VI
FROM MURCIA in Spain Virginia wrote to Vita Sackville-West, my mother. They had met for the first time only a few months before. Her letter was to refuse Vita’s suggestion that Virginia might care to join the PEN Club, an international literary society which discussed not so much literature as authors. Virginia’s letter was kindly expressed but in effect it was a snub. Vita had misunderstood her character. She thought that because Bloomsbury was a sort of society, Virginia must be clubbable, and would enjoy discussing with other writers, most of whom would be strangers to her, the difficulties of their trade. It was a curious mistake for Vita to have made, because she herself was equally secretive about her writing. It seemed that her bloomer would put an end to their friendship scarcely before it had begun.
They had met in December 1922, dining with Clive Bell, and four days later Vita invited her to dinner with Clive and Desmond MacCarthy. From Vita’s point of view, the party was a great success. She wrote to my father, “I simply adore Virginia Woolf, and so would you. You would fall quite flat before her charm and personality. She is utterly unaffected. She dresses quite atrociously. I’ve rarely taken such a fancy to anyone.” Virginia’s account of Vita in her diary was less flattering: “Not much to my severer taste—florid, moustached, parakeet coloured, with all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist.” All the same, she invited Vita to Hogarth House, and their friendship, if not their intimacy, grew: “Dined with Virginia at Richmond. She is as delicious as ever.” “Lunched with her in Tavistock Square, where she had just arrived. Went on to see Mama [Lady Sackville], my head swimming with Virginia.” Her admiration was not yet reciprocated, and then came the PEN episode, which nearly put a stop to it.
Vita Sackville-West, a photograph by Lenare taken in 1927 during her short affair with Virginia. “Here we have Vita, exceedingly bold at one moment, and exceedingly shy at the next, falling in love with Virginia, ten years older than herself, and scared of her.”
They were reaching out to touch with fingertips what can only be grasped by the whole hand, leaving time and space for retreat if either of them came to regret it. It took two years for their friendship to develop into intimacy, and three for intimacy to be acknowledged on both sides as love. It was so unlikely a friendship that their biographers have all reached different interpretations of it. Here we have Vita, exceedingly bold at one moment and exceedingly shy at the next, falling in love with Virginia, ten years older than herself, and scared of her. Bloomsbury was too clever for her, and deliberately alarming to strangers. “Ever heard of Moore?” Virginia asked Vita. “You mean George Moore, the novelist?” “No, no, no—G. E. Moore, the philosopher,” of whom Vita had never heard. Early in their relationship, Vita and my father were invited to dine in Gordon Square with Virginia, Leonard, Vanessa, Duncan Grant, Clive and Lytton Strachey. It was all too obviously designed as an occasion to inspect Virginia’s new friend. Lytton sneered at my father’s life of Tennyson (published on that very day), and Harold, recoiling from his contempt, relapsed into silence. In sympathy, so did Vita. Two days later Virginia wrote in her diary, “It was a rocky steep evening. . . . We judged them both incurably stupid.”
Harold was not a stupid man, but Vita, when ill at ease, could be slow-witted. When she was at her writing table, ideas pullulated from her brain as if from a cornucopia, but in company with more than one or two people, her conversation was apt to be halting. She lacked the gift of repartee: she could not turn a challenging question to her own advantage, an art at which Bloomsbury excelled. What’s more, in their eyes she was old-fashioned. Her pastoral poem The Land was contrasted with The Waste Land (the very titles pointing up the difference) and found wanting. She had no taste for classical music, and thought Duncan’s and Vanessa’s panels in Tavistock Square “of inconceivable hideousness.” It is not surprising that Vanessa considered Vita “an unnecessary importation into our society,” and was astonished by Virginia’s growing intimacy with her, if not actually jealous. “Has your Vita gone?” she once wrote to her sister. “Don’t expend all your energies on writing to her. I consider that I have first claim.”
What, then, caused this uneasy relationship to develop into a love affair? What was Vita’s attraction for Virginia? In the first place, Vita had a fruitier past. There was her ancestry, and the Sackvilles’ great house, Knole, which aroused Virginia’s historical senses like the smell of potpourri in an antique bowl, but not, I think, her snobbishness, since she had no use for the aristocracy unless, like David Cecil, they also possessed the qualities she sought in other people. Vita herself had reacted against her family’s traditions, while honoring them. It was her Knole and the Sackvilles that had first caught Virginia’s attention. But Vita refused to play the role expected of the only child of so great a dynasty. From the age of fourteen, without any encouragement from her parents, she had written plays and full-length romances with astonishing exuberance, some of them in French and Italian, which she spoke fluently. She was indifferent to the playmates whom her mother enticed to Knole for tea parties; she locked them up in the toolshed, and stifled their cries of protest by stuffing their noses with putty. As she grew to debutante age, she was very beautiful, dark and lustrous, and was courted by “every little dancing thing in London” as she described them. She could have been chatelaine of Belvoir or Hare-wood, houses as famous as Knole itself, but she chose to marry Harold Nicolson, a penniless third secretary in the foreign office.
