Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  One evening he said that he would like to ask me a favour. He had no friends and no relations, he said, and the only thing that bothered him was the disposal of his manuscripts after he was dead. He had thought of consigning them all to a literary agency, but that seemed an insecure thing to do, for who could guarantee that any literary agency would find him a publisher? Poetry did not pay—he knew that—and he feared that the eventual fate of his poems might be the waste-paper basket. On the one hand, you see, he was curiously sane. On the other, he was absolutely confident that in, say, a hundred years’ time he would be recognized as the head of English song. He made a possible exception in favour of Shakespeare, but admitted no other rivals. If, that is to say, he had his chance, and that must be my business. In short, he asked me to act as his literary executor.

  Of course, I accepted. No one could have refused him, and I was, as you may imagine, consumed with the desire to read these poems of which I had heard so much. Often though I urged him, he would never show me a line, but putting on an expression at once arrogant and secretive, would reply: “All in good time! You’ll see, you’ll see.”

  It was on a morning in early May that a fisher boy came breathlessly to find me, saying that the Englishman had died during the night: would I please come at once? I had never before penetrated into Lambarde’s lodging, and it was with an uncomfortable sense of intrusion that I mounted the rickety stairs and stood upon the threshold of his room. I had not expected to find him surrounded by many possessions, but neither had I been prepared for such utter barrenness and poverty. He himself lay upon, not in, the bed, dressed as usual in his faded shirt and trousers, as though he had flung himself down in the last fatal access of coughing—for the sheets and counterpane were stained with a deeper flood than ever had been stained his pitiable handkerchief. One glance round gave me the complete inventory of the room. A pair of brushes, a comb, a razor; a bunch of wild jonquils stuck in a bottle, some shoes, a few books, mostly tattered. That was all I could see. But there were papers everywhere strewn over the bed, over the one table, and even over the floor—separate sheets of foolscap, some closely covered, some scrawled with but a single line, tossed aside, blown by the breeze into some neglected corner. His landlady, who had followed me upstairs, doubtless thought that she read criticism in my glance.

  He would never allow her to tidy, she said; sometimes for weeks together he had locked the door and she had been unable to enter his room; and once, when she had ventured to pick up some of his papers and place them on the table, he had flown into the most terrible rage, so that she thought he would expire on the spot. It was comprehensible, she said, with the Latin peasant’s understanding of the artist: the poor young man was a poet, and poets were cursed with that kind of temperament; one could not expect a stag to browse mildly like a cow. And she looked at him, lying upon the bed, with a compassion that forgave him all his trespasses.

  But now he could prevent nobody from picking up his papers and arranging them on the table. It was, indeed, precisely what he had asked me to do, yet I did it with a sense of guilt, induced, no doubt, by my own knowledge of my own curiosity. Outwardly I was executing the wishes of a dead compatriot: in reality, I was gratifying the meanest of our instincts. Yet why should I blacken myself unduly? I love letters, I respect genius; I had lent a sympathetic ear to an unknown poet for weeks past; I had upset all my plans on his account. It was only fair that I should have my reward.

  And yet, I swear, it wasn’t only my reward that I thought of—the reward of discovering a new master of English verse. I honestly wanted to do my best by that proud, lonely, flaming creature who had lived for nothing but his art.

  I persuaded the good wife to leave me, and, alone with the dead man, I fell to my task. You must believe me when I say that I have seldom been more excited. At first I was puzzled, for many of the writings were so exceedingly fragmentary; there were scraps of scenes from plays, whose characters bore names in the Elizabethan tradition—Baldassare, Mercurio, and the like; there were a few verses of what appeared to be a ballad; there were some ribald addresses to Chloe and Dorinda; there was the beginning of a contemplative poem on solitude. I fancied from all these that he had been practising his hand at the art of parody, for he had hit off the Elizabethan manner exactly, and the manner of the ballads, and of the Restoration, and of the early nineteenth century. Whatever else he had been, he was certainly a skilful parodist; I was sure that I had read something very like his play-scenes in some minor work of Kyd or Shirley, I couldn’t remember which. But I turned over his poor papers impatiently, in the hope of coming on one of those poems of which he had said to me, “Lord! I’m tired, but I did something good today, something really first class. I’m pleased.”

  And I found them. I found the really first-class things. He was quite right: they really were first class. He had taken an enormous amount of trouble, putting his pencil through word after word, until he got exactly the word he wanted. That was the extraordinary thing: the amount of trouble he had taken in his search for perfection, carving each phrase laboriously from his brain, working it out like a puzzle; I could imagine him sitting there at that same table, concentrated, rapt, dissatisfied at first, and finally triumphant; I could imagine him springing up at last with a cry of triumph and pacing about the room declaiming the magnificent stanzas to himself. It had been a terrific effort, but he had always got it right in the end.

  One of his first drafts ran thus:

  Fair star! I would I were as faithful as thou art,

  Not in sole glory piercing through the night,

  But watching with unsleeping lids apart

  eremite

  The restless ocean at its patient task

  Of slow erosion round earth’s aged shores.

