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sexual jealousy in her relation with Harold, was seized with ajealousy so
acute as to amount to revulsion -- the news put an effective end to her
attraction to Violet. As for the erring husband, Denys apparently had
other requirements than to persist in his marital transgression; we are not
told what they were although we are told that the Trefusis's marriage,
despite the strength of feeling which had made it so compulsory for
Denys, Violet's hesitations driving him near to madness, turned out to be
not at all of the same affectional order as that of the Nicolsons. And
thereby hangs, of course, a strange text for these times of our confusion:
while it may indeed be that sex is a primary cause of marital incompati–
bility, it takes more than the abandonment of sex to ensure love between
a man and woman.
The story of an aristocratic bohemia which seems no longer to
exist, or not with anything of its old arrogance and flourish,
Portrait of a
Marriage
is also a useful if unintended guide to English habits of feeling
which have managed to survive extreme shifts in the political climate of
the nation and which in fact cut across class lines although announcing
themselves most clearly where class privilege is most marked. In America,
for instance, it would be difficult even today to imagine a writer, even an
"advanced" writer, being as forthright and unashamed about his own
father's homosexuality as Mr. Nicolson is about the homosexuality of
Harold Nicolson -- we have no books in this country like
J.
R. Acker–
ley's fascinating
My Father and Myself.
This is because Americans, unlike
the British, have until now always regarded homosexuality as a mono–
lithic pathology, a bourn from which no man returns to woman. Were
the British to share this view, what with the traditional early and long
separation of the sexes in school and the consequent restriction of early
sexual activity to members of one's own sex, there would surely be no
England. It would also push our famous American permissiveness farther
than it is yet prepared to go for a respectable middle-class publisher–
author to delve as publicly as Mr. Nicolson does into the 'sexual devia–
tions of his own parents. In England, too, Mr. Nicolson's revelations
about his parents have not been entirely immune to disapproval. But in
general criticism has been addressed not so much to Mr. Nicolson's
acceptance of his parents' sexual digressions as to his intrusion into their
privacy: what would not be the case here, it is regarded -in England as
almost as unmannerly to speak so openly about normal as about abnor–
mal intimacies, whether it is a case of a schoolfellow or of one's own
mother or father. This is a quintessential difference in national character:
for the English still, as for Lady SackviIIe, it is not what one does which
matters; what matters is to keep what one does to oneself or to one's
