High Collars & Monocles 3 - Vita Sackville West & Violet Trefusis

HIGH COLLARS & MONOCLES 1920s NOVELS BY FEMALE COUPLES edited by

francis booth 3. Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

At Miss Barney’s one met the ladies with high collars and monocles.

Sylvia Beach

Cover image by Peter Wild

Contents Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis ....................................................................... 4 Vita Sackville-West, Heritage, 1919 ...................................................................39 Vita Sackville-West Challenge (1923, in America only) ....................................49 Vita Sackville-West, The Dragon in Shallow Waters (1921)..............................62 Vita Sackville-West, The Heir (1922) .................................................................71 Vita Sackville-West, Grey Wethers (1923) .........................................................80 Vita Sackville-West, Seducers in Ecuador (1924)..............................................87 Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians (1930) ....................................................94 Violet Trefusis, Sortie de Secours (1929) ........................................................ 112 Violet Trefusis, Echo (1931) ............................................................................. 116 Vita & Violet – Final Echos............................................................................... 122

High Collars & Monocles

VITA SACKVILLE-WEST & VIOLET TREFUSIS I quite see now why you were so enamoured ... what seduction! What a voice – lisping, faltering, what warmth, suppleness ... like a squirrel among buck hares – a red squirrel among brown nuts.

Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West on meeting Violet Trefusis

Few members of the reading public recognised her [Vita’s] portrait in Little Victims, a novel written in 1933 by a former lover of Harold [Nicolson]’s, Richard Rumbold: ‘she speaks like a man in a deep bass voice . . . She is horribly ugly . . .

And gives lurid, detailed accounts of her affairs. She started at sixteen and has kept going pretty well ever since.’

Matthew Denison, Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

Ernest [Beckett]’s extraordinary illegitimate daughter Violet who, exiled from England, was to compensate for her outcast state by claiming the King of England as her father. Such fantasies were a balm for the pain of lost love. But fact and fantasy are held in subtle equilibrium in the best of her novels, which may yet find a legitimate place in European literature for the name Violet Trefusis.

Michael Holroyd, A Book of Secrets

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Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life, involving as it naturally does the lives of so many other people, but I do so urged by a necessity of truth-telling, because there is no living soul who knows the complete truth; here, may be one who knows a section; and there, one who knows another section: but to the whole picture not one is initiated. Having written it down I shall be able to trust no one to read it.

Vita Sackville-West, quoted in Portrait Of A Marriage by Nigel Nicolson [Vita and Harold’s son]

Vita first met Violet Keppel [later Violet Trefusis] in 1904 when she was twelve and Violet ten. She was the elder daughter of George [son of the 7th Earl of Albemarle] and Alice Keppel [the mistress of King Edward VII] and had one sister, Sonia, who was six years younger. Like Vita she had no friends until they met each other at a tea-party in London. They went to the same school in South Audley Street, Miss Helen Wolff’s, where Vita carried off all the prizes, and met again in Paris, where they performed together Vita’s interminable play La Masque de Fer before an audience of sleepy servants at the rue Lafitte.

Nigel Nicolson, Portrait Of A Marriage

I acquired a friend – I, who was the worst person in the world at making friends, closed instantaneously in friendship, or almost instantaneously (to be exact, the second time we saw each other), with Violet. I was thirteen, she was two years younger, but in every instinct she might have been six years my senior. It seems to me so significant now that I should remember with such distinctness my first sight of her; we met at a tea-party by the bedside of a mutual friend with a broken leg, and she made to me some little remark about the flowers in the room. I wasn’t listening; and so didn’t answer. This piqued her – she was already spoilt.

She got her mother to ask mine to send me to tea. I went. We sat in a darkened room, and talked – about our ancestors, of all strange topics – and in the hall as I left she kissed me. I made up a little song that evening, ‘I’ve got a friend!’ I remember so well. I sang it in my bath.

Vita Sackville-West, quoted in Portrait Of A Marriage by Nigel Nicolson

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One day I allowed myself to be dragged to a tea-party at Lady Kilmorey’s. There I met a girl older than myself, but, apparently, every bit as unsociable. She was tall for her age, gawky, most suitably dressed in what appeared to be her mother’s old clothes. I do not remember who made the first step. Anyhow, much to my family is gratification I asked if I might have her to tea. She came. We were both consummate snobs, and talked, chiefly, as far as I can remember, about our ancestors. I essayed a few superior allusions to Paris. She was not impressed; her tastes seemed to lie in another direction. She digressed on her magnificent home in the country, the dogs, rabbits.

I thought her nice, but rather childish (I was then ten). We separated, however, with mutual esteem. The repressions of my short life immediately found an outlet in a voluminous correspondence. I bombarded the poor girl with letters which became more exacting as hers tended to become more and more of the ‘yesterday-my-pet-rabbit-had-six-babies’ type. Clearly, no letter writer. Our meetings, however, atoned for this epistolary pusillanimity. These were devoted mainly to the discussion of our favourite heroes – D’Artagnan, Bayard, Raleigh.

We used to sit angling our legs over the leather fender of my father’s sitting-room (he was never in at this hour) until fetched by our respective governesses. Our friendship progressed all that winter. I was invited to stay at Knole [the Sackville family estate].

Violet Trefusis, Don’t Look Round

My erratic friend Violet Keppel is coming home in April, so you will know her; I am so glad. She will amuse you more than anybody.

Vita to Harold Nicolson, February 21, 1912

Violet Keppel and I gave a party. It was the success of the year. The Rubens lady, who is jealous of VK, was furious. Especially when Violet and I acted afterwards, and ended up in each other’s arms. I disguise from the Rubens lady when Violet comes here.

Vita to Harold Nicolson, February 24, 1913

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Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

Now, to keep my promise and say a word on untitled debutantes. Younger sons and daughters often have a good send-off in London. Interest is taken in the debut of Miss Violet Keppel, elder daughter of Mr. and Mrs. George Keppel. She, like most modern girls, has learnt music and languages at

Dresden, and, on account of her mother's delicate health, has passed the last year or so on the Continent. Now, however, the family are to return to their beautiful house in Grosvenor Street.

Mr. and Mrs. George Keppel intend to spend the season at their house in Grosvenor Street, and Mrs. Keppel will give a dance there on May 10 for the debut of her daughter, Miss Violet Keppel. This will be practically the first entertainment on a large scale given

by Mrs. Keppel in this house, for last season it was let to Mrs. William Leeds, the wealthy American, who is just now in India with a party of friends.

The rush of dinner-parties and dances “given for” debutante daughters is simply phenomenal this month and has the youth and beauty of London society had such a crowded time!

Amongst a long list of such functions, a very interesting one was that given by the famous hostess Mrs. George Keppel, who has come back to London after two years’ absence and will be entertaining a great deal. To 16, Grosvenor-street, her fine old town house, which has been beautifully redecorated, Mrs. Keppel invited a brilliant crowd for the dinner and ball to introduce her eldest daughter, Miss

Violet Keppel. Miss Keppel is a charmingly pretty dark girl, and very like her handsome mother. She looked lovely at her debut, and seldom has a debutante had a prettier setting! The supper and ball-rooms, which were decorated in white, were a mass of crimson rambler roses and pink carnations.

There is an old Dutch garden on the roof which is a mass of blossoming plants; and the dinner-table was a perfect picture, with pink roses and carnations in crystal vases and golden bowls.

Gentlewoman, March 16, 1912

Daily Mirror, April 6, 1912

Swindon Advertiser, May 15, 1912

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I long to stop over Violet – to tell how much I secretly admired her, and how proud I was of the friendship of this brilliant, this extraordinary, this almost unearthly creature, but how I treated her with unvarying scorn, my one piece of really able handling; which kept her to me as no proof of devotion would have kept her – but I am going to tell other things first, because all the present is filled with Violet, and during the past she appears constantly too. I will stop only to say that from the beginning I was utterly sure of her; she might be elusive, she might be baffling, she might even be faithless, but under everything I had the rather insolent (but justified) certainty of her keeping to me. I listened to stories about her with a superior and proprietary smile. I would have remained for ten years without hearing a word from her, and at the end of those ten years I would have held the same undamaged confidence that we must inevitably re-unite. There isn’t a word of exaggeration in these statements – nothing, for that matter, in the whole of this writing is to be exaggerated or ‘arranged’; its only merit will be truth, but truth as bleak as I can make it.

(My writing has been broken here by Violet telephoning to me; I scarcely knew whether it was the Violet of fifteen years ago, or my passionate, stormy Violet of today, speaking to me in that same lovely voice.)

Vita Sackville-West, quoted in Portrait Of A Marriage by Nigel Nicolson

I hadn’t been ‘out’ [as a debutante] a month before my mother informed me that we were spending the weekend at Knole [the Sackville family estate, one of the largest houses in England].

Now, though I had not seen Vita for two years, we had kept up a desultory, and somewhat misleading, correspondence. I think she was rather disgusted with my geographical flightiness, Bavarian rhapsodies. As far as I can remember, I had sent her a snapshot of myself as a fully matured German, complete with plaits and silver-watch sporran. That had silenced her – at any rate, for the time being.

I was still very fond of her however, and was looking forward to demolishing some of her insular prejudices.

If she expected a horizontal pseudo-Gretchen, I expected a ‘representative Englishwoman,’ perpendicular, gauche, all knobs and knuckles. No one told me that Vita had turned into a beauty. The knobs and knuckles had disappeared. She was tall and graceful. The profound, predatory Sackville eyes were as pools in which morning mist had lifted. A peach might have envied her complexion.

Round her revolved several enamoured young men, one of whom had presented her with a bear, inevitably christened Ivan. Bears had taken the place of rabbits.

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Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

She had all the prestige that two years’ precedence dans le monde can confer.

I felt resentful, at a disadvantage. Surely she might have kept me informed of her evolution? “Do you like my dress? Tu me trouves jolie?” I questioned eagerly, reverting to the French of our childhood, pining for praise. “Tu as beaucoup de chic,” was the cautious reply.

Violet Trefusis, Don’t Look Round

THIS MORNING'S GOSSIP Miss Violet Keppel invited a number of her friends to little fancy dress ball last night at her parents' house in Grosvenor-street. The affair was in every way a great success. There were only about seventy people present, and all wore fancy costumes. The surprise of the evening took place at midnight, when, to the strains of the popular valse from “Der Rosenkavalier,” a procession of characters from this opera appeared.

THIS MORNING'S GOSSIP The impromptu fancy dress dance organised by the Duke and Duchess of Manchester at their house in Grosvenor Square on Tuesday night would have been most successful but for the illness of the Duchess, who was compelled to keep to her room and see nothing of the fun going on . . . Mrs. George Keppel wore a beautiful black and gold costume with a large hat

Miss Violet Keppel represented the Rose-Cavalier when disguised as the waiting-maid, and Miss Victoria [Vita] Sackville West represented the princess. Mr. George Keppel and Colonel Bridges, as well as Sir Hedworth Williamson, also took part. Some very effective costumes were worn – one or two of them being decidedly “sensational.”

Daily Mirror, February 22, 1913

trimmed with diamond tassels. Mrs. Ralph Peto, in a vivid tangerine orange early Victorian costume, made a decided hit. Miss Violet Keppel looked well in Spanish costume, Miss Victoria Sackville West, who came with her mother, Lady Sackville, was much admired, and Lady Sackville's jewels were gorgeous.

Daily Mirror, February 22, 1913

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High Collars & Monocles

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Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

Through Knole and her preferred solitude she discovered the joy of writing. The diary which she started in 1907 begins disconcertingly: ‘I am to restore the fortunes of the family’, having received that morning £1 for a poem published in the Onlooker, the first money she ever earned. The diary continues . . . ‘Mother scolded me this morning because she said I wrote too much, and Dada told her he did not approve of my writing. I am afraid my book will not be published. Mother does not know how much I love writing.’ The book was The King’s Secret, a novel of seventy-five thousand words about Knole in the time of Charles II. . . The King’s Secret was not the first. . . [Vita] continued with a bloodthirsty dramatization of the story of Ali Baba (the scene transferred, of course, to Knole), and then wrote Edward Sackville: The Tale of a Cavalier, a novel of sixty-five thousand words penned in a clear childish hand as easy to read as print, with scarcely a correction. Her fluency was remarkable. She taught herself the techniques of narrative and dialogue by careful observation of what she read, since she had no literary mentor and was yet to go to school. One can spot the strong influence of Cyrano. The Sackvilles, who were on the whole a modest family given to lengthy bouts of melancholia, were transformed by Vita into troubadours who played the most romantic roles at the most dramatic moments of English history, and behaved in every situation with the utmost gallantry. . . In little over four years, between 1906 and 1910 [between the ages of fourteen and eighteen], Vita wrote eight full-length novels (one in French) and five plays, and nearly all the manuscripts survive at Sissinghurst [the country house and garden in Kent she bought with Harold Nicholson in 1930, now open to the public; she created a writing space for herself in the Elizabethan Tower]. Her plots lay ready to hand, in the story of Knole and the Sackvilles. . . At seventeen, having had her gloomy Chatterton privately printed at Sevenoaks, she attempted something more ambitious.

It was a novel of 120,000 words called Behind the Mask, set in modern times.

Nigel Nicolson, Portrait Of A Marriage

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I went to stay with Violet after that [her grandfather’s death in 1908; Vita was 16, Violet 13], rather proud of my new mourning, and I am afraid I forgot to sorrow much while I was there. I remember various details about that visit: how Violet had filled my room with tuberoses, how we dressed up, how she chased me with a dagger down the long passage of that very ancient Scotch castle [Duntreath, where the family had summer holidays], and concluded the day by spending the night in my room. It was the first time in my life I ever spent the night with anyone, though goodness knows it was decorous enough: we never went to sleep, but talked throughout the night, while little owls hooted outside. I can’t hear owls now without recalling her soft troubling presence in my room in the dark.

Vita Sackville-West, quoted in Portrait Of A Marriage by Nigel Nicolson

Well, you ask me pointblank why I love you. . . . I love you, Vita, because I thought so hard to win you. . . I love you, Vita, because you never gave me back my ring. I love you because you have never yielded to anything; I love you because you never capitulate. I love you for your wonderful intelligence, for your literary aspirations, for your unconscious (?) coquetry. I love you because you have the air of doubting nothing! I love in you what I know is also in me: imagination, the gift for languages, taste, intuition, and a host of other things.

I love you, Vita, because I have seen your soul.

Letter from Violet Keppel to Vita, October 8, you 1910

Before she went away to Florence, she told me she loved me, and I, finding myself expected to rise to the occasion, stumbled out an unfamiliar ‘darling’. Oh God, to remember that first avowal, that first endearment! Then we didn’t meet till Florence, and she gave me a ring there – I have it now, of course I have it, just as I have her, and I should bury my face in my hands with shame to remember our childish passion for each other (which was too fierce, even then, to be sentimental), were it not for the justification of the present.

Vita Sackville-West, quoted in Portrait Of A Marriage by Nigel Nicolson

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Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

SENSATIONAL £1,000,000 WILL CASE ENDS IN FAVOUR OF LORD AND LADY SACKVILLE. The £1,000,000 will case ended last evening in a verdict against the family of the late Sir John Murray Scott, who opposed probate. The jury found that there had been no undue influence on the part of Lord and Lady Sackville, no fraud on the part of Lady Sackville, and that the will and codicils were duly executed. Lord and Lady Sackville's costs are to be paid by the Scott family.

Lady Sackville was in court when Sir Edward Carson addressed the jury in her behalf yesterday morning. Her daughter, the Hon. Victoria SackvilleWest (known to Sir John Scott as “Kidlet” [later know as Vita]), was present in court with some friends, and, judging by their cheerful demeanour on leaving the court for luncheon, Sir Edward Carson's speech had not made an agreeable impression, prophetic of the result.

Daily Mirror, July 8, 1913

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WILL SUIT ENDS IN ROMANCE. “KIDLET’S” ENGAGEMENT TO YOUNG DIPLOMAT. Congratulations pour on Lady Sackville.

“Kidlet” (the Hon. Victoria Mary Sackville-West), the only daughter of Lord and Lady Sackville, is be married to Mr Harold Nicolson, one of the sons of Sir Arthur Nicolson, the Permanent Under- Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

The formal engagement will not be announced for one month, or perhaps two, and the marriage will not take place till next year.

Naturally, owing to the inconvenience caused by the great law suit, the affairs of the young people have had to stand on one side for the time being.

Tall, stately, and extremely beautiful, “Kidlet,” who is 21 years old, has been much sought after, and rumour has it that she has declined the hand of two of the most eligible bachelors the country in order that she may marry the man she loves, even though in doing so she will sacrifice fortune and estates.

A Romance of Many Years.

But one day she will preside over one Britain’s embassies.

The two young people have known each other for many years.

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Mr Harold Nicolson, who was educated Balliol College, Oxford, is now second attache at Constantinople. At present he is on leave. He is 27 years old, and is spoken of as one of the most promising young men of the Foreign Office staff, and a great future is predicted for him.

His father is the holder of one of the oldest baronetcies the country, the Scottish baronetcy being created in 1637. He was created baronet of Great Britain 1905.

He has acted as British Ambassador at Petersburg and Madrid. He has also held office in Morocco, Hungary, Bulgaria, Egypt, Greece, Persia, and Turkey, and is one of the great powers behind the scenes at the Foreign Office.

A Wire from Knowsley.

Lord and Lady Sackville have received so many letters and telegrams of congratulation upon their great victory that they cannot answer them all.

By yesterday morning over a thousand telegrams had been received at their town house in Mayfair. They commenced to arrive on Monday evening directly the result of the case was known.

Dundee Evening Telegraph, July 9, 1913

Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

On the plane I showed Maggie some of the material I had collected on my previous journey to Ravello. She read that Vita Sackville-West, ‘a friend of one of Beckett’s daughters,’ participated in the planning of the garden. But Vita actually visited the Villa Cimbrone only once, I explained, and that was not to plan a garden but to advance her love affair with Grimthorpe’s illegitimate daughter, Violet.

It was as if the two girls belonged to the same family – almost as if, Violet conjectured, they were twins. But how could Vita pursue a love affair with Violet at the same time as planning a marriage to Harold Nicolson? Violet seemed to float in an illusory world of romantic ecstasy; Harold belonged to the solid world of facts.

And Vita needed both fantasy and fact in her life. Violet Keppel (as she still was in 1913) had a little earlier ‘kissed me as she usually does not, and told me that she loves me’. Vita recorded that Violet came to her room one night and ‘stayed till I don’t know when; she has not repented of our last farewell, and loves me even more’. Vita sometimes doubted whether she could tolerate giving up her freedom for conventional wedlock. But after returning to England, she felt again the charm of Harold’s boyishness, his intelligence, sense of fun and excellent manners. The peace-loving Harold represented her father’s influence – and Vita was fond of her less dominant parent. She decided, if decision it was, that ‘almost I want to marry this year and get it over’. And having made this almost-decision – like Macbeth’s ‘if it were done … then ’twere well / It were done quickly’ – something snapped in Vita’s mind and ‘I loved Harold from that day’. Yet Violet still possessed her heart.

Michael Holroyd, A Book of Secrets

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Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

In April [1918], when we were back in the country, Violet wrote to me to ask whether she could come and stay with me for a fortnight. I was bored by the idea, as I wanted to work, and I did not know how to entertain her; but I could scarcely refuse. So she came. We were both bored. My serenity got on her nerves, and her restlessness got on mine. She went up to London for the day as often as she could, but she came back in the evenings because the air-raids frightened her. She had been here [Long Barn] I think about a week when everything changed suddenly – changed far more than I foresaw at the time; changed my life. It was the 18th of April. An absurd circumstance gave rise to the whole thing; I had just got clothes like the women-on-the-land were wearing, and in the unaccustomed freedom of 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; and Violet followed me across fields and woods with a new meekness, saying very little, but never taking her eyes off me, and in the midst of my exuberance I knew that all the old under-current had come back stronger than ever, and that my old domination over her had never been diminished. I remember that wild irresponsible day. It was one of the most vibrant days of my life.

Vita Sackville-West, quoted in Portrait Of A Marriage by Nigel Nicolson

Once upon a time, there lived an artist and a woman, and the artist and the woman were one in the course of time the woman married; she married the Prince of her dreams, and irrevocable, changeless contentment descended upon her. The artist was temporarily forgotten: wrapped in comfortable torpor, the artist slept, and the woman gloried in her womanhood and in the happiness she could give . . . The combination of woman and the artist had produced a species of mentality as rare as it is sublime; an artist whether it be in painting, in music or in literature, must necessarily belong to both sexes, his judgement is bisexual, it must be utterly impersonal, he must be able to put himself with impunity in the place of either sex.

Violet to Vita, January 25, 1918

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Violet had struck the secret of my duality . . . She was far more skilful than I. I might have been a boy of eighteen, and she a woman of thirty-five. She was infinitely clever – she didn’t scare me, she didn’t rush me, she didn’t allow me to see where I was going; it was all conscious on her part, but on mine it was simply the drunkenness of liberation – the liberation of half my personality. She opened up to me a new sphere. . . She lay on the sofa, I sat plunged in the armchair; she took my hands, and parted my fingers to count the points as she told me why she loved me. I hadn’t dreamt of such an art of love. . . She appealed to my unawakened senses; she wore, I remember, a dress of red velvet, that was exactly the colour of a red rose, and that made of her, with her white skin and the tawny hair, the most seductive being. She pulled me down until I kissed her – I had not done so for many years. Then she was wise enough to get up and go to bed; but I kissed her again in the dark after I had blown out our solitary lamp. She let herself go entirely limp and passive in my arms. (I shudder to think of the experience that lay behind her abandonment). I can’t think I slept all that night – not that much of the night was left. . . I advance, therefore, the perfectly accepted theory that cases of dual personality do exist, in which the feminine and the masculine elements alternately preponderate.

Vita Sackville-West, quoted in Portrait Of A Marriage by Nigel Nicolson

The description of Julian I thought most adequate [in the draft of the novel Vita showed to Violet which became Heritage; Julian became Vita’s secret crossdressing name]. You say it’s not like you! It is you, word for word, trait for trait.

Violet to Vita, June 5 1918,

I dressed as a boy. It was easy, because I could put a khaki bandage round my head, which in those days was so common that it attracted no attention at all. I browned my face and hands. It must have been successful, because no one looked at me at all curiously or suspiciously – never once, out of the many times I did it.

My height of course was my great advantage. I looked like a rather untidy young man, a sort of undergraduate, of about nineteen. It was marvellous fun, all the more so because there was always the risk of being found out. . . Well, I took Violet as far as Orpington by train, and there we found a lodging house where we could get a room. The landlady was very benevolent and I said Violet was my wife. Next day of course I had to put on the same clothes, although I was a little 18

Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

anxious about the daylight, but again nobody took the slightest notice. . . in Paris I practically lived in that role. Violet used to call me Julian. We dined together every evening in cafés and restaurants, and went to all the theatres. I shall never forget the evenings when we walked back slowly to our flat through the streets of Paris. I, personally, had never felt so free in my life. Perhaps we have never been so happy since. When we got back to the flat, the windows all used to be open onto the courtyard of the Palais Royal, and the fountains splashed below. It was all incredible – like a fairy-tale.

