Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings

INTRODUCTION

Vita Sackville-West, an aristocrat from a long and distinguished British lineage, delighted in the colorful mingling of Spanish and gypsy blood, with which she was endowed through the unusual circumstances of her maternal ancestors. She often portrayed herself as a hot-blooded irrational being, a fantasy played out in her acting the part of Julian or Mitya for her various lovers—in particular Violet Keppel Trefusis, who represents Eve to Vita’s dark, romantic, masculine gypsy side.

Raised in privilege and speaking several languages, she was herself a surprising mixture, at once imperious and bashful, a public personality but essentially reclusive. Mostly schooled at home and with governesses, she was always conscious of not having had a lengthy formal education and this contributed to her shyness in the witty society of Bloomsbury, in relation to which she felt herself to be slow. Donkey West, as Virginia Woolf called her affectionately, was a friend of the group, and in particular of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, but not at its intellectual center as were the Woolfs.

Bisexual, with an androgynous mingling of male and female traits, Vita was the wife of Harold Nicolson, a diplomat who was similarly androgynous. Vita, with her many lovers, mostly female, was a gender rebel of the first order. Virginia Woolf modeled the title character of Orlando (termed the longest love letter in history by Nigel Nicolson) on her and greatly admired the aristocratic lineage she represented. Writing in many genres, Vita epitomized the all-around creative personality in an eccentric and distinguished mode.

Life and Loves

Vita was brought up speaking upperclass French as well as English, as was her mother. The Sackville-Wests were a long line of aristocrats, notable in their being and their actions. Their family home, Knole, which had been given to Thomas Sackville in the sixteenth century by Queen Elizabeth, remained Vita’s lifelong place of choice, even when she could not inherit it. In contrast to this aristocratic bloodline, Vita took a particular interest in her grandmother Pepita Duran, a dancer, who, despite being married already, had an affair with her grandfather, Lord Sackville-West. Pepita had inherited gypsy blood from her own mother, a Spanish ex-acrobat married to a barber, and that heritage appealed greatly to Vita’s romantic fantasy, which would encourage and enhance own her various love affairs. The beautiful Pepita—about whom Vita wrote one of her most popular books, called simply Pepita—was known as the Belle of Andalusia, and had many lovers in addition to her Spanish dancer husband, from whom she was never really divorced. Lionel Sackville-West named her as his wife on his deathbed in Arcachon, France. He confessed to his son Henry, however, I never married your mother.… Despite this, they produced three daughters and two sons.

One of these daughters, Vita’s own extraordinarily beautiful mother, Victoria Josefa Dolores Catalina Sackville-West, was raised in the convent of St. Joseph in Paris. She was called to Washington to be her father’s young and brilliant hostess at the British Legation, where Lionel was the minister, and then went with him to Knole, which he had inherited. Vita was always to call her mother B.M., for Bonne Maman, a title bestowed with a certain irony given their often surpassingly difficult relations. Victoria also had an array of celebrated lovers, including J. Pierpont Morgan. William Waldorf Astor and Auguste Rodin were also in love with her. She married her first cousin, also called Lionel. Their only child was Vita, born on March 9, 1892.

Victoria’s companion from 1897 to 1912, Sir John Murray Scott, whom Vita and her mother called Seery, was an immense man, standing six feet four and quite round, something like five feet around his middle, and was as generous in his being as in his girth. He had two gloriously appointed Paris apartments, one on the rue Lafitte, and it was there that Vita spent much of her time when she was young, contributing to her already fluent knowledge of French. Between 1906 and 1910, she wrote eight full-length novels, one in French, and several plays, some of which are also in that language.

Vita met the young diplomat Harold Nicolson in 1910 and married him in 1913. They would have a long and happy marriage in spite of—or, as some would have it, in part because of—their each being involved with members of their own sex. They had two sons, Benedict—an art historian and editor of the Burlington magazine—and Nigel—a writer, publisher, and biographer, who wrote Portrait of a Marriage about his mother and father, and edited their selected letters (Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson). Nigel’s own memoir, Long Life, honest and witty, offers a self-portrait of the kind Vita might well have written, had she chosen to do so. Some of her writings, published and unpublished, included here, give enough of her story to create her own portrait.

