Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  Back at Northampton, I dine with Marion Dodd and Esther Dunn. Robert Frost there, a handsome man who goes in for good conversation. He has a professorship at Amherst. He pays me compliments about “The Land,” which I return in kind. I lecture afterwards—not very well—to Smith College, “Modern Spirit in Literature.”

  March 18. Leave Northampton in a little chilly dawn, change at Springfield, and arrive at Boston, where I am met by Mr. Roland Hopkins. He drives me to his house, where I lecture at 11 A.M. on D. H. Lawrence & Virginia to an overcrowded room full of women. For the first time I find myself speaking with ease & fluency & without notes. A large luncheon party afterwards at the house. A Mr. Johnson and an extraordinary woman who has been sending me flowers & whom I met at the Scaifes come to fetch me & take me to see the [Isabella Stewart] Gardner Museum. Mrs. Gardner was a “character” who built herself a large house like a Venetian palace in Boston & collected things—half Italian primitives, half modern pictures—somewhere in the ‘80s and ‘90s. She must have been exactly like B.M. There is a Sargent portrait of her, and the Sargent of “El Jaleo.” The centre of the house is occupied by a Venetian courtyard roofed over by glass and crammed with hot-house flowers. The smell of the hyacinths in that centrally-heated place is overwhelming. The house is an extraordinary jumble, but they dare not alter anything, because under her will the whole thing is given away if anything is changed. A bunch of marigolds is to be placed every day of the year under a certain picture, a bunch of violets under another.

  The extraordinary woman, whose name I forget, takes me to tea with Mrs. Phillips. A large party there; all toadies. I escape and go to see Mrs. Carpenter from Berlin. The extraordinary woman insists on accompanying me, and waits patiently in the car outside. She then drives me to Miss McGlade’s, where I have a very nice dinner. Dale Warren there. I find that I am also expected to dine with Mrs. Hopkins and the Scaifes, owing to a muddle of Leigh’s. I stick, firmly to Miss McGlade, whom I like, and who is my own private arrangement.

  After dinner I drive out to the Scaifes, where I stay.

