THE DESIRE TO BE a man, shared by Radclyffe Hall, Gertrude Stein, and Willa Cather, is probably no more common among lesbians than among other women, for it begins early in childhood not as a sexual taste but as a rebellion against the physical, emotional, and social restrictions imposed on little girls. Most have resigned themselves, some even embraced those limitations in adolescence, particularly those who are sexually astute enough to realize that they do not have to improve and advance themselves but only their husbands and children to maintain a position of value in the world. To be excused from the self would probably be as much a temptation to some men if they were given the legitimate option. For people who are by nature independent and gifted, that abdication is extremely painful if not impossible.
Of all the women considered in this study, Vita Sackville-West had the greatest reason to wish that she had been born male. She was the only child of Lionel Sackville-West and Victoria Sackville-West. Lionel would inherit Knole, the largest house in England still in private hands, from his uncle because all five of his uncle’s children were illegitimate. Victoria was one of his uncle’s illegitimate daughters, and, when she and Lionel married, they lived at Knole. Vita was born there and lived there until at twenty-one she was married to Harold Nicolson in the Knole chapel, confessing that the only great rival for Harold was Knole itself, for in marrying him she gave up her life at Knole, and, even though she was the only child of the family, she would not inherit the estate because she was female.
A solitary child, she found her greatest ally in her grandfather (who was also her great-uncle), as unsociable as she was, aloof and rude to the numbers of people entertained at Knole. The relationship between her parents deteriorated early, but they tolerated each other’s affairs for some years. Lionel even encouraged Victoria in her relationship with Sir John Murray Scott, an extremely wealthy man, who also lived at Knole for some years and left most of his money to Victoria when he died so that she and her husband could continue to enjoy living on the lavish scale his money for years had provided. His money also made them resigned to Vita’s marriage, for, though they liked Harold Nicolson, he was without resources except for his career in the diplomatic service, and Vita could have married other men who would have provided her with great estates and titles. Obviously wealth and position in themselves did not interest Vita as substitutes for the loved place she must inevitably lose.
When her grandfather died, even her father was not secure in his inheritance, for one of the illegitimate sons contested Lionel Sackville-West’s right to Knole in a law suit that revived the family scandal. When that case was settled in Lionel Sackville-West’s favor, another suit was brought by Sir John Murray Scott’s family contesting his will, in which the scandal of Victoria’s long relationship with him brought even more notoriety to the family. Some time after Vita’s marriage, Victoria finally left her husband and Knole. Vita and Harold had taken a cottage just two miles from Knole and moved only when the land around them was bought by a farmer who was going to raise chickens. When they left the area, they went to Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, a “battered relic of an Elizabethan house in which not a single room was habitable,”1 which they gradually restored. Though it was not imposing and grand, it was old and beautiful, and there in the tower Vita Sackville-West had her study, where she wrote short stories, novels, and biographies, an occupation that had absorbed her since childhood, at which she was successful enough to provide a comfortable income even during a period when Harold was uncertainly shifting professions and Victoria was being recalcitrant about providing the allowance which had been legally made over to Vita at her marriage.
Much less would be known about Vita Sackville-West if her son, Nigel Nicolson, had not recently published Portrait of a Marriage, part of which is a manuscript he found in his mother’s study after her death, an autobiographical fragment of eighty pages written in the seventh year of her marriage about her violent love affair with another woman, Violet Trefusis. The remainder of Portrait of a Marriage is Nigel Nicolson’s description of the long relationship between his parents. “Their marriage not only survived infidelity, sexual incompatibility and long absences, but it became stronger and finer as a result.”2
In that autobiography, Vita described her childhood at Knole when she “made a great ideal of being hardy, and as like a boy as possible.”3 She did not get on well with other children, was rough and cruel to them, enjoyed her own company much more, and devoted hours of each day to reading and writing. In school she was fiercely competitive and very successful academically. “I’ve got a scholarly turn of mind, let me face that damning truth.”4 But there was no question of her going on to university, of course. She must come out and take her place in society. A mind as strong and well disciplined as Virginia Woolf’s could overcome the handicap of a limited formal education. Vita Sackville-West tried, but her biographies are often flawed by her lack of scholarly competence and uncontrolled personal involvement. There is something unfortunately silly as well as charming about her interjecting that she would like herself to dry the tears of Anne-Marie Louise d’Orléans, the subject of Daughter of France, or her assertion “As I can never understand my own finances in 1958 I don’t see why I should be expected to understand Mademoiselle’s in 1660.”5 But since for her being scholarly at all was a “damning truth,” those womanly flutters probably seemed to her in some measure redeeming in her work.
