‘Love in fantastic triumph sate,
Whilst bleeding hearts around him flowed,
For whom fresh pains he did create
And strange tyrannic power he showed.’
Aphra Behn, quoted by V. Sackville-West in Aphra Behn: The Incomparable Astrea, 1927
VITA WAS EMOTIONALLY promiscuous. In a poem called ‘Sometimes When Night …’, she imagined a couple content to ‘read, speak a little, read again’, an evening scene in a house in the country. Its tranquillity is shattered by the sound of a shot. ‘But we read on,/ Since the shot was not at our hearts, since the mark was not/ Your heart or mine, not this time, my companion.’1 The key words are ‘not this time’: next time may be different. About the soundness of her heart, Vita makes her companion no lasting promises.
Like her parents’, Vita’s was an intensely passionate nature. Sex, intrinsic to Julian’s mastery over Eve, played an important part in her relationship with Violet, as it would in future relationships. Her depiction of thwarted sexual desire in a late novel, The Easter Party, bears the hallmark of truth to experience. Vita pictures her heroine ‘pacing up and down her room at night, twisting her hands, throwing her head back, heaving her shoulders, breathing quickly and heavily, in an anguish … trying to regain control’.2
Vita’s choice of Harold over Violet did not mean that she had conquered or forsworn such urges, despite her earlier decision, in the face of Harold’s desire for another child, that sex would play no further part in their marriage. She forswore those urges only in relation to Harold: even in Harold’s case she occasionally relapsed in the early days. Instead Vita had determined to resist for a second time the complete physical and emotional surrender of her relationship with Violet: her motives were self-protection and belated loyalty to her marriage. ‘You know what infatuation is, and I was mad,’ was Vita’s final verdict on the affair to Harold, in December 1922.3 Other lovers would follow in Violet’s footsteps, all but one of them female. Although several sacrificed their own stable, long-term relationships in order to reciprocate feelings they misattributed to Vita, none again threatened the safety of her marriage. Harold referred to them glancingly as Vita’s ‘muddles’.
The ability to remain unharmed by emotional and sexual entanglements points to a capricious quality in Vita’s make-up. Novelty aroused her, so too pursuit, seduction, dominance. Narcissism sharpened her pleasure: the realisation of that image of herself in the male role of conqueror that Violet had recognised, ‘the abandonment of mastery and surrender in the hours of night’, as she described it in Challenge. Most of her believed, as she wrote in her diary, that ‘love makes everyone a bore, but that the excitement of life lies in the béguins [infatuations], and the “little moves” nearer to people’.4 Those feelings were necessarily fleeting; Vita told her mother that her béguins lasted a matter of days and left no imprint. ‘Few delights bear the strain of investigation,’ she wrote in a different context in 1926; ‘they bruise, as tender fruits after handling. It is safer not to know too much.’5 She enjoyed and needed sex, enjoyed the anticipation of fulfilment: she learnt to separate this need from all but temporary emotional involvement. Vita never accepted any lover’s argument that sex implied commitment. That refusal became her means of preserving herself and her marriage. Its consequence was that Vita hurt anyone who felt more strongly than she did.
In her biography of Aphra Behn, begun on 7 June 1927, Vita itemised Behn’s images of love. Her focus is illuminating: ‘there are in the quiver of the god a great many different darts; some that wound for a day, and others for a year; they are all fine, painted, glittering darts … but the wounds they make reach the desire only, and are cured by possessing’.6 Vita recognised her own desire as a chimera but necessary, and accorded it a corresponding place in her priorities. For much of the time, she accepted Behn’s assertion that there are higher aims than physical fulfilment: ‘’tis that refined and illustrious passion of the soul, whose aim is virtue and whose end is honour, that has the power of changing nature …’.7 Couched in terms to satisfy a latter-day Sackville cavalier, this was the ‘passion’ that Vita ultimately realised in her platonic marriage to Harold. More than her relationship with Violet, her decision that her marriage should succeed irrespective of her own physical desires set the course of Vita’s life. Inevitably, at intervals, she fell short of her own lofty resolutions, ‘swept by a sensation I cannot logically explain to others;/ … an irrational passion’.8
In the decade following the collapse of her relationship with Violet, Vita’s affairs resulted in three broken marriages, at least one career ruined, threats of legal action and the publication of a vicious satirical poem intended to expose to public outrage the unconventional (and in Harold’s case, illegal) nature of the Nicolsons’ proclivities. At the same time, Vita’s own marriage regained much of the serenity of the early years in Constantinople and at Long Barn. That the latter should have been possible is a tribute to Vita’s ability to compartmentalise her life and satisfy sexual desire without committing herself beyond the heady moment; a tribute too to Harold’s patient lack of jealousy. Vita reminded herself of the separation between her love for Harold, which she described as ‘real’ and ‘pure’, and what she later dismissed as ‘the cheap unworthy tricks that lure the flesh’.9 She quoted Khalil Gibran: ‘Fill each other’s cup, but drink not from one cup’, and pursued her quarry with a degree of discretion, a degree of detachment, while keeping faith with Harold in spirit. ‘The liaisons which you and I contract are something perfectly apart from the more natural and normal attitude we have towards each other, and therefore don’t interfere,’ Vita wrote to Harold in May 1926; she was wholly sincere.10 As she must have known, that statement was more true of Harold’s affairs, which avoided tempestuousness, than her own.
Vita first met Dorothy Wellesley, then Dorothy Ashton, called Dottie, in March 1914 in Constantinople. Dottie was engaged to Harold’s friend, Lord Gerald Wellesley, like Harold a secretary in the Diplomatic Service. Gerry Wellesley had recently been engaged to Violet; his sister, Lady Eileen Wellesley, was Harold’s former fiancée. On that occasion, Vita’s diary records only Dottie’s wealth (she had inherited an estate in Cheshire). She does not mention Dottie’s aspirations to be a poet or her striking appearance: ‘blazing blue eyes, fair hair, transparently white skin’.11 She also failed to notice the demons that lurked so close below the surface and, unsurprisingly, what another observer described on Dottie’s skull as ‘the three bumps of temper, pride and combativeness more developed than [in] anyone I have ever known’.12 Within a decade this triple endowment would combine to destroy Dottie’s marriage to Gerry, which took place the month after she and Vita met. Vita also played her part in the collapse of this marriage of friends.
In July 1920, dented in spirit and harried by their families, Vita and Violet told their story to novelist Clemence Dane, whom Vita had met with Mrs Belloc Lowndes. Among Clemence Dane’s novels was a girls’ school story, Regiment of Women, which Vita had read; ambiguously she likened Dane to the novel’s villain Clare Hartill. Regiment of Women has strong lesbian components, but ultimately endorses the desirability of marriage in preference to the hothouse emotional effusions it attributes to single-sex schooling. Dane’s response to Vita and Violet that last summer was consistent with the message of her novel: she suggested they give each other up. Confronted by the bleakness of this advice and Violet’s increasingly histrionic demands, Vita turned to Dottie for distraction. Dottie came to Long Barn; Vita discovered their shared interest in poetry, a bond. The same year, to lukewarm critical reception, Dottie published a collection of verse, entitled simply, Poems, which Vita read and advised on prior to publication. The last weekend in August, Vita went to Sherfield Court, the house Dottie had bought on the edge of her father-in-law’s Stratfield Saye estate. ‘I like Dottie but can’t stick smug Gerry,’ she recorded tersely in her diary.13 The women saw more of one another, their intimacy endorsed by Harold’s longstanding friendship with Gerry. Dottie accompanied Vita as her guest to a PEN Club dinner where they met the distinguished novelist John Galsworthy; the veteran author was full of praise for Vita.
The following autumn, on 14 September 1921, Vita, Dottie and Gerry set off for Italy; Harold joined them in Rome on 6 October. It was to be a holiday marred by the Wellesleys’ bickering and squabbling. At intervals Gerry left Vita and Dottie; the women pursued interests of their own. They were alone in Ravenna, Split, Ragusa, Cattaro. In Ravenna, Vita wrote, they ‘left the motor and went into the wood, and lay under the pines, and read snatches of the more obscure poets to one another. We said, “Here Dante, Boccaccio, Shelley and Byron walked,” and again, “Oh my God how the canal does stink.”’14 Vita wrestled with a new novel, but failed to make headway; later she abandoned it and rewrote it over a two-year period as her poem ‘Reddín’. Instead she wrote a short poem about Dottie at Long Barn. It is among her sunniest, and depicts an unnamed Dottie, exotically dressed, skipping in a moonlit Kentish lane.
The lightness of tone of ‘Full Moon’ reveals the scale of Vita’s unawareness of the situation into which she had blundered. She recognised Dottie as ‘a born romantic’, ‘a fiery spirit with a passionate love of beauty in all its forms, whether in flowers, landscapes or works of art’.15 In verse she acclaimed her whimsically as a ‘small impertinent charlatan’ and imagined her as a fey child; in person she called her ‘Aprile’. She did not see that, like Violet before her and, to some extent, Vita herself, Dottie was damaged and unhappy, the victim of a childhood that combined immense material privileges with emotional deprivation. Jointly and separately, Dottie’s commanding mother, Lady Scarbrough, and her elderly nanny, Wa-Wa, had treated her with cruelty and contempt. Remembering Wa-Wa, Dottie wrote in a tone of mounting hysteria in her poem ‘The Deserted House’: ‘There, there, was the bed,/ Where she beat me and shook me,/ When I cried with terror at night.’
Vita and Dottie became lovers. Afterwards one of Vita’s servants claimed to have seen them together ‘in a very amorous position, D with no clothes on’.16 But Dottie needed reliance and reassurance more than sex; she craved the care and attention that had formerly been withheld from her. Not for the last time, Vita found herself in the double role of lover and mother. The price she exacted, as always, was unquestioning devotion. For her part, she described her relationship with Dottie limply as ‘our casual journey’.17
By the time Harold expressed serious concern about the nature of Vita and Dottie’s involvement, the Wellesleys’ separation was only weeks away. Harold warned Vita that Gerry would be likely to look for a scapegoat: it was too late. At Christmas 1922, Gerry moved out of Sherfield. Seven weeks later, on 9 February, he inscribed beneath a photograph of Dottie three lines from an ode by Horace, translated by Dryden: ‘The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine./ Not Heaven itself over the past has power;/ And what has been has been, and I have had my hour.’18 For the next forty-six years, until its theft from a hotel bedroom, he placed beneath his pillow when he slept the watch that Dottie gave him in 1914.19
Harold blamed Dottie for the breakdown of the marriage. ‘I do think Dottie makes a mistake in trying to be at one and the same time the little bit of thistledown and the thistle,’ he wrote in his diary before the final split.20 As in Vita’s relationship with Violet, it was his way of avoiding blaming Vita. Vita herself implicitly acknowledged the part she had played: her reaction emphasises self-preservation over sympathy. To Harold she wrote: ‘I do not want people to say I have anything to do with her marriage having gone wrong, which probably they would be only too pleased to say … I do not want to be dragged into this, either for your sake or my own. We have had quite enough of that sort of thing, haven’t we?’21 But it was Vita whom Dottie repeatedly summoned to her aid, threatening tears in the face of Vita’s reluctance, Vita whom she chose to support her in her wretchedness. Vita responded to Dottie’s summons, though she would find an increasing number of draws on her time as the year progressed.
