Meanwhile Lady Curzon was waiting upstairs to head the procession, & we had to tell her that the procession had gone, & she had to sneak in on the arm of Pollaniani, & Marita had to go with me, the Marquis (who was trying to get away) fell down stairs, & his stick went tockle tockle tockle from step to step in front of him; and then [in tiny writing] I crept away and hid like a little mouse in a room with palms where very sadly I took off the blue rosette & put it in my pocket.
But it wasn’t bad fun after all, & I saw lots of people.
The income tax people have docked my pay. That’s why I was overdrawn. Damn them.
Your own Hadji.
VITA AND VIRGINIA
The choice of these few letters from Vita’s 19-year correspondence with Virginia Woolf is based on their relation to the other materials in this volume. Thus the letters presented here are about Seducers in Ecuador, about Vita’s travels, and about her poems; they continue the time period begun by the family letters. These letters are reprinted from The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, edited by Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska, and incorporate their notes in brackets.
Tre Croci, Cadore [Italy]
16 July [1924]
My dear Virginia,
I hope that no one has ever yet, or ever will, throw down a glove I was not ready to pick up. You asked me to write a story for you. On the peaks of mountains, and beside green lakes, I am writing it for you. I shut my eyes to the blue of gentians, to the coral of androsace; I shut my ears to the brawling of rivers; I shut my nose to the scent of pines; I concentrate on my story [Seducers in Ecuador, published in this volume]. Perhaps you will be the Polite Publisher, and I shall get my story back—“The Hogarth Press regrets that the accompanying manuscript, etc.”—or whatever our formula may be. Still, I shall remain without resentment. The peaks and the green lakes and the challenge will have made it worth while, and to you alone shall it be dedicated. But of course the real challenge wasn’t the story, (which was after all merely a “commercial proposition”) but the letter. You said I wrote letters of impersonal frigidity. Well, it is difficulty perhaps, to do otherwise, in a country where two rocky peaks of uncompromising majesty soar into the sky immediately outside one’s window, and where an amphitheatre of mountains encloses one’s horizons and one’s footsteps. Today I climbed up to the eternal snows, and there found bright yellow poppies braving alike the glacier and the storm; and was ashamed before their courage. Besides, it is said that insects made these peaks, deposit on deposit; though if you could see the peaks in question you would find it hard to believe that any insect, however industrious, had found time to climb so far towards the sky. Consequently, you see, one is made to feel extremely impersonal and extremely insignificant. I can’t tell you how many Dolomitic miles and altitudes I have by now in my legs. I feel as though all intellect had been swallowed up into sheer physical energy and well-being. This is how one ought to feel, I am convinced. I contemplate young mountaineers hung with ropes and ice-axes, and think that they alone have understood how to live life—Will you ever play truant to Bloomsbury and culture, I wonder, and come travelling with me? No, of course you won’t. I told you once I would rather go to Spain with you than with anyone, and you looked confused, and I felt I had made a gaffe,—been too personal, in fact,—but still the statement remains a true one, and I shan’t be really satisfied till I have enticed you away. Will you come next year to the place where the gipsies of all nations make an annual pilgrimage to some Madonna or other? I forget its name. [Santiago de Compostela] But it is a place somewhere near the Basque provinces, that I have always wanted to go to, and next year I AM GOING. I think you had much better come too. Look on it, if you like, as copy,—as I believe you look upon everything, human relationships included. Oh yes, you like people through the brain better than through the heart,—forgive me if I am wrong. Of course there must be exceptions; there always are. But generally speaking.…
And then, I don’t believe one ever knows people in their own surroundings; one only knows them away, divorced from all the little strings and cobwebs of habit. Long Barn, Knole, Richmond, and Bloomsbury. All too familiar and entrapping. Either I am at home, and you are strange; or you are at home, so neither is the real essential person, and confusion results.
But in the Basque provinces, among a horde of zingaros [gypsies], we should both be equally strange and equally real.
On the whole, I think you had much better make up your mind to take a holiday and come.