Vita Sackville-West did not think of herself as an attractive girl or young woman. Her portraits beautifully deny her own assessment, as does her disdained success in the marriage market. What she was aware of even more than being too tall, too scholarly, too impatient of developing her own charms was the fact that “men didn’t attract me.” “Women did.”6 Her first great love was Rosamund, about which for some time she felt relatively innocent. “I realized vaguely that I had no business to sleep with Rosamund, and I should certainly never have allowed anyone to find out, but my sense of guilt went no further than that.”7 Though they never actually made love, the relationship for Vita was “almost exclusively physical” because she found Rosamund “a boring and stupid companion.”8 At eighteen, when Vita met Harold, she was still very much involved with Rosamund and continued to be so all through Harold’s courtship.
From the beginning, Vita discovered with Harold the side of her nature which had been left undeveloped in childhood; “he was the best actual playmate I had ever known.”9 Her love for him “was so fresh, so intellectual, so unphysical, that I never thought of him in that aspect at all.”10 He was away a great deal during the years of their courtship, and she did not really miss him, absorbed in Rosamund, her “pure” love for Harold not as real as “my perverted nature, which loved and tyrannized over Rosamund.”11 But, when she did marry, the loss she felt was not Rosamund, but Knole. In fact, she felt rescued from Rosamund or, at any rate, from the self she was with Rosamund, “from everything that was vicious and violent.”12 “Although I never knew the physical passion I had felt for Rosamund, I didn’t really miss it.”13 She had not with Rosamund ever really satisfied that passion, probably because neither of them had known how, and it must certainly have been a relief to leave it behind for a companion in all other ways so delightful to Vita. She lived in that state of calm pleasure for four or five years, during which time she bore three sons, one of whom was stillborn.
All of these details are offered in the autobiography as background to the love affair with Violet, who had been, aside from Rosamund, Vita’s only important girlhood friend, younger than Vita by two years but as intelligent, as passionate, and far more daring. Because Violet had been an erotically disturbing person even when Vita was absorbed with Rosamund and was rude about Vita’s marriage, Vita did not wholeheartedly welcome her reappearance. Harold was away when Violet came to visit. At first her restlessness annoyed Vita, happily settled into a life of tending her children, gardening, and writing, but one day Vita put on what were called in those war years “women-on-the-land” clothes, breeches and gaiters. “I went into wild spirits; I ran, I shouted, I jumped, I climbed, I vaulted over gates, I felt like a school boy. …”14 Violet, who had been in love with Vita for years, seduced her that night.
The guilt Vita felt was sometimes in the next three years as fierce as her sexual passion. Writing about what happened, she did not try to justify herself ever. “I have never pretended to have anything other than a base and despicable character.”15 “My whole curse has been a duality with which I was too weak and too self-indulgent to struggle.”16 She justified writing about the affair at all because she wanted to tell the entire truth, because she knew of no other record of such a relationship, because she hoped that what she experienced would be better understood in the future. Her own explanation was this: “I advance, therefore, the perfectly accepted theory that cases of dual personality do exist, in which the feminine and masculine elements alternately preponderate. I advance this in an impersonal and scientific spirit, and claim that I am qualified to speak with the intimacy a professional scientist could acquire only after years of study and indirect information, because I have the object of study always at hand, in my own heart.”17
Her view of herself as a dual personality came from the great difference of experience between loving Harold and loving Violet. Of Harold she said, “He has complete power over my heart, though not over my spirit.”18 She was never possessive of him, jealous of him, and though she enormously enjoyed his company, missing him was never something that disturbed her writing solitude. She certainly did often treat him very badly during those three years, but she had no real desire to hurt him. His suffering was perhaps the greatest part of her guilt and grief. Through it all, though he sometimes bitterly protested, he never stopped loving Vita or supporting her emotionally. She wrote to him, “You have met and understood me on every point. It is this which binds me to you through every storm, and makes you so unalterably the one person whom I trust and love.”19 Harold’s own affairs with men certainly helped him to understand Vita’s nature, and, since he was a man not much disturbed by sexual passion, he could usually control his jealousy.
