Vita Sackville-West
Page 13
September 25. We spent an unfortunate morning trying to find a better bathing-place, but all the coves seemed to be populated as thick as Manchester. We didn’t succeed in bathing, but all got extremely cross, tired, and so unspeakably hot that on our return to the hotel we all got into cold baths. We went into Gravosa to see Ozzie off; his boat left at six; we hugged him and said we loved him, and got abscheidstimmung badly. We watched his boat out of sight, and then turned back, feeling very far away from everybody and everything; we went and had dinner at the same little café, drank wine which D. said was like drinking purple pansies, and talked wildly on every subject under the sun. We walked home in the dark. On the way back a timid little man approached us, politely removing his fez, and inquired our terms. He was so meek and diffident that I did not like to snub him, and said as regretfully as I could that we were already booked. We parted with expressions of mutual esteem.
September 26. I tried to take up my book [“Reddin,” an unfinished novel about a wise man building a cathedral on a cliff as a monument to his ideals] again, but with signal insuccess. We went for a walk and found a small grey hotel built on terraces by the sea, dined there, and decided to go there to live.
September 27. We continued to say vaguely that we would change our hotel, but there was an awful sirocco and we were both too limp to do anything about it. Tried to write, and couldn’t. Damn.
September 28. The wind shrieked and raised clouds of dust, and in the middle of it we packed our luggage on to a cab and drove to the other hotel, thinking all the time that the cab would be blown over. It wasn’t; and we were glad we had moved, as we had the sea right under the windows and a lovely view of Ragusa.
September 29. In the morning we bathed; it was extremely cold and rough, and D. was nearly drowned twice, which seemed to annoy her. After lunch we made an effort and went for a walk along the coast. I thought it was a nice walk, but D. was less enthusiastic. We saw wild irises which we could not reach, otherwise the flowers were dull—little dusty yellow things. There were, however, figs, vines, and pomegranates, and in the gardens the oleanders, bougainvillaea, and wisteria were rampant. At the other hotel we used to breakfast off muscat grapes and figs under a roof of wisteria, the only thing I regret [about not being] there.
September 30. The weather continued grey, northern, and unbecoming. I struggled with my book.
October 1. The day was hot and blue again. We went down to the harbour with two little hats and after the usual fuss with the Serbian officials who seemed to be convinced that everyone is a smuggler, we got on board the boat to Cattaro [Kotor]. We stopped at a dear little place called Ragusavecchia, and again at Castelnuovo [Herceg-Novi], just inside the Bocche di Cattaro [Boka Kotorska]. From having been fast sleep we woke up and began to take interest in the Bocche. Castelnuovo is a railway terminus, and we saw the Belgrade train starting off, a rickety-looking affair like a toy, with two engines, three ordinary carriages crammed to overflowing, and half a dozen goods trucks on and in which clustered the superfluity of passengers. We decided not to come back to Ragusa by rail, as we had intended. The Bocche narrowed, becoming gradually less like the west coast of Scotland, and presently we went through the narrowest part, which opens out into a bay entirely surrounded by enormous mountains of grey stone. The sun was just about to set; some of the mountains were golden at the top, others were amethyst; we did not know which way to look as every way was so lovely. We passed two tiny islands with a church and a cypress grove on each, nothing else. We also stopped at a little village called Risano [Risan], once the refuge of Illyrian pirates; and we passed quite close to another little palace called Perasto [Perast] (which D. rechristened), right down on the water’s edge, a lovely and desolate little town, with two dim Venetian campanile and several most beautiful little Venetian palaces, with gardens, which seemed to be totally deserted. I longed to stop and explore. We came now in sight of Cattaro, at the end of a long narrow bay, under the shadow of the tallest and most barren mountain of all. One of the ship’s officers told me about it, and showed the road climbing in serpentines up the sheer face of the rock; and told me how during the war the Montenegrins had held the summit and the Austrians the lower reaches of the road, until by the treachery of the king of Montenegro the Austrians broke through the Montenegrins, who had receive the order not to fire. It is a terrible place, and one dared not imagine fighting under such conditions; indeed there must be something terrible about living under the perpetual threat of such a mountain. It was dark by the time we were able to go ashore. We dined at a filthy little inn, where they had delicious Turkish coffee and rather good food of unexplained nature. Afterwards we sat on deck and watched the stars above the mountain; I was excited because it was so exactly like the mountain in my book, and I thought how magnificent the cathedral would truly look, crowning it. We became quite exalteés about it, but were taken down a considerable number of pegs quite quickly by the swarms of mosquitoes that were already in occupation of our cabin. I spent the entire night killing them with a shoe against the walls of the cabin, to the light of a small piece of candle stuck onto a saucer. D. slept unmoved throughout, which infuriated me. However I scored over her, because I saw the dawn, and she did not. It broke, pale green over that sinister peak and as we slipped slowly out of Cattaro, a huge star hung in the transparent sky on the extreme tip of the cliff. I remained with my head stuck out of the porthole till Cattaro was out of sight.
