Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  And yet the very name cocker was specially applied to a spaniel small enough to penetrate the thick undergrowth where woodcock crouched concealed, and in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I was used to drive game and birds into nets. They are active little dogs, with nothing namby-pamby about them, in spite of a loving nature amounting to sentimentality. Their colour, according to taste, may be red, golden, tan, blue roan, black, or black and white, so there is plenty of variety to choose from.

  It is thought that the spaniel originated in Spain, and in the beginning of their recorded history, which goes back to 1387, they were all generically known as spaniels. It was not until 1790 that they began to be divided into separate varieties. After that we get so many types that the amateur may be forgiven for a failure to disentangle them. There is the English Springer, the Clumber, the Sussex, the Welsh Springer, the Irish Water and the Field Spaniel, which is really a larger version of the Cocker. The main difference seems to lie in the size and weight; the Field may weigh anything from 35 lb. to 50 lb., the little Cocker should not exceed 28.

  The solemn face in the illustration gives no idea of the cheerful disposition of one that is nicknamed the Merry Cocker. I believe also that they have a sense of humour; some dogs have. I once owned a golden cocker bitch and a cream Persian cat; the spaniel had puppies and the cat kittens at the same time, puppies and kittens being of exactly the same colour. The spaniel used to steal the kittens and deposit them amongst her own offspring, suckling them all indiscriminately, and I would swear that the little dog grinned up at me whenever I went to sort them out. I should add that the cat in her turn stole the puppies, but I was never able to discern the slightest trace of amusement on her face.

  The Great Dane

  Unlike the Dalmatian, the Great Dane may well come from the country which gives him his name, though he has also been claimed by Germany. This hugely alarming dog, like many large men, usually has the kindliest disposition; I feel sure he enjoyed carrying a lamp in his mouth ahead of benighted travellers, by his mere presence assuring them of their safety, as he was taught to do in the eighteenth century. He could also be sent back five or six miles to retrieve a forgotten parcel. These were among the services he was pleased to render.

  It seems scarcely necessary to say that he should be wisely handled from puppyhood, for an undisciplined or irritable Great Dane is a terrifying thought. Even an amiable one, anxious to please, provides some elements of peril. Too exuberant a display of affection will easily land you on the floor, and there is also the tail to be considered. It is long, and as hard as a piece of wood, and unlike a piece of wood it wags. Now this tail may get damaged if the dog is confined in too small a kennel, and so generally is this danger recognised that dog-shops supply a special tail-protector. In my admittedly limited experience of the breed, I have noticed that danger from the tail is as much to be taken into account as danger to the tail. One happy swoop across a low table, and off go all the tea-cups.

  Dear Brutus! the only Great Dane I ever intimately knew. How remorseful he was whenever his enormous clumsiness had led him into transgression. He seemed to say he knew he had done wrong, but how could he help it? His owner, the poet Dorothy Wellesley, forgave him all his trespasses:

  My great marbled hound [she wrote]

  Leaps at them [the rooks] as they fly.

  The one in the illustration is a harlequin, which means that he may have a walleye and a pink nose. This truly noble dog, this great marbled hound, ought to be seen in his entirety. He stands 30 inches tall, and weighs at the minimum 120 lb., or nearly ten stone. He has been with us for some two hundred years, possibly three hundred, when dogs were used for pulling carts, even as they are used today in Belgium and Holland. So muscular a dog as the Dane, almost the size of a Shetland pony, would have been well-adapted to cart-harness. Why not use him today, to pull the mowing machine?

  Considering his size, it is rather surprising to find that he registers over 500 a year in the Kennel Club list.

  The Mongrel

  Alas, we can honour him with no history, no pedigree. He must speak for himself, with those great wistful eyes, as appealing as a lost child. Fortunately for him he is well able to do so. I have owned, or been owned by, several mongrels in my time, and never have I known dogs more capable of falling on their feet. Some of them have been pi-dogs1; one made her way into my house in Constantinople, and, too savage to be ejected, gave birth to a litter of puppies on the drawing-room sofa; another dreadful little object collected me in the bazaars of Teheran, followed me home, and took complete possession. The faces of the Persian servants when I made them give him a bath, badly needed, were worth seeing.