With Violet, Vita was a different person. “I am so harsh to her that I could put almost any strain of suffering upon her without feeling a qualm of pity—could and have.”20 She thought of herself as owning Violet. Violet also behaved very differently from Harold. “My house, my garden, my fields, and Harold, these were the silent ones, that pleaded only by their own merits of purity, simplicity, and faith, and on the other hand stood Violet, fighting wildly for me, seeming sometimes harsh and scornful, and riding roughshod over those gentle, defenseless things, but sometimes piteous and tragic, reduced to utter dependence upon me, and instantly defeated by any rough word of mine, until I really knew not where the truth lay.”21
Violet wanted nothing but to escape with Vita and live with her. Though Vita did not want to leave Harold, she did go off with Violet on a holiday which turned into a four-month absence. While with Violet, Vita dressed like a man and called herself Julian, a new identity that made her feel marvelously free. Enraged letters from her mother, telling her of the increasing scandal she was causing, threatening to give up the care of the children, did not touch her. There had been so much scandal in the family, not the least her mother’s own reputation, it could hardly have mattered to Vita. For the children during that period she obviously felt no more than detached affection. It was Harold who finally could persuade her to return.
Violet was meanwhile being pressured by her family to marry. She had already broken more engagements than her reputation could stand, and, since she had no independent means, she could not ignore her family completely. Denys Trefusis, a handsome, strange, and idealistic man, was deeply in love with her and willing to marry her on her own terms, which were that there would be no sexual relations between them and she could be free to spend as much time with Vita as she wanted. Vita was half persuaded that the marriage would give Violet greater freedom, but, as the time for it approached, Violet begged Vita to rescue her from it. Faced with the fact of marriage, Violet said, “I hate men. They fill me with revulsion, even quite small boys. Marriage is an institution that ought to be confined to temperamental old maids, weary prostitutes, and royalty.”22 It seems clear that for Violet the threat of marriage was only a means to force Vita to give up her own marriage for Violet. Vita, instead, escaped to Paris to be with Harold through the day of Violet’s wedding. Denys and Violet arrived in Paris the next day, and Violet went straight to Vita, who was in a frenzy of possessive jealousy. “I treated her savagely. I made love to her. I had her. I didn’t care.”23
Violet used that jealousy again and again to tempt Vita to her, saying that Denys was in danger of breaking his agreement. The thought of anyone else possessing Violet was unendurable to Vita, and finally she and Violet did plan to go away together. Not only her own but Harold’s mother now knew what was going on. Mrs. Nicolson, gentle and understanding, tried to persuade Vita not to go. “I only wanted to fly where I would not pollute their purity any longer.”24 The climax of the long melodrama occurred when both husbands arrived together in France to reclaim their wives. At that time Harold suggested to Vita that Violet was not being truthful with her, that she had in fact let her husband make love to her. This revelation so enraged Vita that she left with Harold, and even the later half denials and explanations from both Violet and Denys did not basically alter Vita’s determination to break with Violet though she was still “longing and aching miserably for someone in whom I had lost faith, that of loving to desperation someone in whose worth I no longer believed.”25 Of Denys Trefusis she wrote, “I now hate him more than I have ever hated anyone in this life, or am likely to; and there is no injury I would not do him with the utmost pleasure.”26 “I only hope he returns it in full measure; he has a hundred times more cause to hate me than I do to hate him.”27
What is remarkable about her account is that she never tried to rationalize her position. Given her own circumstance, her jealousy of Violet was hardly fair, but nothing in the experience involved reason or justice or even understanding. It is described far more like a natural disaster, as a result of which come inevitable regrets: “I regret that the person Harold married wasn’t entirely and wholly what he thought of her, and that the person who loves and owns Violet isn’t a second person, because each suits each.”28 Vita also regretted what she had learned of herself. “Of course I wish now that I had never made those discoveries.”29 She would ponder general cures: “Women, like men, ought to have their youth so glutted with freedom they hate the very idea of freedom.”30 Years later, she said to Harold, “You should have told me about yourself and warned me that the same sort of thing was likely to happen to myself. It would have saved us a lot of trouble and misunderstanding.”31 An unlikely hope, but Harold and Vita, having survived those years, never again faced any serious threat to their marriage. And apparently, after that grotesque beginning, Violet’s own marriage went on to be quite a happy one, she taking full blame for what had happened.
