Vita Sackville-West

[HERO]

Vita Sackville-West: Ni-ENTj or Si-ESTj

- From Portrait of a Marriage; pages 10-12 [Part One (BY V. SACKVILLE-WEST)]:

I realize that this confession, autiobiography, whatever I may call it, must necessarily have for its outstanding fault a lack of all proportion. I have got to trust to a very uncertain memory, and whereas the present bulks enormous, the past is misty. I can’t remember much about my childhood, except that I had very long legs and very straight hair, over which Mother used to hurt my feelings and say she couldn’t bear to look at me because I was so ugly. I know that I wasn’t a physical coward in those days, because I can remember doing dangerous things on a bicycle and climbing high trees – and yet, stop, I do believe I must have been a coward already, because I can’t remember thinking a great deal about whether I should be brave the next day when I went out riding, and I was too much fascinated by seeing other people do things which I knew I shouldn’t dare to do myself. I never realized this until this moment. Anyway, I wasn’t so much of a coward, and I kept my nerves under control, and made a great ideal of being hardy, and as like a boy as possible. I know I was cruel to other children, because I remember stuffing their nostrils with putty and beating a little boy with stinging-nettles, and I lost nearly all my friends in that kind of way, until none of the local children would come to tea with me except those who had acted as my allies and lieutenants.

I don’t remember much more about myself as a child than that. I remember more about outside things. I don’t remember either my father or mother very vividly at that time, except that Dada used to take me for terribly long walks and talk to me about science, principally Darwin, and I liked him a great deal better than Mother, of whose quick temper I was frightened. I don’t even remember thinking her pretty, which she must have been – lovely, even. My impression of her was that I couldn’t be rough when she was there, or naughty, and so it was really a great relief when she went away. I remember very vividly terrible scenes between her and Dada – at least, she made the scene, he usually said nothing at all, or very mildly, ‘Oh, come, dear, is that quite accurate?’ Her statements rarely were accurate; I realized this, very, very slowly, but was incredibly obtuse over it; in fact I didn’t really grasp it until a comparatively short time ago. (Evening is coming on, and I shall soon have to stop writing; thank God I am alone tonight.)

When she and Dada went away, I was left alone with Grandpapa. He was very old, and queer, and silent. He hated people, and never spoke to the people who came to the house [Knole]; in fact, if he got the chance he used to go to London for the day when he knew people were coming, and I used to be left alone to entertain them. It amused me later on, when sometimes I was had downstairs to make fourteen, to see him sitting quite mute between two wretched women who were trying to make conversation to him, or else crushing him into silence: ‘You have lovely gardens here, Lord Northwood [Sackville].’ ‘What do you know about gardens?’, he would snap at them. But at the same time he was always shrewd in his estimate of people, and never liked those who were not worthy of liking, or disliked those that were. Mother used to get furious when in about six words he demolished her friends, but Dada used to laugh, and then she turned on him. But I suppose she was really very devoted to Grandpapa, in her own way, because underneath everything her ideas of duty are sound, and although the most incomprehensible, she is certainly the most charming, person upon earth, whom I adore.


- Pages 24-34:

Besides going to Paris we went to Scotland with Seery every year. He was nearly always with us, or we with him, which his family didn’t relish at all. We had a place in Aberdeenshire, and I have a diary which I was made to keep there in French as a punishment for wrestling with the hall-boy. Next year we had a nicer, wilder place [Sluie], where I ran wild for three months; it was on the Dee, among lovely heather hills and little trout-lochs. I knew really every inch of the hills, and was exactly like the Scotch farm-children with whom I used to play. I was eleven then. The farmer’s son was a year older than me, and in the course of long days spent by the river or on the moors he told me a great many things he oughtn’t to have told me; but I honestly hadn’t got a mind like some children, and as I had always lived in the country I took most things quite for granted, and was neither excited nor interested by them. I practically lived at the farm, where I built myself a shanty. I was happy there. Mother was sensible about me. I was always out, either with the guns, or with the farmer’s boys, or by myself with the dogs (I had an Irish terrier then who could jump like a greyhound). Oh God, oh God, I wish I was back there – those lovely, lovely hills, those blazing sunsets, those runnels of icy water where I used to make water-wheels, those lovely summer evenings fishing on the loch, those long days when I often walked fifteen miles or more with the guns and gillies, I was young, I was healthy, I was simple, my eyes smart with tears to remember it. I had a kilt and a blue jersey, and I don’t suppose I was ever tidy once, even on Sundays. Mother was happy too; she used to pound up and down the same level bit of road, singing to herself, and she started an open-air craze which has never abated since, but which has provided every door in every room at Knole with a door-stopper.

I said I was eleven then. We went there every autumn until I was fifteen or sixteen, from early August till late October. When I was about twelve I started to write. (It was Cyrano de Bergerac that first initiated me to the possibilities of literature!) I never stopped writing after that – historical novels, pretentious, quite uninteresting, pedantic, and all written at unflagging speed: the day after one was finished another would be begun. I think that between the ages of thirteen and nineteen I must have been quite dreadful. I was plain, priggish, studious (oh, very!), totally uninspired, unmanageably and lankily tall, in fact the only good thing that could be said of me was that I wouldn’t have anything to do with my kind. Seeing that I was unpopular (and small wonder, for a saturnine prig), I wouldn’t court popularity. I minded rather, and used to cry when I went to bed after coming home from a party, but I made myself defiant about it. I don’t mean this to sound in the least pathetic; I wasn’t unhappy, only solitary, but I don’t pretend that I minded solitude, I rather chose it. (Looking back, I think I maligned myself rather by calling myself totally uninspired: I had flaring days, oh yes, I did!, when I thought I was going to electrify the world; it was like being drunk, and I can find traces of it now in the margins of all those ponderous, interminable books I wrote – two little letters, v.e., which stood for ‘very easy’, and I look at them now, and re-read the leaden stuff which they are supposed to qualify, and take upon trust that I found those now forgotten moments full of splendour.)

These years are tedious to write about – tedious, and very uncertain. I mean the years from thirteen to nineteen. Things happened, of course, things that made an impression and changed me – not that I changed much, or grew any more sophisticated. What happened? Let me try to remember: there is writing, always writing, and moroseness, and periods of real hard work and proficiency at the daily school to which I went every autumn and winter term in London. I set myself to triumph at that school, and I did triumph – I beat everybody there, sooner or later, and at the end-of-term exams I thought I had done badly if I didn’t carry off at least six out of eight first prizes. I think I was quite self-conscious over this: if I couldn’t be popular, I would be clever; and I did succeed in getting a reputation of being clever, which was quite unmerited, for I am distinctly not clever, but which like all reputations has died hard. I don’t believe it is quite dead, yet – people say, ‘Oh yes, she writes doesn’t she?’, implying that one must be clever in order to write. I wasn’t hated at that school, at least I don’t think so; I think they quite liked me. But I really cared not a scrap whether they liked me or not. Those were my most savage years! I worked very hard, and became more pedantic than ever. I’ve got a scholarly turn of mind, let me face that damning truth.

Other things happened too. 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 [Keppel, later Trefusis]. 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.

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 fiften years ago, or my passionate, stormy Violet of today, speaking to me in that same lovely voice.)

