Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  “Perhaps you’re right,” replied Charlotte, feeling vaguely troubled and lonely, for Amelia seemed to be of one complete pattern—so free from doubt or desire—whereas Charlotte was unsettled and constantly torn between loyalty and genuine love for her sister and other restless qualities which Amelia refused to recognize or comprehend.

  When comfortably settled on the bus, each opened their book, Amelia her Wordsworth and Charlotte the poems that Dr. Watson had given her that day. She remembered his words as he put the gift into her hands, pressing her finger tips. “This woman has that rare quality, courage; it breathes from every stroke of her pen.” Why had his words seemed so significant? Why had he looked at her so intently, so eagerly? And why had she avoided him? But Charlotte was confused and did not wish to think clearly, it was too difficult; she concentrated on the book, opening it at a chance page she read—

  “What have I gathered, packed into old bales

  Stuffed into chests, or dusty on my shelves?”

  She allowed her arms to fall limply against her body, she read no more. What conspiracy was afoot today, that everything seemed directed at her own tentativeness.

  “What have I gathered?” Yes what indeed have I gathered, she thought with unaccustomed bitterness. I am thirty-six and all I have acquired is a reflection of my sister, a fusing of her mentality with my own, so that I never think separately, never act separately. I deliberately obliterate my own life so that it will comply with hers. As she continued with such thoughts her qualms were many. She seemed to be tearing up so much that was inrooted, it almost hurt; she felt she could not let such thoughts continue or ripen—where would it lead? There was Amelia that grey gloved finger placed upon the pages.

  “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,

  The holy time is quiet as a Nun.”

  How serene the poems, how serene Amelia; her very breathing gentle and even bespoke her whole character; grey gloves, grey dress, grey mind; then the guilt of such criticism fell like a flood upon poor Charlotte, she was glad they had reached their destination.

  “I wonder if Mr. Coutes ever recovered; they nearly always have poor health, these poetical persons, I mean I suppose it is that they don’t eat the proper foods,” said Amelia when they had alighted at the terminus.

  “I don’t suppose they let such things bother them,” replied Charlotte carelessly.

  “But they should that’s the trouble, a little more discipline and diet and they would probably have lived to a proper age,” came the emphatic reply.

  “They didn’t all die young,” said Charlotte with amusement. “In any case perhaps they didn’t wish to live to a ripe old age.”

  “Charlotte! How wicked! no one should wish their death. God was merciful enough to give us life, we should be grateful.”

  Exercising great tact Charlotte discontinued the discussion. “Do let us stop,” and she took hold of Amelia’s arm and drew her towards a shop window in which was a display of dresses. “I love the red one, isn’t it a lovely shade?”

  “It would be all right on a young person, now that’s nice, and very much more serviceable,” and she pointed to a navy blue dress in the far corner of the window.

  “Yes I suppose it would be,” said Charlotte. “If not today perhaps some other time I can try them on.”

  “I do think you’re extravagant,” said Amelia, determined to have the last word on the subject.

  “You must take care of that, it would show such ingratitude to give him back a soiled book,” she said later when they were on their way to Bloomsbury Square.

  “But he doesn’t want it returned,” came the quiet reply.

  “You mean he’s given it to you?” Amelia was astonished.

  Charlotte merely nodded and remarked upon the passing traffic, but silence came between the two sisters, the silence of separateness.

  Nearing the lecture hall, however, they were drawn together by common excitement and were faintly relieved to see the commonplace building in the now dilapidated square where only a few large leafy trees appeared to show any evidence of freshness.

  Charlotte remarked to herself how like the visitors were to Amelia, rather wrinkled, colourless, but no doubt infinitely wise. Could any of these be her poet? And she smiled inwardly at the thought of how she had already adopted Sackville-West as someone not remote like Milton or Homer or Dante, lofty and somewhat removed from the variety of complexes that seemed to be her experience of human natures, but she thought of her poet as primarily a human being, vivid, effulgent and quite universal.