Vita did not stop falling in love with women, but she by then did understand herself better and knew that no one would ever come between her and Harold. The most written about of her relationships was that with Virginia Woolf, whose nephew in his biography speculates that there was probably some love-making between them. Nigel Nicolson offers letters exchanged between his parents to clarify the circumstance. Vita was very much in love with Virginia, but she was also extremely protective of her, aware not only that Virginia had never known physical passion but was also threatened with madness. “I am scared to death of arousing physical feelings in her, because of madness.”32 Harold was concerned at first that she might upset the balance of Virginia and Leonard’s relationship, warning her that not all marriages were as secure from such threat as their own, but Vita continually reassured him that she was being sensible. She mothered Virginia, and Virginia wanted mothering, drawn to Vita’s being “in short (what I have never been) a real woman.”33 The physical attraction did not last more than a year or so. The friendship continued until Virginia Woolf’s suicide. “When Virginia drowned herself in 1941, Harold came down to Sissinghurst at once to be with Vita, but during the whole of that long evening, Virginia’s name was never once mentioned by either of them.”34 She had been for Vita something far more than a lover, a friend with whom she shared her work and herself. Virginia Woolf understood her, and she wrote Orlando for her, a book Nigel Nicolson calls “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”35 “Virginia by her genius had provided Vita with a unique consolation for having been born a girl,”36 associating Vita with Knole, allowing her, in fantasy, a life as long as her own ancient family history, in which she was allowed to be a woman and a man by turns.
Vita Sackville-West became increasingly solitary, gardening and writing at Sissinghurst, enjoying weekends with Harold and visits from her sons. She died before Harold, and, though he suffered terribly from loneliness, his sons were probably more a consolation to him than they would have been to her, for she had never been more than a dutiful mother, sometimes less, something Nigel at least does not seem to resent, understanding her need for privacy. “The desire to be free from interruption, free from being available, was as real and painful to her as love or jealousy.”37
Even at the most intense moments of her life, she never neglected her writing. During the four months she spent with Violet, she was working on a novel called Challenge, whose pages she shared with Violet as she wrote them. When she had finished it, both families begged her not to publish it since the heroine was too obviously a portrait of Violet and would confirm all the raging gossip about the two women. Violet was very angry when Vita stopped publication. The book didn’t appear until five years later, and then it was brought out only in the United States. Challenge is not a good book, and it’s hard to imagine why Violet was so pleased with her own representation. Called Eve in the book, she is as beautiful and attractive as Violet was in real life, as spoiled by and flippantly cruel to men, with the exception of Julian, who is her cousin, Vita using the close family tie as a moral restraint for Julian to correspond with her own misgivings about overt lesbian love-making. Julian has a political dream of declaring independence for a group of small Greek islands, on which his family has large investments, and proclaiming himself as leader to give the native people a better life. Eve encourages him only because the break it will cause with his family will leave him free to be with her. Once he has achieved his goal and they are living among the natives of the island, Julian’s continued interest in the political problems of the island makes Eve jealous, and she betrays him. When Julian realizes that Eve is responsible for the successful invasion of the island, he tells her that she has destroyed not only his dream but his love for her. Though he then offers to marry her in responsible despair, she refuses and kills herself. Nigel Nicolson says the islands are a symbol of Harold and all he stood for. Since Julian constantly equates Eve and the islands, sees her and the dream of political freedom as parts of the same goal, it is more tempting to believe that Vita saw in Violet finally not only a threat to her marriage but also to her work, willing to betray not only anyone but anything to have Vita’s undivided attention.
