Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  February 1. A rainy day. Wrote letters in the morning and left Niagara Falls at 1:15 for Toronto. A dreary landscape; as untidy as America. Arrived at Toronto at 3:30 only to find that I had been expected by another train and that journalists had traveled down to Hamilton to meet me. Met at Toronto by Miss Doyle, the Governor’s aide de camp Colonel Hilatine [?] and several photographers. More reporters waiting at Government House. The Governor, Mr. Bruce, is a nice old man with white hair; Mrs. Bruce is much younger, English (he met her in France where she was a V.A.D.) and a vice-regal manner. Was interviewed by several papers and then dined alone with the Bruces. Not very thrilling. Masefield & Clemence Dane have preceded me here, leaving good impressions. Allowed to go to bed early. Sumptuously lodged, with bathroom & sitting room to myself.

  Write letters in the morning and talk to Maxwell Bruce aged 13, who is in bed with a bilious attack. Taken out to luncheon by Mrs. Bruce and Lady Clark (wife of Sir William Clark, British Commissioner to Canada). Luncheon with Mrs. H. D. Warren; crowds of women as usual. After lunch I go to the museum where there are really lovely Chinese pottery things. To tea with Mrs. Clarence Bogert, where I rejoin the Clarks and the Bruces. Large dinner party at Government House. Lecture to Pleiades Club afterwards: English social life. Very smart audience! Supper-party at Mrs. A. H. C. Proctor’s, and to bed at 1:30.

  Feel I have earned my keep today!

  February 3. I leave Toronto at 8. Colonel Hilatine [?] comes to the station with me, which distresses me. A very dreary journey to Chicago which I reach at 8:30, with a view of Detroit on the way. I stay at the Drake Hotel, & reporters come and bother me.

  February 4. More reporters. I revenge myself on them by leaving the window wide open. There is an icy wind blowing straight off Lake Michigan. At 11 A.M. I lecture on “Changes in English Social Life.” In the middle of my lecture a screen falls down on the heads of the audience but they do not appear to mind. I am then taken to lunch with Mrs. Robert McCormick wife of the editor (or owner?) of the Chicago Tribune, a large party, and lovely French pictures, modern. After lunch, Mickey Kellogg & I go out by train to Lake Forest. Very cold, and lots of snow.

  February 7. Wake to find Chicago under snow and a blizzard. Hate leaving Hadji in it, but have to catch the 11:30 to St. Louis. Dreary journey across snow-bound plains interrupted only by grim towns and occasional dumps of broken motors, more squalid than ever, sticking up out of the snow. My train one and a half hours late, so we get in at 7:30 instead of 6. (They light gas-flares to keep the points free of snow and ice. All the trains standing in stations are roofed with snow, and have great icicles dripping down their sides; the engines have flares lit underneath them, so that they appear to be on fire; rather a fine effect in the dusk.) Two women from Lindenwood College meet me with a motor at St. Louis. I escape from the reporters by saying I am late. I am indeed, for my lecture is timed for 8, and we do not reach St. Charles till quarter to 9. I wash but do not change, and give lecture at once; “Modern Spirit of Literature”; audience mostly the college girls, with some outside people as well. I am introduced to all of them afterwards and made to sign books. Observe that the copies of All Passion Spent have changed from 9th edition to 10th. Am given some dinner, which I had not yet had. Get a telegram from Hadji & ring him up. Long to go to bed, but am kept up talking; with all their kindness, these people have very little imagination.

  Get to bed finally by 12. Staying at the college.

  February 8. A lovely, white, frosty morning. I walk across the campus & have breakfast at a sort of tuck-shop. They then motor me in to St. Louis, to the house of Miss Helen Morgan with whom I am to stay. A nice kindly woman with an aged mother. I go to lunch with Mr. Clemens of the Mark Twain Society. A heavy and boring young man, but there is another man who enlarges on the American character with some intelligence. On the way out from lunch I am caught by reporters and remorselessly photographed. They want to take me to see the Lindbergh monument where Lindbergh keeps all the presents his admirers give him, but I evade this. Lindberg & T. S. Eliot are both natives of St. Louis, and so is Mr. Alfred Prufrock. They all loathe St. Louis & say it is the dirtiest & most stagnant place in the United States. It doesn’t seem to me worse than most. A bright young thing called Roberts comes to see me; she is trying to edit a literary review here, & admires Virginia, Eliot, & E. M. Forster. She is very young & eager.

  Miss Morgan has a party, with a man who sings “Ol’ Man River.” I meet one Mr. Clunden whose ancestors came from Cranbrook. Then we go to dine at the Chase Hotel. About 400 people all shouting, & I sit between two deaf men.

