Revisiting Vita and Harold ...

 

“Harold nicolson and Vita Sackville-West were two very remarkable people; but that is no reason for regarding them as having been more remarkable than they actually were. Yet since their deaths – she in 1962, he in 1968 – they have received an excessive amount of deferential attention and ahistorical celebration, especially from the ‘bedint’ bourgeoisie, the very class of people that they themselves most despised. They have been more biographied than many of their greater contemporaries.¹ Their diaries and letters have been published and re-published at indulgent length.² Their private lives have been described and televised in excessive and(...)”

Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain by DAVID CANNADIN

 SEE ALSO:

https://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.com/2017/11/aspects-of-aristocracy-grandeur-and.html

Flirting with fascism

GIBERT ADAIR

 EVENING STANDARD

Tuesday 25 January 2005 01:00

https://www.standard.co.uk/home/flirting-with-fascism-7383683.html

 

If, from Norman Rose's new biography of Harold Nicolson, I had to select a single anecdote that seemed to me to capture its subject in all his contradictions and contrariness, it would be the following.

 

In 1931, having exchanged a never more than semi-successful diplomatic career for what would ultimately prove to be an ineffectual foray into parliamentary politics, Nicolson signed up for Oswald Mosley's putative fascist party.

 

One day he and Mosley sat down to discuss what colour the party uniform ought to be, Mosley eventually opting for brown (black had already been taken). And what, for the record, had Nicolson proposed? Why, "grey flannel trousers and shirts".

 

There you have Nicolson in a nutshell. On the one hand, he "flirted" (to use the canonic euphemism) with several pretty hairy ideas and ideologies, even though, to be fair, he was no fascist and, as a pre-war MP, no appeaser.

 

On the other, he was what used to be described as an affable cove, urbane and puckish, charming, gregarious and witty (attempting to wade through the linguistic thickets of Finnegans Wake, he commented that "it's worse than a letter from Sybil Colefax", to whom both Churchill and Ernest Bevin were equally partial.

 

On the one hand, he wrote a ragbag of 30-odd books, many of them not much better than hack work. On the other, his Some People, an anthology of fictionalised portraits of his more eccentric acquaintances, is a genuine masterpiece: small but perfectly formed, and admired by the notoriously hard-to-please Vladimir Nabokov.

 

He was also, alas, an unrepentant snob, racist and anti-Semite, and the fact that these prejudices were the ideological currency of his uppercrust "set" make them no less repellent to read about today, causing even his biographer to despair of him at times.

 

His son, Nigel, related how once, when served by a black waiter at the Travellers' Club, he "ostentatiously took out a silk handkerchief to wipe the spot on his plate where the man's thumb had momentarily rested". (Did he really have to do it ostentatiously?) On another occasion, he "quipped" that the appearance and behaviour of a Jewish Lord Mayor of London aroused "my sympathy for Eichmann".

 

Yet the contradictions just keep coming. For, racist as he was, he loathed South African apartheid and, anti-Semite as he was, he was passionately pro-Zionist. And even within these contradictions lurk other contradictions. He was fond of making the dizzyingly logic-defying statement that he detested the black races but detested apartheid even more.

 

As for his Zionism, it could, paradoxically, be construed as a sophistical species of anti-Semitism. If, he appeared to imply, the Jewish peoples were granted their own homeland, there mightn't be so deuced many of them elsewhere.

 

The supreme contradiction of his life was, of course, his marriage to his alter ego (or alter egoist), Vita Sackville-West. Though they had two children, he was primarily homosexual, his lovers including Ivor Novello, Duncan Grant and James Lees-Milne, and so was she, of course, with Virginia Woolf.

 

Yet they appear to have been a happier couple than many a more conventional one, suggesting that it might make better sense if we married the people we liked rather than those we loved.

 

A great deal has already been written about that union, most notably by Nigel in his best-selling Portrait of a Marriage and by Victoria Glendinning in her life of Vita. Norman Rose, unfortunately, has not brought much that's new to his biography, which means that, though lucid and stylish, save for the odd dangling participle, and thankfully not at all longwinded - Harold is already five years old by page three, down from Oxford by page 24 and wedded to Vita by page 37! - it cannot help striking any reader familiar with the material as a trifle redundant.