Vita
Virginia Woolf comments on this letter:
“I enjoyed your intimate letter from the Dolomites. It gave me a great deal of pain—which is I’ve no doubt the first stage of intimacy—no friends, no heart, only an indifferent head. Never mind: I enjoyed your abuse very much.…
But I will not go on else I should write you a really intimate letter, and then you would dislike me, more, even more, than you do.”
SS Rajputana, in the Indian Ocean
8 February [1926]
Such an absurd day at Aden yesterday: tearing across salt-marshes in a small open motor, in a hot gale; cyclones of dust; hundreds of tiny windmills madly spinning; salt-heaps in rows like the tents of a regiment; tunnels under hills; empty tanks of a hundred-million-gallon capacity (there are no springs, and it hasn’t rained there for 10 years); small black boys at the bottom of the tanks, like bears at the Zoo at the bottom of the Mappin Terraces, beating their stomachs and crying reverberatingly “No father, no mother, thank you”; Scotch soldiers in kilts; then Aden again, and lions suddenly in the middle of a Ford lorry garage [the lions were in fact caged]; and tea with an old Parsee in cool rooms over an apothecary’s shop. Pure Conrad, this: the merchant-prince of Aden in a shiny black cap, and shrewd eyes twinkling behind owlish glasses. A photograph of the King on a table. Bunches of herbs strung up to keep illness and misfortune from the house. Photograph groups of Parsee generations. Ledgers; a globe; models of ships. A dark young secretary in a suit of white ducks. Sweet biscuits. Talk of cargoes for Somaliland. And Aden lying outside, swept by its hot wind, the most god-forsaken spot on earth. And then a motor-launch, and the ship again, with gulls and hawks wheeling together above the refuse, and sellers of shells bobbing round in tiny canoes, and the Resident coming on board. [Aden was a British Protectorate, under the control of the Viceroy of India.] And then the steaming out into the night, and no more land ahead for two thousand miles, and the self-contained life of the ship closing round one once more.
The Indian ocean is grey, not blue; a thick, opaque grey. Cigarettes are almost too damp to light. At night the deck is lit by arc-lights, and people dance; it must look very strange seen from another ship out at sea—all these people twirling in an unreal glare, and the music inaudible. One’s bath, of sea-water, is full of phosphorus: blue sparks that one can catch in one’s hand. The water pours from the tap in a sheet of blue flame. The parties of Proust gain in fantasy from being read in such circumstances (I don’t mean in the bath, but on deck); they recede, achieve a perspective; they become historical almost, like Veronese banquets through which flit a few masked Longhi figures, and ruffled by the uneasy impish breeze of French Freud. I re-enter their company after struggling with the Persian irregular verbs. My own poem [“The Land’] on the other hand has ceased to have any existence for me at all: it seems just silly. I thought I should be able to stand back and look at it; but no: it is crammed right-up against my nose, and I can’t see it at all. Mme de Guermantes and Khwastan-rasi alone have reality.
But by the time I come home I shall have written a book, which I hope will purge me of my travel-congestion, even if it serves no other purpose. [Passenger to Teheran, selections in this volume] The moment it is released, it will pour from me as the ocean from the bath-tap—but will the blue sparks come with it, or only the blanket-grey of the daytime sea? (By the way, I have discovered since beginning this letter that one can draw pictures on oneself with the phosphorus; it’s like ha
ving a bath in glow-worms; one draws pictures with one’s fingers in trails of blue fire, slowly fading.)
For the rest, it is a perpetual evading of one’s fellow-beings. Really what odd things grown-up, civilised human beings are, with their dancing and their fancy-dress (Charles I stalking the deck with his head under his arm like an umbrella), and their sports, and their blind man’s buff, and an indignant Wellesley being forced to give away prizes. [Dorothy Wellesley, married to Lord Gerald Wellesley, later the seventh Duke of Wellington, from whom she separated in the 1920s] (“Really I do think it’s a little hard that because I happened to marry Gerry I should have to make a fool of myself, on a P. & O.”) But I come up on deck at dawn when there is no one about but a stray Lascar cleaning brasses, and watch the sun rising straight ahead, out of the east, and the sky and sea are like the first morning of Genesis. This is all before the hearty clergymen are awake, or the people who approach and say they think they know one’s aunt. (Why have aunts so many friends?)
