Happy Marriages Are Not Alike

PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE by Nigel Nicolson Atheneum, $8.95

Until the deaths of the three principal figures in the story, the publication of this extraordinary book by Nigel Nicolson about the marriage of his parents, V. Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, would have been unthinkable. Vita (I will follow Mr. Nicolson’s practice of first-naming his characters) died in 1962. Harold, the husband whom she had tenderly loved through a half-century of marriage, died in 1968, not long after the publication of the third and concluding volume of his Diaries. (Edited by Nigel, and perhaps the best known of Harold Nicolson’s many books—though not, I would say, the best, dividing that honor between Some People and his biography of King George V—the Diaries gave no hint of the emotional drama encompassed in the present work.) Violet Trefusis, the third principal, died in 1970.

It was Violet whom Vita had passionately loved between 1918 and 1921; with her, at the climax of their affair, she had briefly eloped; and for her, she had come dangerously close to abandoning Harold and their two sons. In the end, however, tenderness won out over passion. Vita discovered that she could not bear to hurt Harold by leaving him, whereas the thought of hurting Violet by not going off with her was a more manageable guilt— “hurting Violet” had been an exciting element all along in the extravagant course of their affair, no matter how much they adored each other. When Harold, in an unexpectedly positive gesture (for him), hired an aeroplane and came in pursuit of his wife to France, she decided to return to him, and broke permanently with Violet, who returned to her own husband.

With the death of Violet—but how vividly she springs to life again here, a latter-day Caroline Lamb! — the way was clear for the story to be told. Nothing remained to be resolved but questions of privacy and propriety, which Nigel had been pondering for almost a decade. After his mother’s death he had, as her executor, gone through enormous quantities of her personal papers in her sitting room in the tower of Sissinghurst Castle—a room he had entered “only half a dozen times in the previous thirty years”— and then, as he was finishing his tasks, he came upon a locked Gladstone bag in a corner. “The bag contained something—a tiara in its case, for all I knew—and, having no key, I cut away the leather from around its lock to open it.”

What he discovered in the Gladstone bag was a notebook in which Vita had set down her own account of her affair with Violet, virtually as it was happening, an eighty-page document of quite exceptional candor and power, in many respects superior to anything else she was to write in a long, productive literary career that included poetry (The Land), biography (Saint Joan of Arc), and fiction (The Edwardians, All Passion Spent). Although she had put the manuscript away and shown it to no one as long as she lived, it was evident to her son, sitting at her writing table in 1962, and it will be evident now to anyone who reads it in the setting he has so skillfully devised for it, that she did expect that someday it would be discovered and published. But someday is one thing, and now is quite another—and to decide, as Nigel has done, to publish the whole story, must have been painful in the extreme: after all, these were not invented or disguised characters in a novel but his mother and father that he was about to reveal in all their peculiarity.

Of course, anyone who has read Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf will already be acquainted with one of Nigel’s central disclosures: that Vita was not only beloved by Virginia and the inspiration for Virginia’s Orlando, but she was also, in the words of Quentin Bell echoing Mrs. Woolf, “a frank and unequivocal Sapphist.” (Nigel confirms this, but on the actual relationship between Vita and Virginia there are some differences between his and Quentin Bell’s accounts: the emphasis by Nigel is on the nature of his mother’s feelings for Virginia—more idealized love than physical passion, he argues convincingly, and he is forthright in his belief that “it is a travesty of their relationship to call it an affair.”)

We have arrived at a point in time when a marriage between a man and a woman in which one or the other is homosexual (frankly and unequivocally: or furtively; or, as it were, unconsciously), though unusual, begins to suggest the dilemmas of tomorrow’s soap operas— yet one more conventional unconventional “problem” that a marriage counselor, writing for a large, middle-class public, is now ready to deal with, ever so glibly and sympathetically. But there was nothing of the conventionally unconventional about Vita and Harold. About them there was no touch of the “bedint” (in family usage a word for the middle class). Vita’s father was the third Lord Sackville; she grew up at Knole, one of the great, historic houses of England, “larger than Hampton Court,” as her mother remarked. Harold’s father, Sir Arthur Nicolson (later, Lord Carnock), was permanent under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office; Wellington was his public school, and at Oxford he was at Balliol. From the time of their first meeting, at a small dinner party in the summer of 1910, Vita and Harold moved in the same world, and for all their differences of character—Harold bland and Vita passionate—they were alike in the kind of aristocratic self-assurance and disregard for the multitude with which they resolved the “problem” inherent in their story. As Nigel sums it up in a rather heady prefatory statement:

It is the story of two people who married for love and whose love deepened with each passing year, although each was constantly and by mutual consent unfaithful to the other. Both loved people of their own sex but not exclusively. Their marriage not only survived infidelity, sexual incompatibility, and long absences, but also became stronger and finer as a result. Each came to give the other full liberty without inquiry or reproach. Honour was rooted in dishonour. Their marriage succeeded because each found permanent and undiluted happiness only in the company of the other ... the strangest and most successful union that two gifted people have ever enjoyed.

