Vita Sackville-West

by Vita Sackville-West

  Mr. Bucktrout made no answer. He disliked Carrie. He wondered how anyone so hard and so hypocritical could be the daughter of someone so sensitive and so honest as his old friend. He was determined to reveal to Carrie by no word or look how deeply he felt the loss of Lady Slane.

  “There is a man downstairs who can take the measurements for the coffin, should you wish,” he said.

  Carrie stared. So they had been right about this Mr. Bucktrout: a heartless old man, lacking the decency to find one suitable phrase about poor mother; Carrie herself had been generous enough to repeat those words about the rare spirit; really, on the whole, she considered her little oration over her mother to be a very generous tribute, when one remembered the tricks her mother had played on them all. She had felt extremely righteous as she pronounced it, and according to her code Mr. Bucktrout ought to have said something graceful in reply. No doubt he had expected to pull some plums out of the pudding himself, and had been embittered by his failure. The thought of the old shark’s discomfiture was Carrie’s great consolation. Mr. Bucktrout was just the sort of man who tried to hook an unsuspecting old lady. And now, full of revengefulness, he fell back on bringing a man to make the coffin.

  “My brother, Lord Slane, will be here shortly to make all the necessary arrangements,” she replied haughtily.

  Mr. Gosheron, however, was already at the door. He came in tilting his bowler hat, but whether he tilted it towards the silent presence of Lady Slane in her bed, or towards Carrie standing at the foot, was questionable. Mr. Gosheron in his capacity as an undertaker was well accustomed to death; still, his feeling for Lady Slane had always been much warmer than for a mere client. He had already tried to give some private expression to his emotion by determining to sacrifice his most treasured piece of wood as the lid for her coffin.

  “Her ladyship makes a lovely corpse,” he said to Mr. Bucktrout.

  They both ignored Carrie.

  “Lovely in life, lovely in death, is what I always say,” said Mr. Gosheron. “It’s astonishing, the beauty that death brings out. My old grandfather told me that, who was in the same line of business, and for fifty years I’ve watched to see if his words were true. ‘Beauty in life,’ he used to say, ‘may come from good dressing and what-not, but for beauty in death you have to fall back on character.’ Now look at her ladyship, Mr. Bucktrout. Is it true, or isn’t it? To tell you the truth,” he added confidentially, “if I want to size a person up, I look at them and picture them dead. That always gives it away, especially as they don’t know you’re doing it. The first time I ever set eyes on her ladyship, I said, yes, she’ll do; and now that I see her as I pictured her then I still say it. She wasn’t never but half in this world, anyhow.”

  “No, she wasn’t,” said Mr. Bucktrout, who, now that Mr. Gosheron had arrived, was willing to talk about Lady Slane, “and she never came to terms with it either. She had the best that it could give her—all the things she didn’t want. She considered the lilies of the field, Mr. Gosheron.”

  “She did, Mr. Bucktrout; many a phrase out of the Bible have I applied to her ladyship. But people will stand things in the Bible that they won’t stand in common life. They don’t seem to see the sense of it when they meet it in their own homes, although they’ll put on a reverent face when they hear it read out from a lectern.”

  Oh goodness, thought Carrie, will these two old men never stop talking across mother like a Greek chorus? She had arrived at Hampstead in a determined frame of mind: she would be generous, she would be forgiving—and some genuine emotion had come to her aid—but now her self-possession cracked and her ill-temper and grievances came boiling up. This agent and this undertaker, who talked so securely and so sagaciously, what could they know of her mother?

  “Perhaps,” she snapped, “you had better leave my mother’s funeral oration to be pronounced by one of her own family.”