Vita Sackville-West, quoted in Portrait Of A Marriage by Nigel Nicolson

. . . you could do anything with me, or rather Julian could. I love Julian, overwhelmingly, devastatingly, possessively, exorbitant, submissively, incoherently, insatiably, passionately, despairingly. Also, coquettishly, flirtatiously and frivolously. Horrible thought! What friends Denys and Julian would be!

Violet to Vita, October 25, 1918

The early days of their liaison very ecstatically happy; the friends went off to Cornwall for a fortnight. Sometimes they would travel to Plymouth to visit a music hall, where they tasted the pleasures of incognito before those of the transvestism to come. Then Vita had go back to the Long Barn; she did not like to leave Harold alone for very long. But for most of July [1918], Vita and Violet stayed in Cornwall, this time in a house Hugh Walpole lent to them. Before long, Violet could only think about running away with Vita and starting a new life. This impulse to flee appears in most of the letters Violet wrote to her friend when they were separated – one a day, or two or three in times of crisis, and all of which Vita carefully put back into the envelopes and saved. Denys Trefusis destroyed Vita’s letters to Violet.

Phillippe Jullian & John Phillips, Violet Trefusis, Life and Letters

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Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

Young Society well-knowns continue to become engaged with, from the point of view of “mamma,” the most gratifying regularity. Miss Violet Keppel who is the latest, at the moment of writing, to follow the lead given by so many of her friends is the elder daughter of Mrs. George Keppel, from whom she inherits good looks and that invaluable commodity known as the “social

sense” She has, besides, no inconsiderable artistic gifts, which she exercises, amongst others, in the direction of portraiture. Recently she has been in Monte Carlo, where her jersey frocks were the envy of her women, and the admiration of her men, friends.

The Sketch, April 2, 1919

We met again in London, lunched at a restaurant, and filled with a spirit of adventure took the train for Exeter. On the way there we decided to go on to Plymouth. We arrived at Plymouth to find our luggage had of course been put out at Exeter. We had only an assortment of French poetry with us. We didn’t care. We went to the nearest hotel, exultant to feel that nobody in the world knew where we were; at the booking office we were told there was only one room. It seemed like fate. We engaged it. We went and had supper – cider and ham – over which we talked fast and tremulously; she was frightened of me by then. The next day we went on to Cornwall, where we spent five blissful days; I felt like a person translated, or re-born; it was like beginning one’s life again in a different capacity. We were very miserable to come away, but we were constantly together during the whole of the summer months following. . . Well, the whole of that summer she was mine – a mad and irresponsible summer of moonlight nights, and infinite escapades, and passionate letters, and music, and poetry. Things were not tragic for us then, because although we cared passionately we didn’t care deeply – not like now, though it was deepening all the time; no, things weren’t tragic, they were rapturous and new, and one side of my life was opened to me, and, to hide nothing, I found things out about my own temperament that I had never been sure of before. Of course I wish now that I had never made those discoveries. One doesn’t miss what one doesn’t know, and now life is made wretched for me by privations. I often long for ignorance and innocence. I think that if anything happened to bring my friendship with Violet to an end, I might have the strength of mind to blot all that entirely out of my life.

Vita Sackville-West, quoted in Portrait Of A Marriage by Nigel Nicolson

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High Collars & Monocles

Mrs Keppel was not jolly or extensive in 1918 when her daughter Violet suffered for love. Love in her view had no rights when it disrupted or confused the mores of her class. Her sort were aristocrats, political rulers with pedigree wives, owners of castles, houses, fields and forests, employers of legions of servants, makers and arbiters of the law, close to the Crown and close to God. She intervened in her daughter’s life on a startling scale to ensure that propriety and appearance prevailed. ‘How can one make the best of anything’, Violet wrote to Vita, ‘that revolves on lies and deception?’ Her mother’s way was through charm, discretion and deference to the social code. Vita as a child was taught the habit of concealment: ‘toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire’, her mother would say. Violet trailed the words in the memoirs she dedicated to her own mother and which revealed little of her life.

Diana Souhami, Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter

That Mrs Keppel should have taken a strict line is understandable. In her youth she had steered a perilous and successful course between the shoals and reefs of scandal, and now all at once a passion she found unbearable to contemplate threatened to blacken the family name. The Edwardians took adultery in their stride, and a woman of fashion who was what we would bluntly label a nymphomaniac was simply a ‘poor dear’. But they did not extend the same tolerance to homosexuals – of either sex. The Oscar Wilde affair had left a whiff of sulphur in the air, and for homosexuals with means, it was more prudent to go away to live in, say, Italy, if they wanted to avoid the nuisances of scandal and blackmail. It was to Italy that lesbian couples like Radclyffe Hall, author of The Will of Loneliness, and her friend, Una Troubridge, fled. Lady Troubridge had just stepped down from a central role in a divorce trial which must certainly have provided food for thought to the Keppels and Sackvilles. Her husband, Admiral Sir John Troubridge, had cited Radclyffe Hall as co-respondent – and not, as had heretofore been done, another man. The scandal was immense, for all that the families involved were far less prominent than the Keppels or the Sackvilles.

Phillippe Jullian & John Phillips, Violet Trefusis, Life and Letters

. . . For 16 nights I have listened expectantly for the opening of my door, for the whispered ‘Lushka’ [a pet name] as you entered my room, and tonight I am alone. What shall I do? How can I sleep? . . . I don’t want to sleep, for fear of

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Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

waking up, thinking you near by my side, and stretching out my arms to clasp – emptiness!

Mitya, do you remember this?

All that I know of love I learned of you, And I know all that lovers can no, Since passionately loving to be loved The subtlety of your wise body moved My senses to a curiosity And your wise heart adorned itself for me.

Did you not teach me how to love you, how To win you, how to suffer for you now Since you have made, as long as life in deals, My very nerves, my very senses, yours?

I suffer for you now with that same skill Of self-consuming ecstasy, whose thrill (Make Death some day the thought of it remove!)

You gathered from the very hands of love. . . . I think you do now realise that this can’t go on, that we must once and for all take our courage in both hands, and go away together. What sort of a life can we leave now? Yours, an infamous and degrading lie to the world, officially bound to someone you don’t care for, perpetually with that someone, that itself constitutes an outrage to me, being constantly watched and questioned, watched to see if the expected reaction is not taking place, questioned to make quite sure there is no one else!

I, not caring a damn for anyone but you, utterly lost, miserably incomplete, condemned to leading a futile, purposeless existence, which no longer holds the smallest attraction for me . . .

A cheery picture, isn’t it? And you know how true it is. At all events, I implore you to run the H. N. [Harold Nicolson] fiction to death. It is the only thing that can save us, the only thing that will ensure peace for both of us. . .

En attendant, I think ‘there is a lot to be said for being (temporarily) dead’.

Mitya, what stabs me like a knife is to remember you here in this room watching the last things being packed preparatory to going away with you, a fortnight ago.

When I think of that and you waiting for me on the stairs, I feel quite faint from the pain of it all. My God, how exultant we were! And now, ‘la vie est devenue cendre dans son fruit’. There is nothing to look forward to, nothing.

I never thought I would (or could) love like this . . .

Violet to Vita, July 22, 1918

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I have known very few romantic people in my life. Denys Trefusis [Violet’s husband] was romantic. He looked romantic, came of romantic stock. . . Take Vita Sackville-West, a great poet, an heiress, the bearer of a great name. All the ingredients of Romance, you would have thought, were there, but it was not enough.

There must be a dissonance, a flaw somewhere, Romance resides in the flaw, romance is devious; double faced; it is thanks to Pepita [Vita’s maternal grandmother, Josefa Duran, a famous Spanish dancer], the slums of Malaga, the reeking cauldron of puchero, Pepita’s rascally thieving brothers, that Vita is romantic.

Violet Trefusis, Don’t Look Round

I make a resolution: I will write the most mad, obscene, relentless book that ever startled the world. It shall be more than a book. It shall be all passion, insanity, drunkenness, filth, sanity, purity, good and evil that ever fought and struggled in human anguish. . . It shall be the eternal strife between Good and Evil. It shall be Truth . . . The whole of humanity finds its echo in me, bought through pain.

Thank God for my own suffering.

Violet to Vita, June 12, 1919 (four days before her marriage to Denys)

Talking of weddings, the Violet Keppel one is this week, at St. George's, Hanover Square, to Major Denys Trefusis of the Blues. This bride is not following in the Lady Diana Cooper footsteps, for eight bridesmaids – four big, four small – follow her to the altar, the four bigs being a very pretty foursome – Sonia Keppel, Joan Poynder, Olive Paget, and Myrtle Farquharson. The fashionable Victory gold note, of

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course, well to the fore – the bride in a gold train and the bridesmaids in gold tissue and yellow chiffon. And round the bride’s neck some of those famous Mrs. George Keppel pearls that used, so says history, to flutter Edwardian dovecotes, so very very fine and large were, and are, they.

The Tatler, June 18, 1919

Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

Now comes the worst part. Denys and Harold arrived together by aeroplane early in the morning [14 February 1920]. I was very much astonished, because of course I had thought Harold was in Paris all this time, getting letters more or less all the time from me. He came up to my room, hard on Violet’s heels, and told me to pack. Then there was an unpleasant scene. I sat on the windowsill, and Violet stood near me, and we defied first Harold and then Denys, and then both together. This sounds absurd and childish, and so I dare say it was. Denys was the most silent of all; he just looked at Violet while she abused him. The upshot of it was that we refused to leave each other, and Harold said we should be starved out by having someone always with us till we gave way – it was all undignified and noisy to a degree, and I hated it, and was rude to Harold, and he said a lot of silly things that showed him in a wrong light to Violet, and I was sorry about that too. Then Violet and I went together and met Denys in a passage, and he leaned against the wall looking like a stained-glass window saint, very pale and frail, and quite golden-haired, while she said she loathed him, and never to my dying day shall I forget the look on his face. He said nothing at all, but again only stared at her, and if he had slipped down and died at our feet I should scarcely have been surprised.

Vita Sackville-West, quoted in Portrait Of A Marriage by Nigel Nicolson

Little one—I wish Violet was dead: she has poisoned one of the most sunny things that ever happened. She is like some fierce orchid, glimmering and stinking in the recesses of life and throwing cadaverous sweetness on the morning breeze. Darling, she is evil and I am not evil. Oh my darling, what is it that makes you put her above me? . . . it may be just that I am a bad, futile, unconvincing, evasive, unromantic husband. And then against me I have that little tortuous, erotic, irresponsible, irremediable and unlimited person. I don’t blame her. I don’t hate her even—no more than I should hate opium if you took it. But darling, what does it all mean?

Nigel Nicolson to Vita, September 9, 1918

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High Collars & Monocles

My own darling, I was so distressed by your letter today.

Let me make my own view quite clear.

(1) I don’t want or expect you to ‘break’ with Violet. I don’t expect you not to see her or write to her. I don’t care how affectionate your letters are: I know how difficult is the position in which you are placed.

(2) I will not, however, allow you to go away again with Violet for any long period. I don’t want you to allow her to completely monopolise your life—I don’t mean it in a selfish or jealous way.

What I mean is that the position is impossible—and that you simply can’t go on sacrificing your reputation and your duty to a tragic passion. It is bad for you and bad for Violet—and it simply cannot be allowed.

If therefore Violet is completely unreasonable, and wants you to go away with her again, and refuses to see you unless you consent, then you are right to break with her.

Nigel Nicolson to Vita, March 29, 1919

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Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

A WOMAN OF THE DAY

By Winifred Holtby [Novelist best known for South Riding] THE titles of the books written by V. Sackville-West are significant – “Heritage,” “The Heir,” “Knole and the Sackvilles,” “The Land” – their emphasis rightly places her in the company to which she belongs, among the inheritors of a rich and fair tradition.

For, if the Sackvilles were, as she herself describes them, notable chiefly as prototypes of their age, “too prodigal, too amorous, too weak, too indolent, and too melancholy,” they built about the seven court-yards of their home a life mellow and various, a company endowed with wit, intelligence, and power, and a heritage of lovely and beloved creatures, gardens and pictures, silver, flowers, and elegant and comely living.

Knole, near Sevenoaks Kent, one of the most English, most natural and least pompous of all great houses, has been owned by Cranmer and Reginald Pole; Thomas Sackville, poet and treasurer, adorned its courts, set exquisitely moulded pipe-heads to its spouting, and spent thousands of pounds upon its decoration. Each succeeding generation paid tribute to its loveliness; there are Restoration garlands, Georgian colonnade, a Gothic orangery, and winding Victorian walks in the garden. Yet, as is very rare in such places, each fashion has preserved what was thought lovely by the last. The great staircase has been left

painted, its colours faded to steely silver; the long galleries are filled with seventeenth century furniture, their velvets softened with age to the pale bloom of grapes; the hangings of the bed where James the First once slept have lost their wild flamingo pink, but are still stiff with metal embroidery; the faint plumes nod still from its panoply. In one room the dim tapestries always sway in and out as though the great wall breathed. There is this illusion of harmonious life in Knole.

The picture galleries preserve the portraits not only of the owners of the house but of their guests. One room is filled with poets: two of the Sackvilles were poets themselves; Pope visited there, and Gay and Swift and Congreve. Nell Gwynne’s picture hangs there, painted, perhaps, for the Lord Buckhurst who loved her before “the King sent for her,” and there is a pastel of the Bacelli, the Duke of Dorset's Italian dancer, who “behaved very well” when Reynolds and Gainsborough had done painting her, and let her go. Beneath the scrutiny of these men and women grew the child who should become historian of Knole and among the greatest of its poets.

In her childhood she was often alone the house with her grandfather, “a queer and silent old man,” yet kind to her and the inventor of pleasant games. She wrote notes and hid them in the secret drawers of the chests inlaid with painted ivory. She played in the great gardens, among the small, unexpected orchards, and under the beech trees.

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“I was a child, and splashed my way in laughter.

Through drifts of leaves, where underfoot the beech nuts Split with crisp crackle to my great rejoicing.”

She did not go to school. The intimate relationship between her and her lovely home was not broken until she married. Her latticed window looked out to a courtyard ghostly with madonna lilies. The white pigeons tumbled about her gables. The clock from its strange turret crowning the courts called out hours. She became a, lover, ardent and daring and assured, of Knole and the Kentish country. She wrote poems and novels, and in the Knole chapel, only used again for her son’s christening. she married Harold Nicolson, the writer and critic, then in the diplomatic service. She went with him to Constantinople, and learned that to love one place did not prevent her from falling in love with others.

During the war she returned and found an old timbered cottage by barn three miles from Knole. Here she stayed, at first temporarily, then she converted the barn into a long living room, and dug the broken land and planted flowers, and farmed the stubborn clay, she found that she could not leave. Her garden overlooking the green open country, became a lovely thing.

“She walks among the loveliness she made, Between the apple blossom and the water

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She walks among the patterned pied brocade.

Each flower her son and every tree her daughter.

This an island all with flowers inlaid.

A square of grassy pavement tasselated.

Flowers in their order blowing as she bade And in their company by her created.”

Her garden is laid on a hillside, not an island, but she made it herself.

She would not stay. “There must,” she wrote, “I thought, be something a little wrong about someone who attaches, instinctively, so much importance to a place; it betrayed a spiritual superficiality.” Her husband was in Persia. She left her two sons and followed him alone. Of that journey, its perils and discomforts, its ecstasies and compensations, of her visit to Gertrude Bell, to India, Egypt, and Arabia, she writes in “Passenger to Teheran.” it is lovely book, a lover's book, transfused with that passion for places only known to those who have loved one place intimately, consumingly and for long. She is perfectly equipped for writing travel books, for she has a rich capacity for enjoyment, a sane and generous humanity, and the poet’s swift, vital observation, which enabled her, one day when motoring near Crowborough, see once and for all the line and sense and colour of the Fens, so that they form the background, unforgettable and almost more real than

Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

the story, of her novel, “The Dragon in Shallow Waters.”

Again she has been to Persia, returning this summer from a visit during which she finished the long poem which won for her the Hawthornden Prize. The tale of this second journey remains yet unrecorded, but one day she may publish the story of how she went south to the fertile lowlands of Persia, and of how she returned, walking, over the mountains, for twelve days her caravan climbing down stony tracks while past her, upwards, scrambled the nomad tribesmen with their flocks, almost engulfing her and her companions in the surge of moving sheep. She does not flee discomfort.

Behind her pleasure in loveliness, and the gay vitality which enables her to enjoy diverse experience, lies a vigour which despises softness. She is no dilettante. She could write “The Land,” in her English Georgics, because she has not just watched others work, but has worked herself. She knows the ache of straining muscles, and the slow, resentful obstinacy of those who wrestle with a farm. So in her development as an artist, she has grown, deliberately it would seem, in strength rather than in subtlety, as though she feared in her inheritance the “amorous, indolent melancholy” of her ancestors, and set herself to harden the style to classic austerity, to stiffen her sensitive mind, and discipline are strong splendid

body, until she can create at will literature of effort, silent patience, and deep, stubborn love.

She is staying in England now, writing a biography of Aphra Behn, Kentish woman, dramatist, and traveller, one of the first women to earn her living by her pen, and unofficial diplomat for Charles II. She intends to write other poems, and perhaps another travel book. She has filled her house in the Long Barn and the cottage with lovely things, silk hangings from Persia, glass from Turkey, honest and ancient English wood; it has become already the centre of a gracious, vivid life, whose leisure is creative and articulate, because it is the leisure of men and women commonly engaged in serious activity.

Tall, dark-haired, light-footed, she resembles an ancestress of Byron’s days, whose portrait, painted in flamboyant Eastern attire, languishes roguishly on the walls of Knole; yet he has greater beauty and dignity than that lady, for to elegance she has added vigour and candid strength, the intelligence of her humanity and the tolerance of her wide experience. In a day when aristocracy is reckoned by intellect and achievement rather than by birth, she remains by every test, an aristocrat.

Yorkshire Post, August 19, 1927

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High Collars & Monocles

Jacques-Emile Blanche [Parisian artist who painted a portrait of Violet] guessed rightly that Violet’s ambitions lay much more in the direction of literature than frivolity. She liked to write, and she had an excellent gift for observation, sharpened by her talent for mimicry and flair for decor. She could create an atmosphere in a novel as easily as in a drawing-room. In the best of Paris traditions Violet presided over a salon. Paul Morand [author and diplomat who transcribed the reminiscences of Colette], Jean Giraudoux [novelist, essayist, diplomat and playwright] and a sprinkling of diplomats were among the regulars.

Lady Crewe, the wife of the English ambassador, would bring along English friends beset by qualms about being introduced to the scandal that is Violet, but they always went away vanquished by her charm. Nothing about this elegant young hostess bespoke Lesbos; she seemed even more at home in smart society than in literature.

Things were settling down. Her position in society safely reconquered, Violet was now after fame rather than notoriety. She started to write, more carefully than before, but less weightily too. During this period women writers, always more respected in France than in England, basked between the walls in the light reflected by two stars in particular, Anna de Noailles [a French/Romanian Princess and feminist, painted by many artists, the first woman to become a Commander of the Legion of Honor, the first woman to be a member of the Royal Belgian Academy of French Language and Literature, and recipient of the "Grand Prix" of the Académie Française in 1921] and Colette [author of the Claudine series, Chéri and Gigi, all made into films. She had affairs with numerous women, including notably with Natalie Clifford Barney and the transgender Mathilde de Morny, with whom she scandalously acted on stage], not to mention all the other Egerias speakers, literary-jury chairman, who were the focus of a certain interest. Each pursued her speciality: Myriam Harry, the Middle East; Princess Bibesco, international society; Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, the French provinces. Violet’s specialty was England, and she always whirled into her plots the sort of complications that ensue from involvement, whether through family connections or sentiment, with two countries, France and England.

Phillippe Jullian & John Phillips, Violet Trefusis, Life and Letters

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Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

In conversation and writing [Violet] switched with facility from French to English and weakened her style by intertwining the two – Broderie Anglaise and Écho in French, Hunt the Slipper and Tandem in English. She interlaced her unimportant plots and slight characters with epigrams and apophthegms – a sort of conversational spice: ‘I wish we could have children without the mothers. A kind of masculine virgin birth.’

‘She is the last representative of a milieu to which she never belonged.’

‘Her bones were joss-sticks, her eyes were by Fabergé, her heart, made out of Venetian glass, was a pretty toy.’

But she moved into a cultural limbo, her books not translated, her worlds divided, her print runs small, her readership split. She had no need to make her writing pay. She said she wrote each morning for a couple of hours but as the day passed her brain went woolly. She thought of herself as naturally indolent, without particular talent, deferred to Vita – a bestselling author – as the better writer, though her own style was sharper, her wit quicker, her intelligence more acute.

Diana Souhami, Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter

My house, my garden, my fields, and Harold, those were the silent ones, that pleaded only by their merits of purity, simplicity, and faith; and on the other hand stood Violet, fighting wildly for me, seeming sometimes harsh and scornful, and riding roughshod over those gentle defenceless things, but sometimes piteous and tragic, reduced to utter dependence upon me, and instantly defeated by any rough word of mine, until I really knew not where the truth lay.

Vita Sackville-West, quoted in Portrait Of A Marriage by Nigel Nicolson

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Although she repented the unhappiness she had caused Harold, Vita did not regret the adventure of her wanderlust. It was her riposte to the hypocrisy of Edwardian double standards. In her short biography of the playwright Aphra Behn, written in 1927, Vita offered a triumphalist endorsement of her subject’s mores: “in her private life she followed the dictates of inclination rather than of conventional morality.” It was, ever after, as Vita would live her own life.

Matthew Denison, Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

Aphra Behn, that good-humoured lady, that lady ‘dressed in the loose robe de chambre, with her neck and breasts bare; how much fire in her eye! What a passionate expression in her motions! How much assurance in her features!’ . . .

From the moment when she was carried, an infant in arms, past the hop gardens and into the church under the green hill at Wye, she set out on a career rich in contradiction and controversy. . .

She was an inhabitant of Grub Street with the best of them; she claimed equal rights with men; she was a phenomenon never before seen, and, when seen, furiously resented. The anger of her critics and rivals was equalled only by her own anger at not being dispassionately judged. Well aware of her own position as a pioneer, and confident in her own powers to carry through the task she had undertaken, her tongue and her pen grew tart under the injustice of organised attacks. ‘A woeful play, God damn him, for it was a woman’s’. . .

But although sometimes angry, and often hurt, she was never discouraged.

Novels, translations, poems, plays streamed from her quill, together with vituperations and retaliations fired at her detractors. From the moment that she took to writing, to the day of her death, she was never worsted; by her stubbornness she rendered a service to her sex, and it was no small service. . . .