At thirty, Vita was beautiful. Even one of her less fanciful observers described her as being ‘in the prime of life, an animal at the height of its powers, a beautiful flower in full bloom. She was very handsome, dashing, aristocratic, lordly …’22 Her hooded eyes were dark and clear under attractively heavy brows, her nose long and straight, her profile strongly modelled. She was tall and often strikingly colourfully dressed, a ‘remarkable person in black and scarlet’ as she described herself in an unpublished short story she wrote about herself called ‘The Poetry Reading’.23 She still, at this point, made regular trips to the hairdresser, she wore dangling earrings, ropes of coloured beads or the pearl necklace Seery had left her; large rings crowded her fingers. Victoria took credit for her dazzling complexion, attributing it to the mercilessness with which she had prevented Vita from eating ‘chocolates and bonbons’ in childhood. ‘She must be grateful to me now that she is thirty, that her cheeks are like two ripe peaches, with a sun-kissed look and a bloom that is the envy and the admiration of everyone.’24 Victoria drew attention to Vita’s ‘dignity and repose’: there is a quality of stillness in the photographs of Vita taken by émigré German portraitist E. O. Hoppé at sittings in February 1923 and again in February 1924, as well as that easy confidence Strang had captured five years previously. Only Sir William Rothenstein, drawing Vita in 1925, missed her iconic allure. Rothenstein’s portrait, today in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, reimagines Vita as a pre-Raphaelite sleepwalker: heavy-featured, expressionless, apparently with a cast in one eye, stolid rather than statuesque. ‘Vita was a beautiful woman and this is an ugly one,’ Harold commented, when presented with the drawing years later.
None of these images suggests that the ‘virile’ quality in Vita, identified mischievously in 1923 by novelist Ronald Firbank, was yet visible in her appearance. In his novella The Flower Beneath the Foot, Firbank satirised Vita as Victoria Gellibore Frinton, the Honourable Mrs Chilleywater, ‘the sole heir of Lord Seafairer of Sevenelms, Kent’, writer of ‘lurid studies of low life (of which she knew nothing at all)’.25 ‘Virility’ was a part of Vita’s make-up – after her epiphany with Violet, Vita understood it as one half of her dual nature. To the casual observer it revealed itself only in a certain boldness of gesture and mannerism, the habit of striding that so struck Leonard Woolf, and outside her immediate circle Vita had no intention of advertising her duality further than in her choice of deliberately masculine hats. ‘Charlotte was … surveying Sackville-West,’ Vita wrote in ‘The Poetry Reading’; ‘she saw the dark felt hat, the heavy cream lambskin coat, black dress, scarlet earrings, scarf, and shoes, yet apart from these externals the quality that held the audience and Charlotte in particular was not the beauty of the rather tired face, but its exceptional sincerity.’26 In describing her own appearance, Vita chooses sincerity over virility, depth of feeling over physical forcefulness. As much as the swashbuckling characteristics of earlier self-fictions, it possesses a heroic dimension: Vita’s ‘sincerity’ in the story persuades the frustrated Charlotte to break free from the smothering influence of her elder sister, Amelia. As in fiction, so in Vita’s life. Without any idea of doing so, unaware even of her own power, the fictional Vita destroys the Pringle sisters’ bond. With equal sincerity would the real Vita destroy relationships in her path. It was never her intention. Nor did she take responsibility for fallout from her ‘béguins’.
Vita had met Geoffrey Scott before she saw him in Rome with Gerry and Dottie in the autumn of 1921 – in Florence, in 1909, while travelling with Rosamund Grosvenor. Geoffrey Scott was married, the author of a highly praised architectural monograph, The Architecture of Humanism, published in 1914; tall, humorous, darkly attractive behind round spectacles, melancholic for all his easy wit. Financially he was supported by his wealthy wife, Lady Sybil, younger daughter of the Earl of Desart; they lived in Fiesole, in Michelozzi’s fifteenth-century Villa Medici, amid manicured formal gardens. Three years into their marriage, in 1921, the Scotts had embarked on a trial separation: Geoffrey had fallen in love with another woman. His was a chequered romantic career, with numerous affairs before his marriage to Sybil Cutting and a reputation for philandering. Contemporary slang denounced him as a ‘bounder’; Vita would call him Tinker. As much as Vita, he was driven by desire and a kind of recklessness over consequences. Like Vita, he understood the perils of love.
At the end of July 1923, Geoffrey left Italy for London, his third appearance in Vita’s life; his purpose was Vita herself. He was working on a biography of eighteenth-century novelist Madame de Charrière, The Portrait of Zélide, while Sybil completed translations of four of Madame de Charrière’s novels, also for publication; in 1926 the former won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In addition Geoffrey Scott was a poet. A Box of Paints: Poems was published in November 1923 to enthusiastic reviews. It included the lines: ‘I locked the gold Sun with a key/ That lasting joy might dwell with me;/ The sun did scorch my hands and feet/ But to my heart refused his heat;/ So the swift flame with captive rage/ Consumed me in his glowing cage.’ In London that summer and subsequently with Vita in Italy, Scott failed to heed his own warning; Vita herself fell fleetingly in love with him. From the ruins of Dottie’s marriage to Gerry, Vita stepped open-eyed into another passionate liaison. Inevitably she withdrew once the love she had demanded in turn exacted its own demands; again the béguin was temporary. It was Geoffrey who eventually found himself consumed by the ‘captive rage’ of love’s flame. Sybil divorced him. He lost wife, wealth, reputation and failed to win Vita.
Before that, Vita and Geoffrey spent a week together in the Lake District (Ben and Nigel were safely out of the way in Brittany with their French governess, Mademoiselle Nadré, known as ‘Goggy’). In the autumn they met again in Florence, where Vita arrived ahead of Harold. In Florence, the Nicolsons stayed with the Scotts at the Villa Medici. By the time of Harold’s arrival, thanks to a combination of Florentine moonlight and overwrought emotionalism, Vita had fallen in love with Geoffrey and he with her, much to Sybil’s distress. Vita confided in her mother. Victoria’s anxiety was balanced by healthy enjoyment: she was certain that sex with Geoffrey would successfully banish memories of Violet. Vita and Geoffrey discussed The Portrait of Zélide and the long poem that would become The Land; Geoffrey referred to them as ‘our book’ and ‘our poem’. Shared literary aspirations nourished the lovers. After parting, they wrote to one another daily; Geoffrey fretted over Sybil’s reaction. On her return to Long Barn, Vita wrote emolliently to Sybil, a gesture in which worldliness and unworldliness combined in equal measure. Like a lover in a story, sincere in her role play, Vita offered to renounce Geoffrey. Sybil was temporarily placated. Her equanimity did not survive Geoffrey’s return visit to London in the New Year.
‘At 3.30 Geoffrey rang me up to say he had arrived,’ Vita wrote on 10 January 1924. ‘At 7 he came for me, we dined at the Berkeley; and came back here afterwards; a bewildering and not very real evening. Rainy London; taxis; champagne; confusion.’27 The following day she took Geoffrey to Knole. Geoffrey and Dottie were among guests at a lunch party on 15 January, which Vita described as ‘uncomfortable … by reason of the tension between Aprile [Dottie] and Geoffrey’.28 On Sunday 20 January, Vita took Geoffrey to Knole again, in company with Harold and Ben: in her diary she listed her companions in order ‘Geoffrey, Harold, Ben’. The following night she stayed on at Knole, alone with Geoffrey; they dined and lunched together in the week ahead and, on 31 January, following a furious argument with Victoria over a plate warmer, Vita noted Geoffrey’s ‘consolation’ in her diary. On 1 February, at a lunch party, Vita ‘talked to Sybil [Colefax] and tried to enlist her help in diminishing talk about me and G’.29 Three days later she took Geoffrey in Harold’s place to a PEN Club dinner after Harold had to ‘chuck at the last moment as he has to do a draft on the relations of France and England for Ramsay McDonald’.30 On 7 February, after an afternoon alone together at Ebury Street, Geoffrey bought Vita a ring. And so it continued for another week.
Vita understood the symbolism of the ring, understood the direction of Geoffrey’s thoughts – and maintained the pattern of frequent meetings. It was surprising behaviour given her stated ‘confusion’ and typical of what Harold regarded as Vita’s ‘muddled’ approach to her love affairs. As he wrote to her later, ‘I have every confidence in your wisdom except where this sort of thing is concerned, when you wrap your wisdom in a hood of optimism and only take it off when things have gone too far for mending.’31 Vita could have stopped seeing Geoffrey, just as she could have resisted parading him in front of literary London at a PEN Club dinner only days after asking for help to quash gossip. In the latter aim she failed anyway. In her letters written from Florence she had confided too much to Victoria; now she introduced Geoffrey to her mother in person. And Victoria, even when her relationship with Vita was not riven by arguments of the plate-warmer variety, was dependably indiscreet. Once Geoffrey returned to Sybil in the middle of February, his cause was lost. As Violet had discovered, Vita’s loyalty seldom survived physical separation: she excelled at epistolary equivocation.
Geoffrey came back to England and Vita in the summer. His visit to Long Barn, cut short by Vita and Harold’s imminent departure for the Dolomites, was unsatisfactory: his furious reaction to Ben and Nigel bursting into his bedroom to find him naked, changing for dinner, is indicative of his unsettlement. Harold was similarly unhappy about developments. He told Vita: ‘I dislike Geoffrey because: a) he talks better than I do; b) he worries you; c) he has a yellow face & sits up late & is flabby; d) because he is more emotional than I am, and because you are impressed by emotion.’32 Geoffrey would continue to worry Vita in his letters for the remainder of the year. As in Vita’s relationship with Violet, their correspondence took on a one-sided quality: all the urgency, ardour and – increasingly – suffering, belonged to Geoffrey. Vita responded either inadequately or with careful promises that she must have known she would not keep. Only Victoria took pity on Geoffrey. She found him ‘so unhappy’ before his return to Italy that she treated him to lunch: ‘I think I cheered him up with lobsters stuffed with caviar.’33 But she signalled her approval of Vita’s growing detachment by cancelling her loan on Ebury Street and offering Vita and Harold £500 a year towards its running costs; she also offered to clear Harold’s tax debt. It was a symbolic gesture.
Like Violet, Geoffrey found it impossible to accept the obvious explanation for what he interpreted as Vita’s contradictory behaviour: her initial insistence on his wholehearted surrender followed by an unexplained withdrawal once that surrender had been granted. ‘To ask for a possessive lover, and do everything to show him he “possesses” nothing, is not only damnable, it’s idiotic,’ he wrote to her.34 It was an inconsistency Vita would never resolve, this need for abject submission that contained within itself the seeds of her disillusionment. ‘It made love richer to have something saved up for a later day. One did not give everything out at once. An essential of love was to keep something in reserve always,’ she wrote in Grand Canyon in 1942.35 But Vita did not encourage reserve in her lovers, and she consistently attracted those whose need was to give everything out at once, prostrating themselves completely, helplessly, childishly. Geoffrey had decided that Vita did not share the sexual excitement that for him was as fundamental to their relationship as their literary communing. He told her she responded to the appearance of emotion. It could not be otherwise given the element of play-acting that shaped her receptivity to the idea of love.
Throughout the spring of 1925, Vita’s diary records her meetings with Geoffrey; in April, in Venice with Harold and Ben, she spent her mornings with the man she knew now she would never marry. Despite Sybil’s decision in May to file for divorce, and Geoffrey and Vita’s shared fear of Vita being cited in proceedings, they continued to meet in London that autumn, not only in the privacy of the Nicolsons’ Ebury Street house but publicly, in restaurants like the Criterion. Vita’s progress on The Land was well advanced: current muddles did not prevent her from describing life as ‘too exciting altogether’. One particularly good day she wrote seventy-one lines of her poem – ‘a record I think?’.36
At the end of the year her mood changed again: Geoffrey was threatening to kill himself; Vita explained his visit to Long Barn in October as ‘very much against my will’.37 On 29 December he telephoned Vita in the evening ‘in a state of hysteria (or so it sounded)’. Her response was one of bafflement, compounded by disappointment that, having allowed him fruitlessly to destroy his marriage, they could not ‘have remained good friends’.38 The following day she described him starkly as ‘very sinister’. If he threatened physical violence on that occasion, it would not have been the first time: afterwards Vita claimed that Geoffrey had once nearly strangled her.