  I am very tired, and fear that my voice will go. It doesn’t and I lecture afterwards, “Modern Spirit in Literature.” Escorted home after by a lot of bloody people I can’t get rid of. Heaped with flowers, really lovely ones.

  February 9. I leave St. Louis for Chicago at 8:35 & get to Chicago at 3:25 where Hadji meets me.

  February 13. Leave Lake Forest at 8:48 and travel as far as Chicago with Hadji. Catch my train at 10 o’clock at Chicago, for Minneapolis, while Hadji goes to Washington. A nasty parting, for 10 days. Snowy plains all the way across Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, broken by occasional rough hills and rocks. Read Of Human Bondage in the train and am disappointed in it, having read it years ago. Am met at Minneapolis by Mrs. Murray and another woman. Two journalists come to see me. Get to bed at midnight.

  February 14. More journalists & photographers in the morning, also a nice bookseller-cum-bibliophile man called Leonard Wells. Mrs. Murray collects me to lunch with the Women’s Club. A very grand club-house. Lecture: “Modern Spirit in Literature.” Go afterwards to see Mr. Wells’ shop, and dispatch some of my own books, i.e., books I have read, back to myself at New York, to relieve my congested luggage. Leave Minneapolis at 5 for Des Moines. My train is nearly an hour late, so I don’t get there till after 1 and am met by Mrs. Cowles, a small dark woman with a greasy skin and fuzzy black hair; not bad, downright & sensible.

  February 15. Sleep late. Reporters in the morning and photographs. Lunch alone with Mrs. Cowles, & then lecture on “Novels & Novelists”; Women’s Club. Have tea with Mrs. Kratsch, who has a rather prettily situated house among trees on a hill. Des Moines is quite prettily situated, for it is hilly and wooded; better trees than usual. Mrs. Kratsch has lovely Indian corn cobs from Arizona hanging in bunches outside her front door—golden, orange, dark red, purple, white, and even blue and white. A huge noisy tea party.

  Dinner with the Cowles. A dinner party. Some men, actually; but not attractive specimens—hard, crude, Middle-West business men. I am very tired. Expect to find my sleeper waiting at the station, but it isn’t there, so I have to wait at the station until nearly 1 o’clock. Fortunately I am tired enough to go to sleep on a wooden bench among my luggage, looking like an immigrant. My redcap is very sympathetic & says he saw my photograph in the paper. Such is fame.

  After dinner they ring up from Cowles’ office to say there has been an attempt to assassinate Roosevelt.

  February 16. Arrive at Kansas City at 7:20 & am met by a dear little dump called Mrs. Doughty. She takes me to the Baltimore Hotel, where I am put into a complimentary suite consisting of two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a shower-bathroom, three w.c.’s, a hall, and an enormous sitting room, all filled with roses. A jolly view over the city & skyscrapers. Get a large post, including English letters, and read them in the intervals of seeing reporters. Write some letters. Mrs. Doughty comes again to fetch me for luncheon; she telephones up to my room saying “this is your friend Mrs. Doughty.” I sign a lot of books in her room at the Women’s Club. An enormous luncheon, where I sit between the president, an awful fat ill-tempered looking bedint [lower-class person, in Vita-Harold terminology] called Mrs. Bush, and an exceptionally nice, original intelligent person from Maine called Mrs. Martin. Like Mrs. Martin very much indeed; she is a real grown-up highbrow full of ideas. Am slightly disconcerted by having to lecture from the luncheon- table, with the front row of
the audience about 3 feet from my nose, but it does very well & they seem delighted. “Modern Spirit in Literature” again. I am getting quite glib at it. Then I am taken for a drive by Mrs. Bush, Mrs. Doughty, & another enormously fat woman (Mrs. Hearst?) to see the city, War Memorial, and statues called the Pioneer Mother & the Scout. All rather good; the war memorial very modern; but it looks rather incomplete because they ran out of funds. The residential quarter is well & elaborately planned, with some very charming houses on hilly ground with trees. Have tea with Mrs. Hearst. Very tired. Dine at the Country Club, but am allowed not to change. The Country Club is charming, with an English looking room, a log fire, sofas and cretonne. A nice dinner; about 40 people. Sit between Mrs. Bush again & a nice old judge, but talk nearly all the time to the editor of the local paper, Mr. Haskell, a clever man who loves Hadji’s book on his father. Met Ernest Hemingway’s aunt. Nice people altogether. Mrs. Doughty drives me back to the station, which I leave at 10:30 for Chicago in one of those beastly sections.