She might be abused, there might be a clique determined to destroy her, but at least she was recognised, at least she had a name that came frequently up for discussion in the coffee-houses and the drawing-rooms. She was attacked, but she was not ignored.

Vita Sackville-West, Aphra Behn: The Incomparable Astraea, 1927

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Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

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High Collars & Monocles

Woad!

Some personalities are so vivid that they cast their colour over a whole landscape. Walk with a Sitwell over the homeliest meadow and you will find that even the wild roses are turned to cardboard, and the irises stand like yellow candles by a river of iron. Explore with certain priests from Pusey the far-from-devotional suburbs of Oxford, and at once the dusty trees seem to mass their branches formally together, as though they heard the footstep of Mr. William Morris on the asphalt. This quality has its disadvantages. I knew a charming but overpowering woman who turned half of Devonshire into a series of Van Goghs.

And few of the Bloomsbury School can cross a landscape without blurring it.

That is why, if I had to choose a companion for a country walk, I should certainly choose Victoria SackvilleWest. She is so completely of the earth, so in harmony with Nature, that she seems merely to set the country at its ease. I can imagine her sitting alone in a wood, like an allegorical picture, and I can fancy that after a little while the blue-bells would lift their heads and the aspens would cease to shiver.

A poor picture, perhaps, but it tells a story.

A few hours ago I walked with her through the winding lanes of Kent. A withered bunch of wild flowers lies on my desk to remind me of that walk, and the very names of the flowers recall her quiet spirit – celandine, meadowsweet, a wild parsley, a cluster of honeysuckle, some white, solemn

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daisies. These are the everyday garments of earth, the rough working dress of Nature in her universal mood.

Had I been with the Sitwells, I feel sure that we should have encountered nothing but thistles and orchids – two flowers of which I am passionately fond, but only at cocktail time.

Therefore when she paused at a wooden stile and told me that she wrote “The Land” in a spirit of indignation against those who had forgotten the land – or did she say a spirit of pity – I needed no explanations. I remembered her own words, sent as a challenge to those of us whose vision is bounded by Metropolis – Book-learning they have known, They meet together, talk, and grow most wise; But they have lost, in losing solitude, Something – an inward grace, the seeing eyes, The power of being alone.

The italics, ladies and gentlemen, are my own, entirely my own, but I feel that, the poet will not object to them.

For they emphasise her significance, not only in letters but in life. It is an old plea this, the plea to forsake the pleasures of neurosis, to clear one's mind of Cannes and one's body of Monte Carlo, to leave the jazz bands and to listen to the nightingale. It is an old plea, but it has to be delivered. And when it is delivered with such reverence as she has delivered it, it is our duty to listen.

Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

And yet – shall we listen? “I think my poem is dull.” She said that to me quite seriously, while I was biting a long piece of grass. “Dull,” she repeated. And I, at the end of a London season, knew what she meant. It was dull in the sense that an English landscape is dull when one looks at it through one’s window on a Sunday morning, after one has come down from a party in the early hours. There are no festoons of pink roses, no hectic violets, no glaring effects of colour. Only a chess-board of fields on which no player but the sun ever plays. Only an infinitely delicate medley of greens.

Only a gentle fragrance.

In fact, an overpowering dullness, because civilisation has blinded our eyes. A few pages of “The Land” will show you the extent to which it has blinded them. The poem is like a hedgerow – growing as naturally and as inevitably, as full of quiet colour and lovely detail. Nobody whose eyes were not crystal clear could even have begun to write it. Not only is it a matter of living in the country – because one can live the hectic life in the Cotswolds with alarming ease – it is rather a matter of allowing the country to live in one's own spirit. It is then that the spell begins to work, then that the petals open and tell their tale – Of campion and the little pimpernel; Of kexen, parsley and the varied vetch; Of the living-mesh, cat's-cradle in a ditch; Of gorse and broom and whins. . .

I am only repeating her own words when I say that the singer of country delights must nowadays run the risk of being stamped as an unbearable prig.

So many bishops and old ladies deplore the cocktail girl in every Sunday newspaper that one's natural instinct is to defend this young lady against all comers. I would therefore urge that Victoria Sackville-West wrote “The Land” not as a moral but as an aesthetic gesture. She was tired of steel roses, and crème-de-menthe meadows, and rusty brooks, and mechanical thrushes. She had wearied of woollen clouds, and valleys that gibbered beneath mad moons. She felt that it was necessary to take a deep breath, to shake her brush free of stale colours, mixed by other artists, and to look Nature straight in the eyes, painting what she saw in a few vivid, direct strokes, such as – Water alone remains untouched by snow.

That is a clear, cold statement which is the result, not of mood, but of observation. It is very typical of her. A 1927 poet, whirling down to Kent after an Embassy frolic, might notice the very same natural phenomenon as she has noticed here – the fact that water, in a landscape drained of colour by the snow's chill, keeps its funereal hues untouched. But he would probably have made a song about it he would have groped in his fevered mind for alien fancies –fancies not born of nature, but struck like sparks from the

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High Collars & Monocles

hard anvil of civilisation, and he would have written – Like a sore on white flesh The lake lies Sullenly.

Forgive me if I appear to be indulging in cheap parodies of free verse.

There are still a few maniacs who see red when any poet allows his fancy to dictate its own rhythm, but I am not one of them. It is not with the suggested rhythm that I am quarrelling but with the simile itself. The mind of Victoria Sackville West, being quiet and sane, being free of Nature's secrets, is content to record the stupendous fact that in a country overspread with snow, water remains aloof and uninfluenced. The mind of my imaginary poet, being noisy and insane, has no patience with the fact itself. He must twist it to his own base uses. He must

Miss V. Sackville-West, author of “Heritage” and “The Dragon in Shallow Waters,” has her own theory as to why women writers so rarely make men the inspirational subjects of their books. She comments as follows: An ingenious theory was recently advanced to explain why, among the supreme poets, no woman, with the possible exception of Sappho, was to be found. Whoever heard of a poem written to celebrate the beauty, the elusiveness or the mystery of a man? Ridiculous, 36

mix it with his own poison the poison of all of us who do not occasionally bend over wet earth and ponder, with a happy smile, the ways of the worm.

It seems to me, on re-reading this essay, that I have turned a charming and witty woman into a sort of healthcrank, with sandalled feet and a morbid interest in Morris dancing. And that very conviction shows me how deeply this poison of the hectic fife has entered into my veins – and, perhaps, into yours. Defend the daisy, and you are damned. Sing the beauty of the celandine, and you are a simpleton.

Study the sun, except through smoked glasses, during periods of astronomical flux, and you are regarded as insane. Very well, if that is insanity, it is the sort of insanity which I shall choose.

Beverley Nichols, ‘Celebrities in Undress,’ The Sketch, July 13, 1927

obviously. Or even the strength of a man? Or even his courage? The thing could not be done.

One is led to ask one’s self whether the same theory applies to the writing of novels. We have been given a surfeit of novels about women: their appearance, their clothes, their struggles, their weakness, their success or failure, and above all, the unravelling of that tangling thread, their psychology; we have had it all. It is true that we have also had a few novels in which a man was the central fig-

Vita Sackville-West & Violet Trefusis

ure; but for every novel about a man we can think of at least a dozen about a woman. It is true also that in a novel with a heroine there is apt to be a hero as well, but his rôle is all too frequently kept insubordinate. The true hero of most novels is decidedly the heroine.

Man wonders why this should be so.

It is probably a question of psychology. The psychology of a woman is so much more involved than that of a man, her motives so much more complex and obscure – perplexing to others, unintelligible even to herself. It must be a manifestation of the instinct of selfprotection to conceal the true heart – the vulnerable spot – inside a maze of twisting path’s and blind alleys as difficult to thread as the actual maze which was the delight of the eighteenth-century gardeners.

Women do not do it on purpose.

Surely no one in her senses would want to encumber her life with so confusing an asset as the feminine

psychology on purpose. No. It goes far back to primitive days, before psychoanalysis began to make things clear; it goes back to the old truth; man the hunter, woman the hunted. It is a manifestation of the ingenuity of the quarry that wants to elude capture, while all the time longing to be captured. And that again is very baffling.

Small wonder, then, that men, and women too, should apparently never come to the end of the novels they want to write about women!

Such a fertile field never to be harvested. About men, honest and simple, there is comparatively so little to be said. I mean that as a compliment and I am glad that it should be so. Picture a world peopled by two sexes each doing its utmost to conceal its true motive from the other; imagination boggles at the thought – though it would be a godsend to the writer of novels!

New York Times, May 14, 1922

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Vita Sackville-West, Heritage

VITA SACKVILLE-WEST, HERITAGE, 1919

Vita had Wanderlust. The desire to be free from interruption, free from being available, was as real and painful to her as love or jealousy. She longed to be in new places where nobody would ask her to order luncheon or pay house-bills or come to her with a grievance against someone else. In a sense she had at Long Barn everything which her romantic heart desired: My Saxon Weald! My cool and candid Weald!

Dear God! the heart, the very heart, of me That plays and strays a truant in strange lands, Always returns and finds its inward peace, Its swing of truth, its measure of restraint, Here among meadows, orchards, lanes and shaws.

[Orchard and Vineyard 1921] But she could rebel against the tameness of the English landscape, where the hills are small hills, the lakes small lakes, and at night the stars are small stars. At these moments the whole countryside appeared to her a horrible compromise, like its smug society, and she longed for a crueller climate, a more tempestuous people, and to shake the mud of ‘this beastly grey place’ off her shoes. In Heritage she wrote: ‘Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of man’s life’; and in the character of the Romany-Kentish Ruth, the heroine of her novel, she drew her self-portrait. Ruth’s lover says: ‘What am I to believe – that she is cursed with a dual nature, the one coarse and unbridled, the other delicate, conventional, practical, motherly, refined? Can it be the result of the separate, antagonistic strains in her blood, the southern and northern legacy?’

Vita believed that the Spanish blood ran even more strongly in herself than in her mother. She felt it to be the more vehement strain, the source of her creative talent; but she also acknowledged that it was wild and irresponsible, and conflicted with the stability which she also coveted. Violet was the Mediterranean in her; Harold was Kent.

Nigel Nicolson, Portrait Of A Marriage

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[In early 1918] She [Vita] was working hard expanding Heritage, ‘altering the end, killing the grandmother, sending Ruth and Westmacott out into the night, reviving Malory, juggling everybody up again when they flattered themselves they have got to the end of their troubles, – and incidentally hoping to make it of publishable length.’

She showed the manuscript to her literary neighbour, George Moore: He was charming about it . . He even suggested a means by which I might extend it to the necessary length. The means he suggested were due to what he described as a ‘real-life story’ he had read in some American newspaper. Practically every reviewer who subsequently condescended to notice my book observed that nothing of the sort could ever have happened in real life. Thus I am wholly indebted to George Moore for the eventual publication of my novel.

In this extensive rewrite, she codified the confusions and conclusions arising out of the crisis with Harold. In the characters of Malory and Rawden Westmacott she created two models of the V. Sackville-West hero, who was to reappear in almost all her fiction. Malory was the traveller with no dependents, no address; he was the man she would have liked to have been, and her ideal man, from her woman’s point of view. Malory is one of those people who ‘should not marry, or, if they do, should at least choose a partner as inconsistent as themselves . . . It is a new kind of eugenics, a sort of moral eugenics.’

Rawden Westmacott in the novel, though a man of Kent, was ‘a Bedouin in corduroy, with a thin, fierce face, the grace of an antelope, and the wildness of a hawk.’ Both Rawdon and the woman he loves, Ruth, have a mixed SpanishKentish ancestry: for the first time Vita explored the double heritage in herself, exploiting the family stories about Pepita and expressing her own duality in terms of conflicting inheritance. Malory asks himself whether Ruth is not ‘cursed with a dual nature’ – ‘the one coarse and unbridled, the other delicate, conventional, practical, motherly, refined . . . And is it, can it be, the result of the separate, antagonistic strains in her blood, the southern and the northern legacy?’ . . .

She sent the manuscript of Heritage to Hugh Walpole, who approved of it, saying it style derived from Conrad and from Wuthering Heights. He put it into the hands of the literary agent A. P. Watts; Collins, the first publisher approached, accepted it.

Victoria Glendinning, Vita, The Life of Vita Sackville-West

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Vita Sackville-West, Heritage

In May Heritage was published; and Lady Sackville left Knole. Harold returned to England for a week’s leave, and Violet was enraged by his very presence, ‘with its Hadji [Harold] this, and Hadji that, and you and he strolling about arm in arm (God I shall go mad!). And I, who love you fifty times more than life, am temporarily forgotten, set aside.’ She began to load on Denys new conditions, hoping that they would break him, but he agreed to everything, even to Vita sharing their honeymoon, even to the two women remaining abroad together when he returned. Violet felt trapped and desperate. Reproached by Vita for telling people that she and Denys were in love, she replied: ‘Of course I told them that. But why? To camouflage our going away . . . I hate men. They fill me with revulsion, even quite small boys. Marriage is an institution that ought to be confined to temperamental old maids, weary prostitutes, and royalty.’ When she thought Vita was weakening in her resolution to elope, she wrote: ‘They have taken you from me, Mitya [one of Violet’s nicknames for Vita]. They have taken you back to your old life; you are so prone to take fakes for the genuine article. Julian [Vita’s crossdressing name] is dead.’

Nigel Nicolson, Vita. Portrait Of A Marriage

Darling, that’s done it. The Secretary of the Marlborough Club, otherwise an intelligent and quite polite man, has just said to me: ‘By the way, are you any relation to the Nicolson whose wife wrote Heritage?’ Now look here: I don’t mind being Hadji [her use of that name dates from about this time]; or you being Vita; or my being your husband. I might even put up, from foolish people, with being called ‘Vita’s husband’ or ‘V. Sackville-West’s husband’. I might (though I’m not sure) put up with being ‘that fellow Nicolson whose wife wrote Heritage’. But I will not be asked if I am ‘by any chance’ (by any chance mark you) ‘a relation of the’ (just think, the) ‘Nicolson whose wife etc . . .’

Harold Nicolson, letter to Vita

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One suspects something tangled or unseaworthy about a story which needs two people to narrate it. In Miss V. Sackville-West's Heritage (Collins 6s. net) A begins by telling how B told him a story. Then A picks the story up for himself; and then B comes in again by means of letters to A. Wondering why C (the author) should not have told the whole tale for herself, since she knew it and knew A and B and all the other people concerned, we still admit that the author gets the effect that she wants. And that is all that matters. We hanker nevertheless after the pleasure of discerning for ourselves what a fool and a prig and a pedant B was when he went nosing about into the psychology of a splendid girl instead of falling in love with her like a man and saving her from marriage with a brute who had a hold over her. The hold was no disgraceful secret; it was merely the drop of Spanish blood which was the heritage of both these English folk of the weald of Kent. By the fireside sat a very ancient great-grandmother, once a Spanish dancer and the girl’s father, sturdy English farmer though he was, wore red braces which both A and B found to be extraordinarily significant of dangerous elements in the blood.

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When B offered her psychology instead of kisses the Spaniard in Ruth Pennistan ran away with the Spaniard in Rawdon Westmacott and duly paid for it.

In the end B won her back and a good deal of the book is filled with a gallant but incomplete attempt to show the transformation of a prig into a man. This is the kind of thing that maturity does better than youth yet we can but recognize a good deal of insight in Miss Sackville-West’s handling of the matter. We are less convinced about the change in Rawdon Westmacott, who was, as it were, turned over by the years, so that the bully side of the coin went under and its inseparable fellow, the coward came uppermost. That is partly B’s (or C’s) fault for warning us urgently that the change was very difficult to understand. It seems to us possible that it was perfectly simple; and we are left suspecting something subtler than the story brings out. In the main, nevertheless, this is a vigorous novel full of English air and rich in English character.

Times Literary Supplement, May 22, 1919

Vita Sackville-West, Heritage

When I got in just now, I found a parcel in the hall. I opened it and felt as though I had been struck. I had been struck: it was ‘Heritage.’

O, Mitya [one of Violet’s pet names for Vita], my darling, darling Mitya, I am writing this in floods of tears. I beg and implore you to come back. I have been crying almost uninterruptedly ever since I got your letter this morning. [All of Vita’s letters to Violet were destroyed by Denys Trefusis.] I got Pat to take me out to lunch, poor thing. She is at her wits’ end to know what to do. Mitya, for the sake of your own future you must come back . . .

What I pray for is an answer to my telegram. I am alone, alone.

How could you write those awful words in that letter? When you knew I could neither see you nor speak to you?

Mon cheringue, I thank God for your telegram: I hope it also means you’re coming back next Wednesday. . . . I am more odious and impossible than words can say. Put yourself in my place. . . . I loathe myself, I loathe my selfish, jealous, suspicious ungovernable. I loathe my pettiness and meanness, my exorbitant disposition; I loathe my hardness and bitterness, cynicism and vindictiveness.

Each day I miss you more; each day you seem to be withdrawing yourself still further from me. . . .

Violet to Vita, May 3, 1919

Miss V. Sackville-West is known as one who has made her mark as a writer of verse, but “Heritage” is her first essay in fiction. As a first novel it shows quite unusual promise, and readers will certainly look forward to the further development of her powers in the gentle art of story-telling. Her subject is the influence of heredity, shown in the effect which a strain of Spanish blood has on a stolid Kentish stock, manifested in the persons of a farmer’s daughter and her cousin, whom she subsequently marries. In Ruth and Rawdon we see the passionate spirit that was the heritage of their common blood drawing them together when she, by an accident of dislike, would have drawn apart. In some cu-

rious little ways Ruth has more than a touch of Hardy’s country heroines in her; like Tess, she is cursed with a dual nature – the one coarse and unbridled, the other delicate, practical, motherly.

In both there are instinct the blind and groping thoughts of a living peasantry still primitive, imbued in Ruth’s case with a southern passion of temperament that flings itself headlong at what it instinctively loathes, with ever a backward glance at the ideas which, through her own action, she has put beyond her reach. There is something, too, of Hardy's gift of Nature description in this book. Like Hawthorne and Hardy, Miss Sackville-West has a gift of sight into the spirit of place. With a few words she makes us smell the 43

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damp woods, catch the change in the wind’s voice and sense the restful atmosphere of the Kentish weald with an economy of means surprising in a first novel. Its literary style, its power of creative imagination, and its dramatic vitality presented against a back-

ground of action and psychology, make “Heritage” the most arresting first novel we have had this season.

Miss Sackville-West has already achieved no little success as a writer of verse, but, unless we are mistaken in the public taste, we believe that this success, will be altogether eclipsed by the present book. For a first novel it is little short of a miracle, for it puts its writer at once in the first flight of modern novelists. We have read nothing better, and very little as good, for long time past. Miss Sackville-West has a style individual, delicate, and mature; her characterisation is clean and true, and, an unusual gift, she draws her peasants as justly and readily as her educated people.

The main plot is simple, though its incidents are exciting enough, and the interest is never allowed to flag, and through it all there runs that sense of inevitability, that note of racial domi-

nance which gives its title to the book.

The story deals with the marriage of Ruth Pennistan, the daughter of a Kentish farmer, to her cousin, Rawdon Westmacott. Both come of yeoman stock, but both have an ancestress in old Spanish dancer, whose wild blood, flares up again in them. Into the lives these young people comes a dilettante philosopher, who loves the girl without knowing it, and only discovers his own secret when he finds her unhappy and ill-treated by the husband. In the end we are left with the inference that the right people will come together, even the way the way of their coming be conventionally wrong. It is notable story notably told, and will have, and deserve, many admirers.

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Aberdeen Press and Journal, May 15, 1919

Pall Mall Gazette, May 23, 1919

Vita Sackville-West, Heritage

Sevenoaks [a town in Kent, England] readers of fiction have during the past few days been able to gratify their curiosity as to the latest literary venture of Miss V. Sackville-West (Mrs Harold Nicolson) in publishing her first novel.

It may be said at once that the task of satisfying one’s natural interest in the work of a local authoress has proved in this instance a very pleasant and delightful occupation. The most satiated student of fiction will not fail to admire the literary skill of the plot of “Heritage,” and, above all, the artistic restraint with which Miss SackvilleWest deals with a problem which is as old as humanity. We are introduced to a Weald of Kent homestead, where we should hardly expect in the healthy Kentish atmosphere that the problems of heredity and primeval passion would have full play. However, a drop of hot Spanish blood in the veins of honest Kentish folk causes all the mischief. By the farmhouse fire sits an ancient grand dame, who was once a Spanish dancer, and the fire of passion which once coursed through her veins is the inheritance which leads to the complications which Miss SackvilleWest sets out to solve in her novel, which is full of English atmosphere and rich in English character. We must leave our readers to study for them-

selves the story of the sturdy Kentish yeoman and of his daughter, the fascinating maid of Kent, in whose veins pulsates the warm blood of the Spanish ancestor. To enjoy a vigorously told story, one must not lose patience with the foolish prig and pedant who peers into the psychology of a splendid girl instead of falling in love with her like a man and saving her from marriage with the brute she eloped with when her priggish admirer offered her psychology instead of kisses. The Spaniard in the girl revolted from all this, and she ran away and paid the price of her revolt. In the end the pendant won her back and became transformed in the process from a prig into a man, while the bully went under, and the inseparable cowardice of the bully revealed itself in his defeat. Miss Sackville-West displays a deep insight into the theory which she sets herself to solve, and her subtle handling of it will undoubtedly leave the reader wondering and thinking over a problem as old as the hills, but of never-failing interest. That the eternal feminine is ultimately victorious provides the necessary ending to an admirable story.

Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser, May 23, 1919

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The quite new novelist, he who makes his first adventure, is always a subject of interest. He may fall by the way, or he may not, but anyhow you have a gamble in him. Miss Sackville-West, who writes a clever novel, “Heritage,” is, however, a lady, and perhaps that is not her actual name, at all events her

married name. She has written verse, and “Heritage” shows that she has literary style and a dramatic sense, rather rare things in women.

Miss V. Sackville West has found herself in her first novel, “Heritage”. Yet one does not quite know why it should be so often considered necessary by novelists to introduce Spanish or some other hot-blooded Latin strain to explain the phenomenon of passion in English folk. This study of Rawdon and Ruth strikes us as real and true without seeking for any explanation heredity. However, that is a slight mat-

ter. The book is strongly written, with an unusual charm of literary style, and a dramatic power that is always discreetly held in check. It holds us right up to the startling, but convincing, climax. We shall look forward with interest to the writer’s next book.

