0 Saisons, 0 Chatelaine
Alastair Forbes
Lady Sackville Susan Mary Alsop (Weidenfeld £6.95) Revisiting Knole one recent meteorologically magical day, I found it little changed from my first boyhood sight of it, which must have been round about the time of the publication of that prose-poem singing Virginia WooIfs love for Vita Sackville-West, Orlando, in which the great place is described quite as well as in either of the latter's two books, one fiction and the other history, about her home. 'There it lay in the early sunshine of spring. It looked like a town rather than a house . . . Courts and buildings, grey, red, plum colour, lay orderly and symmetrical . . . all were clasped by the roll of a massive wall. . . This vast yet ordered building which could house a thousand men and perhaps ten thousand horses . . . looking out upon turf which for centuries had known neither dandelion nor docicweed . hearing pigeons coo and the fountains fall.' As 'Chevron' in The Edwardians it was rather boastfully credited with nine acres of buildings, while in my own memory had obstinately stuck the stupendous statistic of seven acres f tiftd roofs, reduced, first by the estate carpenter and now by Susan Mary Alsop to the only barely more encompassable expanse of four acres. There are still fifteen miles of boundary wall beyond the house, with its 365 bedrooms for the days of the year, its fifty two staircases for the weeks and its seven courtyards for each of the latter's days, though already by the time of its being handed over to the National Trust in 1947, when Vita Sackville-West was craving in the Spectator 'a word of valediction' for 'those to whom these things belonged by birthright, and who belonged to the service of these things by tradition', 'few of its many chimneystacks now send up their thread of smoke, for its population is diminished and this blue symbolic breath of its life has faded down with the death of the different mode of existence that went to its making'.
Mrs Woolf wrote of the Sackvilles and their descendants that 'Lords though they were, they were content to go down into obscurity with the molecatcher and the stonemason'. Vita's book Pepita about her grandmother made it certain at least that Lionel Sackville-West, the second Lord Sackville, would be saved from obscurity, while Nigel Nicolson's rather more controversial home-movies-verite scenarioPortrait of a Marriage gave readers intriguing blurred images of his own grandmother, Lionel and 'Pepita' Josefa de Oliva y Duran's illegitimate daughter Victoria. She first became Knole's chatelaine ('Everybody says I made Knole the most comfortable large house in England, uniting the beauties of Windsor with the comforts of the Ritz') when her father succeeded to the title and then extended her tenure when she fell passionately in love with and married her father's heir, who was a first cousin five years her junior and also christened Lionel Sackville-West. Soon after the first Lord Weidenfeld had proposed Victoria as a biographical subject to Mrs Alsop she found herself entrusted by his original partner, Nigel Nicholson, with 'four huge suitcases with the original documents' frota Sissinghurst, and 'a green satchel full 01 papers' which the sixth Lord Sackville 'hadn't even had time to inventory' froin Knole. These she took home to her snuf divorcee's lair at the Watergate in Washing' ton DC where, strongly supported by the half-Nelson grips of a research assistant and one of those busybody New York editors (Doubleday Toil and Troubleday), who usually hover over American literature about as helpfuily as NGA machine'• minders over British journalism, but who 1.fl this instance is thanked by her author-puPII for her 'rare sense of style', she spent three years turning into this very entertaining ad readable book the extraordinary facts tha,t could more easily pass for fiction, a 'story she says herself, that 'could have corne, straight out of an Offenbach operetta' all" which is of a life often described by her Paris-born subject as 'Quel Roman!' There were, in the 1860s, no duals!' thinktanks to go crashing through the, tangled undergrowth of the private lives 01 such diplomats as the Church of England Protestant Lionel Sackville-West whose efficient performance ,of his official duties was in no way diminished by the growing unofficial family he was acquiring from the Andalusian dancer-mistress who acconv panied him at a discreet distance from post.te post until her death in March 1871 left h011. with five Roman Catholic children. Victor was the eldest daughter and either despite,. or because of her seven years of Frene' convent education she had some difficulq in grasping what was meant by her 'illegitt. macy' of which she was first informed nuse years later, when she was eighteen. The fol.; lowing year her father was appointed Hea.0 of Mission in Washington and thus stood in urgent need of a hostess. His sister, Lad, Derby, formerly the widowed Lady Sall!, bury, possessed considerable influence anu succeeded in persuading both Lord &WI,' ville and the Queen to support her propose' that this hostess should be none other thrill the Minister's natural daughter, the prettY young niece to whom she had taken a con' siderable fancy.
The Queen's consent to this unpre' cedented kick in the striped pants of ordy nary corps diplomatique protocol was made contingent on the agrement of Washington and this was given in the last resort by committee composed of the four wives highest in the capital's order of precedenee and in no time Victoria was persona gratis' sima as well as hostessa mostissima. Hefl James, in a story sending up Henry Adair's, once made a Washington character who Os projecting a guest list exclaim, ignoriug social niceties, 'Hang it. . . let us have souse fun —let us invite the President.' The auth?: and her second husband, the former Poll'; ical columnist Joe Alsop, did just this Inauguration Day in 1960 when JFK wes,!°„ give his Secret Service detail a hard timer" choosing so promptly in his Presidency t° play hookey from the White House in order to epater his old Georgetown cronies. Furthermore, the Mrs Peter Jay mentioned among the fifty or so other names so gratefully dropped in the author's long catalogue of acknowledgements (but the more snobbish still Virginia Woolf wrote of her own scarcely shorter one for Orlando, `The list threatens to grow too long and is already far too distinguished') is not, as it happens, that daughter of Mr Callaghan who has lately assumed Victoria's old place but the author's centenarian mother who before her death last year contributed some interesting personal reminiscences not only of Victoria Sackville but also of J.P. Morgan.