Vita lived an extraordinary life, both in her extensive and wide-ranging work and in her emotional attachments—those passing and those more lasting, those she envisaged as belonging to Julian, the masculine side of herself, and the one in which she dwelled every day by presence and by correspondence as Harold’s lifelong partner. Vita was as lively as her name indicates, although additionally in Harold’s letters to her she is Mar, her mother’s name for her, and he is Hadji or pilgrim, his father’s name for him. So they represent, in that fashion as in others, something handed down and symbolic, a tradition, even as their own marriage was, strictly speaking, highly nonconformist. The marriage worked, both surprisingly and well. The contradictions in their lives made them all the more interesting as persons, private and public, and as writers.

In general, it was quietly that Vita arranged and carried on a great many love affairs, a number of appearances and radio broadcasts as author and expert on gardens, and a massive amount of work, which she never discussed with her family. She lived precisely as she wanted to, traveling extensively with and occasionally without Harold, and finally spending more time in her garden and her writing tower than in society. Harold’s love affairs were less public than Vita’s and appeared to mean less to him. Hers, as her son Nigel put it, endured longer and were more significant: She was never without a love. As a young debutante she had been courted by an Italian, Orazio Pucci, and later, in 1914, had an affair, on her part as literary as it was passionate, with Geoffrey Scott, author of The Architecture of Humanism. After the affair ended, Scott’s own marriage also eventually expired. This was to be the case with many of Vita’s lovers, all women after this. Many of them found their marriages ruined over their passion for Vita.

Notoriously, the person Vita most loved, aside from Harold, was the woman with whom she was intimate from April 1918 to 1921, Violet Keppel, the daughter of George and Alice Keppel; Alice Keppel was King Edward VIII’s mistress. Violet represented the greatest threat to the marriage of Vita and Harold. Vita and Violet had known each other at school, had exchanged an impetuous embrace, and had shared a precocious European childhood: I had learnt Italian with her in London, and we had been together in Paris, and had acted part of a play I wrote in French in five Alexandrine acts, about the Man in the Iron Mask, and in those days we rather ostentatiously talked to one another in French in order to tutoyer one another [to use the informally intimate form of the verb] and so show what great friends we were.¹ This, I think, already indicates Vita’s relating of language to life, using speech to display intimacy.

Violet Keppel Trefusis, beauteous and seductive, sketched in words the best portrait anyone has made of Vita, describing the two halves of her face with the upper half pure and grave, the lower half domineering and sensual. Vita herself continually experienced this profound division, this actual split in her personality and in her many loves. She had had a close childhood friend, Rosamund Grosvenor, with whom she became intimate and then tossed aside, as she was to do with her many other female lovers in ensuing years. Only her love for her husband remained in its inviolate state: "Harold, who is unalterable, perennial, and best; there has never been anything but absolute purity in my love for Harold, just as there has never been anything but absolute bright purity in his nature. And on the other hand stands my perverted nature, which loved and tyrannized over Rosamund and ended by deserting her without one heart-pang, and which now is linked irremediably with Violet."²

For a while, the male part of her personality, suddenly liberated in 1918 by a change in costume and her encounter with Violet, became dominant. She exhibited this in her newly donned breeches and gaiters: I went into wild spirits; I ran, I shouted, I jumped, I climbed, I vaulted over gates, I felt like a schoolboy let out on a holiday.… that wild irresponsible day. It was one of the most vibrant days of my life.³ So, for a number of years, until 1921, the tug of war between the two parts of her persona was unresolved, for Violet had struck the secret of my duality.… I had been vouchsafed insight, as one sometimes is … all the gentleness and femininity of me was called out by Harold alone.… I might have been a boy of eighteen, and she a woman of thirty-five.⁴

Violet was able to state, in her purple lyric style, exactly what Vita represented for her. Vita was, she wrote, like the wild hawk and the windswept sky … splendid and dauntless, a wanderer in strange lands.…⁵ Who, made like Vita in body and mind, could resist being the wild hawk rather than the faithful wife? Violet could write in scorn of what she despised and claim loudly what she admired: Heaven preserve me from littleness and pleasantness and smoothness. Give me great glaring vices, and great glaring virtues, but preserve me from the neat little neutral ambiguities. Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be an anarchist, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity’s sake be it to the top of your bent. Live fully, live passionately, live disastrously. Let’s live, you and I, as none have ever lived before.⁶

Radclyffe Hall, the author of The Well of Loneliness, a celebrated lesbian novel, so determined to break all the rules, had never managed, alas, to write like this, but then Violet, like Vita, was nourished on Baudelaire and the romantic poets. On and on went the affair, with Vita dressing as a young man, in London, in Paris, in Monte Carlo. Vita would wear a khaki bandage around her head, browning her face and hands, and all were deceived. She would present Violet as her wife and wondered in delight if anyone would recognize in the slouching boy with the bandaged head … the silent and rather scornful woman they might have met at dances or dinners.⁷ In many of Vita’s novels, such as The Dark Island, the dark romantic figure is Vita herself, doomed to love a place and to figure an unusual destiny.