Certain facts need to be adduced as a counterweight here. Harold and Vita were married in October, 1913, and there is considerable evidence to justify Nigel’s claim that in the early years of the marriage they were “sexually compatible.” Their first child (a son) was born in August, 1914. A second child was born dead in November, 1915. Their third child (Nigel) was born in 1917. “After 1917—” I am quoting from Nigel again; somehow the feeling that one is invading the privacy of these gifted people is diminished by doing so—“it gradually became clear that their mutual enjoyment was on the wane. . . . When I myself married, my father solemnly cautioned me that the physical side of marriage could not be expected to last more than a year or two, and once, in a broadcast, he said, ‘Being “in love” lasts but a short time—from three weeks to three years. It has little or nothing to do with the felicity of marriage.’ Simultaneously, therefore, and without placing any great strain upon their love for each other, they began to seek their pleasure with people of their own sex.”

The style is so fluent here, it hardly allows for questions—but one does draw back for a moment at that inevitable-sounding “therefore.” Vita, as we encounter her in these pages, especially in her own memoir, was a woman of ardent temperament, as innocent and demanding as a loving animal in her physicality. Suppose, for example, Harold had been a more passionate lover than he was, not “so physically cold,” as Vita remarked to her mother, mightn’t things have taken a different course? Idle to speculate, since that is not how things arranged themselves, but it is not uninteresting that Vita’s next affair, when she had returned to Harold and given up Violet, was with Geoffrey Scott, the author of Portrait of Zélide, a man of forty who was, as Vita yet again confided to Lady Sackville, “very passionate.”

In any event, from 1919 on, theirs was a marriage in which the sexual relation played no part at all; and once the perils of the Violet episode had been survived, their separate, temporary connections outside the marriage in no way endangered it; indeed, it may even have become, as Nigel asserts, “stronger and finer as a result.”

In a society such as ours where a continuing, not to say nonstop, sexual relationship is held to be the prime ingredient in a successful marriage, and where even septuagenarian marital partners are concerned with the quality of their orgasms, the strangeness of the Nicolsons’ marriage is more likely to be accepted than its success. And yet I don’t see how anyone reading this book (unless he chooses to disbelieve the evidence of Vita’s and Harold’s letters, and Nigel’s remarkably specific statements supporting them) can doubt that their marriage was successful for them—it worked!— and by what other standard, so far as its protagonists are concerned, is a marriage to be sensibly judged?

That the marriage portrayed here is an exceedingly different one from the conventional stereotype goes without saying. Yet, reflecting upon it, one is tempted to suggest that the difference is a matter of degree. Any successful union of two people determined to live together for all their lives will have its elements of the mysterious and unexplained. It is hardly surprising that we should know more about the couples who live in fiction—the Bovarys, the Karenins, the Leopold Blooms, the Dick Divers, the Dodsworths—than we do of the couples who live down the street. Once the door of the bedroom closes, all is darkness within, and statistics and answers to sexual questionnaires are inadequate to the mystery it contains. Yet beyond the bedroom there are other rooms and settings where the lineaments of a marriage are to be discerned, and at Sissinghurst—the Elizabethan ruin which the Nicolsons bought in 1932 and proceeded over the years to make habitableone looks to the garden.

The property, which is still Nigel Nicolson’s home, has been given to the National Trust, and is open to visitors. If one goes late in the afternoon. toward closing time, one avoids the crush. The effect, strolling from one beautiful “room” to the next—a purple garden, a white garden, a cottage garden, all reds and oranges and yellows, disciplined in design and romantic in the planting—is magical. One feels that the creators of this great work of art and nature are palpably if invisibly there, perhaps on the other side of the ancient brick wall. To Nigel it is a “portrait of their marriage,” and one can understand why he should think so. For the garden at Sissinghurst, designed by Harold and planted by Vita, is a reflection of their so strongly contrasting natures, and the harmony between them that was, like this garden, their own extraordinary achievement.