There were other happenings in those years. I went to Italy, to Florence. Violet was there, in fact I went to join her. (See how she comes in again immediately!) That was the first time I had been anywhere except to Paris, and it opened my eyes thoroughly. And Violet – how well did I know her then? My dates are so uncertain and I have no papers to guide me. I must have known her very well – it is coming back to me by degrees – for I had learnt Italian with her in London, and we had been together in Paris, and had acted part of a play I wrote in French in five Alexandrine acts, about the Man in the Iron Mask, and in those days we rather ostentatiously talked to one another in French in order to tutoyer one another and so show what great friends we were. It all comes back to me. Her mother [Alice Keppel] was the King’s mistress (which added a touch of romance to Violet), and often when I went to their house I used to see a discreet little one-horse brougham waiting outside and the butler would slip me into a dark corner of the hall with a murmured, ‘One minute, miss, a gentleman is coming downstairs’, so that I might take my choice whether it was the King or the doctor. Often Violet would be sent for to come down to the drawing-room, when we said, ‘Oh bother!’, much as we did when I was sent for in my own house to see Seery, I took one as much for granted as the other.

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.

I feel I am doing all this part very badly, very confusedly; it is very difficult to do, because I am afraid of taking too seriously what would, normally, have begun and ended as the kind of rather hysterical friendship one conceives in adolescence, but which had in it, I protest, far stronger elements than mere unwholesome hysteria. There is a bond which unites me to Violet, Violet to me; it united us no less than it unites us now, but what that bond is God alone knows; sometimes I feel it is as something legendary. Violet is mine, she always has been, it is inescapable. I knew it then, albeit only through my obscurely but quite obstinately proprietary attitude; she knew it too, less obscurely, and took all the active measures to make me realize it. That I left them unseconded, yet without any fear of losing her, proud and mettlesome as she was, only goes to prove how certain I was of my hold upon her. She was mine – I can’t express it more emphatically or more accurately than that, nor do I want to dress up an elemental fact in any circumlocution of words.

That autumn [1908] I stayed with her in Scotland. I was sent to Scotland to stay with Seery and his sisters because Grandpapa was ill, and I suppose Mother and Dada knew he would die and wanted me out of the way. My parting with him makes me sad to remember now. He got me into his little sitting-room and asked me to kiss him. I said I hoped he would be better when I came back, but he only shook his head. He died while I was staying with Seery. One of Seery’s sisters – the big one, whom her family called the Duchess – came to my room before breakfast with the telegram; she had on a pink flannelette dressing-gown, and no false hair, and I remember noticing how odd she looked. She kissed me in a conscientious sort of way, but I wasn’t very much moved over Grandpapa’s death just then; it only sunk in afterwards. I changed my red tie for a grey one, and tried to pray for Grandpapa, but couldn’t think what to say. Then I went downstairs to Seery’s room, and never to my last moment shall I forget the sight he presented, sitting at his dressing-table perfectly oblivious, the twenty-five stone of him, dressed only in skin-tight Jaegar combinations, and, dear warm-hearted old Seery, crying quite openly over the telegram. I felt I ought to be crying too, if Seery, who was about sixty to my sixteen, could cry, but I was too much overwhelmed by Seery’s appearance.

I went to stay with Violet after that, 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], 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.

Then I went to London, where I found Mother in deep black, and for the first time I realized Grandpapa’s death when Mother told me how much he had suffered and had died saying my name. (I was gratified by that.) We couldn’t go to Knole except unofficially, because Mother’s brother was bringing a lawsuit against Dada, claiming succession. We were very poor then, because all the money was kept in Chancery. I was taken to the law-courts for a minute while the case was going on, and saw all Mother’s Spanish relations sitting there in the well of the court; the case collapsed, and Dada, Mother, and I had a triumphant return to Knole, pulled up in the carriage by the fire-brigade with ropes, under welcoming arches.

I saved up my pocket money to go back to Florence next spring [1909]. I was seventeen then, and less plain (still very plain, though), and an Italian [Orazio Pucci] fell in love with me and wanted me to marry him, which made me feel very grown-up. He followed me to Rome, and then to Paris, where I refused to see him, but I found him waiting for me on the quay at Calais when I crossed to England. In the autumn of that year I went with Mother and Seery to Russia. Oh how I loved it! I don’t know whether to give an account of it, or to pass it by. We stayed with a Pole owning an estate 100 miles square between Warsaw and Kieff. At the frontier between Austria and Russia Mother refused to get out of the train to go to the Customs, till they sent two soldiers with rifles to fetch her, and in the grey dawn she was marched between them down the platform, saying to everyone she met, by way of protest, ‘Ich bin eine grosse Dame in England’, the only German phrase she could evolve. We finally got to the local station, where we were met by an immense yellow motor and taken in it for fifty miles across atrocious country (no road, nothing but pits and bumps – Seery kept on saying between his bumps, which were more considerable than anybody else’s, that Napoleon ought to have made decent roads across Russia, and Mother and I laughed so much we were nearly ill, what with bumps and laughter), until we came to a very elaborate French Chateau [Antoniny] looking very incongruous in the middle of the steppes. Here we found, besides our host and hostess, about twenty Poles we had never seen or heard of before, but they were all very friendly, and the life there was magnificent. There were eighty saddle-horses, a private pack of hounds, carriages-and-four, Cossacks attached to one’s particular service and sleeping across the threshold of one’s door, hereditary dwarfs to hand cigarettes, a giant, and Tokay of 1740. Not the least part of it was the host, who had a European reputation as a gambler before he forswore cards; he had teeth like a wolf (in fact he was not unlike a wolf altogether), and when he danced the Mazurka, as he did invariably after the 1740 Tokay, they snapped, and seemed to increase in size, number and prominence.

I found a sort of rhapsody I wrote after that; it is written in Italian (for secrecy), but I translate: ‘How much I loved Russia! those vast fields, that feudal life, that illimitable horizon – oh how shall I ever be able to live in this restricted island! I want expanse.’ It goes on: ‘I am happier this winter. I hope the terrible times of sadness are over. At heart I am still sad, and always shall be.’ There is more of it, but that suffices. I must have been suffering from a bad attack of Weltschmerz, and indeed I had just finished a play on Chatterton of quite unequalled gloom.

Florence again in the spring, with the Italian still faithful. I saw very little of Violet at this time; the two years between us were a barrier. I ‘came out’ – a distasteful and unsuccessful process – but the death of the King [Edward VII] saved me many festivities. Thus can the tragedies of great Kings be turned to the uses of little people.


26 JULY [1920]

It was just then, however, that I first met Harold. He arrived late at a small dinner-party before a play, very young and alive and charming, and the first remark I ever heard him make was, ‘What fun’, when he was asked by his hostess to act as host. Everything was fun to his energy, vitality, and buoyancy. I liked his irrepressable brown curls, his laughing eyes, his charming smile, and his boyishness. But we didn’t become particular friends. I think he looked on me as more of a child than I actually was, and as for myself I never thought about people, especially men, under a very personal aspect unless they made quite definite friendly advances to me first; even then I think one wonders sometimes what people are driving at.

I was eighteen then and he was twenty-three.

That summer [1910] I caught a heaven-sent attack of pneumonia, and as a consequence of my being ordered abroad we spent the whole winter from November till April in the South of France near Monte Carlo. My illness revived my intimacy with Violet – I have the panic-stricken letter she wrote me, after hearing an exaggerated account of my being ill – and I suppose I saw something of her that autumn, because I can remember driving round and round Hyde Park with her one night after going to a play, a day or two before she left for Ceylon, and the end of that motor-drive was one of the very rare but extremely disturbing occasions when she kissed me. If I had gone to Ceylon with her, my life would probably have turned out very differently. But oh Lord! What’s my miserable life? It only bulks large becaues these pages covered with pencil happen to be a history of it.