  March 20. Pasatiempo, Santa Cruz. Woke to find a slight fog, which quickly cleared off, leaving a brilliantly sunny day. I wrote a few letters, and at about eleven Miss Hollins came and fetched me, and we motored into the hills, up and down lanes so narrow that the buses scraped along both sides of the car. We went first to her racing stable, there were two foals in a paddock. Then up into completely uninhabited country, heavily wooded with medrone, ilex, and redwood. She lost her way once, and we came unexpectedly on a wood shack with a few puppies tumbling about, and a dark girl and a fair boy standing enlaced in the doorway. A most Arcadian pair. They re-directed us, and after miles of steep and muddy lanes we came to a vineyard whose proprietor was a friend of Miss Hollins. He led us into his “cave,”—a sort of barn,—and gave us wine out of vast barrels. An Englishman appeared, named Braithwaite—an odd-looking, rather faded man with blue eyes, who said he came from Lake Windermere, had been out here for years, and never intended to go back. There were about six bulldogs of all sizes and ages. Then we went on to lunch at the Golf Club. I felt rather fish-out-of-water among half a dozen golfing ladies in sweaters and tweed skirts. All very hearty. After lunch Miss Hollins & I set out for Monterey, about 60 miles away. We stopped in Monterey at an antique shop kept by Mrs. Elkins (David Adler’s sister), which is the house where R.L.S. [Robert Louis Stevenson] lived for a time. A lovely old wooden house. Then to Mrs. Elkins’ own house, old and wooden also; very good taste, rather Syrie Maugham-ish, bleached wood and Fantin-Latour arrangement of (sham) flowers. Then on to Carmel; white sand and cypresses. These cypresses are spreading, like cedars, instead of being pointed, and grow nowhere else but on that strip of coast. They are very dark and gnarled and lovely, with the white sand beneath them and the sea twinkling beyond. We found Robinson Jeffers’ house, very rugged, on the edge of the sea. A curiously Cornish effect; great rocks, a grey sea, and alyssum all over the place. A notice-board on the gate says “Not at home,” but an old lady in corduroy trousers who drives up at the same moment walks firmly in. Jeffers emerges, a tall, lean, handsome man in riding-breeches and a shirt with a Byronically open throat. Electric-blue eyes and greying hair. He is very taciturn, and very much aware of his good looks. He asks us in, but not very cordially. A dark untidy room roughly panelled in wood, with a window-seat overlooking the sea and lots of books. Conversation rather sticky till Mrs. Jeffers arrives, plump and voluble. Miss Hollins introduces me as Mrs. Nicolson, but Mrs. J. exclaims “Orlando!” and explains me to “Robin,” who then thaws a little and talks about the Woolfs. Mrs. J. then says we must come over to tea with Mabel Luhan. Miss Hollins is sent off to look for the Jeffers twins at the barber’s shop, and “Robin” takes me and Mrs. J. to Mrs. Luhan’s house 200 yards away. Mrs. Luhan is plump and dark, dressed in black with a white jabot; her hair is cut square like a medieval page. She looks faintly Indian. There are large photographs of Tony [Luhan] on the mantelpiece. Brett [Dorothy Brett] is there, very untidy and chinless and deaf; her head tied up in an Indian handkerchief. Mrs. Jeffers says, “Now, Brett, put on your ears,” and Brett obediently places a kind of telephone over her head, attached by flex to a black box like a Kodak which she holds on her knee. Every now and then she changes its little battery, like putting in a new film. Mrs. Luhan gazes with rapt and undisguised passion at Jeffers, who pretends not to notice. I talk to Brett. She has not been home for nine years, and asks with avidity after all her friends. How is Duncan [Grant]? Does he still fall in love with young men? Is it true that Carrington killed herself? How is Ottoline [Morell]? How is Virginia? How are Gertler and Siegfried Sassoon? I shout answers into the Kodak. She is trying to get naturalised American, but has to pass an exam first about the American constitution. Mrs. Luhan asks with some acerbity about Frieda Lawrence. They all scream when I say that she has been lecturing at Oxford.

  We leave finally and drive to Mr. McComus’ studio at Monterey. A nice man with a wife like Consuelo Balzan. He shows us sketches of Arizona. It is dark when we leave, and we drive home, Miss Hollins stopped frequently at various houses on the way to collect a hat or a sweater; none of these are forthcoming, but she retrieves other lost objects instead, such as a baby Ciné. We drive through more cypresses, very lovely against the dark sea. We don’t get home till 9:30.

  PART V

  CRITICAL WRITING

  Vita took her job as an acknowledged and respected critic and responsible reader seriously. Both her lecture on modern English poetry and her perceptive and learned book on Andrew Marvell reflect that seriousness. That she could be light about such things in no way detracted from her power of judgment, as we see in her letter to her friend, Alvilde Lees-Milne (May 29, 1955), extolling her kindness and lamenting what she had just read: “I can’t think how in the whirl and gaiety of your London life you remember things like your promise to send me Bonjour Tristesse. God, what a Waste Land of a book! It made me want to write a counterpart called Bonjour Bonheur.”

  From her early diary entry about the first fee she earned for writing a poem to her essays on other poets, her deep concern with matters of the mind is clear. She was no less renowned as a critic of literature and of poetry, no less celebrated as a lecturer on modern writing, than as an authority on gardens and country living.

  In her small book on Andrew Marvell, one chapter of which is reprinted here, Vita takes the intricate details of his poems seriously, and uses her wide knowledge of literary modes to illuminate the subject under consideration.

  Her lecture: “Some Tendencies of Modern English Poetry,” given October 16, 1928 and her story called “The Poetry Reading,” included elsewhere in this volume, reveal, perhaps as much as her own poetry does, her concern not just with that particular genre but with herself as exemplifying its traditions—no matter how against the current they were. As it happens, by one of those ironic twists of literary fate, the peculiar self-reflection of this story places Vita firmly in th
at very modernist tradition against which some of her more seemingly traditional writings seem to position themselves.

