Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

by Vita Sackville-West

  Joan emerges in her true colors here, or so it feels.

  Grand Canyon. London: Michael Joseph, New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1942.

  This novel was inspired by the visit Vita and Harold made to the Grand Canyon in 1933 during their lecture tour of the United States. It was the next to last place they visited, before Charleston, South Carolina (to which one of the poems included here, “Middleton Place,” is dedicated). Vita declared herself “increased” by that visit,10 and the setting here, down Bright Angel Trail, exhibits her enthusiasm for the place. The novel was refused by Leonard Woolf—in part for its defeatism, since the Nazis win out in it—in 1941 but published by Doubleday, Doran in New York in 1942.

  It is a science-fiction fantasy, Vita’s only effort in this genre, imagining what it would be like to live at the bottom of the Grand Canyon if the Nazis, once they had defeated Britain, had conquered America, and New York had tumbled into ruin. In the novel, Germany has persuaded America to make peace—and it has not proved to be a lasting one. The tragedy of Europe is “over and finished. Do not lament over the dead and the conquered,” says the protagonist of the book.11

  The hotel in which two English people, Mrs. Helen Temple and Mr. Lester Dale, have been staying is destroyed by bombs, and they lead the other guests to the bottom of the canyon, for an idyllic existence in Phantom Ranch. Describing the descent down the Bright Angel Trail, which she was awed by, Vita writes: “A long crocodile of marchers switched on their tiny flames, making little circles of light round their feet. They wound down steadily, making towards the bottom of the canyon.… It became warmer with every step taken downwards; they passed from a moderate temperature into a semi-tropical.”12 Once arrived in their haven, the survivors (or as the reader later deduces from the story, their spirits) develop as they can in what they have: Their souls are not dead, and they are unsentimental. For beyond life experience is another experience, to be figured only in the imagination. With that, Vita was richly endowed.

  The Easter Party. New York: Doubleday, 1953.

  This novel, whose beginning Vita had thought very bad, and then less so, shows Vita’s indulgence of her own sense of melodrama at its highest peak. “Perhaps one is never able to judge oneself.”13 Such judgement creates only a cloudy experience, she says, hoping the reader will see what is implicit in the author’s statement. One might well put under the category of “cloudy experience” The Dark Island, and other novels, like the excruciating attempt at sci-fi called Grand Canyon.

  Whereas the preposterous, glittering, and concise Seducers in Ecuador is enlightened by irony, the same is not true of The Easter Party. One has only to glance at the terrible plot line through Walter Mortibois’s brother, Gilbert, who pretends to put Walter’s adored dog Svend to death to teach him a lesson about love. (Vita’s own dog Svend was no less adored.) Walter is indeed a chilly figure: When his beautiful house Anstey is burning, he seems exalted. The description of the fire, transparently surnamed Mortibois (dead wood), is as efficacious as terrible in its repetitions: “Anstey was burning and in no mean measure … Anstey burnt. It was frightful, and magnificent, to watch the burning. The burning hulk of Anstey poured out its flames. All splendour had departed.… There had been a magnificence in ruin; now there was nothing but a dying stench of wet and charred remains.”14 This is not one of the highest peaks of Vita’s writing—nevertheless it forms part of her way of seeing things—frequently melodramatic to the point of Gothic stylization.

  Daughter of France: The Life of Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans 1627–1693. London: Michael Joseph, 1959.

  Vita’s relation to history was intense, one might say almost intimate. She had an extraordinary sense of tradition that the haunting loss of Knole exemplifies, but also of French and English history. If she wrote on her grandmother Pepita Duran, she wrote also on La Grande Mademoiselle (Anne Marie Lousie d’Orleans), the two St. Theresas, Joan of Arc, and also a groundbreaking and feminist work on Aphra Behn. She was justly celebrated for her celebration of great figures in history and literature, such as Chatterton, Voltaire, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, Richelieu, Alcibiades, Alice Meynell, Gottfried Kunstler, Lady Anne Clifford, Walter de la Mare, George Eliot. Vita’s sense of English history—“England is always very much the same”—reinforces her notions of heredity: “the instinctive arrogance of the aristocrat,” wrote Harold. Her books such as Family History, The Edwardians, and The Heir reflect her study and her passion. The details she researches and retains put lesser biographers and historians to shame. They are not only historical, they are linguistic: for instance, take her very learned discussion, in the 1947 edition of Knole and the Sackvilles, of Thieves’ Cant (the slang of the vagabond classes, made famous by the medieval French poet Françoise Villon).

