Ars brevis, Vita longa
Alastair Forbes
PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE by Nigel Nicolson
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.95, pp.216
When reviewing in these pages a dozen or so years ago Susan Mary Alsop's 'very entertaining and readable book' ab- out Vita Sackville-West's fascinating mother Lady Sackville, I referred in pass- ing to the present volume (now reissued after no less than six earlier impressions since its first appearance in 1973) as 'Nigel Nicolson's home-movies-verite scenario' about his parents' private lives. Now the BBC's mini-series merchants have had their hands on it and the result is being offered in four instalments for the titilla- tion, though I doubt the delectation, of this autumn's TVoyeurs. I suppose that at best some people may buy the book, if only to see if it can really be as bad as Penelope Mortimer's surprisingly poor script (bril- liant Victoria Glendinning's literary advice notwithstanding) and the BBC's mostly grotesque miscasting have succeeded in making it. For my money almost every- thing about it was wrong, from the first shot of the all-too-obviously toy models of a Luftwaffe fleet in suicidally close forma- tion supposedly overflying the Nicolsons' famous home at Sissinghurst, which, however, along with Knole, performed perfectly throughout, even when appalling- ly overlit by the 'brutes', the searchlights Britain's over-unionised electricians love to spoil a director's broth with.
I do, however, except Janet MacTeer's I nearly said masterfully successful attempt to catch Vita's rather lopsided way of putting her hand on her bebreeched hip. ('Comment est Madame Nicolsonr , Cyril Connolly had once in Paris been asked and had wittily replied: `Eh bien, il vous faut imaginer le haut de Lady Chatterley et le bas de son amantr I should add that he lived to deplore her 'gaunt and avid son's' decision thus to exhume for the media market the bodies of the authors of his being; nor would he have sympathised with the son's well-publicised 'unhappiness' with what the media market has done with his offering.) Nancy Mitford had already reflected before its appearance that it was 'rather wonderful and terrible how all could now be said, characteristically adding that 'One has only to know about other people's lives for one's own to seem absolutely perfect'. I suppose that might be the therapeutic effect of both book and telefilm.
Bearing in mind that Nigel Nicolson is the more fluently literate of the two publishing partners named on the book's spine, one may be forgiven for presuming him to have been at least ultimately re- sponsible for its jacket's blurb. In this his parents' marriage is described as 'one of the ,happiest there has ever been'. No doubt if Darby had seen Joan only at weekends and both had gone their separate ways to bed even at home, they would have won Dunmow Flitches in perpetuity. Furthermore, this Darby and this Joan had always, like the Owl and the Pussycat, had 'plenty of money', together with the know- ledge that there was plenty more where that came from. Vita's extraordinary and in every sense electrifying mama, in the film vulgarly guyed by BBC casting, had seen to that. She was the bastard daughter of the Spanish dancer mistress of one Lionel Sackville-West who, after marrying another Lionel Sackville-West, became, after legal obstacles she triumphantly sur- mounted, the chatelaine of Knole, which she made, despite her thirst for continual draughts of fresh air, as she said herself 'the most comfortable large house in Ehg- land, uniting the beauties of Windsor with the comforts of the Ritz' and whose charms could elicit from her admirers in a trice such gratifying and useful 'petits cadeaux' as sixty-five thousand 1911 pounds from J.P. Morgan and ten thousand of the same in crisp Treasury notes from William Wal- dorf, later 1st Viscount Astor.
But her story ('Quel roman est ma vie!', she liked to exclaim) has been much better told by Mrs Alsop than by Mr Nicolson. Nor has his humbugging apologia for pub- lishing the private 'Confession' of his mother, which he chooses absurdly to inflate into 'a document unique in the vast literature of love', acquired any greater persuasion over the intervening years. For, let us face it, it is no better written than the rest of the stuff that most of her life, from `Well, one thing's for certain: there's no Lifebuoy after death.' schoolroom days on, flowed from her overfluent pen at the rate of ten or 12 sheets a day. (Her son refers to her 'interminable' girlhood play La Masque de Fer, in which she and Violet Keppel performed on holiday in Paris; but both these girls surely knew that in French masque is a masculine noun.) There are, it is true, one or two ben trovati lines in 'The Land' but Virginia Woolfs Orlando is a far better book about Knole than Vita's The Edwardians. (About Virginia's visit to Knole Leonard Woolf artlessly wrote, 'It is kind of you to have her'. Vita took at his word 'the tiresome and sometimes Jewish Leonard', as she called him, and did indeed have her, giving Virginia her only happy experience of sex — her nephew Professor Quentin Bell admitting that 'there probably was some caressing — some bedding together'.) Harold Nicolson's fluency of output was not a whit less. He could, and did, pour out words at an even faster striking rate than Paul Johnson or Bron Waugh. Yet halfway through his life he noted, perhaps a trifle overmodestly, in his diary, which, also edited by his son Nigel, to his surprise turned out to be by far his most important literary and political achievement: 'I can- not write better than I write now and my best is little more than hackwork'. (Virgi- tha Woolf herself bitchily dismissed him as 'simple downright bluff; wishes to be a writer but is not I'm told and can believe adapted by nature'.) The page-and-a-half of Vita's principal plea for greater understanding of Lesbian as well as bisexual love reads like the prose of a Government White Paper or Blue Book, more Wolfenden than Woolf. One wonders, too, that in 1920, when it was written, she should be so worried about it all, until one remembers that it was to be another 10 years before Marguerite Rad- clyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness, with its very discreet soft-focus treatment of the topic, was to be written and promptly banned, though also much read in Britain. Its monocled author in her butch two-piece and with her beloved Lady Troubridge on her arm were, in my student days, a familiar enough sight in the Café Royal. All the same, 1990 seems late in the day for a classically educated novelist like Kingsley Amis to have two of his male characters in their local Primrose Hill pub puzzling over the exact gymnastics of Saphism. 