  The titles for her lecture tour of 22 cities in the United States in 1933, from January to April—during which she was treated as a well-known scholar and writer—are indicative of the range of literary topics she could handle with ease. She spoke on “Novels and Novelists,” “Changes in English Social Life,” “The Modern Spirit in Literature,” “Travels Through Persia,” and “D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf.” Most of these lectures seem to have been great successes, according to all accounts.

  Yet Vita’s success as a fiction writer was at fault, I think, for overwhelming her critical writing. When she was young, she had always found herself “not clever,” but it is in the long run she herself who best sums up her qualities as a critic: “Learned I am not; well-read only in scraps; polemical not at all; didactic: I hope not, but am not very sure.” Her uncertainty as to whether or not she was didactic seems to me something of a fair testimony to her not being so.

  LECTURE ON MODERN ENGLISH POETRY (1928)

  The following talk was given for BBC Radio, in London, in five parts, on five Tuesdays in the fall of 1928: October 2, 16, and 30, and November 13 and 27. It has not been previously published. In World War II, all the contracts between Vita Sackville-West and the BBC were destroyed, and no trace remains of the archives. My gratitude to Nigel Nicolson for permitting me to publish the talk, which is of great interest to those concerned with the reception of poetics and poetry in England at this period.

  “SOME TENDENCIES OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY”

  I have not come here today to make out a case for modern poetry. Neither have I come to make out a case against it. But we have been accustomed, in the past, to divide the poets roughly into two main groups, the Classical and the Romantic, and to those two groups we are now inclined to add on a third, which we call the Modern. We accept the addition, according to our temperaments, with distaste, mistrust, and apprehension, or with relief, interest, and sympathy; but be our attitude what it may, the classification has definitely taken its place in our critical jargon. Now, nothing in literary criticism is more difficult than to steer clear of jargon; it is a jargon not only of phrases but of the whole attitude that we have to avoid, if we are to keep the mind free and open, to think freshly, and not to become enmeshed in stale shibboleths. Literary criticism is responsible for more loose thinking than any other form of intellectual activity; the two words I used just now, Classical and Romantic, may stand as instances of what I mean. We all respond vaguely when these words are uttered, we contort our minds into a certain shape, getting them ready for what we are to hear next, but I doubt whether many of us, under pressure, could come forward with any very exact definition. And this is wrong. We ought not to be content to use words, and to think in terms that we are not prepared to probe to the last recesses of their significance. But such is the nature of literary or indeed any aesthetic criticism that we have constantly to call our minds back from wandering away into the mists of abstraction, the swamps of pseudo-scientific terminology; to get our feet on to firm ground, and discipline our unruly vocabulary into monosyllabic words of good concrete meaning. What have we, then, in mind when we so glibly speak of the modern spirit? Are we quite sure that any such thing exists? And if we come to the conclusion that it does exist, by what characteristics are we to define and recognise it? These are the questions which I have set myself to answer, and to consider further to what developments in poetry such a spirit may be expected to lead.