  The pencil had been dashed through the last two lines, and he had substituted with scarcely a check:

  The moving waters at their priest-like task

  Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.

  Yes, I thought, no wonder he was pleased with that; no wonder he had come down to the café to tell me had had done something really good!

  And there were other passages which had worried him considerably:

  But after me I seem to hear

  The wheels of Time near

  A fiery spirit? bright and swift

  The Earth like Danae

  Like Danae the Earth

  Under the stars the Earth like Danae lies.

  But he had got that right, too, nearly the whole of it; except one line, for which he had left a blank.

  I sat back and stared at his papers. What had gone wrong in that poor muddled brain? What fantastic trick had memory played upon him? I remembered how he had told me that he had quite given up reading the poets now, “for fear of being influenced,” though he had read them extensively as a boy. Influenced, indeed! the irony of it!

  And yet, you know, I still maintain that a poet was lost in him. I found among his papers one sonnet, which, with the obvious though partial exception of the first line, I have so far been unable to trace to anybody else. It is not the kind of poetry which brought him downstairs to tell me that he had done something “really good”; it is, indeed, only a sonnet of a type which could be turned out in dozens by any competent rhymester, soaked in the conventions of English literature; the octet may pass muster, but the sextet is poor, as though scribbled down in a hurry; and probably I exaggerate the merit of the whole, being privy to the absolute truth which inspired it; but such as it is, it may very well stand as his epitaph:

  When I am gone, say only this of me:

  He scorned the laurels and the praise of men,

  Alien to fortune and to fame; but then

  Add this: he plunged with Thetis in the sea;

  Lay naked with Diana in the shade

  He knew what paths the wandering planets drew;

  He heard the music of the winds; he knew

  What songs the sirens sang; Arion played.
r />   Say this; no more; but when the shadows lengthen

  Across the greensward of your cloistered turf,

  Remember one who felt his sinews strengthen

  And tuned his hearing by the line of surf.

  One who, too proud, passed ease and comfort by,

  But learned from Rome and Hesiod how to die.

  “THE POETRY READING”

  One of the oddest documents in Vita’s own self-imagination, self-creation, and self-portraiture is the story called “The Poetry Reading,” written in June 1944 but never published, in which Vita pictures herself giving a lecture. A dynamic figure in her black dress with matching scarlet scarf and shoes, she shows herself making an immense impression on two sisters who have come to hear her read:

  Charlotte was also surveying Sackville-West; she saw the dark felt hat, the heavy cream lambskin coat, black dress, scarlet earrings, scarf, and shoes, yet apart from these externals the quality that held the audience and Charlotte in particular was not the beauty of the rather tired face, but its exceptional sincerity.

  Charlotte was interested in her personally, what did such a face reveal? So many things, almost everything that is save happiness; it was passionate, instantaneously receptive, sometimes childish, discontented, shy, imperious.

  Vita sees herself in extraordinary detail, as elegant, poised, humorous, and a bundle of other interesting qualities, which of course she was. She pictures herself as “remarkable” and courageous in the description that Dr. Watson hands Charlotte, along with one of her books: “‘This woman has that rare quality, courage; it breathes from every stroke of her pen.” And at the reading, she hears her own voice: “How clear, how luxurious, how rich”(!)

  The Vita who is pictured here is quite like the one we have learned to recognize, but it feels strange to be given the picture by the object of our gaze. Vita, both admiring and admired, was adventuresome to the extreme, in both her way of living and writing.

  “THE POETRY READING”

  The agitation in the Pringle household was such that the usually imperturbable black cat had found it necessary to arise from his accustomed place by Miss Amelia’s workbasket and stroll in a state of dazed dignity in and out of the legs of the dining room table; pausing occasionally, with a slight twitching of the right ear but an otherwise Oriental inscrutability when a tassel from the red plush tablecloth interfered with the undulation of his tail.

  Though his inherent pride would not allow him to flicker an eyelid in the direction of the equally perturbed canaries, it could be noted that the radius of his activities was sufficiently near his feathered companions to conclude that his thoughts must lie in that vicinity also. But the birds it seemed either from long custom or the excitement of the Misses Pringle appeared quite indifferent to the menace of Silas, and shafted like bright splashes of golden rain from one side of the cage to the other, giving forth bright trills of song.

  “It was most thoughtful of Dr. Watson to remember us, when there are so many people he could have given them to,” said Amelia Pringle, and her hand as she smoothed on the third finger of her grey cotton glove could be seen to tremble slightly. With two further fingers waiting to be enveloped, she paused and looked at the white printed card which lay on the dressing table next to her handkerchief sachet.

  “He is always thoughtful,” said Charlotte with equally warm emphasis and a half blush. Stepping down from the chair on which she had been standing to reach the hat box on top of the wardrobe, she unwrapped the contents of the box and placed one in each hand.

  Amelia was still fluttering with her gloves, this nervous tip-toe quality of hers gave a rustling atmosphere which infected the whole house as if it were a poplar tree battling against the wind; in features the two sisters were similar but Charlotte’s face was firmer, not having fallen into the timid disintegration of Amelia who was her senior by some nine years.

