Do you know that my time in Teheran is drawing to an end? Every night as I walk across the compound and look up at the stars through the planes, I wonder if I shall ever see Teheran again. Everybody asks me if we are coming back. I say “So far as I know.” But that is just official discretion: I cannot believe that the swords and silk stockings will exercise their charm much longer. In the meantime I remain wisely silent, observing a struggle going on in Harold, and knowing that an ill-placed word often makes people turn contrary.
What else? Yes, I have read Cowper [William Cowper, “The Task,” 1785]:
The stable yields a stercoraceous heap.…
It bears an unpleasant resemblance to The Land, doesn’t it? But it has its good moments.
While fancy, like the finger of a clock,
Runs the great circuit, and is still at home.
I read Les faux-monnayeurs too [by André Gide]. I remember you said you didn’t like it. Yet I wonder you weren’t interested by the method of springing decisive events on the reader, without the usual psychological preparation. I thought it gave a strange effect of real life. I liked it better than Si le grain ne meurt, in which I liked only the beginning of the 3rd volume, about the French littérateurs; I was bored by the African part; I don’t think lust is interesting as such, and it doesn’t inspire me at all to know that Gide had an Arab boy five times in one night … but the Wilde part was good although revolting. How beautifully unsubtle Gide makes Fielding appear, with all his knock about fun in Gloucestershire inns, when you read them as I did in conjunction, dove-tailed, Gide in the daytime and Fielding at night.
I have come to the conclusion that solitude is the last refuge of civilised people. It is much more civilised than social intercourse, really, although at first sight the reverse might appear to be the case. Social relations are just the descendants of the primitive tribal need to get together for purposes of defence; a gathering of bushmen or pygmies is the real ancestor of a Teheran dinner party; then the wheel comes full cycle, and your truly civilised person wants to get away back to loneliness. If all my life went smash, and I lost everybody, I should come and live in Persia, miles away from everywhere, and see nobody except the natives to whom I should dispense quinine. It is only affection and love which keep one. But I think Lady Hester Stanhope must have had a good life. [Stanhope went to live in a convent in Syria in 1810 until her death in 1839.]
I’ve been buying, in large quantities, the most lovely Persian pottery: bowls and fragments, dim greens and lustrous blues, on which patterns, figures, camels, cypresses, script, disport themselves elusive and fragmentary. [See her poems in this volume.] How I am going to get them all home God knows. For the moment they stand round my room, creating a rubbed, romantic life of forgotten centuries. It’s like looking into a pool, and seeing, very far down, a dim reflection. I make all sorts of stories about them.
Where will you get this letter? in London? in Greece? I wish I had your address. I told Leigh [Ashton] he might run into you there, he’s going to the British School at Athens. Oh God I wish I were going to be in Greece with you, lucky lucky Leonard. Please wish that I might be there. Please miss me. You say you do. It makes me infinitely happy to think that you should, though I can’t think why you should, with the exciting life that you have—Clive’s rooms, and talk about books and love, and then the press, and the bookshop, and wild-eyed poets rushing in with manuscripts, and all the rest of it.
But I am going to Shiraz, it’s true. This would be heaven if I didn’t so much want Virginia. However, next time I go abroad it will, it shall, it must, be with you.
Your V.
P.S. I think it is really admirable, the way I keep my appointments. I said I would be back on the 10th of May, and here I am, rolling up in London at 11:50 P.M. on the ninth, with ten minutes to spare. It’s like the Jules Verne man who went round the world in eighty days, and who had forgotten to turn off the gas in his flat.