 

The Nicolsons are undoubtedly interesting as raffish products of their period and class, but, once you've read two books about them, you've read them all.

 

Catherine Brown

Vita in her ivory tower: a portrait of a lonely, lovelorn aristocrat who yearned to be mistress of her own ancestral home

A review of Behind the Mask by Matthew Dennison reveals that in Vita Sackville-West’s copious writings, she generally cast herself as a man

From magazine issue: 22 November 2014

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/vita-in-her-ivory-tower-a-portrait-of-a-lonely-lovelorn-aristocrat-who-yearned-to-be-mistress-of-her-own-ancestral-home

 

Visitors to the National Trust’s Sissinghurst — the decayed Elizabethan castle transformed by Vita Sackville-West in the early 1930s — are regaled by picturesque extracts from Vita’s landscape poems, and moving professions of love to and from her husband Harold Nicolson. Matthew Dennison’s title, Behind the Mask, indicates his ambition to get beyond such projections to something more real. But the metaphor is unfortunate. There was no single image that Vita adopted or which others imposed on her — nor a single real self which has been concealed until now.

 

Dennison knows this. He interprets Vita in terms of a split between the reserve inherited from her English father Lord Sackville and the passion inherited from her mother, the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish dancer and another Sackville (Vita’s father’s uncle). The autobiographical ‘Ruth’ of Vita’s first published novel, Heritage, is ‘cursed with a dual nature, the one coarse and unbridled, the other delicate, conventional, practical, motherly, refined’. Vita herself acknowledged that ‘My whole curse has been a duality with which I was too weak and too self-indulgent to struggle.’

 

But Dennison also finds two other aspects of Vita’s family determinative. One is the selfishness, prodigality and snobbery of her parvenu mother Victoria, who presents a model of painfully broken marriage to her undermothered daughter. The second is Knole, the Elizabethan mansion in which Vita grew up and which she increasingly thought of as her lover. Her inability to inherit it because of her sex is posited as the cause of a lifelong obsession, and as encouraging her self-projection as the man who would have inherited it.

 

Vita’s copious writings — novels, novellas, poems, biographies and travel writing — have now been largely forgotten, and were falling out of favour even in her lifetime. Dennison interprets them as autobiographical, and therefore sees them as fair game to chop up and scatter through his biography in corroboration of his points, always explaining ‘who’ in life is ‘who’ in fiction. Vita is usually a male character. Because Dennison’s interests are as much psychoanalytic as narrative, his structure is not only chronological but thematic, and the chapters are based on titles of her works. This produces a degree of repetition.Nor are his psychological inferences invariably convincing. The Spanish/English binary has limited explanatory power. He observes that, since Vita understood love and suffering to be inextricable, ‘the surprise is that she herself remained highly sensitive and easily wounded’. One wonders why.

 

Yet this carefully researched book is intelligently and elegantly written, frequently using what Vita’s sometime lover Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own, calls ‘a man’s sentence’ — balanced, oratical and confident. He makes illuminating references not just to Vita’s writing but to others’; Woolf’s Orlando (a tribute to Vita which she gleefully accepted), Vanity Fair (in which Vita, significantly, liked Becky Sharp), and Anna Karenina (which Vita reread during a particularly fraught elopement with her lover Violet Keppel).

 

Still, as I read, I repeatedly asked myself ‘why?’ — or ‘why now?’ ‘What is our interest in Vita today?’ Some will still relish her highly sensuous gardening writing (‘We hold a single rose close to our eyes and absorb it in an intimate way into our private heart’). She was, importantly, heterodox as a woman, and, like Dennison, was moved to write biographies of extraordinary women of earlier ages (in Vita’s case, Joan of Arc). Yet, as was true of many aristocrats, she had little interest in the women’s movement. Nor did she identify as a ‘lesbian’ (a term little used then) or ‘a congenital invert’ (the sexologist Havelock Ellis’s term, adopted by her more decidedly gay contemporary Radclyffe Hall). Unlike Vita, Hall dressed consistently as a man, and unlike her, wrote an explicitly lesbian novel.