Again it was Harold who saved Vita from her predicament. On 24 September 1925, he told Vita he had been posted for two years to Tehran, beginning in November. Excited by the idea of Persia, though still hostile in general to Harold’s diplomatic career, Vita decided to join him in the New Year. The day before she left, on 19 January 1926, she had a farewell lunch with Geoffrey. They were not alone. Also present was Dorothy Warren, a niece by marriage of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Dorothy was in love with Geoffrey. She was also in love with Vita. There were suggestions of history repeating itself: Violet and Pat Dansey all over again, one lover replaced by their substitute. This time Vita reacted differently. She had learnt at least one lesson. Dorothy’s importuning, her shyly insinuating letters, irked her.
Later that year Sybil divorced Geoffrey and married in his place the writer Percy Lubbock. ‘A memory, a bird flown,/ A wild bird’s claw prick in the moon,/ … love is so,’ Geoffrey had written in A Box of Paints. So it proved. In October 1927, he travelled to the States as first editor of the James Boswell Papers, which had recently been bought by American businessman Colonel Ralph Isham. He did not marry Dorothy Warren. Vita discouraged further contact, writing to Harold on 28 June 1926: ‘Geoffrey writes but I have refused to see him, and he has accepted that. He now writes me sentimental letters about “Remember what I was once …”’39 Despite her dislike of sentiment and her relief at having extricated herself, she may have taken his injunction more to heart than she realised. Long after his death, Vita claimed that Geoffrey was one of the two people she missed most (the other was Virginia Woolf). In the meantime she avoided Dorothy, whose reappearance in Vita’s life four years later proved equally unwelcome.
Vita had remained close to Dottie during her affair with Geoffrey. She did not confide in her: their own relationship was too recent for that and she recognised Dottie’s jealousy, which she discussed with Geoffrey. Vita’s principal confidante remained her mother, notwithstanding upheavals brought about by frequent arguments. Given the complexity of her emotional life, Vita needed a confidante. A third liaison, conducted in tandem, ended so badly that, at the beginning of 1924, Vita reported herself ‘hav[ing] moments of wishing most people at the bottom of the sea’.40 It ought not to have happened.
On the table beside her bed in her flat in Cumberland Mansions in Bryanston Square, Pat Dansey had a copy of Vita’s second volume of poems, Orchard and Vineyard. It was signed ‘with love from DM’.41 ‘DM’ was Vita, the book her gift to Pat, Pat’s name for Vita ‘Dark Man’.
‘“That brilliant creature Vita Sackville-West” is a darling, I think, to have sent me her book of poems. I am dreadfully proud to have been given them. Vita, thank you a thousand times,’ Pat wrote on 12 November 1921. ‘I spent the whole of last night dreaming about you. I expect it was because I had taken your poems to read in bed. Queer dream it was too …’42 Two months later Vita and Pat became lovers. In both cases, their motives contained traces of cynicism.
Pat was the confidante and chaperone Mrs Keppel had sanctioned for Violet and, until Violet’s letters to Vita ceased in November 1921, the women’s go-between. A niece of the last Lord Fitzhardinge, she spent formative years in medieval splendour at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, living with her childless, elderly, ‘crochety ogre’ of an uncle. Physically diminutive, she was self-willed, with an active fantasy life; she may have been, as Lord Northumberland described her, ‘not quite right in the head’.43 She found a degree of emotional fulfilment early on with Joan Campbell, a granddaughter of the Duke of Argyll, who would remain nominally her partner for life. Her emotional volatility matched Vita’s own but she was less adept than Vita at regulating her feelings. Her friendship with Violet included an overt sexual dimension – she described inventing ‘the most erotic pastimes to appeal to [Violet’s] taste’.44 She was determined that sex would also play its part in her relationship with Vita.
Vita’s relationships invariably encompassed an element of manipulation, Vita herself alternately villain and victim. She first met Pat in 1918 with Violet; afterwards, we know, in the spring of 1920, Pat travelled with Vita and Violet from Verona to Paris. Pat’s loyalties were initially clear. Once the lovers had parted, she kept open a channel of communication between them; she sent Violet money, cigarettes, press cuttings of Vita’s poems. Then something changed. Pat’s covering notes to Vita, included alongside Violet’s letters, which she forwarded, set out to drive a wedge between the women: she described Violet as deceitful, given to trickery and lies; spitefully she suggested that Violet could only ‘ever be happy in being unhappy’.45 Slowly, insidiously, Pat attempted to usurp Violet’s position in Vita’s thoughts. It is a measure of Vita’s own unhappiness that she apparently failed to spot, or chose to overlook, Pat’s feline duplicity.
Pat was well equipped to claim Vita’s attention. Not only was she her last link with Violet, with whom she remained in love, since 1917 she had been privy to all of Violet’s confidences about Vita. Pat had listened well. She wooed Vita exactly as Violet had unwittingly instructed her, and seduced her, as Violet had, with a fantasy of herself, the image of the Dark Man: she was strong, handsome, masterful. ‘I do wish, Vita, that when you come to see me you could manage to look ugly,’ she wrote. ‘You make me forget all the important disagreeable things I want to say.’46 Just to be certain, she wrote to Vita pointing out, in a safely roundabout way, that she was in love with her; afterwards she whispered that Vita attracted her ‘in a way which I cannot describe’.47 Beside her copy of Orchard and Vineyard stood a framed reproduction of Vita’s portrait by William Strang, the picture painted while Violet had sketched in the background of Strang’s studio. For Vita the transition from Julian/Mitya to Dark Man was easy.
Like Violet and Geoffrey, Pat gave Vita a ring. She went one better and gave her two rings, one of diamonds, the other emeralds. With lover-like abandon she showered Vita with presents: Champagne and Sauternes from the cellars at Berkeley Castle; oranges from South Africa and flowers from the South of France; a fountain pen; a Burberry mackintosh; she described a Daimler coupé she meant to buy her. She absorbed herself wholeheartedly in Vita’s life, ‘your dogs, cats, garden, books, children, husband and mother!’.48 She gave Vita a copy of the Arabian Nights, perhaps hoping to kindle Vita’s memories of Scheherazade and that rainy October evening in 1918 when, following a matinée of Rimsky-Korsakov’s ballet, Vita first transformed herself into Julian. Then, in December 1922, Pat declared herself terminally ill and promised to leave everything she owned to Vita; Vita described her as ‘the queerest fish I ever came across’.49 That Christmas, Pat joined the family party of Vita, Ben, Nigel and Victoria at Victoria’s huge house in Brighton (Harold was in Lausanne, at an international conference debating the future of Turkey). It was the same month Gerry Wellesley moved out of Sherfield Court.
There was a desperate quality to the scale of Pat’s generosity. Like Victoria she exploited the magpie lure of her gifts to bind Vita closer to her. She offered Vita the very concession Violet had failed to make good: a sham marriage as a screen for their continuing liaison. Pat was in the grip of a sexual infatuation every bit as strong as Vita’s for Violet or Violet’s for Vita. Even the thought of their lovemaking unsettled her: ‘hot waves rush all over me. Little electric needles of sensation prick all through me.’50 Vita’s own feelings, muddied from the outset by her unresolved love for Violet and the less assertive dependency of Dottie, were characteristically slippery. The poem she wrote for Pat, ‘Black Tarn’, lacked the urgency and earthy directness of her poems to Violet, a lengthy description of a hill walk, terminating in ‘a pool in a crater’. It is a poem about a landscape, which never fully makes the leap to examining Vita’s own interior landscape. Even its central metaphor of climbing beyond the familiar and ‘leaving a discontent/ With the lake in the valley, and the road beside the lake,/ And the dwellings of men, the safety, and the ease’ makes no reference to Pat herself, much less to happiness, love, exaltation, desire.51 The pool in the crater is suggestive: it too falls short of becoming the sexual symbol it first appears. Nor is it, the poet insists, the only pool in those ‘rough, negative hills’. Inevitably Vita would soon make good that threat.
By the summer of 1923, Geoffrey Scott vied with Dottie and Pat for Vita’s attention. From Florence in November, Vita wrote to Pat explaining that she had fallen so hopelessly in love with Geoffrey that she could no longer go on seeing her. Her letter inspired desolation swiftly followed by fury. Unlike others among Vita’s lovers, Pat would not be content to slake her rage in silence. She demanded the immediate return of all her presents and refused Vita’s easy reassurances. ‘I centralised on you for three solid years as my life, and you just shut me off bang! stranded,’ she wrote.52 In the New Year, Vita’s diary reported alarming developments: ‘Quarrel with Pat in full swing; letters exchanged, she threatening lawsuits, and I being rather pompous.’53 Vita discussed her latest ‘muddle’ with Harold, ‘and finally wrote her a conciliatory letter’. Harold resisted blaming Vita and Vita avoided blaming herself. Instead she described her mood as one of boredom.54 She followed up her letter with a short meeting two days later, which she described as ‘perfectly amicable’, and pursued her tottering relationship with Geoffrey.
Pat had no intention of quickly fading away, however. She was deeply in love, humiliated and vengeful. She had flattered Vita in her careful fantasy of the Dark Man, knowing from Violet Vita’s susceptibility to appeals made to her conviction of her own duality. And now she had been defeated by the flipside of Vita’s posturing, ‘your obsession that you are a romantic young man who treats women badly’.55 Like Violet, Pat threatened suicide; unlike Violet she consulted a lawyer and told Vita she would take her story to the newspapers: ‘I shall tell the despicable way in which you treated me throughout … How you dropped me when it suited you.’56 She accused Vita of playing her off against Dorothy Wellesley. Violet had accepted Vita’s abandonment, continuing to love her even after Vita chose Harold, Ben, Nigel and Long Barn in her stead: Pat’s love was not so selfless. ‘You have always only considered your feelings, your wishes, your wants,’ she spat.57
On 8 March, Vita described Pat inadequately as ‘very cross’. It was a dramatic encounter. Pat produced a pistol; with a fight Vita wrenched it from her. ‘If it had been loaded it was bound to have gone off,’ Pat wrote afterwards of their rough, clumsy fight.58 In the face of melodrama worthy of one of her own novels, Vita maintained commendable sangfroid in her diary: ‘Pat came in the morning … suggested blowing her brains out and leaving a letter to be read at the inquest saying it was all my fault for having been so unkind to her – but melted finally – and we parted friends, me wiping the sweat of surprise off my brow.’59 Pat may have regarded their ‘friendship’ in a different light. She herself had manipulated Vita through storytelling, bolstering the legend of the Dark Man; she is unlikely to have been swayed by more words. Notwithstanding the gun, it was typical of the way Vita shirked resolving romantic conflicts which she had entered voluntarily. With hindsight her grounds for surprise seem slender. In her assessment of Vita’s focus on what she described as ‘your feelings, your wishes, your wants’, Pat hit upon a truth of all Vita’s short-term relationships. Vita admitted other considerations only in her relationships with Harold, Victoria and the boys – and in her long and loving friendship with Bloomsbury writer Virginia Woolf.
Virginia Woolf admired Vita Sackville-West’s legs and her ancestry; she considered her a second-rate writer. Vita for her part admired Virginia Woolf unreservedly, while remaining ambivalent about Bloomsbury, which she labelled ‘Gloomsbury’: ‘She had the warmest and deepest and most human of affection for those she loved. They were few, perhaps, and she applied alarmingly high standards, but her love and humanity were real, once they were given.’60
Vita conceded Virginia’s superior artistry: she attributed to her a ‘mysterious power … to make certain words, – perhaps quite ordinary words – start up out of the page like partridges out of a turnip field, getting a new value, a new surprise’, a power she knew that she herself did not possess.61 Virginia was exhilarated by Vita’s forcefulness as a presence, her ‘full-breastedness; her being so much in full sail on the high tides’.62 Insisting on her intellectual superiority – she labelled Vita and Harold ‘both incurably stupid’ within weeks of meeting them63 – Virginia admitted inferiority in other areas. In that way her relationship with Vita adopted the model of mastery and submission that characterised Vita’s affairs with Violet, Dottie and Pat. Unlike her predecessors in Vita’s affection, Virginia did not relinquish control completely.
