Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  July 6. Long Barn. Stay till the evening, after an awful morning with Clemence Dane trying to make L. and me give each other up.

  July [8?]. Sonning. Come down here & find L. very seedy, with her heart gone wrong.

  July 9. Sonning. Not well, so I chuck going to the opera with L. I’ll stay down here—not reluctantly. A perfectly happy day.

  July 12. Sonning. H. to Paris, I come here, alone with L.

  July [13, 14, or 15]. Long Barn. Sale at Ebury St. See L. first at Pat’s; attend the sale, rather fun.

  July 16. 34 Half Moon St. L. comes this afternoon. As she has not told D. where she is, he telephones to her after dinner, and he forces her to go up to London. She misses the last train, so I motor her in, without luggage or anything; I get a room here, while she goes to the Curzon Hotel.

  July 17. Beacon Hotel, Hindhead. L. comes round to me before 8 this morning and says she has had a scene with D.T. [Denys Trefusis], and has left him, so after seeing Pat, lunching at our little Rubens hotel, we motor down here. O Christ, how I long for peace at Long Barn! but she is in such distress of mind & so seedy into the bargain that I must give way to her. It is lovely here, but I had been so looking forward to being at home. However … She writes D. a note asking him to see her for a final discussion on Monday.

  July 18. Moorlands Hotel, Hindhead. We transfer to this hotel, as it is nicer. We go for a lovely walk across the moors. Very happy.

  July 19. Long Barn. Go for another walk this morning, lovely day. No answer from D., so we motor up to London after tea, and L. gets him on the telephone; he is very rude to her, so she motors down here with me.

  July 20. Long Barn. L. very seedy this morning, so I take her up to London.

  It seems that I am never to have any peace!

  B.M. comes to dinner on her way to London from Brighton

  July 22. Sumurun, Deal. Race this morning in a heavy wind. Brittania wins. Anchor off Deal; horribly rough.

  July 23. Sail round from Deal to Dover this morning in a very rough sea after a beastly night of rocking about in a swell. On the way to Dover our dinghy gets washed adrift by a specially heavy sea. One of the crew gets his head cut open by a block. Altogether an adventurous trip.

  July 24. Long Barn. Alone here. Writing an autobiography, started today.

  July 27. Long Barn. Go up to London and lunch with L. and see Pat for a short time. B.M. stops here to dinner, she is specially charming tonight.

  (Jean de Gaigneron, he paints and I write.)

  August 5. Hill Street. Long Barn. A horrible day. Tell L. on the telephone that I am going to Albania [trip with Harold], which brings her here by the next train. She arrives ill & goes straight to bed. H. comes back in the evening & she persuades him not to go. Everything too hellish.

  August 6. Long Barn. Ben’s birthday. Give him Meccano. L. leaves in the morning & goes back to Sonning. Perfectly miserable.… There seems to be nothing but misery of one sort and another for everyone.

  August 7. Long Barn. We were to have started today at 2 for Albania!

  [Between August 8 and 12.] Moorlands Hotel, Hindhead. Spend all day in bed at Long Barn, and motor across here to join L. in the evening—a lovely drive & perfect weather.

  August 13. Hindhead. Lovely day. Go for a picnic with L. Happy.

  August 16. Moorlands Hotel, Hindhead. Come across here by train, and retrieve the motor on the way. Have got 5 days with her.

  August 17. Marden’s Head, Uckfield. Motor as far as this, where the car breaks down. Don’t mind much.

  [Probably August 18.] Mermaid Inn, Rye. Leave Uckfield after lunch, and motor here, which we stop and look at. the moat is dry for the moment, which detracts from its beauty L. likes it, but doesn’t like Rye—how instinctively right she always is about things!

  August 28. Sherfield, Basingstoke. Spend the day pottering about. Harold comes down in the evening. I like Dottie but can’t stick smug Gerry. [Dorothy Wellesley, née Ashton, with whom she would later travel to Teheran; Gerry Wellesley, her husband; Sherfield, their home.]

  August 30. Brighton. Spend the day in London with L. who is a little better, and who leaves in the evening for Holland. Come down here & find Ben & Nigel very happy.

  September 4. Sumurun. H. writing a novel, with his usual indefatigable energy.

  September 10. At sea I sleep on deck, in the gig, a glorious night, quite calm, studded with stars—never liked anything better, except that the swell is rather a bore as the boom and sail and blocks make such a row banging about.

  September 15. Brighton. Ben and Nigel well, & still here. Most successful week on Sumurun. Have simply loved it.

