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

She was eighteen and had grown into a beauty. ‘The knobs and knuckles had disappeared. She was tall and graceful. The profound hereditary Sackville eyes were as pools from which the morning mist had lifted. A peach might have envied her complexion.’¹ Victoria drew attention to the loveliness of Vita’s skin and her eyes, ‘with their double curtain of long lashes’.² Shyness appeared as aloofness: with ‘her sleek brown head, her glowing skin, her disdainful poise’, she resembled Ruth Pennistan in Heritage.³ Thanks to the Sackville succession case in February, Vita also possessed, in attractive measure, a degree of notoriety; newspaper reports had emphasised her connection to Knole, which possessed a glamour of its own. With her schooldays at Miss Woolff’s behind her, Vita would find that she had graduated from inspiring schoolgirl crushes to provoking a similar response in the young men she encountered. At eighteen, there was a soft and gentle quality to Vita’s beauty. Later this softness gave way to something more florid: a harder, bolder, more masculine appearance, ‘all rather heroic and over life-size; all on a big scale; no feminine charm at all’, as she herself described one of her fictional alter egos.⁴ The shift would reflect a change in her attitudes. For the moment, youthful curiosity had yet to be overwhelmed by the certainties of middle age.

      Clare Atwood’s portrait of Vita as Portia, which today hangs in Ellen Terry’s former home of Smallhythe Place, suggests androgyny: Vita as a romantic Italian youth. Set against a medieval cityscape, she appears as she would have wished: as she described herself three years later, ‘essentially primitive; and not 1913, but 1470; and not “modern”’.⁵ For all its self-consciousness, it is a picture of a sitter without vanity, as if she disregarded her own looks. Victoria considered that a true assessment: she claimed that Vita was not in the least conceited. Unlike her mother, Vita at eighteen was not interested in feminine wiles; her interests lay elsewhere. Two years previously, in Le Masque de Fer, she had dressed up as the Man in the Iron Mask; a year ago, in her verse drama about doomed poet Thomas Chatterton, she was Chatterton himself, forger and Romantic hero, martyr to the written word. She wore a costume of breeches, white stockings, buckled shoes and a white shirt, which her maid Emily made for her in secret. Each time she played the part, learnt by heart and performed in an attic at Knole to an audience of abandoned trunks and cast-off furnishings, she reduced herself to tears: ‘Earth has been my hell,/ Another world must surely be my heaven.’⁶ Even at their most vulnerable, the men Vita chose for her alter egos were heroic. Her posturing arose from other impulses than vanity, but the element of self-association was potent. ‘Each time I burnt Chatterton’s manuscripts in the candle I felt I was burning my own,’ she remembered; ‘each time I died most uncomfortably on the oak settle, it was not only Chatterton but I myself who died.’⁷

      On a rainy July day in 1910, in the guise of Portia masquerading as a lawyer in order to contrive her own happy ending, Vita continued that narrative of heroism and wish fulfilment she had begun in childhood – as Sir Redvers Buller, bold in khaki amid Knole’s flowerbeds, and as Cranfield Sackville in The King’s Secret, writing, always writing. This was Vita’s other life, the life of her imagination. In imagination, every Sackville was a conquering hero and each, as she described them in 1922, ‘the prototype of his age’;⁸ Vita was their latest incarnation. Her life would retain this element of fantasy. Repeatedly in her fiction she celebrated a male version of herself, because she associated maleness with control, possession, inheritance, fulfilment and love – as she invested ‘the bull’ in her poem of the same name, the ability to ‘stand four-square and lordly scan/ His grass, his calves, his willing cows,/ Male, arrogant, alone’.⁹ She is Julian in Challenge, buoyant with love for Eve; Peregrine Chase in The Heir, inheriting, and refusing to give up, the Tudor manor house of Blackboys; Sebastian in The Edwardians, handsome, fêted, secretive, heir to a fictional Knole; Nicholas Lambarde in her unpublished story ‘The Poet’, certain of his writer’s vocation, author of ‘a contemplative poem on solitude’ as Vita would be: ‘The only important thing in the world to him was poetry.’¹⁰ Most of all, and most revealingly, she is aspects of Miles Vane-Merrick in Family History. His house is a castle in Kent, based on Vita’s future home of Sissinghurst; his interests include poetry, farming and philosophy; his emotional requirements are specific and unyielding: ‘He wanted to retain his individuality, his activity, his time-table. He wanted to lead his own life, parallel with the life of love, separate, independent.’¹¹ For Miles, everything has its allotted place. His life is docketed, divided into compartments, but he relinquishes nothing. From early in her romantic career, the same idea appealed to Vita. She would prove herself mostly skilful at maintaining her independence, her ‘separateness’ from the life of love. Like Julian in Challenge, she learned to put things – people – aside until she wanted them: ‘not forgotten, not faded … but merely put aside, laid away like winter garments in summer weather’.¹²

