Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings
ed Mary Ann Caws
365pp, Macmillan, £22.99
Glamorous aristocrat, complete with ancient name, Spanish Gypsy blood, lost inheritance and family scandals; reckless, romantic lesbian and cross-dresser; devoted wife to a noted diplomat and diarist; mother of two talented sons; bestselling writer, gardener of genius - what could be more enthralling?
The passionate friend of Virginia Woolf, muse of Orlando, the lover of Violet Trefusis, the maker of Sissinghurst, and the author of popular novels such as The Edwardians and All Passion Spent, kept in the public eye by her son Nigel Nicolson's intimate account of his parents' marriage in 1973 and vividly brought back to life by Victoria Glendinning in 1983, Vita Sackville-West looks ripe (Virginia Woolf always thought she looked ripe) for a revival. But is she any good?
Mary Ann Caws thinks so, and her editorial commentary to this wide-ranging selection of Sackville-West's work positively drools with adulation. Written in a curiously erratic style, which veers between feminist orthodoxy ("Vita Sackville-West was a gender-rebel of the first order") and old-fashioned schmaltz (Violet was "beauteous", Vita and Harold had "an authentically vibrant love", Vita was an "adventuresome" traveller, etc), Caws prostrates herself before her heroine as a creature of the utmost fascination, brilliance and romance, even exclaiming of her at one point: "How very wonderful indeed."
She sees the interesting contradictions in Vita's life and writing - at once nonconformist and traditional, "adventuresome" and reclusive, sexually faithless and maritally loyal, unconventional and immensely snobbish. But she mostly struggles to reconcile these into unqualified celebration.
She wants to claim her as "a feminist of true stripe", for her unconventionality, her bisexuality, her rage at being labelled "Mrs Nicolson"; but this means leaving out Vita's baffled response to Woolf's Three Guineas, her indifference to feminist politics, and even (in later years) her hostility to jobs for women. And Caws wants to call her a "modernist", even though she publishes Vita's disparaging 1927 broadcast on modern English poetry (mainly directed at The Waste Land), complaining of its lack of conviction, "incredible crudity" and sad emptiness.
Of her own, fruitily Edwardian landscape poems ("The sunlight with a sinking finger plucks / Last notes from each bare branch"; "Ivied fingers... Anachronistic vagabonds!" and so on), Caws argues that if we "can lay aside our preconceived notions of what 20th-century poetry is meant to be... we can enter the stateliness and interior order of these verses, provided we take the time. It is a privilege so to do."
The reaction of most readers, I suspect, will tend more to historical curiosity than to hushed awe. The personal story is certainly gripping. Here, yet again, are the scandalous dramas and farcical crises of Vita and Violet's elopement from their husbands, the outrage and outrageousness of Vita's terrible mother, and the much quieter, complex, erotic intimacy of Vita and Virginia.
In the diaries printed here, Vita comes across as victim rather than as predator, lamenting in entry after entry another "impossible situation", "state of collapse", "ridiculous and abusive scene", "taxis; champagne; confusion"; and, once, with a huge sigh of relief, noting: "Alone; worked hard." The Drury Lane melodrama she goes to see in 1924 ("shipwreck, motor accidents, fire, & a horse race; all very thrilling") seems rather like her own life.
A sense of deep trouble spills out of her "dream books", in which her mother regularly figures having her head gnawed off by the dog or as a cow with bloody udders, and Vita wanders through stately houses, never at home. The best of the memoirs is her account of her great-grandmother in her vast, ancient house in Paris, at night, pacing the corridors full of antiques, listening to her clocks striking.
Sackville-West excels as the intrepid, impressionable observer of other lives and other places. Her letters to Virginia Woolf from Persia, and the book that came out of those travels, Passenger to Teheran, are superb, whether she is noting train stations with notices saying "Change for Babylon", or a meeting with the remarkable Gertrude Bell in Baghdad, or a storm in the Valley of Deh Diz on the Bakhtiari Road. There is high romance here, but, even better, there are matter-of-fact practicalities: "Other essentials are a knife and a corkscrew, and a hat which will not blow off."
It's the same with her gardening notes, of which I would have liked far more. Vita on the usefulness of the widger ("you widge up a weed, or widge up a caked bit of soil for the purpose of aerating it"), or on the pleasures of planting on a slope, or her counsel for all gardeners, "majestic or modest" - "Simplify" - would make a useful introduction to a visit to Sissinghurst.
At the other extreme are the lush purple passages of romantic novels such as Challenge, a self-exposing version of her affair with Violet, suppressed by Lady Sackville, in which Vita features as the Byronic Julian and Violet as the entrancing Eve: "What was this magic that drew together their hands like fluttering butterflies in the hour of sunlight, and linked them in the abandonment of mastery and surrender in the hours of night?... this force, hurling them together with such cosmic power that within the circle of frail human entity rushed furiously the tempest of an inexorable law of nature?"
Caws does a disservice to Sackville-West in comparing her, at one point, to Edith Wharton. She could, also, have chosen some better examples - The Edwardians, Pepita, the exciting story of her Spanish grandmother, or her strong life of Joan of Arc. Vita's awkward exercise in ironic fantasy, Seducers in Ecuador, written for Virginia Woolf, and some weak short stories are here instead.
One of these is a bizarrely self-regarding account of two women going to hear Vita Sackville-West giving a lecture: "How clear, how luxurious was the voice now speaking. It held the richness of long-matured wine, yet there was no hesitancy... with head raised and in the easy eloquence that springs from the most natural yet most profound truths she continued to absorb her audience."
This might come under the heading "a pity", as in "Vita's Book of a Thousand Pities", one of the oddities printed here, in which an alphabetical list of topics, from "Art" to "Youth", includes items to be noted as "a pity" - such as "Bores", "Bolsheviks", "Committees", "Dullness", "Fascism", "Journalism", "Mussolini", "Politics", "Psychoanalysis", "Socialists", and "Vandals". Under this heading one might also include her harsh reactions on her comically frightful American tour of 1933, to "the intelligentsia of Buffalo", "the hard, crude Middle-Western business-men", and "the pretentious, pseudo-smart Jews" of Chicago; or her remarks about English urban developments in the 1930s and 1940s - expressing disdain for suburban sprawl, week-enders, speculators, and "the bungaloid effect".
But though her feeling for her country is selective and lordly, it is also profound. The secret heart of it is in a short, sharp piece called "Owls Brood", of creeping up on a Little Owl nesting in a hollow apple tree, seen "cowering, head drawn back, ready to strike, a wicked eye looking up at me from the darkness".
Whether it's a nesting owl, or the history of Knole, or the beauties of Kent - "the short sunny slopes of the chalk hills... the wide skies of Romney Marsh... a bluebell wood, and the sunlight falling through the young green of the beeches" - this is Vita Sackville-West at her most sympathetic and touching, catching "the tone of England".
· Hermione Lee's books include Virginia Woolf (Vintage)
