BOOKS
COUPLES
PORTRAIT OF A MARRI AGE. By Nigel Nicolso n. At heneum. Illus–
t rated. $10.00.
FROM TIME TO TIME . By Hannah Tillich. Stein
&
Day. $7.95.
"Now that I know everything, I love her the more, as my
father did,
because
she was tempted,
because
she was weak. She was a
rebel. ... " Nigel Nicolson is summing up his response to the sexual
vagaries of his mother, the writer Vita Sackville-West, but his statement,
which expectably enough is quoted on the dust jacket of the latest of
our best-selling English literary biographies, is no less misleading than it
is high-minded: as Mr. Nicolson himself makes plain in
Portrait of a
Marriage,
Vita Sackville-West was not "tempted" by homosexuality, she
gave herself to it throughout her life, with zest, and was often -- very
much so in the notable instance of Virginia Woolf -- far more the
seducer than the seduced. As to being "weak" and a "rebel," how is
anyone either weak or a rebel who, child of Knole, one of the greatest of
English houses, has both within and in back of her the fullest power and
license of her class? The hallmark of Vita's world, not alone the aristo–
cratic world of her birth but the Bloomsbury society in which she
elected to live, was indulgence of the personal will, particularly of the
sexual will -- we remember from a recent biography of the Bloomsbury
painter, Carrington, that when Carrington and the homosexual Lytton
Strachey, with whom she was passionately in love and with whom she
shared a house in the country, had weekend visitors, she would watch at
bedtime from the garden until all the upstairs lights had gone off and on
again and then off again so that she could have a rough floor plan of who
was sleeping with whom of whichever sex. Lady Sackville, Vita's mother,
had suffered no loss of station because she was the illegitimate child of
an earlier Lord Sackville or through the protracted residence at Knole of
a wealthy admirer whose happy participation in the Sackville family life
did a great deal to ease the financial strains of the costly household. She
was not only informed but also busily kept others informed of her
daughter's exotic elopement with Violet Keppel, daughter of Edward