When Violet was about to be married to Denys Trefusis, Vita fled to Paris, terrified of what she might do—interrupting the service or worse. Just before the marriage took place on June 16, 1919, Violet wrote a one-sentence note: You have broken my heart. Goodbye. But of course it was not goodbye, for their affair continued, and they in fact eloped to France in 1920. The husbands came after them in a small airplane: All her life, Vita remained much impressed with Harold’s energy in undertaking the trip. She returned to Paris with Harold, already exhausted with Violet, who fled south through France, telephoning Vita from various places, her voice becoming faint as the distance grew between them. It all ended badly, as we read in Vita’s diary entries: My God, what a day. I am broken with misery, and if things were as bad as I at first thought I should put an end to myself … I had to go, I should have killed her if had stayed an instant longer. I have told her I cannot even see her for two months. She calls this banishment—it is not, it is simply the impossibility of bringing myself to see her for the present.⁸

What remains of that long-lasting affair is a florid collaborative novel by the two women: Challenge. It had originally been called Rebellion, then Enchantment, then Vanity, and at one point Foam, as well as a few other things. The prolonged hesitation over the title seems to me symptomatic of the fascination both of them found in the experience of this writing, and the writing of this experience. This novel is the fullest expression of the Julian/Eve relationship in its tormented excitement. When the novel was already in proof, Vita’s mother objected forcefully to the publication (shame on the family, the children, etc.), so when the book finally broke into print, it sank without a trace. Doran in New York published it in 1924, and it reappeared in 1975, with a preface about the affair by Nigel Nicolson. The scandal is long gone, the book long forgotten; but the entire last part is included here as the intimate and creative witness of the famous affair.

Vita’s double nature continued to get her into muddles, as she and Harold called the messes she would make of others’ lives and marriages. This was an important factor in Vita’s life; to put it delicately, she did not have a green thumb with the marriages she became involved with. Vita devastated the emotional lives of many women, notwithstanding her essential modesty, benevolence, and that magnanimity that Virginia Woolf felt hovering about her. From early to late, from the longer-lasting to the briefer, Vita’s loves were numerous. Vita’s quite amazing number of amorous adventures and her secrecy about them mingled with her ability to keep many things going at once, and her erotic exploits, while maintaining her dignity, make her a heroine to many, in spite of the hurt her affair with Violet and her other involvements caused in others.

A partial list of her involvements, with the beginning dates simply and very roughly documenting one of the years in which the particular relationship mattered, would include many women and far fewer men. (For details, see Victoria Glendinning’s thorough and engrossing 1983 biography, Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West.) As a general reference point, these names may suffice with the initial dates of the affairs, which petered out over time, or more suddenly, as Vita would tire of the complications and jealousies:

Kenneth Campbell, 1908

Rosamund (Roddie, Rose) Grosvenor, 1909–1911

Orazio Pucci, 1909

Violet Trefusis (Eve, Mitya), 1918–1920

Dorothy (Dottie) Wellesley, 1921

Margaret (Pat) Dansey, 1922

Geoffrey Scott, 1924

Virginia Woolf, 1925

Mary Campbell, 1927

Margaret Goldsmith Voigt, 1928

Hilda Matheson, 1929

Evelyn Irons, 1931

Olive Rinder, 1931

Christopher (Christabel Marshall) St. John, 1932–1934

Gwen St. Aubyn, 1934

Violet Pym (Vi), 1947

Edith Lamont, 1947

Bunny Drummond, 1947–1952

Vita’s multitudinous love affairs are never explicitly discussed in her diaries or her writings but only referred to in passing. However, the many traces of them and the personalities involved are as easily detected as Violet Trefusis in the florid writing of Challenge or Gwen St. Aubyn in the highly melodramatic novel Dark Island. Of course, apart from her lifelong and devoted relationship with Harold, Vita’s most crucial involvements were with Violet Trefusis and then Virginia Woolf. In her affair with Virginia, she is scarcely loquacious, even to herself. Melodramatic she is not. Here are her diary entries for a few days during 1925:

November 7. Long Barn. A lovely warm golden day. Sat in the sun all the morning. Went to tea with Eddy—Leonard went back to London, Virginia remained.