Well, we had an enormous white villa at Monte Carlo [Chateau Malet], where I lived in a perfection of happiness for those six months. Harold came to stay, and he and I fell into a rather childlike companionship, and I was rather hurt when he said goodbye to me without any apparent regret. I missed him – he was the best actual playmate I had ever known, and his exuberant youth combined with his brilliant cleverness attracted the rather saturnine me that scarcely understood the meaning of being young. Later I used to call him ‘the merry guide’, which name best describes him:

And in the dews beside me
Behold a youth that trod
With feathered cap on forehead,
And poised a golden rod,
With mien to match the morning,
And gay delightful guise . . .

That was Harold to the life. ‘Gay delightful guise . . .’ I cannot, cannot, bring sorrow into those eyes.

Violet returned from Ceylon in the spring, bringing me rubies, and we spent a day or two at San Remo. She also came to see me at our villa. How little we thought, as we stood under the olive-trees in the wild part of the garden (I remember admiring to myself the thick plait of her really beautiful hair), how little we thought of the next time we were to be together in that same place! When I went to her at San Remo, we saw an acrobat with no arms or legs. We had written to each other copiously during the whole winter, and now when she went to live in Munich, we continued to write, and she kept urging me to go and stay with her there, but I never did.

Harold meanwhile was in Madrid, and, but for an interlude when I dragged a plaintive but self-sacrificing Mother to Florence in the spring, the rest of the year was a repetition of the experience of being ‘out’. But now something else happens – something which, I would like to emphasize, started in complete innocence on my part. I want to be frank. I have implied, I think, that men didn’t attract me, that I didn’t think of them in what is called ‘that way’. Women did. Rosamund did. I have mentioned Rosamund as being the neat little girl who came to play with me when Dada went to South Africa. She had come out to stay at Monte Carlo – invited by Mother, not by me; I would never have dreamt of asking anyone to stay with me; even Violet had never spent more than a week at Knole: I resented invasion. Still, as Rosamund came, once she was there, I naturally spent most of the day with her, and after I had got back to England, I suppose it was resumed. I don’t remember very clearly, but the fact remains that by the middle of that summer we were inseparable, and moreover were living on terms of the greatest possible intimacy. But I want to say again that the thing did start in comparative innocence. Oh, I dare say I realized vaguely that I had no business to sleep with Rosamund, and I should certainly never have allowed anyone to find out, but my sense of guilt went no further than that.

Anyway I was very much in love with Rosamund.

Harold came back from Madrid at the end of that summer [1911]. He had been very ill out there, and I remember him as rather a pathetic figure wrapped up in an Ulster on a warm summer day, who was able to walk slowly round the garden with me. All that time while I was ‘out’ is extremely dim to me, very largely I think, owing to the fact that I was living a kind of false life that left no impression upon me. Even my liaison with Rosamund was, in a sense, superficial. I mean that it was almost exclusively physical, as, to be frank, she always bored me as a companion. I was very fond of her, however; she had a sweet nature. But she was quite stupid.

Harold wasn’t. He was as gay and clever as ever, and I loved his brain and his youth, and was flattered at his liking for me. He came to Knole a good deal that autumn and winter, and people began to tell me he was in love with me, which I didn’t believe was true, but wished that I could believe it. I wasn’t in love with him then – there was Rosamund – but I did like him better than anyone, as a companion and playfellow, and for his brain and his delicious disposition. I hoped that he would propose to me before he went away to Constantinople, but felt diffident and sceptical about it.


https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/sackvill...-h.html#chap01

- From Passenger to Teheran by Vita Sackville-West; pages 25-9 (Chapter I—Introductory):

Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong. Not only do we not want to hear it verbally, but we do not want – we do not really want, not if we are able to achieve a degree of honesty greater than that within the reach of most civilised beings – to hear it by letter either. Possibly this is because there is something intrinsically wrong about letters. For one thing they are not instantaneous. If I write home to-day and say (as is actually the fact), "At this moment of writing I am sailing along the coast of Baluchistan", that is perfectly vivid for me, who have but to raise my eyes from my paper to refresh them with those pink cliffs in the morning light; but for the recipient of my letter, opening it in England at three weeks' remove, I am no longer coasting Baluchistan; I am driving in a cab in Bagdad, or reading in a train, or asleep, or dead; the present tense has become meaningless. Nor is this the only trouble about letters. They do not arrive often enough. A letter which has been passionately awaited should be immediately supplemented by another one, to counteract the feeling of flatness that comes upon us when the agonising delights of anticipation have been replaced by the colder flood of fulfilment. Now when notes may be sent by hand, as between lovers living in the same town, this refinement of correspondence is easy to arrange, but when letters have to be transported by the complex and altogether improbable mechanism of foreign mails (those bags lying heaped in the hold!), it is impossible. For weeks we have waited; every day has dawned in hope (except Sunday, and that is a day to be blacked out of the calendar); it may have waned in disappointment, but the morrow will soon be here, and who knows what to-morrow's post may not bring? Then at last it comes; is torn open; devoured;—and all is over. It is gone in a flash, and it has not sufficed to feed our hunger. It has told us either too much or too little. For a letter, by its arrival, defrauds us of a whole secret region of our existence, the only region indeed in which the true pleasure of life may be tasted, the region of imagination, creative and protean, the clouds and beautiful shapes of whose heaven are destroyed by the wind of reality. For observe, that to hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.

The poor letter is not so much in itself to blame,—and there is, I think, a peculiar pathos in the thought of the writer of that letter, taking pains, pouring on to his page so much desire to please, so human a wish to communicate something of himself, in his exile,—not so much to blame in the inadequacy of its content, as in the fact that it has committed the error of arriving, of turning up. "Le rôle d'une femme," said an astute Frenchman once, "est non de se donner, mais de se laisser désirer."

The art of reading letters, too, is at least as great as the art of writing them, and possessed by as few. The reader's co-operation is essential. There is always more to be extracted from a letter than at first sight appears, as indeed is true of all good literature, and letters certainly deserve to be approached as good literature, for they share this with good literature: that they are made out of the intimate experience of the writer, begotten of something personally endured. But it is not every one who knows how to read. Many a word, wrung out of the pen, many an indication, gets thrown on to the dust-heap because it stood alone, unamplified and unsupported. Only the ideal reader appreciates the poignancy of understatement.

