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

he oughtn’t to have told [her]’ about sex: she was ‘neither excited nor interested’ by his revelations.³⁷ His subsequent demonstration of the physical differences between boys and girls provoked a more dramatic response. Deeply shocked, Vita fled.³⁸

      For all his boyishness and his bright eyes, the curly-haired young man invited to Knole for the Masque of Shakespeare failed to excite Vita physically. At no point in his undemonstrative courtship would he do so. Afterwards, Vita stated that it was Harold’s own fault. He was too ‘over-respectful’; his behaviour convinced her (correctly, in the event) that he was not ‘the lover-type of man’.³⁹ Until Harold’s kiss in September 1912, Vita’s response to him was like that of Gottfried Künstler, in her novella of the same name. As Gottfried grew closer to Anna Roche, we read, nevertheless ‘it never entered his head to fall in love with her’.⁴⁰ Unlike Vita, Gottfried did not blame Anna for his conduct. Her protest has a hollow ring to it. She later claimed of the period before Harold’s proposal, ‘People began to tell me he was in love with me, which I didn’t believe was true, but wished that I could believe it.’ Significantly she adds: ‘I wasn’t in love with him then.’⁴¹ Yet for reasons of her own – insecurity and confusion uppermost – she needed to believe that Harold loved her.

      Harold almost certainly did fall in love with Vita, albeit his affection, like hers, lacked physical ardour. It was a conundrum rich in irony. At eighteen, Vita had yet to realise the implications of her feelings of arousal or non-arousal: she did not regard her ‘intimacy’ with Rosamund as any sort of disqualification from marriage or, more surprisingly, disloyalty to Harold. ‘It never struck me as wrong that I should be more or less engaged to Harold, and at the same time very much in love with Rosamund,’ she confessed in her autobiography.⁴² To Harold she wrote: ‘I love the Rubens lady [Rosamund], and somewhere in the world there is you.’⁴³ She did not think of herself as gay. Like the majority of women of her generation, she considered her long-term sexual choices as marriage or abstinence. Lesbianism, as understood today, did not exist as an option for Vita; the word itself had yet to enter common parlance. Later she told Harold that she had known nothing then of homosexuality. It was, anyway, a label she would have rejected. Rosamund provided affection, distraction and physical excitement during Harold’s lengthy absences. There was virtually no intellectual companionship between the women. In time, Vita would come to consider them temperamentally mismatched: ‘She is a stupid little thing, and her conventionality drives me mad.’⁴⁴ Regardless of her sexual feelings for Rosamund – or Rosamund’s apparently deeper feelings for her – Vita would shortly decide to marry Harold. Rosamund’s destiny, like Julian’s winter garments in Challenge, was to be ‘put aside’.

      Six years her senior and a man, Harold was less naïve than Vita. He was aware that, despite his love for her, his sexual inclinations were predominantly homosexual and could not be satisfied by a wife. As recently as September 1911, he had been forced to leave Madrid under a cloud after contracting gonorrhoea from an unidentified partner. (Unaware of the nature of his illness, Vita described him sympathetically as ‘rather a pathetic figure wrapped up in an ulster’.⁴⁵) But he was not deterred. Throughout his life Harold treated his affairs lightly. They provided physical pleasure, they were divertissements, but they did not, in his own eyes, define him as a person. With few exceptions, they never overwhelmed him emotionally in the way that Vita was repeatedly consumed by her affairs. Intermittently Harold craved sex with another man: he avoided acknowledging any need for the larger commitments – and rewards – of a full-scale relationship. Marriage was still a conventional expectation in early-twentieth-century England: Harold Nicolson was a man of conventional background. He had chosen a conventional career and would pursue it with more or less conventional success until Vita’s intransigence knocked the wheels off the cart. In 1910, male homosexuality was a criminal offence. The need for secrecy in relation to this central aspect of his life surely shaped Harold’s behaviour in the summer he met Vita; the fact of his homosexuality partly accounted for the nature of his polite but dilatory courtship. As it happened, his chosen wife was every bit as secretive as he was. She allowed Harold to believe that her love for Rosamund was no more than an intensely loving friendship, while reciprocating Rosamund’s devotion and, up to a point, her desires. The courtship of this young man and woman already skilled in concealment, uncertain or dishonest about the nature of their sexual appetites and their emotional needs, was inevitably bound for choppy waters.

      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’.⁴⁶ 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’;⁴⁷ he categorised his family background as that of a ‘landless tribe’ lacking ‘hereditary soil’.⁴⁸ 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 £100,000,⁴⁹ while Lord Lascelles told Victoria that his father’s income was ‘£31,000 a year from his land alone, plus plenty of cash’.⁵⁰ 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.’⁵¹

      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’.⁵² 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’.⁵³ To Harold, Vita wrote: ‘I like having things done for me.’ It bored her to do things for other people.⁵⁴ 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’.⁵⁵ 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