! [in circle]

V. told me about re-reading the first 30 pages of To the Lighthouse & how she had had to rewrite them.

November 8. Virginia stayed till the evening. Such a wet day.

November 10. Spent the evening with Virginia, dinner with the Drinkwaters. Very dull.

November 24. Went up to see Virginia.… After to a party at Vanessa Bell’s.

November 25. Went to Virginia in the evening. Went afterward to Clive’s rooms, found Virginia there.

November 27. Virginia came to Mount St. to see me.

November 29. Spent the afternoon with Virginia.

December 4. Long Barn. Virginia came.

December 5. Alone all day with Virginia.

December 6. Went up with V. in the evening.

December 17. Alone.

December 20. [X at top of page] Spent the afternoon with Virginia; dinner with her at Mount St.

Virginia was eventually to see in Violet Trefusis what Vita had so cherished. When Violet went to see her about the Hogarth Press perhaps publishing her novel, called Tandem, Virginia wrote Vita: I quite see now why you were so enamoured … what seduction! What a voice—lisping, faltering, what warmth, suppleness and in her way—it’s not mine … how lovely, like a squirrel among buck hares—a red squirrel among brown nuts. We glanced and winked through the leaves.⁹ This encomium produced in Vita an instant disquiet. For Virginia’s friendship was, most likely, the deepest and most important of all those in Vita’s life, except for Harold’s, just as Vita’s friendship was the most important one in Virginia’s, except for those with Leonard and with her sister Vanessa. From the time of her first meeting with Vita, Virginia Woolf found the contrast between her aristocratic air and her modest regard for her own talents as attractive as it was disarming. She took a flirtatious tone in many of her letters, issuing a warning to them both that was not entirely without some basis: But you don’t see, donkey West, that you’ll be tired of me one of these days (I’m so much older).…¹⁰ Virginia’s own point of view about their affair was that Vita, in her full-breasted and mature plenteousness and maternal protectiveness, was like rich fruit: the grapes are ripe; and not reflective. No. In brain and insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this and so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always most wished from everyone…¹¹ Vita’s affair with Virginia was followed by a longstanding and close friendship in which each placed a high value on the other’s company. After their brief trip through Burgundy in 1928, much of which was taken up with their writing to and waiting to receive mail from their husbands, they remained friends; over the years, however, the degree of closeness varied. Writing in her diary entry of September 26, 1937, about a visit just paid to Sissinghurst Castle, Virginia speaks of Vita’s silent goodness, and Harold too, a sense of the human understanding unspoken.…¹² And in 1940, when bombs were exploding around Vita’s house, and Virginia thought that she might be killed any moment, she was at once more forthrightly affectionate with this great friend. What can one say—except that I love you and I’ve got to live through this strange quiet evening thinking of you sitting there alone.… You have given me such happiness.¹³ And, writing to Vita on March 4, 1941, shortly before her suicide, Virginia says feelingly: I suppose your orchard is beginning to dapple as it did the day I came there. One of the sights I shall see on my death bed.¹⁴ And perhaps, in her dying moments, so far from a deathbed in the conventional sense, she did: Who is to say? Vita’s poem on Virginia Woolf’s death is included here as her final tribute to her friend.

Vita and Harold

Vita, so close to her land and garden and work, managed to live what one might call a happy married life, despite all her other involvements—or perhaps, seen from another angle, because of them she was able to value her relationship to her husband as greatly as she did. Writing to Harold in 1953, she says it succinctly, explaining their love of living and their intense dislike of growing older: the real deep reason for us, you and me, is that we hate the idea of leaving Life, as we must, twenty to thirty years hence, and we both love life and enjoy it.¹⁵

They had two kinds of lives, of course, as Harold pointed out, just as Vita had the two parts of her being. What with Vita never even knowing what the League of Nations was, her world was a different one from his. And yet, in the long run, perhaps that saved their marriage, this nonconcordance of worlds that permitted their concord in salvaging the thing that mattered: their love and their marriage. Letter after letter makes the enduring quality of the love between Vita and Harold clear and authentically vibrant. Their quite remarkable relationship, documented by well over two thousand letters exchanged, seems never to have lessened in any impact: Over and over during their very long life together they express their gratitude for it.