SELECTIONS FROM PASSENGER TO TEHERAN (1926)
Passenger to Teheran and Twelve Days are both the colorful renderings, full of humor and lively anecdote, of some of Vita’s more exotic travels in Persia and Russia. From the wise suggestions about what to take along, to the accounts of what a traveler in relatively harsh conditions must endure, to the tales of Gertrude Bell’s insisting on her choosing a Saluki dog to the vagaries of mail deliveries, to the marvels of mountainscapes and teeming cities, she never loses her sense of amusement.
Vita traveled widely and often most glamorously, amid and over the mountains of Samarkand and of Persia, rode on many a mule and walked in much mud, writing of her extraordinary experiences whenever she had a moment. She had chosen Salukis with kings, traveled with the famous, endured what travelers endure, and written it all up as a proud and often lonely venture. Her poems about Persia grasp something of her feeling for the country.
In November of 1925, Harold Nicolson was posted to the British Legation in Teheran as His Majesty’s counselor. Vita, preferring to stay in their Sussex home at Long Barn, visited him twice, in 1926 from January to the middle of May, and then in 1927, to walk with him over the Bakhtiari Mountains. During this period, Harold was writing his most successful book, Some People.
For the first trip, Dorothy Wellesley went with her as far as India—they went up the Nile to Luxor and in India went to Agra and New Delhi, after which Vita went up the Persian Gulf by boat, then by rail to Baghdad, staying a few days with Gertrude Bell (Vita omits from Passenger to Teheran any mention of Dorothy Wellesley being on the trip and gives scarcely any notice to India, which she disliked.) She then continued the journey in a caravan of cars over the mountains of Persia and to Teheran, meeting Harold at Kermanshah, to his excitement and her utter composure.
She greatly liked Persia, and, as Nigel Nicolson tells us in his introduction to the 1990 edition of Passenger to Teheran, “Persia had not welcomed since Curzon a more observant and appreciative British visitor than Vita.”1 She, Harold, and Raymond Mortimer—another Bloomsbury figure and Harold’s intimate friend—went together to Isfahan. Eventually she and Harold parted and she wended her way home through Russia and Poland, in the most difficult of circumstances, all of which she took as an adventure.
Vita was a courageous and not in any way the shrinking violet feminine traveler. She was forerunner, mulerider, and wanderer: Over deserts and wide spaces, into mountains and adventures of all sorts, in cities and royal receptions, she remained as intrepid as any of the more celebrated
explorers. One of her more useful talents along these lines was flexibility, what we might call the art of making-do. She retains, fortunately, a sense of humor about the expected and unexpected details of traveling, of the British Legation, and of a diplomat’s life. If every fortnight the bag of correspondence left Teheran for Bagdad, the delays were similarly noticeable: It took a letter from Vita to Virginia Woolf about six weeks to arrive. And in the other direction, there were delays no less noticeable: Having sent themselves three cases of wine from London in October, still in May—though they had once been glimpsed—they had not arrived, and there was silence on the topic. “Beyond looking with interest at every camel I meet lurching along the street, and trying to read the address upside down on the crate he bears, I accept this silence with philosophy and drink the amber-coloured wine of Shiraz instead,” Vita wrote.2
When Virginia Woolf received the letters Vita sent her from Persia, she was not altogether complimentary, writing in her diary of 1926: “She is not clever: but abundant and fruitful, truthful too. She taps so many sources of life: repose and variety.” But then upon receiving the typescript of Passenger to Teheran, which the Hogarth Press was to publish in 1926, she exclaimed to Vita how good it was and admitted: “I didn’t know the extent of your subtleties … not the sly, brooding, thinking, evading Vita. The whole book is full of nooks and crannies.”3
PASSENGER TO TEHERAN
CHAPTER II
TO EGYPT
I
One January morning, then, I set out; not on a very adventurous journey, perhaps, but on one that should take me to an unexploited country whose very name, printed on my luggage labels, seemed to distil a faint, far aroma in the chill air of Victoria Station: P E R S I A. It was quite unnecessary for me to have had those labels printed. They did not help the railway authorities or the porters in the least. But I enjoyed seeing my fellow-passengers squint at the address, fellow-passengers whose destination was Mürren or Cannes, and if I put my bag in the rack myself I always managed to let the label dangle, a little orange flag of ostentation. How subtle is the relationship between the traveller and his luggage! He knows, as no one else knows, its idiosyncrasies, its contents; he may have for it a feeling of tenderness or a great loathing; but, for better or worse, he is bound to it; its loss is his despair; to recover it he will