Vita and Virginia’s nineteen-year correspondence is notable for a degree of self-dramatisation on both sides. Their epistolary flirtation was energetic and imaginative, their physical intimacy gentler and of shorter duration. Vita told Harold that she and Virginia slept together only twice. Given Virginia’s nervous fragility, it is unlikely that Vita exaggerated their abstemiousness. Both women recognised the danger to Virginia’s mental stability of any full-scale physical awakening. Virginia’s inspiration for Vita was cerebral rather than sexual, ‘a mental thing; a spiritual thing … an intellectual thing’, as Vita explained to Harold:64 her influence is clearest in Seducers in Ecuador and, to a lesser extent, Gottfried Künstler, allusive novellas that are indebted to Virginia’s writing thematically and stylistically.
On her side, Vita inspired Virginia romantically, imaginatively, historically; on and off their letters tingle with the idea of sex. ‘She is a pronounced Sapphist, and may … have an eye on me, old though I am,’ wrote the forty-year-old Virginia, at the outset of their acquaintance.65 ‘I lie making lovely plans, all firelit and radiant,’ Vita wrote to her on Christmas Day 1926. ‘My bed’s at least nine feet wide, and I feel like the Princess and the Pea, – only there is no Pea. It is a four-poster, all of which I like. Come and see for yourself.’66 Vita’s ‘radiance’, a byword for her easy sensuousness and commanding vigour, became a given between the two women; Vita labelled herself an ‘honest sensualist’67 and encouraged Virginia to project her fantasies on to her. In Virginia’s last novel, Between the Acts, she itemised Vita’s physical impact in her descriptions of Mrs Manresa: ‘goddess-like, buoyant, abundant, her cornucopia running over’.68
Virginia’s earlier novel Orlando is a celebration of what Vita meant to her. Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson called it an extended love letter: undertaken once the flush of first intimacy had passed, it is also the literary equivalent of a shackle. It was Virginia’s means of skewering Vita in print in order to possess at least a part of her in person and prolong indefinitely aspects of their closeness; she explained its inception as arising from an ‘overmastering impulse’.69 It is also a valediction, Virginia’s permission to Vita to stray sexually. ‘It was certain indeed that many ladies were ready to show [Orlando] their favours’; ‘he was excessively generous both to women and to poets, and both adored him’, Virginia writes: a nod from one woman to the other in this hybrid fantasy.70
Predictably Vita adored both Orlando and Orlando. She fell in love with a vision of herself that replicated in essentials personal fables stretching back to her childhood. As Virginia had read Challenge, which Vita loaned her in the summer of 1927, Orlando is partly inspired by Violet’s vision of Vita as Julian: lover, Byronic hero, gypsy leader. It is a refinement of the Julian/Mitya/Dark Man myths of Vita’s sexual history, coloured by the lascivious snobbery that Vita always stimulated in Virginia (‘it’s the breeding of Vita’s that I took away with me as an impression’, Virginia recorded of her first visit to Knole71). Orlando was the nearest Vita came to inheriting her father’s house. The novel imagines Vita–Orlando as the sum of all her ancestors, every Sackville rolled into one through three centuries, and returns Knole to Vita as hers by right of temperament as well as birth. For all these reasons – romantic, narcissistic, possessive, proprietorial – Vita loved not only the book but its creator.
They met for the first time on 14 December 1922, at dinner with art critic Clive Bell, while Harold was in Lausanne. Virginia’s diary betrays her curiosity about Vita; Vita’s diary is blank. Three weeks earlier, Vita had published Knole and the Sackvilles, her second book of the year, following The Heir. Of the two of them, as Virginia was aware, Vita was the better-known, bigger-selling, commercially more successful author and would remain so throughout their friendship. But it was Virginia, proprietor with her husband Leonard of the Hogarth Press, publishers of T. S. Eliot, who had the reputation for cleverness.
Virginia’s first impressions of Vita established from the outset the terms of their engagement: Virginia regarded her as a physical specimen and, under the influence of Knole and the Sackvilles, an embodiment of a social type; she dismissed her intellectually. Vita was ‘florid, moustached, parakeet coloured, with all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist … The aristocratic manner is something like the actresses [sic] – no false shyness or modesty … She is a grenadier; hard; handsome; manly; inclined to double chin.’72 Virginia was intrigued. Vita, she noted, made her ‘feel virgin, shy & schoolgirlish’; she observed that Vita knew ‘everyone – But could I ever know her?’ and accepted an invitation for the following week. She marvelled at Vita writing ‘15 pages a day’ and clung doggedly to her conviction of her own superiority, however ‘schoolgirlish’, in the face of Vita’s creative facility, her ‘supple ease’ and ‘grenadier’ manner. On 15 January, she referred to ‘the new apparition Vita, who gives me a book every day’.73 Something of that sneering tone would persist, though she would find that Vita did not warrant so spiky a dismissal. Virginia did not reveal in her diary that it was she who had requested from Vita copies of Knole and the Sackvilles and Orchard and Vineyard, did not mention, as Vita reported to Harold with dismay, the orange woollen tights and pumps that she had worn to Clive’s dinner.
As ever, Vita made up her mind quickly. ‘I simply adore Virginia Woolf, and so would you. You would fall quite flat before her charm and personality,’ she wrote to Harold five days after their first meeting. She described her as simple, ‘utterly unaffected’, ‘both detached and human’ and told Harold candidly: ‘I’ve rarely taken such a fancy to anyone … I have quite lost my heart.’74 Correctly she surmised that Virginia reciprocated her béguin; she was unaware of the extent of Virginia’s equivocation in private (even three years on, Virginia still characterised her feelings about Vita in her diary as ‘very mixed’75). ‘I like you a fabulous lot,’ Vita wrote to Virginia frankly and straightforwardly in August 1924.76 On both sides, albeit translated in time into a safely sexless tendresse, this fancy would endure.
Vita never doubted the importance of Virginia Woolf in her life. She swiftly came to occupy a place similar only to Harold’s – that of an enriching, devoted friendship. ‘I don’t think I have ever loved anybody so much, in the way of friendship; in fact, of course, I know I haven’t,’ Vita told Harold four years after she and Virginia met.77 Only Enid Bagnold, novelist and playwright, came close to offering Vita friendship that resembled her relationship with Virginia, and that on an altogether different, lesser scale: a mutually supportive understanding between women of shared literary aspirations, touched by love. In Enid’s case, she lacked Virginia’s literary genius; the love and admiration Vita felt for her were less pure, less selfless. For all Vita claimed, ‘I never loved you, Enid, save as a friend’, she may not have been wholly truthful.78 In 1933, she wrote to Enid of her ‘qualms … a sudden horror and dismay’ about including in her Collected Poems ‘that doggerel I once wrote to you, which seemed to me not so bad as I reread it, and not too terribly indiscreet either’.79 Vita’s friendship with Enid probably included unresolved sexual tension on Vita’s part; their closeness suffered after Enid’s marriage to Sir Roderick Jones of Reuters. By contrast, Virginia’s marriage to Leonard served to illuminate Vita’s understanding of their relationship; Vita was Leonard’s friend too. The sexual aspect of their friendship would be briefly but satisfactorily resolved without lasting damage to Vita, Virginia, Harold or Leonard; innuendo added liveliness to their correspondence, a shared joke, concord.
Vita had continued to work at her long poem The Land throughout the upheavals of her affairs with Geoffrey and Pat; along with The Portrait of Zélide, it formed part of the ‘glue’ of her affair with Geoffrey. Now she discussed it with Virginia. She divided the poem into four sections, named after the seasons of the year; within each season were stand-alone elements. In October 1923, the London Mercury printed ‘Bee-master’ from Spring and ‘Making Cider’ from Autumn; Dottie wrote to congratulate Vita on the former. It was prose, however, that Vita chose when Virginia invited her to contribute to the Hogarth Press. ‘I hope that no one has ever yet, or ever will, throw down a glove I was not ready to pick up,’ Vita wrote by way of reply on 16 July 1924. It was a characteristically grandiloquent response to what was in fact a commonplace request that a professional writer write; it echoed the masterful rhetoric of The Tale of a Cavalier and The King’s Secret. From such statements would Virginia build up her picture of Orlando’s swank. Vita was with Harold in the Dolomites, the walking holiday that had cut short Geoffrey’s visit to Long Barn; on her return she reshaped the holiday into an article for the Evening Standard. ‘You asked me to write a story for you,’ Vita wrote to Virginia. ‘On the peaks of mountains, and beside green lakes, I am writing it for you. I shut my eyes to the blue of gentians, to the coral of androsace; I shut my ears to the brawling of rivers; I shut my nose to the scent of pines; I concentrate on my story.’80 The result was Seducers in Ecuador, dedicated to Virginia, its contract negotiated – to his annoyance – without the intervention of Vita’s new agent Alec Watt of A. P. Watt and Son, and published to warm reviews on 30 October 1924 by the Hogarth Press.
To Alec Watt on 9 October, Vita called her novella ‘a very slight thing’.81 Virginia’s response was altogether more positive. She recognised her own influence in the fantastical tale of a man who retreats from reality behind coloured sunglasses, and preened herself that Vita had ‘shed some of the old verbiage, and come to terms with some sort of glimmer of art … and indeed, I rather marvel at her skill and sensitivity; for is she not mother, wife, great lady, hostess, as well as scribbling?’.82 (Over time Virginia would continue to marvel at Vita’s ability to keep ‘her hands loosely upon so many reins: sons; Harold; garden; farm’.83) Vita delivered her manuscript in person. Against the shabbiness of Monk’s House – the Woolfs’ white-painted, weatherboarded house in the Sussex village of Rodmell – Vita, with her smart car, expensive dressing case and nightdresses wrapped by her lady’s maid in sheets of tissue paper, appeared particularly splendid to Virginia.
Her splendour aside, and discounting the flatteringly imitative quality of Seducers in Ecuador, Virginia allowed herself to venture no further than a tentative ‘this might be a friendship of a sort’ in her diary.84 Virginia’s attitude to Vita continued to waver. Vita decided Virginia was ‘curiously feminist’: ‘She dislikes possessiveness and love of domination in men. In fact she dislikes the quality of masculinity. She says that women stimulate her imagination, by their grace and their art of life.’85 For all her womanly plenitude, Vita provided ample evidence of ‘the quality of masculinity’ in her possessiveness and love of domination; as Orlando proves, her stimulation of Virginia had little to do with grace. In Vita’s company Virginia was moved to ‘childlike dazzled affection’,86 roused by what she described in March 1926 as ‘the glow and the flattery’;87 in her absence a note of detachment, even reserve, asserted itself. Early in their friendship, Virginia was hurt when Vita accused her of ‘lik[ing] people through the brain rather than through the heart’;88 it was her means of maintaining her balance, but she worried that Vita would hold it over her. In that she misjudged Vita.