  B.M. is having financial rows … O god, this bloody money means so much to her.

  September 17. Long Barn. It pours, gardening, perfect weather.

  B.M. “of an angelic sweetness.”

  September 24. Stratford. Out shooting all day, a very jolly day. In the evening 12 farmers come to dinner, and Dada makes a speech and so do I!

  October 9. Sonning. Go for a walk with M. Harwood in the morning over the Downs. Come up and go straight across London to meet L. at Paddington, she having just arrived from Holland. Come down here together. So happy.

  October 11. Sonning. L. a little better. So happy.

  October 12. Sonning. Spend the day in bed.

  October 13. Hill Street. Come up after lunch, after four really perfect days without one jarring moment. Dine with L. and Harold.

  1921

  April 16. Snow! “The snow!”

  July 21. Sherfield. A lovely day; D’s monkey is too attractive.

  July 23. Sailing Sumurun. Have a roughish sail up from Ryde.

  July 24. A lovely day; we sail about.

  August 2. Long Barn. John Drinkwater and I read each other’s poems aloud after dinner.

  August 3. Sumurun broke her mizzen boom yesterday racing for the King’s Cup; Harold loved it; there was a big wind.

  August 5. Long Barn. D. [Dorothy Wellesley] comes to stay.

  August 6. Ben’s birthday. He is too sweet.… Ben comes down to dinner for the first time in his life, has champagne, and falls into a drunken slumber.

  August 7. Long Barn. The house catches fire in the morning & we have great fun putting it out. Play lots of tennis.

  August 11. Finish a story called “The Bell Buoy,” for the New Statesman. Have got the proofs of my poems & have been working on these. Are they good? Are they futile? I don’t know.

  August 12. Long Barn. Begin writing a new book.

  August 25. Long Barn. Alone; work hard.

  December 18. Long Barn. H. began to work at his book on Tennyson; I read “Reddin” from the beginning, and was infinitely depressed by it. [Reddin was a topic she worked on as a book, as a play—both unfinished—and as a poem: Reddin, an old, wise architect-sculptor, “gentle, mild and sure,” understanding the “unimportance of life,” surrounded by disciples, building a cathedral on a cliff as a monument to his ideals.]

  December 19. L. comes over from Paris tomorrow.

  1922

  [Mostly Vita used this diary as an engagement calendar for this year, listing tennis, lunches, and parties.]

  August 6. Ben’s birthday. He dines downstairs. Gets le vin gai. VERY sweet. Give him a pony.

  August 7. Play tennis most of the day & discuss poetry with Eddy. Find him devitalising.

  August 8. Got seven new dogs—(one born since above entry). Watch the whole process; much impressed by manifestation of instinct—platitudinous but cosmic.

  August 10. Sail to Portland. Sulky and homesick (not seasick).

  August 11. Sail to Dartmouth. Home tomorrow! and my puppies.

  August 13. H. depressed because it is the end of his leave. Play tennis. Give the four children rides on the pony. Corrected proofs of Knole [Knole and the Sackvilles].

  1924

  January 24. Quarrel with Pat in full swing; letters exchanged, she threatening lawsuits, & I being rather pompous. [Pat Dansey, V
iolet Trefusis’s lover, a mythomaniac and madly jealous over Vita, to whom she gave a car, threatened suicide over her other lovers, and persisted in such fabrications as offering Vita nonexistent shares in the Morning Post and declaring she was leaving everything to Vita at her death.]

  January 3. Went home with April, and dined home alone with H; talked to him about Pat, & finally wrote her a conciliatory letter. So bored with this row, and have moments of wishing most people at the bottom of the sea.

  January 4. 34 Hill Street. Lunched at Portland Place, and in the afternoon took Ben, Nigel, Valerian, and Michael Montague to the Drury Lane Melodrama, shipwreck, motor accidents, fire, & a horse race. All very thrilling. Came home to find B.M., Gerald Berners, & Desmond McCarthy dinner; told murder stories till 12:30. He asks me to review for the Statesman & Empire Review, whose literary side he has just taken on.

  January 6. Knole. Walked over to the cottage and back in the morning. I lay down in the afternoon, and between sleeping and waking started writing a poem about woods.

  January 8. Ben came to me in tears because he had been copying out the Golden Journey & Nigel had torn it up. He has a real passion for it, and copies it out, learns it by heart. I shan’t force this taste, but let it take its own course. He loves that and the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” so he has begun well; also the Bible.