That was not all. While still an adolescent, she recognized in herself an attraction toward her own sex rather than to boys and men. She had a sentimental love affair with a foolish girl named Rosamund Grosvenor, and then dropped her for Violet Trefusis, daughter of Alice Keppel, Edward VII’s mistress. Only a year or two before she met Virginia she eloped with Violet to France, to be retrieved by their two husbands in a dramatic scene at Amiens which has become, in print and film, a notorious incident in the history of the British upper classes.
All this Virginia knew, and was impressed by it. There was the further attraction that Vita was also a writer, better known in 1922 than Virginia herself, for besides her early novels, she was a poet too, and a critic good enough to be judged by Leonard worthy to contribute regular book reviews to the Nation. They could discuss literature together not on equal terms, for Vita acknowledged Virginia’s superior gift, which Virginia did not trouble to deny, but with a common background in the literature of the past, and they corresponded endlessly. The letters of one took fire from the other’s. How much more entertaining were Virginia’s letters to Vita than those she had written to Violet Dickinson, and Vita’s to Virginia than those to another Violet. There were occasions when Virginia could not suppress admiration for Vita’s writing. “A pen of brass,” was her dismissive verdict to Jacques Raverat, which is often quoted to indicate her contempt, but it was not typical. She saw in The Land a talent of which she was incapable, in Seducers in Ecuador (which she published) a cleverness which she could hardly have suspected from Vita’s conversation, and of Passenger to Teheran she wrote to Vita, “Yes—I think it is awfully good. I didn’t know the extent of your subtleties,” and meant it. Vita, she discovered, had a “rich, dusky attic of a mind.” In Victoria Glendinning’s phrase about Seducers, Vita had “out-Bloomsburied Bloomsbury.” In the same issue of the New York Evening Post it was reviewed jointly with Mrs. Dalloway, but it was Seducers that headed the column with high commendation, while Virginia’s book was considered more shortly as “a fog of words.”
It was said that Vita was like a mother to Virginia, but I can find no evidence of this. Their relationship, though tentative at first, was always on the level, protective, perhaps, on Vita’s side, but not maternal, nor submissive on Virginia’s. They were mutually solicitous and provocative. Vita seemed astonished that Virginia should love her carnally (Virginia’s word), and when in December 1925 they first slept together at Long Barn, Vita’s house near Knole, it seems to have been as much on Virginia’s initiative as on the more experienced Vita’s. As Mitchell Leaska has astutely commented, “Vita seemed forever fanning the embers of passion yet forever stepping back from its blaze.” She was flattered, naturally, but fearful of arousing in Virginia passions that might ignite a fresh attack of madness. “For heaven’s sake be careful,” Harold warned her when she confessed to him. “It’s not merely playing with fire; it’s playing with gelignite.” He need not have worried. Their affair continued, on and off, for about three years, without damaging either of them.
More puzzling is Virginia’s attitude. She was not a deeply sensual woman. Her affection for Violet Dickinson and Madge Vaughan had been more sentimental than physical, but she confessed to herself that women attracted her more than men. Toward the end of 1924, when her friendship with Vita was intensifying, she wrote in her diary, “If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure—the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men!” But when, a year later, after the Vita affair had begun, she asked herself who was essential to her happiness, she named six people—Leonard, Vanessa, Duncan, Clive, Lytton and E. M. Forster—only one of whom was a woman, and Vita was not mentioned at all. She expressed no fear, and no shame, in undertaking at the age of forty-three the only love affair of her life. Rather, she was curious about her own reaction to it, as Vanessa was when Virginia told her about it one day when they were shopping, and Vanessa asked her how one woman could make love to another. Virginia did not record her reply, and worded her account of what was happening ambiguously, even in her diary. “These Sapphists,” she wrote, as if she were not one herself, “love women. Friendship is never untinged with amorosity.” She found homosexual relations between men distasteful. “Have you any views on loving one’s own sex?” she asked Raverat. “All the young men are so inclined, and I can’t help finding it mildly foolish, though I have no particular reason. For one thing they all tend to the pretty and lady-like. They paint and powder. . . . Then the ladies, either in self-protection, or in imitation or genuinely, are given to their sex too,” and then follows a fanciful account of Vita’s elopement with Violet, not to either woman’s credit.