  Then there was Micky, who had a dash of Irish terrier in him. I think Micky must be the only dog who has openly walked ashore off a battle-ship on to English soil without being intercepted and clapped into quarantine. I had left him behind in Turkey, when, unable to return myself owing to the outbreak of war, the Ambassador who detested dogs but to whom I remain eternally grateful brought him home to me on a string. Micky it was, too, who, falling through a skylight when he ought by all the rules to have been killed, contrived to land on a bed—though that was perhaps due to good luck rather than to good management.

  The worst of mongrels is that they are apt to be so very plain. Micky himself was no beauty. Good breeding tells. One has noticed the extreme ungainliness of dogs lying about the streets of foreign villages, and has been thankful that the proportion of these mistakes is not so high in Britain. But for sheer urchin wit and resourcefulness the mongrel can be hard to beat, only unfortunately when tempted to acquire an irresistible puppy one is seldom aware of its lineage, immediate or remote, and thus cannot estimate what characteristics it is likely to develop in later life. Will it have a bit of the sheep-dog in it, and proudly but inconveniently bring one a flock of sheep belonging to somebody else? Will it have a bit of terrier, and have to be dragged backwards by the tail out of a rabbit-hole? Or will it be merely a small scavenger, preferring unspeakable filth to the nice bowl we painstakingly provide? One must take one’s chance, and in most cases one’s life is no longer likely to be one’s own.

  The Collie

  There are, roughly speaking, five types of collie: the rough and the smooth, which are large; the Welsh and the Border, which are small; and the Shetland or Sheltie, which is smallest of all. The smooth-coated collie has never been so popular as the rough; some shepherds may have found short coats more convenient in wet weather, but the rough is incomparably the more beautiful animal, with its silky coat, the frill, the gentle expression, the graceful build, the intelligence in those watchful eyes.

  His honest, sonsie, bawsent face

  Aye got him friends in ilka place.

  There is also the bearded collie, whose portrait is facing.…

  All collies are extremely sensitive, which may account for their reputation for a treacherous temper. If offended or frightened, they retaliate. The reverse of the medal is their excessive devotion. Who has not shed a tear for Owd Bob in fiction, or over the recent real-life story of the dog who stayed for three months by the dead body of his shepherd, lost on the snow-bound moors?

  Ideally the collie should be a working dog; he should follow his natural profession. Thwarted of this, his hereditary instinct is still predominant, sometimes in amusing ways. My own Border collie, because as a puppy he was never employed in herding sheep, still tries to herd the clumps of daffodils in the orchard, running round them in circles and snapping with exasperation when he cannot get them to move. More regrettably, he also tries to herd people into groups, and is not above giving a nip to the human ankle as he would nip at the fetlock of a recalcitrant sheep. When one thinks of the almost incredible sagacity displayed at the sheepdog trials, it seems wasteful to turn such marvellous material into a mere pet.

  These little cattle-herders, apart from their peculiar aptitude for driving sheep through hurdles where sheep don’t want to go, have many pretty and en
dearing ways. I have never known any other dog who would sit hanging his head, in expectation of a scolding. Puzzling and idiosyncratic companions, I have come to the conclusion that they are a bit fey. It must be due to the Celtic strain in them.

  How much one wishes, sometimes, that one’s dog could explain what is going on inside his head; and that he could tell one how often in spite of all one’s love, one misunderstands him.

  PART XI

  SUMMARY OF WORKS NOT EXCERPTED

  The following are very brief comments on some of the works not excerpted or quoted at any length in the pages of this volume. They are intended only as guides to works that may or may not be available in libraries or in print.

  Aphra Behn: The Incomparable Astrea. New York: Russell & Russell, 1927.

