Vita Sackville-West
Novels of British writer Victoria Mary Sackville-West, known as Vita, include
The Edwardians
(1930) and
All Passion Spent
(1931).
This prolific English author, poet, and memoirist in the early 20th century lived not so privately.
While married to the diplomat Harold Nicolson, she conducted a series of scandalous amorous liaisons with many women, including the brilliant Virginia Woolf. They had an open marriage. Both Sackville-West and her husband had same-sex relationships. Her exuberant aristocratic life was one of inordinate privilege and way ahead of her time. She frequently traveled to Europe in the company of one or the other of her lovers and often dressed as a man to be able to gain access to places where only the couples could go. Gardening, like writing, was a passion Vita cherished with the certainty of a vocation: she wrote books on the topic and constructed the gardens of the castle of Sissinghurst, one of England's most beautiful gardens at her home.
She published her first book Poems of East and West in 1917. She followed this with a novel, Heritage, in 1919. A second novel, The Heir (1922), dealt with her feelings about her family. Her next book, Knole and the Sackvilles (1922), covered her family history. The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931) are perhaps her best known novels today. In the latter, the elderly Lady Slane courageously embraces a long suppressed sense of freedom and whimsy after a lifetime of convention. In 1948 she was appointed a Companion of Honour for her services to literature. She continued to develop her garden at Sissinghurst Castle and for many years wrote a weekly gardening column for The Observer. In 1955 she was awarded the gold Veitch medal of the Royal Horticultural Society. In her last decade she published a further biography, Daughter of France (1959) and a final novel, No Signposts in the Sea (1961).
She died of cancer on June 2, 1962.
“She walks in the loveliness she made, Between the apple-blossom and the water--She walks among the patterned pied brocade,Each flower her son, and every tree her daughter.”
“I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.”
“Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens,When I have no engagements written on my block,When no one comes to disturb my inward peace,When no one comes to take me away from myselfAnd turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle,A broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection,Being so contrived that it takes too long a timeTo get myself back to myself when they have gone.”
“Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.”
“I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. Oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly.You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.”
“It is no good my telling you. One never believes other people's experiencem and one is only very gradually convinced by one's own.”
“The fount of joy was bubbling in thine eyes,Dancing was in thy feet,And on thy lips a laugh that never dies,Unutterably sweet. Dance on! for ever young, for ever fair,Lightfooted as a frightened bounding deer,Thy wreath of vine-leaves twisted in thy hair,Through all the changing seasons of the year...”
“We owned a garden on a hill,We planted rose and daffodil,Flowers that English poets sing,And hoped for glory in the Spring.We planted yellow hollyhocks,And humble sweetly-smelling stocks,And columbine for carnival,And dreamt of Summer's festival.And Autumn not to be outdoneAs heiress of the summer sun,Should doubly wreathe her tawny headWith poppies and with creepers red.We waited then for all to grow,We planted wallflowers in a row.And lavender and borage blue, -Alas! we waited, I and you,But love was all that ever grew.”
“I cannot love your weeping poets...”
“There is nothing more lovely in life than the union of two people whose love for one another has grown through the years, from the small acorn of passion, into a great rooted tree”
“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this —But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.”
“Heureuse ! Qu'est-ce que cela signifiait ? C'était tout juste un mot commode pour ceux qui veulement que la vie soit uniformément blanche ou noire, pour ces petites gens perdus dans la jungle humaine et qui cherchent à se rassurer par une formule”
“J'ai toujours pensé qu'il valait mieux plaire beaucoup à une seule personne, qu'un peu à tout le monde.”
“I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.”
“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.”
“One must be businesslike, although the glass is falling.”