Miss V. Sackville-West's first novel, “Heritage,” fully deserves the praise which the critics have given it. The subject is all the more interesting from its reminiscence of an incident in the novelist's own family, which probably suggested the story. In the novel a Kentish yeoman, while soldiering in Spain, marries a Spanish dancer, and we are shown how, four generations later, the fantastic mingling of blood breaks out in tragedy among his farmer descendants in the Weald of Kent. Now it is a fact of history that the late Lord Sackville made an irregular union with a famous Spanish opera

dancer. A legitimacy suit brought by their son, the late Mr. E. H. SackvilleWest, to establish the lawful marriage of his parents occupied the courts for several days in 1909 and 1910. The petition was dismissed, and the petitioner, following the death of his wife, to whom he was attached with all the Latin passion of his mother, the dancer, committed suicide. No doubt the tragedy produced a strong impression on the author of “Heritage.”

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James Milne, The Graphic, May 24, 1919

Sheffield Daily Telegraph, May 29, 1919

‘In Town and Out,’ by ‘Christopher’, The Tatler, June 4, 1919

Vita Sackville-West, Heritage

This is a remarkable book for a first effort, and the author may be sincerely congratulated on achieving an able study of the warring influences of heredity, as exemplified in the personalities of two cousins, a man and a girl.

They are members of a typical and solid Kentish yeoman family; but their great-grandfather, when serving in Spain as an officer, had married a Spanish dancer, and the Moorish and Gipsy traits, characteristics, and physical attributes of this peculiar strain in the pedigrees were the heritage solely of the two protagonists of the story.

Consequently their amatory relations are of a bizarre and fierce nature: hatred and yet physical attraction being predominant factors in their stormy alliance.

In a way, Heritage has a suggestion of the fierce passions and crude actions of Wuthering Heights, and the principal narrator of the story, the inept Malory, bears resemblance to the inept Lockwood who acts the narrator of Wuthering Heights. Miss SackvilleWest has adopted the awkward method of narrative used Emily Bronte, and so tells her story by means of two characters who both speak in the first person singular, which is confusing to the reader. Unfortunately the denouement of Heritage is unconvincing. There is no reason for supposing that Rawdon Westmacott’s heritage of

Spanish or other blood would cause him to go to pieces in a nervous sense as result of his wife’s one and unsuccessful attempt to shoot him. His hitherto savage character gave no indications of such latent cowardice; and to go away and leave his wife free for the arms and protection of his feeble and unheroic rival, Malory, is as unsatisfactory an ending as that which mars Meredith's Lord Ormont and his Aminta. Up to this point Miss Sackville-West's characterisation is good.

She is best in descriptive scenes, and can paint vivid pictures in a few words.

That passionate interview in the cowshed would bear comparison with Hardy. “As l looked down the line of stalls in which the slow cattle were lazily ruminating I saw two indistinct figures, and beyond them, the open door, the night sky, and angry moon, the yellow hunter's moon, rising behind the trees.”

Miss Sackville-West has the sense of memory and place. She can conjure up the aspect of the Weald of Kent, the country of Knole and Penshurst, with a graphic word or two. She can also touch a deeper note of reflection and pathos. Her future work will be awaited with interest.

S. M. Ellis, Daily Herald, September 5, 1919

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The Tatler, August 13, 1919

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Vita Sackville-West, Challenge

VITA SACKVILLE-WEST CHALLENGE (1923, IN AMERICA ONLY)

The best evidence of Vita’s feelings for Violet is contained in her novel Challenge, which is dedicated to Violet and is about her. She began it in May 1918 within a few days of their return from Cornwall, and finished it in Monte Carlo in November 1919. It was never published in England [until 1974]. Both Vita’s and Violet’s parents insisted that it be suppressed (much to Violet’s fury), since the portrait of her was too easily recognizable and they feared a scandal. But it was published in the United States in 1924, and I have the manuscript at Sissinghurst. While Vita was writing it, she was living her life on two levels, the actual and the fictional, and as her love for Violet intensified, so did that between Julian and Eve in the novel, with incidents, conversations and letters lifted into the book from reality.

Every evening Vita would read to Eve’s model the pages which she had written during the day, and Violet loved the game, glorying in the splendidly romantic situations in which she found her fictional self, suggesting extra touches to the drama and her own portrait, and adding from time to time huge chunks of her own invention.

It is the story of Julian, a rich young Englishman living in a small republic on the Greek coast, who incites the offshore islanders of Aphros to revolt, and becomes their illegal president. Eve, his cousin, lovely, wayward, contemptuous of all other suitors, joins him there, and they become happy lovers, until jealousy of Julian’s commitment to Aphros leads Eve to betray him. Eve wants Julian absolutely, and to hell with convention and his political beliefs: I understand love in no other way. I am single-hearted. Is is a selfish love. I would die for you gladly, without a thought, but I would sacrifice my claim on you to no one and to nothing. It is all-exorbitant. I make enormous demands . . . Freedom, Julian, romance! The world before us to roam at will! . . . Tweak the nose of propriety, snatch away the chair on which she would sit down!

Julian is Vita; Aphros stands for Harold, the rival for Eve’s love; Eve is Violet to the very inflexions of her voice, the tossing of her dark hair, ‘turbulent, defiant, courting danger, and then childishly frightened when danger overtook her, deliriously forthcoming, inventive, enthusiastic, but always at heart withdrawn . . . She lives constantly, from choice, in a storm of trouble and excitement.’ ‘She was spoilt, exquisite, witty, mettlesome, elusive, tantalizing, a creature that from the age of three has exacted homage and protection.’ ‘Was Eve to blame for her cruelty, her selfishness, her disregard for truth? Was she, not evil, but only alien, to be forgiven all for the sake of the rarer, more distant, flame? Was the standard of cardinal virtues set by the world the true, the ultimate, standard?’ . . .

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Challenge is Vita’s defence of Violet, and of herself. Vita was twenty-six in 1918, Violet twenty-four. When together their feet barely touched the earth. They were carried on the breezes towards the sun, exalted and ecstatic, breathing the thin air of the empyrean. Violet seemed to her a creature lifted from legend, deriving from no parentage, unprecedented, unmatched, pagan. Their bond of flesh was so compelling that it became almost a spiritual, not a bodily, necessity, exacting so close and tremulous an intimacy that nothing existed for them outside. It swept away their careful training, individual and hereditary, replacing pride by another pride. They loved intensively, with a flame that purged all from their love but the essential, the ideal, passion. Marriage was nothing to this: marriage was only for husbands and wives. When Eve betrays Julian, his final insult is to offer her marriage. And she, proud to the end, drowns herself.

Nigel Nicolson, Vita. Portrait Of A Marriage

‘Rebellion’ [the working title for Challenge] will be acclaimed as a work of genius (you have no conception how good it is). Julian (in the flesh will be acclaimed as a junior Don Juan, hélas) [Julian in the novel stands for Vita; it was her crossdressing name] and I shall by then have developed into a sort of secretary drudge (expected to dust and cook as well) with no higher mission in life than to typewrite your MS. and dress your love letters.

Also, you will drink, you will gamble with my money. You will sell my jewels in order to keep the Mélusines of this world in silk stockings and black onyx wristwatches! Mais je t’adore, tout admettant que – suis bête!

Violet to Vita, October 10, 1919

Then about five days before her wedding [Violet’s wedding to Denys Trefusis] I suddenly got by the same post three miserable letters from Harold, who had scented danger, because, in order to break it to him more or less gently (and also because I was in a dreadful state of mind myself during all that time), I had been writing him letters full of hints. When I read those letters something snapped in my mind. I saw Harold, all sweet and gentle and dependent upon me. Violet was there. She was terrified. I remember saying, ‘It’s no good, I can’t take you away.’

She implored me by everything she could think of, but I was obdurate. We went up to London together, Violet nearly off her head, and me repeating to myself phrases out of Harold’s letters to give me strength. I telegraphed to him to say I 50

Vita Sackville-West, Challenge

was coming to Paris; I had only one idea, to fly as quickly as I could and to put distance between me and temptation. . .

Then I went to Paris, alone. That is one of the worst days I remember [June 15, 1919]. While I was in the train going to Folkestone I still felt I could change my mind and go back if I wanted to, for she had told me she would wait for me up to the very last minute, and would come straight away if I appeared, or telephoned for her. At Folkestone I felt it becoming more irrevocable, and tried to get off the boat again, but they were moving the gangway and pushed me back. I had Harold’s letters with me, and kept reading them until they almost lost all sense.

The journey had never seemed so slow; it remains with me simply as a nightmare.

I couldn’t eat, and tears kept running down my face. Harold met me at the Gare du Nord. I said I wanted to go straight back, but he said, ‘No, no’, and took me out to Versailles in a motor. The next day was Sunday, and he stayed with me all day. By then I had got such a reaction that I was feverishly cheerful, and he might have thought nothing was the matter. I gave him the book I was writing [Challenge], because I knew Violet would hate me to do that, as it was all about her. I was awake nearly all that night.

Vita Sackville-West, quoted in Portrait Of A Marriage by Nigel Nicolson

As soon as they reached Paris [in early 1919], Violet began to extract promises from Vita that she would stay with her indefinitely, threatening to kill herself if she did not agree, and these scenes were repeated whenever Vita tried to escape.

But Vita did not try very hard. . . Very quickly they ran out of money. They moved from the Hôtel Bristol to the less expensive Hôtel Windsor, but found themselves by mid-December quite penniless (‘We have fifty centimes between us’, says Vita’s diary), and they were obliged to pawn their jewels to pay the hotel bill and raise enough money to gamble, successfully, at the Casino. Harold then cabled them £130. They spent their days reading, writing Challenge, playing tennis, walking in the hills and the garden of Château Malet, and their evenings at the tables.

Nigel Nicolson, Portrait Of A Marriage

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Vita Sackville-West, Challenge

I have done a rather nice drawing of Eve and Julian. [Julian was the name Vita gave to her cross-dressing alter ego. The drawing was enclosed with the letter.]

Like the contrasted angles of their bodies – don’t lose it, as it has suggested an idea for the cover, which we might work out together on Monday. . . Isn’t it exactly like Julian? It is so like Julian’s length and stoop – more droop than stoop, somehow.

They are under a réverbère [street lamp] and in Paris. He is trying to light a cigarette, and she is pulling him back to look at something? Bring it with you when you come.

Darling, sorry to be so tiresome, but I do think the drawing might be adapted for the cover [of Challenge], if it were probably [sic] done in a décor, other than a Paris boulevard. I think the dignity and concentration of the tall loose-limbed Julian makes a good contrast to the waywardness and caprice of the other figure, who resents is being absorbed even in a cigarette!

Darling, please don’t misunderstand me: it isn’t properly drawn, but it might be – however I’ll do it for you when you come.

Violet to Vita, September 23, 1919

At Toulon [France, in February 1920] they [Vita and Violet] met Mrs Keppel [Violet’s mother], who treated her daughter with great consideration. She did not insist that Violet should remain with Denys, nor that she should break completely with Vita, who could, if she wished, stay with them in England from time to time; and she offered her an allowance of £600 a year. But Violet was untouched by her generosity and soft persuasion. She wrote to Vita, ‘I shall bolt from Bordighera at the first opportunity. You must meet me in a town in the south of France.’ Vita calmly returned to England, even agreeing, as an act of renunciation more than of contrition, to abandon the publication of Challenge, now in proof. She appeared with Harold at the theatre, at lunch parties, without betraying by word or look what they had both been through, and they were almost the only people not to speak about it.

Nigel Nicolson, Portrait Of A Marriage

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Throughout it all, Denys [Trefusis] had kept faith with an idea of something lovable in Violet; when she drew his portrait during their engagement, he interpreted it as a speaking gesture. Only now, with his eyes finally opened to the true nature of her love for Vita, did Violet allow him to dislike her as she deserved. . . He would take revenge by destroying all of Vita’s letters to Violet. . . Vita returned from Paris to Long Barn. She was like Clare Warrener in Grey Wethers, unable to settle down to her ‘suitable’ marriage, but tortured by the thought of making good a bolt for freedom. . . She immersed herself in Challenge and the garden; at an auction in July she bought an additional thirty-three acres next to Long Barn, with two cottages and standing timber. Her occupations were symbols of the two halves of her life, both of them more easily managed in the absence of her coplayers. Of the experience of writing Challenge she wrote to the absent Harold that she was ‘playing gooseberry to the oddest couple.’. . It was letters of this sort, with their promise of ‘another year,’ which persuaded Harold to agree to Vita’s suggestion late that summer that she again go away with Violet. The excuse this time was a trip to Greece as research for Challenge. . . Vita and Violet did not reach Greece. Instead they lingered in Paris, Vita again dressed as Julian, and afterwards travelled south to Monte Carlo. Vita had suspected her passion was on the wane but quickly learned she was mistaken. ‘There was no abatement, rather the reverse, in our caring for one another; there was no abatement either in my passion for the freedom of that life.’

Matthew Dennison, Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

Eve is not a ‘little swine’, she is just all the weaknesses and faults of femininity carried to the nth power, but also redeemed by the self-sacrifice which is also very feminine. I do think she is left sympathetic at the end, in spite of what she has done. It will be fun to think you are reading it. Julian is a practical idealist. He is much better, and less a schoolgirl hero. (But still a little bit that, I’m afraid.) The end was very difficult. I have tried to keep it as simple as possible. But as a whole it is a bad book. I shall never write a good book; at least, I might write dozens of quite good books, but I shall never write a great one. And to be great is the only thing that really counts, whether for books or people.

Vita to Harold, November 26, 1919

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In October [1918] the friends [Violet and Vita] saw each other daily in London.

At the beginning of their liaison, they had started on a novel whose protagonists were portraits of themselves. Vita is ‘Julian,’ a young Englishman whose family is the richest family in a vaguely Hellenistic republic, and who aids a vassal island offshore to gain its independence. Violet is ‘Eve,’ his cousin, who joins him in the adventures but ends by betraying Julian. She wants him to herself, without having to reckon with his newly won power over the islanders. Julian proceeds to humiliate his cousin – and to retain her – by proposing marriage, but in her pride in her own independence she drowns herself (like Sappho). While this might make a good film script, it is not a very good plot for a novel. . .

With all the fervour of youth, the friends did not hesitate to include a good deal of purple prose which is nonetheless meant perfectly seriously. Some of these passages were underlined in pencil by Violet herself when she re-read Challenge in 1922, just after the final break. J. W. Lambert very fairly noted in his Sunday Times review of Challenge: Eve (a portrait, much enjoyed by its original, of Violet Trefusis) is an appalling young creature. More described than created, until she goes into action as a sexual suppliant, she draws her author repeated chains of doting adjectives (‘meddlesome, elusive, tantalising, detached . . . Selfish, jealous, unkind, pernicious, indolent, vain’). [He concludes by summing the novel up as] a daydream which sweeps along with all the exhilarating courage of its own absurdity . . .

Violet soon found herself unable to endure long separations from Vita, who had truly become Julian and immediately after the armistice, the two friends decided to leave for Paris. A friend, Edward Knoblock (the author of Kismet) lent them a pied-à-terre in the Palais Royal. Like [novelist] Hugh Walpole, he was a fashionable homosexual. The idea of becoming accomplices in an adventure as romantic as it was aristocratic, but which also defied society with more courage than either of these gentlemen had ever been able to muster, must have enchanted them.

Philippe Jullian & John Phillips, Violet Trefusis, Life and Letters

On 20 February, in Paris, an apathetic Vita received proofs of Challenge, ‘about the only thing which has stirred me to any interest since Amiens [where she went with Violet after Lincoln].’ The same day her mother had a sad letter from her; ‘Vita was like a ‘broken-hearted lover,’ her mother realized. ‘If V. T. [Violet Trefusis] was a man, I could understand. But for a woman, such a love beats me, but I try so hard to understand.’

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B. M. [Vita’s mother] was less understanding when, on Vita’s return London, she read the proofs of Challenge. She saw at once the portrayal of Violet in the character Eve and was horrified. She thought the book was dull as well – ‘brilliantly dull’ – and with Harold’s approval let Vita know it would be a terrible mistake to publish it. ‘Harold suggested I should make my letter to Vita much stronger . . .’ But when Vita tested, Harold changed horses and backed Vita; ‘it was too weak of him.’

The book was due to be published the following month, March 1920. Violet had adapted a saucy drawing she had made of herself and ‘Julian,’ smoking a cigarette, under a lamp post in Paris for the cover. The book was also to be published in America. Vita was not too hard to sway by threats of gossip, which in spite of her defiance she dreaded, and withdrew her book from Collins in midMarch. (She had to pay them £150 recover the rights.) The book was already printed, but not bound. ‘It will be sewn, and put away in lavender,’ Nigel de Grey of Collins wrote to her when he had got over his irritation. American publication was also postponed [until 1923].

Victoria Glendinning, Vita: the Life of Vita Sackville-West

You can’t seriously mean what you said about not publishing our Book. It would be too idiotic. It is quite admirable – What rotten judges people are of their own books (i.e., you, Clemence Dane [novelist and feminist] ) . . .

You’ve no idea how good ‘Rebellion’ is. I suppose I might say it is superlatively interesting as it is about us, but it is for all that. Wait and see this doesn’t prove me right. I believe Clemence Dane is jealous of YOU – of ‘Heritage,’ I mean. (How lovely to think that my book will suscitate no jealousies – it is too putrid). . .

What do you think is wrong with ‘Rebellion?’ It is original in plot, lenient in style, psychologically it couldn’t be more accurate. What more can you have? It has none of the awkwardness of ‘Heritage,’ no rather difficultly drawn character like Malory. I’m not crabbing ‘Heritage.’ It was frightfully good, but nothing will induce me to think that ‘Rebellion’ isn’t ten times better. Why ‘superficial?’ I should have thought quite the opposite – You can’t say that either you or Julian superficial.

I don’t know that I shall particularly enjoyed steeping myself in Trefusis’s weekend . . . Mitya, BE GOOD. I trust you. Don’t relax, don’t relent, don’t sigh and soften: it’s absurd, disloyal (to me), and useless.

Violet to Vita, January 29, 1920

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Long Barn.

Change my title to “Challenge.” I can’t give it up; B.M. [her mother] asks too much.

Vita Sackville-West, diary March 2, 1920 Hill St., Richmond.

Mrs. Belloc Lowndes rings me up out of the blue and says she wants to know me.

[Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes, to whom Victoria will write about the awfulness of Orlando.] Will I go and see her? I go. She is much au courant with my circumstances, and with the question of publishing “Challenge” or not. I am to send her the proofs.

Vita Sackville-West, diary March 12, 1920 Hill St., Richmond.

Go to see Mrs. Lowndes, and have a long discussion with her about “Challenge,” which she has now read in proof. She wants me to cancel it—says if L. [Lushka, ie Violet] were dead, would I publish it, etc.? This hits me—gossip I don’t care a damn about. Mrs. Lowndes is kindness itself. So I give it up. I hope B.M. [her mother] is pleased. She has beaten me.

Vita Sackville-West, diary March 15, 1920

I knew then what I suppose the general reader probably knows of Violet. I had read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and remembered from the first chapter of her novel the extraordinary appearance (though not the full reverberating name) of Princess Marousha Stanilovska Dagmar Natasha lliana Romanovitch, or ‘Sasha’ as Orlando calls her (echoing ‘Lushka’, the luscious name Vita Sackville-West used for Violet). Orlando was written partly in response to, partly guided by, two books: one by Vita Sackville-West and the other by her husband Harold Nicolson.

Vita’s book was Challenge, a fictional account of her love affair with Violet who helped her in its composition between 1918 and 1919 – while the two of them were escaping from the conventional world of sexual and romantic adventures (Vita sometimes disguised as a man and transformed into ‘Julian’ from the novel, Violet evolving into the eternally feminine ‘Eve’). At the insistence of Vita’s mother Lady Sackville, who feared the scandal this novel would arouse, the British publication was delayed for over fifty years – until Vita and Violet were both dead, and after Vita’s narrative of their lesbian relationship had been made available by her son Nigel Nicolson in his famous book, Portrait of a Marriage. But 57

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Challenge was published in the United States in 1924 [actually February 23, 1923 by George Doran, New York] and it was this edition that Virginia Woolf took up and read during the summer of 1927 by which time she and Vita had grown very close.

Vita’s sexual ambivalence changed Virginia Woolf’s awareness of her own sexual nature. But her literary imagination was caught the same month (June 1927) by Harold Nicolson’s Some People. ‘I can’t make out how you combine the advantages of fact and fiction as you do,’ she wrote to him. The day before, she had written to Vita about Challenge, politely calling Eve ‘very desirable’. She wanted to write her own make-believe pen portrait of Violet Trefusis – with all the freedom of fiction since they had never met. ‘I lie in bed making up stories about you,’ she had told Vita.

Michael Holroyd, A Book of Secrets

For more than a year, Vita had forced herself go into society with her husband, where, as their son Nigel has amusingly remarked, ‘they were almost the only people not to speak about’ the scandal. She made her peace with her mother, and as a token of her change of heart promised to stop the publication of Challenge.

Lady Sackville had shown that the manuscript to Mrs Belloc Lowndes, the novelist, a goodhearted, sensible woman who felt that it was not worth risking more trouble for. She simply asked Vita: ‘Would you publish this book if Violet were dead?’ Vita had to acknowledge that she would not, and took the manuscript back from their English publisher (though the book appeared in an American edition in 1924. Violet, who had helped Vita with Challenge and hoped enter posterity under the guise of Eve, was terribly hurt by her friend’s circumspection. What would remain of their love, of all they had gone through, if not this book? Only Violet understood Vita’s dedication when the book did come out. Written in their secret language, it was undecided until 1973, when a Sunday Times reader, Mrs Riddler, discovered that its vocabulary came from George Borrow’s The Zincali (Vita, proud of her gypsy grandmother, knew everything the author of The Bible in Spain had written): This book is thine, honoured witch; If thou readest, thou wilt find thy tormented soul Changed and free.

The passages Violet marked in her copy of Challenge reassured her that she had been the object of an incomparable love.

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Vita Sackville-West, Challenge

Whatever she might do, whatever crime she might commit, whatever baseness she might perpetrate, her ultimate worth, the core, the kernel, it remains to him unsullied and inviolate. This he knew blindly, seeing it as the mystic sees God; and knew it the more profoundly that he could have defended it with no argument of reason.

What balm the novel would have provided for so many wounds if only it had turned out to be a masterpiece; if only Vita had become, as she wanted to, last of the great romantics. Challenge would have brought immortality with it. But by a twist of fate, it was Vita who was immortalised, in Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, Orlando.

Philippe Jullian & John Phillips, Violet Trefusis, Life and Letters

Ambisextrous A book which is mystifying Americans and is therefore selling well, on its undiscovered merits, is “Orlando”; Mrs. Virginia Woolf wrote it, and it is all about a hero who starts life in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, changes to a heroine several centuries later, and ends up pleasantly alive in this year of grace.

People are reading it, and saying that it takes “Understanding” and that it is “Deep.”

It is certainly very well written.

Even though she does lapse into “neither . . or” instead of “neither . . . nor.”

But Mrs. Woolf says that she wrote it as a joke after staying with Vita Sackville-West. And she illustrates it with photographs of Miss SackvilleWest.

