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Vita Sackville-West
FAMILY HISTORY
With a new Introduction by Victoria Glendinning
To
My Mother
Contents
Introduction
Foreword
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Introduction
Vita Sackville-West began writing this novel in May 1931, just four days after the publication of All Passion Spent which, like The Edwardians the year before that, was very successful and brought her increased fame and a lot of money. She finished Family History in thirteen months, and although it did well—6,000 copies were sold before publication day in October 1932—it was not a bestseller on the scale of the previous two, and has been largely neglected since. Her husband Harold Nicolson, when he read it in proof, privately considered it “very competent and moving but not exactly her type of thought”. Later he revised his opinion, writing in his diary: “Read Family History in train and weep copiously.”
It was dedicated by Vita Sackville-West “To My Mother”, only for the reason that the temperamental Lady Sackville had just made a terrible scene because Vita had dedicated her poem “Sissinghurst” to Virginia Woolf and not to her. There is one extraordinary feature of Family History, elucidated by Vita in her Foreword. She attempts in this novel to introduce a spelling reform, writing “that” as “thatt” when it is used as a pronoun, to distinguish it from its other grammatical functions, as in, for example, “I fear that thatt will irritate my readers.” It irritated even her, she writes, when she was reading over her manuscript; not surprisingly, no one followed her lead, and happily she dropped the idea.
My own feeling about the book has changed. In the biography Vita I wrote of it rather dismissively as “this not very distinguished novel”. Family History was written at a time when her own personal life and her husband’s professional life were both in a state of confusion. Submerged by biographical minutiae, I saw it principally as a love story illustrative of Vita’s own impatient attitude towards lovers who became too possessive and dependent. That is of course what it is, but as fiction it is much more interesting and complex. Reading it again, one can see how Vita detached herself imaginatively from the purely personal, and also how the love story serves as the occasion for expressing the author’s perceptions of what the class structure of England was, and how it was changing.
The love story itself concerns Evelyn Jarrold, a pretty widow nearing forty, and a young man, Miles Vane-Merrick, who is fifteen years her junior. The age gap makes any relationship between them less likely to last and more socially uneasy, even reprehensible in conventional terms: Evelyn, however much in love she may be, will not consider marrying Miles. (The age gap was perhaps Vita’s way of “translating” the hazards of lesbian love into heterosexual terms.) Both of them, we are told, have strong personalities and tyrannical natures, so if things go wrong there is no chance that either will give in; thus a crash is inevitable. But “even the most passionate lover of truth shuts his eyes to truth in the early stages of love”, and these two love one another passionately.
The story, and our understanding of its implications, unfold in a series of “Portraits”. We learn that Evelyn Jarrold has soft and expensive clothes, a soft and expensive life, and too much time on her hands. She is “jealously possessive” by nature, and has a very close relationship with her teenage son Dan—who is an idealised portrait of Vita’s elder son Ben, as she told him at the time. Vita identified strongly with seventeen-year-old Ben, but did not have this physically demonstrative relationship with him; there is a hint of incestuous desire in the scene where young Dan dances with his mother and feels her yield, and feels too “the softness of her woman’s body in her silken clothes, and knew how much Miles must have loved her, and how much she must have loved Miles”. Evelyn is even jealous of the devotion of her niece; she must have everyone half in love with her. “Doesn’t everyone like to be loved? . . . One never gets enough love.”
She could well be a monster, but is not by virtue of the fact that she is indeed lovable, a woman who is “apparently a model of the domestic virtues and who yet suggested all the chic of Vogue and all the passion of Shakespeare”. The reader, like Dan, can understand how much Miles must have loved her.
The “Portrait of Miles Vane-Merrick” reveals him as a peculiarly middle-aged twenty-five-year-old in spite of his glamorous good looks—maybe because the author projected a good deal of her forty-year-old self on to him. He is a busy chap—an idealistic socialist, in the middle of writing “a stiff book on the economic situation” (this is the time of the great Depression), he becomes an M.P. He is also a landowner and a dedicated country squire. The descriptions of his castle in Kent, from the moment when he drives Evelyn and her son “off the main road, down a rough little lane between hedges”, are descriptions of Vita’s Sissinghurst—the tower, the archway, the courtyard, the orchard, the moat, the cottage with mullioned windows, the way it all consists of “isolated buildings” linked by ancient brick walls.
In 1931–32 Sissinghurst was not as visitors see it today. The archway under the tower had only just been unblocked, planning and planting were still piecemeal and sketchy, and the Nicolsons were only just finishing clearing the site of nettles and rubbish; Miles’s castle seems to Evelyn “an encampment”. Vita indeed camped there often during the time she was writing Family History; the family did not move in until April 1932. She was often alone there with a friend or lover, and they would stand at night, like Miles and Evelyn in the novel, on the roof of the tower “leaning their elbows on the parapet, and looking out in silence over the fields, the woods, the hop-gardens, and the lake down in the hollow from which a faint mist was rising”. In conveying Miles’s proud and passionate feelings about his castle, Vita had only to transcribe her own growing attachment to Sissinghurst.