The Second World War affected Vita and Harold seriously; each of them carried a small vial of poison, as did Virginia Woolf, in case of catastrophe. Vita’s reactions were clear-cut: she refused to attend a banquet at Buckingham Palace, not wanting to have to purchase the proper clothes; her difference from her mother’s delight in her jewels could scarcely be more radical. Vita: I am writing this letter with my jewels littered all around me—emeralds and diamonds, just taken out of the bank—and they make me feel sick; I simply can’t subscribe any longer to the world which these jewels represent. I can’t buy a dress costing 30 pounds or wear jewels worth 2,000 pounds when people are starving. I can’t support such a farce when people are threatened that their electric light or gas may be cut off because they can’t pay their arrears. Harold replied with admiration for how sound she was in her values.¹⁶

By contrast, her mother thought nothing of spending those 2,000 pounds on a diamond necklace and then, directly after, would write on the toilet paper in Harrods’s Ladies Cloakroom, finding it was excellent for letters and writing to Vita (in French of course), and in how well it took the ink.¹⁷

In one of her last published letters, Vita writes of seeing Harold out the window, in his blue coat and black hat: It is the sort of sudden view of a person that twists one’s heart, when they don’t know you are observing them … I often think I have never told you how much I love you—and if you die I should reproach myself, saying, ‘Why did I never tell him? Why did I never tell him enough?¹⁸ The truth is, as all lovers know, that enough is never enough in such a realm. And it is this that twists the heart.

Her son Nigel, who has edited their letters and Vita’s autobiographical writing with discretion, courage, and love, states unabashedly his viewpoint about his mother. "I love her more, as my father did, because she was tempted, because she was weak.… She fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men only women. For this she was prepared to give up everything."¹⁹

Harold knew all about Vita’s duality and was always worried by the two parts of her personality: As he wrote to her, The one tender, wise and with such a sense of responsibility. And the other rather cruel and extravagant.²⁰ He believed the first part was the essential one but was alarmed by the latter, always unfathomable to him. What in fact he emphasized, as Vita did, was the importance of their love and their marriage.

On their last cruise together, when Vita was aware that she was seriously ill, she hid it from Harold, knowing how much pain it would cause him. He was always her primary concern, and their marriage, her primary reassurance along with their work in their garden at Sissinghurst and her constant devotion to her writing, particularly her poetry. Vita was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and then a Companion of Honour in 1948. She died at Sissinghurst Castle at the age of seventy.

Garden and Tower

Sometimes a tragedy can lead to a triumph for a strong person and writer. So it was with Vita Sackville-West. If she had her own private tragedy, it was no less a public and indeed a cultural tragedy, symbolic of tradition and what it can do. In her time and her country, women could not inherit the royal title and attendant lands of their family. Not being a man, Vita was deprived of her ancestral home at Knole, which she loved with the kind of original devotion that inspires not just our admiration but our compassionate complicity in her loss. Her cousin Edward (Eddy) Sackville-West inherited it, and even though she was finally given a key to it, she rarely used it. The trauma remained. Her dream book, which she called just that, is reprinted here, where it is noticeable that the single dream in which she is reconciled to Knole and feels no anguish at returning is prefaced by her remarking on that rare event. Writing Knole’s history and that of her family in Knole and the Sackvilles and creating her garden at Sissinghurst, which we might see as a substitute garden, scarcely sufficed to make up for what she should have had. She deserved it by her ancestral passion, loved it more than anyone else could have, and would have cherished it best.

Given Vita’s passion for and extensive knowledge of French literature along with her acknowledged mastery of everything related to the art of gardening, it is doubly ironic to think, in relation to her life, of Voltaire’s Candide. His all-too-often quoted ironic statement and lament about this not exactly being the best of all possible worlds leaps to mind: Il faut cultiver son jardin—you do have to cultivate your garden, whichever one you happen to have or be allotted. So Vita Sackville-West worked in and thought about, year in and year out, her garden at Sissinghurst, which was obliged to replace what she might have cultivated at Knole. Her garden still flourishes, visited by an increasing number of persons every year. Indeed, Vita’s newspaper columns and her radio broadcasts about the cultivation of gardens far more fame than did her writings on other topics, fictional and factual. Yes, she cultivated her garden, but in a sense it was the wrong one. The way in which she eventually made it the right one took great force of will and managed what we might call a translated passion.

