Portrait of a Marriage
I have just finished reading Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, a book I nearly did not buy from my local Children’s Society charity shop, but whose £1 price tag compelled me to try it anyway. I’m so glad I did.
From the back cover:
The ‘marriage’ was that between the two writers Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, and the ‘portrait’ is drawn partly by Vita herself in an autobiography which she left behind at her death in 1962, and partly by her son Nigel.
It was one of the happiest and strangest marriages there have ever been. Both Vita and Harold were always in love with other people, and each gave the other full liberty ‘without enquiry or reproach’, knowing that their love for each other would be unaffected and even strengthened by the crises which it survived.
It was definitely a strange marriage, but I did not find much evidence in this book that it was “one of the happiest there have ever been”. I’m not just talking about their respective, plentiful affairs, or her willingness to dump her babies to go off with Violet Trefusis, or the fact that the two of them had no physical relationship after producing their children, or the long distance marriage they chose to maintain for most of their lives. These two struck me, through and through, as people who rarely knew actual suffering, so chose to bring it upon themselves in myriad ways and thrive upon the drama they created - Vita especially.
Nigel claims - and his parents themselves did claim - that they did not care if their affairs caused scandal, and that they did not care what people would think. I think the very existence of Vita’s account, her attempt to justify what she did and the choices she made, proves otherwise.
That said, I found these two letters from Harold to Vita - written during one of their rare reunions while he was working in Iran - quite touching. Maybe it’s all the travelling I’ve been doing lately, but these got to me:
When I closed your bedroom door at Rasht, I stood for a moment on the landing with a giddy agony, which made the whole house swing and wobble. With a great effort I stopped myself bursting into your room again - where I should have found your dear head bowed in tears, and your green pyjamas still wet from them. I went down the stairs into the garden and looked back at your window. I longed to call, “Vita, Vita, I can’t bear it!” I got into the motor with Raymond, and gradually I found my voice again. We talked on indifferent things…We stopped for lunch by the roadside, and Raymond said, “Here’s a tin of Ovaltine.” I said, “Yes, there are some little cakes in it.” I had put those cakes in before leaving, and you had had one of them. I crouched there, holding the fork in the stream - tears pouring down my face. I went up behind the rock and leant against it and shook and shook with sobs. Raymond was infinitely tactful…
And upon his arrival in Tehran, he wrote:
I found your fur cap in my cupboard. I flung myself on the bed in an agony of suffering such as I have never known. I walked up and down in the dark saying, “Vita, Vita, Vita, Vita, Vita!” with the tears splashing on the dark floor. I felt that this is not to be borne. One can’t be as unhappy as this. This morning I broke down completely. I leant against the window with my back to Raymond. He said, “I would give my head to have in my life a love such as you and Vita have.” That comforted me. Oh my dear, we can’t go through this again. It is mad to inflict such suffering on each other.
And yet they did, for most of their marriage.
Perhaps it is Vita and Harold’s stunning emotional immaturity that makes this such a good read; after a while, the mind boggles at what ridiculous shenanigans Vita has next up her sleeve. This book is like an extended copy of Us Weekly or Heat, made worthwhile by the weighty element of trash. I can understand, though, that their son would feel the need to believe that their marriage was a happy and ‘liberated’ one, despite the misery that saturated it. Lucky us that he thought their story must be told.
Filed under: Books, Happiness, Life, Men and Women, Relationships