The portrait of Eve, as well as her name, is classic, woman as temptress and betrayer, idealized and then despised, tyrannized over and protected and then cast off. And Julian is a classic of male chauvinism, not really interested in the freedom of the islanders so much as in his own magnetic power and importance, jealous and mistrustful and arrogant in his dealings with Eve. But neither character is conceived to be criticized. They are to be granted tragic size and tragic fate. When Julian loses Eve, he loses a great vision: “Was it for Eve supremely, and, to a certain extent for all women and artists—the visionaries, the lovely, the graceful, the irresponsible, the useless!—was it reserved for them to show the beginning of the road?”38 Julian ends as an aging man, cynical, believing in nothing, a genuine philanthropist, with a proper sort of wife. Ah, better to hurl oneself into the sea and lose life itself! Well, fortunately Vita Sackville-West left a more troubling and requiring record of her love for Violet than this translation into bad politics and worse romance.
She wrote far better fiction as well. The Edwardians is a good period piece in which she examines the meaning and value of high birth and inheritance; yet, though she strives for detachment, there is still unresolved nostalgia for the masculine privilege she never had, for the high adventure she never risked.
All Passion Spent is a less ambitious, somehow truer, and therefore even more successful book in which Lady Slane, in her eighties, looks back on her exemplary life as the wife of a successful man, who became Prime Minister of England, and mother of a number of not very attractive or interesting children. She reveals that she never did want to marry. “For the thoughts which ran behind this delicate and maidenly exterior were of an extravagance to do credit even to a wild young man. They were thoughts of nothing less than escape and disguise; a changed name, a travested sex, and freedom in some foreign city.”39 She wanted to be a painter. Confronted with a proposal she doesn’t so much accept as fall silent before, she lets herself be carried into marriage on other people’s assumptions, thinking only “even had she been in love with him, she could see therein no reason for foregoing the whole of her own separate existence. Henry was in love with her, but no one proposed that he should forego his.”40 She did love her husband finally. That love “had been a straight black line drawn right through her life. It had hurt her, it had damaged her, it had diminished her, but she had been unable to curve away from it.”41 She envied young couples simply in love, without conflict, but at the same time she was repelled by “this intolerable masculine lordliness, this abject feminine submission.”42 Her conclusion about her choice is, “It had been terrible to live with, and to love, a being so charming, so deceptive, so chill. Henry, she discovered suddenly, had been a very masculine man; masculinity, in spite of his charm and his culture, was the keynote to his character.”43
Thinking she has no more to do now than live quietly evaluating her life, she is suddenly confronted with FitzGeorge, an elderly miserly millionaire who has been distantly in love with her for years. He gets a confession from her that she would really have liked to be a painter, and he judges her, “When you chose that life you sinned against the light.”44 Lady Slane wants no criticism of her husband. FitzGeorge agrees. “According to his lights, he gave you all you could desire. He merely killed you, that’s all. Men do kill women. Most women enjoy being killed; so I’m told.”45 When FitzGeorge dies, he leaves Lady Slane his fortune, and all her children recognize the sudden possibility of greater status that money would provide them at their mother’s death. She, however, is not interested in it or in them. She gives the inheritance away, only vaguely troubled at her children’s disappointment, perhaps even a little amused. A great-granddaughter, recently engaged to a title and fortune, calls on Lady Slane, who braces herself for reproof. Instead the great-granddaughter thanks her for giving the money away, an act that has made it much easier for the girl to break her engagement and risk a career in music, which is what she really wants. When Vita Sackville-West did not identify with the male character in a book, she was clearly for women’s liberation.
Lord Slane’s career was very much like Harold Nicolson’s, but Vita never agreed to serve as the charming wife of a diplomat. When Harold was assigned posts outside the country, Vita stayed behind, and he never reproached her for it. As the long separations got more painful for them both, it was Harold who made the decision to give up his career for journalism and politics, neither of which ever really suited him, and, though he often regretted his choice for himself, he never blamed Vita for it. There was nothing of the lordly master in Harold Nicolson. Vita knew accurately, by default, what Lady Slane’s life had been.
Vita Sackville-West seems to have written often out of her own experience by posing a series of “what if” questions. For The Edwardians, what if she had been the male heir of Knole? For All Passion Spent, what if she had been a conventional wife for Harold? Her short stories often deal with inheritance of great houses, rebellious women who dream of escaping into male identities. She wrote biography in somewhat the same way, trying to find an identity in her subject. “What if Anne-Marie Louise d’Orléans had been someone like me?”
