One consequence of being born an aristocrat is that you think the written record matters. Your family, after all, has a paper trail that stretches back centuries, consisting of deeds, letters (legal and intimate), newspaper cuttings, estate books and diaries. What’s more, you’ve got the space to steward it carefully – a muniments room if you’re particularly grand, or a large safe if you’re simply making do with a cottage on the estate.
When it comes to the Nicolsons of Sissinghurst, everything they touch seems to turn to text. Harold Nicolson’s diaries, which stretch from 1907 to 1964, remain one of the great accounts of 20th-century political and literary life. His wife Vita Sackville-West (pictured with Harold at Sissinghurst in 1960) wrote an autobiography that forms part of Portrait of a Marriage to which her son Nigel Nicolson appended his own account of his parents’ enduring but freewheeling alliance. Nigel also produced his own autobiography in the late 1990s. And in this present generation there are more writers than you can shake a lovingly inherited Parker pen at: Adam Nicolson is the author of Sissinghurst and Gentry, while his sister Juliet has written evocations of Britain in the first half of the 20th century, the period during which the Nicolsons were at their most eye-catching. Meanwhile, their cousin (or possibly second cousin – in aristocratic families these distinctions matter since they determine who gets the keys to the castle) Robert Sackville-West has written books about his wing of the family called, with pointed symmetry, Inheritance and The Disinherited.
So it must have seemed entirely natural to Vanessa Nicolson, daughter of Vita and Harold’s elder son Ben, to write a book of memoir/family history. In fact, the only odd thing is that it has taken her until she is almost 60 to do it, especially since it transpires that she too has saved absolutely everything down the years, from the stub of her first cigarette, through bus tickets, to an odd twist of metal to which is attached the careful note “this used to be part of my tape recorder”. What’s more, as an only child she has had unimpeded access to her parents’ archives. And since both Ben Nicolson and his wife Luisa Vertova were art historians whose trade involved tracking the provenance of important paintings, it comes as no surprise that they too hung on to every kind of material scrap that passed within reach of their busy fingers. When Vanessa goes rifling guiltily through her mother’s stash (Luisa is still alive), she discovers amid the scholarly articles and the family jetsam a thick plait of hair that was lopped from her very own head when she was six years old.
What stopped Vanessa writing earlier was her sense of not being a proper Nicolson, and therefore not quite mattering enough to put pen to paper. Despite the fact that her father was Vita and Harold’s elder son, she explains that she has always felt pushed to the edge of the Sissinghurst narrative. In the family tree, attached to an updated edition of Portrait of a Marriage, Nigel Nicolson managed to reduce her to a vestigial stump by omitting any mention of her marriage or daughters, despite including these details for his own children. By this time, the 1990s, Uncle Nigel had long since positioned himself as the paterfamilias of Sissinghurst, as his brother Ben not only died relatively early but was a self-described “congenital homosexual”. Quite why this should entail Ben living in a house round the corner from the V&A rather than at the family pile isn’t quite clear, especially since Vita and Harold were themselves enthusiastically bisexual. Nonetheless, some sense of not quite coming up to the mark seems to have clung to Vanessa, especially in relation to her Sissinghurst cousins who, according to the evidence of the photographs included here, were blond and breezy and fetching in hand-knitted jumpers. Vanessa, by contrast, looks sultry and sullen and incapable of keeping her fingernails clean.
Have You Been Good?, then, might be described as an alternative account of what it means to grow up a Nicolson, one that doesn’t involve dwelling too long on Vita’s way with hydrangeas or Harold’s amusing recollections about Churchill. After Vanessa’s parents split up in the early 60s she was sent to a convent in Florence, followed by a stint at a liberal British boarding school that was, quite literally, going to pot. She is good on the anguished ennui of adolescence in the 70s – the anorexia that was allowed to linger since no one had the right words for it, the running away from school without anyone noticing, the way that other people’s dads felt entitled to let their eyes linger on a passing cheesecloth blouse a bit too long.
The title refers to Luisa Vertova Nicolson’s habitual interrogation of little Vanessa, just prior to producing some sweets or crayons as a bribe. Yet by the time she was 14 it is clear that Vanessa was often rather bad. She walks around Florence in bare feet, never gets the hang of contraception, takes overdoses and almost means it. Periodic crises ensue when Luisa, like a true archive hound, reads her daughter’s diaries and calls her a whore.
Told in outline, Nicolson’s life sounds promising, as if it has the makings of an updated Bell Jar, transported from suburban America to broken old England, complete with a toxic mother-daughter bond as its dark heart. But an outline is all it is. For Nicolson makes the mistake of assuming that facts tell their own story, without any coaxing. She gives us the details of her life with an admirable lack of vanity, even confessing at one point to having strangled a kitten. But she also remains strangely incurious about the cause of her choking rage.
Only fitfully does Nicolson’s real reason for writing her book emerge. Throughout the story of her own coming of age she unfolds an account of her younger daughter, who died in 2008 at the age of 19. Rosa was epileptic and drowned during a seizure in a swimming pool on the edge of the Sissinghurst estate. Following family tradition, Nicolson goes rummaging through her late daughter’s archive, looking for clues as to what had been going on inside the teenager’s head in the years leading up to her death. What she discovers is a girl whose traumas remarkably mimic her own – the same reckless sexuality, the same eating disorder, the same periodic longing for death. This, then, should have been the moment that the through-line of the book finally became legible, complete, perhaps, with an analysis of how Nicolson family culture has been passed down in blood and sinew as well as weathered brickwork and pointed arches. Instead, right to its very end, Have You Been Good? reads as a jumble of archival bits and pieces, waiting for someone to ask the right questions, the ones that will begin to make sense of it all.
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