Vita Sackville-West did not mope about and shared neither her grief nor her work, which took place in her tower at Sissinghurst at a comfortable distance from the house in which everything else took place. The house, actually a castle, had no guest rooms. In Vita’s tower upon her desk, there remains the photograph of Virginia Woolf, where it always was. Her still-remembered and much-celebrated affair with Woolf yielded the triumphant and un Woolfian text of Orlando, whose hero/heroine is based on Vita, and in which Vita’s elegant and willful changeability, in personality as in costume, is rendered in different genders over the ages. And Vita’s brief Seducers in Ecuador, with its play on varying views dependent on the color of one’s glasses, is quite as Woolfian any of Woolf’s stories, short or long.

Vita’s life was both busy and quiet. She wrote, lectured on literature and family life as well as gardening, and made radio broadcasts, but was eventually more at ease at Sissinghurst, in her tower and with her family and dogs, than out in the public arena. There she lived a casual life in her favorite costume: long pearls and silk shirts worn with pants and high boots. That is the way she would choose to be remembered, as well as in her fashionable hats and costumes for her public performances. Here too her double nature and chosen appearance was an intimate part of her being.

Among the verbal portraits of Vita offered by those who knew her best, those by Virginia and Leonard Woolf stand out sharply. After a dinner in December 1924, which Roger Fry attended, Virginia Woolf described the difference between her friends and Vita: She has the habit of praising & talking indiscriminately about art, which goes down in her set, but not in ours.… dear old obtuse, aristocratic, passionate, Grenadier-like Vita.²¹ It is that very enthusiasm that attracts many of us to Vita the writer: She was passionate to the point of irritating others—how very wonderful indeed.

In a letter of the same period to Jacques Raverat in France, the very ill husband of her friend Gwen Darwin and recipient of many of her letters, Virginia Woolf gave her famous description of Vita’s legs: Oh they are exquisite—running like slender pillars up into her trunk, which is that of a breastless cuirassier (yet she has 2 children) but all about her is virginal, savage, patrician; and why she writes, which she does with complete competency and a pen of brass, is a puzzle to me. If I were she, I should merely stride, with 11 Elk hounds behind me, through my ancestral woods.²² That pen of brass should be taken here in context, as it often is not, with its admixture of understandable envy and of admiration for her other qualities.

Leonard’s own description is no less vivid: To be driven by Vita on a summer’s afternoon at the height of the season through the London traffic—she was a very good, but rather flamboyant driver—and to hear her put an aggressive taxi driver in his place, even when she was in the wrong, made one recognize a note in her voice that Sackvilles and Buckhursts were using to serfs in Kent 600 years ago, or even in Normandy 300 years before that. She belonged indeed to a world which was completely different from ours.²³ The very difference of her world remains part of her appeal for present day readers—not so much the envy of it, as its foreignness to many, and its naturalness to her.

A Note on Vita’s Irony

Vita, in her awareness of emotions, style, and language, had—even in her moments of intensity or despair—what I would like to call the dignity of irony. This preserved for her a certain distance from her involvements and, in my view, made the quite extraordinary marriage of herself and Harold, whom she never ceased to cherish, a success. One example may suffice. In her best-known novel, All Passion Spent, the last part of which is included in this volume, Vita, in the voice of the elderly and nonconformist Lady Slane, reflects on happiness in this fashion: ironic, scholarly, and precise: But what was happiness? Had she been happy? That was a strange, clicking word to have coined—meaning something definite to the whole English-speaking race—a strange clicking word with its short vowel and its spitting double p’s and its pert tip-toe at the end.²⁴

Writing and Reception

In a real sense, the life pictured in Vita’s garden writings, in her reflections on the architecture of various country houses, in her explicit poem Sissinghurst, and in the long poems The Land and The Garden is her true life. Against the current of what we think of as the poetry of the early to middle part of the twentieth century, she composed long poems of epic nature, taking as theme and backdrop the world of nature and its loving cultivation. Yes, she would have preferred to be remembered as a poet rather than a novelist. During her lifetime she was known and celebrated as one, and both her Georgic poems, The Land and The Garden, won prestigious prizes, respectively the Hawthornden and the Heinemann. Yet something that she found hurtful in the extreme happened in March of 1946. At a meeting of the poetry committee of the Society of Authors (a committee that included Edith Sitwell, Walter de la Mare, Dylan Thomas, and Louis MacNeice), she was not asked to participate in a poetry reading to be held in Wigmore Hall in the presence of the Queen. Four years later she wrote in her diary of her despair over that: I don’t think I will ever write a poem again. They destroyed me for ever that day…²⁵ Clearly, they did not think her poetry good enough to read. The problem was not her voice or her presence, since she was continually lecturing on the radio and in public. She always valued her critical writing and even her novels—for which she is best known—less than her poetry, a judgment with which the present day reader may argue. Her poetry has, on the whole, been far less appreciated than her other work, particularly her fiction and her essays.