As with Geoffrey Scott, Vita’s decision to join Harold in Tehran acted as a catalyst on Virginia. In Geoffrey’s case, Vita’s departure provided final severance; in Virginia’s case, fear of that parting and its consequent loss of intimacy encouraged her to decisive action. Virginia had been ill for much of the summer and the women’s meetings had been few and brief. In December 1925, at Leonard’s suggestion, Virginia proposed herself for a visit to Long Barn. She stayed three days. Without any conscious effort Vita dazzled her guest physically – ‘she shines in the grocer’s shop in Sevenoaks with a candle-lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung’.89 Vita felt confirmed in the pleasure of Virginia’s company, but wrote to Harold that, while loving Virginia, she knew she would not fall in love with her. The next day she added that her affection contained no ‘backstairs’ (homosexual) element; the day after that she repeated her assurance that she was not in danger of falling in love with Virginia. So many emphatic denials might have worried Harold: he reassured Vita that he ‘was not really bothered about Virginia and think you are probably very good for each other’.90 On the second day of Virginia’s visit, Vita’s ‘goodness’ took the form of listening to her talk until three o’clock in the morning. ‘Not a peaceful evening,’ was Vita’s comment in her diary. Their conversation roved widely, flirtatiously, amorously. Subsequently Vita referred to ‘the explosion which happened on the sofa in my room here when you behaved so disgracefully and acquired me for ever’; Virginia described it as ‘the night you were snared, that winter, at Long Barn’.91 Without meaning to, Vita had snared Virginia too.
Vita spent her last afternoon before her departure for Persia with Virginia, crossing London to be with her after her farewell lunch with Geoffrey. In the evening, at Ebury Street, she read over Harold’s latest letters. With her was writer Raymond Mortimer, himself a friend of the Woolfs and Harold’s lover since 1924. He and Vita read the letters together.
Harold did not have to go to Tehran. He chose it over the alternative of Peking for Vita’s sake. ‘Of all foreign posts it will be the one Vita will dislike least,’ he wrote in his diary.92 He was right. But Vita’s preferences were flimsy foundations on which to base important decisions about his career: her dislike of diplomacy was too marked, too unreasoned, her refusal to accompany Harold full time unorthodox in a diplomat’s wife and potentially damaging. The truth was that Vita wanted Harold to have no career but her own one of writing – she described it as his ‘legitimate’ pursuit93 – and her own pastime of gardening: ‘You love foreign politics. And I love literature, and peace, and a secluded life. Oh my dear, my infinitely dear Hadji, you ought never to have married me.’94 On the eve of another departure, Harold pleaded with her in vain that ‘being parted is only like standing back from the picture to see it better’.95 More successfully, in December 1925, he wrote requesting tulip and hyacinth bulbs, cuttings of rosemary and lavender for his new Persian garden. Vita dispatched a box of rosemary the week before Christmas.
Despite her ‘muddles’, Vita had done her best to make good her return to ‘my house, my garden, my fields, and Harold’ following her ‘scarlet adventure’. She had published Orchard and Vineyard, with its poems about her relationship with Violet, including ‘Bitterness’, in which a lover is reluctantly ‘rescued’ from his mistress: ‘Let your heart heal. Forget!/ She was your danger and your evil spirit’;96 she had published The Dragon in Shallow Waters, with its investigation of her own double nature and its dedication to Violet. Then she appeared to turn her back on rebellion. She wrote the history of Knole, the house she longed to call ‘mine’, and followed it with an edition of Lady Anne Clifford’s diary; she wrote a love story, The Heir, about the joy of inheritance, and elevated the ecstasy of possession above sexual ecstasy: ‘He suddenly stretched out his hands and passionately laid them, palms flattened, against the bricks.’97
In both subject and style, Vita’s books proclaimed her return to the fold. Seven poems from Orchard and Vineyard were included in the fifth and final volume of Georgian Poetry, published in November 1922. They confirmed Vita’s aesthetic credentials as those of a traditionalist and a conservative. When, the following year, her novel Grey Wethers appeared, with its rebellious heroine Clare Warrener who, ‘like a hobbled colt … wanted to kick herself free’ of conventional expectations,98 no one but Harold would have understood Clare’s struggle between acceptable love, represented by Calladine, and unacceptable love, in the person of Lovel, as an image of Vita’s own life so recently at a crossroads. Only Harold knew that Vita was simultaneously Clare and Lovel and that each was characterised by incompleteness. He told Vita that ex-Viceroy Lord Curzon had described Grey Wethers as ‘a magnificent book. The descriptions of the downs are as fine as any in the language. Such power! Such power! Not a pleasant book of course! But what English!’99 Husband and wife avoided talking about the novel’s ending, when Clare abandons her husband for her lover. For it is Clare, not Lovel, who suggests escape: ‘“We had better go,” she said, inviting him.’100
‘It’s no use writing novels which are only the observations of life,’ Harold had told Vita at the height of her unhappiness in September 1921, ‘the point is to write books which are the explanation of life.’101 Like The Dragon in Shallow Waters, and so much of her writing, Grey Wethers endeavoured to explain Vita to herself. It was not necessarily what Harold had intended, and confirmed his anxiety about Vita’s weakness for striking heroic attitudes: ‘No poet is a hero to himself (except my Vita who is a heroine to everyone including her own darling self).’102 Uniquely Harold recognised the nature of Vita’s inner struggle. With his dislike of confrontation, he mostly veered away from addressing the issue, save occasionally in his letters. Instead, between 1921 and 1924, he concentrated on his own writing. He wrote a novel, Sweet Waters, about diplomatic life in pre-war Constantinople; in the character of Eirene, it included a loose fictional sketch of Vita. He also wrote a clutch of literary biographies (of the poets Verlaine, Tennyson and Byron). He did so without as yet any intention of resigning from the Foreign Office.
In Harold’s absences, and missing Violet, Vita spent time with her mother. The final unravelling of Lionel and Victoria’s marriage was protracted and painful. For all his surface courtesy, Lionel did little to mitigate Victoria’s unhappiness at his lost love. In November 1917, Victoria had discovered that Lionel had removed from his room her two portraits, which had hung there since 1889. She interpreted their removal correctly as symbolic and began to look about for an alternative house of her own.
She found the answer in a large townhouse in Sussex Square in Brighton. ‘It was a huge house,’ Vita remembered, ‘a great echoing mausoleum of a house, with vast naked staircases and still vaster drawing rooms, large enough to accommodate four generations of descendants.’103 Victoria was enchanted. Greedily she acquired the two neighbouring houses, both of equal size, and set about remodelling the charmless pile. The process was a costly one – airily Victoria estimated she had spent something in excess of £50,000 – but the result was a house of twenty-four bedrooms which, she explained to Vita, would make an ideal holiday house for Ben and Nigel. Vita was forced to acknowledge that there was something ‘ripping’ about the sheer scale of her mother’s folly. Her own room, decorated in 1918, was papered in metallic emerald green, with sapphire blue doors and curtains, furniture painted the same bright blue and an apricot ceiling, a vigorous scheme inspired by the Ballets Russes settings of Léon Bakst, designer of Scheherazade. It was a far cry from the ‘flowers, chintz and Jacobean furniture’ of Long Barn, a dramatic and theatrical space closer to Violet’s sultry eroticism than Vita’s life of elkhounds and climbing roses; a last exercise in the decorative artifice of Vita’s rooms at Knole and Hill Street in the years before her marriage and a window on to something unresolved in Vita.
Despite her expenditure and its size, Victoria meant at first to use the Brighton house only as a bolt hole. She took no more furniture from Knole than the bare minimum, transported in seven lorries. Events in April 1919, however, forced her hand. Victoria returned to Knole in the early evening. She went into the garden looking for Lionel, and discovered him with his mistress Olive Rubens. They were ‘under one of the tulip trees, O and L in each other’s arms and kissing!! Just like any soldier and his girl in the park. I got away as quick as I could and tore to the sycamore seat.’ The sight haunted her; she described it as an ‘evil day’ when Lionel fell in love with Olive; she returned to the memory again and again, unable to banish it: ‘Oh, shade of that tulip tree, where they were kissing and hugging and God knows what, as I did not stop long enough to look.’104 The final humiliation was Victoria’s certainty that Lionel had seen her. Her ‘Book of Happy Reminiscences’ demonstrates the extent, and the longevity, of her anger at Lionel’s betrayal. She exacted the only revenge left to her by mulishly refusing his repeated requests for a divorce.
From the moment of Victoria’s final departure from Knole, on 19 May 1919, Vita’s challenging relationship with her mother would be further complicated by this angry disaffection, which never went away, and a coruscating loneliness for which Vita felt in part responsible. In 1923, Victoria sold the house in Sussex Square at a loss of more than £45,000; she dispersed many of its contents in an equally unsuccessful two-day auction. She moved to the smaller White Lodge, on a cliff at Roedean perched above the English Channel, where Vita visited her assiduously. Bar a brief flirtation with an ugly red-brick villa standing in five acres close to Streatham Common, Victoria remained at White Lodge until her death.
Dottie was Vita’s companion on 20 January 1926. Together they travelled from London via Egypt, Port Said and Aden as far as Agra and New Delhi, before Dottie turned back and Vita continued alone up the Persian Gulf to Baghdad and thence to Tehran and Harold. Vita left behind her Ben and Nigel, at preparatory school at Summer Fields in Oxford, and Virginia, to whom she gave a copy of her latest manuscript of The Land. In her diary the latter noted: ‘I feel a lack of stimulus, of marked days, now Vita is gone; and some pathos, common to all these partings.’105 Vita travelled with her jewel case and her emeralds, a fur coat and fur hat against the cold, Harold’s statue of St Barbara, a flask of Dottie’s best brandy and another copy of The Land, which she had almost completed. She carried messages from Victoria to Lutyens, with whom she had tea in Bombay on 12 February; within her she carried the idea of Virginia. ‘I miss you horribly,’ she insisted on 29 January. From now on Geoffrey would vanish from her consciousness. Pat’s disappearance too was already becoming a memory; at intervals she wrote to Vita. Over time the list of former lovers who continued to write became a long one, proof of the strength of Vita’s hold on their affections for all that her béguins were transitory.
On the SS Varela, from Bombay through the Persian Gulf to Baghdad, Vita fell ill with fever. It did nothing to diminish her sense of her journey as an adventure and, on 20 February, goaded into writing by envy at Virginia’s descriptions of progress on To the Lighthouse, she recorded her start on ‘my new book’. It became Passenger to Teheran, a chronicle of Vita’s four-month odyssey, published by the Hogarth Press in November. An instance of her need to separate distinct aspects of experience, Vita discusses landscape, impressions of Egypt, India and Persia, Persian culture, the diplomatic life of the British legation and the coronation of Reza Shah, but makes no mention of Dottie. On the printed page Vita travels alone, hers as solitary a progress as Orlando’s. Dottie was understandably infuriated.
Passenger to Teheran is an account of a love affair. Out of sight of Virginia and Dottie, disentangled from Geoffrey and Pat, as sanguine now as she would ever be where Violet was concerned, Vita fell in love with Persia. She thrilled to its visible reminders of a past that, compared with English history, seemed infinitely distant; she noted the features of Persian gardens, with their flowering Judas trees and peach blossom, and water rills lined with rich blue tiles; and she rejoiced, outside the legation compound, in the open spaces, the expansiveness of a landscape that extended infinite possibilities of solitary escape. ‘One is allowed to be lonely … in more civilised communities no one is allowed to be lonely; the refinement of loneliness is not understood.’106 The same impression stirred Vita to poetry: ‘Are there not hearts that find their high fulfilment/ Alone?’ she asked, anticipating her own future reclusiveness; in the poems she wrote about Persia, Vita celebrated isolation as ‘pure’.107 When she came home, she wrote verses about a migrating English swallow glimpsed against the red rocks of the Persian desert; so long as she remained away, she found it impossible to acknowledge the reality of England.108
Like all Vita’s affairs, first love for Persia was intense but brief. She returned early in 1927, before Harold’s final departure; together they journeyed into the Bakhtiari mountains to visit the tomb of Cyrus the Great. Their expedition formed the substance of Twelve Days, Vita’s second Persian travel book. While both books include passages that are among Vita’s best – lyrical, insightful and colourful – the later account also records the disillusionment that seized her when she saw the Abadan oilfields and confronted face to face the unromantic reality of Persia’s future: an end of sorts to the affair.