Nowhere in the novel does Vita Sackville-West quote Byron’s famous lines
Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
’Tis woman’s whole existence.
But that is what this love story is about. Byron’s formulation has a complacent air; in Vita’s book, the message is a dreadful warning to both the man and the woman. Nor do I think she was postulating this state of affairs as the norm between the sexes. It was simply the situation between this particular man and this particular woman. The fact that Vita found her lovers rather too ready to make her their “whole existence”, while she needed to compartmentalise her life, explains her choice of theme but does not exhaust its fictional possibilities.
Evelyn, staying with Miles, is dismayed by the fact that he unfeelingly keeps to his working day; he in turn finds that her “vanity and passion” disrupt his life. She realises that “he was a full man and she was an empt
y woman”. Miles adores her when she is gay and easy-going; he loves her, but “she represented his diversion, not his whole life”. He is maddened when she is “difficult and strenuous and jealous”. The crux is this:
Love and the woman were insufficient for an active mind. Love and the man, however, were all-too-sufficient for a starved heart and unoccupied mind.
What each learns from this predicament, and how it is all resolved, the reader will find out for herself or himself. The author is careful to keep the balance of sympathy swinging between the two: it is easy to understand Miles’s exasperation with idle, possessive, demanding Evelyn. And yet his friend Viola says, “I am sorry for any woman who loves Miles”, and he himself wonders whether “he has a heart at all”:
Love as Evelyn understood it was an entire absorption of one lover into the other. He wanted to retain his individuality, his activity, his time-table. He wanted to lead his own life, parallel with the life of love, separate, independent.
If Evelyn is spoilt, trivial, conventional, unanalytical, limited in her interests, as she is, what is one to make of a man like Miles who “likes women to be idle and decorative” (so long as they keep out of his way when he is busy) and who says that while he likes intelligence he “hates clever women”? If some women became mindlessly dependent pets, and ended up with no function and no weapon except love itself, whose fault was it, I should like to know?
The clash between their expectations is in part a function of the generation gap between them. It is possible, we infer, that Miles might sustain a better, if less erotic, relationship with an educated girl of his own age who had a life of her own. This brings us to a broader and perhaps more interesting theme of Family History: the collision of values and attitudes to work, sex and social behaviour in a society that Vita, in the early 1930s, saw as changing radically. (Collision is the master metaphor of this novel, made graphic by a tragedy on the railway line glimpsed by Evelyn on her first visit to Miles’s castle.)
Vita Sackville-West is not primarily interested in the working classes, represented here by Miles’s devoted retainers and Evelyn’s servant. If Evelyn is self-conscious about her employees’ disapproval of her, it is because her roots are middle class. Please note: many people today use “middle class” pejoratively, to mean bourgeois and therefore over-privileged. Formerly, “middle class” was used equally pejoratively but by the upper classes, including such as Vita, to mean bourgeois and therefore not out of the top drawer, even a bit “common”. The reasons for this shift of perspective lie in social changes that Vita did not even envisage; but that is another day’s story.
Evelyn, whose father is a country solicitor, “passes” among the landed aristocracy by virtue of her wealth, beauty, and graceful manners. She is rigidly conventional and class-conscious, relying on the rites and ceremonies of polite society to sustain her own place in it and keep others out. She feels mystified and threatened by Miles’s friendly acceptance of his clever, working-class political agent, and she is surprised by Miles’s own casual ways: he has no chauffeur, and he does not change for dinner. As a born member of the territorial aristocracy and an intellectual, the implication is he can afford to break the rules.
The old aristocracy is seen at play at the ball at Chevron House. Readers of The Edwardians, Vita’s romantic-ironic novel based on her own Edwardian girlhood, will recognise the Duchess, twenty years on— “somewhat wrinkled and withered” now—and Lady Roehampton, with whom the young Duke had had an affair; he is absent, still unmarried, “proverbially inaccessible” and travelling somewhere in Asia. (So he escaped after all.) Apart from him, the younger generation are a degenerate lot. “The standard of looks was amazing”—but there are no brains and no ideas in those beautiful well-bred young heads. Decadence has set in.
So much for old wealth. New wealth is represented by Evelyn’s in-laws, the Jarrolds. Old Mr Jarrold is an industrial magnate who came up the hard way, without education, raising himself by his own bootstraps. He has provided his family with 200 acres of Surrey and a “square, red, ornate and comfortable house”. Mr Jarrold is as “solid as an old bull in a field”, unlike his more refined but useless sons, who have not had to work for their living and “imagine themselves the aristocracy of the future”. This, by 1930, was quite possible since “new families quickly merged with the genuine article”. But the younger Jarrolds are “rotten fruit”, as irresponsible and lazy as the guests at the Chevron House ball.