Furthermore, to letters of travel attaches a special disability. The link between two persons must indeed be close before one of them is really eager to visualise the background against which the other moves; to see with his eyes, hear with his ears, be transplanted to the heat of his plains or the rigours of his mountains. If this link exist, well and good; and certainly it is a fine and delicate form of mental exercise to reconstruct a landscape, to capture so subtle a thing as the atmospheric significance of a place, from the indications given; rather, reconstruction and capture are words too gross for the lovelier unreality that emerges, a country wholly of the invention, like those roseate landscapes of the romantic Italian painters, but it is an art in itself, a luxury for the idle and speculative, repaid—with a freakish twist—when later on we tread with our mortal feet that place which for so long served as the imaginary country of our wanderings (for nothing is harder than to re-evoke a place as we knew it before we went there, so tenuous was the fabric of our weavings, so swiftly dispelled, for all its apparent solidity and its detail; as a place that we knew in childhood, now wrongly remembered in colour and size, under the fresh but not necessarily truer impression of our actual beholding). But if this stimulus be absent, then it is, let us confess it, with a weary conscientiousness that we read the descriptive passages of our nomad friends. Even those letters which were not addressed to us, nor to any of our generation, the letters of Beckford, let us say, or of Lady Mary Montagu, we read less for the sake of the countries described than for their historical curiosity (in itself an adventitious thing), or as we read a diary, for the strokes of vigour, humour, or downrightness which unconsciously build up the personality of the writer. "As a diary," in fact, is no bad comparison, for in a diary, even though compiled by the most illiterate of pens, that which stands out, in the ultimate and cumulative sense, is its convincingness, investing, by its bald, gradual, and uncompromising method, even the dullest record with the indisputable effect of truth.

There would seem, then, to be something definitely wrong about all letters of travel, and even about books of travel, since the letters of another age, collected into library editions, may fairly claim to rank as books rather than as mere correspondence. There would seem, going a step further, to be something wrong about travel itself. Of what use is it, if we may communicate our experience neither verbally nor on paper? And the wish to communicate our experience is one of the most natural, though not one of the most estimable, of human weaknesses. Not one of the most estimable, for it is æsthetically unprofitable (since a pleasure shared is a pleasure halved), and, as an attempt, in the last resort fallacious (since no experience can ever be truly communicated, and the only version we can hope to get through to another person but a garbled, deceptive account of what really happened to us). Travel is in sad case. It is uncomfortable, it is expensive; it is a source of annoyance to our friends, and of loneliness to ourselves. Of course to the true solitary this last is a great recommendation; but loneliness and solitude are not even first cousins. The true solitary will savour his apartness; he will feel that he is himself only when he is alone; when he is in company he will feel that he perjures himself, prostitutes himself to the exactions of others; he will feel that time spent in company is time lost; he will be conscious only of his impatience to get back to his true life. Alone,—for although he may put on carpet slippers the furnishings of his mind are fastidious in the extreme,—he will draw a book from his shelf, or from his store of images some toy that delights him, rolling it round in his mind as the gourmet a grape in his mouth, tasting the one sweet escaped drop of its juice before he bursts it into its full flood against his palate.

It may be that language, that distorted labyrinthine universe, was never designed to replace or even to complete the much simpler functions of the eye. We look; and there is the image in its entirety, three-dimensional, instantaneous. Language follows, a tortoise competing with the velocity of light; and after five pages of print succeeds in reproducing but a fraction of the registered vision. It reminds one of the Oriental who with engaging naivety thought that by photographing the muezzin he would record also the notes of his call to prayer. The most—but what a most!—that language can hope to achieve is suggestion; for the art of words is not an exact science. We do not indeed reflect often enough how strange a world-within-the-world we have created by this habit of language, so strongly rooted in us by tradition and custom, so taken for granted, that we are no longer capable of imagining life without it, as one of those ideas which the mind is unable to conceive, like the end of time or the infinity of space. Thought is impossible without words; and the process of thought appears to us a desirable exercise; but how are we to know what relation thought bears to the world of fact? whether any true relation at all, or merely a conventionalised, stylised relation such as is borne by art, that extraordinary phenomenon, that supreme paradox of conveying truth through various conventions of falsity? Such may well be the secure and presumptuous position of language, but since we are moving in a vicious circle, having no weapon against words but other words, it seems improbable that we shall ever be able to judge. It is said that the new-born child knows no emotion but that of fear induced by noise; consequently all other emotions, and all other ideas, must be the result of learning and association; but from the baby startled by the beating of a gong to the finest and most complicated product of the civilised brain is a terrifying road to travel. Give a thing a name, and it immediately achieves an existence; but either that thing had an existence before it had a name, or else the reverse is the case; we cannot tell which. Thus for the Hindu, 'to-morrow' and 'yesterday' have but one denomination, so that we may assume his idea of relative time to be very different from our own, or surely he would have forged a word to suit the needs of his enlarged perceptions. We have no means of apprehending those ideas which we cannot clothe in words, any more than we are capable of imagining a form of life into which none of the elements already familiar to us should enter; yet it would be no more reasonable for us to pretend that such ideas may not exist, than for a child to crumple in a temper a handbook of higher mathematics. We are the slaves of language, strictly limited by our tyrant.

Moreover, the contradictions contained within the capacities of language are violent and astonishing. At one moment it seems that there is nothing (within the limits of our experience) that may not be expressed in words, down to the finest hair-stroke of a Proust or a Henry James; next moment we recognise in despair, so poor is our self-imposed vehicle, our incapacity truly to communicate to one another the simplest experience of our factual or emotional life. Who amongst us could boast that, transplanted into the mind of another person, even though that person be his nearest, he would not find himself in a strange country, recognising here and there a feature that he knew, but on the whole baffled by unexpected grouping, shape, and proportion? There is only one province of life with which language is almost fitted to deal: the province of the intellect, because that is the province, so to speak, begotten by language itself, which without language would never, could never, have come into existence. Those things which are felt, and those things which are seen, because they exist independently, and in no ratio to the degree of our articulateness, are not the business of words.

One must concede then, and sadly, that travel is a private pleasure, since it consists entirely of things felt and things seen,—of sensations received and impressions visually enjoyed. There is no intellectual interest in travelling, and most intellectuals have been stay-at-homes. They prefer, wisely perhaps, to doze by the gas fire and let the minarets and cupolas arise without risking the discouragements of disillusion. Or, more probably even, they never think of the minarets and cupolas at all, but root their interest in the stray, perplexing souls of their friends. Travel is simply a taste, not to be logically defended; nor standing in any need of defence, since it cannot be argued away, but remains there like a good concrete fact, not to be talked into nothingness, but sticking up as solidly when the mists of argument have cleared, as it did when their futile miasma began to arise. Nothing is an adventure until it becomes an adventure in the mind; and if it be an adventure in the mind, then no circumstance, however trifling, shall be deemed unworthy of so high a name. In common with all the irrational passions it has to be accepted; irritating it may be, but it is there.

And like all irrational passions it is exceedingly romantic. At first sight it would appear to be too materialistic for romance, being based on material things, such as geography, which is concrete and finite. Ships leave London daily for antipodean ports; nothing easier, if we have the means, than to buy a ticket and hire a cab to take us down to Tilbury. But this is not the end of the matter. The spirit is the thing. We must have the sharpest sense of excursion into the unknown; into a region, that is, which is not habitually our own. It is necessary, above all, to take nothing for granted. The wise traveller is he who is perpetually surprised. The stay-at-home knows that peacocks fly wild in India as starlings in England, and sees nothing to exclaim at in the fact. But the truth is, that it is a very astounding thing indeed to watch wild peacocks spread their tails in the light of an eastern sunset. Nature, with a fine rightness, planned her animals against the background of their own landscapes; it is we who have taken them away and put them in the wrong place.

So, if we are not to be surprised, or pleased with a deep, right pleasure, or are not prepared to endure an exciting but essential loneliness, we had best remain by the gas fire, looking forward to the presence of our friends at dinner. But, for my part, I would not forgo the memory of an Egyptian dawn, and the flight of herons across the morning moon.














