122
DIANA TRILLING
which drove Ward to suicide; but by the measure of his own middle-class
morality there was obviously ground enough.
In Mr. Nicolson's re-creation of his parents' marriage the middle
class with its cruel moral judgments, its duties, its demands and exigen–
cies, its cautions and its limitations on freedom is only an offstage
rumble. Harold and Vita Nicolson had a family word for the way life is
lived on a level lower than their own: they called it "bedint" -- the
very sound is ugly -- and their joint eschewal of everything which
smacked of the bedint undoubtedly helped cement their remarkable
alliance. Knole with its 365 rooms was manifestly not bedint. Their own
more modest establishment, Long Bam, in which they could manage
with the help of only three indoor and two outdoor servants, was not
bedint. Sissinghurst Castle, a later residence -- it was here, in Vita's
tower retreat, that after her death Nigel Nicolson found his mother's
Byronic record of the affair with Violet which, together with family
letters and diaries, makes the basis of his narrative -- was not bedint.
The famous Sissinghurst gardens which Vita and Harold designed to–
gether and which Vita executed with no small skill and effort were
anything bu t bedint. Least of all were the Nicolsons' marital contrivances
bedint, or the rearing of their sons. It may have been impossible for Vita
to mask her restiveness when the children were brought to her for their
daily audience but she had the substantial virtue of never being worn and
irascible like a bedint mother with the wash still to do and supper to get,
and -- so Nigel tells us -- there was always Harold to be genuinely
interested in the boys when, having exchanged diplomacy for a literary
career in London, Harold was able to come home with fair regularity for
weekends; for the rest the children had their nannies, their games, their
Eton, and they even had their Granny.
It
was Granny Sackville, indeed,
who told Ben, older of the two boys, about his mother's affair with
Violet Trefusis -- this was when Ben was sixteen. From Nigel Nicol·
son's description of the episode it is hard to say whether Lady Sackville
was being vicious, senile, or just making the small talk of her set.
With
Portrait of a Marriage
pursuing its conspicuous way in America
one hears the relation of Vita and Harold Nicolson celebrated as a
triumph of bisexuality. Actually it was bisexual only in its short first
years when the children were being produced; once the family was
established Vita and Harold made no pretense of sexual interest in each
other. Their nonsexual devotion nevertheless steadily grew, increasing in
intensity virtually in proportion to their sexual distance from each other
and to their conscientious disregard of each other's extramarital activity
-- and we gather from Nigel Nicolson's account that their extramarital