'I sup- pose you wouldn't happen to know what they get up to?', asks one of the other. The BBC, fortified by its previous experience of PT programmed, has gone a long way to satisfy such unimaginative curiosity. As a lifetime heterosexual moyen sensuel my- self, I could never think unnatural a woman sharing my own predilection for her sex. Indeed, I was once much touched to be told on her deathbed by a past love that I shared top billing in her heart and body with a femme fatale. And I always listen with sympathy to ladies who some-
times tell me, often in interesting detail, of their switch to homosexuality, without being in any way tempted to make the same switch myself. In any case, it would surely be too late. Even when I was young and prettier ea deb's delight of classic beauty with fair unblemished skin, witty,
mischievous and bright', scripsit circa 1943 James Lees-Milne, Harold Nicolson's friend and biographer), I don't recall more than two passes being made at me, both by politicians. One of them was by Harold Nicolson himself, who was not in the least perturbed by not getting lucky, thereafter proving always a friend and sometimes a political ally, once even praising me on the Spectator page he so long and effortlessly filled week after week.
Harold once told his biographer that, except perhaps with Raymond Mortimer, he had never, subsequent to his marriage, been in love, being content with casual affairs, one of which, as the film empha- sises, had given him a dose of clap. Lady Sackville observed with shocked horror that 'Vita is not in the least jealous of H. and willingly allows him to relieve himself (sic) with anyone, if such is his want or fancy'. As his son writes with massive understatement, he 'had a slight insensi- tiveness to people who were not born with his advantages'. My own impression was that the nearest he had got to rough trade was Guy Burgess with his filthy Old Etonian tie. It was his libido that had always lain on the low side. Vita had seen her fiance as a 'playmate' but she was to find him a dead loss as a loreplaymate', complaining to her mother that he was 'always so sleepy and has me in a desperate hurry'.
Vita's own libido simply seems to have gone into temporary abeyance after she got over her purely physical crush on Rosa- mund Grosvenor, a childhood chum who grew up to be almost a dead ringer for — though not so common of speech as — the silly little bit of fluff playing Violet Keppel later Trefusis who, take it from me, was neither a little bit of fluff nor by any stretch of the imagination in the least common of speech. In fact, Violet had until the end of her life, during the last 30 years of which I saw her fairly often, staying with her both in France and in Italy, a specially seductive voice, some- thing her screen caricature has emphatical- ly not. Vita, describing the night they first 'went all the way', writes that she was 'infinitely troubled by the softness of her touch and the murmur of her lovely voice, as she let herself go limp and passive in my arms'. Violet was an odious snob all her life and utterly lacked any truly aristocratic consideration or empathy for others, furth- er corrupting Harold into adopting the Sacicvilles' boring obsession with 'bedints' as they nicknamed the middle classes. Had she married either of her two principal suitors, the 9th Duke of Rutland or the 6th Earl Harewood, she would have been a disaster. They both did far better.
In her autobiography Violet was honest enough to take much blame upon herself, looking back at how 'spoilt, egocentric, insensitive and odious' she had been. But Nigel Nicolson is fair enough to recognise that she had been 'attractive in its most literal sense . . brilliantly gifted, richly subtle, loving everything that was beauti- ful, she had all the qualities which Vita most admired.' She certainly became a bit of a trial in old age to many people in Paris, which is where Susan Mary Alsop after the war met her, and that explains the indig- nantly puzzled question in her own book as to how Vita could possibly have remained under the spell of someone so 'selfish, lazy and unpleasant to the last degree except in bed'. She forgot the many-sidedness of truth. Thus, while Vita in 1922 wrote 'Not for a million pounds would I have anything to do with Violet again', she could also, as late as 1950, write to the same Violet, 'If you really want me, I will come to you always, anywhere'. Likewise, having felt 'the most violent feeling I have ever experi- enced in my life . . . my hatred of Denys' (Trefusis, Violet's husband, much liked by all my friends who knew him) she could almost at the same moment write that she 'saw how intelligent he was, how absorbed in un-sordid things; I even saw what good friends we might have been in other circumstances'.
My own feelings about the book have not changed since its first appearance in 1973. Nobody comes well out of it and Nigel Nicolson surely worst of all. As for the BBC's dreadful series, as the final credits came up, I could not help thinking they might as well have gone the whole hog and made a jolly bisexual porno video job on location at Sissinghurst and Knole, complete with the obligatory French maid, in this case Vita's faithful Louise. As Truman Capote was once heard to ex- claim, 'Quels goings-on!'.
'No, I don't mind it too much. I used to be a British Rail commuter.'
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