Marriage portrait

By Ruth Fischer

It sounds more like fiction than fact. An adult son, shortly after his famous mother's death in 1962, enters her study to sort out her papers. In an obscure corner he finds an old leather satchel. He opens it --and discovers a secret diary written 40 years earlier. It is the guilt-ridden outpouring of a young wife who, after seven years of a happy marriage, fell in love and eloped with another woman.

The son is Nigel Nicolson, and Portrait of a Marriage (Atheneum; $10) is his intelligent, low-key account of his mother's confessional and of the extraordinary events that preceded and followed it. The

Books

book's title, benign and unsensational, signals Nicolson's focus on the 50-year-marriage of his parents-the poet-novelist Vita Sackville-West and the British diplomathistorian Harold Nicolson-rather than on the dramatic events described in the diary.

Vita relates with disarming candor her innocent acceptance of her bisexuality, with no hint of immorality. "It never struck me as wrong that I should be more or less engaged to Harold, and at the same time very much in love with Rosamund." she, writes. In fact. Rosamund, an early object of Vita's affections, served as a bridesmaid at Vita and Harold's fashionable wedding.

Rosamund was only a passing fancy. The searing passion in Vita's life was Violet, with whom she eloped and experienced "the liberation of half my personality... It was a madness of which I should never again be capable." During their year-long liaison, Vita wore men's clothing and assumed the role of a male lover. But her gentle affection for her husband and two young sons finally overwhelmed Vita's lust for Violet. The Lesbian affair collapsed when she returned to the "purity. simplicity and faith" of her splendid family home-where she and Harold never again shared a bedroom.

It is at this turning point that Portrait of a Marriage most admirably lives up to its title. It describes a partnership that not only survived the slings and arrows of

recurring infidelities, but was profoundly strengthened by mutual understanding. Nigel Nicolson credits his father for the stability of the unusual marriage. Harold was incapable of vindictiveness. Of Violet, his female competitor, he wrote to Vita: “I don't hate her. No more than I should hate opium if you took it."

He respected his wife's need for sexual relationships outside their marriage. (One of her lovers was Virginia Woolf, whose novel "Orlando" was based on that affair). He believed that sexual love had “little or nothing to do with the felicity of marriage," and his asexual love for Vita was balanced by his own homosexual affairs. Through all of this, Vita and Harold's devotion grew. "They did not leap together like two flames, but berthed like sister ships," their son writes.

How did Nigel finally react to the turbulent events the diary disclosed, and to his mother's complex personality? “Now that I know everything, I love her more, as my father did. She was a rebel. She fought for the right to love men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love. How can I despise the violence of such a passion?” The book is a compassionate tribute, rich in insights to human longings.