  The younger woman came nearer to the dressing table; she first tried on the grey straw hat and then decided in favour of the black straw trimmed with pink and black ribbon. She leaned a little forward towards the mirror and surveyed herself; the picture was not displeasing; her eyes held life and depth, and faint sparks of rebellion lurked in her soul.

  Amelia who was almost ready with her toilet caught her sister in this act of reflection and felt unreasonably irritated. In such moments she glimpsed a Charlotte which she had long hoped to erase.

  Amelia asked nothing more of life than to live peaceably with her sister whom she had mothered for so many years, and to whom she was inordinately if narrowly devoted. Affectionate, kindly, almost sexless, she found it difficult to imagine that this mode of existence might possibly have its limitations and insufficiencies; yet there were moments such as the present when her sister seemed to threaten such security by her unconscious individualism.

  “It makes you look far too young. We shall be late,” she added as her sister, still facing the mirror caught the brim of her hat in each hand and pulled it becomingly in an arch across her face; she looked down at her dress.

  “How shabby I am, it must be two years since I had a new dress. Amelia, perhaps if there’s time we can look at the shops at Victoria,” and then as if there was some connection between a new dress and the doctor she continued, “Dr. Watson said if he had time he would call in tonight to know how we shall have enjoyed ourselves this afternoon.”

  “Why there’s nothing the matter with it at all,” and Amelia fingered her sister’s dress and then her own. “I’ve had mine for over five years and it’s still as good as new.”

  “Oh but one grows so tired of the same old things, but we’ll see,” and she gave her rich infectious smile to Amelia, which left her little to say. Amelia moved about the room fussing a little over the hang of the curtains, and pushing the coat-hangers into position in the wardrobe.

  “He doesn’t seem to be bothering about his housekeeper leaving next month, has he told you what he intends to do?” and Amelia looked searchingly at her companion, but Charlotte appeared intent upon the two white cards that the Doctor had given them.

  “Sackville-West? It sounds so familiar yet I can’t think what I can have read of hers. Nice name isn’t it? Sounds powerful.”

  Amelia joined her and once again they both read the invitation cards.

  Royal Society of Literature

  The Annual Lecture on Poetry will be given by V. Sackville-West

  Her subject will be Wordsworth especially in relation to Modern Poetry.

  To the two rather quiet ladies this small pasteboard square represented a world which had scarcely ever been formulated within them, a place of delicacy and romance, of secrecy and great glamour.

  Amelia could not fail to be drawn by the compliment Dr. Watson had paid to their intelligence by given them the cards, but she had a slight suspicion that poetry and particularly poets were dangerous and not a little mad; she had her exceptions of course, she liked the stolidity of Tennyson, so safely folded within the swaddling clothes of Victorianism, this too applied to Wordsworth; she felt sure such men were good men, leaving an aura of gentle piety wherever they dwelt. How fortunate Dorothy Wordsworth was to possess and be in constant attendance on such an uplifting personage; she, Amelia, felt that if, only if, she had ever contemplated such a thing as matrimony then the worthy Alfred or William would have been the type selected by her.

  “I wonder what she’s like. If only he had brought these before we might have read up something,” and Charlotte picked up a book of Sackville-West’s poems and opened the page.

  But Amelia moved impatiently towards the staircase. “We really haven’t time.”

  Automatically her sister followed whispering the words she had just glimpsed, “The country habit has me by the heart.” Could anyone, she thought, have expressed more feelingly yet more simply that innate love of country life. She paused on the landing and looked down into their little Clapham garden with its margin of pink and lavender and dark flopping roses, but she o
nly half saw this little treasured spot; instead she seemed to see the woman who had the power to make other eyes see these things also.

  Amelia was calling Silas into the kitchen away from the birds; when she had shut the door and poked a finger into the canaries cage with a loving coo, she came into the hall.

  “To be an artist must surely be one of the loveliest things in the world,” said Charlotte dreamily.

  “Why?” and Amelia had opened the front door, seen a few lazy billows rolling over the very blue sky, and had picked up her umbrella.

  “It must be like having a religion, you impart something of value, of great value.”

  But Amelia was not particularly interested. She gave a final roll to the sleek coil of her umbrella as they walked down the street, and gave another glance to the one creamy cloud above her head as if she suspected it of following her. “It’s best to be on the safe side, you never can tell with this climate.”

  “Yes” and Charlotte gave an imperceptible touch to the book in her hand.

  “I don’t think we’ve ever seen a poet in the flesh before, have we?”

  “Yes we have, there was Mr. Coutes, the Vicar of St. Gilda, you remember, he always looked so poorly.”

  “And wrote poorly too I thought,” said Charlotte ironically.

  “He was a very good influence in the parish, the church was always crowded.”

  “Yes but only with a certain type, the sort that have to lean on something or other. He was such a blind egoist that he could always attract a crowd, but as for being a poet!” Charlotte’s sudden termination was eloquent.

  “I sometimes think you are too exacting, Charlotte, you should learn to accept without question.” Amelia had adopted the tone of correction which had impressed her younger sister so often.