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VII's favorite mistress, and she was scarcely ignorant of Vita's trans–
vestite excursions in London and on the Continent in the role of
"Julian," a young wounded war veteran. When Lady Sackville at–
tempted, as she unsuccessfully did, to persuade Vita to give up Violet
and return to her husband, Harold Nicolson, and to their two small sons,
it was not because she was shocked by Vita's desertion of her family or
by her liaison within her own sex -- the lesbian preference was only
curious -- or because she thought that a husband, even a husband who,
like Harold Nicolson, was himself homosexual, had a claim on his wife or
that children had need of their mothers. Simply, she was worried that
the newspapers might get the story and make Vita's escapade a matter of
public discussion rather than what it miraculously remained, a subject of
private titillation within her own class. Apparently the worst, the one
really bad thing that could happen to a Sackville, as to Virginia Woolf,
was exposure to the judgment of ordinary persons.
Portrait of a Marriage
turns out to be a fascinating extended
footnote to British upper-class habits and advantages. But this is inad–
vertent. Mr. Nicolson gives no sign of having any greater awareness of the
uncommon nature of the social authority his mother could bring to her
sexual desires than of the complex emotional requirements which were
served in Vita and Harold's marital arrangements or those of Violet and
the man she eventually married, Denys Trefusis. Surely had he been
conscious of how different the situation would have been if Vita, with
her homosexual urgency, had been trapped in the conventions ·of
middle-class marriage, he could not have made his pious appeal to our
(presumed) present-day tolerance, portraying his mother as a pioneer of
the freedom which is now supposedly available to all of us and implying
that it asked merely the passage of time for her conduct to be counte–
nanced more readily than it was in her lifetime. Vita's sexual behavior
was thoroughly countenanced in her lifetime. It could not have been
more so, short of holding parades in her honor. She suffered no iota of
social or economic pain because of it. True, it is now permissible as it
would not have been in Edwardian England to publish a book about
one's parents' sexual deviations. Yet it is in our own enlightened day that
an English sexual scandal, the Profumo case, cost Profumo his career and
Stephen Ward his life. One's English friends protest that Profumo was
discredited and disgraced not by his sexual behavior but solely by his lie
in the House, but Ward was a chiropractor, he had no public office in
which to lie or not lie, and yet the censure directed to him was so harsh
that he was unable to sustain existence. Objectively measured, there may
of course have been insufficient ground for the ultimate fear or shame
