#nigel nicolson

"They were reaching out to touch with fingertips what can only be grasped by the whole hand, leaving time and space for retreat if either of them came to regret it."

I did not know that Vita could love like this, had loved like this, because she would not speak of it to her son. Now that I know everything, I love her more, as my father did, because she was tempted, because she was weak. She was a rebel, she was Julian, and though she did not know it, she fought for more than Violet. She fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men only women. For this she was prepared to give up everything. Yes, she may have been mad, as she later said, but it was a magnificent folly. She may have been cruel, but it was cruelty on a heroic scale. How can I despise the violence of such passion? How could she regret that the knowledge of it should now reach the ears of a new generation, one so infinitely more compassionate than her own?

[Virginia’s] friendship was the most important fact in Vita’s life, except Harold, just as Vita’s was the most important in Virginia’s, except Leonard, and perhaps her sister Vanessa. If one seeks a parallel to Vita-Harold, one can find it only in Virginia-Leonard, although one must admit differences, for Virginia was sexually frigid and Leonard was not homosexual. Their marriages were alike in the freedom they allowed each other, in the invincibility of their love, in its intellectual, spiritual and non-physical base, in the eagerness of all four of them to savour life, challenge convention, work hard, play dangerously with the emotions — and in their solicitude for each other. How well do I recall Leonard’s look as he watched Virginia across a sitting-room to see that she did not grow tired or overexcited, caring for her much as Joseph must have cared for Mary, for their relationship was Biblical. There was no jealousy between the Woolfs and the Nicolsons, because they had arrived independently at the same definition of “trust.”

I think of her as delicate, but in the cobweb sense, not the medical. I think of her as an autumn, indoor, person, though she loved the summer and the Downs, stretching tapered fingers towards the fire, elaborating her fantasies, provocative, delicious, matching gestures to her words, drawing back her long hair from her forehead as a new fantasy occurred to her, smiling often, laughing seldom, and with never a giggle in her laugh. I think of her at Knole, leaning S-curved against a doorway, finger to her chin, contemplative, amused. She instinctively assumed attitudes expressive of her moods.