  Mr. Bucktrout and Mr. Gosheron both turned gravely towards her. She saw them suddenly as detached figures; figures of fun certainly, yet also figures of justice. Their eyes stripped away the protection of her decent hypocrisy. She felt that they judged her; that Mr. Gosheron, according to his use and principle, was imagining her as a corpse; was narrowing his eyes to help the effort of his imagination; was laying her out upon a bed, examining her without the defences she could no longer control. That phrase about the rare spirit shrivelled to a cinder. Mr. Bucktrout and Mr. Gosheron were in league with her mother, and no phrases could cover up the truth from such an alliance.

  “In the presence of death,” she said to Mr. Gosheron, taking refuge in a last convention, “you might at least take off your hat.”

  PART IX

  POEMS

  Vita’s poetry is very much of her time and place. This is definitely the least modern side of her writing, and yet we can scarcely fail to be aware of the richness of her natural perception, the high color of her love for places and persons.

  TRAVEL POEMS

  Vita’s love of travel was, of course, paramount. Her poems, whether from Turkey, from Persia, or from Provence, all depict her ability to observe what was new, specific to the geography, and in the long run most unforgettable. Her 1913 poem about Constantinople was written when Harold was posted there as third secretary in the British Embassy, and they were living in their first married quarters, on a hill overlooking the Bosphorus. It was part of Eight Poems, published privately in 1915. After returning from Persia, which had inspired her superb travel book Passenger to Teheran, that land was always in her memory. It provided the model for her famous White Garden at Sissinghurst. From Isfahan, she had brought back the blue beads celebrated in one poem, and of which she had given a string, after a night together, to the adoring Christopher St. John (Christabel Marshall, who called herself St. John out of fervor for Catholicism and St. John the Baptist). Vita’s affairs were, like her travels, nothing if not exotic.

  Her travel poems, of which a selection is included here, are in general associated with an object, like that bowl of blue beads, or a person to whom the poem is dedicated explicitly (for example, to Hilda Matheson) or implicitly (Evelyn Irons). Of all places she liked touring, France, where she traveled widely, held her interest longest; her 1928 trip with Virginia Woolf, from which her diary is published in this volume, is the most well-known of those voyages. In 1929, she traveled in the Val d’Isère in the Savoie with Hilda Matheson, director of talks for the BBC, thus the dedication to her of the poem about the storm in the mountains. In 1931, she traveled in Provence with her new love, Evelyn Irons, the thirty-year-old Scot who was editor of the women’s page for the Daily Mail.

  The landscape and feeling of Provence are particularly sensed in the poems set in the high then-deserted town of Les Baux above St. Rémy, memorializing both their love and that high ruin of rock, which she designated in one of these poems the “Temple of Love.” Vita’s intense love of Provence was reawakened when she was 63 and on a driving trip with Harold. She describes in a letter to Alvilde Lees-Milne (also a friend of Violet Trefusis, thus providing the triangular love tension Vita so cherished) the scenery through the Gorges of the Tarn and the high and beautiful Provençal scenery between Sisteron and Digne. For Vita, nothing is lost, everything intensified by the accumulating affairs, and she retains her gift of friendship along with her more ephemeral and more passionate involvements. Each emotion is clarified by its setting. This letter dates from October 13, 1955, and was written from Aix, recalling that trip: “Oh goodness what a beautiful country it is, from Brantôme to Aix we have had nothing but one beauty after the other. The Dordogne was flaming red and gold, the Gorges du Tarn more tremendous than I had imagined, never having been there before, and of course Provence is always like itself. Have you ever been to Roussillon? A blood-red village, the colours of Coulonges-la-Rouge, with a canyon of cliffs to match?”

  And Vita’s enthusiasm was always awakened every time by travel, to which the poems included here bear witness, just as her poems The Land and The G
arden speak, at far greater length, of her love of Sussex. Even the poem about Charleston, South Carolina, written on her last stop with Harold and just after their visit to the Grand Canyon, during her lecture trip to the United States in 1933, recalls England, which she greatly missed. Always and everywhere, she is fully aware of place.