“The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they’re always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.”—Vita Sackville-West




From Portrait of a Marriage; pages 10-12 [Part One (BY V. SACKVILLE-WEST)]:

I realize that this confession, autiobiography, whatever I may call it, must necessarily have for its outstanding fault a lack of all proportion. I have got to trust to a very uncertain memory, and whereas the present bulks enormous, the past is misty. I can’t remember much about my childhood, except that I had very long legs and very straight hair, over which Mother used to hurt my feelings and say she couldn’t bear to look at me because I was so ugly. I know that I wasn’t a physical coward in those days, because I can remember doing dangerous things on a bicycle and climbing high trees – and yet, stop, I do believe I must have been a coward already, because I can’t remember thinking a great deal about whether I should be brave the next day when I went out riding, and I was too much fascinated by seeing other people do things which I knew I shouldn’t dare to do myself. I never realized this until this moment. Anyway, I wasn’t so much of a coward, and I kept my nerves under control, and made a great ideal of being hardy, and as like a boy as possible. I know I was cruel to other children, because I remember stuffing their nostrils with putty and beating a little boy with stinging-nettles, and I lost nearly all my friends in that kind of way, until none of the local children would come to tea with me except those who had acted as my allies and lieutenants.

I don’t remember much more about myself as a child than that. I remember more about outside things. I don’t remember either my father or mother very vividly at that time, except that Dada used to take me for terribly long walks and talk to me about science, principally Darwin, and I liked him a great deal better than Mother, of whose quick temper I was frightened. I don’t even remember thinking her pretty, which she must have been – lovely, even. My impression of her was that I couldn’t be rough when she was there, or naughty, and so it was really a great relief when she went away. I remember very vividly terrible scenes between her and Dada – at least, she made the scene, he usually said nothing at all, or very mildly, ‘Oh, come, dear, is that quite accurate?’ Her statements rarely were accurate; I realized this, very, very slowly, but was incredibly obtuse over it; in fact I didn’t really grasp it until a comparatively short time ago. (Evening is coming on, and I shall soon have to stop writing; thank God I am alone tonight.)

When she and Dada went away, I was left alone with Grandpapa. He was very old, and queer, and silent. He hated people, and never spoke to the people who came to the house [Knole]; in fact, if he got the chance he used to go to London for the day when he knew people were coming, and I used to be left alone to entertain them. It amused me later on, when sometimes I was had downstairs to make fourteen, to see him sitting quite mute between two wretched women who were trying to make conversation to him, or else crushing him into silence: ‘You have lovely gardens here, Lord Northwood [Sackville].’ ‘What do you know about gardens?’, he would snap at them. But at the same time he was always shrewd in his estimate of people, and never liked those who were not worthy of liking, or disliked those that were. Mother used to get furious when in about six words he demolished her friends, but Dada used to laugh, and then she turned on him. But I suppose she was really very devoted to Grandpapa, in her own way, because underneath everything her ideas of duty are sound, and although the most incomprehensible, she is certainly the most charming, person upon earth, whom I adore.


- Pages 24-34:

Besides going to Paris we went to Scotland with Seery every year. He was nearly always with us, or we with him, which his family didn’t relish at all. We had a place in Aberdeenshire, and I have a diary which I was made to keep there in French as a punishment for wrestling with the hall-boy. Next year we had a nicer, wilder place [Sluie], where I ran wild for three months; it was on the Dee, among lovely heather hills and little trout-lochs. I knew really every inch of the hills, and was exactly like the Scotch farm-children with whom I used to play. I was eleven then. The farmer’s son was a year older than me, and in the course of long days spent by the river or on the moors he told me a great many things he oughtn’t to have told me; but I honestly hadn’t got a mind like some children, and as I had always lived in the country I took most things quite for granted, and was neither excited nor interested by them. I practically lived at the farm, where I built myself a shanty. I was happy there. Mother was sensible about me. I was always out, either with the guns, or with the farmer’s boys, or by myself with the dogs (I had an Irish terrier then who could jump like a greyhound). Oh God, oh God, I wish I was back there – those lovely, lovely hills, those blazing sunsets, those runnels of icy water where I used to make water-wheels, those lovely summer evenings fishing on the loch, those long days when I often walked fifteen miles or more with the guns and gillies, I was young, I was healthy, I was simple, my eyes smart with tears to remember it. I had a kilt and a blue jersey, and I don’t suppose I was ever tidy once, even on Sundays. Mother was happy too; she used to pound up and down the same level bit of road, singing to herself, and she started an open-air craze which has never abated since, but which has provided every door in every room at Knole with a door-stopper.

I said I was eleven then. We went there every autumn until I was fifteen or sixteen, from early August till late October. When I was about twelve I started to write. (It was Cyrano de Bergerac that first initiated me to the possibilities of literature!) I never stopped writing after that – historical novels, pretentious, quite uninteresting, pedantic, and all written at unflagging speed: the day after one was finished another would be begun. I think that between the ages of thirteen and nineteen I must have been quite dreadful. I was plain, priggish, studious (oh, very!), totally uninspired, unmanageably and lankily tall, in fact the only good thing that could be said of me was that I wouldn’t have anything to do with my kind. Seeing that I was unpopular (and small wonder, for a saturnine prig), I wouldn’t court popularity. I minded rather, and used to cry when I went to bed after coming home from a party, but I made myself defiant about it. I don’t mean this to sound in the least pathetic; I wasn’t unhappy, only solitary, but I don’t pretend that I minded solitude, I rather chose it. (Looking back, I think I maligned myself rather by calling myself totally uninspired: I had flaring days, oh yes, I did!, when I thought I was going to electrify the world; it was like being drunk, and I can find traces of it now in the margins of all those ponderous, interminable books I wrote – two little letters, v.e., which stood for ‘very easy’, and I look at them now, and re-read the leaden stuff which they are supposed to qualify, and take upon trust that I found those now forgotten moments full of splendour.)

These years are tedious to write about – tedious, and very uncertain. I mean the years from thirteen to nineteen. Things happened, of course, things that made an impression and changed me – not that I changed much, or grew any more sophisticated. What happened? Let me try to remember: there is writing, always writing, and moroseness, and periods of real hard work and proficiency at the daily school to which I went every autumn and winter term in London. I set myself to triumph at that school, and I did triumph – I beat everybody there, sooner or later, and at the end-of-term exams I thought I had done badly if I didn’t carry off at least six out of eight first prizes. I think I was quite self-conscious over this: if I couldn’t be popular, I would be clever; and I did succeed in getting a reputation of being clever, which was quite unmerited, for I am distinctly not clever, but which like all reputations has died hard. I don’t believe it is quite dead, yet – people say, ‘Oh yes, she writes doesn’t she?’, implying that one must be clever in order to write. I wasn’t hated at that school, at least I don’t think so; I think they quite liked me. But I really cared not a scrap whether they liked me or not. Those were my most savage years! I worked very hard, and became more pedantic than ever. I’ve got a scholarly turn of mind, let me face that damning truth.

Other things happened too. 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 [Keppel, later Trefusis]. 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.

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 fiften years ago, or my passionate, stormy Violet of today, speaking to me in that same lovely voice.)