  Among her historical and biographical works, the one perhaps of most interest to contemporary readers is the heftily titled Daughter of France: The Life of Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans 1627–1693: a biography of the duchess of Montpensier who was known as La Grande Mademoiselle. Like her literary research, her historical research into figures as well as houses was all-consuming. As a life-story teller, Vita was highly skilled—her biographies are often more readable than her novels. But she thought this one very bad; her reasoning is clear, and her modesty reassures all of us who write: “Oh Hadji,” she writes to Harold on February 26, 1958, “My book is so bad.… I read a lot, but I haven’t been able to synthesise or compress it as I hoped. It is just a mess. I had a clear picture when I started, but now it has all got muddled up with detail and the outline has got lost.”15

  What is lasting about this book is idiosyncractic and personal. She firmly believes in personal intervention in such writings, the main reason for present-day readers to tackle such a biography. This topic was originally suggested by Raymond Mortimer, who had asked Vita years before, one day in a French vineyard: “Why don’t you write the life of the Big Miss?”16 And so she did. In the middle of the book, which she called an “interlude,” she recapitulates the events in reverse order. Since, as she points out, it was never intended to be a scholarly biography, she hopes her “sins as a historian,” such as this antilinear one (as we might put it), can be forgiven.17

  Even in her childhood, the Grande Mademoiselle had a “searching little brain,” and was always shrewd, motivating in part Vita’s delight in following her adventures. Vita was fluent in French, and here she has translated the words of Mademoiselle and her contemporaries as idiomatically as possible. At a few points, she simply leaves the French; Lauzun insults the king’s mistress, Mme de Montespan, when she declares she has tried to arrange the King’s consent to his marriage with Mademoiselle de Montpensier but that he has refused. “You lie, bougresse de putain,” he cries, saying his spies have told him the contrary. A delicate footnote to this expression that combines the delights of buggerdom and prostitution reads simply: “This, which most French authors would hesitate to print in full, is not an amiable term to apply to a woman.”18

  In the last two chapters about the Grande Mademoiselle’s love of the courtier Lauzun and her terrible downfall, Vita’s personality makes itself felt: this “fragile theory of her own” is heightened by the death of Mademoiselle at 66, as Vita points out: “the biographer’s age writing this book.” Here again, the reader feels the force of her personality. Conscious always of heritage, Vita studied it from close up, as she did history and literature. This is the major appeal of her more serious works.

  No Signposts in the Sea. London: Michael Joseph, New York: Doubleday, 1961.

  Vita’s last novel, about a cruise, was inspired by one of the six she took with Harold: their 1959 cruise to Port Said, Singapore, and Manila, on the Cambodge. (His own book Journey to Java was also based on this trip.) It is dedicated to Edie Lamont, a painter friend who lived nearby, of whom Vita was very fond at that point in her life. Edie was on their last cruise with them, and Vita assured Harold that “if either you or I got ill, she would be a rock of help and comfort.”
Indeed, Edie was the one in whom Vita confided about her cancer, and before dying, asked her to keep Glen, her golden retriever.

  The novel centers on Edmund Carr, a journalist on shipboard, who is keeping a diary given to him by his fellow passenger, Laura, and records in it his secret love for her. He intends to throw it into the sea, but he dies before he is able to, yet not until after he has recounted their discussions of their conceptions of love. He wants to believe that he is nearer to her than he would be if she were his, “in the common sense of the word.” Their discussion leaves him joyous, but it is in fact the end of his life. The book concludes with his last diary passage:

  I cannot think, I dare not think … Folly, folly, folly! She got up and went, leaving me alone with the lighted ship in the night.