forego railway tickets and steamship berths; it is still with him even when he has locked himself away in the drab bedroom of a strange hotel. There is the friendly box, which contains his immediate requisites, and which is opened and shut a dozen times a day; there are the boxes which will not shut, and which therefore he takes care never to open, however badly he may need an object lurking in their depths; to unpack them altogether is unthinkable, as bad as trying to put the djinn back into the bottle. There are the miscellaneous bits—a hold-all with rugs and coats; and always some small nuisance which he wishes he had not brought; had, known, indeed, before starting that he would regret it, but brought it all the same. With what a distinction, too, are invested those of his possessions which have been chosen to accompany him; he knows that he has left behind him an untidy room, with open drawers and ransacked cupboards, the floor strewn with bits of tissue paper and string; a room abandoned for somebody else to tidy up, while he sits smug in his carriage, having got away and escaped; and with him go, stowed away in the dark rectangular jumble of pigskin, fibre, or alligator, those patient, faithful, indispensables which will see the light again in bewilderingly changed surroundings, but which for him will emerge always with the association of his own dressing-table, his own washstand, and all the close familiarity of home. They have shared his ordinary life; now they are sharing his truancy; when he and they get home again, they will look at one another with the glance of complicity.
There is a great art in knowing what to take. The box which is to be opened and shut a dozen times a day must be an expanding box, and to start with it must be packed at its minimum, not its maximum, capacity. This is the first rule, and all temptations to break it by last-minute cramming must be resisted. A cushion or a pillow is a bulky bother, but well worth it for comfort; an air-cushion is less of a bother, but also less of a comfort. A Jaeger sleeping-bag (which goes in the hold-all) makes the whole difference to life on a long and varied journey; but it ought to be lined with a second bag made out of a sheet, or else it tickles. I had neglected this precaution. Thermos bottles are overrated; they either break or leak or both; and there are few places where you cannot get tea. Other essentials are a knife and a corkscrew, and a hat which will not blow off. An implement for picking stones out of horses’ hooves is not necessary. Quinine for hot countries, iodine, aspirin, chlorodyne, sticking-plaster. I would say: avoid all registered luggage, but there are few who will follow this sound advice. I did not follow it myself. I had a green cabin trunk, which I grew to hate, and left behind in Persia. I had, however, the excuse that I must provide against a variety of climates; I expected to be now boiled, now frozen; must have a fur cap and a sun-helmet, a fur coat and silk garments. My belongings had looked very incongruous when they lay scattered about my room.
Equipped, then, and as self-contained as the snail, the English traveller makes the most of the two hours between London and Dover. He looks out over the fields which, on the other side of the Channel, will widen out into the hedgeless sweeps of Northern France. For my part I know that line all too well; it takes me through my own fields, past my own station, and a curious mixture stirs in me; there is a dragging at the heart, and then to correct it I think deliberately how often I have seen this very train hurtle through the station, and have had a different dragging at the heart as “Continental Boat Express” whisked past me—a wish to be off, an envy of those people sitting at the Pullman windows; but no, that was not a dragging at the heart, but at the spirit; it is home which drags the heart; it is the spirit which is beckoned by the unknown. The heart wants to stay in the familiar safety; the spirit, pricking, wants to explore, to leap off the cliffs. All the landmarks flash past me: there are the two factory pistons which go up and down, near Orpington, plunging up and down alternately, but never quite together; that is to say, one of them is not quite risen before the other has begun to fall; ever since I was a child those pistons have distressed me, because I could not get them to work in unison, side by side as they are. I know that I shall remember them, travelling across Asia; and that on my return I shall see them again, still going up and down, and still a little wrong. Then comes my own station, and Yew Tree Cottage, and the path across the fields. But would I, if I could, get out of the train and run home by that path across the fields? There is the orange label dangling: P E R S I A. In half an hour I should be home; and my spaniel, sitting on my glove, would run out astonished; but meanwhile the train has rushed me into less poignant country; I am carried beyond that little patch of acres, beyond the woods where the orchis grows. I wonder whether the things in my luggage have felt a similar pull? responded, as the needle of the compass to the north?