There is also a photograph of a painting of Orlando as a young man a century or so ago, which so closely resembles Miss Sackville-West that I think it must be one of her ancestors.

Lady Eleanor Smith, Weekly Dispatch, December 16, 1928

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The proofs of Challenge reached Vita when she was recovering from this ordeal in Paris. Much of the novel had been written in Monte Carlo at the height of the affair, and the agony of revising her work threw her into a new emotional turmoil.

Challenge was her declaration of defiance, an apologia for her conduct. She wished to publish it as a memorial to what she had endured, as her statement of what love could and should be. She first called the book Rebellion, then Enchantment, then Vanity. She finally settled on Challenge, as a summing-up of everything she wished to convey. . .

To those who knew nothing of the real circumstances it would be a simple love-story with no overtones or undercurrents. Not one in a thousand readers would recognise Violet in the character of Eve, nor Vita herself in Julian. But Vita felt the risk to be too great. At the last moment she yielded, not to shame, but to reticence. She told her publishers, Collins, that she had changed her mind, giving as her false reason her disappointment with its literary quality. Lady Sackville, on her behalf, paid Collins £150 in compensation for cancelling publication, since the book had already been advertised as forthcoming. Four years later Vita agreed to its publication in America, making one change only: for the phrase ‘Dedicated with gratitude for much excellent copy to the original of Eve’ she substituted three lines of a Turkish love-poem which nobody was expected to understand. The novel can now do no conceivable harm to anyone, and it is fitting that it should be reborn under the imprint of the same publisher from whom it was snatched at the font more than half a century ago.

Nigel Nicolson, Foreword to the first British edition, 1974

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Vita Sackville-West, The Dragon in Shallow Waters

The Sketch, June 29, 1921

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VITA SACKVILLE-WEST, THE DRAGON IN SHALLOW WATERS (1921) The excuse for [visiting the English cathedral city of] Lincoln was Vita’s new novel, The Dragon in Shallow Waters, which was set in the Fen district, but she also told her mother that she was taking Violet to the country to escape Denys, who was threatening to shoot her. . . The truth was that Vita and Violet were very happy in Lincoln, staying at the Saracen’s Head Hotel. There they made their plan to fly the country together. It was a hot-blooded plot, and Vita was a willing partner to it. Harold was in Paris, busy with the Adriatic question and the fate of war-criminals, quite unconscious, in spite of all Vita’s warnings, that the climacteric moment had arrived. He knew that she was in Lincoln, but he did not know that Violet was with her. He thought that Vita was collecting local colour for Dragon.

Nigel Nicolson, Portrait Of A Marriage

On 18 April 1918 [1920], Violet had already been at Long Barn for five days. She was bored, playing her waiting game. Vita, too, anxious to be writing, chafed at the restraints of her company, a sign of the gulf between them. The previous month, at Thornton Manor on the Wirral, Vita had stayed with another of Victoria’s wealthy admirers, Sunlight Soap magnate Lord Leverhulme. ‘Go over the soap works at Port Sunlight, great fun,’ she recorded in her diary. A seed was sown. It would grow into the novel that, in 1921, became The Dragon in Shallow Waters, a violent, darkly melodramatic story that begins with a description of a soap factory and culminates in a gruesome death by immolation in a vat of boiling soap; throughout its inception Harold and Vita referred to the novel simply as ‘Soap’.

Matthew Dennison, Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

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I was happy last night [July 25, 1920]. I lay awake thinking about this writing, and watching the patterns that the moonlight, shining through branches and lattices, made upon my bed. This morning I woke up to wonder whether it was worthwhile going on with a bald egotistical statement; it keeps me from Soap [working title] which I ought to finish.

Vita Sackville-West, quoted in Portrait Of A Marriage by Nigel Nicolson

Darling, I was so spoilt yesterday: I had 4 letters from you, and in that lot only one nasty one which I dutifully answered. The last one you wrote after having received mine, I adored. Bless you for having written it.

As to the one about your book, I think you ought to make it ‘end well;’ as you say yourself, then Silas will have failed everything, and personally I think that it is more artistic than the other solution. It is an awful temptation to make one’s books end badly. I experienced it over my miserable effort.

I have been writing a little – it is now ‘starker’ than ever – the barest possible statement of fact – no embroideries, no flights of fancy. It is merely an undraped chronicle of things that actually happened. It has no merit – it is abominably written – the only merit it could possibly have is one of the most undeviating concentration looks neither the right, nor to the left, but sees only straight in front of it!

I can never help laughing at my own austerity.

As to your novel, I was tremendously impressed with what I read of it. I think it’s quite excellent . . . eschew prettiness at all cost, prettiness and its effete train bearers, Rhapsody and Sentiment.

Violet to Vita, August 28, 1920

In September [1920], Vita finished The Dragon in Shallow Waters. Violet read it the following month and dismissed it as ‘coarse’. Neither woman appears to have questioned Vita’s choice of subject matter, but this shilling shocker tale of brothers Silas and Gregory Dene had a curious aptness. ‘They lived in a double-cottage; Gregory with his wife in one half; Silas and his wife . . . In the other . . . Of the two brothers Gregory had been deaf and dumb from birth, and Silas blind.’ Their physical impairments mean that each brother is incomplete: only when they are together do they function fully. That idea is emphasised by their occupation of twin halves of the same house. Silas and Gregory also embody opposing character 64

Vita Sackville-West, The Dragon in Shallow Waters

traits, the former violent and destructive, the latter patient, thoughtful, creative.

That neither is wholly believable as a character is due to Vita having attempted to depict the dualities of a single nature into different people. Remote as the fictive Denes’ lives are from Knole and the Sackvilles, The Dragon in Shallow Waters is another of Vita’s attempts to work out in fiction uncomfortable aspects of what she imagined to be her own character. She wrote the novel at a moment of crisis, when that schism seemed more than usually real and powerful to her. Vita’s towering fury in the hotel at Amiens, when she learned, as she thought, that Violet had deceived her by sleeping with Denys, became Silas’s loathing for his brother.

Matthew Dennison, Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

Darling, I want you to tell me more about your book. Have you made it end ‘well’ or ‘badly’ – I like the title. Please tell me more about it.

Goaded to fury by your having finished yours, I have been trying to write mine again, but it will be ages before it is finished, as I write very slowly and anyway it is rotten. . . [It is not known which book Violet was working on; her first novel was not published until 1929.]

Violet to Vita, September 27, 1920

The early summer of 1921 was peaceful. The Nicolsons and their friends played tennis on the new court at Long Barn; Vita’s second novel The Dragon in Shallow Waters, finished the previous September . . . came out. It is a bizarre violent story about bizarre violent people, ending with a blind man precipitating a deaf-mute into that of boiling soap. (Vita got her soap-factory material from a visit . . To Lord Leverhulme’s factory at Port Sunlight.) Enid Bagnold [novelist best known for National Velvet, 1935], having read the book, told Vita she was ‘an Amazon who played with boulders instead of tennis balls.’

Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

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Vita Sackville-West, The Dragon in Shallow Waters

Miss Sackville-West evidently means to go from strength to strength. In THE DRAGON IN SHALLOW WATERS (Collins 7s. 6d.) she more than bears out the promise of her first novel, “Heritage,” which had already aroused the interest of those readers to whom the novel is, in the most catholic sense of the term, poetry, a product of the creative imagination, and not merely an hour’s entertainment. It is a queer tale she has given us here, all of grimness and violence: a tale of two brothers, Gregory and Silas Dene, sinister figures, sprung of a sinister race, whose successive generations seem doomed to bear in some form or other the marks of physical affliction and mental savagery. Of these brothers, Silas is blind, Gregory deaf and dumb, yet by sheer force of body and character they have established a kind of domination over their fellow villagers. Silas is the more actively malevolent of the two; the tragedy of outward events is carefully engineered by him, from no motive as far as one can see but a blind suspicion and hatred of humanity and a desire to wreak vengeance upon his fellows for the affliction cast upon himself. He is, indeed, a veritable monster, scarcely credible; Miss Sackville-West must have known perfectly well that in sketching such a figure she was courting disaster. But her daring has had its reward, though we do believe in him as we read and even feel some touch of pity and understanding. What makes the man really dangerous is the latent streak of cowardice in him which, paradoxically enough, is shown to be in itself a spur to action; the man’s vanity

is always awake, always afraid that failure to act may suddenly reveal him for what he is and expose him to ridicule. This psychological peculiarity of cowardice is the truth on which the issue of the story depends. That issue does not altogether convince as we turn the final pages: the interplay of motive and character is tortuous and at moments (perhaps inevitably) obscure.

This failure – if failure it can be called – is the kind of failure which, arising from a determination to essay the most difficult feats is itself an earnest of future victory. There are, too, positive grounds to make one confident that Miss Sackville-West is going to achieve that victory. First of all, she can characterise in the real novelists’ way – by allowing her characters to reveal themselves in speech and action, instead of resorting to the meticulous analysis which is so favourite a method today, and which is in itself a confession of creative impotence. All the characters in this novel are well drawn, with the one exception of Christine Malleson, the town-bred beauty seeking distraction from rustic boredom. She is a lay figure; the others are all men and women, except the demoniac brothers themselves. Second, the structure of the book is vital and organic. The characters unfold, and the outward events, the “plot” if you like to call it so, is the direct outcome, the expression in action, of that unfolding. This sense of organic design is the greatest of the author’s gifts.

Where there is weakness – as in the Silas-Christine episode – it results

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from a failure in characterisation. As Christine is herself dramatically unreal, so the episode in which she is directly concerned is structurally irrelevant; a flaw, no doubt but a flaw that would be much less evident in a work less finely organised.

Finally one must testify to the author’s sense of style and power of description. It is not a mere knack of fine writing; its virtue lies in its essential

sobriety, relying not so much on verbal opulence and high-flown imagery as in the power to select, and, in selecting to bestow there by distinction and significance on the object selected. It is rare to possess such a power; not to be possessed by it is rarer still.

Unusual and powerful in its intensity and tough individuality, this second novel of Miss Sackville-West's (Mrs Harold Nicolson) gives her at once an established place among the women novelists who count in contemporary literature. “Heritage,” her first novel of a year and a half ago, was story of promise, with signal qualities of thought and originality, but its successor far surpasses its largeness and direct simplicity, its massiveness and proportion. In a way, though minor in theme and treatment in comparison, it reminds one instinctively of Emily Bronte's “Wuthering Heights,” as a study of the demoniac in fiction, passionate, unforgettable, haunting in its grimness, its grey melancholy. Somewhat of the dreary, bleak vastness of the former’s Yorkshire moors is reflected in Miss Sackville-West's picture of the Fens, with the soap factory and its three belching chimneys in the foreground, the half-ruined Norman Abbey, the railway track stretching through the flats. But while Emily Bronte’s study is stark tragedy unre-

lieved, Miss Sackville-West chooses a lighter tone that lifts the dank, choking miasma from her story. “After that day (with its tragic happenings at the seething vats) clean April poured sunlight over the marshes. Flocks of plover settled on-the emerging pasture; and the sea, whose presence was divined rather than seen over the edge of the Fens, ceased to be a threat . . . like a great bowl opened to gold-moted emptiness of heaven the country lay, recipient of the benediction.”

“The dragon in shallow waters,” who fulfils the Chinese proverb by becoming the butt of shrimps, is Silas Dene, a blind workman at the soap factory, the elder of two brothers— Gregory, the other, is deaf and dumb— who were “cursed from their birth with physical deficiencies and spiritual savagery.” Gregory is a mechanical genius who refuses leave his rough, manual toil till he has finished the ambition of his life, which inexorable Fate frustrates. Silas, despite his blindness, is a book-worm, who before his first crime, the cruel murder of his drudge-wife, is

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Times Literary Supplement, June 16, 1921

Vita Sackville-West, The Dragon in Shallow Waters

something of the voice the people, an orator and thinker, though dreaded alike by his employers and mates. His first taste of blood inflates his straining, rebellious spirit to a monstrous defiance of humanity, and the little mental strength that he had dissolves into his physical madness, hurrying him to his doom. The deterioration of his brain is shown in the malignant maliciousness with which he maims animals in the night, plots mischief on every hand, and finally concentrates in arousing his brother's murderous jealousy of the love-idyll between his timid, shrinking wife and the young lodger in the double cottage. Theirs is an innocent affair enough, but aggravated by the evil influence of the squire’s wife, who exploits the blind man for her own mental gratification, and spurred headlong by his own maniacal frenzy, Silas goes straight to his own and his brother's ruin, realising too

late that he is achieving not his own tortured impulses but the fiat of Fate.

It is a grim, realistic story, told with a directness, a surety of touch, and an economy of means, in words and in technique, that is almost remarkable for a young writer. The story certainly is depressing, and possibly not to be recommended as a mental tonic for the neurotic, but its massive proportions, its grim fatalism, and its vivid characterisation command admiration. We are made to see the blind man not only from the outside standpoint of the normal mind, but we follow the very trend of his abnormal, groping thoughts. Against the stark blackness of his grim figure there strikes as a ray of sunlight the shy, demure and confiding Nan, a figure of sweet, wind-blown womanliness delightful of modern fiction.

Aberdeen Press and Journal, June 13, 1921

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Vita Sackville-West, The Heir

VITA SACKVILLE-WEST, THE HEIR (1922)

For her [Vita], Sissinghurst was indeed ‘the Sleeping Beauty’s castle with a vengeance’: she hoped it would never awaken to the full horror of the present, and its attraction lay in its ability to transport her into its timeless dream world.

It became the tower she had told Victoria [her mother] she longed for, somewhere to be alone with her books . . . Vita felt something else besides: the tug of atavistic possessiveness. It was a pole like that she attributed to Peregrine Chase in The Heir, the novella she had written almost a decade ago. After spending his whole life in Wolverhampton, Chase finds that he rapidly becomes enmeshed in the house in the country which he has inherited from his last surviving aunt in Vita’s romantic narrative, contrary to expectation, including his own expectation, Chase resists every (sensible) pressure to sell: he is motivated not by greed, acquisitiveness or snobbery, but drawn by ‘laws [that] were unalterable’ into ‘a rhythm that no flurry could disturb’, the unchanging rhythm of inheritance and single-family ownership. Chase has no choice but to remain at Blackboys: it is an act of fidelity and family piety occasioned by visceral promptings.

Matthew Dennison, Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

On Thursday Messrs Heinemann will publish “The Heir,” by V. SackvilleWest, author of “Heritage” and “Dragon Shallow Waters.” Before the appearance of her first novel, Miss Sackville-West had already attracted attention as a poet of unusual austerity of expression, combined with great emotional power. “The Heir,” her new book, displays to the full not only the vital and significant qualities of this

author, but also the versatility of her talent. The book contains five tales, not connected in subject, but linked together by that creative impulse which is the common inspiration of them all —an impulse which invests both ordinary and extraordinary events with the beauty of emotional experience.

Hull Daily Mail, May 22, 1922

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The Heir was published and sold 1,400 copies in the first fortnight; the only adverse review was by Rebecca West. B. M. [Vita’s mother] decided that this was because Rebecca had befriended the still very unhappy Violet.

Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

It is a large claim, made by the publishers of this book of short stories, that the first of them, “The Heir,” may be “ranked as the greatest short story the last years.” It immediately challenges comparison with H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, John Russell, and Katherine Mansfield, and that is pity, for much of its intrinsic worth may be obscured in the process. Admirers of her novels, “Heritage” and “The Dragon in Shallow Waters,” will find that Miss Sackville-West loses nothing of her descriptive ability (especially as

applied to the English countryside) in her excursion into the difficult art of the short story. Our quarrel with “The Heir” is that she credits Chase, the central character, with a far greater and more appreciative intelligence than she has created for him. In other words, Miss West allows her own feelings to run away with her character, and he is obviously incapable of the pace.

Volume III of “The New Decameron” [A series of short story anthologies published by Basil Blackwell in the UK from 1919-1929] contains stories by writers whose names are sufficiently tempting, almost a guarantee that, if the spirit of Boccaccio is to be recaptured, they, or some of them at least, are the people to succeed. (The authors were J. D. Beresford, Storm Jameson,, D. H. Lawrence, Compton MacKenzie and Vita). But the Decameron was the child of an age, and that age is gone beyond recall. . . .

The connecting thread, so appropriate and easyflowing in Boccaccio, is in the

new work only a jarring interruption.

It cuts rudely across Miss SackvilleWest’s powerful and bizarre little episode, “Chelsea Justice,” just when the writer seemed to be rounding it to a full close. One grudges being cheated of her completed art in any way, and there was some reassurance in the title story of her new book, “The Heir” (Heinemann; 6s.), but it is in the novel that her great strength lies, and her admirers look to that for the perfect flowering of her genius. To her grasp of situation and character she brings a vigorous style free alike from preciosity and strain. She is one of the very few

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Shields Daily News, June 10, 1922

Vita Sackville-West, The Heir

younger writers who never torture English to wring from it an arresting phrase. Some good fairy has taught her the almost lost art of paragraph sequence. All these virtues of manner would be nothing if she had not matter as well. Matter she has, together with fine invention and a sound groundwork of knowledge. How delightfully, for example, she plays with feudal

formulae in “The Heir,” handling them as old Izaak would have his compleat angler handle the frog! One of these days Miss Sackville-West should give us an undoubted masterpiece. But it will be delayed if she flirts overmuch with pseudo-Decameronians.

It is really a compliment to Miss Sackville-West to say that the five stories in this volume do not, we believe, represent the best work she can do. The stories are so well written, with such delicate insight, such extreme truthfulness to human nature – yet they leave us with an uneasy feeling of something lacking. What is wrong? We believe it is that the short story is not Miss Sackville-West’s real metier. She cannot take some little incident and so set it before us that it appears to summarise some whole aspect of life. Her method is more leisurely; she likes to convey her impression to us by means of a multitude of small touches, thus slowly building up the atmosphere in which her characters can reveal themselves. Of these five stories only the first (which is much the longest and occupies half the book) impresses at all complete in itself. This story shows the gradual spell cast by a very old and beautiful country house on a man, who after humdrum life as a provincial

insurance agent, suddenly inherits it.

The house is heavily mortgaged, and solicitors assume that it must be sold, but at the last moment, while the sale is in progress, the heir decides that he prefers to live there in poverty rather than in comfort anywhere else. This story, good as it is, is spoilt by being a little too obvious: we can see the end coming too easily. The others impress us as rather inconclusive fragments, saved from the commonplace only being unusually well written. One cannot help thinking what such a story as “Her Son” would have been like had it been written by, say, Miss Katherine Mansfield. Such a comparison is usually rather unfair, because it is absurd to demand from one author the particular excellences of another. We only make it here because believe that Miss Sackville-West has plenty of gifts of her own, to which the short story form does not give adequate expression.

Illustrated London News, July 1, 1922

Yorkshire Post, June 14, 1922

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The only complaint one can make against “The Heir: A Love Story,” by V. Sackville-West (Heinemann), is that it is but half the length that it professes to be. One reads on and on, innocently supposing that, as wrapper and titlepage implied, here was a one-volume novel. Suddenly, in the middle of the book, we came to the finish of the story, with more short stories to follow, and these we resentfully decline to read. But “The Heir” is well worth reading all the same. We do not quarrel with the sub-title, “A Love Story,” although there is not a woman in the book. The love is that of an heir for the old house in the country he has inherited. The place is heavily mortgaged, and when the heir arrives he is told by the lawyers he must sell, and he agrees. Very beautiful is the description of the affection the old house,

with its long gallery, its library, its many charms, has for the new owner so soon to part with it. The author grips you with her sentiment for a noble inheritance of bricks and mortar.

Suddenly you are pulled up at the sale, when the heir outbids all competitors, and buys the property, to the infinite vexation of the self-seeking lawyer.

But we implore a sequel. It is true that in story-telling something must be left to the imagination, but our imagination refuses to comprehend how even with “exquisite privations one could carry on a fine old family mansion on next to nothing a year.” To work out that problem provides the author and the reader with another joyous experience.

A Story from the Skies

It appears, from the reference books, that this lady is the daughter of Lord Sackville, the owner of the famous Knole Park, Kent; that she married the Hon. H. G. Nicolson in 1913, and has already written a book called “Heritage,” and another called “The Dragon in Shallow Waters,” and still more under the title of “Etc.” None of these volumes chances to have come my way so to me V. Sackville-West was a new author.

I examined the present volume more closely. It was composed, I discovered, of five complete stories, “The Heir” standing first, as the longest if

A strange thing happened to me yesterday. I was sitting at my desk, a pile of books in front of me, trying to make up my mind which best deserved the foremost place in my weekly causerie, when the parcel-postman called. As a rule, he brings me a fairly large parcel.

This time it was quite a small one, containing just one book. I opened the parcel and glanced, without much interest, at the book. It was called, “The Heir, A Love Story.” Nothing particularly exciting about that. I looked at the name of the author – “V. SackvilleWest.”

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C. K. S., The Sphere, June 17, 1922

Vita Sackville-West, The Heir

not the best . . . I began, not very hopefully, to read.

“Miss Chase lay on her immense red silk four-poster that reached as high as the ceiling. Her face was covered over by a sheet, but as she had a high, aristocratic nose, it raised the sheet into a ridge, ending in a point. Her hands could also be distinguished beneath the sheet, folded across her chest like the hands of an effigy and her feet, tight together like the feet of an effigy, raised the sheet into two further points at the bottom of the bed. She was eightyfour years old, and she had been dead for twenty- four hours."

The Spell Begins This did not promise well. An opening of the “realistic” kind like that is rather démodé. Almost anybody could have written that, though not everybody would have balanced the sentences so neatly, or told us that the four-poster was of red silk. That touch of colour, somehow or other, did give me an inkling of the unusual.

There were also present in this room a lawyer named Nutley and a young man named Chase, the latter a clerk at Wolverhampton who had never known anything better than Wolverhampton. By the death of this old lady, his aunt, he had inherited a dream house and an estate which had belonged to members of his family for five hundred years. Oh, yes, there was a mortgage on it, and Mr. Nutley

would sell the lot for him and get rid of the peacocks. The gardens of Blackboys were full of peacocks, and everybody knew that peacocks were terribly hard on a garden.

This sort of thing – very well and amusingly done in dialogue – went on for twenty pages. But not till the lawyers had gone, not till Chase found himself alone and free to examine his property, did the spell of the author's infinite charm begin to work.