  By now they had entered the building. A quiet voice and hand indicated the direction they must follow up the wide circular staircases and further kindly verger-like forms ushered them into the hall.

  “We’d better not sit too near the front,” said Amelia in her most timid state.

  “Will this do?” and they edged their way into two center seats halfway down the small panelled room. When settled, they looked around. Amelia began to regain confidence for the atmosphere was warmly parochial. Age and modification was strictly in evidence for no apparent reason. Charlotte was reminded of her sister’s bedroom with its faint but perpetual odour of lavender and mothballs; and then she looked at the numerous photographs upon the walls. How similar they were to the occupiers of the seats. It might almost have been that at some former occasion the visitors had merely left their imprints upon those walls. She studied the portraits with mixed feelings, for however aware one might be of the restrictions of the Victorian and early Edwardian periods there was an integrity in those faces that the present age for all its emancipation could never produce; stodgy they might be but nevertheless disciplined and somehow refreshing in their purposefulness. Now, it is true, reflected Charlotte, we are emancipated but to what ends are we travelling when God himself seems to be an anachronism?

  Her meditations were interrupted, however, by two visitors who were standing in the doorways: one a short rather insignificant woman in green and beside her a tall remarkable person in black and scarlet; Charlotte knew at once that this was the person she was waiting to hear.

  “That is she,” she exclaimed involuntarily to her sister.

  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.

  They watched her take a seat beside her friend in the audience.

  “Perhaps it isn’t her, she hasn’t gone to the front,” said Amelia.

  “Oh but it is,” came Charlotte’s voice of certainty in response to her sister’s whisper.

  The hall by now was almost full. Many glances were passed towards the woman in black and scarlet; the chairman had entered and she rose with a word to the friend beside her and a few remarks to several people in the audience and then made her way to the platform.

  “I wonder who the friend is, they seem to understand each other rather well?”—and Charlotte glanced at the woman in green who was intent upon the poet. “I should think she was devoted to her,” and the younger sister did not care especially whether this half soliloquy was understood or not.

  The chairman opened the lecture with a charming and most complimentary speech in which he declared that he had heard the poet eighteen years before in that same hall and could still remember every detail of her dress.

  “I’m not surprised,” thought Charlotte with genuine affection and reverence for Sackville-West. This speech, flattering as it was, seemed a trifle too long, it being a common error of chairmen to mistake themselves for the lecturer.

  Then the poet herself arose amid great a
pplause and from that moment, fidgeting ceased, a leaf could be heard to drop from the elm tree in the square, and Amelia’s nervous fingers omitted to pinch the opposite fingertips of her glove.

  How clear, how luxurious was the voice now speaking. It held the richness of long matured wine, yet there was no hesitancy either in the delivery or in the content. Though the speech was written, the speaker had that fortunate faculty of giving the merest glance at the page upon the lectern, and with head raised and in the easy eloquence that springs from the most natural yet most profound truths she continued to absorb her audience.

  Charlotte was but one of the many who said within themselves, “Ah, that’s what I have always thought but never been able to express.”

  “I think Dorothy must have been something of a bore.”

  “I have a theory that if Wordsworth had lived at the present time he would have been a greater poet, for he was the victim of an age which was superficially moral.”

  “William must have been tiresomely dictatorial.”

  Oh how startling, how deliciously refreshing were such words, such views. Charlotte was delighted, more delighted than she could ever remember. She felt like a bird who suddenly sees the door of its cage wide open and infinite regions of space lying ahead.

  Every word that came from the lips of this woman was born of supreme divine independence; she seemed to dwarf all the listeners. Charlotte had difficulty in maintaining her accustomed calm; she wanted to shout her freedom. Oh how little Amelia now seemed, she who had been a fortress hiding the light and the truth. Then she forget herself in listening again to the speaker. Someone at the back of the hall was laughing heartily at the subtle references to William’s periodic disappearances and his corresponding silences upon such excursions, and a woman seated in front of the two sisters nodded approval to the friend beside her at almost every third word of the lecturer’s until she, the nodding woman, became as automatic as a clockwork figure.

