Peche Melba

By S. L. Parmacek

PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE:

V. SACKVILLE-WEST AND HAROLD NICOLSON

by NIGEL NICOLSON

249 pages. Atheneum. $10.

She was Vita Sackville-West, the darkly handsome child of a great Kentish family, a minor poet and novelist (The Edwardians). He was Harold Nicolson, cherubic British diplomat, Member of Parliament, brilliant belletrist and historian (Making Peace, Some People). They were married in 1913 and stayed married for nearly half a century, inhabiting a succession of manors and gardens and picturesque ruins. Their union resulted in two gifted children and was for years regarded as the kind of enviable domestic alliance that survives long separation and divergent interests.

One day in 1962, soon after his mother's death, their son Nigel Nicolson, by then a London publisher and M.P., unlocked a Gladstone bag hidden in Vita's tower writing room. In it he found her 1920-21 memoir of an intense three-year affair with Violet Keppel, an iconoclastic redheaded girl whose mother had been the mistress of King Edward VII. The occasionally purple memoir, written when Vita was 28. makes up about a third of this book. Along with it Nigel Nicolson offers biographical annotations and an elaborate tribute to his parents' "perfect marriage."

Gladstone bag and all, the book has become a delicious and gossipy literary event in England. But what should be said is that the memoir has an honesty and self-awareness quite unmatched by Vita's other writings. It is more touching, moreover, in its swift portrait of Vita's childhood world than in its moments of passion: "Mother did not cry; she always tries not to cry because it gives her headaches." Vita remembers herself as a cruel, lonely tomboy roaming around Knple, one of the last great private estates in England. Her only affectionate companionship came from her grandfather, Lord Sackville, a shy, wood-whittling man who "loved children and believed in faeries." Knole was financed through what Nigel calls the "corner on millionaires and elderly artists" held by Vita's formidable mother. Vita retreated from family lawsuits into daydreams of feudal ceremony and tempestuousness.

The affair with Violet, which began after five happy years of marriage, arose through "an absurd circumstance." World War I had given Vita a chance to run around in breeches. Harold was away, Violet appeared in red velvet. "I hadn't dreamt of such an art of love," Vita recollects. Soon the two women were running off to France together--over and over. In the circumstance, Harold carried British sang-froid and tolerance to laughable extremes. From Versailles, where he was busy working on the treaty, he used to cable money with an "Enjoy yourself." He made quips about "wild oats." In 1919 Vita wrote to him, "I don't think you have taken the thing seriously . . . I am absolutely terrified. I tell you about it in order to protect myself from myself." Vita wanted so badly to be rescued that she even treasured unsatisfactory replies like this: "Being a woman, you will say, 'Well, he can't love me very much, as he would have made more fuss.' More fuss! When my heart feels like a peche Melba. "

Son Nigel, who, by all accounts, his mother rarely saw or thought of, describes these goings on as "a magnificent folly," a struggle for "the right to love, both men and women." But Vita herself saw that the whole thing was fantasy, not liberation. Her happiest times with Violet, she writes with horror, were spent striding the Paris boulevards dressed up as a war veteran named Julian. She wrote the memoir, she says, hoping to encourage more candor about "normal but illicit relations" and assumes that the sexes will eventually be come "more nearly merged" as "centuries go on." Vita never commends homosexuality. What she urged was a civilized, scientific examination of "dual personality."

"Darling, she is evil and I am not evil," Harold finally got around to writing in one of the letters that most fortified Vita. She, too, saw the crisis in terms of her "violent and vicious" side ranged against the "purity, simplicity and faith" of "my house, my garden, my fields and Harold." In 1920 she came back to him for good. Harold won out because Vita needed an "anchor." Thenceforth Harold would be her fellow gardener, the custodian of an almost medieval little world and her "play mate," as she always put it, meaning, however, nothing carnal by the phrase. Indeed, one of the most revealing moments in the book comes when Nigel Nicolson notes that at the absolute height of the affair with Violet, fleshly passion was forgotten as the two Nicolsons exultantly discovered "that Bodiam Castle, the shell of which rises from the Sussex Weald, was for sale."

After their reunion, Vita continued to have sporadic escapades and Harold to smile upon them. One, with Virginia Woolf, produced the latter's most engaging book, Orlando, a kind of historical fantasy `a clef about Vita, Violet and Harold. In it, an English noble of indeterminate gender falls in love with a treacherous vixen, then chooses a marriage based on companionship rather than passion. Feminist Virginia Woolf mocked the marriage, suggesting that Vita fell into bondage to the necessary evil of husbands thus sacrificing the potency of the Sackvilles. Harold knew better; so, in her tower room, did Vita; and so will anyone who reads Portrait of a Marriage with the proper sympathy and irreverence.

S. L. Parmacek

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