There were other happenings in those years. I went to Italy, to Florence. Violet was there, in fact I went to join her. (See how she comes in again immediately!) That was the first time I had been anywhere except to Paris, and it opened my eyes thoroughly. And Violet – how well did I know her then? My dates are so uncertain and I have no papers to guide me. I must have known her very well – it is coming back to me by degrees – for I had learnt Italian with her in London, and we had been together in Paris, and had acted part of a play I wrote in French in five Alexandrine acts, about the Man in the Iron Mask, and in those days we rather ostentatiously talked to one another in French in order to tutoyer one another and so show what great friends we were. It all comes back to me. Her mother [Alice Keppel] was the King’s mistress (which added a touch of romance to Violet), and often when I went to their house I used to see a discreet little one-horse brougham waiting outside and the butler would slip me into a dark corner of the hall with a murmured, ‘One minute, miss, a gentleman is coming downstairs’, so that I might take my choice whether it was the King or the doctor. Often Violet would be sent for to come down to the drawing-room, when we said, ‘Oh bother!’, much as we did when I was sent for in my own house to see Seery, I took one as much for granted as the other.

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.

I feel I am doing all this part very badly, very confusedly; it is very difficult to do, because I am afraid of taking too seriously what would, normally, have begun and ended as the kind of rather hysterical friendship one conceives in adolescence, but which had in it, I protest, far stronger elements than mere unwholesome hysteria. There is a bond which unites me to Violet, Violet to me; it united us no less than it unites us now, but what that bond is God alone knows; sometimes I feel it is as something legendary. Violet is mine, she always has been, it is inescapable. I knew it then, albeit only through my obscurely but quite obstinately proprietary attitude; she knew it too, less obscurely, and took all the active measures to make me realize it. That I left them unseconded, yet without any fear of losing her, proud and mettlesome as she was, only goes to prove how certain I was of my hold upon her. She was mine – I can’t express it more emphatically or more accurately than that, nor do I want to dress up an elemental fact in any circumlocution of words.

That autumn [1908] I stayed with her in Scotland. I was sent to Scotland to stay with Seery and his sisters because Grandpapa was ill, and I suppose Mother and Dada knew he would die and wanted me out of the way. My parting with him makes me sad to remember now. He got me into his little sitting-room and asked me to kiss him. I said I hoped he would be better when I came back, but he only shook his head. He died while I was staying with Seery. One of Seery’s sisters – the big one, whom her family called the Duchess – came to my room before breakfast with the telegram; she had on a pink flannelette dressing-gown, and no false hair, and I remember noticing how odd she looked. She kissed me in a conscientious sort of way, but I wasn’t very much moved over Grandpapa’s death just then; it only sunk in afterwards. I changed my red tie for a grey one, and tried to pray for Grandpapa, but couldn’t think what to say. Then I went downstairs to Seery’s room, and never to my last moment shall I forget the sight he presented, sitting at his dressing-table perfectly oblivious, the twenty-five stone of him, dressed only in skin-tight Jaegar combinations, and, dear warm-hearted old Seery, crying quite openly over the telegram. I felt I ought to be crying too, if Seery, who was about sixty to my sixteen, could cry, but I was too much overwhelmed by Seery’s appearance.

I went to stay with Violet after that, 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], 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.

Then I went to London, where I found Mother in deep black, and for the first time I realized Grandpapa’s death when Mother told me how much he had suffered and had died saying my name. (I was gratified by that.) We couldn’t go to Knole except unofficially, because Mother’s brother was bringing a lawsuit against Dada, claiming succession. We were very poor then, because all the money was kept in Chancery. I was taken to the law-courts for a minute while the case was going on, and saw all Mother’s Spanish relations sitting there in the well of the court; the case collapsed, and Dada, Mother, and I had a triumphant return to Knole, pulled up in the carriage by the fire-brigade with ropes, under welcoming arches.

I saved up my pocket money to go back to Florence next spring [1909]. I was seventeen then, and less plain (still very plain, though), and an Italian [Orazio Pucci] fell in love with me and wanted me to marry him, which made me feel very grown-up. He followed me to Rome, and then to Paris, where I refused to see him, but I found him waiting for me on the quay at Calais when I crossed to England. In the autumn of that year I went with Mother and Seery to Russia. Oh how I loved it! I don’t know whether to give an account of it, or to pass it by. We stayed with a Pole owning an estate 100 miles square between Warsaw and Kieff. At the frontier between Austria and Russia Mother refused to get out of the train to go to the Customs, till they sent two soldiers with rifles to fetch her, and in the grey dawn she was marched between them down the platform, saying to everyone she met, by way of protest, ‘Ich bin eine grosse Dame in England’, the only German phrase she could evolve. We finally got to the local station, where we were met by an immense yellow motor and taken in it for fifty miles across atrocious country (no road, nothing but pits and bumps – Seery kept on saying between his bumps, which were more considerable than anybody else’s, that Napoleon ought to have made decent roads across Russia, and Mother and I laughed so much we were nearly ill, what with bumps and laughter), until we came to a very elaborate French Chateau [Antoniny] looking very incongruous in the middle of the steppes. Here we found, besides our host and hostess, about twenty Poles we had never seen or heard of before, but they were all very friendly, and the life there was magnificent. There were eighty saddle-horses, a private pack of hounds, carriages-and-four, Cossacks attached to one’s particular service and sleeping across the threshold of one’s door, hereditary dwarfs to hand cigarettes, a giant, and Tokay of 1740. Not the least part of it was the host, who had a European reputation as a gambler before he forswore cards; he had teeth like a wolf (in fact he was not unlike a wolf altogether), and when he danced the Mazurka, as he did invariably after the 1740 Tokay, they snapped, and seemed to increase in size, number and prominence.

I found a sort of rhapsody I wrote after that; it is written in Italian (for secrecy), but I translate: ‘How much I loved Russia! those vast fields, that feudal life, that illimitable horizon – oh how shall I ever be able to live in this restricted island! I want expanse.’ It goes on: ‘I am happier this winter. I hope the terrible times of sadness are over. At heart I am still sad, and always shall be.’ There is more of it, but that suffices. I must have been suffering from a bad attack of Weltschmerz, and indeed I had just finished a play on Chatterton of quite unequalled gloom.

Florence again in the spring, with the Italian still faithful. I saw very little of Violet at this time; the two years between us were a barrier. I ‘came out’ – a distasteful and unsuccessful process – but the death of the King [Edward VII] saved me many festivities. Thus can the tragedies of great Kings be turned to the uses of little people.


26 JULY [1920]

It was just then, however, that I first met Harold. He arrived late at a small dinner-party before a play, very young and alive and charming, and the first remark I ever heard him make was, ‘What fun’, when he was asked by his hostess to act as host. Everything was fun to his energy, vitality, and buoyancy. I liked his irrepressable brown curls, his laughing eyes, his charming smile, and his boyishness. But we didn’t become particular friends. I think he looked on me as more of a child than I actually was, and as for myself I never thought about people, especially men, under a very personal aspect unless they made quite definite friendly advances to me first; even then I think one wonders sometimes what people are driving at.

I was eighteen then and he was twenty-three.

That summer [1910] I caught a heaven-sent attack of pneumonia, and as a consequence of my being ordered abroad we spent the whole winter from November till April in the South of France near Monte Carlo. My illness revived my intimacy with Violet – I have the panic-stricken letter she wrote me, after hearing an exaggerated account of my being ill – and I suppose I saw something of her that autumn, because I can remember driving round and round Hyde Park with her one night after going to a play, a day or two before she left for Ceylon, and the end of that motor-drive was one of the very rare but extremely disturbing occasions when she kissed me. If I had gone to Ceylon with her, my life would probably have turned out very differently. But oh Lord! What’s my miserable life? It only bulks large becaues these pages covered with pencil happen to be a history of it.