  How shall I meet her tomorrow?

  Shall I

  Edmund Carr was found dead in his cabin the morning after this conversation had taken place. He had fallen forward on to his table, his diary open at the page where he had recorded these last broken-off words … Carr had also included a note to the effect that he wished to be buried at sea. These instructions were duly carried out in the Pacific Ocean.

  A canister of lighted fuel is thrown in after him to mark the spot, and they watch it burning “as the ship proceeded on her way, until the flame died down and nothing more was seen.”19 Nothing more was seen.… The way the ending of this last volume closes off so perfectly in darkness makes it the kind of conclusion to a life befitting Vita’s great style. The ending is absolute and gives, were it needed, absolution.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1. Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage. London: Futura, 1974, p. 27.

  2. Ibid., p. 38.

  3. Ibid., p. 105.

  4. Ibid., p. 106.

  5. Ibid., p. 150.

  6. October 25, 1918.

  7. See the description of Julian in Challenge.

  8. Diary entry, Paris, February 14, 1920.

  9. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Traumann, eds., Letters of Virginia Woolf. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979, vol 5: 8 November, 1932.

  10. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 302.

  11. Nicolson, Portrait, p. 202.

  12. Anne Olivier Bell, ed., assisted by Andrew McNeillie. The Diaries of Virginia Woolf. London and New York: Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, vol. 5, p. 111.

  13. Ibid., vol. 1 June 27, 1940, p. 305.

  14. Nicolson, Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol.6, March 4, 1941, p. 476.

  15. Nigel Nicolson, ed., Vita and Harold: the Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. New York: Putnam’s, 1992, p. 410.

  16. Sarah Ruth Watson, V. Sackville-West. New York: Twayne, 1972, p. 22.

  17. Michael Stevens, Vita Sackville-West: A Critical Biography. New York: Scribner’s, 1974, p. 14.

  18. Nicolson, Vita and Harold, p. 42.

  19. Nicolson, Portrait, p. 175.

  20. Nicolson, Vita and Harold, p. 336.

  21. Victoria Glendinning, Vita: A Biography of Vita Sackville-West. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983, p. 142.

  22. Ibid., p. 143.

  23. Ibid., loc. cit.

  24. All Passion Spent, p. 167.

  25. Glendinning, p. 341.

  26. Ibid., p. 241.

  27. Stevens, p. 14.

  28. Glendinning, p. 375.

  Part I

  1. Nicolson, Portrait, p. 26.

  2. Ibid., p. 18.

  Part III

  1. Nicolson, Vita and Harold, p. 179.

  Part IV

  1. Nicolson, in Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran, p. 20.

  2. Sackville-West, Passenger to Teheran, p. 81

  3. Nicolson in Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran (1990), p. 22.

  4. Sackville-West in Nicolson and Trautman’s Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. III, p. 533.

  Part VI

  1. Vita Sackville-West, Knole and the Sackvilles (London: William Heinemann, 1922), p. 36. Hereafter all subsequent references to this work will be abbreviated as KS.

  2. Vita Sackville-West, English Country Houses (London: Prion, 1941), pp. 40–43, 46.

  3. Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson; New York: Knopf, 1983), p. 389.

  4. From 1947 edition (London: Lindsay Drummond).

  5. Country Notes (London: Michael Joseph, 1939; New York: Harper, 1940), p. 14. Hereafter all subsequent references to this work will be abbreviated as CN.

  6. CN, p. 113.

  Part VII

  1. The short story “The Other Two” can be found in Descent of Man and other Stories (New York: Scribner’s, 1904).

  2. “The Poet” was included in Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour, published by Doubleday, Doran in 1932, in London and New York.

