Long life
Vita and Orlando
Nigel Nicolson
Iwas watching Orlando last week, the filmed version of Virginia Woolf s romantic `biography' of my mother Vita, and just as it came to the wonderful moment during the ice-carnival when Orlando and Sasha (Virginia's rendering of Violet Trefusis, only more beautiful) catch each other's eye for the first time, the woman in front of me put her arm round her neighbour's shoul- ders and stroked her hair. It was that com- pelling. I am not going to write about the film, except to say that it is a great work of art created out of another, and to complain that Orlando's house is not, as it was and should have been, Knole, but Hatfield, with Blenheim allotted a bit-part in the middle.
Instead I shall recall as best I can how this astonishing book originated. We know the exact moment of its conception because Virginia described it in a letter to Vita dated 9 October 1927:
Yesterday morning I was in despair . . • I couldn't screw a word from me and at last dropped my head in my hands, dipped ray pen in the ink, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: A Biography . . But listen, suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita, and it's all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind (heart you have none, who go gal- livanting down the lanes with Campbell)...
Now, pause there, because those last words betray a secret motive for the book: jealousy. Virginia would reclaim Vita from Mary Campbell by writing her a love-letter so fantastic, so delicious, so flattering that it would be irresistible. It worked. Vita replied, 'My God, Virginia, if ever I was thrilled and terrified, it is at the prospect of being projected into the shape of Orlando. You have my full permission.'
So an amazing year began. I was only 11, but was let into half the secret. Virginia was writing my mother's life. She took my brother and me to Knole, walked us through its galleries, interrogated us about the portraits, and taking our ignorance for granted supplied her own make-believe answers on the spot. Some of the charac- ters in Orlando were born that day, but we did not know it, and the two mind-boggling fantasies, that Orlando ages only 20 years in 350 and changes from man into woman halfway through, were hidden not only from us but from Vita too, until a finished copy, and the manuscript, arrived by post on publication day. She wrote to Virginia: 'I am completely dazzled, bewitched, enchanted . . how you could have hung so splendid a garment on so poor a peg.' But when we read it, loud were our complaints: 'But you've given Orlando only one son! There are two of us. Where's the other?' To which she replied, as Humpty-Dumpty might have done, 'In my books one person counts as two.'
The novel is full of family jokes like Vita's adventurous driving habits and her ineradicable belief that rivers like the Nile which flow north must run uphill, but her very existence as Orlando's model inevitably disappears in the filmed version, and the most poignant true-life event can- not even be hinted at. In January 1928, when the book was half completed, Vita's father died and an uncle, not she, inherited Knole. The dancing wit of the early chap- ters gave way to a more sombre note. Orlando became a memorial mass, and gave Knole back to Vita by identifying her with it for ever.
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