Well, we had an enormous white villa at Monte Carlo [Chateau Malet], where I lived in a perfection of happiness for those six months. Harold came to stay, and he and I fell into a rather childlike companionship, and I was rather hurt when he said goodbye to me without any apparent regret. I missed him – he was the best actual playmate I had ever known, and his exuberant youth combined with his brilliant cleverness attracted the rather saturnine me that scarcely understood the meaning of being young. Later I used to call him ‘the merry guide’, which name best describes him:

And in the dews beside me
Behold a youth that trod
With feathered cap on forehead,
And poised a golden rod,
With mien to match the morning,
And gay delightful guise . . .

That was Harold to the life. ‘Gay delightful guise . . .’ I cannot, cannot, bring sorrow into those eyes.

Violet returned from Ceylon in the spring, bringing me rubies, and we spent a day or two at San Remo. She also came to see me at our villa. How little we thought, as we stood under the olive-trees in the wild part of the garden (I remember admiring to myself the thick plait of her really beautiful hair), how little we thought of the next time we were to be together in that same place! When I went to her at San Remo, we saw an acrobat with no arms or legs. We had written to each other copiously during the whole winter, and now when she went to live in Munich, we continued to write, and she kept urging me to go and stay with her there, but I never did.

Harold meanwhile was in Madrid, and, but for an interlude when I dragged a plaintive but self-sacrificing Mother to Florence in the spring, the rest of the year was a repetition of the experience of being ‘out’. But now something else happens – something which, I would like to emphasize, started in complete innocence on my part. I want to be frank. I have implied, I think, that men didn’t attract me, that I didn’t think of them in what is called ‘that way’. Women did. Rosamund did. I have mentioned Rosamund as being the neat little girl who came to play with me when Dada went to South Africa. She had come out to stay at Monte Carlo – invited by Mother, not by me; I would never have dreamt of asking anyone to stay with me; even Violet had never spent more than a week at Knole: I resented invasion. Still, as Rosamund came, once she was there, I naturally spent most of the day with her, and after I had got back to England, I suppose it was resumed. I don’t remember very clearly, but the fact remains that by the middle of that summer we were inseparable, and moreover were living on terms of the greatest possible intimacy. But I want to say again that the thing did start in comparative innocence. Oh, I dare say I realized vaguely that I had no business to sleep with Rosamund, and I should certainly never have allowed anyone to find out, but my sense of guilt went no further than that.

Anyway I was very much in love with Rosamund.

Harold came back from Madrid at the end of that summer [1911]. He had been very ill out there, and I remember him as rather a pathetic figure wrapped up in an Ulster on a warm summer day, who was able to walk slowly round the garden with me. All that time while I was ‘out’ is extremely dim to me, very largely I think, owing to the fact that I was living a kind of false life that left no impression upon me. Even my liaison with Rosamund was, in a sense, superficial. I mean that it was almost exclusively physical, as, to be frank, she always bored me as a companion. I was very fond of her, however; she had a sweet nature. But she was quite stupid.

Harold wasn’t. He was as gay and clever as ever, and I loved his brain and his youth, and was flattered at his liking for me. He came to Knole a good deal that autumn and winter, and people began to tell me he was in love with me, which I didn’t believe was true, but wished that I could believe it. I wasn’t in love with him then – there was Rosamund – but I did like him better than anyone, as a companion and playfellow, and for his brain and his delicious disposition. I hoped that he would propose to me before he went away to Constantinople, but felt diffident and sceptical about it.


https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/sackvill...-h.html#chap01

- From Passenger to Teheran by Vita Sackville-West; pages 25-9 (Chapter I—Introductory):

Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong. Not only do we not want to hear it verbally, but we do not want – we do not really want, not if we are able to achieve a degree of honesty greater than that within the reach of most civilised beings – to hear it by letter either. Possibly this is because there is something intrinsically wrong about letters. For one thing they are not instantaneous. If I write home to-day and say (as is actually the fact), "At this moment of writing I am sailing along the coast of Baluchistan", that is perfectly vivid for me, who have but to raise my eyes from my paper to refresh them with those pink cliffs in the morning light; but for the recipient of my letter, opening it in England at three weeks' remove, I am no longer coasting Baluchistan; I am driving in a cab in Bagdad, or reading in a train, or asleep, or dead; the present tense has become meaningless. Nor is this the only trouble about letters. They do not arrive often enough. A letter which has been passionately awaited should be immediately supplemented by another one, to counteract the feeling of flatness that comes upon us when the agonising delights of anticipation have been replaced by the colder flood of fulfilment. Now when notes may be sent by hand, as between lovers living in the same town, this refinement of correspondence is easy to arrange, but when letters have to be transported by the complex and altogether improbable mechanism of foreign mails (those bags lying heaped in the hold!), it is impossible. For weeks we have waited; every day has dawned in hope (except Sunday, and that is a day to be blacked out of the calendar); it may have waned in disappointment, but the morrow will soon be here, and who knows what to-morrow's post may not bring? Then at last it comes; is torn open; devoured;—and all is over. It is gone in a flash, and it has not sufficed to feed our hunger. It has told us either too much or too little. For a letter, by its arrival, defrauds us of a whole secret region of our existence, the only region indeed in which the true pleasure of life may be tasted, the region of imagination, creative and protean, the clouds and beautiful shapes of whose heaven are destroyed by the wind of reality. For observe, that to hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.

The poor letter is not so much in itself to blame,—and there is, I think, a peculiar pathos in the thought of the writer of that letter, taking pains, pouring on to his page so much desire to please, so human a wish to communicate something of himself, in his exile,—not so much to blame in the inadequacy of its content, as in the fact that it has committed the error of arriving, of turning up. "Le rôle d'une femme," said an astute Frenchman once, "est non de se donner, mais de se laisser désirer."

The art of reading letters, too, is at least as great as the art of writing them, and possessed by as few. The reader's co-operation is essential. There is always more to be extracted from a letter than at first sight appears, as indeed is true of all good literature, and letters certainly deserve to be approached as good literature, for they share this with good literature: that they are made out of the intimate experience of the writer, begotten of something personally endured. But it is not every one who knows how to read. Many a word, wrung out of the pen, many an indication, gets thrown on to the dust-heap because it stood alone, unamplified and unsupported. Only the ideal reader appreciates the poignancy of understatement.