Persepolis
30 March [1927]
The hawks wheel between the broken columns, the lizards dart through the doorways of the palace of Darius; Persepolis towers on its great terrace. I’ve driven a motor over nearly a thousand miles of Persia within the last week. I am dirty, sunburnt, well. We have got up at dawn every morning and gone to bed (on the floor) at 8:30. We have slept in ruined huts; made fires of pomegranate-wood and dried camel-dung; boiled eggs; lost all sense of civilisation; returned to the primitive state in which one thinks only of food, water, and sleep. But don’t imagine that we have nothing but water to drink; no, indeed; we carry a demi-john filled with Shiraz wine, and though we may discard our beds (which we did on the first day, when our Ford luggage-car broke down and we strewed the street of a Persian village with chemises and tea-pots,) the demi-john we do not discard. We get up at dawn, we motor all day across plains and up gorges, tearing along, and at nightfall we arrive somewhere or other, and shake out our little diminished camp, and fall asleep. A very good life, Virginia. And now (for I have moved on since beginning this letter at Persepolis) I have seen Shiraz, an absurdly romantical place, and passed again by Sivand, and slept there, a valley full of peach blossom and black kids, and came again to Isfahan, where the post was waiting for us, and a letter from you. (But before I answer it, don’t imagine, please, that this life of flying free and unencumbered across Persia is in any sense a romantic life; it isn’t; the notion that one escapes from materialism is a mistaken notion; on the contrary, one’s preoccupation from morning to night is: Have we cooked the eggs long enough? have we enough Bromo left? who washed the plates this morning, because I didn’t? who put away the tin-opener, because if nobody did, it’s lost? Far from finding a liberation of the spirit, one becomes the slave of the practical—
But anyway, my darling, I found a letter from you. There it was (I’ve now unpacked the ink and refilled my pen). We topped the pass, and came down upon Isfahan with its blue domes, and there in the Consulate was our mail-bag full of letters. You were no longer going to Greece but to Rome. [After a holiday in Cassis, the Woolfs and Vanessa and Clive Bell were going to Sicily, then to Rome.] You won’t like Rome, with its squaling tramlines, but you will like the Campagna. Please go out into the Campagna as much as possible, and let your phrases match the clouds there, and think of me. I’ve just been to dinner with a young Persian—he’s in love with me—such a nice creature—I knew him last year—he chants Persian poetry so beautifully—This letter gets interrupted all the time, but I love you, Virginia—so there—and your letters make it worse—Are you pleased? I want to get home to you—Please, when you are in the south, think of me, and of the fun we should have, shall have, if you stick to your plan of going abroad with me in October—sun and cafés all day, and? all night. My darling.… please let this plan come off.
I live for it.
Do you really get the Femina prize? [Woolf did in 1928, for To the Lighthouse.] And the Hawthornden. [“The Land” had won the Hawthornden prize, presented to her after her return.] D’you remember our bet? what fun. [Presumably, that they would both win prizes that year. They did.] Yes, let’s write about solitude. Oddly enough, by the same post as your letter, I got sheets from Ethel Smyth, largely about that same subject, solitude. She likes it too.
Such a scrawl. By candlelight. The motor leaves at 4 tomorrow morning for Teheran. I’m in a queer excited state—largely owing to your letter—I always get devastated when I hear from you. God, I do love you. You say I use no endearments. That strikes me as funny. When I wake in the Persian dawn, and say to myself “Virginia … Virginia.…”
The Common Reader was in my room at Shiraz—it gave me a shock.
Look here … you’ll come to Long Barn, won’t you? Quite soon after I get back? If I promise to get back undamaged? I’ll be sweeter to you than ever in my life before—
Your Vita
PART IV
TRAVEL WRITING
Vita generally kept, with some persistence, a journal of her travels. The entrie
s, of irregular lengths, are generally of interest to the contemporary reader, sometimes for the singularity of outlook and always for the exact transmission of what she saw and her reflections upon it. To compare these passages with her published and more polished works such as Passenger to Teheran and the nearly unobtainable Twelve Days in the Bakhtiari Mountains is to glimpse her artistic judgment. Several long selections from both published books on her Persian travels are presented here, as well as selections from her various travel journals.
ITALIAN JOURNEY WITH DOROTHY WELLESLEY (1921)
This early travel diary about Vita’s trip to Italy that started in Paris with Gerald and Dorothy Wellesley in the fall of 1921 is full of the intensity Vita always experienced when voyaging. She notes her reactions to places, weather, skies, reading, companions—in high color. A superb traveler, she will later transcribe her reactions in her travels to Persia, the mountains of Russia, and through the United States with the same sort of enthusiasm evident here.