In February 1926, Vita stayed in Baghdad with Arabist and archaeologist Gertrude Bell. Bell took her to tea with the King of Iraq, whom Vita reimagined in her own image as her classic fictional hero: ‘a tall, dark, slim, handsome man, looking as though he were the prey to a romantic, an almost Byronic, melancholy’.109 She acquired a Saluki puppy, ‘a marvel of elegance, – long tapering paws, and a neck no thicker than your wrist’,110 and met Harold in Kermanshah; at the very end of Vita’s life, Harold singled out ‘the great moment at Kermanshah’ as a shining nugget of happiness. Husband and wife travelled the last 300 miles of the journey together, the yellow Saluki curled on Vita’s knee. On arrival, Vita dismissed Tehran as squalid; she reacted predictably to the prescriptive formalities of European life in the compound and what she described to Virginia as the ‘eventless weeks’,111 but she was happy in her reunion with Harold and fascinated and delighted by Persia as a whole. With an appearance of good grace, if limited anticipation of enjoyment, she accompanied Harold to entertainments connected with the forthcoming coronation of the new shah; she shared the Persians’ excitement at celebratory fireworks. There were moments of freedom too. Every morning at seven, Vita and Harold went riding, dazzled by ‘the freshness and beauty of the morning’, and to Virginia, Vita described ‘days of going into the mountains, and eating sandwiches beside a stream, and picking wild almonds, and of coming home by incredible sunsets across the plain’.112
There was a makeshift quality to diplomatic life in Tehran, and indeed to Reza Shah’s monarchy, that surprised Vita: ahead of the coronation, she found herself mixing paints in the great hall of the Gulestan Palace and advising on the peach-coloured distemper of the throne room walls. She was invited to see the crown jewels. ‘Knowing too well by now the shabby condition of everything in this ramshackle country, I was not very much excited at the prospect of seeing the treasury of imperial Iran.’113 The experience astonished her. Green and gold, it glittered in her memory. It would remain vivid in its otherworldliness, a direct appeal to that side of Vita that had revelled in Scheherazade and decorated her room in Brighton in jewel-like, Bakst-inspired colours. She likened the treasury to Aladdin’s Cave: in Persia, fact and fable merged. ‘I am blind. Blinded by diamonds,’ she wrote. ‘Sacks of emeralds were emptied out before our eyes. Sacks of pearls. Literally. We came away shaking the pearls out of our shoes. Ropes of uncut emeralds. Scabbards encrusted with precious stones. Great hieratic crowns. All this in a squalid room, with grubby Persians drinking little cups of tea … It was simply the Arabian Nights, with décor by the Sitwells.’114
Vita discovered a different story in Persia, too, though sharing an element of transformation: that of nineteenth-century French archaeologist’s wife and cross-dresser, Jane Dieulafoy. She recounted her history in Vogue: ‘“What,” said the Shah, “is that boy a woman?” On being assured that it was so … Why, he enquired, was she not dressed in the long skirts and garments of European ladies? Jane replied that she found man’s dress more convenient.’115 At the beginning of April, Vita wrote teasingly about Madame Dieulafoy to Virginia: an arrow shot in their extended, long-distance flirtation. She labelled her simply ‘a ravishing character’.116
Vita began her fortnight-long journey home on 4 May. With her she carried iris and tulip bulbs plundered from the Persian plains. She potted them up in Dottie’s greenhouse at Sherfield and wrote to Harold on 12 October to report on their progress. The previous month she had sent Harold his own consignment of spring bulbs: tulips, scilla and Iris reticulata, which she instructed him to plant in a shallow bowl to flower in February. In return she asked for cuttings of wild broom, sage and pink-flowered lavender, packed in damp moss and sealed in a biscuit tin. She sent him Passenger to Teheran in proof form and a copy of The Land, which Heinemann published on 30 September; she had written the last ten lines in Isfahan in April.
Harold praised both books generously, though he was hurt by The Land’s dedication to Dottie, who is also the subject of the poem’s best-known section, ‘The Island’, about the gardener of the manmade island in the lake at Sherfield, ‘laughing at her flowery escapade’.117 ‘It is such a lovely thing, darling, so beautiful a thing,’ Harold wrote on 7 November. That opinion was echoed by The Land’s reviewers. Fellow poet John Drinkwater claimed in the Observer that ‘it contain[ed] some of the loveliest verse written in this century’;118 on the strength of a similar review, Vita announced in her diary that she had ‘started writing a poem about gardens’ (the partner poem to The Land, which would eventually be published in 1946 as The Garden).119 But it was Virginia’s view that resonated loudest. She had read The Land while Vita was in Tehran and written that it lacked ‘a little central transparency: Some sudden intensity.’120 In November, she suggested that the absence was in Vita as much as in her writing, a void, ‘something reserved, muted’.121 This verdict haunted Vita. At the end of the year, despite Heinemann ordering a reprint of the poem and indications (which would be proved right) that it would win her the Hawthornden Prize, Vita sat down to write a poem that reveals the extent of her uncertainty about her abilities. ‘What have I gathered?’ she asked in ‘Year’s End’, weighing up not only the passing year but her working life in its entirety. The only answer she could give herself was ‘one unprofitable naught’. Despondently the poem ends with a question: ‘Shall I not clear my goods and quit the ring?’122 It was a markedly different Vita from the woman who had told Virginia she would always be ready to pick up any glove thrown down. She did not quit the ring, though she set aside The Garden. Throughout the following summer her letters to Virginia increased their provocative, teasing note. If she could not triumph as a writer, she would insist on her superiority as a woman.
A string of blue Persian beads bought for sixpence coiled on Vita’s writing table at Long Barn. ‘Now, in a bowl, in exile, they/ Speak Persia to an English day,’ she wrote in ‘A Bowl of Blue Beads’. She added that the beads proved ‘that Persia is no lovely lie/ For me, but sharp reality’.123 Except in her relationships with Harold and Virginia, it was physical proof that for Vita kept love alive. The idea of Persia remained a powerful one, even if her excursion to the Bakhtiari mountains shattered some illusions. At the time of her death, among the debris on Vita’s desk was a packet of seeds: Sutton’s wallflowers, Persian Carpet.124
In the winter of 1927, a young woman with raven hair and pale skin was painting a picture of Long Barn. It is a truncated image which simplifies the outline of Vita and Harold’s garden and reduces in length the barn that had become the Big Room.
Her name was Mary Campbell. Physically she resembled Ruth Pennistan in Heritage, an untamed Romany beauty invariably dressed in coloured breeches and a velvet cloak; hers was a restless, rebellious, unconventional nature. The eldest of nine children of a wealthy Midlands doctor, she had studied art at Heatherleys and, six years previously, in a long black dress and golden veil, married penniless South African poet Roy Campbell. Vita met her in the post office in Sevenoaks Weald on 22 May. Roy was there too: tall, thin, blue-eyed. He was also hard-drinking and intemperate, but Vita could not have known that on first meeting. Vita invited them to dinner the following day.
Vita and Roy Campbell shared a weakness for bravado. ‘We never kiss but vaster shapes possess/ Our bodies: towering up into the skies,/ We wear the night and thunder for our dress,’ Roy wrote in his poem, ‘We are Like Worlds’. Vita would discover that they also shared a weakness for sexual jealousy. Roy had fallen in love with Mary Garman at first sight, describing the experience as an ‘electric thrill’; his was a possessive, aggressive, angry love and his ideas of marriage, he explained later, were ‘old-fashioned about wifely obedience’.125 Vita had read and partly admired the collection of poems Roy Campbell published in 1924, The Flaming Terrapin, which she discussed in letters to Virginia. The book failed to sell. With an income of £20 a month following the death of Roy’s father, a baby, Anna, and a three-year-old daughter Tess, the Campbells struggled financially. Vita turned their heads, Virginia reprimanded her afterwards, ‘with her silver, and her coronets, and her footmen’.126 Cynically Mary referred to Vita as ‘our latest acquisition … the daughter of Lord Sackville’.127
As May gave way to June, Vita continued to work on Twelve Days. She began her short biography of Aphra Behn, which she completed in nine weeks despite the inevitable disturbances of Ben and Nigel’s summer holidays, visits to and from Dottie at Sherfield and Virginia at Rodmell, a daily tally of lunch and dinner invitations. At the end of August she and Harold heard to their horror that the Foreign Office intended sending Harold to Budapest (he refused the posting and was ordered to Berlin instead); both worked out their uncertainty about the future through gardening. Vita decided to spend the £100 she received for the Hawthornden Prize on 16 June on new plantings of hazel and poplar in the woods at Long Barn. Observing her daughter’s appearance of happiness at a similar moment of quietus, Victoria imagined she had glimpsed emotional tranquillity after recent tempests. Darkly she noted then: ‘She seems contented now, but the Volcano is there, ready to burst into flame, I am sure.’128 In the summer of 1927 Victoria was proved right.
The previous August, Vita had reassured Harold that her friendship with Virginia was not about to develop into one of her ‘muddles’. ‘I have gone to bed with her (twice), but that’s all,’ she wrote, referring to a visit to Rodmell earlier in the summer. In stark terms she explained, ‘I am scared to death of arousing physical feelings, because of the madness.’129 Harold praised her restraint: ‘it’s not merely playing with fire; it’s playing with gelignite’.130 If Vita wanted physical stimulation – and she invariably did – she needed to look elsewhere.
What Victoria mistook for settledness was lingering discontent. In Tehran at the end of February, Vita had reflected on an unhappy month: ‘Very depressed all this month owing to 1) inability to write, 2) fear of Hadji continuing in diplomacy. The Foreign Office says he will have to come back in September for another year. God help us! I had hoped to find him disgusted with exile and social duties, but it is quite the contrary.’131 Vita’s assessment fell wide of the mark. Harold’s diary records a morning during Vita’s second visit to Tehran when he woke up ‘with a conviction that I shall chuck the diplomatic service. I have been fussing and worrying about this problem for months.’132 Nothing came of his first attempt at change. An interview with Sir John Cadman, chairman of Anglo-Persian Oil, failed to produce the hoped-for offer of a job in the company’s London offices. It was Vita’s hopes, as much as Harold’s, that were dashed.133 With plenty to occupy her, Vita did not immediately focus her attention on the Campbells following their meeting in the post office. Mary went to Long Barn for tea a fortnight after the first dinner invitation; three weeks later, she and Roy returned to dinner, this time in company with Vita’s cousin Eddy and Bloomsbury writer David Garnett. Roy dined alone at Long Barn in July and, on 22 August, Vita went for tea with Mary. That invitation was reciprocated within less than a week; three days later, Mary appeared at Long Barn in the evening and she and Vita went for a walk. In Vita’s diary she remained ‘Mrs Campbell’.