The Dream House “The house looked down at him, grave and mellow. Its façade of old, plum-coloured bricks, the inverted V of the two gables, the rectangles of the windows, and the creamy stucco of the little colonnade that joined the two protecting wings, all reflected unbroken in the green stillness of the moat. It was not a large house; it consisted only of the two wings and the central block but it was complete and perfect, so perfect that Chase, who knew nothing and cared nothing about architecture, and whose mind was really absent, worrying in Wolverhampton, was gradually softened into a comfortable satisfaction. The house was indeed small, sweet, and satisfying. There was no fault to be found with the house. It was lovely in colour and design. It carried off, in its perfect proportions, the grandeur of its manner with an easy dignity. It was quiet, the evening was quiet, the country was quiet; it was part of the evening and

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the country. The country was almost unknown to Chase, whose life had been spent in towns – factory towns. Here he was on the borders of Kent and Sussex, where the nearest town was a village, a jumble of cottages round the green, at his own park gates. The house seemed to lie at the very heart of peace.”

growing more and more attached to the place which Mr Nutley would shortly put under the hammer? What was the good of it? Nutley was rather impatient with him. Where was the sense of it? It had to go. Why not clear out at once and let the lawyers get the best price they could?

Well, we are not all ruled all the time by common-sense, thank heaven.

Chase stayed on.

The Love Story Charm of Morning “But,” you interrupt, “you said that this story was a love story. When does the girl come on?”

Aren’t you there yet, my friend?

There is no girl. The story is the story of a man who fell in love with a house, a house that had suddenly come to him through the squalor and misery of a factory town, a house that had belonged to his family for five hundred years. He did not know that he was falling in love with the house. He was afraid of it as yet – afraid of its mellowness, its beauty, its cool interiors, its exquisite old furniture, its pictures, its silver which bore the arms that were engraved on his own ring. He was afraid, too, of the servants, of the old butler, of the tenantry, of the dog that belonged the house, of the peacocks.

He was afraid just as a boy is afraid of the first girl with whom he falls in love.

I am trying to describe to you, in an ordinary, commonplace, scrappy “review” the spell of this exquisite prose-poem. Chase, of course, did not return – as yet – to Wolverhampton; he stayed on at Blackboys. Why did he stay? Why did he talk himself into

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“Like a child strayed into the realms of delight, he was stupefied by the enchantment of sun and shadow. He remained for hours gazing in a silly beatitude at the large patches of sunlight that lay on the grass, at the depths of the shadows that melted into the profundity of the woods. In the mornings he woke early, and, leaning at the open window, gave himself over to the dews, the young, glinting sunshine, to the birds. What a babble of birds! He couldn’t distinguish their notes – only to the cuckoo, the wood-pigeon, and instant row of a cock could he put a name. The fluffy tits, blue and yellow, popping among the upper branches, were to him as nameless as they were lovely. He knew, theoretically, that the birds did sing when day was breaking; marvellous thing it was, not that they should be singing, but that he, Chase should be awake and in the country to hear them sing. No one knew that he was awake, and he

Vita Sackville-West, The Heir

had all a shy man’s pleasure in seclusion. No one knew what he was doing; no one was spying on him; he was quite free and unobserved in this clean-washed, untenanted, waking world.”

A Shy Man’s Pleasure There’s an understanding phrase for you – “a shy man’s pleasure in seclusion.” What comfort and joy that phrase will bring to the shy, who are always ashamed of their shyness.

“Don’t be shy! Don’t be silly! If you’re shy you’ll never make friends!”

True, worldly-wise nurse! But there is no cure for shyness – except drink or drugs, which lead to the final cure of all.

Imagine this shy man all alone in this wonderful house and this wonderful garden! Imagine the horror to him of the “business” at Wolverhampton, the pleasantries of his pachydermatous companions, streets, trams, the local club – the whole inevitable, brazen publicity of everyday life. In place of that – “He knew the sharp smell of cut grass, and the wash of the dew round his ankles. He knew the honing of a scythe, planned of a forge and the roaring of its bellows, the rasp of a saw cutting through wood and the resinous scent of the sawdust. He knew the tap of a woodpecker on a tree trunk and the midday murmur, most amorous, most sleepy, of the pigeons

among the beeches. He knew the contented buzz of the bee as it closed down upon a flower, and the bitter shrill of the grasshopper along the hedgerows. He knew the squirt of milk jetting into the pails, and the drowsy stir in the byres.

He knew the marvellous brilliance of a petal in the sun, its fibrous transparency, like the corneliancoloured transparency of a woman’s fingers held in a strong light.

He associated these sighs, and the infinity of simple small sounds composing the recurrent melody, with the meals prepared for him, the salads and cold chicken, the draughts of cider, and abundance of flesh, humble fruit, until it seemed to him that all senses were gratified severally and harmoniously, as well out in the open as in the cool dusk within the house.”

The Sale And so the day for the sale drew on. I hope that makes you jump. I should be delighted to think you had recoiled in horror from the mere suggestion of a sale, because that would be proof that I had managed to give you an inkling of the charm – I don’t think there is a better word – of this lovely story.

The day of the sale arrived, and Chase – where was he? In Wolverhampton. Yes, he had returned to Wolverhampton, and the lawyer was in the seventh heaven, as they say of delight. Lot 1: sold. Lot two: sold . . .

Lot sixteen: “The Manor house known as Blackboys Priory, the pleasure

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grounds of twenty-eight acres and one hundred and twenty-five acres of park and adjoining.” An American and a Brazilian bidding against each other.

Thirty Thousand guineas are bid. The place is as good as sold. The lawyer chuckles with glee.

“Thirty-one thousand,” cries a strangled voice, “thirty-one thousand!”

It is Chase, of course, Chase, hurrying back from Wolverhampton to save his love.

The right finish. The only finish for an artist. You may say that in real life the house would have been sold. I retort that this is better than real life; it is what real life should aim at if it wants to go on living it. If you never raise a banner on high, what reason have you to lift your eyes from the ground?

Well, are you going to get hold of this story and read it or are you not? It

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is for you to decide. You can do precisely as you choose. You can go on grubbing among mouldy roots, or you can spend an hour or two in Paradise.

I have said my say, I have paid my small tribute to one of the finest bits of work I have read for many a day.

The other four stories in the volume are not exhilarating. They are clever studies in the morbid. Had I been the publisher, I should have allowed “The Heir” stand by itself, with broad margins, and perhaps a few exquisite illustrations.

However, that is not my business. I have merely put down my impressions of the book without exaggeration or reserve.

Keble Howard, ‘The Literary Lounger,’ The Sketch, June 21, 1922

Vita Sackville-West, Grey Wethers

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VITA SACKVILLE-WEST, GREY WETHERS (1923) Seven poems from Orchard and Vineyard were included in the fifth and final volume of Georgian Poetry, published in November 1922. They confirmed Vita’s aesthetic credentials as those of a traditionalist and a Conservative. When, the following year, her novel Grey Wethers appeared, with its rebellious heroine Clare Warrener who, ‘like a hobbled colt . . . Wanted to kick herself free’ of conventional expectations, no one but Harold would have understood Clare’s struggle between acceptable love, represented by Calladine, and unacceptable love, in the person of Lovel, as an image of Vita’s life so recently at a crossroads. Only Harold knew that Vita was simultaneously Clare and Lovel and that each was characterised by incompleteness. He told Vita that ex-Viceroy Lord Curzon had described Grey Wethers as a ‘magnificent book. The descriptions of the downs are as fine as any in the language. Such power! Such power! Not a pleasant book of course! But what English!’ Husband and wife avoided talking about the novel’s ending, when Clare abandons her husband for her lover. . . ‘It’s no use writing novels which are only the observations of life,’ Harold had told Vita at the height of her unhappiness in September 1921, ‘the point is to write books which are the explanation of life.’ Like The Dragon in Shallow Waters, and so much of her writing, Grey Wethers endeavoured to explain Vita to herself.

Matthew Dennison, Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

Miss Violet [sic] Sackville-West will be bringing out a new novel in a few weeks. The public has great difficulty in taking seriously society ladies who dabble in literature, but Miss Sackville-West proved from the start that she was no dabbler, but a lady with very serious qualifications. She has certainly been blessed with very ample opportunities, and in this respect her marriage to Mr. Harold Nicolson, member of the Diplomatic Corps, and author himself, must have helped her.

Her last book was a large volume narrating the history of her family, and the Sackvilles, their ancestral home Knole. Her new novel will deal with 80

Vita Sackville-West, Grey Wethers

the conflict between the real and the unreal, the battle of values in life. It is to be called “Grey Wethers,” and will have for a background the English Downs. Wethers are not sheep, of course, but the primeval sarsen stones, which are to be found on English Downs. In connection with Miss Sackville-West, I bad a rather curious and painful experience.

A little over a year ago Messrs.

Heinemann published her book “The Heir.” The late Mr. Sidney Pawling, head of Heinemann’s, and a discrimi-

nating reader, on the day of publication sent me a copy of the book enclosing with it a note in his own hand, ending the story as of exceptional merit owing to being sent to an old address it did not reach me until twelve months later, a week after Mr. Pawling’s death, so that the letter and the kindly thought prompting it came like a message from the dead.

‘Seer,’ ‘Books and Bookmen,’ Nottingham Journal, March 8, 1923

Vita’s novel Grey Wethers came out in England [in 1923], to mixed reviews. It is the archetypal early V. Sackville-West novel, about Clare, married to an overcivilised, articulate, non-masculine man, and in love with lean, dark, red-shirted, gypsy-like Lovel. ‘He was frightened that a day might come when she would be forced to be true to herself again; when the decent, ordinary, conventional false self should be suddenly abolished.’ Vita’s story is narcissistic: she is both Clare and Lovel, in love with both halves of herself, who are in love, in the novel, with one another. . .

Raymond Mortimer, reviewing Grey Wethers in the Nation, praised it before saying that ‘everything she writes is spoilt by the devastating ease with which she falls into a certain sort of empty rhetoric.’ This was ironic, since one of Clare’s criticisms of her husband in the novel was that, although his distress was genuine, he was theatrical and ‘could not refrain from rhetoric.’ Vita in Great Wethers had followed Harold’s advice about letting her fantasies of escape play themselves out in her fiction: Clare and Lovel take flight for ever, as Vita and Violet failed to do. But in later years Vita hated to be reminded of Great Wethers.

Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

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Miss V. Sackville-West’s new book, GREY WETHERS (Heinemann, 7s. 6d. net), is a fairytale, although she does not say so. It is all about an enchanted village built round great monoliths called the Grey Wethers, enclosed within ancient earthworks and lost on the Downs. Everyone in King’s Avon is under a spell; the stick figures, unreal as a dream, mumble and mutter through the story. The lovers, Clare and Nicolas – he a simple village yokel, she a maid of high degree – most unreal of all, move together, are separated, seek each other in the end and are united and mysteriously lost to the world that had known them. What became of them the reader is left to imagine “in the manner best suited to his own fancy and requirements.”

The book professes to be a romance of half-a-century back, of “an age and district when stories of witches and burnings were curiously mingled in the mind of the ignorant with the opening of barrows and the fables of British princes”; but it belongs to an older age than that. The writer weaves the fabric of a vision and not the rough homespun with its strong country smell as one expects at the beginning, when the four old men sitting at the Waggon of Hay rejoice that they have the place to themselves, while the lads and girls are skylarking on the Downs at the yearly Scouring of the White Horse. The rustics thin to unreality, but the result is not unpleasing to readers tired of the gaffers and gossip and intensive advice of so many villagers from Spoon River to Wales. Here is a strange, still place, and the scenery is

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set (as Calladine remarked hysterically later on) for high romance. Most of the characters have appeared many times in other fairytales; old Warrener in his beehive hat playing with Flint and Shards in his manor house; lovely, youthful Clare, his daughter, free as air to roam the Downs and learn their secrets with Gypsy Lovel; Calladine, the pale æsthete, with his melodramatic love-story and his stagehousekeeper; the village idiot, and the red-haired wanton; Lovel himself, grandson of a witch burnt to death, and burdened with a wicked, bedridden mother muttering obscenities to his crazed young brother Olver. (Old ladies, it seems, who “whisper obscenities,” are taking in popular fiction the place once allotted to the wicked roué who muttered smothered oaths). Calladine loved Clare, but she and Lovel were one. She adored to watch him ploughing, she helped him with the lambing. She trusted him profoundly.

“What if he should beckon to her and, whistling a little fluty tune, precede her for ever over the hills? . . . In essence they were equal; different, of course, he male, she female, but united they made a whole, each contributing an equal part.” But Lovel was tricked into marriage with Daisy, the redheaded wanton, and Clare married Calladine, and lived frozen, soulless, prisoned in his house at Starvecrow, where he vainly tried to interest her in objects of art and virtue. She would mix up Clodion and Houdon. It could not last. Olver, crazed young brother of Lovel, watching him burn for Clare, became Fate’s instrument to restore

Vita Sackville-West, Grey Wethers

these lovers to each other. Olver indeed is the most remarkable character in the book, lifted with unusual penetration and power of deduction. He disclosed to Clare with a lucidity and point given to few village idiots her predestined, inevitable unity with Nicholas, mentioning with astuteness that the child born to Lovel is another man’s. Clare goes to her lover in his heart on the Downs. When three days later Calladine and her father find

them, hand-in-hand, the lovers fade into the golden light of evening, to give rise to a hundred legends.

What is very agreeable about the book is Miss Sackville-West’s admirable descriptive power; the Downs and the hard contours of the hills live in her pages. And who that has ever loved fairystories really leave them behind?

Mrs Harold Nicolson still keeps her first pen-name, when she was Miss Vera [sic] Sackville-West. It is a name that has now become synonymous with poetry of distinction and a power of novel-writing that is steadily raising itself high among our women novelists. “Grey Wethers” is another fine novel from her pen, not gloomy and tragic as “The Dragon in .Shallow Waters,” not perhaps so light and subtle as “The Heir,” but distinguished, of vivid rendering in setting, and of rare craftsmanship in its delineation of character. It is a story, tragedy, or fate as you will, of the English Downs, where the austere simplicity of the rolling wolds and the primaeval mystery of the sarsen stones, that give its title to the novel, are fused into and the very essence of the spiritual kinship of Clare Warrener and Nicholas Lovel. Clare is the daughter of the manor, not yet in her twenties, who from childhood has spent most her time on the downs, riding, fishing,

picking up the lore and atmosphere of her native dales from Nicholas Lovel.

For a time to her Lovel is the quiet, reliable shepherd the wolds: to the gossips of the village he is a gipsy, enigmatic figure, the taciturn brother of a half-wit and the son of an invalid mother, attributed with witchlike powers, who is never seen. The real depth and meaning of her feelings is made clear to Clare when she learns that Nicholas, poor in birth, lowly in station, but lofty in character, is to marry – by a vile trick – the loose daughter of small farmer. In despair Clare herself marries an assiduous wooer, middle-aged, cultured, but of the town – a being strange to her beloved downs.

Henceforth tragedy, or fate, whichever it be, creeps apace, subtly outlined in the unsatisfactory life of the couple at Starvecrow, and in the domestic bitterness of Daisy, who is now reaping what she has sown. With steady, easy steps the author leads up

Times Literary Supplement, June 28, 1923

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to her denouement, which partakes of that refinement of the essential, as distinguished from the ephemeral, that characterises the austere simplicity of her setting. The love of Clare and Nicholas is a thing eternal, with none of the artificialities of city convention, but broad and deep as the downs themselves.

Miss Sackville-West scorns the weaker artifices of approach

and handling overwrought by so many contemporary writers. She puts aside the psychic complexities and subtleties of modern lives, and has delineated with power and simplicity a large and commanding theme.

For immediate charm, combined with a promise of staying power, I should be inclined to choose Miss Victoria Sackville West's new novel, “GREY WETHERS” (Heinemann; 7s. 6d). It may be some individual kink of taste in me – I know not – but no other among our younger writers seems to approach Miss Sackville-West in pure literary quality. The mere cadence of her sentences is a delight; she finds the right word with no apparent effort, or if effort there be, it is most cunningly concealed. But the vital point is that she can tell a story magnificently, and she has a story to tell. She makes a

most welcome reappearance with a full-dress novel after an interlude of short stories, in which her hand is not at its strongest. “GREY WETHERS” is a tale of the Downs, a tale in which the characters move under an eerie, otherworldly spell. Here this author, who has previously shown what she can do as an uncompromising realist, has moved forward to ethereal romance.

Fiction can well afford to be a little more fictitious.

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Aberdeen Press and Journal, July 5, 1923

JD Symon, Illustrated London News, August 4, 1923

Vita Sackville-West, Grey Wethers

Lady Sybil Scott, mother of Miss Iris Cutting, who is to marry the Marchese Origo, does a good deal of entertaining in the spring and autumn at her historic home near Florence, the Villa Medici, and among her guests in the near future for a rather long stay will be Mr. and Mrs. Harold Nicolson, doubtless with a view to obtaining Italian settings for new novels. Their hostess herself writes, - and has some pretty verse to her credit.

The Nicolsons are a very busy couple. Although they are both quite

young they are already writers of repute. Mr. Harold Nicolson, Lord Carnock’s diplomat son, is now engaged upon a life of Byron, while his pretty wife, who is petite, dark and slender, is following up her last novel, “Grey Wethers,” with another. She is the only daughter of Lord and Lady Sackville, and writes under the name of V. Sackville West.

‘The Rambler.’ Daily Mirror, October 19, 1923

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Vita Sackville-West, Seducers in Ecuador

VITA SACKVILLE-WEST, SEDUCERS IN ECUADOR (1924)

‘You asked me to write a story for you,’ Vita wrote to Virginia [Woolf, who had founded the Hogarth Press in 1917]. ‘On the peaks of mountains, and beside green lakes [Vita was with Harold in the Dolomites], I am writing it for you. I shut my eyes to the blue of gentians, to the coral of androsace; I shut my ears to the brawling of rivers; I shut my nose to the scent of pines; I concentrate on my story.’ The result was Seducers in Ecuador, dedicated to Virginia, its contract negotiated – to his annoyance – without the intervention of Vita’s new agent Alec Watt of A. P. Watt and Son, and published to warm reviews on 30 October 1924 by the Hogarth Press.

To Alec Watt on 9 October, Vita called her novella ‘a very slight thing.’ Virginia’s response was altogether more positive. She recognised her own influence [Woolf’s 1928 fantasy Orlando was inspired by Vita’s fantastical life] in the fantastical tale of a man who retreats from reality behind coloured sunglasses, and preened herself that Vita had ‘shed some of the old verbiage, and come to terms with some sort of glimmer of art . . . And indeed, I rather marvel at her skill and sensitivity; for it is she not mother, wife, great lady, hostess, as well as scribbling?’

Matthew Dennison, Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

On 15 September [1924] Vita drove down for her first visit to Monk’s House, Rodmell, the Woolf’s [Virginia and Leonard’s] spartan country house (no bathroom, no inside lavatory, no telephone). She brought the manuscript of Seducers in Ecuador with her. Virginia said she liked it: ‘I’m certain that you have done something much more interesting (to me at least) than you’ve yet done . . . I am very glad we are going to publish it, and extremely proud and indeed touched, with my childlike dazzled affection for you, that you should dedicate it to me.’

Victoria Glendinning, Vita: the Life of Vita Sackville-West

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Virginia’s influence on her is shown best, I think, in Vita’s short novel Seducers in Ecuador, which she wrote for the Hogarth Press in 1924, for it is the most imaginative of all her fiction, as if she had wanted to write something ‘worthy’ of Virginia, in Virginia’s allusive style, tuned to a new vibrancy by the thought of so critical an editor whom she was meeting almost every day. The effect of Vita on Virginia is all contained in Orlando, the longest and most charming love-letter in literature, in which she explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her, and ends by photographing her in the mud at Long Barn, with dogs, awaiting Virginia’s arrival next day.

Nigel Nicolson, Portrait Of A Marriage

In some quarters Vita proved to have out-Bloomsburied Bloomsbury. Seducers in Ecuador came out in the United States the following year, and was reviewed in the same issue of New York Evening Post’s Literary Review as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. In considering the personal and professional relationship between the two women, it is important to realise that although Virginia Woolf never thought of Vita as a great writer, and although Vita always conceded intellectual and artistic supremacy to Virginia, the common reader in their lifetimes took another view. Vita was, simply, more successful. Seducers was reviewed at the top of the page, along with a languorous drawing of its author. The notice by Joseph Collins ends: ‘it is an amusing story well told, which can do more in an hour’s reading to make the reader think and meditate on the values of what he considers realities that a great many novels do.’ Mrs Dalloway, reviewed below, got a cool reception from Walter Yust; as a novel ‘it lacks that quality of illusion which can turn the day . . . Into a life richer than any single figure groping through it . . .

Mrs. Dalloway is sometimes dull and drear under a fog of words and (sensitively realized) redundancies.’

Victoria Glendinning, Vita: the Life of Vita Sackville-West

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A reader of SEDUCERS IN ECUADOR (The Hogarth Press 4s 6d net) may very well find himself thinking again what odd little books are written now. It is true that both the cause and the climax in Miss V. Sackville-West's story – which are first, the utter change in one’s view of life produced by wearing coloured glasses, and lastly, the execution of the hero for murder – might have occurred just as well in some fantasia of the early nineties. But the manner of presenting them would not have been quite the same. Nor would the title, perhaps, although its mere audacity may warn us not to expect an outbreak of banded vice in South America, but rather euphony and mystery. Ecuador here remains a shadow in the distance behind Egypt and London. What the tale fixes on as really devastating is the unlicensed spirit of imagination, which is never more hazardous than when it is conjured up by ordinary people. It broke loose in the bored and weary Lomax on a yachting cruise in the Mediterranean when he found that spectacles of diverse tints veiled the garish day so enchantingly that he could never do without them.

It impelled Miss Whitaker to entangle him in a web of fictions about herself which contained perhaps one half-true thread; and it drove Bellamy, his host, to believe himself smitten by an intolerable mortal disease and to beg Lomax to put an end to him at the right moment. And doubtless all these things (except possibly the systematic wearing of the glasses) might have happened in the real, and Lomax

might even have come to the gallows.

For life continually provides more improbabilities than fiction, and usually it is only their pale image in a book which staggers us.

Miss Sackville-West however adroitly keeps us clear of these fruitless comparisons. She also has put on coloured glasses, and they create an air of fantasy. The result is a prose entertainment of seventy pages, sparkling with terse amusing irony and occasionally vibrant colour, and hinting mysterious abysses. When we are in doubt we are generally meant to be.

Allusiveness can be effective and amusing when it is surrounded by clear narrative; and the author frankly employs it here to make her atmosphere. More than once we enjoy the skill which suggests a whole dimension of episode behind a sentence. We find ourselves sorrowing more than we expected over Lomax’s tragedy, and the tragedy of the imagination which is so helpless when it appeals for truth to a cold and half-blind world. These are the deeps behind what looks like a trifle, though it hovers on the brink of ghastliness to evoke them in the end.

We are left thinking how all-pervasive now is the spell of the incongruous, how dominating the small shades; and still more perhaps how much wit and cleverness can be packed into a little room because it is more convenient to their owner than a large one.

