124
DIANA TRILLING
two heterosexuals or even of one heterosexual and one homosexual: it
was a
possible
condition of enduring peace and pleasure.
It is a shortcoming of
Portrait of a Marriage
that Mr. Nicolson
makes it almost wholly Vita's story and that he glides all too smoothly
over his father's sexual history both before and during the marriage. This
leaves many questions unanswered, among them the interesting one of
why Harold was impelled to marriage in the first place, and committed
to it, once Vita had become his wife, to the extent of wanting to win her
back from Violet. Harold and Vita were married and parents when Vita
eloped with the woman to whom she had already been attached in
girlhood.
If
Harold had married only in order to perpetuate the line, this
had now been accomplished; he no longer had need of a wife for
purposes of procreation. But so simplistic a view of what moved him,
while it offers the quickest explanation of why an active homosexual
would wish to marry, conforms not at all to Mr. Nicolson's account of
Harold's need to keep the marriage from breaking up. Mr. Nicolson
quotes extensively from his father's correspondence with Vita during the
period of greatest threat to the marriage: although Harold's pleas to Vita
to come back to him are rather more literary (even in their self.pity)
than impassioned, they at least arrived in a steady stream and they are
bafflingly uncynical; they sound no slightest note of sexual slyness or
collusion such as one might expect in a communication from one
admitted homosexual to another. They are the letters of a person who,
although uncertain of his right to his marriage, unmistakably wants it,
and on unchanged terms.
Then there is Violet to be exp lained, and her relationship with
Denys Trefusis or, rather, his to her, and Vita's response to
their
marriage. Violet had no impulse to be wed but both she and Vita, in the
fashion of well-placed young heroines of nineteenth-century fiction,
recognized that, as Vita put it, "she would gain more liberty by marry–
ing." (Though how she could use more liberty than she already had, it is
hard to say.) Denys's motive in wanting to marry Violet, on the other
hand, had no such time-honored social-economic source. For reasons
which Mr. Nicolson doesn't undertake to explore, Denys was a self–
entrapped prisoner of the perverse circumstance: the more Violet was
given to Vita, the more he was determined to capture her; he went so far,
in fact, as to vow never to claim his conjugal rights. Once Violet actually
became his wife, Denys broke this promise or very likely only attempted
to, probably only once and with Violet's encouragement. At any rate,
the gross imposition was reported to Vita by Harold; it was his champion
stroke in getting back his wife: Vita, who had never been touched with