Does all this covering up indicate that Virginia considered that she was doing wrong, or was it an attempt to minimize scandal about her and Vita? Undoubtedly she was anxious not to distress Leonard. When he heard of the affair, she laughed it off and told him not to worry. Their marriage was not threatened by it. If Harold did not mind (in fact he thought it would do Vita much good), nor should Leonard. But the two marriages, though similar in several ways, were not identical. Leonard was not a homosexual like Harold, and he spent almost every day with Virginia, while Harold at the beginning and height of the affair was in Teheran at the British Legation. Vita wrote to him an almost daily commentary on it, telling him, “One’s love for Virginia is a very different thing, a mental thing, a spiritual thing if you like, an intellectual thing, and she inspires a feeling of tenderness which I suppose is because of the funny mixture of hardness and softness. . . . Also she loves me, which flatters and pleases me.” Then she added, “I am scared to death of arousing physical feelings in her because of the madness.” Presumably Leonard cautioned Virginia too, but he seemed to be more bored than worried. It is not surprising that Vita saw Leonard as “a funny, grim, solitary creature” in contrast to Virginia, who was an angel of wit and intelligence.
It was at this period that I first came to know her. In 1924 I was seven years old, and my brother Ben was nine. She often came to Long Barn for a night or two, and we greatly looked forward to her visits, being ignorant of their cause. (A woman, who should have known better, once said to me, “You realise that Virginia loves your mother,” to which I innocently replied, “Yes, of course she does: we all do.”) Virginia was not particularly fond of children apart from Vanessa’s, and except for James in To the Lighthouse, they do not figure largely in her novels. But she was interested in us, because children, like eccentrics, are unusual people, and under the guise of amusing us she would amuse herself: “Tell me, what have you done this morning?” “Well, nothing much.” “No, no, that won’t do. What woke you up?” “The sun, coming through our bedroom window.” “Was it a happy sun or an angry sun?” We answered that somehow, and then it was dressing: “which sock did you put on first, right or left?” And breakfast, and so on, right up to the moment when we came to find her. It was a lesson in observation, but it was also a hint: “Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any.” It was advice that I was to remember all my life.
We did not think of her as famous: indeed, when we first knew her, she wasn’t. She was like a favorite aunt who brightened our simple lives with unexpected questions: “What is the French mistress like? What sort of shoes does she wear? Can you smell her scent when she comes into the classroom?” Apart from the butterfly hunting, she seemed to us an indoor person, autumnal more than summery, happiest when warming her hands at a log fire, and talking, talking, talking, in a deep, slightly singsong voice, teasing, provocative, drawing back her hair from her forehead as if to clear her mind. It is with Long Barn that I mainly associate her, but we would often go to Knole, where she would lean S-curved against a doorway, finger to her chin, contemplative, amused. I do not remember thinking her beautiful, but children’s taste is for prettiness not beauty. Although Vita exaggerated in saying that she dressed “atrociously,” she cared little for her appearance, hating makeup and being fitted by shop assistants, and bought loose, unemphatic clothes off the peg, which draped around her like folded wings.
Nigel (left) and Ben Nicolson with Virginia Woolf at Knole in 1928, when she was writing Orlando. “She would lean S-curved against a doorway, finger to her chin, contemplative, amused.”
Occasionally Vita would take one of us to Monk’s House when she was not staying the night there, and one incident remains very clearly in my memory. Besides Virginia and Leonard, the only people present were Keynes and his wife Lydia Lopokova, the ballerina. We sat in the larger of the two sitting-rooms, and the discussion (I forget what it was about) grew animated. Virginia, standing by the fireplace, was arguing excitedly, when Leonard slowly rose from his chair and gently touched her on the shoulder. Without inquiry or protest, she followed him from the room, and they were absent for about a quarter of an hour. Nobody made any comment when they returned, since everyone except myself knew exactly what had happened. In her excitement, Virginia might overstep the bounds of sanity, and Leonard, observing her closely, took her away to calm down. When I read in some feminist accounts of their relationship allegations that Leonard neglected her, even drove her to suicide, I think of that incident. The gesture with which he touched her on the shoulder was almost biblical in its tenderness, and her submission to him indicated a trust that she awarded to no other person.