Times Literary Supplement, November 27, 1924

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Vita Sackville-West, Seducers in Ecuador

This, probably the shortest novel of the autumn season (74 pages), like Master Bill Primrose's song of the Mad Dog, “cannot hold you long” in the reading, but you won’t get it out of your thoughts easily, for all that. In one way it will hold you long enough, for it is a condensed horror, the offspring of that phase of the author’s talent which gave us the agonised short story about a sinful man imprisoned in a bell-buoy. If you don't trouble about reality or probability (or even possible absurdity), you will be carried away (for the moment) by the hideous fate of Lomax, who, because he took to blue spectacles, saw life as a wild phantasy, and acted accordingly.

In that mood he married Miss Whitaker secretly, because he believed she had a seducer in Ecuador, and that shortly she would require above all things the justification of a husband’s name (mere moonshine, this). Then he kindly murdered his best friend, Bellamy, at Bellamy's request, to save Bellamy from a lingering disease which Bellamy hadn’t (moonshine, or blue glamour, again). Is the story a parable against sentimentality or ultra-realism I cannot say, but I do know that, like all Miss Sackville-West's work, it is admirably written.

Miss V. Sackville West's remarkable little story is, perhaps, caviar for the millions, but, for the less numerous elite, an adventurous and intriguing book. The entire plot turns upon a man’s entry into a different world by wearing coloured glasses, by which transforming means a hedonistic idler gets himself involved in an ultrachivalrous marriage, and benevolent murder. When at last his glasses are taken from him he no longer cares to

live, seeing only too clearly, in the light of common day, the futility of his exalted actions and the mean selfinterest of his beneficiaries. The story is dosed with power and style; rather cynically and jerkily, but with remarkable individuality and cleverness (Hogarth Press, 4s. 6d.)

The Sketch, December 3, 1924

‘Sub Rosa,’ Gentlewoman, November 22, 1924

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Now that the winter is here, we all turn to our book lists, and Miss Victoria [sic] Sackville-West's latest production is sure to have a big success. It is a slim little volume with the intriguing title of “Seducers in Ecuador,” and has, I’m sure, already been responsible for a good deal, as I saw a smart young woman dining at a restaurant the oth-

er night with an attractive-looking man, yet she was deep in its pages in spite of all his efforts to distract her.

Miss Sackville-West is, of course, Lord Sackville s daughter, and is in private life Mrs. Harold Nicolson.

We have rarely met a more intriguing title than that given by Miss V. Sackville-West to her fantasy, “Seducers in Ecuador” (The Hogarth Press; 4s. 6d. net). What we were to expect we did not know, but we soon found that the title had little to do with seduction and less with Ecuador. Frankly it is not easy to define or to explain. Lomax, the principal character, finds that life takes on a new aspect when he wears coloured glasses, and it is his absorption in this new aspect of existence that makes him marry an uninteresting nonentity out of a mistaken sense of chivalry—her lover having left her in Ecuador—relieve his host of the burden of life, at his own request—and end his own life on the gallows. Miss Sackville-West is an artist in the sparing use of words. She has found a way

of suggesting a whole episode in a short sentence. She has succeeded in an amazing degree in conveying to the reader the fantastic picture that life presents through the coloured glasses of Lomax. The fault to-day among too many writers is their inability to stop.

Novels are not too short, but too long.

Miss Sackville-West has shown in her amazing tour-de-force how much brilliancy and wit can be found within comparatively few pages. Her novel will not, we are afraid, have a wide appeal, for, in spite of a recent case, people still find it hard to believe that fact can be stranger than the wildest fiction.

‘Mariegold,’ The Sketch, November 26, 1924

Sheffield Daily Telegraph, December 11, 1924

You ask me which of my novels I prefer. I dislike them all, – Seducers in Ecuador is the only one I might save from the rubbish heap.

Vita to Frederick Prokosch, September 6, 1930

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VITA SACKVILLE-WEST, THE EDWARDIANS (1930)

Again and again they [Vita and Harold] returned to the central problem of their separation, although they met far more frequently than during the Persian years.

Harold often came home on leave, and we spent several of our school holidays in Germany, skating in the Tiergarten, sailing on the Heiligesee and playing badminton in the Embassy ballroom, while Vita managed to avoid most diplomatic parties and was able to work on her books: she began the first chapter of The Edwardians in the restaurant of Cologne railway-station. But more meetings meant more separations: I spent most of the evening in tears. It is sheer misery for me, these perpetual departures . . . I simply feel that you are me and I am you – exactly what you meant by saying that you became ‘the lonely me’ whenever we parted.

This could have been written by either of them. In fact, it was written by Vita, in the spring of 1929.

Nigel Nicolson, Vita, Portrait Of A Marriage

Before Vita returned to England [in 1929], she and Harold escaped together for a few days to Italy. It was freezing cold in Rapallo, but ‘the truants were exuberantly happy,’ Vita told Virginia [Woolf]. Hilda Matheson [Director of Talks at the BBC and Vita’s lover from 1928] was instructed to type up the envelopes of her letters to Rapallo: Harold did not know the depth and extent of this involvement, and Vita did not want him to. They were perfectly content together, walking and writing.

Vita had an idea for a novel – ‘and I’m going to write it this summer [1929] and make my fortune. Such a joke it will be, and I hope everybody will be seriously annoyed.’ This was to be The Edwardians, her own romance of Knole, begun perilously, perhaps as a complement to [Woolf’s] Orlando. It was to be her most commercially successful book. Meanwhile she was happy with Harold: ‘Every morning while I still lie in delicious sleep with an enormous letto matrimoniale (Cologne), I am aroused by a clash of opening shutters next door, and then a figure dressed in canary-yellow pyjamas bursts into my room’ to open her shutters to the sunrise over the sea. . .

The Edwardians came out on 29 May . . . by early June it was apparent that the Hogarth Press [run by the Woolfs] had a success on its hands. ‘Vita’s book is such a best seller that Leonard and I are hauling in money like pilchards from a 94

Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

net,’ Virginia wrote to her nephew Quentin. ‘We sell about 800 every day.’ By 30 July sales had topped 20,000 already. In America the book was chosen by the Literary Guild, and Hugh Walpole wrote a ‘London Literary Letter’ for the New York Herald Tribune entirely about that gifted couple V. Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. The success of The Edwardians was long-lasting; cheap editions followed, and in 1936 Leonard Woolf told Vita that 64,000 copies of the sixpenny Penguin edition have been sold.

Vita had done what she set out to do: write a popular success; and she had done it by recreating the lavish, feudal, immoral ancient régime of her childhood.

She starts her story in 1905; Chevron, the great house in the book, is Knole in every detail, from the leopards on the battlements to the hierarchy of indoor and outdoor servants, the ‘endless, extravagant meals’, the gorgeous, sombre state bedrooms and the Christmas tree ceremony in the Great Hall. She promotes the lady of the house to the rank of Duchess, and divides her own personality between the two children of the house – Sebastian the young heir, dark, moody and glamorous, and Viola his withdrawn, straight-haired, sceptical sister. [These are the names of the twins in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.] ‘No character in this book is wholly fictitious,’ she wrote provocatively in her Author’s Note. She even gave to Sebastian her own dogs, Henry and Sarah.

Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

In her novel The Edwardians Vita was to describe Violet’s mother, Alice Keppel, as ‘a woman who erred and aspired with a certain magnificence. She brought to everything the quality of the superlative. When she was worldly, it was on a grand scale. When she was mercenary, she challenged the richest fortunes. When she loved, it was in the highest quarters. When she admitted ambition, it was for the highest power.’ Under the name Romola Cheyne, she is presented as a figure out of grand opera: not the virtuous heroine but an amoral schemer.

Michael Holroyd, A Book of Secrets

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Vita did her duty as the daughter of Knole and went to parties, sometimes to four balls a week and luncheons every day, and she enjoyed them if they were the sort of parties at which powdered footmen announced duchesses. Like both her parents she was a snob, in the sense that she attached exaggerated importance to birth and wealth, and believed that while the aristocracy had much in common with working people, particularly those who worked on the land, the middle class (or ‘bedints’ in Sackville language) were to be pitied and shunned, unless, like Seery or Lord Leverhulme, they had acquired dignity by riches.

When she was twelve years old, she could write to her mother, ‘The little Gerard Leghs not bedint, are they?’, and, ‘Yesterday we had a Sevenoaks girl to tea: she was rather nice, but a little bedint of course’, and she never quite rid herself of this complex; her most famous novel, The Edwardians, written in 1930, was strongly influenced by it. She was a conforming rebel, a romantic aristocrat.

Nigel Nicolson, Vita, Portrait Of A Marriage

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Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

BOOK OF THE MONTH

by Clemence Dane A YEAR or two ago all the novels had to be written about To-day or Tomorrow. Failing that, The-Day-BeforeYesterday had a certain selling power.

But in the last few months the tide has turned and mere dull Yesterday has come into fashion again. . .

Now comes the poet and novelist, Victoria Sackville-West, to add her own special impressions to the general stock of memories. She tells the story of a young duke of the period, passionately attached to his home; hampered by the traditions of his class; spoilt by too much money wasted upon silly love-affairs ridden by selfconsciousness and the curious inverted snobbery which believes that other people spend their lives in envying him; yet capable of becoming a fine creature if his set will let him!

Round him are grouped the set which, for the author, represent “The Edwardians,” though “Some Edwardians” would have been a safer title. For so immediate a past is in everyone's memory. And memory tells us that the author’s Edwardian Kensingtonians, for instance, are no more like the real thing than the wooden figures in Noah’s ark are like the Noah family.

But of her chosen group itself Miss Sackville-West writes with a conviction that imposes belief upon the reader, though she draws the units cruelly enough. Her hero, Sebastian, is a vain, Byronic gesture of a man, and the lovely Sylvia an elle-frau, hollowbacked as a spoon. Even the modern

Viola is dank-hearted and unlovable.

Curiously, yet in spite of their author's dislike of them, these people, these shadows of yesterday, have a certain life – the cold life of an unacted Pinero play. Dead on paper, one yet feels that on their own stage they must have nevertheless been capable of holding their audiences entranced.

Indeed, Miss Sackville-West makes it plain enough that the true lives of these people were lived in public. Her Duchess dresses in public; her Sylvia makes love while all the world watches, and when Sebastian decides to escape from his cage, he does it on his way home from Westminster Abbey.

Now we know well enough that publicity bleaches the individuality. Perhaps that is why the book becomes so particularly exciting, alive and moving, when all these individual Edwardians are gathered on their stages at a Court ball, or dinner, a Coronation service when, in fact, they are part of a pageant.

Then, indeed, the reader cannot help himself; he must, he finds, hurry to the window and watch this Edwardian pageant. For Miss Sackville-West has a true gift for description, and she is, I think, at heart a poet-painter, after the order of Rosetti, rather than a workaday storyteller. She is moved to speech by things rather than by people, by the sights rather than by thoughts. Give her an impersonal scene and she writes superbly. Such described events as the Christmas tree party or the scene in the moonlit picture gallery live on in the reader's mind as intensely as if they had been

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actually experienced. And the description of the Coronation Service that closes the book has true magnificence.

“The blue and silver of the velvet wall hangings, the blue mantle of the Prince of Wales, the grey heron plumes in his cap, the silks of the Indian princes, the lozenges on a herald’s tabard, the crimson of the peers and peeresses massed in the transepts, the motley of a jewelled window, the silence of the Throne, the slight stir, the absence of voices, the swell of the organ, the hushed arrivals, the sense of expectancy all blended together into one immense and confused significance. It is to be doubted whether one person in that whole assembly had a clear thought in his head. Rather, words and their associations marched in a grand chain, giving hand to hand England, Shakespeare, Elizabeth, London, Westminster, the Docks, India, the Cutty Sark, England, England,

Gloucestershire, John of Gaunt, Magna Carta, Cromwell, England.”

Is not this fine and moving? I wish I had space for the whole passage in which the King is crowned but there is only room for the last picture.

“The Crown had been placed upon his head, the trumpets and drums had sounded, the people had cried ‘God Save the King.’ And at the moment when the Queen was crowned the peeresses had likewise put on their coronets, in a single gesture of exquisite beauty, their white arms rising with a sound like the rushing of birds’ wings and a proud arching like the arching of the neck of a swan.”

This is the poetry of history. I wish Miss Sackville-West would write us a modern “English Chronicle.” She could do it!

The Bystander, May 28, 1930

When she let all this go off together in a novel about high life, she produced in The Edwardians a kind of period piece and a best-seller . . . Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people. Vita was very nearly a best-seller of this kind. She only just missed being one because she did not have quite enough of the third and fourth element in the best-selling brew.

Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way

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The Literary Lounger

By L. P. Hartley “The Edwardians” [is] a book with some many claims to distinction that one does not know which to take first.

To say that it is a cross-section of English social life between the years 1905 and 1911 – a cross-section crowned by the King and shod, as it were, by the employees on a great territorial estate – gives some indication of its subject, but little of its mood and spirit, which are as various and unpredictable as the weather of an April day. But there are two ideas dominating the others. The first is that an institution like Chevron is an anachronism, the society that meets and makes merry within its ample walls is an anachronism too; and the sooner that Sebastian, the young Duke, and shake himself free of both and lead the life of an ordinary twentieth-century citizen, the better for him.

This is the point of view held by Anquetil, the explorer, whose originality of mind and appearance so strongly appealed to Sebastian’s mother, the Duchess of Chevron; and it is the point of view that the author, when satirising the dullness, worthlessness, and frivolity of those who enjoy the privileges of Chevron, adopts also. But pleading against this verdict is Chevron House itself, infinitely beautiful, rich with associations of the past, subtly extending its influence into corners of the being where the mind cannot follow, posing its siren-song, its soft, exquisite, inarticulate voice, to the dry, neat arguments of reason. As the book accumulates emotional force, Chevron

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becomes not only a symbol of a passing or past order, but an emblem of all those insubstantial amenities of life which the individual cannot create for himself, which are the inherited temperature and climate of his being, influences “heard in the heart and felt along the blood.” “To live one’s own life,” if these influences are expelled, is surely tantamount to impoverishing it? How can one live in a vacuum, or endure an existence furnished only with those cold comforts which the will to freedom collects on its barren course? In a final passage describing the Coronation of King George V, Miss Sackville-West brandishes before Sebastian all the allurements of the ancien régime.

Coronation of George V Meanwhile the pageant went superbly forward from rite to rite. The undoubted king of this Realm had been presented to his people at each point of the compass, and at each point of the compass had been recognised with loud and repeated acclamations and with the blare of trumpets echoing against a stone on the pavement to the roof. The waiting Altar had received the Bible, the paten and chalice. Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet had been invoked, and the crowning of Solomon recalled. Four Knights of the Garter had raised a canopy of cloth of gold over the King.

Oil from the Ampulla, poured from the peak of the little golden eagle, had anointed his head, his breast, and his hands. His hands had been

Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

dried with cotton wool. The white tunic of the Colobium Sindonis and the golden pall of the Supertunica had replaced his robes of state, revealing the mark of sunburn at the back of his neck. The golden spurs had touched his heels; the Armill had been flung about his shoulders; the Sword had been girded on and redeemed with one hundred shillings in a red velvet bag; the Orb, the Ring, the Sceptres had been delivered to him; the Lord of the Manor of Worksop had offered a glove. The Crown had been placed upon his head, the trumpets and drums had sounded, the people had cried “God save the King.”

A Novel of Ideas I make no apology for quoting in full this splendid rousing passage, which symbolises, formally and visually, those survivals of the feudal past which Sebastian, doubtful of their reality and meaning in the modern world, felt called upon to renounce. I

do not want to give the idea that “The Edwardians” is a succession of purple patches. It is written in the grand manner; but Miss Sackville-West’s prose is a sensitive instrument that responds to every change of mood, and her moods are gay as well as a grave.

Unlike many novels of the day, her book is not a subjective document written to relieve the writer’s feelings.

Her main concern is with individuals, but her interest is not confined to their personal experience; she links them with the world in which they move, externalises and generalises them. She sees into the heart of the private soldier, but she also takes into account the disposition of the troops and the issue of the battle. The reproach levelled at some modern novels, that they contribute nothing to general ideas, cannot touch her. And so I have the utmost confidence in recommending “The Edwardians” even to those austere readers who normally eschew fiction.

The Sketch, June 11, 1930

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CHEVRON OF THE EDWARDIANS KNOLE AND ITS CHÂTELAINE Lady Sackville is the wife of Lord Sackville, fourth Baron, and was formerly Miss Anne Meredith Bigelow, of New York. Lord Sackville, who succeeded his brother in 1928, lives at Knole, the family seat of the SackvilleWests, and one of the most celebrated houses in England. It contains 365 rooms, has 32 staircases, and is a treasure-house of works of art while

Miss Victoria Sackville-West’s new novel THE EDWARDIANS (the Hogarth Press 7s. 6d. net) contains two distinct elements. They agree very well together, they do not jostle but mix and yet they remain distinct. The first element and perhaps most important is the Edwardians themselves, the very highest society, chiefly the fast set but also the intensely respectable set which was gradually even then decaying, though its power was still immense.

Miss Sackville-West’s description of this fast set who gave each other as Christmas presents “trinkets that were either cut in stone as hard as their own hearts or mounted in enamel or ormolu as vain as their own protestations,” is very brilliant. It is a description obviously circumstantial and based on real knowledge, but perfectly assimilated in the form of fiction. Miss Sackville-West manages the difficult art of bringing real or very nearly real episodes into a novel without any awk102

many royal personages have been entertained there. The Hon. Mrs. Harold Nicolson, formerly the Hon. Victoria Sackville-West, daughter of the third Lord Sackville, and well known as a poet, author, and novelist, has written a book on Knole, which was her childhood s home. She has also described the famous house in “The Edwardians,” her latest and most-discussed novel, in which she calls it “Chevron.”

The Sketch, July 2, 1930

wardness of any kind. And of course it is a most fascinating world which she describes. Here were these grand people going from one week-end at a great house to another where the rooms were arranged to suit the convenience of the recognized lovers and where the groom of the chambers would be dismissed because he did not at once destroy blotting-paper which, when held up to the looking-glass by great ladies, would reveal an incriminating letter.

For anything might be done provided that the knowledge of it did not spread from the small world in which such things were done. Hence the astonishing poise and decorum which they maintained before the world at large; and hence also the sterility of their lives, for surely nothing is so disastrous as a great difference between private actions and public protestations. In Miss Sackville-West's skilful hands the characters, though each is dominate by the same ideas, emerge as

Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

individuals and the whole elaborate und dead society begins to live again.

But one at least of the Edwardians in the novel could not fit into this society and so we come to the second element in the book. A young Duke, whose mother is in the centre of the fast set comes to meet, and in the most fantastic circumstances to converse with, an explorer who is the temporary lion of society. Leonard Anquetil tries to persuade the duke to leave all and come away with him, but tradition is too strong for this. The duke goes from love affair to love affair seeking an outlet for his close confined life. Each of his mistresses from many different

worlds represents some stage of his spiritual progress. The final culmination of his overpowering dukedom comes at the coronation of the new King, a scene described perfectly. In fact nearly all the adventures of the romantic young duke are described with the same acute realism as are the lives of the essentially Edwardian. But the duke himself is apt to grow u little too fantastic and to converse too strangely on the roofs of houses. It is hard to take him quite as seriously as one should.

One of the predilections of a section of the present generation of litterateurs is for showing up in the light of truth – satirically, or otherwise – the great figures and phases of other centuries.

Mr Lytton Strachey performed the office of exposer of skeletons in cupboards for certain eminent Victorians, and the Victorian age has been so exposed, revealed, attacked, and stripped by other, lesser pens than Mr Strachey’s that, by way of reaction, people are coming to think that there must have been something, however little, decent about these Victorians and Victorian times. Perhaps they will find it out in time.

But this craze for writing the truth about figures and phases which were wont to be treated with romance and “hushery” had, for a time, been going

back beyond Victoria’s time – Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, with a biff at Dickens have been particular popular themes. Now, in the latest turn of the truth wheels the cycle is crossing the purple, gold and hectic scarlet of the reign of King Edward VII. Fairly frank memoirs were published lately, the work of the late Sir Lionel Cust; now Miss V. Sackville-West gives us a novel “The Edwardians” (Hogarth Press: 7s 6d), in which truth and fiction are blended in a manner that those who care for the game of hunt the figure will find “most intriguing.”

Times Literary Supplement, May 29, 1930

From the Inside Miss Sackville-West, heir to the family of the Sackvilles of Knole Park, near Sevenoaks – that lovely, old, sto103

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reyed mansion and demesne – knows her subjects from the inside. She is also a literary artist of great ability.

Her novel is beautifully written, and would have made excellent reading apart from its special interest. But it is not, for that, a first-rate performance, either as novel or as a study of a particular act and period.

One of the chief lacks of the book, as novel and period study, is incisiveness. There is vagueness over all that seems to come from an indecision not in the conception of the book, but in the writing of it. Is the book as bold as its author planned it? Certainly, here and there, there is no mincing, not so much words as of revelation as to the truth of the ways of Society in Edward’s day. The Mayfair, Belgravia, and country house lot are shown to us as publicly engaged in whitewashing their own or their neighbour’s private lives – a kind of perverted noblesse oblige.

Miss Sackville-West takes the ducal mansion of Chevron as her principal mise-en-scene, and the young Duke of Chevron, Sebastian, as her pivotal figure. Sebastian is not the normal fellow his circle, and, but for chance twist of fate, would have avoided being drawn into its vicious circle.

We see him in relation to his tenantry – the change there is cleverly suggested by the refusal of the young generation to follow its forbears in continued servility to the “great house” – to his ancestry, and to the call of modernity and a form of democracy.

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Amorous Adventures Before, however, he goes out into the wilds to find a new and better existence, with the adventurous fisherman’s son and Oxford graduate – Anteuil, one of the best figures in the book, but too little seen – he has many amorous adventures with the middleaged Lady Roehampton, with a too virtuous doctor’s wife, and with a modern miss, an artist’s model.

Around the adventures is what is almost more important than the tale of them – the grouping of personages, including King Edward, the house of Chevron above stairs and below – the stodgy dowagers and virtuous set in society, and a particularly fine picture of King George’s Coronation. The novel has a host of things to interest one in main matters and, often more interesting, sidelights and details; yet the final feeling remains that the incisiveness spoken of is missing and also a coalescence of angles of aspect and various sections of Chevron’s adventures. In idea, in parts, in writing certain scenes – that between Lord and Lady Roehampton when the fine, old English gentleman husband puts an end to her butterfly career is particularly good – the novel has fascination and wit, but a whole it disappoints us.

But it is, without doubt, a novel to be read and enjoyed for various attributes.

Aberdeen Press and Journal, June 9, 1930

Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

THE FEATHER-BOA AGE Miss Sackville-West’s now book is less a novel than a criticism of “Society” – vintage year 1905. Sebastian, the nominal hero, is a duke who owns Chevron—a famous house probably not unknown to Mrs Woolf’s Orlanda. His devotion to Chevron was punctuated by philandering, and on almost the last page he is found complaining that it is an awful thing to have been born a duke; a paralysing thing – “It doesn’t give one a fair chance.” His complaint is partly self-criticism and partly selfexcuse; it is presumably also part of Miss Sackville-West's criticism of a social organisation that imposes upon certain individuals by reason of their birth obligations which may conflict with their development as individuals.