  Vita describes in this book her chosen involvement with her heroines, pretending to complain, and perhaps in part doing so, about “the tedious hours she has compelled me to spend over her volumes.” The book begins by instantly showing us “Aphra Behn, that good-humoured lady, ‘dressed in the loose robe de chambre,’ but with what fire in her eye!” Behn’s novel Oroonoko, about the pleasantness of love, was written—as Vita points out—when she had grown into a self as comfortable and “loose” as her costume, into “the loose-living, kindly, successful Astrea of Restoration London,” but later than her heyday, when she frequented coffee-houses with Dryden and Otway.1

  This kind of courage is precisely what appealed to Vita, and her heroines are all of the courageous sort. “Gay, tragic, generous, smutty, rich of nature and big of heart, propping her elbows on the tavern table, cracking her jokes, penning those midnight letters to her sad lover by the light of a tallow dip—this is the Aphra of whom one cannot take leave without respect.”2 Three months in her company, says Vita, she gladly spent.

  Her irony and rapidity as a biographer, writer, and critic are in full evidence in this early book. She is amused by the way in which Aphra describes Surinam, where she went as a child, but about which she writes as a grownup: “For the moment, though, let it pass.” She is not taken in: about Aphra’s writing in her novel Oroonoko, she pulls what might be a Jane Austen trick: “You see, of course, what is coming.”3 Indeed we do, but less so in Vita’s writings. She is always somewhere else, writing in some other genre: thus her appeal for many of us.

  The Edwardians. New York: Doubleday Doran & Co., 1930.

  A statement precedes this volume as an author’s note, the contrary of the usual disclaimer about the reality of the depictions in relation to the writer’s imagination: “No character in this book is wholly fictitious.” Beginning on this self-conscious note, the novelist treats herself as a presumably nongeneric “he.” “Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.”4 This hugely successful novel presents a picture of some of the novelist’s own problems. Among them, the protagonist’s attachment to a great house modeled after Knole, a duchess modeled after Vita’s mother, siblings Sebastian and Viola modeled after Vita herself; Sebastian’s struggles with life and love, torn between adventure, sin, and conformity to his wealthy upper class expectations and traditions. Most interesting are the descriptions of the house parties and of Sylvia, one of the central female characters, the older woman with whom Sebastian has his first love affair.

  On April 19, 1930, The Edwardians was presented as a play at the Richmond Theatre, to great acclaim.

  Family History. London: Hogarth Press, New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1932.

  Written directly after the success of The Edwardians and All Passion Spent, this novel revolves around the affair of a charming young politician in the Labour party, Miles Vane-Merrick—and an older overly possessive woman, Evelyn Jarrold.

  Since Vita’s mother took very badly to Vita’s having dedicated her poem “Sissinghurst” to Virginia Woolf and not to her, Vita dedicated this book to that fearsome being. (Something of her character can be surmised from her diary, pages of which are printed in this volume.)

  Evelyn falls in love with Miles, and their tryst with each other and their different natures as well as the destructive nature of possessive love occupy all the superbly visual central themes. The highly discreet and drawn-out 30-page deathbed conclusion has Miles holding Evelyn’s hand as she is dying. Over this conclusion Harold, says Victoria Glendinning, Vita’s biographer, wept profusely in the train between Staplehurst and London. As she is about to take the morphine that will help her on her way, Miles stays by her side, as she murmurs: “Don’t go. So he stayed for an indefinite period. He was simply merged with her in the dark room, with no physical contact between them except her hand lying in his.”5 This sentimentally satisfactory ending strikes a different note from the extended ecstatic passage of Evelyn’s passion. This is Vita at the height of her descriptive powers relating to the emotions. The fact that the hero’s home and the setting of much of the novel is a castle resembling her own castle, Sissinghurst, greatly contributes to the interest of the novel.

  The fact that her spelling reform of the pronoun “thatt” runs riot through this book is itself odd: she tried it nowhere but here. The point had been to distinguish between “that” as a conjunction and “that” as a pronoun: so “thatt” was the idea that she had entertained.

  The Dark Island. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1936.