She was obviously drawn to the character of Mademoiselle, Anne-Marie Louise d’Orléans’ official title as niece of Louis XIII, because of her ambivalent sexuality and because of the homosexual tenor of the court at that time, both Louis XIII and his brother preferring men. Vita Sackville-West raises the issue with some hesitation. “It may be noticed also, without wishing to press the point too far, that her friendships were always with women rather than with men, and that those friendships were apt to be deeper and more violent than is customary.”46 Though Mademoiselle was, in some ways, a colorful character, involving herself in political escapades and making something of a comic heroine of herself during the Fronde of the Princes at the Bastille and at Orléans, she never really understood the political circumstance. “She had not been born with a masculine mind, which is, perhaps, the deepest failure of her life if only she had known it.”47 Mademoiselle is not the stuff of which great biographies are made, and choosing her, Vita Sackville-West had to content herself with rather plodding explanations of the time, spiced with speculations about the meetings between Mademoiselle and Christina of Sweden. “One wonders whether Christina would have met with better luck, had she attempted to seduce the virginal Mademoiselle”48 instead of merely extending her the masculine courtesies which are historically recorded. Mademoiselle’s attendants may have been lesbian. One of them wouldn’t sleep with her rarely present husband. They didn’t sleep with Mademoiselle, for she found them as tiresome as they found her. “She was very ugly, uncouth, hoydenish and without charm.”49 To such a woman, Vita Sackville-West brought more private curiosity than historical insight.
Vita wrote to Harold after discussions with Virginia Woolf, who was a gentle but astute critic. “There is something muted. What is it, Hadji? Something doesn’t come alive. I brood and brood, feel I am groping in a dark tunnel. It makes everything I write a little unreal, gives the effect of having been done from the outside.”50
The Dark Island is a good example of this muting, this viewing from the outside, for, though it has drama and melodrama enough for several books, the “what if” principle is again operating, sometimes making a curiosity and puzzle instead of a hard-come-by insight. This time it is “What if someone rather like Violet (or maybe Victoria) married a man who was the inheritor of a magnificent and romantic island because she wanted the island and what if someone like me loved her not the way I loved her but the way I loved Virginia and what if the husband loved Violet the way I loved Violet and then discovered she had married me for that island?” Well, everyone would die of it, and they do, for something in Vita Sackville-West wished that passions were grand enough to die of instead of live through, and she fulfilled that wish in fiction rather than in life. For her life, one is grateful. For her fiction, one is not.
Shirin, the main character in The Dark Island, comes from a middle-class family in Dulwich who holiday each year at Port Breton, off which is the island, Storn, owned by Lord and Lady le Breton. Shirin spends her summers dreaming and brooding about the island until she is taken there by the orphaned grandson, whom she has met out fishing. The grandmother and the day on the island stay in her memory far more than the boy, Venn. Her encounter with him has been unpleasantly sexual, something she wants to forget after its meaning is explained to her by the innkeeper, Mrs. Jolly, an ex-prostitute who is obviously fond of rubbing Shirin’s back and telling her the facts of life. Shirin grows up into a remarkably beautiful and provocative woman, marries very well, has four children, one of whom is psychopathic and has to be institutionalized.
She is divorced from her husband for her numerous infidelities and then meets Venn again, now Lord le Breton in his turn. He proposes marriage at once. She accepts, quite honestly admitting that she is not in love with him and is not easy to love, perhaps impossible since no man has ever meant anything to her sexually. Once they arrive on the island, she is so in love with the place that she is suddenly hopeful she may learn to love her husband as well; but he, even more jealous of his island than of her past lovers and children, makes it clear to her that the island is his and his alone. From that moment, Shirin resolves to be an exemplary wife in every respect but one: she will bear her husband’s children, run his house, involve herself in island affairs only as it pleases him, but she will not love him.
