Sackville-West Vita - Portrait of a marriage

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

To S.A.

Frontispiece

V. Sackville-West in 1918 by William Strang / Glasgow Art Gallery

Between pages 30 and 31

1. Pepita at the height of her dancing career

2. Knole, seen from the air / Aerofilms

3. Victoria Sackville-West [Vita's mother] in 1897

4. Sir John Murray Scott ['Seery']

5. Vita and her mother in 1900

6. Portrait of Vita in 1910 by Laszlo / Sissinghurst Castle

7. A bust of Lady Sackville by Auguste Rodin / Musee Rodin

8. Harold Nicolson, Vita, Rosamund Grosvenor and Lord Sackville in July 1913

9. The wedding of Vita and Harold in the chapel at Knole, 1 October 1913

Between pages 110 and 111

10. Violet Trefusis, a portrait by Jacques-Emile Blanche / property of Philippe Jullian

11. Harold in 1919

12. Vita in 1919

13. Harold dictates to a secretary at the Paris Peace Conference

14. Long Barn, near Sevenoaks

Between pages 206 and 207

15. Geoffrey Scott at the Villa Medici, Florence

16. Virginia Woolf at Knole in 1928

17. Harold and Vita with their two sons in 1929

18. Harold and Vita at Sissinghurst in 1932

19. Vita in her sitting-room in the tower at Sissinghurst

20. Sissinghurst from the air / Aerofilms

21. Vita at Sissinghurst in about 1950 / photograph by Bertram Park

Foreword

When my mother, V. Sackville-West, died in 1962, it was my duty as her executor to go through her personal papers. She was careful about such things, and had filed everything of importance, including all her letters to and from Harold Nicolson during the fifty years of their engagement and marriage, and all her own diaries and the diaries of her mother, Lady Sackville. In the forty pine wood drawers of a large Italian cupboard I found hundreds of letters from the friends who had meant most to her since her childhood. At the time I read very little, making a mental note that while all the material existed for a full record of her life, it should be allowed to simmer.

I took a final look round her sitting-room in the tower at Sissinghurst (a room which I had entered only half a dozen times in the previous thirty years), and came upon a locked Gladstone bag lying in the corner of the little turret-room which opens off it. The bag contained something- a tiara in its case, for all I knew. Having no key, I cut the leather from around its lock to open it. Inside was a large notebook in a flexible cover, page after page filled by her neat pencilled manuscript. I carried it to her writing-table and began to read. The first few pages were abortive drafts of a couple of short stories. The sixth page was headed '23 July 1920', followed by a narrative in the first person which continued for eighty more. I read it through to the end without stirring from her table. It was an autobiography written when she was aged twenty-eight, a confession, an attempt to purge her mind and heart of a love which had possessed her, a love for another woman, Violet Trefusis.

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PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE

The simplicity of it, its candour, the extraordinary sequence of events which it unfolded, her implicit plea for forgiveness and compassion, for the strength to resist further temptation, stirred me deeply. I had long known the barest outlines of the story (but not from her) and here was every detail of it, written with scarcely an erasure or correction at a moment when the wound was still fresh and painful. Although her narrative began uncertainly with a rambling account of her childhood, when she came to the heart of her problem it grew in power and intensity, sharpened by a novelist's instinctive variation of mood and speed, almost as if it were not her own experience that she was describing but another's.

I never showed it to my father, although in the first paragraph she wrote that he was the only person whom she could then trust to read it with understanding. My mother's death had shaken him so dreadfully that this reminder of the crisis of their marriage might have increased his misery intolerably, and I feared that he might destroy it, or it him. When I quoted in the Introduction to his published Diaries a few innocuous passages from the autobiography describing her childhood at Knole and their early married life, he never asked to see the rest of it. Now I think that I should have shown it to him when the agony of her loss had been transmuted into numb acceptance of it. He might well have agreed with me that this was a document unique in the vast literature of love, and among the most moving pieces that she ever wrote; that far from tarnishing the memory of her, it burnished it; and that one day, perhaps, it should be published.

Let not the reader condemn in ten minutes a decision which I have pondered for ten years. In Harold Nicolson's lifetime, and in Violet's, no question of publication could arise. He died in 1968; Violet in 1972. I consulted several people, above all my brother Benedict, and Violet's close friend and literary executor, John N. Phillips, to whom I acknowledge my debt for his sympathetic attitude and for copies of certain letters. Both agreed to publication in the form which I suggested. A few of my

FOREWORD

parents' friends expressed misgivings, but most confirmed my growing conviction that in the 1970s an experience of this kind need no longer be regarded as shameful or unmentionable, for the autobiography was written with profound emotion, and has an integrity and validity of universal significance.

It is the story of two people who married for love and whose love deepened with every passing year, although each was constantly and by mutual consent unfaithful to the other. Both loved people of their own sex, but not exclusively. Their marriage not only survived infidelity, sexual incompatibility and long absences, but became stronger and finer as a result. Each came to give the other full liberty without enquiry or reproach. Honour was rooted in dishonour. Their marriage succeeded because each found permanent and undiluted happiness only in the company of the other. If their marriage is seen as a harbour, their love-affairs were mere ports-of-call. It was to the harbour that each returned; it was there that both were based.

This book is therefore a panegyric of marriage, although it describes a marriage which was superficially a failure because it was incomplete. They achieved their ideal companionship only after a long struggle which was still not ended when Vita Sack-ville-West wrote the last words of her confession, but once achieved it was unalterable and life-long, and they made of it (as I wrote in the Introduction to my father's Diaries, without revealing the extent of their difficulties) one of the strangest and most successful unions that two gifted people have ever enjoyed.