 

Perhaps Vita speaks most loudly to the present in her open marriage. The realm and power of marriage have been much diminished since Vita’s time, and unconventional marriages, such as hers, the Woolfs’, and the Bells’, helped bring this about. Yet this biography makes clear how emotionally expensive open marriage can be. During the most fraught of Vita and Violet’s elopements to France, Vita ended up travelling with Violet’s pursuant husband Denys. After Denys returned home in despair, Violet’s mother found a two-seater aeroplane and sent him back, accompanied, at Victoria’s insistence, by Harold. This foursome met in different configurations over three torrid years.

 

Despite this, Vita comes across as of limited interests and interest. Her disconnection from politics, despite living through two world wars, and her husband becoming an MP, is striking. Her extensive and exotic travels, connected with Harold’s diplomatic career, and her travel writings, are briefly described. Of her and anyone else’s views on religion there is no mention.

 

Vita’s similarities with her contemporary, the artistic hostess and patroness Lady Ottoline Morrell, are striking. Both spent lonely, aristocratic childhoods in a vast house which they would never inherit, eventually acquiring country seats of their own. They married mild-tempered men of a slightly lower class, who entered politics and tolerated their many affairs. They presented their unusually beautiful tall selves with theatrical aplomb, were painted often and designed interiors and gardens with pleasure and success. They had mounting money problems and died painfully of cancer.

 

But the differences work overwhelmingly in Ottoline’s favour. Whereas Vita yearned for Knole all her life, Ottoline accepted the loss of not only Welbeck, but her adult homes at Garsington and in Bedford Square with good grace. Virginia Woolf felt the difference, and came to admire Ottoline — as she told Vita — particularly in later life. Ottoline cared about the state of the country, her husband’s liberal politics, her religion and the wellbeing of the arts and artists. She was inveterately sociable. Vita of the ivory tower did less, with more wealth. In her relationships, unlike Ottoline, she hurt more than she was hurt. Yet her artistic creations, of words and plants, remain. What she bequeaths us speaks of an age which is past, but should not be forgotten. We are its children.

 

Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West review – a catalogue of sexual conquests

 

No salacious detail of her love affairs is spared in an infuriating new life of Vita Sackville-West, the first new biography in 30 years

 

Rachel Cooke

 @msrachelcooke

Sun 12 Oct 2014 08.00 BST Last modified on Thu 22 Mar 2018 00.21 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/12/behind-the-mask-life-of-vita-sackville-west-review-catalogue-sexual-conquest-matthew-dennison-review

 

Vita Sackville-West, the writer and gardener extraordinaire, grew up at Knole in Kent, a house that resembled “a medieval village with its square turrets and its grey walls, its hundred chimneys sending blue threads up into the air”. It is a self-contained but irredeemably grand building: now in the care of the National Trust, it is reputed to have a room for every day of the year. Sackville-West was deeply, cripplingly attached to it, perhaps for the simple, stubborn reason that it would never be hers (it would pass to a male heir). Down the years, Knole was first a shield – a perimeter wall over which those she disdained would never be able to climb – and then, once it was lost to her, a perpetual ache. Thanks to this, she grew up to be that most rare of creatures: a restive, questing woman who seemed always to be in search of a means of assuaging her loss, yet was also wholly herself, as easy in her skin as in her breeches and gardening boots.

 

The whiff of scandal, though, was there from the beginning, and sometimes it was in danger of turning into a stench. In 1910, when she was 18, her mother’s siblings launched a legal claim to the estate, one that would climax in a salacious court case (Vita’s mother, Victoria Sackville-West, was only the mistress of Knole because she had married her cousin, the third Lord Sackville; Victoria and her brothers and sisters were the illegitimate children of the second Lord Sackville). Three years later, another battle followed when the family of Victoria’s late lover, Sir John Murray Scott, challenged his will, accusing Lady Sackville-West of having used undue influence over him in order to secure a substantial legacy. Victoria triumphed on both occasions, but such public notoriety, you feel, also had its effect on her only child. Beneath Vita’s expansive, passionate nature ran a certain coolness. She was blithe, flexible, thick-skinned: as oblivious to the pain she caused others as to the gossip that inevitably trailed her.