Furthermore, to letters of travel attaches a special disability. The link between two persons must indeed be close before one of them is really eager to visualise the background against which the other moves; to see with his eyes, hear with his ears, be transplanted to the heat of his plains or the rigours of his mountains. If this link exist, well and good; and certainly it is a fine and delicate form of mental exercise to reconstruct a landscape, to capture so subtle a thing as the atmospheric significance of a place, from the indications given; rather, reconstruction and capture are words too gross for the lovelier unreality that emerges, a country wholly of the invention, like those roseate landscapes of the romantic Italian painters, but it is an art in itself, a luxury for the idle and speculative, repaid—with a freakish twist—when later on we tread with our mortal feet that place which for so long served as the imaginary country of our wanderings (for nothing is harder than to re-evoke a place as we knew it before we went there, so tenuous was the fabric of our weavings, so swiftly dispelled, for all its apparent solidity and its detail; as a place that we knew in childhood, now wrongly remembered in colour and size, under the fresh but not necessarily truer impression of our actual beholding). But if this stimulus be absent, then it is, let us confess it, with a weary conscientiousness that we read the descriptive passages of our nomad friends. Even those letters which were not addressed to us, nor to any of our generation, the letters of Beckford, let us say, or of Lady Mary Montagu, we read less for the sake of the countries described than for their historical curiosity (in itself an adventitious thing), or as we read a diary, for the strokes of vigour, humour, or downrightness which unconsciously build up the personality of the writer. "As a diary," in fact, is no bad comparison, for in a diary, even though compiled by the most illiterate of pens, that which stands out, in the ultimate and cumulative sense, is its convincingness, investing, by its bald, gradual, and uncompromising method, even the dullest record with the indisputable effect of truth.

There would seem, then, to be something definitely wrong about all letters of travel, and even about books of travel, since the letters of another age, collected into library editions, may fairly claim to rank as books rather than as mere correspondence. There would seem, going a step further, to be something wrong about travel itself. Of what use is it, if we may communicate our experience neither verbally nor on paper? And the wish to communicate our experience is one of the most natural, though not one of the most estimable, of human weaknesses. Not one of the most estimable, for it is æsthetically unprofitable (since a pleasure shared is a pleasure halved), and, as an attempt, in the last resort fallacious (since no experience can ever be truly communicated, and the only version we can hope to get through to another person but a garbled, deceptive account of what really happened to us). Travel is in sad case. It is uncomfortable, it is expensive; it is a source of annoyance to our friends, and of loneliness to ourselves. Of course to the true solitary this last is a great recommendation; but loneliness and solitude are not even first cousins. The true solitary will savour his apartness; he will feel that he is himself only when he is alone; when he is in company he will feel that he perjures himself, prostitutes himself to the exactions of others; he will feel that time spent in company is time lost; he will be conscious only of his impatience to get back to his true life. Alone,—for although he may put on carpet slippers the furnishings of his mind are fastidious in the extreme,—he will draw a book from his shelf, or from his store of images some toy that delights him, rolling it round in his mind as the gourmet a grape in his mouth, tasting the one sweet escaped drop of its juice before he bursts it into its full flood against his palate.

It may be that language, that distorted labyrinthine universe, was never designed to replace or even to complete the much simpler functions of the eye. We look; and there is the image in its entirety, three-dimensional, instantaneous. Language follows, a tortoise competing with the velocity of light; and after five pages of print succeeds in reproducing but a fraction of the registered vision. It reminds one of the Oriental who with engaging naivety thought that by photographing the muezzin he would record also the notes of his call to prayer. The most—but what a most!—that language can hope to achieve is suggestion; for the art of words is not an exact science. We do not indeed reflect often enough how strange a world-within-the-world we have created by this habit of language, so strongly rooted in us by tradition and custom, so taken for granted, that we are no longer capable of imagining life without it, as one of those ideas which the mind is unable to conceive, like the end of time or the infinity of space. Thought is impossible without words; and the process of thought appears to us a desirable exercise; but how are we to know what relation thought bears to the world of fact? whether any true relation at all, or merely a conventionalised, stylised relation such as is borne by art, that extraordinary phenomenon, that supreme paradox of conveying truth through various conventions of falsity? Such may well be the secure and presumptuous position of language, but since we are moving in a vicious circle, having no weapon against words but other words, it seems improbable that we shall ever be able to judge. It is said that the new-born child knows no emotion but that of fear induced by noise; consequently all other emotions, and all other ideas, must be the result of learning and association; but from the baby startled by the beating of a gong to the finest and most complicated product of the civilised brain is a terrifying road to travel. Give a thing a name, and it immediately achieves an existence; but either that thing had an existence before it had a name, or else the reverse is the case; we cannot tell which. Thus for the Hindu, 'to-morrow' and 'yesterday' have but one denomination, so that we may assume his idea of relative time to be very different from our own, or surely he would have forged a word to suit the needs of his enlarged perceptions. We have no means of apprehending those ideas which we cannot clothe in words, any more than we are capable of imagining a form of life into which none of the elements already familiar to us should enter; yet it would be no more reasonable for us to pretend that such ideas may not exist, than for a child to crumple in a temper a handbook of higher mathematics. We are the slaves of language, strictly limited by our tyrant.

Moreover, the contradictions contained within the capacities of language are violent and astonishing. At one moment it seems that there is nothing (within the limits of our experience) that may not be expressed in words, down to the finest hair-stroke of a Proust or a Henry James; next moment we recognise in despair, so poor is our self-imposed vehicle, our incapacity truly to communicate to one another the simplest experience of our factual or emotional life. Who amongst us could boast that, transplanted into the mind of another person, even though that person be his nearest, he would not find himself in a strange country, recognising here and there a feature that he knew, but on the whole baffled by unexpected grouping, shape, and proportion? There is only one province of life with which language is almost fitted to deal: the province of the intellect, because that is the province, so to speak, begotten by language itself, which without language would never, could never, have come into existence. Those things which are felt, and those things which are seen, because they exist independently, and in no ratio to the degree of our articulateness, are not the business of words.

One must concede then, and sadly, that travel is a private pleasure, since it consists entirely of things felt and things seen,—of sensations received and impressions visually enjoyed. There is no intellectual interest in travelling, and most intellectuals have been stay-at-homes. They prefer, wisely perhaps, to doze by the gas fire and let the minarets and cupolas arise without risking the discouragements of disillusion. Or, more probably even, they never think of the minarets and cupolas at all, but root their interest in the stray, perplexing souls of their friends. Travel is simply a taste, not to be logically defended; nor standing in any need of defence, since it cannot be argued away, but remains there like a good concrete fact, not to be talked into nothingness, but sticking up as solidly when the mists of argument have cleared, as it did when their futile miasma began to arise. Nothing is an adventure until it becomes an adventure in the mind; and if it be an adventure in the mind, then no circumstance, however trifling, shall be deemed unworthy of so high a name. In common with all the irrational passions it has to be accepted; irritating it may be, but it is there.

And like all irrational passions it is exceedingly romantic. At first sight it would appear to be too materialistic for romance, being based on material things, such as geography, which is concrete and finite. Ships leave London daily for antipodean ports; nothing easier, if we have the means, than to buy a ticket and hire a cab to take us down to Tilbury. But this is not the end of the matter. The spirit is the thing. We must have the sharpest sense of excursion into the unknown; into a region, that is, which is not habitually our own. It is necessary, above all, to take nothing for granted. The wise traveller is he who is perpetually surprised. The stay-at-home knows that peacocks fly wild in India as starlings in England, and sees nothing to exclaim at in the fact. But the truth is, that it is a very astounding thing indeed to watch wild peacocks spread their tails in the light of an eastern sunset. Nature, with a fine rightness, planned her animals against the background of their own landscapes; it is we who have taken them away and put them in the wrong place.

So, if we are not to be surprised, or pleased with a deep, right pleasure, or are not prepared to endure an exciting but essential loneliness, we had best remain by the gas fire, looking forward to the presence of our friends at dinner. But, for my part, I would not forgo the memory of an Egyptian dawn, and the flight of herons across the morning moon.