  February 17. Arrive at Chicago at 9:30 &.go to Mrs. Fairbanks house. Find letters there & spend a peaceful morning, writing letters, re-packing, etc. Some men come to lunch, & then I go to Krock’s bookshop to sign books, & ten to see Mrs. McNeil at Colston Leigh’s. To be with Mrs. Houston Johnson who I don’t like at all. Mrs. Fairbank who has arranged to collect me there at 5:15 doesn’t arrive till 6—so I have to dress in a hurry & am late for dinner. Drive with Mrs. Manheimer, & dislike it extremely; for one thing I am very tired & for another they are all pretentious, pseudo-smart Jews. Go on with them to lecture at Book and Play Club; “Modern Spirit in Literature” again; a horrid audience, all Jews; can’t capture them at all. Very tired & dejected. Leave Chicago at 1:55 A.M. for Madison.

  It is much warmer, & Chicago is all slush and heaps of dirty snow.

  [Ed. Note: I have left this entry intact, as I have all the others, so as not to censor Vita’s opinions, which were typical of her time and social set.]

  February 18. My train arrived at Madison at 6:35 but I did not wake till 8, as we got shoved onto a siding. I woke to find a bright sunny day, with a certain amount of snow. Took at taxi to the Hotel Loraine, where I got a room & had some breakfast. I avoided reporters by telling them Mrs. Miller was coming to take me out. She did, in fact, come at 10—a nice elderly woman with lovely eyes of powder-blue and grey hair, accompanied by another woman whose name I didn’t discover, something like Schliedermann. They drove me round Madison in a large motor, showing me the University buildings first, & the Capitol & Observatory; then we went along the shores of Lakes Monona and Mendota. It must really be very pretty in summer. The lakes which are 5 in number are surrounded by low hills and trees, and one gets into the country much quicker than usual, Madison being only a small town. They have an interesting modern building which is an experimental place for woodwork, but the architecture of the small houses near the lakes was very poor, not nearly so good as Kansas City.

  I lunched at 1 o’clock with the Civics Club at the Loraine Hotel—nearly 600 of them. I sat between Mrs. Miller & Mrs. Glenn Frank, wife of the president of the University. Didn’t like her much, but beyond her was one George Middleton, who interested me—he is connected with some dramatic agency & knows a lot of people I know. After luncheon I gave my lecture (“Modern Spirit in Literature”) from the high luncheon table; it went very well indeed; one of the best audiences I have had, so I recovered from the dejection of the Chicago meeting last night. They asked me to give a personal impression of Virginia afterwards, which I did, also to “explain” Orlando! Mrs. Frank then took me to her house where I met her husband, and then to tea with Mrs. Walter Franklin, a fair young woman who has just built a house on the edge of a lake, with rather nice rooms panelled in unstained wood. A large selection of the club members came, the plainest and dowdiest lot of women I have ever seen or ever wish to see. All very noisy and boring; I was made to stand by the door while they all filed past & were introduced.

  I caught the train back to Chicago at 5. Glenn Frank appeared at the station to see me off, and gave me his book. I arrived at Chicago at 9 & went to Mrs. Fairbank’s house where I am staying; they were all out at a party except Janet Fairbank whom I discovered dressed up as a little girl, with her hair down her back, a hair-ribbon, short skirts, black pumps, and white socks with an expanse of fat hairy leg above them. Not pretty, but she did give me a cocktail. I refused to go to the party, & went to bed instead in an empty house.

  February 19. Had breakfast with Mrs. Fairbank & Janet, & left Chicago at 10. Got to Columbus at 6:50 after a long day over unspeakably hideous country, but had a pleasant surprise when the clocks were put forward an hour, so that I appeared to arrive at 5:50 instead of 6:50. Mr. & Mrs. Rockwood met me at the station & took me to the hotel (Dechler-Wallick) to get a room; then took me out to dinner with Mr. & Mrs. Wright, the latter an intelligent woman. More abuse of certain English lecturers, notably Margo Asquith, Oliver Baldwin, & Priestley; but they had liked Hugh [Walpole], Randolph Churchill, Yeats, & James Stevens.

  I escaped early; found a reporter waiting for me at the hotel.

  Janet Fairbank drove me to the station at Chicago by the “lower level” streets—most sinister tunnels, in which the unemployed are allowed to sleep. Through their arches I caught sight of the bare masts of Byrd’s South Polar ship; an extraordinary effect of anachronism.

  February 20. I had even more reporters than usual in the morning, including Eugenia Wolfe, who rang me up first on the telephone, when it sounded like “This is Virginia Woolf speaking.” I also had a visit from Mrs. Wiggins wanting me to sign a petition for the repeal of the 18th Amendment, but I pointed out that this was scarcely my business. Another bore rang me up about the history of the Wests.

