Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live. That is a truism when said, but anything but a truism when daily observed. Nothing shows up the difference between the thing said or read, so much as the daily experience of it. The small green shoot appearing one day at the base of a plant one had feared dead brings a comfort and an encouragement for which the previous daily observance is responsible. The life principle has proved unconquerable, then, in spite of frost and winds? The powers of resistance against adversity are greater than we thought; the germ of life lies hidden even in the midst of apparent death. A cynic might contend that nothing depressed him more than this resoluteness to keep going; it depends on the angle from which you regard this gallant tenacity. For my own part I find a singular solace in the renewal and reality of even the most monotonous of natural processes; I welcome the youth of the new season, whether it comes with the first lambs to be born in a snowstorm or with the new buds of the hornbeam pushing the old brown leaves off the hedges. If you have a taste for such things, no amount of repetition can state them; they stand for permanence in a changing world.

  Country Speech

  How much one regrets that local turns of speech should be passing away. There was a freshness and realism about them which kept the language alive and can never be replaced. Imported into prose they become fossilised and affected, for accurately reported though they may be in those novels of rural life of which one grows so tired, the spontaneity and even the accent are lacking; imported into poetry, they instantly sound like the archaisms of a poetic convention. If I read the phrase, “The cattle do be biding in the meads,” it gives me no pleasure at all, but if a cowman says it to me (as he once actually did) it fills me with delight. I like also being informed that the rabbits are “interrupting” or “interfering with” the young trees; at least, I do not like the fact, but the way in which it is conveyed does much to mitigate my annoyance. I resent the mud less when I am told that the cows have “properly slubbed it up.” Then sometimes comes a proverbial ring: “He talks too much, talk and do never did lie down together.” I do not see where we are to find such refreshing imagery in the future, unless, indeed, we look to America where the genius of the vivid phrase still seems to abide.

  The Knitter

  I have a friend who knits. She sits on the floor, the firelight glancing on her hair, her tartan scarf thrown over her shoulders. She and the wide brick fireplace and the clicking needles and the balls of wool heaped on the floor beside her would compose a complete Dutch-school picture, were it not for the tartan scarf which suggests a crofter’s cottage. She, oblivious of such objective considerations, continues to knit. She does not care whether she looks Dutch or Scottish; whether she fits into the tiled interior rosy as a pippin, or into the shieling. Nor do I care either. All that I know is that whenever she condescends to visit me, she, with her scarf and her wools, adds colour to the warm evening hour, when it has grown too dark to go out and one sits over the fire and talks.

  Talks.… There is the snag. One cannot, I find, talk to a knitter. Conversation may seem to be going in that greased, easy way essential to all good conversation; starting hares [broaching topics] too lavishly to follow them up; allowing pauses for rumination; bursts for sudden eagerness in digressions, returns, new departures, discoveries of rooted creeds or new ideas—sooner or later the challenge is bound to come: “Don’t you agree?” or “What do you think?” “Yes?” says the knitter, startled but polite, “seventy-five, seventy-six—just a moment till I get to the end of my row—seventy-seven, seventy-eight—yes,” she says, looking up brightly, “it’s all right now. What were you saying?” But of course one has forgotten or no longer cares.

  All the same, everyone who wants to add a coloured domestic touch to that pleasant idle hour which comes between tea and dinner should engage a permanent knitter, dumb if necessary but ornamental. There is something soothing to the nerves about the monotony of the long needles travelling up and down the line; something satisfying to the eye about this primitive craft so closely allied to netting and weaving. A lace-maker rattling the bobbins on her pillow would make too much noise, and the whiteness of her work would jar too crudely on the hush and dimness of the room. The knitter with her wools, curled up beside the fire, is precisely what is needed. So long as you do not expect her to talk.

  Small but Vigorous

  Certain small animals seem to have been created with a fury of energy enough to do credit to any dictator. On another plane of life they might have accomplished anything. Luckily for humanity, they are limited by their size to relatively harmless activities. One of them, indeed, the common shrew, which may be heard squeaking either with excitement or temper in the long grasses, is one of the smallest mammals in existence, but his minute framework in no way limits the ardour with which he sets about his business. This business is usually concerned with the obtaining of food, for the shrew is one of those unfortunate creatures who must eat continuously and enormously. It is not so much that he is greedy, as that if he neglects his appetite he simply dies. No wonder that he is in so desperate a hurry when he knows that his last meal must be followed by another one within the hour, and that his long nose must lose no time in smelling it out. Even at night he cannot rest, for he cannot stoke himself up for the hours of darkness with a particularly large and late dinner: he is so constituted that he must eat often. Six times his own weight in food will see him safely round the clock, but any deprivation or delay will soon reduce him to a pathetic little corpse. If you have the time and inclination to spend most of the day hunting for worms and insects, you may keep a tame shrew and impress your friends by the readiness with which he will snatch food from your hand, but be under no delusion: this is not because he loves or trusts you, it is merely his extreme urgency leaving no room for fear.