      In the neverlands of her fiction and drama, Vita changed her sex as a means of taking control and a preliminary to action. It was a simple conceit. She continually rewrote her own history and, in swapping her sex, perfected what she regarded as imperfections. It enabled her for an instant to bypass those impediments to inheriting Knole which she could never overcome; it enabled her to love as she wished, unconstrained by social expectation; as Cranfield, Chatterton and Portia, using language with a lawyer’s skill, she staked her claim to be a writer in the face of parental resistance. The Vita of her books was never dispossessed and never without love: always the cynosure, never the pariah; always autonomous. In Seducers in Ecuador, the unreliable Miss Whitaker shares Vita’s fantasy: ‘her own stories were marvellously coming true. Indeed, to her, they were always true; what else was worthwhile? But that the truth of fact should corroborate the truth of imagination! Her heart beat.’¹³

      In fiction, imagination and reality merged: it was a mission statement for Vita. Even Shakespeare forced her into men’s clothing. She did not resist. Her desire to share in all the possibilities and perquisites of a man’s life shaped her. If, as she suggested, her role, like her forebears’, was to be the ‘prototype’ of the age, it is appropriate that this woman who was born into the smug certainties of aristocratic Victorian England, and who witnessed their collapse in the aftermath of the First World War, should in her life embrace areas of confusion and uncertainty. Added to which, she enjoyed dressing up. Events like the Masque, which included several of her friends, were a high point in that debutante life she decried as ‘distasteful and unsuccessful’. Deep down Vita’s real reservation, as at Miss Woolff’s, arose from her fear of not being liked.

      The Masque was a fundraising exercise. A theatrical performance showcasing many of Shakespeare’s best-known characters, it was intended, as the programme notes explained, to benefit ‘the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Fund, which is established to promote the erection and endowment of a Tercentenary Memorial to Shakespeare to take the form of a National Repository Theatre’. Vita had attended her first rehearsal at Apsley House on 10 June. Also taking part were Rosamund Grosvenor and Vita’s friend Irene Lawley, along with Lionel’s current mistress Olive Rubens, as well as professionals including Ellen Terry. A London performance on 30 June was abandoned midway because of rain. Three days later it rained at Knole, too, ‘torrents, but cleared up and we were able to finish it’.¹⁴

      In her diary, Vita makes no comment on her role. She lists rehearsal times and weather conditions for the outdoor performances; she records the loan of Terry’s costume. She does not reflect on Portia’s emotional dilemma – or her own. In Shakespeare’s Venetian comedy, Portia is the wealthy young woman whom suitors squabble over. Her father has set a riddle to determine the choice; her own choice is set on Bassanio. ‘The lottery of my destiny/ Bars me the right of voluntary choosing,’ Portia tells the Prince of Morocco. In the summer of 1910, Vita’s case appeared quite different. She was surrounded by choices. She understood her parents’ hopes for her, but estimated correctly that they would allow her to make up her own mind. To Victoria, Lionel wrote, ‘I see that it’s no good trying to force her.’¹⁵ To Vita, when the time came to choose between suitors, he made it ‘clear he had other dreams’. Even in his disappointment, Vita wrote, he was ‘sweet’.¹⁶

      Rosamund Grosvenor was still in love with Vita; only