  “THE MUEZZIN” (CONSTANTINOPLE, 1913)

  Above the city at his feet,

  Above the dome, above the sea,

  He rises unconfined and free

  To break upon the noonday heat.

  He turns around the parapet,

  Black-robed against the marble tower;

  His singing gains or loses power

  In pacing round the minaret.

  A brother to the singing birds

  He never knew restraining walls,

  But freely rises, freely falls

  The rhythm of the sacred words.

  I would that it to me were given

  To climb each day the muezzin’s stair

  And in the warm and silent air

  To sing my heart out into heaven.

  “A BOWL OF BLUE BEADS” (1928)

  I bought these beads in Isfahan;

  I bought a handful for a kran,

  —That’s sixpence—at the motley stall

  Against the Meidan’s northern wall,

  At evening when the plane-tree’s cool

  Shadow blessed the dirty pool,

  And the great arch of the bazaar

  Gaped like a cave crepuscular.

  Blue beads to keep the evil eye

  Away as horse and mule go by

  Through narrow streets between the brown

  High walls of mud that make the town,

  And gain the melon-fields that lie

  Where the desert meets the sky.

  Now, in a bowl, in exile, they

  Speak Persia to an English day;

  Blue as the skies that once in March

  Were framed for me beneath the arch

  Of a ruined caravanserai.

  And oh, how glad, how glad am I

  That Persia is no lovely lie

  For me, but sharp reality.

  —February 1928

  “PERSIA” (1928)

  The passes are blocked by snow.

  No word comes through, no message, and no letter.

  Only the eagles plane above the snow,

  And wolves come down upon the villages.

  The barrier of mountains is the end,

  The edge of the world to us in wintry Persia.

  We are self-contained, shut off.

  Only the telegraph ticks out its flimsy sheets,

  Bringing the distant news of deaths of princes.

  Day after day the cold and marvellous sun

  Rides in the cold, the pale, the marvellous heaven,

  Cutting the blue and icy folds of shadow

  Aslant the foothills where the snow begins.

  So would I have it, pure in isolation,

  With scarcely a rumour of the varied world

  Leaping the mountain-barrier in disturbance.

  Are there not hearts that find their high fulfilment

  Alone, with ice between them and their friends?

  “NOSTALGIA” (1932)

  That day must come, when I shall leave my friends,

  My loves, my garden, and the bush of balm

  That grows beside my door, for the world’s ends:

  A Persian valley where I might find calm.

  And this is no romance, the place is no

  Vague lovely Persia of a poet’s tale,

  But a very valley where some cornfields grow

  And peasants beat the harvest with a flail.

  I saw it, as I saw the pigeon-towers

  Streaked white with dung, and goat-kids born in blood;

  And saw the early almond spray its flowers

  Through breaches in the wall of sun-burnt mud.

  Brutality and beauty shared the sun;

  Necessity of crops the river-bed;

  And I without such sunlight am undone,

  Without such rivers wilt unharvested.

  “PALMYRA” (1927)

  This is the street of a hundred golden columns,

  But the pavement is of sand;

  Sand of the desert, a white, a wind-blown

  Forgotten strand.

  These are the columns that were raised by Arabs,

  Arabs who had heard of Rome;

  But the wild bees hang in the arches to build

  Their honey-comb.

  Sand of the desert has blown and silted

  Half a column high;

  Now no longer the proud Odenathus

  Goes riding by.

  Only a caravan of laden camels

  Slouching with noiseless pad,

  Goes stringing out at dawn on the desert

  Towards Baghdad.

  “STORM IN THE MOUNTAINS” (SAVOY, 1929)

  For Hilda Matheson

  The rags of storm are on the hills;

  The gathering dusk is shot with light;

  One peak is dark, another bright,

  And every vein of valley fills,

  With wind as on a message sent:

  The thunder bruises through the clouds,

  And spears of lightning tear the shrouds

  Behind the mountains’ tattered tent,

  But distant still the muted storm

  Waiting, like anger, for the spark,

  Delays in masses bright and dark,

  And drapes with threat the ranges’ form,

  Yet will not break.