September 14. D., G., [Dorothy and Gerald Wellesley] and I left Victoria at 11 for Paris. I was miserable because H. [Harold] had got out of our taxi halfway to the station, and had walked away looking white and unhappy. I wrote to him in the train, to try to console him a little. We had dinner in Paris at the Gare de Lyon [in Le Train Bleu, a famous restaurant up a stately staircase, with immense murals depicting French cities, an historical monument]. We left Paris at 9 and got to Lausanne the next morning, where we changed into an ordinary carriage.
September 15. We spent the whole day in the train, reaching Verona late at night. I did not much like coming back to Verona …
September 16. G. went out by himself in the morning to see Verona—and D. & I wandered out later and I showed her the things I liked, i.e., the Arche and the Gothic staircase. After lunch we took G. to see the staircase, and he destroyed its beauty in a few deft phrases, which made me angry. After that we went to see churches, and he admired baroque chapels, which seemed to me of an unparalleled hideousness, but I listened to his remarks on the baroque with interest, and, I hope, an open mind. We trailed about the streets getting hotter and more thirsty every minute. There were barrows of fruit at every street corner, and barrels of fresh wine standing along the river. In the evening we went to a cinema in the arena—a moonlit anachronism which was great fun. D. was thrilled. Afterwards, we walked about the streets.
September 17. G. & D. took me in a beastly open motor to Mantua, where we wandered through a dull palace of which D. and I contrived to miss the only interesting part. After lunch we went on to the Palazzo del Té, which I liked inordinately, and then to Sabbioneta in pursuit of the baroque; very dull. Then on to Parma. I did not like the motor, but I liked the grape-hung vines all along the road and the heaps of red-gold maize which men with wooden shovels were turning over & over in front of every farmhouse. I had forgotten how lovely Italy was in the autumn. At Parma we saw nothing which amused us in the least except a motor-bicycle race passing through on its way from Milan to Naples—faces caked with white dust flashing down the main street in the glare of acetylene lamps and to the scream of sirens. We wandered about the streets after dinner rather aimlessly, as nobody would say what they wanted to do, and then went back to the hotel, where I left D. to talk to G., and sat myself in my bedroom talking to the hotel housemaid for an hour.
September 18. D. & I left G. at Parma looking rather forlorn. We changed at Bologna, meaning to go to Rimini, but as we found a train that went to Ravenna we thought we would go there instead. We tore through the night as far as Castel Bolognese in the fastest and shakiest train I had ever been in. At Castel Bolognese we got out. They seemed a little doubtful there as to the train for Ravenna. One official said it went at eight, another at eight-thirty, and yet a third said it went at nine, and added, “Qualche volta arriva” [Sometimes it comes] which I thought cryptic, and, under the circumstances, a little casual. We filled in the time by having dinner in the station buffet: tagliatelle, vitello, and too much Chianti. We became hilarious, and nearly missed the train, but not quite. It deposited us at Ravenna at nine. We asked for the Hotel Byron, where we had our letters sent, and were told “Non esiste piu” [It isn’t there any more]. We found, however, another one, where at first they said they couldn’t take us in, as even the bathrooms had people sleeping in them, but finally they produced one room. There were quantities of mosquitoes, no mosquito curtains on either bed, and we were cross at having to share; but the general irresponsibility of the country had infected us, and we did not much care, and hunted mosquitoes more or less cheerfully for the better part of the night.
September 19. We went out rather vaguely to see the town. We thought how horrified G. would be by our vagueness, but we did not do so badly. We saw San Vitale, the tomb of Galla Placidia, San Apollinare Nuovo, and the tomb of Dante. At the latter we saw a bottle that contained bits of Dante, very nasty and rather macabre, but no doubt he himself would have appreciated the latter element as much as anybody. In the evening we went to a cinema, which at one moment gave promise of developing into a row, but this came to nothing. We got another room and mosquito curtains out of the reluctant management, and so slept undisturbed.