  Another hearty eater who is afflicted with a similarly precipitate temperament is that bane of gardeners, the mole. Larger and heavier than the shrew, he still demands at least the equivalent of his own weight in food each day. But consider the exercise he takes, and the violence he displays in taking it. It is enough to make anybody hungry. Semi-blind as he is, we might expect him to go about his work half-heartedly as a sluggard, but on the contrary he rushes at it as though a troop of devils were after him. Digging furiously, his track may often be watched rising in weals and mounds across the newly-raked seedbed, tracing his progress underground. Physically the little miner is beautifully adapted for his curious mode of life; his front paws are amazingly strong and provided with sharp claws and an extra bone; his ears non-existent though his whole body is, one might say, an ear; his eyes so deeply buried in his fur that they can come to no harm while he tunnels; his fur so disposed that there is no “wrong way” in which it can be brushed up, a very useful asset when its owner may have to retire backwards along a narrow passage. His teeth are sharp and numerous, as you will learn if you attempt to pick him up; his nose pointed and well-designed for use as a kind of trowel; in fact, the only weak point in his whole equipment lies in the fact that he dies immediately from a rap on that useful snout.

  Eclipse

  Many, if not most, people must have observed how frequently happenings occur in series. There exists a superstition that things happen in threes—you break one object and then immediately break two others, although you may not have broken anything for years. I do not know on what ground this superstition is based, but although I try (unsuccessfully) not to be superstitious, there are still certain beliefs to which I pay attention. One of those beliefs, corroborated by experience, is that although for weeks and even months one’s own personal life may have remained uneventful, it will suddenly and without warning produce event after event, all in a rush, all in one day. That these events should be on a big scale or small does not affect the question. The point is that a number of things happen suddenly within twenty-four hours. Doves enter the window at dawn and sit cooing on the window-si
ll; a girl gets engaged; a boy gets a job; one hears the cuckoo for the first time this spring; the swans lay eggs; two partridges are discovered to be nesting in the orchard; eighteen bantam chicks hatch out; green woodpeckers carve a hole in an apple-tree; a puppy chews the Greek tortoise, and the sun goes into eclipse.

  A busy day for those who enjoy a quiet life.

  The sun went gently, not dramatically, into his eclipse. There was none of that darkened drama which attends the total phenomenon. The sun merely crept, rather cautiously on this occasion, behind the moon’s shadow for three-quarters of an hour, allowing his sinking majesty to be impaired by no more than a bite out of a schoolboy’s slice of bread-and-butter or the Mad Hatter’s out of his teacup. It was not an impressive eclipse, as eclipses go. But even a partial eclipse, I discovered, may offer unexpected effects. I was thankful that unlike the Chilcotin Indians I need not feel obliged to tuck up my robes and, leaning on a stave, walk round in circles until the sun was once more in safety. I was thankful that I might squint simply through a smoked glass, standing outside the kitchen door, sharing the glass with other members of my small household. We passed it from hand to hand, from eye to eye. Looking westward at the sinking bitten sun, other objects came strangely into our darkened view: a flowering tree of red prunus, transmuted into a tree of a sinister loveliness unknown to any earthly botanist; and Kentish oast-houses coming into the small dark picture too—those oast-houses which always suggest witches’ hats even in ordinary daylight, but which seen through a smoked glass with an eclipse of the sun going on behind them take on an alarmingly Sabbatical character. The visiting moon did indeed leave something remarkable that day.

  May

  At this season of the year, when so much in nature happens so quickly, I find it difficult to keep my head. I surmise that such a phrase may read as an affectation; yet I protest with all my sincerity that I do try to set down on paper as simply and directly as possible the feelings by which I am moved. It is a hard thing to do; hard not to appear either exaggerated or mawkish, precious or inexact. It is very difficult indeed to write about nature and the natural processes without getting bogged in morasses of sentimental language. It is difficult for any honest writer to express his feelings in a way which will convince himself, let alone his readers, of his original sincerity; and if it is hard enough to be starkly honest towards ourselves even in our own private thoughts, to arrive without embellishment or gloss at what we really mean, the writer alone knows how far harder it is to be faithful on paper. Something comes between the writer and his pen; the passionate feeling, the urgency to record, emerge as a blob of ink, a smudge, a decoration. As Orlando discovered, green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Thus if I set down that I have today seen apple-blossom strewn by wind on grass, I am stating a fact, and if I should happen to re-read my own words in future years (which is unlikely) they will probably recall that vision, as fresh and bright in memory as on that morning in the month of May. If, on the other hand, I start to expand my statement, in the hope of evoking a similar vision in the mind’s eye of another, I shall immediately find myself drawn into semi-falsities, into truth wrapped round with untruth; I shall immediately begin to search for what the apple-blossom was like. I shall find confetti or snowflakes as a convenient comparison; I shall hit on the word shell-pink to express the delicacy, the papery delicacy of the scattered petals; I shall begin to “write”; but really, if I can be sufficiently severe with myself, I shall put my pen through all those blobs of ink, those wordy words, and cut myself back to the short phrase about apple-blossom strewn by wind on grass. It ought to be evocative enough, without amplification; but such is the impuissance of the human mind that it requires expansion before the experience of one person can be communicated to another. Or, at any rate, it requires a magic which mere prose is unable to provide. This is where poetry comes in; where poetry is, or should be, so far more evocative, more suggestive, than prose. Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time. Writing, is indeed a strange and difficult profession.