Everything begins to recede: home, friends; a pleasant feeling of superiority mops up, like a sponge, the trailing melancholy of departure. An effort of will; and in a twinkling I have thought myself over into the other mood, the dangerous mood, the mood of going-out. How exhilarating it is, to be thus self-contained; to depend for happiness on no material comfort; to be rid of such sentimentality as attaches to the dear familiar; to be open, vulnerable, receptive!
II
Earlier memories of Cairo were scarcely agreeable; very young, very shy, and very awkward, I had been made to stay with Kitchener. I had not wanted to stay with him; I had protested loudly; my relations, who thought they knew better, said that some day I should be glad to have gone. I was not then, and am not yet, glad; for the recollection survives with horror, a sort of scar on the mind. I had arrived at the Residency suffering from a sunstroke and complete loss of voice—not an ideal condition in which to confront that formidable soldier. Craving only for bed and a dark room, I had gone
down to dinner. Six or eight speechless, intimidated officers sat round the table; Kitchener’s bleary eye roamed over them; my own hoarse whisper alone punctuated the silence. Egyptian art came up as a topic. “I can’t,” growled Kitchener, “think much of a people who drew cats the same for four thousand years.” I could think of nothing more to say, even had I been physically capable of saying it. Worse followed; for as we sat on the terrace after dinner, looking across the garden towards the Nile, a quick, happy patter came across the bare floor and in trotted an alert yellow mongrel. “Good gracious, what’s that? a dog?” cried Kitchener, glaring at his A.D.C. The sanctity of the Residency was outraged; a dozen swords were ready to leap from their scabbards. I could not sit by and see murder done; I had to own that the dog was mine.
Next day, however, my host took me to the Zoo, as pleased as a child with the baby elephant which had been taught to salute him with its trunk. The ice was broken.
This time, after the lapse of years, I was irresponsibly in Egypt again; no dog to conceal, no servants, no Kitchener, no sunstroke. I went to Luxor. I had nine days’ grace between ship and ship. Blankets of magenta bougainvillaea hung over the white walls of Luxor; four creamy Nubian camels knelt beside the Nile. I remembered how on that previous occasion in Luxor I had lain in a cool dark room, sick with headache, but thankful to have escaped and to have my sunstroke at last to myself. Instead of going to the Valley of the Kings I had lain watching the bars of sunlight between the slats of the Venetian blinds, and hearing, with the peculiar vividness that only the concentrated egoism of illness brings, the drops of water falling on the tiled floor outside, as the servant splashed it from a bucket; a pleasant way of spending the days—and even the pain seemed to add something, to mark off that week from ordinary life—I was not resentful, only a little wistful at having to come as far as Luxor in order to do it. Now all was changed, and full of energy I took the dazzling, naked road that leads to the Valley of the Kings. How far away now appeared the English fields—yet the two pistons were still going unevenly up and down; small and very brightly green they appeared, as though seen down the wrong end of a telescope, when I thought suddenly of them in the midst of the Theban hills. But above all they presented themselves to me as extremely populous, full of small busy life, rabbits at evening coming out from the spinneys, hares sitting on their haunches among the clods of ploughed lands, field-mice, stoats, slinking through the leaves, and birds innumerable hopping in branches; a multitudinous population of tiny things, with plenty of rich corn and undergrowth to shelter them; very soft, green, and cushioned Kent appeared to me, as I paused in the white dust of that lifeless landscape. A hoopoe? a lizard? a snake? no, there was nothing; only the tumbled boulders and the glare of the sun. This silence and lifelessness frightened me. The rocks closed in on the road, threatening. There is a keen excitement in not knowing what one is going to see next; the mind, strung up, reaches forward for an image to expect, and finds nothing; it is like picking up a jug of water which you believe to be full, and finding it empty. I had formed no image of the burial-ground of the Pharaohs. Indeed, it seemed incredible that within a few moments I should behold it with my eyes, and know for the rest of my life thereafter exactly what it looked like. Then it would seem equally incredible that I should not always have known. These small but stinging reflections kept me lingering; I was loth to part with my ignorance; I reproached myself with having wasted so many years in not speculating on this royal sepulchre. Never again would that delight be within my reach; for the pleasures of the imagination I was about to exchange the dreary fact of knowledge. Already I had seen the road, and, even were I magically to be whisked back to Luxor, or, like Habakkuk, picked up by the hair of the head and through the vehemency of an angelic spirit set down to give my luncheon to some one a thousand leagues distant, still I should have seen the road and might form some idea, on a solid basis, of what was likely to be revealed round the corner. It was no good turning round and going back, out of this wilderness to the narrow green reaches of the Nile: I went forward.