Old Mr Jarrold says it takes three generations of prosperity to make a real English gentleman. Dan Jarrold, Evelyn’s son, is the third generation; he is at Eton, he could be “the genuine article” and fulfil his grandfather’s conventional ambitions. But Dan is “interested in ideas”, admiring the maverick Miles Vane-Merrick to the point of idolatry. He will be a rebel—like Miles, like the young Duke in The Edwardians, and like subversive Leonard Anquetil, also from The Edwardians, who has married the Duke’s sister Viola.
Vita Sackville-West brings Viola and Leonard Anquetil, now the parents of a grown daughter, into Family History to suggest the life of ideas and radical thinking that was flourishing independently of the philistinism of most high society. As we read about the Anquetils’ progressive, articulate household, it is hard not to recognise some version of the Bloomsbury group, which Vita knew through Virginia and Leonard Woolf (who published Family History at the Hogarth Press). Vita was never altogether comfortable in Bloomsbury, though she loved Virginia; and her unease is reflected and magnified in conservative Evelyn’s reactions to these clever friends of Miles’s. Evelyn recognises that “this was a different England”; she is impressed by the frankness and “reality” of the Anquetils’ conversation, but shocked by the subjects that they discuss. She is startled too by their lack of ritual deference to women and, yet again, by the fact that no one changes for dinner. “Evening dress was a formula, a safeguard, like good manners; it was part of all those things which greased the wheels of life.” The Anquetils, like Miles, have the confidence to dispense with all that.
But the Anquetils are not the author’s favourite characters. Vita Sackville-West seems as enamored of Miles Vane-Merrick as is her fictional Evelyn, and Miles propounds his social philosophy with some eloquence. He is not “modern”, even for 1932; he is a “reversion to type”, a Renaissance man or an Elizabethan Englishman: adventurous, cultivated, intellectually curious, a citizen of the world. On the question of class he is for the traditional hierarchical system, in spite of his socialism. He believes in the “dignity” of the labourer and in being proud of “what you really are”. His ideal seems to be a sort of romantic feudalism: “He loved the people, though he loathed and hated democracy.”
There is precious little protein in this for the 1980s. But it is as well to remember that before the Second World War social class was an inescapable and self-evident fact of life, like the weather, and something that could not easily be disregarded even by free spirits. Miles’s ancient regime style of thinking mirrors Vita Sackville-West’s precisely: she called herself a “pre-1792 Tory”. Many of her friends would have shared her opinions, while taking a less benevolent, or paternalistic, view of the working class. Vita was not a radical, nor an original thinker in any profound sense; she was as trapped in the class into which she was born as any farm labourer. She herself was to seem appallingly reactionary to her son Ben as he grew older. The traditional upper classes had a lot to lose by the spread of democracy, including much that had gratified not only themselves but their dependent inferiors. It becomes easier to understand if one thinks of the parallel history of feminism: men, and complacently dependent women too, had everything to lose, apparently, from change, and even the “nicest” men, in the context of feminism, might have echoed Miles’s comment on the class system: “Instinct makes me reactionary, reason makes me progressive.”
Family History, then, is not a socially subversive novel but a period piece. This realisat
ion is reinforced by the details of life, taken for granted in these pages, which half a century later acquire a new dimension as social history. It takes a great effort of the imagination, for a start, for us to credit how disturbing it was for Evelyn to meet all these people who did not “change for dinner”. I find it interesting too to think about the extent to which having servants must have inhibited personal life: Evelyn is embarrassed by their noticing the bright blue envelopes which arrive almost daily from Miles. (This is taken, indirectly, from life: Vita’s own very noticeable bright blue envelopes were arriving almost daily at this time at a house in Chelsea—two at a time, since she was writing to two young women, one of them called Evelyn, who were living together, and it caused not just embarrassment but trouble.)
Then there are the greyish-yellow fogs, a hazard to health, so thick that “women had earrings torn from their ears” by invisible assailants. The Clean Air Acts after the Second World War put a stop to those peasoupers. The last pages of this book describe the progress of a terminal illness. In the 1920s and thirties, only the poor went into hospital. Even in cases of grave illness, the well-off were looked after at home by day-nurses and night-nurses, as recounted in detail here. There is a period flavour too in the assumption that “chill deadly air” can bring on infection or inflammation, in the frequent visits of the physicians, and in the remedies they prescribe: chloral for sleeping, and “piqûres” of morphia where we would say “injections”. Fifteen years later, the patient would have been given the new antibiotics, and need not have died at all.
Why did Vita Sackville-West launch herself into this thirty-page sickroom marathon? Already in the novel she had described one deathbed – that of someone who was “a product of the Victorian age”. In this infinitely more protracted second one she was perhaps essaying a “modern” version of a nineteenth-century deathbed scene in order to mark the belated passing of the sexual and social attitudes of the Victorian age. She pulls out all the stops, and we are affected by it, even against our will, though the writing of this section is not above criticism: you may feel that the nurse’s private thoughts are conveyed in a carelessly repetitive way.
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