The story of the book is, however, less interesting than the picture it contains of “Society” in the reign of Edward VII. For a parallel instance of “high life” in the novel it is perhaps necessary to go back to Disraeli’s novels, though there was no tinge of satire in his descriptions of how “Society” behaved. Miss Sackville-West depicts a “Society” insistent upon the outward observance of convention while admitting laxity of conduct. The shallow life of the fashionable world is mercilessly exposed.

Before the war this book would have

created a great stir, but it is now almost a commonplace that the Edwardian age concealed its original sin under a façade of good manners; whether there has been any diminution in original sin with the coming of outspokenness is another question. The picture of the servant world in Chevron is drawn with skill, and is amusing . It need hardly be said that Miss Sackville-West is a good craftsman, and that there is much to admire in her handling of the theme she has chosen to embroider, but there is a certain architectural weakness about the whole – no doubt due to the fact that she is emphasising the tendency to aimlessness or dissipation of energy characteristic of the early nineteenhundreds and in doing so makes her hero exhibit the same unheroic tendency. The description of the Coronation of King George towards the end of the book is one of several passages, which show the author’s powers at their best. This is a book which, once begun, is not likely to be laid down until it has been read through. There is a pleasant spice about a book which bears the note, “No character in this book Is wholly fictitious,” though no doubt that could be said of almost any novel.

The Scotsman, June 5, 1930

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The action of Miss Sackville-West’s novel takes place in the last six years of the reign of King Edward VII. It is a many-sided book, at once romance, satire, comedy of manners, social history. The hero, the young Duke of Chevron, is the meeting-place and battle-ground of two epochs and of many divergent loyalties. He realises how vapid, for the most part, are the members of the haute monde by whom he is surrounded; he would fain follow the advice of the explorer Anquetil, and cut himself adrift from the people of his “set.” They are, perhaps, not a specially favourable example of the society of the period; Miss Sackville-West has little patience with them. But Sebastian cannot easily give them up without also giving up his home—that beautiful house in which

the traditions of the past still linger in all their original glory, untainted by the decadence and meaninglessness of the present. For a time he tries to fulfil the role expected from man of his birth; joins the army, has a love-affair with the beautiful, notorious Lady Roehampton, attends the Coronation of the new Sovereign. But his being still cries out for experiences which his present way of life, so magnificent in its setting, so empty in itself, cannot yield: his chance meeting with Anquetil after the coronation confirms his resolve. Though diversified with many passages in a lighter vein “The Edwardians” is a splendid, stately, melancholy book.

By the announcement at the beginning of “The Edwardians” that “No character in this book is wholly fictitious,” Miss Sackville West rather encourages those gossips who for the past few days have been worrying their woolly wits as to whom precisely depicted as Lady This and Lord That.

To the bulk of sensible readers the question will never arise, for what matters is that here is an unusually attractive novel, in which history is most skilfully assimilated into fiction.

This or the other episode may or may not actually have happened in “real life”; both are equally entertaining in Miss Sackville's novel.

The central character of “The Edwardians” is not King Edward – though he makes an appearance – but a young duke, blasé because he was completely at a loose end in life. His existence was a round of conventional social observances – even his scandalous intrigues with women were conventional, for he belonged to that “smart set” that observed every propriety in public, Ascot and at the opera, but so arranged their week-end parties that recognised lovers never found their rooms at opposite ends of the house.

Miss Sackville West writes very incisively about him and his kind. He refuses an invitation to leave Mayfair

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Illustrated London News, June 21, 1930

Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

with an explorer friend, and for six years continues to do all the fashionable things expected of him. At last he sees a glimmer or two of light, however, and Coronation Day, when King George ascends the throne, he again meets the explorer, and this time decides to shake the dust of London off his tired feet.

The Edwardian Ladies

by Norah Hoult Not the least interest of Miss SackvilleWest's agreeable novel “The Edwardians” is the reminder it brings that 25 years ago our mothers had to take a deal more thought over most things than we have to-day. For example, their toilet was nothing if not complicated. Miss Sackville-West gives us an intimate peep at a duchess preparing for a dinner party. To begin with there was the business of inserting pads into the hair – They were unappetising objects, like last year's birds' nest, hot and stuffy to the head, but they could not be dispensed with, since they provided the foundation which the coiffure was to be swathed and piled, and into which the innumerable hairpins were to be stuck. It was always a source of great preoccupation with the ladies that no bit of the pad should show through the natural hair. Often they put up tentative

The Duke is a fantastic sort of character, admirably treated. For his sake alone, “The Edwardians” (Hogarth Press, 7s 6d), with its magnificent descriptions of such episodes as the Coronation, is well worth reading.

Dundee Evening Telegraph, May 30, 1930

hand to feel, even in the midst of the most absorbing conversation; and then their faces wore the expression which is only seen on the faces of women whose fingers investigate the backs of their heads.

And pads, not alone for the hair, but fastened over the stays into place on the hips and under the arms, still further accentuate the 18 inch smallness of the waist. Moreover, stays, laced and heavily boned, were stays in those days, and not to be put off and on in a second.

Those were the days, too, when unmarried girls of high degree did not go out unescorted by a maid; when it was considered very “fast” to dine alone with a man, when the older generation shook their heads over the admission of Jews and Americans into “Society”; the days of hatpins and crochet hooks; of overcrowded rooms littered with palms, silver ornaments, family photographs, pampas grass in crane-necked vases, hassocks; the

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days, in brief, when it was proper to be proper.

For though it would appear that Edwardian Society honoured the Seventh Commandment more in the breach than in the observance the Eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not be found out,” was most rigidly imposed. And so when Lady Roehampton’s affair with the young hero, Sebastian, is discovered by her husband. she does not for a moment think of divorce, any more than does her husband. The thing to do is to retire into the country with a broken heart, which she duly does.

Lady Roehampton has never indeed been very much approved of by the dowagers. She could not help being a professional beauty, but she could help countering her face, and, once, she was undoubtedly rouged.

Also she had been seen driving in a hansom alone with a man of bad repu-

tation. And finally she sealed her exclusion from the most select parties by appearing as Queen Etheldreda in a public pageant. When she next met the Duchess of D. she was given two fingers instead of three – she had never been given five.

So life was not altogether easy for the more advanced spirits of the age.

But Miss Sackville-West, ending the book with the Coronation of King George, intimates that already there were not wanting signs that the old order was changing. On this most solemn occasion, peeresses actually peeped at their faces in mirrors, and the dowagers looking down from the galleries said that it was easy to see that “the reign of Edward the Seventh was over and days of decent behaviour ended.”

Tomorrow’s Daily Mail is a bumper issue. It contains the first of a series of articles on “The Georgians” by Miss V. Sackville-West. Miss Sackville-West has written the most-discussed book of the year — “The Edwardians,” the first edition of which was sold out three weeks. This book deals with the Edwardians — “from Edward VII down to the housemaids in the servants’ hall.”

In her exclusive series of articles on “The Georgians” she will deal with the years since George V’s coronation in the same witty way. These articles, for their wit, their brilliance, their satire, are likely to be as widely discussed as her book. You must not miss the first of this series which starts to-morrow.

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Yorkshire Evening Post, June 9, 1930

Weekly Dispatch, July 13, 1930

Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians

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Violet Trefusis, Sortie de Secours

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VIOLET TREFUSIS, SORTIE DE SECOURS (1929)

Shortly before Denys’s death, I had published a mediocre little book, a patchwork affair, aphorisms, maxims, annotations, loosely woven into the shape of a novel.

It served its purpose, it was a loophole, an outlet, above all, a piece of blotting paper which absorbed my obsessions.

Sortie de Secours [Violet’s first novel, written in French, possibly because her mother didn’t speak it; it has never been translated into English] led to Écho and Écho to many things.

Violet Trefusis, Don’t Look Round

In 1929 Sortie de Secours (Emergency Exit) was published. The plot is simple: an independent young woman of means has a very handsome but somewhat lukewarm lover. To arouse his jealousy, she sets out to seduce a famous painter old enough to be her father. She succeeds, and even falls in love with the personable old man, when she realises that jealousy and love are less important in life than independence. The theme of the novel was pinpointed for her by Misia Sert [an extraordinary woman, muse and model to many artists; see my book Everybody I Can Think of Ever for much more detail on her fascinating life] (Nathalie Styx): ‘In each human being there is an emergency exit: that is, the cult of self under a multitude of manifestations, which means that when an obsession becomes too violent you can escape, vanish with a snicker . . .’ It was that diabolic Natalie who unconsciously opened that door for me!

The novel is written in the first person by a woman who has decided she’s finished with suffering. What Violet writes about this sort of affliction is both amusing and revealing: Happiness for me lies in things, not people. Should I ever be unfaithful to Drino, it would be with a country or a city. You could say that my irresponsible and evasive nature can’t support the heavy trappings of love. And, when someone does impose them, it becomes as grotesque as a little girl dressed in grown-up finery. It knows what’s expected and wanted; flattered, for a little while it will turn grown-up: voice, gestures, gait, everything will be faithfully reproduced. But the result is caricature. The voice will be sterner, the gait more pompous, the adult evoked through a pitiless stress on the comic. I am

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Violet Trefusis, Sortie de Secours

ridiculous when I’m in love – more ridiculous than other people. Like the little girl, I take my part terribly seriously; every ounce of moderation and taste desert me. I tripped over my train.

At thirty-five, Violet looked back on the drama and follies of her twenties with ironic contempt.; She would never be caught off guard again, that was certain.

Her despair, at least so it appeared, had dwindled into a few melancholy reflections she scattered here and there, more heavily laden with irony than drama: ‘The sea you drown in can be a lovely shade of blue’ . . . ‘Death – what am I waiting for? I’ve loved enormously, suffered enormously, travelled enormously. I should die, rich in all that love, all that pain, all those countries’ . . . ‘I shall say: God, let me give back to you what’s left of my life; I don’t like carrying small change.’

The book leaves the impression that passion and its attendant dramas are to be considered in the worst possible taste. There is in it the sometimes slightly pedantic off-handedness of Giraudox, the sensuality of Colette.

Philippe Julian & John Phillips, Violet Trefusis, Life and Letters

She looked round at her life through this novel and, not liking what she saw, decided to purge her past. ‘I am forced to admit that I do not have any good or bad qualities which make love flourish,’ says the central female character Laure.

‘Happiness comes to me from things, not people.’ It is as if Violet has floated up from one of those dark oubliettes at St Loup and decided to pass the rest of her life giving parties in the dining room above. ‘In every person there is an emergency exit; a self-interest which in its various forms allows one to escape … The disadvantage is that one cannot always come back.’ Laure is a comparatively wealthy young woman whose charming and handsome lover Drino is growing increasingly distant. . .

Violet juggles aspects of her life in this story: but however she plays her cards, the game comes out badly. Sortie de Secours was never translated into English.

An early draft was dedicated to Denys, but Violet removed his name leaving no dedication in the published volume. She would not have wanted it read in Britain for fear of arousing unpleasant memories in her mother (with whom she was now on good terms). Sortie de Secours cleared the ground for her more sophisticated novels. In her forlorn days, while writing ‘Battledore and Shuttlecock’, she had admitted to an inability to express herself. ‘I don’t know English well enough, I can’t analyse, I can’t reason, and am altogether too stupid,’ she had confessed to Vita. She found more encouragement in France and was soon to discover more oblique methods of orchestrating her thoughts and feelings in the French lan113

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guage. There is a recurring tension between the social life these novels describe and their emotional undercurrent, a battle between past and present, culture and morality.

Michael Holroyd, A Book of Secrets

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Violet Trefusis, Sortie de Secours

Most of her fiction was an attempt to make sense of her past. The emergency exit she described as ‘self-love in all its various forms’. The exit was there for when obsessive love threatens to destroy the person it consumes. It allows them ‘when some obsession becomes too violent to vanish away with a mocking laugh’. In French she wrote with a mocking laugh, a comic irony to shield past pain. In French she joked about games of the heart. This was her adopted language which her mother’s society could not claim. The tone she found, caustic and defended, contrasted with the rawness of her letters to Vita. In Sortie de Secours Laure loves Drino, a charmer. Because she loves him so much he withdraws. Because she waits for letters they do not arrive. Because she fears betrayal she finds it. She falls ill, leaves Paris for Provence and starts a seemingly safe relationship with a painter, Oradour. Because she has someone else Drino is jealous. She visits him in Paris and he tries to ‘claim’ her as his. The gamesmanship of it all frees her and she travels back to Oradour. On the train she overhears two middle-aged women talking of love. One speaks of jealousy, the other of her attachment to … Oradour.

Love, Violet suggested, is a merry-go-round of betrayal. There is no freedom in it.

Its manipulations, declarations and reversals form repetitive patterns.

Diana Souhami, Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter

Everything is fair, subtle and finely expressed. But the most lively pleasure of this reading comes from its pleasantly variegated style, full of words, of conceits, of amusing and twisted preciousness; very modern language, in short, to dress feelings which are not themselves and which always seem. This mixture of tradition and novelty has a lot of flavour. And then we find great charm in seeing so many things that we know well like Provence, for example, captured and expressed with freshness by a foreign spirit and who renews them.

Edmond Jaloux

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VIOLET TREFUSIS, ECHO (1931)

Écho was a novel about the Scotland of my childhood; it was romantic, nostalgic, with a sublimated incest motif running through it like an alien thread. Much to my surprise, it was a success, and nearly won me the ‘Prix Femina.’

Apropos of this, is customary make a series of calls before the award of the prize, exactly as it is necessary to ‘canvass’ academicians before ‘standing’ for the Académie Française. Madame Alphonse Daudet, widow of the great Daudet, was one of the most influential members of the jury; a visit to her house was indispensable. “Whatever you do,” my friends recommended, “not let her think you’re well off.” I accordingly borrowed an old suit from my maid, taking the métro, not a taxi, to her distant quartier. A few days later I sent the old lady a few mangy marigolds. “Quand je pense,” she bewailed, “que cette petite veuve si méritante a dû se priver de manger pour m’envoyer ces fleurs!” [When I think that that deserving little widow had to deprive herself of food to send me these flowers.]

Alea jacta est [the die is cast]. henceforth my road was clear: I had been put into the world to write novels.

Violet Trefusis, Don’t Look Round

Écho, published two years later [than Sortie de Secours], takes place in Scotland.

Better received than Sortie de Secours, it was even something of a best-seller. Its style is more finished, less fidgety, and the plot more original. A delightful Parisienne visits her Scottish aunt in her gloomy castle. There she charms her inseparable twin cousins, a brother and sister. The sister is sure that her French cousin has become her brother’s mistress and she drowns herself. The brother banishes the Parisienne. A host of reminders of Violet’s Scottish holidays are cleverly counterpointed with the wit of a Paris salon. Yet this book, which Somerset Maugham might have turned into an excellent short story, interests us less than Sortie de Secours: Violet had become an accomplished novelist, but we lose sight of her.

Philippe Jullian & John Phillips, Violet Trefusis, Life and Letters

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Endowed with a remarkable gift for languages, Violet Trefusis is one of the very few British writers – Beckford and Wilde also come to mind – who wrote with equal fluency in English and in French. From 1921 she resided in France. Echo, her second novel, published in 1931, gave her the opportunity to delineate her native land, Scotland, and the country which she had adopted, France. It would be difficult to imagine two more different milieux than brilliant jaded world of a sophisticated Parisian femme du monde and that of her young Scottish cousins, totally absorbed in the rustic delights of primeval Scotland. This vision of Scotland is anachronistic: a land of feudal traditions and of a melancholy romantic beauty.

A striking feature of Echo, as of the author’s subsequent novels, is her delight in dissecting, with verve and humour, the foibles, the nuances, the peculiar characteristics of society in England, Scotland, France, Italy and Spain. Her plots may be slight, but the portraits of representative national ‘characters’ which emerged from the novels add up to a rich ensemble, displaying rare gifts of perception. The ensemble preserves panorama of a certain ‘Vieille Europe’ which has all but vanished and in which Violet Trefusis was an ornament.

Echo turns on the visit to Scotland of the young Parisienne, Sauge. She leaves behind her worldly and very French husband for a séjour in the remote castle of her aunt, Lady Balquidder, where she encounters her twin cousins. The twins, brother and sister, are wonderfully savage and remarkably beautiful. Malcolm and Jean thrive like wild beasts in perfect concord with their natural world. Both resent the intrusion of the newcomer. And then something happens. John, the seductive femininity of the young Parisienne is irresistible . . .

In the delineation of Sauge’s character it is fascinating to discern a selfportrait of the author. A distinctive feature of Violet – often remarked – was her exceptional voice, and in Echo we find Sauge endowed with ‘une voix mystérieuse, clandestine,’ an excellent description of Violet’s own voice. Vita SackvilleWest’s journal, incorporated in Portrait of a Marriage, refers to ‘my passionate, stormy Violet of today [25 July 1920] speaking to me in that same lovely voice.’

And in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando the portrait of the seductive Sasha comes to mind: ‘she talked so enchantingly, so unwittingly, so wisely.’. .

Then, finally, the novel ends on a tragic plaintive note, expressed by that most Scottish incantation: . . .

For me and my true love We’ll never meet again . . .

As Sauge holds her breath: The very soul of Scotland was revealed to her in that sweet, plaintive song and its oft repeated themes: the endless yearnings of Northern love, the longings,

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Violet Trefusis, Echo

the fateful separation, the exile, the loneliness, heartbreaking dignity of the Stuarts. In vain did she help for a cry of revolt . . .

For me and my true love We’ll never meet again . . .

And this was also the refrain which pervaded the life of Violet Trefusis.

John Phillips, introduction to the English translation of Echo, 1987

This second novel came within one vote of winning the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize (it was awarded that year to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de Nuit). It is a miniature Gothic story, which culminates in a fatal seduction. . .

Echo is cleverly told by means of letters between Sauge and her husband in France – letters sent and not sent. The unsent letters tell a disturbing psychological truth, the sent ones are largely pragmatic. The novel is full of dark omens. . .

By giving her novella the title Echo, Violet invites the reader to find a lingering note in it of her intimacy with Vita. ‘The whole of humanity finds its echo in me, brought through pain,’ she had written to Vita. Then she had been unable to express any person’s point of view other than her own. In Echo she ingeniously sidesteps this problem by discovering aspects of herself within several of her characters and sometimes merging them with memories of Vita. The identical twins, who may be seen as androgynous aspects of a single bisexual person, encounter Sauge at a place reminiscent of Duntreath Castle in Scotland where the sixteen-year-old Violet had first invited the eighteen-year-old Vita. She had gone to Vita’s bedroom, they had heard the ‘incessant tick-tick of pigeon feet upon the roof, and the jackdaws flying from turret to turret’ and afterwards Violet had declared her love. ‘I am primitive in my joy as in my suffering.’. . .

Echo belongs to island literature in which sophisticated travellers, their baggage full of knowledge and culture and apparently excellent intentions, spread disease through the noble islanders – those Johnsonian inhabitants of the ‘Happy Valley’ also sought by Melville’s characters in Typee and idealised by Rousseau in his Discours.

Ideally this is a novel for younger readers: but I first read it in my seventies and it has imprinted itself on my imagination as if I had known it all my life.

Michael Holroyd, A Book of Secrets

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Who has the most beautiful house in Paris, rare charm, great intellect, looks, talent, taste? The answer’s an English woman, Mrs. Trefusis, who was Violet Keppel and writes as Violet Trefusis. I’m reading her first French novel, which deserves all the nice things the Parisian critics said, and you’ll soon be reading her first English novel, “Tandem,” which is set in the bicycle period. In L’Écho she writes of her childhood in Scotland (Mrs.

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George Keppel was an Edmonstone). A leading Glasgow paper reviewed it favourably, but thought it a pity the authoress had never come in touch with the Scottish aristocracy. The same paper published my first and last poem when I was twelve – all comment superfluous.

Pamela Murray, ‘Paris Asides,’ The Sketch, March 1, 1933

Vita & Violet - Final Echoes

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VITA & VIOLET – FINAL ECHOS

I am writing now in the light of later events, and writing in the midst of great unhappiness which I try to conceal from poor Harold, who is an angel upon earth. It is possible that I may never see Violet again, or that I may see her once again before we are parted, or that we may meet in future years as strangers; it is also possible that she may not choose to live; in any case it has come about indirectly owing to me, while I remain safe, secure and undamaged save in my heart.

The injustice and misfortune of the whole thing oppresses me hourly; it gives me an awful sense of doom – Violet’s doom, which she herself has consistently predicted.

Vita Sackville-West, quoted in Portrait Of A Marriage by Nigel Nicolson

Isn’t life odd?

There was once a time when Violet and I were so madly in love, and I hurt you so dreadfully—and now how dead that is, passion completely spent—and the true love that has survived is mine for you, and yours for me.

I think it was partly your fault, Hadji. You were older than me, and far better informed. I was very young, and very innocent. I knew nothing about homosexuality. I didn’t even know that such a thing existed—either between men or between women. You should have told me. You should have warned me. You should have told me about yourself, and have warned me that the same sort of thing was likely to happen to myself. It would have saved us a lot of trouble and misunderstanding. But I simply didn’t know.

Vita to Harold, 23 November 1960

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Sissinghurst Castle, Kent.

July I mean August 5, 1962 [Vita had died at Sissinghurst on June 2, 1962, aged 70] My dearest Violet, I think Vita would have liked to you to have a book of hers as well as the ring [the fifteenth century Venetian ring given to the six-year-old Violet by legendary art dealer Joseph Duveen and later given by Violet to Vita]. You were her best and oldest friend and she thought much about you and admired your work.

Those long and deep affections are the best thing in the world and I am grateful to you for your long and devoted and amused affection for her. I am glad indeed that she had so happy a life and you were a large part in it.

Things will never be the same to me again. But one cannot expect such happiness to continue for ever and the day will come when I shall be able to look back on the last fifty years with gratitude instead of torturing regret.

Your loving, Harold

As for Violet’s heart, the struggle it made, the denial it endured, she asked that it be sealed in the medieval wall of the monks’ refectory at St Loup. On the wall is a plaque, a valediction in French: ‘Violet Trefusis 1894–1972, English by birth, French at heart.’ Before she died she wrote the lines My heart was more disgraceful, more alone And more courageous than the world has known.

O passer-by my heart was like your own.

Diana Souhami, Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter

God knows I have much to be thankful for, yet I hope I do not cling inordinately to life. I have sojourned, never resided. Doubtless, my lease is nearly up?

‘She withdrew’, would, I think, be a graceful epitaph.

Violet Trefusis, Don’t Look Round

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