  Those slatted beams stand upright from the mountains’ flanks

  As laddered for celestial ranks

  In tall and misty golden gleams.

  Enormous stage, with curtains hung

  Of mournful purple in the deeps,

  And midnight blue upon the steeps

  From ropes of slanting sunlight slung,

  And solitude that empty holds

  The scarp, the crag, the valleys’ cleft,

  As though no son of man were left

  To stride between the curtains’ folds!

  The butterflies that fanned the stone

  With azure or with speckled wing

  Are fled before the shadowing;

  A few last fugitives are blown

  About the upland meadow’s slope

  In wild and windy path too frail

  To choose a way before the gale,

  But still held up on gusty hope,

  Unlike the lowly, rooted flowers

  That tethered to their fate remain,

  Among the grass a painted stain

  In sunny or in savage hours,

  Such hours as they, familiar, knew

  Since first upon a shaping world

  The veils of such a storm were furled,

  And peaks rose up, and gentians grew.

  “MIDDLETON PLACE, SOUTH CAROLINA” (1933)

  Stand I indeed in England? Do I dream?

  Those broken steps, those grassy terraces,

  Those water-meadows and that ample stream,

  Those woods that take the curve of distances,

  Those still reflections mirrored in the faint

  And milky waters under milky skies

  That Constable might paint,

  Do they indeed but cheat my heart, my eyes,

  With their strange likeness to the thing they seem?

  Tricked at each turn by nature’s difference

  Englishmen came, and cut their English shapes

  Out of the virgin forest and the dense

  Tangle of branches loaded with wild grapes;

  Pointing their axis to the river’s bend,

  Sleepy as Thames.

  Content as one who finds

  An unexpected friend

  In alien lands where blood more closely binds,

  Rejoiced they at the forced coincidence.

  …

  Loo
k closer; never in an English glade

  Flashed scarlet wings, nor grew the northern larch

  In onyx pools as here the cypress staid;

  Nor flamed the azalea in an English March

  Down paths of fallen petals, aisle on aisle;

  Nor climbed the tall liana to the sun,

  Nor squatted near a pile

  Of oranges, their morning labour done,

  That group of negroes idle in the shade.

  Nor from the branches hung the parasite

  Of greybeard moss bewitching ancient trees,

  Blowing aslant through ilex-woods at night

  In pointed cobwebs streaming on the breeze;

  Singular veils of spectral nameless plot,

  The unrelated symbol of a spell

  Once potent, now forgot;

  Some lost mythology of woods where dwell

  The shorn and lockless spirits shunning light.

  Pensive within its evening of decay

  The garden slopes towards the river reaches;

  Deepens the sunset of the southern day

  In sombre ilexes and coral peaches.

  No England! but a look, an echoing tone

  Such as may cross the voice of distant kin,

  Caught briefly, swiftly flown,

  Different in resemblance, held within

  A heart still mindful of the English way.

  —Charleston, South Carolina, April 1933

  OTHER POEMS

  Although her upbringing in privilege and her decidedly chilly attitude toward those of different classes might seem to disqualify Vita Sackville-West for the idealized role of female intellectual, her extraordinary production and passion in relation to creativity and literary life go far to combat that.

  Vita spent much of her life writing and lecturing for the radio and literary audience on society and on gardening, on England, its literature and its history, and on her travels. From her early diary entry about the first fee she earned for writing a poem to her essays on other poets, her deep concern with things of the mind is clear. Her small book on Alexander Marvell contains a wonderful passage on the word (and color) “green,” reflecting, as in her other writing, her care for the meaningful literary detail. Her unpublished lecture “Some Tendencies of Modern English Poetry,” given October 17, 1926, and her unpublished story “The Poetry Reading,” reveal, perhaps as much as her own poetry, her concern with that particular genre, her favorite.