  I spent the morning in bed, going on in the poem about woods … Ben had a crise de nerfs, so I sent him to bed for the afternoon—not as a punishment, but to rest and recover!

  January 10. 34 Hill St. Geoffrey rang me up … at 7 he came for me, we dined at the Berkeley, & came back here afterwards; a bewildering and not very real evening. Rainy London; taxis; champagne, confusion. [Geoffrey Scott, who continued to hope Vita would go off with him; later, his marriage broke up over his affair with Vita.]

  January 31. 34 Hill St. An awful agitated day. Lunched with B.M. to meet Mrs. Spears, whom I liked particularly. B.M. came back to Hill St. with me & flew into a rage about the plate-warmer, she left the house in a fury. I descended to the basement & cried for two hours, on the kitchen table. Advent of Geoffrey; consolation from him and Lily. Advent of Ozzie; laughter restored to life.

  Had seven to dinner … Felt like death, or rather, like flu.

  February 1. Lunched with B.M. who was apparently unconscious of anything having happened: Talked to Sybil [Geoffrey Scott’s wife] & tried to enlist her help in diminishing talk about me and G. [Geoffrey Scott]

  February 2. Long Barn. Nice here, but draughty. Dined alone, & the puppies ate my little cold joint while I was answering the telephone.

  February 3. 34 Hill St. A real spring day at the cottage; we sat out on the step in the sun, read Yeats, and were quite warm, surrounded by Canute, Wolf, Swend, & Enid [her dogs]. Tulips, hyacinths, & Spiraea coming up, aubrietia just beginning, lilacs in full bud.

  February 7. Dined with Clive Bell. Ethel Sands there and Desmond McCarthy. Went to Hammersmith to hear “The Way of the World”; a queer wedge of people in the dress circle: Berners next to me, Goosens, Geog of Russia, Lytton Strachey, the Jowetts, and a lot of others. Then to Mrs. Hutchinson’s at Chiswick, where poor Desmond fell downstairs and broke his kneecap. This cast a certain gloom over the party. Came home, giving Duff Cooper a lift … to my astonishment he made love to me—I don’t suppose I see him more than once in two years. Altogether a queer evening.

  February 13. Knole. Spent the day alone again, but rather better, and not sorry to be shut away from a biting east wind; with Swend and Canute and books. Dover’s “The Patrician,” which seemed to me the worst of all—and incidents dragged in by the scruff of the neck just to give the author an opportunity to show off his fine writing or to bring in a moral point—and of course the morality maddened me—it all seemed so queerly out of date. Read “Les caves du Vatican” [André Gide’s novel] which bored me surprisingly; and Aristophanes, which makes me laugh always. For the rest, lay very happy watching a fitful sun play along the walls of the green court. Got up for dinner and beat Dada at chess. Harold had to stay up.

  February 22. Went down to Richmond by underground to dine with the Woolfs; in the kitchen as usual; Raymond Mortimer there. Virginia delicious as ever; how right she is when she says love makes everyone a bore, but that the excitement of life lies in the béguins [initial infatuations] and the “little moves” nearer to people—but perhaps she feels this because she’s an experimentalist in humanity and has no grande passion in her life …

  March 16. Went to the cottage with H. and Nigel.… Niggs so nice and intelligent, with a pronounced taste for the practical and the topical. Anything to do with organization or government interests him.

  April 2. Long Barn. In raptures at being home.

  April 21. Easter Monday. A lovely, hot day, 70 in the shade. The hedges are rushing out, but the trees are still black—a queer effect of winter trees on a really summer’s day. Down to get the bee orchids, and afterwards to Nigel’s woods. A very happy day—marred only by a post-prandial argument about one’s duty to one’s relations—only Harold maintaining that one has one to relations as such.

  April 22. B.M. very sweet, & brought red daisies, as (I suspect) an olive branch. Pat arrived just before she left. Pat in a maddening mood, and I was thankful when Ronnie [Ronald Balfour] came back. Harold was kept up in London. Went for a walk with Ronnie across the fields, having quarreled with Pat. Dinner was strained, but R. played up magnificently. Pat collapsed after dinner and was so pathetic—poor little thing.

  April 23. Spent quite a happy day with Pat, gardening—but it is cold again … H. came down.

  April 26. B.M. saying I neglected her. Such balls.

  1925

  March 23. Dined with Mario Lanza.

  April 9. Sherfield. Tennis talk. Read Tchekov.