As for the writing on gardening, that simply encompassed her passionate knowledge and practice. In any case, most of her novels (except Dark Island, Grand Canyon, and La Grande Mademoiselle—which she herself disliked) were immediate successes, particularly All Passion Spent and Seducers in Ecuador, which upon its appearance took top billing over Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In Seducers, it was often said, she had out-Bloomsburied Bloomsbury.

Her own idiosyncratic nature is apparent in her other writings as well. One of my favorites is the delightful, if eccentric, series of reflections on dog portraits collected in her late work called simply Faces, many of which have autobiographical reflections about her reactions to those portraits based on her own dog family. These quieter musings make a high contrast to her travel writings, particularly those about Persia and the Bakhtiari Mountains, and the hitherto unpublished diary of her travel in the United States. The extraordinary range of her activities, her writing genres, and her knowledge, together with her own dual nature, as documented in her fiction and letters and in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, render her, as Nigel Nicolson so rightly terms it, a subject of growing fascination.

The enthusiasm with which she entered her various love affairs always helped her to produce quantities of work: translations (of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, with Margaret Goldsmith Voigt and later with Eddy Sackville-West) as well as fiction and more learned material. Writing in 1931 to Evelyn Irons, with whom she traveled in Provence and to whom many of the poems in Les Baux are dedicated, Vita remarked on her own prolific output: She said she never stopped writing stories and articles.… I must make the most of it while the fit is on me—but they are cheap stuff.²⁶

In Vita’s prose and poems, the details are resoundingly clear, especially those of food, clothes, colors, landscapes, and seascapes. Her highly visual sense of things is evident in her dream book, as in all her writing. Everywhere her wit manifests itself in her discussion of external details that seem often to give the essential clue to the characters in and the character of her fiction. What is most credible about them is not so much their personal makeup as the things they love and the roles they play in relation to them. They are, more often than not, possessed by the houses and traditions they inhabit, the worlds they live in, and the things they love. They can have, as Vita did, a passion for their land—as in Dark Island and in her long poems The Land and The Garden—for their inherited traditions—as in Family History or The Edwardians—or, perhaps no less believably, for their dog—as in Easter Party. All these passions were so strongly part of Vita that they give her, together with her acknowledged dual nature, a particular fascination for those who were close to her and for her readers then and now. Fully conscious of this double-sidedness, she explored it in many of her writings in different guises.

Her sense of self, of land, and of work, was always a positive one. As an example, take the way in which her long poem The Land is a response to T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land:

The land and not the waste land celebrate,

The rich and hopeful land, the solvent land,

Not some poor desert strewn with nibbled bones,

A land of death, sterility, and stones.

As for her fictional self, she portrays herself and her impassioned love of Knole as a dark and romantic lover torn between sentiment and a sense of land. Perhaps the most vivid picture she gives of herself as a writer, picturing that self from within and without, is found in the odd story The Poetry Reading, in which the poet (and Vita always thought of herself as that) has a special allure for the young person listening, who is enchanted by the dress and the person, the appearance and the reality of the poet as woman.

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.

That story, included in this volume, reveals her willed duality as well as anything could.

Vita was a feminist of true stripe. Incensed at being addressed as Mrs. Harold Nicolson, she was flung into a rage. You know, she wrote Harold, I love you more than anybody has ever loved anybody else, but I really do resent being treated as if I were your dog. The whole thing is an insult to human dignity.… Why not get me a collar with your name and address engraved upon it?²⁷ She was no more pleased by the title Lady Nicolson. As Victoria Glendinning points out, when Harold and Vita became Sir Harold and Lady Nicolson in 1953, after the publication of his biography of George V, they considered turning down the honor, which seemed to them dreary and middle class. Vita greatly disliked being called Lady Nicolson and remained V.