  Originally called “the dark island,” in lower case letters, this very peculiar and brooding novel, dedicated to Gwen St. Aubyn, Harold’s younger sister and Vita’s lover at the time she wrote it—is, according to Virginia Woolf, too closely associated with the personal for Vita to have the necessary distance to make it a good piece of writing. Woolf cared for it less than for Vita’s other writings—and the present editor is in total agreement with her. The location, the island of Storn, is associated with St. Michael’s Mount (off the Cornish shore), which Gwen’s husband, Francis (Sam) St. Aubyn, the third Baron St. Levan, was to inherit.

  Storn, situated off the coast at Port Breton, has a piney wood, a Gull Rock, a castle with a terrace, a cave, a sandy beach, and a village. There is a “map” to show us where the Dark Island is. The willed specificity of these details is meant to make it feel more “real,” a qualification arising often in the text. Gwen is pictured as the heroine Shirin (a prefatory note tells the reader to pronounce it Sheereen, just in case we would be speaking it aloud). For Vita’s stand-in here, Sir Venn, is a would-be dweller in the mythical, given to flashes of “anger and impatience” and wedded above all to his past—a past he has shared with Shirin—on his hereditary island of Storn. Language is no concern of his, and when Shirin argues with him about words, it only irritates him: “‘Are there,’ she asks, ‘certain words you like, so that they thrust into you whenever you hear them spoken?’

  “‘There you are,’ he said, ‘talking real again.’ And he thought what a mixture she was, of candour and pretence; of passion and control.”6

  All that interests Venn is the island, dark because inescapably part of him. This Shirin knows, and when the doctor has suggested tearing Venn from his beloved wet and dark island, she thinks: “Venn would never leave Storn.… Venn whom she knew as a skilled and audacious sailor, a venturous swimmer, a daring rider! Yet he clung to her now, sobbing, hysterical, all self-respect gone; he would not, could not, die, he said; he would not leave Storn;… she must not force him away from Storn.…”7 This attachment to place on the part of the hero/heroine (since it is always Vita, as Venn here and as Julian in Challenge) is inescapably part of the dark romanticism, verging on the Gothic, that makes up Vita’s writing temperament in her most passionate mode.

  Saint Joan of Arc: Born January 6, 1412, Burned as a Heretic, May 30, 1431, Canonized as a Saint, May 6, 1920. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1938.

  Vita had a certain attraction to the idea of religion, finding it a part of tradition, inherently valuable, even if she herself was “pagan.” As Nigel Nicolson observed to this author, it was not the rit
ual side of religion she liked, but the mystical side. Personally believing in “some mysterious central originating force”8 she concentrated some of her writing energies on the legends of saints, as in her forceful portrayal of the two Teresas in The Eagle and the Dove, and in this biography, Saint Joan of Arc.

  The front cover of this historical biography reads: “an authentic and unprejudiced account of one of the most dramatic and moving stories in the world’s history—the thrilling career of the heroic peasant girl who rode triumphantly through brilliant victory to tragic martyrdom.” Vita wrote the biography believing that otherwise quite educated persons retain only the impression of Jeanne d’Arc as a peasant girl hearing voices, seeing visions, besieging Orleans, and being burned to death at Rouen; perhaps one remembers the detail of an English soldier making two pieces of wood into a cross he hands her amid the flames. She lays out the history of the moment, the conditions in France and the war raging there for over seventy years as the English claimed sovereignty over it.

  Vita’s love of details and her assurance in presenting them is authoritative: she does not follow the march towards Reims but interrupts her narrative in Troyes in Burgundy to describe the Franciscan friar called Brother Richard and his role in Troyes’ transfer of allegiance to the dauphin. Then she proceeds to the coronation and shows us how Jeanne is the subject of all attention. “But a single figure drew all eyes, the cause, as they said, after God, of this coronation and of all that assembly. Jeanne d’Arc, who kept her place standing beside the King, in armour, her standard in her hand. ‘Il avait été à la peine,’ she said, when they asked why her standard had figured at the sacre, ‘c’était bien raison qu’il fut à l’honneur.’” (“It had been present at the suffering, it is only right it should be present at the honour.”)9