September 20. In the morning we took a motor and went to San Apollinare in Classe, a large, derelict, and mildewed basilica which we liked. Then to the Pineta, where we were extremely arty: left the motor and went into the wood, and lay under the pines, and read snatches of the more obscure poets to one another. We said “Here Dante, Boccaccio, Shelley, and Byron walked,” and again “Oh my God how the canal does stink!” There were a great many lizards, and even more picnic papers littering the ground. Then we went back to Ravenna, and at four got into a lackadaisical train for Trieste. On the way we ate cheese and figs, and drank the Chianti. After Mestre we got into the Corso country, which was very impressive under the moonlight. The train climbed slowly up hill between mostly limestone boulders and for the first time since we had been in Italy we were cold. We got to Trieste at one in the morning, and drove to the quays where the Sarajevo was lying alongside, small, black, and dirty. A gale was blowing. We could not get on board, as the steward was on shore and everything was locked up. The Italian customs house officials were very suspicious, and searched everything for arms and ammunition, but finally let us through. We drove to a hotel, but could not get a room, nor was Ozzie [Dickinson, a friend of Harold’s and of Vita’s mother] there. By this time we were rather dispirited, and extremely cold, and began to think that we should have to spend the rest of the night in the dark. Things brightened suddenly when we discovered another hotel where they were able to give us a room, and not only that, but Ozzie was there; so we rushed to his room and woke him up (it then being about half past two in the morning)—and he hugged us both, because he thought we were never going to turn up.
September 21. After about three hours sleep we got up and went on board the Sarajevo. It was still blowing a gale, but this miraculously dropped as we left Trieste, and there was no sea. It was a most lovely day, blue and gold. The coast was rather dull as far as Pola [Pula]. At Pola we got off the boat, and went to see the arena, which was all overgrown inside with sage, thyme, and snapdragons. Then we walked about the town, had drinks at a café, and bought Havelock Ellis in Italian. After dark we got to Lussin-piccolo [Losinj], where we landed, and had more drinks in another café, under oleanders, and were extremely self-conscious and said “How romantic to drink golden wine on an island,” and more to the same effect. During the night we got to Zara [Zadar], where we stayed for several hours in an intolerable din of coaling, and of shipping cargo. I saw Zara in the dawn, it looked rather nice.
September 22. Sailed all day past a sort of fairyland coast, between islands, on the bluest of seas. An Albanian on board entered into conversation with me and asked me to go and live with him in the mountains of Albania. I was rather tempted by this suggestion, especially as he was young, tall, dark, and good-looking. In the evening we came to Spalato [Split
], which thrilled us, as being the first properly Serbian thing we had seen, and also as being built inside the outer walls of Diocletian’s palace, so that mixed up with narrow slums one came suddenly upon great Roman gateways, or a Roman colonnade. We got Serbian money, and dined on the terrace of a café. A good day. The Serbian officials were very suspicious and prodded us all over before we were allowed to land.
September 23. I got up very early and slipped up on deck to watch the sunrise behind the mountains. It was impressive—blood-red, gold, and purple. The coast and the islands had been steadily getting lovelier and grander, but quite barren and uninhabited. I spent most of the morning with the Albanian, who became hourly more poetic and more ardent. By about mid-day the coast began to soften a little, cypresses and stone pines appeared, and presently Gravosa came in sight. Here we were given a sort of royal reception by the commissary of police and a posse of gendarmes, but I never made out why. We drove up to Ragusa [Dubrovnik], where we had lunch, and afterwards went out and looked at the town. I got a violent attack of liver, which made me feel so ill that I forgot to mind the ignominy of it. I had no dinner, and went to bed and sulked there while D. and G. walked about the quays.
September 24. I was better, but not quite mended. Yet we all three sat on the quays, and watched young men like bronze statues bathing. This thrilled me inordinately, as I had never before seen the human body burnt to such a colour. It was very hot and blue. After lunch D. and O. insisted on bathing; they bathed in a dark, rough cove amongst crowds of hairy men, most of whose very inadequate drawers had split in the most ill-chosen places. I sat on the beach, and sulked. After this D. and O. wanted to go for a walk, so we walked to Gravosa and I recovered my temper. On the way there we went through a rough archway and were suddenly confronted with the sunset behind the islands, a staggering sight. We dined at Gravosa at a small café, and walked back afterwards in the dark.
Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings Page 12