  Then the full weight of applause broke … even Amelia took off her gloves so that it could resound the more. On it went, delivered with that fervour so rare yet so delicious in an English audience. Sackville-West was partially hidden from view as she sat down behind the lectern, but Charlotte watched closely and with ever increasing devotion that elusive face now transfused with a certain pleasure.

  Then the younger sister looked again at the woman in green and was reminded anew of the absorption in this particular face for the woman who had just been speaking.

  With regret they found the lecture was finally concluded, the crowd was dispersing and hung in clusters by the doorway.

  Sackville-West was talking animatedly with innumerable admirers and signing autographs and often being completely obscured from view by such persons. Once Charlotte noticed she gave one brief yet curiously intense glance at the friend in green who seemed to be apart from the enthusiasts.

  “I’m so very glad we came, she seems so human, doesn’t she,” said Amelia, giving a last glance at the poet as they moved away.

  “I wish I knew her,” said Charlotte.

  “Why don’t you ask for an autograph?” and Amelia was surprised at her own audacity.

  “No, that sort of thing doesn’t interest me.”

  The sky being clear and the sun brightening the thronged streets, the two sisters walked to Victoria.

  Charlotte was once more looking at the red dress. “If it fits me I shall have it,” she said with such unusual conviction that Amelia could not easily find the correct phrase.

  “When do you think you will have an occasion to wear a scarlet dress,” said she with sufficient acidity as they entered the store.

  “When I marry Dr. Watson.”

  “Charlotte!” said the horrified Amelia.

  PART VIII

  NOVELS

  The two works excerpted (Challenge, All Passion Spent) and the one given complete (Seducers in Ecuador) are of such importance within Vita Sackville-West’s oeuvre that they seem to warrant star billing: Challenge for its picture of Vita as a romantic young man, All Passion Spent for its message about the independence of women and the importance of their careers, and Seducers in Ecuador for its modernist style, theme, and realization.

  FROM CHALLENGE (1924)

  Written between May 1918 and November 1919, published in America in 1924 and in England finally in 1976, Challenge has a background and a publishing history as interesting as the novel itself. Since it is impossible to find now, it has seemed fully worth reprinting much of it in this volume—the last part by far the most crucial to the story and to the Vita and Violet Trefusis story as well.

  The first paperback publication of Vita’s second novel appeared in the United States in 1975 with little fanfare save that which its cover blurbs attempted to create. Its front cover pictures, in a languorous semi-reclining position, an elegantly dressed woman in a Chinese jacket and long silk frock, looking up and back over her shoulder at a demure woman in a drab gown with her hand under her chin. A rich tapestry serves as a proximate backdrop; the women are framed by an Oriental screen and a yet taller gilt-framed painting behind—the entire cover hints at layer upon layer of rich meaning. Directly under the title and the author’s name we read: “Her famed, long-suppressed novel of consuming love and reckless passion.” Suppressed, says the explanatory text on the back cover, because it told the truth about her “illicit love affair with Violet Keppel, the childhood friend for whose sake she was prepared to outrage convention by abandoning her husband Harold Nicolson, her family, and all that England meant to her.” It continues with a quotation from Nigel Nicolson’s foreword: “Seldom can a novelist have expressed so clearly, in the different characters of her hero and heroine, her conception of the capacity of the human spirit.”

  Initially it was not a single-authored text, for the two lovers, Vita and Violet Keppel (Trefusis), herself an accomplished writer, intended to write the novel together. In fact, Vita wrote it with Violet’s input. Upon examination of the manuscript it becomes clear that very few substantial changes were made, and that the style is pure Vita in its effusiveness. B. M., Vita’s mother, was firm about the novel’s not appearing—in order not to embarrass the family—and Vita ultimately capitulated to her demands, halting publication despite her own anger and dismay.