And so it might have continued, if Mary had not declared her hand as Vita drove her to the station on the morning of Friday, 2 September. Unsettled and evidently surprised, Vita frittered the following day in idleness, ‘unable to read or write, upset about MC’.134 Ten days later, the women had become lovers: the volcano burst into flame and Vita, as she imagined herself later, was straying again in ‘whispering galleries …/ That like a sea-cave or a fluted shell/ Reverberate with love’s whole ocean swell’.135
Vita was heroic, reckless. ‘Love’s the lion that with golden eyes/ Shames the unruly pack and makes them cower,’ she trumpeted with the braggadocio that came naturally to her in the grip of one of her béguins.136 Then Nigel came down with influenza and a temperature of 102. For a single night Vita parted from Mary. At considerable risk of detection, they spent the following night together at Long Barn – in the small room next door to the room into which Vita had moved Nigel. The next night she and Mary again had sex in the room beside Nigel’s. It became a repeating pattern: Mary spending nights with Vita whenever Roy went to London – and neither woman told their husband. ‘I have just acquired a new friend who takes up all my time while Roy is working,’ Mary wrote obliquely.137 Vita was excited and persuaded herself that her excitement was love: Mary’s feelings ran deeper. Like all Vita’s lovers until Evelyn Irons, there was a neediness in Mary Campbell. She told Vita that she was ‘sometimes like a mother to [her]. No one can imagine the tenderness of a lover suddenly descending to being maternal. It is a lovely moment when the mother’s voice and hands turn into the lover’s.’138
Their idyll lasted two months. On 1 October, after the beginning of the school term, the Campbells moved into Ben and Nigel’s cottage, to live there rent-free. Five weeks later, Roy told Vita he knew about their affair. It was a tit-for-tat announcement: in the same breath he revealed his own affair with Geoffrey Scott’s old flame, Dorothy Warren. Later his mood changed and a frightened Mary briefly returned from the cottage to Vita. That night, Roy’s threats alternated between suicide and murder. It was the beginning of what he later called a ‘comically sordid and silly period’; he denounced ‘vice’ as ‘a sort of obligation for board and lodging’.139
Without revealing her own part in the affair, Vita wrote to Harold in Berlin, updating him on the progress of the Campbells’ rapidly unravelling marriage. ‘I think he is absolutely crazy. I feel most frightfully sorry for Mary. He went for her last night with a knife.’140 Three days later, Vita reported, his anger was more focused. He had offered Mary two alternatives: a suicide pact on the one hand, both of them slashing their wrists with Roy’s razor; on the other, Roy’s own suicide or his return to South Africa. Mary allowed herself to waver. Uncontrite, she was anxious only to be reunited with Vita and ‘naked except for a covering of your rose leaf kisses’;141 Vita congratulated herself on the calming effect on Roy of her own presence and her arguments in favour of moderation. Meanwhile Harold, contemplating his marriage long distance and distracted by lunch in Berlin with Noël Coward, stuck to his conviction ‘that our love and confidence is absolute’.142 On the evening Mary fled from Roy’s anger, Dottie was at Long Barn. She kept watch through the night with a shotgun across her knee. ‘Gin-soaked, a shot-gun in her clutches/ The Fury was a future duchess,’ Roy commented later in verse.143
Vita confided the truth of the ‘muddle’ to Virginia, whose response was sharply critical. ‘I felt suddenly that the whole of my life was a failure,’ Vita wrote of her chastisement.144 She had failed to reckon with the importance attached by Bloomsbury to relationships: in Vita’s tangled amorousness, Virginia saw only bungling and an inability to commit herself wholeheartedly to any single individual (herself included). Privately Virginia admitted that she was jealous; she told Vita she hated being bored, but gave herself away in her letters: ‘heart you have none, who go gallivanting down the lanes with Campbell’.145 Virginia knew of the night Vita had recently spent with Mary Hutchinson, Clive Bell’s former lover; she suspected the young actress Valerie Taylor, who had fallen in love with Vita and kept her talking late into the summer nights, or dressed up as Byron for Vita’s titillation. Confronted by Virginia’s disappointment, Vita cried, admitted her incapacity for ‘creating one single perfect relationship’, and swiftly reassured herself: ‘Well, at least I won’t create any further mistakes!’ It was a vain hope.
Roy dropped his plans to divorce Mary and wrote soberly but resignedly to Vita that he was tired of trying to hate her. ‘I realise that there is no way in which I could harm you (as I would have liked to) without equally harming us all. I do not dislike any of your personal characteristics and I liked you very much before I knew anything. All this acrimony on my part is due rather to our respective positions in the tangle.’146 He and Vita agreed to a halt in Vita’s affair with Mary and a semblance of normality was restored. Vita frenziedly wrote sonnets about Mary (‘a sort of catharsis,’ she explained to Harold147), Mary began her painting of Long Barn and Roy internalised his anger. He would mine its rich seam to devastating effect in what he called ‘a satirical fantasy in verse’, The Georgiad, published in 1931. Although the satire of The Georgiad roves widely through the Bloomsbury Group, Harold and Vita feature prominently. Roy’s depiction of the ‘frowsy poetess’ Vita – ‘too gaunt and bony to attract a man’ – indicates the damage Vita had inflicted on his sexual vanity.148 With some justification, the poem deprecated Harold and Vita broadcasting on the radio ‘about married life,/ As if their life were one protracted kiss,/ And they the models of connubial bliss’.149 As late as 1952, Vita declined an invitation to a Foyle’s lunch for Stephen Spender ‘because I didn’t fancy the idea of meeting Roy Campbell’.150
With a degree of understatement, Harold had recently warned Vita that she lacked a happy touch where married couples were concerned. He resisted reminding her of this warning and instead did his best to restore her equilibrium. He countered Virginia’s criticism by pointing to their marriage as proof of her ‘genius for durable relationships’, indicated as well her relationships with Dottie, the children, her parents. In the middle of December, Vita spent five days with Harold in Berlin, letters of protest from Mary following in her wake; on her return she persuaded Roy to go on living in the cottage. To her diary Vita confided that she was ‘very depressed at leaving [Harold] alone in that beastly place [Berlin]’; her dislike of the German capital would grow.151 Neither Harold nor Vita had any idea that one of Vita’s ‘durable’ relationships was about to end, with long-lasting consequences for Vita. At the relatively young age of sixty-one, Lionel was weeks away from death.
Lionel Sackville-West, 3rd Baron Sackville, died on 28 January 1928 of pericarditis (inflammation round the heart). Knole passed by ancient right to Vita’s Uncle Charlie and his American wife, Anne, whom Vita loathed. Bar a handful of occasions, she would never return and so her mythologising of Knole became complete: it was the house of her memories, the house in her dreams, a region of fantasy and her own perfect panacea. ‘I dream quite often about Knole. I dream about the deer galloping down the stable passage, their hooves rattling on the wood boards,’ she wrote in her Dream Book. ‘I like this dream. I like any dream that takes me back to Knole. I wish I dreamt oftener about Knole … I wish I did. It used to be a sort of substitute for not going there.’152
Lionel had been attended by Sir Thomas Horder, a ‘short, friendly specialist in cancer and heart disease’ with a roster of royal clients, and nursed at Knole by Olive Rubens and Vita, who described him as suffering ‘agonies of pain’.153 Victoria’s wretchedness at his death focused at first on these nursing arrangements: it was Vita, henceforth labelled ‘the Vipa’ in her mother’s diary, who bore the brunt of her anger. Vita made arrangements for Lionel’s funeral and his burial in the family chapel at Withyam church: cart horses drew his coffin. She also answered more than three hundred letters of condolence and conceived a novella, The Death of Noble Godavary, about heredity, inheritance and the destruction of an ancient family home by an outsider of mixed blood (like Victoria, and indeed Vita herself). ‘It is a dismal affair for her,’ Virginia wrote to Eddy Sackville-West, son of the new Lord Sackville and now heir to Knole; ‘and your aunt’s [Victoria’s] behaviour could only be tolerated in an Elizabethan play. That she might take a dagger to her own throat or drink broken glass is rather my hope.’154
Virginia’s thoughts were running on Elizabethan history. At the time of Lionel’s death she reported herself ‘hacking rather listlessly at the last chapter’ of Orlando.155 Its publication in October would offer Vita consolation of sorts in this year of dispossession when Knole slipped irretrievably from her grasp. ‘When she left the house behind the old carthorses, she went for ever,’ Virginia reported Vita telling her in the aftermath of Lionel’s funeral. Virginia was sympathetic if detached: ‘Can one really be in love with a house?’156 But Orlando made good Vita’s symbolic return.157
Accurately Harold told Vita that it was a book ‘in which you and Knole are identified for ever, a book which will perpetuate that identity into years when you and I are dead’.158 Vita described it as containing ‘romance, wit, seriousness, lightness, beauty, imagination, style’.159 Since all those qualities belong not only to the novel but to Orlando himself, she could not help but be flattered. Virginia’s diary records Orlando’s critical reception and its commercial success: she does not dwell on Vita’s reaction. Perhaps she knew she could take her excitement for granted, so accurate is her realisation of Vita’s mythomania. Photographs of Vita were included among Orlando’s illustrations – Vita as a portrait by Lely, as a Victorian and in modern times, beside a five-bar gate at Long Barn; she was its dedicatee and identified in reviews. Lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall, who did not know her, wrote to Vita on 16 December 1928 after seeing her, ‘it must have been you because it was someone who looked so exactly like Orlando’.160
To Virginia, Vita signed her ecstatic, admiring, respectful letter of thanks for a special leather-bound copy of the novel, which arrived a day ahead of publication, ‘Orlando’. In September the women had spent six days together in France, as a result of which Vita considered that both she and her friendship with Virginia had been regenerated (Virginia, by contrast, spent much of the time missing Leonard, but concluded that Vita was not as unintelligent as she had assumed). During the summer, Vita had signed her notes to Mary Campbell with the same alias. Orlando helped Vita face the altered reality of life without Knole after her father’s death; in providing another mask in her romantic armoury, it helped her to escape again into unreality.
Of the two readers who complained about Orlando to Vita, Victoria railed against what she interpreted as Virginia’s lesbian agenda and her desire to separate Vita and Harold, and Mary lamented the passionlessness of Virginia’s portrait. ‘Orlando is too safe too sexless and too easy-going to be really like you, but then I am thinking of him as he appears to me … Ah an entire book about Orlando with no mention of her deep fiery sensuality – that strange mixture of fire and gloom and heat and cold – seems to me slightly pale.’161
Vita’s relations with both women were in a state of flux. In the third week of February, while Roy remained incapacitated following an operation for appendicitis, Vita had resumed her affair with Mary. There were passionate nights and more poems on Vita’s part, but the giddiness of first infatuation had passed. In April, Roy left the cottage for Martigues in the South of France; like Geoffrey’s initial parting from Sybil, it was understood as a trial separation. Roy wrote to Mary constantly, imploring her to join him. On 11 May, Mary did so. She was still in love with Vita but recognised now, like other lovers before and after, the gulf between her own feelings and Vita’s. As ever, Vita channelled her feelings into the safe containment of the written word. King’s Daughter, published in 1929 and the last of Vita’s collections of verse, captured the lights and shades of this vanished béguin: ‘Time was our banker once …/ Now he’s turned sour, and our account does edit.’162 Harold disliked the poems’ overt lesbianism and advised against publication; Virginia overruled his reservations. Vita also wrote a short story based on the affair for a women’s magazine. The Roy of the story, treated sympathetically by the narrator, shoots himself.
There would be no similar disappearance on Victoria’s part: instead, a hiatus in relations between mother and daughter. This came about on 18 April 1928, the short-term cause a ‘terrible scene’ in the office of the Sackville family solicitors.
For too long Victoria had exploited the money that came to her from Seery as an unwieldy instrument of power. Houses, jewels, Rolls-Royce motor cars, furniture, tapestries, gardeners, school fees and tax bills all fell within the remit of her munificence when she wished it. But her character was mercurial: the fairy godmother was also a witch. On this occasion Victoria’s fury focused on twelve extra pearls she had added to the pearl necklace that was Vita’s posthumous twenty-first birthday present from Seery. She surprised Vita at Pemberton’s, signing documents. Amid floods of ‘the vilest abuse … like a mad woman, screaming Thief and Liar, and shaking her fist at me till I thought she was going to hit me’, Victoria demanded the return of her dozen pearls.163
‘She was made to take the pearl necklace from her neck, cut it in two with a pocket knife, deliver over the 12 central pearls [and] put the relics, all running loose, in an envelope the solicitor gave her,’ an incredulous Virginia noted in her diary.164 Victoria had retreated to the comfort of her Rolls-Royce. Vita followed her. Outside, amid the clangour of the London street, she broke apart the necklace and handed over the pearls. Victoria screamed that she hated her, hoped she would die then and there, that very minute, standing in the street, run over by a bus. Then she sent her secretary after Vita into Pemberton’s office to demand the return of all the other jewels she had ever given her: they were to be brought to her room at The Savoy the following morning and Vita would wait outside in the corridor while Victoria made her inventory. Vita agreed to their return, but refused to be treated ‘like a servant’ in a hotel corridor. When the breathless Victoria began to abuse Harold, Vita took refuge in a taxi. The episode lasted from 12.30 to 2.15, almost two hours of unremitting invective, and created a rift that lasted until February 1930, when, symbolically, Victoria returned to Vita the twelve contested pearls. Of greater significance to the Nicolsons than the shortening of Vita’s pearl necklace was Vita’s decision to give up the allowance Victoria paid her. At a single blow, Harold and Vita found not only Vita’s pearl necklace but their income drastically reduced.