  Mrs. Rockwood came for me after 12 and took me out to lunch at the Country Club with a very good-looking Mrs. Edmunds. There were other people there, of course. Quite a pretty club, out in the country, and actually built on a hill.

  After lunch I was allowed to return to my hotel and tried to write to Virginia with only minor interruptions, such as a young man who said “Lady Victoria?” outside my door in a gentle voice, wanting me to sign my books for him, and a girl who came for an interview but ended by telling me how she longed to go to college only her parents could no longer afford it.

  The Rockwoods collected me at 6:30 & took me to dinner at the Club house. We then returned to my hotel and I lectured in the ballroom there; “Changes in English Social Life.” A very dankbares publicum [thankless public], and it went very well indeed. I was then introduced to hundreds of people, but was rescued by Mrs. Edmunds and taken away into a small room with a select few, and given a whiskey & soda. I liked Mrs. Edmunds, who is really lovely without a hat—lovely wide brows and a serene look; dark hair; a Madonna-like type. Then there was a ball—the elite of Columbus, I watched it from the upper balcony till after twelve, when I parted from the kind Rockwoods with expressions of gratitude, and from Mrs. Edmunds with every assurance that we would meet again, perhaps in England; went upstairs & did my packing, & then to bed.

  February 21. Leave Columbus at 8:25 A.M. and reach Cincinnati at 11:20 A.M. where I am met by Mr. & Mrs. Scott Allen. [.…] Am driven to Miss Ruth Harrison’s house, Weebetook, Grandin Road, G. Walnut Hills, where I am to stay. Old-fashioned house with heavy Victorian furniture and old family photographs, a winter garden, and a nice view up the valley of the Ohio & the Kentucky hills opposite. Miss Harrison herself is rather like Margaret Warrenden. Expect to find letter & tickets awaiting me, but they are not here, which rather worries me. Lunch with the Woman’s Club, noisy and dull. Lecture afterwards, “Modern Spirit in Literature” to an overcrowded and indeed overflowing auditorium. A lady comes up afterwards, and tells me she has had a vision during my lecture, and that I was Balkis, Queen of Sheba in a previous incarnation. Try to look suitably grateful. The mayor of Cincinnati, Mr. Wilson, by whom I sat at lunch, introduced me in a great many ill-chosen words.
They all seemed pleased, and one lady threatens to write to Virginia saying how well she interpreted Orlando. Return to Miss Harrison’s where a lady strives to collect a specimen of my handwriting for the local graphologist, and another lady to present me with three anthologies of local verse.

  Dine with Miss Harrison who has a dinner party. Am not allowed to go to bed before 1.

  February 22. Hadji arrives from Georgia at 2:30. Spend the morning fussing about my reservations, as the post has failed to produce my tickets. Just when everything is fixed up the tickets arrive, with English letters too.

  Hadji lunches out, I lunch with Miss Ellison & the American Pen Women. Ghastly entertainment. Then I go to the bookshop in the hotel to sign books; a nice shop, in a big panelled room like a library. Return to Miss Harrison’s & go with her and Hadji to tea at the Scott Allens. We all dine with the English Speaking Union & Hadji lectures on “National Character & International Cooperation.” Go home to change & pack, and leave alone for Philadelphia at 11:20.

  February 23. Get to Philadelphia at 5 after a long day in a very hot train. I spend most of the day writing letters. We go through the Alleghenies, and along the valley of the Susquehanna. A dramatic piece of engineering called the Horseshoe Curve. Am met at Philadelphia by a stout bedint called Miss Lord who drives me out to Bryn Mawr, 15 miles away. She explains what a beautiful drive it is, and we then pass through endless suburbs black with cars. I stay at the President’s House; the President, Miss Park, is away, so I am alone with Miss Lord who apparently shares the house with her. The local bookseller brings books for me to sign. Dine with Mrs. Manning—one of the faculty—and about ten of the students; nice pretty girls. Lecture in Goodheart Hall on D. H. Lawrence and Virginia, a vast hall like a cathedral. Meet Alice Smith there, and return with her to Miss MacGeorge’s house where she is staying, after a supper party with the students who all bring books to sign. Meet a very nice Miss Ely, to whom I say “I am going to make a very personal remark.” She replies: “I am going to make the same remark to you.” I say “But you don’t know what it was.” She says, “You were going to say, What a lovely frock.” She is quite right, so we get on like a house on fire, and she offers me the loan of her adobe house in Santa Fe.