  November 7. Long Barn. A lovely warm golden day. Sat in the sun all the morning. Went to tea with Eddy—Leonard [Woolf] went back to London, Virginia remained.

  ! [in circle.]

  V. told me about re-reading the first 30 pages of “To the Lighthouse” & how she had had to rewrite them.

  November 10. Spent the evening with Virginia, dinner with the Drinkwaters. Very dull.

  November 24. Monday Went up to see Virginia.… After to a party at Vanessa Bell’s.

  November 25. Went to Virginia in the evening. Went afterward to Clive’s rooms, found Virginia there.

  November 27. Virginia came to Mount St. to see me.

  November 29. Spent the afternoon with Virginia.

  December 4. Long Barn. Virginia came.

  December 5. Alone all day with Virginia.

  December 6. Went up with V. in the evening.

  December 17. Alone.

  December 20. [X at top of page] Spent the afternoon with Virginia; dinner with her at Mount St.

  1928

  October 1. The 15th anniversary of our wedding day!

  October 2. Went up [to London] after breakfast and broadcasted (Modern Poetry) at 6 [lecture included in this volume]. Went to see Margaret and Frederick [Margaret and Frederick Voigt, later divorced]. Dined with Clive who gave me the mss of his book on “Proust.” Raymond [Mortimer] there, and Frances Marshall [later Frances Partridge]. Staying with Raymond and Paul Hyslop.

  October 4. Long Barn. A perfectly lovely day, & quite warm. Walked across the fields with the dogs. Virginia & Leonard came to lunch, bringing Pinker and her puppies. April came to dinner & after dinner I lectured on the Bakhtiari Road to the 7 Oaks Literary Society. [Her book Twelve Days was published in 1928.]

  October 5. Alone.

  October 30. London. Lunched with Hugh Walpole. Virginia there. Conversation all about the “Well of Loneliness” [Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel, banned in 1928]. Went to see Pat. Broadcasted at 6 and then went to see Virginia. Dinner with Clive: Vanessa, Duncan, Virginia, Leonard, Beatrice Meyer, Frankie [Birrell, owner of bookstore].

  December 2. Long Barn. Collected Nigel & John St. Aubyn in the morning & we went to C
hrist Church where Nigel was sick. Lunched with John Sparrow.

  December 31. Delighted to see the last of 1928.

  1929

  March [?]. A peaceful day. Took Ben to skate on the lake. Cold but fine. Nothing out in the garden at all, not even a bit of aubrieta & scarcely any bulbs showing.

  March 20. Hilda came for the night. [Hilda Matheson, Director of Talks at the BBC, “Stoker” to Vita. They would travel together in the French Savoy in July 1929.] I tidy up the house.

  March 21. H. painted the front gate & cut down some things in the wood & made a bonfire. Alone all day. I fear that poor Niggs has got whooping cough.

  March 22. Long Barn. Alone. Worried about Harold’s cold so rang him up but he was out. Started to write my Marvell essay [Andrew Marvell, in Faber’s “Poets on Poets” series, published 1929].

  March 23. April came to stay, after lunch. Went down in the wood, and my bonfire set fire to the grass all over the Hawthornden. [Vita’s “The Land” won the Hawthornden prize in 1927; “The Garden” would win the Heinemann prize in 1946.] Hadji rang me up in the morning.

  April 24. April here. Sat in the sun & read poetry.

  Motored Ben, Boski [the children’s governess], and Nigel to Newhaven, from where they go to Dieppe. Stopped at Rodmell on the way back & lunched with Virginia and Leonard; saw their new motor & their new plot of land.

  April 28. Virginia came down to dine and sleep. Heard the nightingales for the first time this year.

  April 29. Virginia left before lunch. Told me about going to Greenwich in a rage. Hilda came to dine & sleep. Nightingales again, but a great wind sprang up & it turned cold at night, after one really warm & lovely day.

  April 29. Virginia left before lunch.

  May 8. Long Barn. Alone.

  May 9. Saw Hilda for a minute at the BBC. Went to Virginia and we went to Hampstead to see Keats’ house. She told me how she had discussed modern poetry last night with Blunden and how they had decided that poets today were too thin—not pouring out a flood of nonsense & poetry all in the same muddle. She also told me about Laura Riding throwing herself out of the window.

  May 16. Lunched with Miss Compton-Burnett [Ivy Compton-Burnett, the novelist] & Miss Jourdain, Leigh there. Went out with Virginia. We went to see the old Roman Baths near the Strand. Broadcast at 7 [her regular broadcasts on gardening].