In a letter to Harold that evening, Vita described the morning’s events with as much calmness as she could muster; her diary is laconic. At lunch with Raymond Mortimer afterwards, she drank half a bottle of Champagne. She spent the afternoon at London Zoo with a supportive Virginia. In the evening, for the first time, Vita broadcast live for the BBC. It was an unsettling preliminary to this important new development in her career.
Vita fell in love at the BBC. As with other béguins, her fancy was generously rewarded. The relationship she embarked on with Director of Talks Hilda Matheson took a familiar course: obsession, physical rhapsody, letters, concealment, a holiday abroad, friendship after the damping of the flames. Hilda’s self-effacement prevented it from becoming a ‘muddle’. ‘I want you to love me – to have me – to possess me utterly – I want to give myself to you,’ Hilda wrote to Vita on 15 January 1929; she offered Vita adulation, devotion, submission. Her love was physical as well as emotional: ‘My body is yours as my heart is yours … sometimes I want you so terribly physically that I can hardly bear it.’165 Hilda fell in love with a private Vita, ‘the most beautiful person that’s ever swept across my horizon’; she loved the public Vita too, the acclaimed novelist and poet, the Vita who, in April 1930, after the death of Robert Bridges, was considered for the position of Poet Laureate.166 Vita called Hilda ‘Stoker’ (Virginia claimed the name was Harold’s). It suggested the hard-working stoker men of steam engines, an appropriate moniker for Hilda, who shunned the limelight, happiest in reflected rays. And Vita returned Hilda’s love. Then the moment passed and Hilda the lover became Hilda the friend.
They met on 18 April and again on 4 June, when Vita read passages from The Land. Hilda wrote to congratulate Vita on that broadcast; Vita returned the compliment three weeks later after listening ‘with the tears pouring down my face’ to Robert Harris read Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.167 Hilda invited Vita to discuss broadcasting poetry; Vita invited Virginia to accompany her to the BBC. Hilda spent a weekend in July at Long Barn: in Vita’s diary she was still ‘Miss Matheson’.
On 2 October, Vita broadcast the first of six talks on ‘Modern English Poetry’. By the following May she had begun the fortnightly radio reviews of new fiction that would continue until December 1931 (after which, for the next year, Vita shared with former literary editor of the New Statesman, Desmond MacCarthy, a half-hour-long slot, ‘Literary Criticism’). Vita received ten guineas a broadcast, with an additional payment for subsequent publication in the Radio Times or The Listener. Hilda was Vita’s producer; the women met regularly and often. Elaborating her invitation to Vita to ‘contemplate a fortnightly review of new novels’ in January 1929, Hilda wrote: ‘It would be so perfect from my point of view – excuse for your coming to my office, benefit untold to my listeners, prestige of the most exalted kind for the BBC.’168 By then, for both of them, the first reason carried the day.
They became lovers in December 1928. Vita broadcast a discussion on ‘The Position of Women Today’ with novelist Hugh Walpole who, a decade earlier, had loaned Vita and Violet his cottage in Polperro. Hilda and Hugh spent the preceding weekend at Long Barn; broadcast over, Vita spent the night in Hilda’s flat in South Kensington. The morning after, Hilda stayed with Vita, too faint to go to work. The same day she sent Vita her first love letter. ‘I love you more than ever I can tell you … it’s the most completely comprehensive sweep I ever dreamed of, all of me, in every sort of different way. I bless you and Heaven and creatures generally for having made it possible for this to happen; and you in particular … for being so perfect and so good to me, and most of all for loving me.’169 Wholeheartedly, Vita returned Hilda’s love. It was obvious even in her letters to Harold. It was also obvious, and a source of disgruntlement, to Dottie, whom Vita continued to see regularly. Hilda wrote to Vita and Vita, with her customary zeal, wrote back, fifty letters in a matter of weeks.170 Following Vita’s departure on 19 December for Berlin and Christmas and the New Year with Harold and the boys, Hilda wrote up to three times a day. Their intimacy then was a novelty. ‘Here we are writing to each other every day, without any apparent barriers or obstacles or reserve … I have this incredible feeling of naturalness and absence of shyness or reserve or anything towards you,’ Hilda marvelled.171 As Vita had predicted, in the short term they came to know one another better on paper than in person.
Hilda’s letters punctuated a five-day visit to Berlin in the middle of January by Virginia and Leonard. They were joined by Duncan Grant, Virginia’s sister Vanessa Bell and her nephew Quentin. It was an unsatisfactory visit, pressed on Virginia by Vita. The day after Virginia’s departure, Vita began writing Gottfried Künstler, ‘a story about skating’ influenced by Virginia’s descriptions of the Great Frost in Orlando. Vita dedicated it to Hilda. It was all grist to the mill of Virginia’s jealousy.
Virginia Woolf deplored Hilda Matheson as an ‘earnest middle-class intellectual … drab and dreary’.172 To Vita she wrote: ‘She affects me as a strong purge, as a hair shirt, as a foggy day, as a cold in the head.’173 She parried Hilda’s invitations that she too should broadcast for the BBC, gave in with all ill grace, delivered a talk on Beau Brummell in November 1929, claimed that Hilda had made her ‘castrate Brummell’ and, broadcast over, ‘poured … rage hot as lava over Vita’; she was determined not to be considered alongside Hilda and Dottie as part of Vita’s ‘second-rate’ schoolgirl clique.174 Vita admitted the validity of the criticism but remained loyal to the loyal Hilda.
Hilda stayed at Long Barn in the spring, when Vita started writing Andrew Marvell, the first of a new series launched by Faber & Faber called ‘The Poets on The Poets’. Vita had begun collecting budgerigars: her diary records a gift of two birds from Deirdre Hart-Davis. For three days in the middle of April, Vita and Hilda made an aviary; after Hilda’s departure, Vita finished it with Ben. The next week Virginia was with Vita when she bought a pair of blue budgerigars. On a rainy night in May, Vita stayed with Hilda in London after broadcasting: she excused herself on grounds of the weather. A fortnight later it was Hilda, not Ben and Nigel, who inaugurated the new swimming pool built at Long Barn by Harold. In June, Vita’s first budgerigar chicks were born; her excitement was in line with her fondness for rabbits and dogs, derided by Violet. The radio discussion on marriage Vita broadcast in the middle of the month with Harold, who was briefly at home on leave, would also have provoked Violet to derision. Ditto a follow-up discussion on happiness, broadcast in April 1930.
Vita travelled with Hilda to Savoie and Val d’Isère in July; clumsily she attempted to lessen Virginia’s jealousy by presenting the holiday as a last-minute decision. In France she wrote a pair of poems for Hilda. ‘Storm in the Mountains (Savoy)’ and ‘Peace in the Mountains (Savoy)’ are landscape descriptions like the poem she had once written for Pat, but lacking the earlier poem’s ambiguity: colourful, pictorial, postcards in verse. Vita was reading Ethel Colburn Mayne’s newly published The Life of Lady Byron, which thrilled her. It drew on previously unpublished sources, among them letters from Byron to different, jealous lovers; Vita’s diary does not record any train of reflection set in motion as a result. The high point of the trip had nothing to do with Hilda. ‘Came down in the morning and found a very exciting letter from Hadji saying he had been offered a job by Lord Beaverbrook,’ Vita reported.175 Four days later, Harold sent more details. On 1 August, having parted from Hilda, Vita met Harold in Karlsruhe for ‘endless discussions about Beaverbrook!’.176 She described the news to Virginia as ‘a happy bombshell’.177
Lord Beaverbrook was the proprietor of the Evening Standard and the Daily Express. He offered Harold £3,000 a year to join the staff of the Standard. Harold requested a higher figure and his political independence and was granted the latter.178 Vita was delighted. In her diary the previous summer, she had written herself a memorandum: ‘Many discussions with H as to our future. He seems determined to remain in diplomacy, and quite cheerfully contemplates years spent in foreign capitals. Don’t think he realises in the least what this means to me – and I don’t want him to.’179 Virginia shared Vita’s pleasure. For his part, Harold suspected he was trading the certainty of an embassy for moonshine. It was a suspicion that would never leave him. He lamented ‘the tug always at my heart of diplomacy in all its forms’, but contemplated with pleasure a life in which there would be no more lengthy separations from Vita and the boys.180 His contract with Beaverbrook began on 1 January 1930. Harold would endure it for twenty months.
At Long Barn, Vita stumbled walking upstairs. Lumbago set in, acutely painful and debilitating; the condition would return at intervals until her death. She described herself to Virginia as ‘only able to hobble from room to room on two sticks, or else drag myself along the floor’; she was too incapacitated to broadcast.181 Hilda helped to nurse the thirty-seven-year-old invalid. With Harold set to return to Britain full time in December, she recognised now the curfew on their intimacy; she had always acknowledged Vita’s ‘other claims’: ‘You know I am the sort of person to whom you can always say without any kind of compunction – please keep away from Long Barn, or please after all don’t come tomorrow, or next weekend, or whatever it is.’182 For all her devotion, such selflessness occasionally cost her dear.
Her back recovered, Vita spent three days looking for a London flat for Harold (she had sold the Ebury Street house in 1926). She found it at King’s Bench Walk in the Inner Temple, on 7 October. The next day advance copies arrived of King’s Daughter, proof to Vita as well as to Hilda of the changeability of the former’s affections. Vita organised ‘plumbers, painters, electricians’ for King’s Bench Walk; she chose chair covers and, in the second week of December, unpacked Harold’s cases from Berlin, hung pictures and arranged furniture. She even bought a painting by Duncan Grant, perhaps a sot to Virginia given Vita’s previous hostility to Bloomsbury painting. She hung it too in the new flat, which was within walking distance of the Standard offices; King’s Bench Walk would become Harold’s Monday-to-Friday home in his new existence. Before Harold left Berlin he was commissioned by the BBC to broadcast a series of talks called ‘People and Things’. Hilda Matheson would remain part of Vita’s life. Though there would be flashes of disillusionment and considerable pain in her loss of Vita’s love, Hilda mostly adjusted to her altered status with characteristic lack of recrimination. When internal politics at the BBC forced her resignation in 1931, she briefly licked her wounds with Vita and Harold, working as the equivalent of their personal assistant. ‘I respond unlimitedly to kindness,’ she had once told Vita.183
In the novella Vita dedicated to Hilda Matheson, Gottfried Künstler ‘fall[s] on the back of [his] head on the ice’ and becomes a different person. He calls himself Klaus and finds a companion called Anna. Like Hilda, Anna is patient and ripe to fall in love. In his new life in the icy wilderness, Gottfried revels in the patterns that his ice skates slice into the surface of the frozen lake, ‘a scratch … that next day would turn to water’. His skating, the patterns in the ice, his progress across the lake with Anna are no more than ‘a gesture … that might break a limb, or a heart; and all for nothing … “As our life together,” [Anna] said, looking at him very sadly, and expecting perhaps some human reassurance, some warm contradiction; but he only said, with a philosophy that amounted to indifference, “Just so – as our life together.”’184