  3. See also Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; New York: Knopf, 1983).

  Part VIII

  1. Quentin Bell, “A Cézanne in the Hedge,” in Hugh Lee, ed., A Cézanne in the Hedge and other Memories of Charleston and Bloomsbury (London: Collins and Brown, 1992), pp. 136–139.

  2. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, eds. Letters of Virginia Woolf (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 6 vols., 1975–1980), vol. 2, p. 230.

  3. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman, ed. Letters of Virginia Woolf (New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1979), vol. 5, pp. 110, 100.

  Part IX

  1. Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West (London: Wiederfeld and Nicolson; New York: Knopf, 1983), p. 242.

  2. See John Richardson, Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters. (New York: Random House, 2001), on “Vita’s Muddles,” pp. 112–122.

  Part X

  1. In a letter to Jacques Raverat, December 26, 1924 (Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman, ed. Letters of Virginia Woolf (New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 1979), vol. 5, p 150.

  Part XI

  1. Vita Sackville-West, Aphra Behn: the Incomparable Astrea (New York: Russell & Russell, 1927), pp. 85–86.

  2. Ibid., p. 86.

  3. Ibid., pp. 16, 18.

  4. Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians (New York: Doubleday Doran & Co., 1930), p. 1.

  5. Vita Sackville-West, Family History (London: Hogarth Press, New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1932), p. 315.

  6. Vita Sackville-West, The Dark Island (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1936), pp. 101–102.

  7. Ibid., p. 260.

  8. Vita Sackville-West, 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), p. 344.

  9. Ibid., p. 223

  10. Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life Of Vita Sackville-West (New York: Knopf, London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), p. 260.

  11. Vita Sackville-West, Grand Canyon (London: Michael Joseph, New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1942), p. 177.

  12. Ibid., p. 171.

  13. Vita Sackville-West, The Easter Party (New York: Doubleday, 1953), p. 398.

  14. Ibid., 228–229.

  15. Nigel Nicholson, ed., Vita and Harold: THe Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson (New York: Putman, 1992), p. 424.

  16. Vita Sackville-West, Daughter of France: The Life of Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans 1627–1693 (London: Michael Joseph, 1959), p. 5.

  17. Ibid., p. 220.

  18. Ibid., p. 299.

  19. Vita Sackville-West, No Signposts in the Sea (London: Michael Joseph, New York: Doubleday, 1961), p. 156.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Cross, Robert and Ann Ravescroft-Hulme, eds., Vita Sackville-West: A Bibliography.

  Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies; New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 1999.

  DeSalvo, Louise and Mitchell A. Leaska, eds. Introduction by Mitchell A. Leaska. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. London: Virago Press, 1992.

  Glendinning, Victoria. Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; New York:
Knopf, 1983.

  Lee, Hugh, ed. A Cézanne in the Hedge and Other Memories of Charleston and Bloomsbury. London: Collins and Brown, 1992.

  Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, eds. Letters of Virginia Woolf. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 6 vols. 1975–1980.

  ———. Portrait of a Marriage. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; New York: Atheneum, 1973.

  ———, ed. Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1992.

  Raitt, Suzanne, Vita and Virginia: the Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

  Richardson, John, Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters. New York: Random House, 2001.

  Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. New York: St. Martin’s Press, Griffin: 1996.

  Stevens, Michael, ed. V. Sackville-West: A Critical Biography. New York: Scribner’s, 1974.

  Watson, Sara Ruth. V. Sackville-West. New York: Twayne, 1972.

  WORKS BY VITA SACKVILLE-WEST

  The following is a list of Vita Sackville-West’s works that are discussed or mentioned in this volume.

  All Passion Spent. London: Hogarth Press; New York Doubleday, Doran, 1931.

  Andrew Marvell. London: Faber & Faber, 1929.

  Aphra Behn. London: Gerald Howe, 1927; New York: Viking Press, 1928.

  Challenge. New York: George H. Doran, 1924.

  Collected Poems, vol. 1. London: Hogarth Press. 1933.

  Country Notes. London: Michael Joseph, 1939; New York: Harper, 1940.