 

In his new biography of Sackville-West, Matthew Dennison whizzes through her childhood and these court cases. His interest, in spite of the vague protestations he makes in the preface, seems to lie mostly in his subject’s sex life, a frisky business that was never going to be compromised by her marriage in 1913 to the writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson, who was gay. As a result, his narrative consists for the most part of a somewhat well-rehearsed catalogue of conquest, Vita’s béguins – this is his preferred term for the many women with whom she falls into bed – lined up one after the other in what quickly comes to resemble a kind of sapphic beauty pageant. The roll call begins in 1917 with Violet Keppel, the daughter of Edward VII’s mistress (“I know that when you fall into V’s hands your will becomes like a jellyfish addicted to cocaine,” wrote Harold, who couldn’t help wishing the manipulative Violet would simply drop dead); it ends with Alvilde Lees-Milne, the wife of the diarist James Lees-Milne. Along the way it takes in, among many others, Virginia Woolf; Hilda Matheson, a director of talks at the BBC; and Gwen St Aubyn, Vita’s sister-in-law. Faced with this seamless parade, the reader has little choice but to agree with another lover, the cruelly abandoned and unfortunately-named Olive Grinder, who wrote to Vita in 1932: “You do like to have your cake and eat it – and so many cakes, so many, a surfeit of sweet things.” There are times when the reader simply cannot tell these female confections apart. Poor Matheson stands out in the memory only because Vita charmingly likened her blue-stocking darling to “a strong purge… a hair shirt”.

 

You can see where this is going. Predictably, Dennison’s attention wanes dramatically after Vita, Harold and their two sons move to Sissinghurst Castle in 1930, the purchase of which did not go down terribly well with some of their friends (Harold’s lover, Raymond Mortimer, thought it “a gloomy place in hideous flat country, with commonplace cottages and no view”). Once they’re settled in and busy planting their hornbeams and climbing roses, his book starts to feel very much like a race to the end. The menopausal Vita, with her refusal to attend grand parties – “I hate the idea of being examined under electric lights,” she told Harold – and her “dark shadow of moustache” cannot match, for him, the young Vita, whose hooded eyes were feted, whose wedding dress was the same gold as “the tassel of Indian corn”. He touches on her drinking, the “muzzy moods” that came to worry Harold, only lightly. Ditto the staggering success and influence of the garden she created. He puts some effort into summarising her literary output, which was prodigious, reminding us along the way that she was briefly talked of as a future poet laureate (her reputation used to rest, somewhat uneasily, on her long poem, The Land; these days, if she is loved at all it is for her novel All Passion Spent, in which an elderly aristocratic widow finds new freedom in Hampstead). But his accounts are so uninspiring, so unwitty. In the end, what lingers in the memory is not this character or that plot, but the fact that Virginia and Leonard Woolf bought their Frigidaire on the back of the profits from Vita’s bestseller, The Edwardians, a novel they published at the Hogarth Press.

 

Dennison is an old-school biographer who begins at the beginning and ends at the end, and whose style is occasionally grandiloquent (his last subject was Queen Victoria, the life of whose youngest daughter, Beatrice, he has also written). But it wasn’t this that infuriated me as I read Behind the Mask. Nor was it his failures of psychology, weird though many of them are (Vita’s affair with Trefusis, he says, resembled “short-term schizophrenia”). Rather, it was simply that the information contained in his book is so obviously inadequate, so frequently incomplete. I need give only one example to make the point. What kind of biography of Vita Sackville-West, I wonder, refers to the suicide of Virginia Woolf in a single sentence? The only possible answer is a wholly deficient one. This friendship was one of the most significant of her life. Apart from anything else, it is clear (look at the letters) that Vita felt she might have been able to save her friend if only she’d known her state of mind (Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts, can be seen as a farewell to her – a letter with a subtext that Vita singularly failed to grasp when she read it). Again and again, I found myself turning to my battered paperback of Victoria Glendinning’s Whitbread prize-winning biography of Sackville-West, the better to fill in the holes in Dennison’s doily. If you are going to write, as he has done, the first new life of Vita to appear in more than 30 years, it is, I feel, beholden on you to bring more to the biographical table, not vastly less.

 

SEE ALSO : Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West . Portrait of more than a Marriage.

 https://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.com/2018/11/violet-trefusis-and-vita-sackville-west.html