I expect you think this is a dumb letter. It is rather. But of such things life is made at present. Everything else has been stripped away, and one remains a sponge, just drinking things up. What will happen when it’s all over, do you think? What would happen to you, I wonder chiefly, if you could be so thoroughly disturbed out of Bloomsbury? my greatest desire at present is to try that experiment. Also I want nine lives at least—another desire. And nine planets to explore. You have no idea how silly the tiny refinements of introspection can become.
If all this happens on a mere passage to India, what oh what is going to happen to poor Vita when she reaches the heart of Asia?
Perhaps some sense of selection will blessedly return, to order the traffic, like an archangel, or a policeman.
We have crept onward a few hundred miles since I began this letter, and the sun has come tropically out, and the clergymen have put on their sun-helmets. Tomorrow I shall be bouncing across India in a dusty train.
Have you quite forgotten this poor pilgrim? I haven’t forgotten that I am to tell you I think of you, but I think that will be a nice occupation for the Persian Gulf. In the meantime I think of you a terrible great deal. You make a wonderful cynical kindly smiling background to the turbulence of my brain. Shall I find a letter from you at Bombay I wonder?
I don’t mind if you do laugh at me—
Your V.
Teheran
8 April [1926]
Persia has turned magenta and purple: avenues of judas-trees, groves of lilac, torrents of wisteria, acres of peach-blossom. The plane-trees and the poplars have burst into green. I know you had a lovely Easter in England—Reuter chronicled it. (Reuter is a great joy to us, because it always arrives all wrong, e.g., “Lady Fisher has just completed her 27 days’ fast, undertaken to cure her of an illness caused by General de Bility.”) But I suppose you are in France now, tearing about—well, I, too, am about to tear, for we are going down to Isfahan. And, dear me, I can write you only one more letter after this, for the next fortnightly bag [diplomatic mail pouch] will bring me to the eve of my starting for home. I have been studying Mme Dieulafoy, a ravishing character, in fact I wrote an article about her, which you may see in Vogue. (Vogue is illustrated, and Mme Dieulafoy is incomplete without a portrait, or I would have sent it to Leonard.) [Vogue, June 1926. Extracts from Vita’s article about Jane Dieulafoy’s travel journal of her voyage to Persia in the 1890s and her husband’s excavation of the palace of Darius are included in Passenger to Teheran.] Raymond [Mortimer] and I have agreed to divide the world; rather like the Versailles peace conference we are: he is to have Palestine, Syria and the desert, and I am to have Persia, for journalistic purposes. (We are both rather resentful of Aldous Huxley.) [Whose Jesting Pilot described his world travels.] Raymond has arrived, you see; he fell over a precipice and was fired on, but survived. It seems odd to see him here. He is very happy, and as good as gold: scribbles away, and gives no trouble. But we both find it difficult to write about travel. My drawer is full of loose sheets that refuse to connect up. I daresay you are right about rhythm; all I can say is that rhythm and I are out of gear. I have finished my poem though, and it goes off by this bag. There are large patches of Asia in it now. Will you approve, I wonder?
But indeed my bringing-up wasn’t so very different from yours: I mooned about too, at Knole mostly, and hadn’t even a brother or a sister to knock the corners off me. And I never went to school. [An invention; she did.] If I am jolly and vulgar, you can cry quits on another count, for you have that interest in humanity which I can never manage—at least, I have the interest, but not the diabolical skill in its practice which is yours. And as I get older (I had a birthday only the other day) I find I get more and more disagreeably solitary, in fact I foresee the day when I shall have gone so far into myself that there will no longer be anything to be seen of me at all. Will you, please, remember to pull away the coverings from time to time? or I shall get quite lost. It is, I think, a pity to allow oneself to come to that stage when one only wants to be with people with whom one is intimate or perhaps in love. One ought to have a larger repertoire. But there, you see, am I saying “one ought to,”—and that gives away the whole trouble: that I live by theories, or rather they revolve and jostle in my head, and then I neglect to put them into practice, or perhaps am incapable of so doing. And that perhaps is one of the reasons why I like women better than men (even platonically), that they take more trouble and are more skilled in the art of making friendship into a shape; it is their business; men are too spoilt and lazy.