  Gardeners

  Gardens have behaved in an extraordinary way this year (1938). Looking back upon my garden-diary, I find that on January 26th the blue primroses were in full flower, thus preceding their ordinary flowering period by about two months. Primroses, even the blue ones, have no right to start flowering in profusion until March or April. Then, on March 9th I find a note saying “all primroses flowering in earnest,” and towards the end of the month another note to the effect that the garden appears to have gone mad, and that the pink clematis montana is out in company with tulips, hyacinths, anemones, and even a few of the flag irises. By April 1st we were eating asparagus from the open; by Easter I was picking roses. But there is no need to go on with the tale. Everyone knows that gardeners invariably say the season has been exceptional, only this year it happens to be true.

  I find gardeners disconcerting people. Either they know infinitely more about the subject than I do, or else they know infinitely less. Seldom do I encounter one with whom I can discuss our common topic on equal terms. The gardener who knows more is impossibly highbrow, and makes me feel as small as a board-school child trying to discuss mediaeval Latin literature with, say, Miss Helen Waddell; the gardener who knows less makes me feel as though an earnest culture enthusiast said: “Do tell me something about The Shropshire Lad; it’s a play, I know, but I’ve never seen it.” This, by analogy, is what happens when somebody points to a delphinium and says “How they have improved lupins recently, haven’t they?” How should one reply? To correct the speaker sounds patronising; to pass over the slip in silence destroys the possibility of further comment.

  The Kentish Landscape

  At the moment of writing these words, Kent is looking absurdly like itself. Cherry, plum, pear, and thorn whiten the orchards and the hedgerows; lambs frolic; the banks are full of violets and primroses; the whole landscape displays itself as an epitome of everything fresh and innocent which has drawn ridicule upon the so-called school of Georgian poets. It is a simple delight which pleases everyone, from the unsophisticated to the sophisticated. Why affect to despise it? Year after year I enjoy it more, and reflect with pride that my own county offers a fair presentment of the English scene to the foreigner travelling in his Pullman between Dover and London.

  He, of course, cannot know it as we know it, though on his way up to London he is accorded a generous glimpse of the valleys of the Beult and the Medway. He sees the orchards and the hop-gardens; orchards he has seen before in his own Normandy, but the hop-gardens strike him as very peculiar and individual, opening and shutting as they do while the train flashes past. If he does not already know what they are, he is reduced to asking an obliging stranger for the explanation. Those tall bare poles, that elaborately knotted string, those ploughed acres—what does it all mean? The explanation is forthcoming: it is English beer. Of course: this is Kent. He looks out again with renewed interest, he remembers that this is called the garden of England.

  Then his train slides into London, and he forgets about Kent.

  But we, who live in Kent, do not forget about it and have no wish to do so. Intimately, not dramatically, it unfolds itself month by month. There are other landscapes more sensational, more romantic, more picturesque. This is a countryside which needs knowing. It needs a close and loving knowledge of the woods, the lanes, the villages, the changes of light, and the lost places. It needs, perhaps, a spirit far removed from the speed and competition of modern life to know and love it completely. One must be satisfied with small and subtle things. One must have time to absorb. Otherwise one is in very much the same position as the man in the train, flashing through, registering merely the passing comment: “Very pretty, yes, very pretty indeed.”

  Living here, we realise more than the prettiness, the tenderness, the intimacy, we realise also the variety which can be ours for a little trouble. I wonder what picture the word
“Kent” evokes most readily in the minds of its lovers. For one of us, it will be acres and acres of blossoming trees; for another, the short sunny slopes of the chalk hills; for another, the wide skies and lush meadows of Romney Marsh; for another, the seacoasts; for another, a bluebell wood and the sunlight falling through the young green of the beeches. There are the slow streams and the stone bridges, composing exquisitely with the tower of the village church-beyond. There are the villages themselves, many as yet unravished—Yalding, Smarden, Chiddingstone, Brenchley; the little towns which preserve their charm and dignity such as Tenterden with its wide main street and the decency of its small Georgian houses, Cranbrook rocketing up and down hill, crowned by the white windmill and its noble sails. There are the dens and the hursts, with the miles of pleasant country in between, and the pink cottages tucked into odd corners, bright as a painter’s palette with their jumble of flowers. All this is Kent, and all indubitably English.