  For my own part, I am one of those who believe that no innovation is quite so startling as it appears to its own contemporary generation, and that all poetry, at one time, went under the probably rather scornful designation of “modern.” I believe, for instance, that Donne must have surprised his contemporaries just as much as Mr. Eliot, let us say, surprises us; but to us Donne wears a definitely seventeenth-century air, as the portraits in a picture-gallery have what we would call an Elizabethan face, or a Georgian face, though by what means we are so certain of our chronology we could not very easily tell. It is a question of perspective, of getting sufficiently far away. I believe that poetry is a continuous stream, rather than a series of lakes connected only by a tenuous trickle, or by a cataract which we call Blake, or Mallarmé, or Walt Whitman, as the case may be. A stream with windings certainly, flowing through various landscapes: now past broad lawns and Palladian mansions, now through dark ravines overhung by ruined castles and ivy-mantled towers, now widening out again between calm pastures, but always the same stream, though fed by many tributaries. This is probably only another way of expressing a belief in action or reaction, the swing of the pendulum, the positive & the negative, or whatever term we may choose for the sake of convenience, and to go further into the situation would involve an examination into the old dispute as to what poetry really is, in what quality and degree it differs from prose, even so-called poetic prose, an examination for which we have no time, even though they would not be wholly irrelevant to the purpose of my argument and inquiry. I am assuming, therefore, that we are more or less agreed upon the nature of poetry—that we speak in fact, the same language when we speak of poetry—and I am assuming also, as the very title of my essay indicates, that we are to work on the assumption that poetry has some future before it, a point upon which opinion does not appear to be always unanimous. But it must be admitted from the start that the field of poetry has recently been so much enlarged that we are now compelled to recognise as poetry—or at least as subjects which the poets themselves deem proper material for the exercise of their craft—many regions of human experience, many subtleties of human perception, which would have caused our forefathers to shudder and to exclaim. We have come to recognise that no subject is, in itself, more “poetic” than any other subject and that to talk about the province of poetry is nonsense.

  No subject, however rough, however slight, however common, and above all however intellectualised, is to be rejected; all is to be grist to the poetic mill. This, I think is one of the first differences to be observed; one of the first, and perhaps one of the best, one of the best, I mean, in the sense of being one of the most enriching; and if we are to regard poetry as a living thing, as a growing thing, and not as a mere hobby for the student and the dilettante, we cannot do otherwise than welcome any tendency to push back the frontiers of the poet’s estate, to vary the landscape though which the stream of poetry flows. It must however be confessed that what we have gained upon the one count we have lost upon another. I am not now speaking of what many people consider the loss to poetic diction; not of the uncouth phraseology and halting metres which grate upon so many ears. Of diction—that is to say, of the surface texture of modern poetry—I shall have to speak presently, though briefly; what I am most concerned with is something far more fundamental; it is the very stuff out of which that poetry is to be made. Against our gain must be set a loss. It is true that many humbler and many subtler aspects of life now find their expression in poetry, but there is one aspect which is, today, entirely omitted, and that is, unfortunately, the aspect which has given us, in the past, the noblest poetry of our language. It is impossible to imagine, even after allowing for changes of diction, a Gray’s “Elegy” or an “Ode on the Intimation of Immortality,” still less an “Excursion” or a Paradise Lost, as the product of the early twentieth century. It may be argued that we have no great poetry today because we have no great poets; that is a perfectly definable argument. Still, I do not believe that even a great poet, were one to arise, could or would move upon the plane or breathe the air of Milton and of Wordsworth. This is simply another way of saying that sublimity has gone out of fashion. Or I might say, again, that we have no passion because we have no convictions. And it is very difficult to see what is to take the place of that passion which in the past, and according to the temperament of the writer, has clothed itself in the garments of reverence, awe, and faith. We have nothing b
ut doubt and uncertainty, both negative forces; and above all we have, overdeveloped, that destructive sense of proportion—destructive to poetry, I mean—which we are pleased to call our sense of humour. It has been frequently suggested of late, indeed, that science might provide some material for poetry, but although this idea seems plausible and fertile enough at first sign, on second thought it is apparent that it represents only a very journalistic conception. I allude to it, and to the fact that such a suggestion has been made, merely to support my contention that something, some constructive meaning, some ideal, if you like to call it that, is lacking in the poetry of today, and that the critics have felt the lack of it, and are casting round for something which may take the place of the quality which I have characterised as reverence, awe, and faith. And when I say faith, I do not, necessarily, mean a religious faith; I mean what I can only call passion, that sense that some things are more important than other things and by that I do not mean, again, the fine frenzy, but a quieter, deeper thing, which is unaffected by our sense of humour, and expresses itself without the deterrent fear of ridicule.