloth: ‘my little court [is] so lovely in the moonlight. With its gabled windows it looks like a court on a stage, till I half expect to see a light spring up in one window and the play begin.’⁸⁵ When at length Vita devised a role for herself, she existed in a mythical tower, part heroine, part observer. At Sissinghurst thirty years on, she made good that pretence. Her sense of life as a performance – theatrical and containing elements of make-believe – began much earlier.

      Victoria rejoiced in a reality that surpassed any romantic novel: Vita transformed the reality of her unsatisfactory childhood into a personal fiction. It was one way of placing herself centre stage and making sense of her fellow actors; the process also implied distance. These impulses of mythomania and detachment would remain part of Vita’s psyche until death. Early on, albeit subconsciously, she resorted to fiction to clarify the business of living: later she recycled her own reality as the principal element of her fiction, and all her novels contain fragments of autobiography. Despite this, Vita was an honest child and naturally affectionate. For the most part, those traits too would endure.

      Vita Sackville-West described the childhood of the Spanish saint, Teresa of Avila, in The Eagle and the Dove, published in 1943. Identifying Teresa’s favourite childhood pastime as ‘tales of adventure’, she warmed to her theme. Throughout her youth, Vita wrote, Teresa, along with her brother Rodrigo, ‘could think of nothing but honour and heroism, knights and giants and distressed ladies, defeated evil and conquering virtue; they even collaborated in composing a story of their own, modelled on these lines’.⁸⁶

      Vita’s was a life of storytelling. Aspects of her poetry, the fiction she wrote in order to make money, her nonfiction and much of her journalism have a strong narrative content; ditto her diary, in which events, appointments and people take the place of analysis or self-searching. Honour, heroism and conquest – sometimes metaphorical, sometimes reimagined – all find a place within the stories Vita spun; invariably she projects herself into the person of her hero. She glimpsed an echo of these vigorous heroics in the youthful St Teresa, a fiery and imaginative aristocratic teenager sent to the Convent of Santa Maria de Gracia after suspicions of a lesbian affair. It was this swashbuckling quality that endeared Teresa to her: similar feelings coloured Vita’s interpretation of seventeenth-century writer Aphra Behn and French saint Joan of Arc, whose biographies she also wrote. Vita’s juvenilia, written in her teens, includes ‘tales of adventure’: so too the more fanciful of her mature fiction, for example, Gottfried Künstler and The Dark Island. The greatest adventure was writing itself. It would remain so. ‘I do get so frightfully, frenziedly excited writing poetry,’ she once admitted. ‘It is the only thing that makes me truly and completely happy.’⁸⁷ 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’.⁸⁸ 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’.⁸⁹ 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’.⁹⁰ 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.”’⁹¹ 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’.⁹² 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