  The original manuscript of the novel is dedicated to Violet, but for the 1924 publication Vita thinly veiled this dedication by substituting a quotation in the Romany language—bearing out Vita’s gypsy longings—from George Borrow’s novel The Zimbali: “This book is yours, honored witch. If you read it, you will find your tormented soul changed and free.” The dark male hero, Julian, is presented first as a “tall, loose-limbed boy, untidy, graceful.… A single leap might carry him at any moment out of the room in which his presence seemed so incongruous” (p. 20). The women look at him with interest, the tall mirrors reflect the candles and the group of guests, and the one figure all eyes are concentrated upon is, of course, Julian, Vita’s alter ego, not much disguised. He is bound up in politics and adored by the feminine other, Eve—Violet herself. Vita, in her escapades with Violet, called herself Julian, darkened her skin, donned men’s clothers, and wore a khaki bandage as a turban around her hair. Violet was called Eve (“Lushka or “L” in their letters, and Vita’s diary).

  So inspired by her very long, passionate, and celebrated love affair with the seductive Violet Trefusis, Challenge is a fruity, melodramatic, superheated work, continually out of print. This book is the poof that Vita, at this point and also later, was capable of writing very purple purple-prose. From the novel now named Challenge but which had other names—light ones like “Foam” and heavy ones like “Rebellion” and “Endeavour”—the last chapters are included. Here and throughout, Julian (Vita) and Eve (Violet) are often all atremble, as is the writing. In these pages Julian is dramatically and romantically torn between his love for his lovely cousin Eve—who does not want to marry him but wants to love in freedom with him—and his pas
sion for the Greek island of Aphros, where he is leading a revolution. These passions are, in his mind, both opposed to each other and confused with one another (“‘Eve,’ he murmured exultantly, ‘Aphros!’”). By his side, Eve’s opposite, the Greek Anastasia Kato, is pledged to the same revolutionary politics as Julian.

  The plot of Challenge revolves around an island, politics, and the doom of lovers. Julian loves Aphros, his island, from which he will refuse to be separated, except at the price of giving up his dreams, escaping, settling down in—horror of all horrors—marriage. He is in love with the gentle but strong Eve, who has been, until now, his partner in everything personal and political. The lovers have a boat waiting for them, and Julian is willing to give up his ideals, go to Athens, and even marry Eve, but she, terrified by that idea, only wants to dance madly with him in true gypsy fashion. Finally, he leaves with Anastasia Kato, doomed as they are for having failed in their revolution, not by their fault but by Eve’s betrayal. Eve will expiate the crime of not wanting to separate him from his fate by plunging herself into the dark waters, tied as absolutely to her fate as Julian is to his.

  The setting of Herakleion, with a political revolution raging over the nearby archipelago, lends local color with its Greek names and costuming, but serves mainly as a backdrop to the presentation of Julian, the dark diplomat, a romanticized version of Vita.

  Julian awakens from his passivity in the final chapter, when his passion overcomes his previous control. This is the antibourgeois point of the novel, completely in accord with the real Violet’s disparagement of everything societal and staid, and with her disdain for those elements that warred with the romanticism in Vita’s heart and life. Julian’s “rough head and angry eyes” match his erotically charged statements. “‘I shall break you,’ he says, like a man speaking to a wild young supple tree.” Eve, in her dime-store-novel-styled desire (“she wanted him for herself alone”) has waited for, schemed for, and battled for Julian. The gypsy melodies sweeping them up heighten the pitch of sacrifice: that of Julian’s love for his land (“you’d sacrifice Aphros to me?”) and that of betrayed faith (“where can one find fidelity?”) The rebellion has been betrayed, and Eve’s one-dimensional love of love is a betrayal also.