Always an entirely private person, unwilling to share her inner self with anyone, Shirin has made only one friend, Cristina, a sculptor, whose finest quality for Shirin is that she never asks personal questions. When Venn’s secretary dies, Shirin proposes that Cristina be hired. The day Cristina arrives, she is involved in a family game of tag, which the two children adore because when their mother is “it,” no one can catch her, and it amuses them that their father tries hardest and never succeeds. It is Cristina who catches Shirin and later reflects, “We became our real selves, for the first time, when I caught her into my arms beside the sea.”51
The intimacy between the two women grows very slowly because Shirin is reticent and Cristina careful. “I want the whole of Shirin, greedily, yet not for anything in the world would I steal her, unless she asked to be stolen.”52 Had Venn not been increasingly jealous of their intimacy, he would have enjoyed Cristina’s company, for though she was “all rather heroic and over life-size, all on a big scale; no feminine charm at all,”53 he could feel “a sudden comradeship with Cristina, rather as though she were a man.”54 And Cristina often likes Venn, who can be charming and simple in his love of the sea and his love of his children, but his brutality to Shirin is hard for her to endure. Occasionally Shirin is called to London to deal with the children of her first marriage, particularly the institutionalized boy, over whom she secretly grieves. Anything that distracts her from Venn puts him in a rage. His cruelty is not limited to humiliating her before other people with vicious accusations. He has beaten her, even chained her to a wall and lashed her with a whip, all of which she endures without complaint. She explains to Cristina that she feels responsible for having brought out that side of his nature, which is, anyway, how he is made, something he can’t help. She apparently forgives him everything but his withholding of the island from her. Cristina often begs to be allowed to leave since she knows Venn’s jealousy of her makes him far more brutal to his wife, but Shirin cannot bear the thought of losing Cristina, the love between them the only thing that keeps Shirin alive. It is never given in sexual terms. Cristina “desired her love for Shirin above all things to remain pure, clear-sighted, useful.”55 Shirin says to Cristina, “You know I love you more than anything in the world, you know you’re the only person on whom I have ever allowed myself to depend.”56 There is a “mystical current”57 between them.
Venn, increasingly unwell, is finally persuaded to see a doctor. He has consumption and will surely die more quickly if he stays on the island or is exposed to any kind of disease. Terrified and enraged, he shrieks out his horror not only of losing his life but of leaving Shirin and Cristina behind, in possession of the island. Shirin, always willing to serve any need except his need of her love, persuades him to go with her away from the island for the winter. Though he agrees, he is more and more broodingly restless, often insisting on Cristina’s company on long walks and sailing. Though she is afraid of him, she is also sorry for him. One day he returns from sailing without her, explaining that they had gone in two boats, but it is clear that he has killed her, though he is easily cleared at the inquest. Shirin goes on preparing for their winter trip, stunned in her rage and grief. Venn grows afraid of her. Just before they are to go, she becomes ill, and, knowing something about medicine, she suspects that she has diphtheria. Long habit has made her automatically protective of Venn, but at his sudden appearance in her room she kisses him and by that means kills him. Shirin lives only for a short time, long enough to know that her son is the image of his father, possessive of the island, wanting to share it with no one. Indifferent, Shirin dies.
It is as if Vita Sackville-West often used fiction both to glorify passion and to punish it, a process that may have been therapeutic for her but prevented her often from coming to terms with much that she did know. She could admit to all that is ugly in lust, to selfishness, sadism, and murder. Those all had a kind of grandeur that could move them beyond moral consideration and into tragic fate. What she could not deal with were the silly humiliations, the absurdities and childishness which often reduce lust in real life to the ridiculous, about which she knew so much. She and Harold spoke of the necessity, in a relationship between a man and woman, for a man to develop his feminine qualities, a woman her masculine qualities. Practically for them, only Harold’s side of the equation worked, for Vita loved in him his charm, gentleness, and compassion. What she called masculine in herself was cruel and vicious, a side of herself she never inflicted on Harold and apparently outgrew even in her relationships with other women if her motherly protection of Virginia Woolf is an example. Only in her writing did she stay obsessed with the destructive glory of passion which is often accurate in its sexual politics, but, as Virginia Woolf pointed out, doesn’t quite come alive, does often seem unreal. Vita Sackville-West is herself the finest character of her creation, and, if she never resolved her own conflicts, she endured them with more humanity, courage, and even happiness than she permitted anyone in her fiction, books which lie behind her like shed skins and were, perhaps, what allowed her to grow.