One had rather expected that between long-lived mother and salonnibe daughter, the book's strongest chapters would be those on the highly successful seven years in the United States that were to end so dismally in Lord Sackville allowing himself to become the foolish victim of a dirty Republican election trick and being handed his passports by Grover Cleveland. These chapters have indeed been thoroughly researched but the cuttings do not seem quite to come to life on the pages to which they have been transplanted, perhaps because the sympathetic picture of the beautiful young girl acquiring confidence through social successes that included numerous proposals of marriage (some much more impressive than that from the widowed President Chester Arthur himself) is somewhat spoilt by the plethora of 'perhaps's' and `while it can only be conjecture, it is possible that's' etc. Much more assuredly does Mrs Alsop handle Victoria's love-at-first-sight marriage to young Lionel, that suitcase and satchel containing evidently much more worth declaring. Her long hair was famous and added to her curious notoriety as a conductor of electricity, her nose having once actually set light to a Government House gas-burner in Ottawa. `I was so successful that I gave people a baddish shock when I touched them. It hurt me too.' But on the black sheepskin rug in front of the fireplace in the matrimonial bedroom at Knole neither she nor her husband minded this extra high tension being added to their amorous disporting. The author is clearly delighted to have found yet another Victorian wife who, like the Queen herself, did not just 'close her eyes and think of England' but revelled in `the intense pleasure' of sex with her husband, whose penis she nicknamed 'Baby' but which in its `chronically naughty con dition' evidently managed very grown-up priapic feats around the clock. No wonder she was so often singing Plaisir d'Amour in her sweet voice about the great house. And no
wonder she was so shocked when in later years she discovered how unlike her own was the Nicolsons' private life, writing of Vita, 'Harold always so sleepy and has her in a desperate hurry. So many men are like that.'
But after ten years the husband's passion for his wife was spent and he was described by her as 'Poor Lionel, trying to like me but being physically absolutely unable to do so' though Baby found it increasingly warm outside marriage. Yet despite the onset of infidelities they had stuck triumphantly
together throughout the notorious law case, costing the family the equivalent of nearly half a million pounds in today's money, in which Victoria's brother Henry reappeared from Australia and foolishly sought to usurp Lionel's place as his father's legitimate heir, a case as excellently described, from official transcripts, as the later eightday long Capron v Scott Probate case in which the family of the Wallace Collection's Sir John Murray Scott unsuccessfully cited Lady Sackville and her husband for exerting undue influence on the testator who had so munificently rewarded them, and through them Knole, for their friendship. In Portrait of a Marriage Nigel Nicholson had already revealed the madly indiscreet lengths to which his grandmother went in her letters to F.E. Smith, Opposing Counsel in the case, indiscretions which in no way hampered her triumphant discomfiture of him from the witness box, a victory she celebrated by buying Vita a necklace for two thousand 1913 pounds. Lady Sackville was by then just enough of a psychopath to be able to make rings round any member of the English Bar, either on the Bench or in the well of the Court. Her natural attraction for rich men was always greatly to assist the Knole Estate as well as herself. In 1911, while Vita waited in the car below, she had got £65,000 and a quick bear hug from J.P. Morgan in nexchange for some Knole tapestries of the Seven Deadly Sins. Two years later, William Waldorf Astor (who did not, pace Mrs Alsop, found the Observer but merely bought it) was so grateful for `that splendid hour's excitement' she had given him one July afternoon at Hever that he made her 'a little present of £10,000 in Bank of England notes' and later spent ten incognito days in Interlaken with her picking edelweiss under the chaperoned and chaperoning eyes of the affianced Vita and Harold.
Virtually turned out of Knole so that her husband could live there in greater peace with his mistress Olive Rubens, she went on
a spree of house buying and house decorating, her taste for trompe l'ceil matching her
capacity for self-deception. She needed to be loved and admired and was sometimes pleased to put an old love back on the boil, as with the Swedish Ambassador in Rome, a former Washington beau. Her most lasting late attachment, and the last, was to Sir Edwin Lutyens, the cosy, compulsively joky architect who was glad to find a sentimental and sybaritic refuge from a home his wife, née Lady Emily Lytton, had turned into an austere theosophical ashram for Annie Liesant, Krishnamurti and Co. But money had by now become the only power she knew how to use over others and with it she succeeded only in winning hate where she sought love. From as early as 1914 on paranoia began to creep up on her with grandmother's steps. Before the Twenties
were over she had turned against Vita and Harold and they against her. Her grandson, nice Ben Nicolson, now so sadly and suddenly dead and mourned, wrote in puzzlement at eighteen, `Daddy says she was like Iago but Mummy that she was a genius gone wrong. I don't think I understand.' She was also going blind which must have added to the sort of tragic transvestite Lear image she began to present. The wholly unsentimental Virginia Woolf wrote that `her behaviour could only be tolerated in an Elizabethan play' and told Vita's cousin Eddie that `The old woman ought to be shot'. Osbert Sitwell who knew her better, was characteristically gentler in his judgment and saw that she 'lived in a world almost imaginary. . . capable of imaginative kindness and of cruelty . . . she was clever and cunning and silly and brave and timid and avaricious, extravagant and most generous, possessed the best taste and the worst and was, in all, one of the most vivid personalities I have ever met.
0 Saisons, el Chateaux Quelle a me est sans defauts?
One is grateful to Susan Mary Alsop for bringing this strange human being into our lives for a few hours in a book which should long prove a worthy best-seller, along with Vita's and Virginia's, in the National Trust's busy shop at Knole and points West.
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