There now is a long egoistic passage; but from time to time I get seriously worried, and have a longing to be gregarious, and pour it out on poor Virginia.
I met a young American poet called MacLeish [Archibald] who has a passionate admiration for you. He is a serious young man, who has come here on an opium commission. You and Eliot are the only two writers in England today, etc. etc. By the way I would like to read Middleton Murry’s invectives, but you didn’t say what they were in. [Attacks on Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” in the Adelphi, February 1926] Will you keep them for me?
Darling Virginia, you mustn’t write me any more, because I shall be coming home. On the 25th is the coronation; then we are going to climb a mountain, then I am going to start. I can’t find anything about my journey; tourist agencies are unknown here, and the continental time-tables ignore Russia altogether. So I shall just launch off into the blue and trust to luck, and ought to reach England on the fourteenth, laden with rugs for old Bridges. [Robert Bridges] If you aren’t very careful I shall really bring you a tortoise, as the place is alive with them. (Have you read Lawrence, D. H., on tortoises?)
Have you read “Comment debuta Marcel Proust”? I cried over it. (By the way, that might be a good book to publish in translation; it’s quite short.)
How pleased I shall be to sit on your floor again.
I have got to go and see the Crown jewels, which is unexpectedly cutting my letter short, and I daren’t risk the bag not being closed when I get back—I’m also going to see that they’ve painted the room the right colour for the coronation, and am to be rewarded for my trouble by being allowed to pour bowls of emeralds through my fingers! So, at least, says the high functionary who is gracious enough to accord me this favour. I am taking Raymond. I must fly—
Your V.
Postscript. just back from the palace, with 1/2 an hour before the bag shuts.
I am blind. Blinded by diamonds.
I have been in Aladdin’s cave.
Sacks of emeralds were emptied out before our eyes. Sacks of pearls. Literally.
We came away shaking the pearls out of our shoes. Ropes of uncut emeralds. Scabbards encrusted with precious stones. Great hieratic crowns.
All this in a squalid room, with grubby Persians drinking little cups of tea.
I can’t write about it now. It was simply the Arabian Nights, with décor by the Sitwells. Pure fantasy. Oh, why weren
’t you there?
Teheran
11 March [1927]
The posts are all awry and amok; a stray Daily Mail trickles in, then a detective story for Harold, then a letter for me posted on Jan. 30th, but no nice big lumps of post come as they ought to do. As for our missing Foreign Office bag, it hasn’t turned up yet. And I haven’t heard from my mother for four weeks! So Heaven knows when this letter will reach you.
But at least, among the trickles of the Russian post, is a letter from you, of February 16th. I gather from internal evidence that one is missing—it’ll come in the bag next week, I expect. But are you really shingled? Is it true? Oh darling, do I like that? I think I preferred the dropping hairpins, that cheerful little cascade that used to tinkle onto your plate. But Mary [Mary Hutchinson, Clive Bell’s lover] says you look nice shingled, does she? And Mary ought to know. It makes you go all wrong in my mind, and the photograph of you at Knole no longer tells the truth, which upsets me.
Otherwise, yes, you are a very bright bead. What amuses me most is the speculation on what you would be like here. And in Greece: Where shall we go in October? Avignon? Italy? Or are you going to let me down over that? Tired of going abroad, after Spain with Dadie [George Rylands]!
Meanwhile our plans are ever so slightly changed: we cannot reach Athens on April 28th as I told you before, but on May 5th—a week later. Is there any hope that you will still be there? We shall be on the Lloyd Triestino (Carinthia, Carniola or Trento, according to which boat is running—we can’t discover exactly which) which will reach the Piraeus from Cyprus and go on to Trieste. I dare not hope that you will be able to join it—or dare I? In any case, we get to London on. May 9th, late at night. But oh, if you could join the boat.…
Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings Page 11