When Virginia Woolf met Vita Sackville-West in December 1922,
she had just published, at the age of forty, the first of her
distinctive novels, Jacob’s Room, which followed the more traditional The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919). Most of her published writing consisted of unsigned book reviews, so she was known to very few people.
Virginia
belonged by descent and marriage to Britain’s elite of arts and
letters: her father, Leslie Stephen, had been a distinguished
intellectual whose first wife was Thackeray’s daughter. Julia Margaret
Cameron, the great Victorian photographer, was her aunt. Her sister, the
painter Vanessa Bell, was married to a prominent art critic, Clive
Bell, though she lived with another painter, Duncan Grant. Their
intimate circle included Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, John Maynard
Keynes, and Roger Fry. Virginia’s husband, Leonard, was a political
journalist and editor. This was the Bloomsbury group, named after the
unpretentious area of London where many of them lived; it was a world of
plain living and high thinking—“Gloomsbury,” the high-living,
plain-thinking Vita would call it.
Treasured by her family and
friends as a brilliant, witty, and original presence, Virginia also had
enormous mood swings and terrible headaches, was sociable until she
collapsed, was depressed until she was writing, then depressed again as a
book was finished and publication loomed. The doctors in charge of her
treatment had nothing to recommend but bed rest and cessation of mental
activity.
Her husband had become a dedicated caregiver, and,
partly as occupational therapy for Virginia, they ran a publishing
house, the Hogarth Press, with the printing press in their basement.
That, along with her reviewing, kept her in touch with the leading
writers and critics of the day. Their life was austere but full, their
house in London always lively, and for rest they had a cottage in the
country. In 1922 Virginia was at the beginning of the most fruitful part
of her career, although she felt herself to be behind where she should
be: she ought to be considered, she said, thirty-five, not forty, at
least five years having been wasted in bed.
Most of the year
preceding her meeting Vita was lost to repeated bouts of flu, which left
her heart so weakened that doctors warned Leonard she might not live
much longer. A sickroom-bound invalid in 1922 could not pick up the
phone and chat with friends. Letters provided the only relief from
isolation, and even that writing drained Virginia’s energy. Still, she
loved hearing from friends and, when she could manage it, answering. Her
letters, along with her diary, offer unusual access to the private life
of a great writer. So what was it like when she finally fell in love
with Vita, after living in a stable but sexless marriage with Leonard
for so many years, when her imagination was more aroused by women? To
find out, we turn eagerly to Love Letters: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, which
tells the story through their letters to each other, supplemented by
extracts from both women’s diaries and Vita’s letters to her husband.
And who exactly is telling the story? We do not know, as no editor is
cited on the title page. Buried on the copyright page we find “selection
by Lily Lindon,” but Alison Bechdel’s introduction sheds no light on
how this selection was made or what it offers that cannot be found in
the letters as masterfully edited in 1985 by Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell
A. Leaska.
Vita, now the less celebrated of the
couple and known primarily as the cocreator of the magnificent gardens
at Sissinghurst, was in the early 1920s by far the more famous writer.
Although ten years younger than Woolf, she was an established literary
figure in London. Rich, aristocratic, sensual, free-living, polyamorous,
commanding, self-confident, boisterously healthy, she was Woolf’s
opposite in many ways, and not the least of her appeal lay in her family
history.
Her father, the 3rd Baron Sackville of Knole, belonged
to the de la Warr family (as in Delaware), whose titles dated back to
the fourteenth century. Knole, the family seat in Kent, a manor house as
large as an entire village, had been gifted to Thomas Sackville, the
1st Earl of Dorset, by Queen Elizabeth I. Vita grew up at Knole without
siblings, with a beautiful, eccentric mother, who had been born
illegitimate but nonetheless a Sackville. Since Vita’s grandfather had
no legitimate offspring, the house and title passed to Vita’s father.
Had Vita been born male, she would have inherited Knole, with its four
hundred rooms. As it was, on her father’s death, it passed to his
brother.
When she chose to marry Harold Nicolson, a diplomat from a
family of diplomats, Vita’s family was not pleased. They considered him
a disreputable intellectual, not at all a good match, without even the
saving grace of money. But compared to most men Vita had met, Harold had
a lively mind and tremendous vitality. It was a love match. Neither of
them seemed to realize at the time of their marriage how deeply they
were attracted to people of their own sex. After producing two sons,
they constructed what in later days would be called an open marriage.
Unshakably committed to each other, they were free to have other sexual
partners. They wrote to each other every day they were apart, sharing
everything, even accounts of their love affairs.
In
general, Vita proved to be good at keeping her affairs relatively short
and unthreatening to Harold. But at about the time he was in Paris
working on the Treaty of Versailles, she got caught up in the most
passionate affair of her life, with Violet Keppel (later Trefusis),
whose allure and lack of discipline threatened the Nicolsons’ alliance.
The details are to be found in their son Nigel Nicolson’s enthralling
book Portrait of a Marriage (1973), an elegant melding of
autobiographical writing by Vita and parental biography by her son,
which should be required reading for anyone who thinks that marriage of
any kind is effortless.
Both in London and in Paris, Vita and
Violet went out together in public with Vita cross-dressed as a recently
repatriated soldier with a head wound requiring a bandage. She had
never known such freedom. But eventually Violet’s fiancé and Vita’s
husband retrieved the two runaways from France, and Vita’s passions were
subsumed into the pleasant regularities of country life. Fundamentally
upbeat, she got enormous pleasure from her house, household, garden, and
dogs.
And she wrote constantly. By the time she met Virginia, Vita had published five volumes of poetry and two novels, one of which, The Dragon in Shallow Waters, was a best seller. She had written an account of her family and its estate, Knole and the Sackvilles,
and had found her great theme in the connection between real estate and
a person’s sense of identity, explored first in a novella, The Heir. She had also written a fictionalized account of her affair with Violet, Challenge, which her mother convinced her was too scandalous to publish in the UK. She was still only thirty.
Virginia’s
first impulse on meeting Vita at a dinner party at Clive Bell’s was to
look down on her as a facile writer: “She writes fifteen pages a day—has
finished another book—publishes with Heinemanns.” What attracted her
was above all Vita the aristocrat. “The aristocratic manner is something
like an actress’s—no false shyness or modesty—makes me feel virgin,
shy, and schoolgirlish,” she wrote. Vita’s long, languid face, which
Virginia later found so beautiful, did not at first appeal to her, but
“all these ancestors and centuries, silver and gold, have bred a perfect
body.” In Virginia’s imagination, Vita was often striding—through
fields, across plains, in Turkish pants, in emeralds—the supremely
competent and self-assured woman, managing children, nannies, gardeners,
butchers, dukes, duchesses, and motorcars with equal ease.
Vita’s
feelings about Virginia were clear from the start and not quite so
fanciful. “I simply adore Virginia Woolf, and so would you,” she wrote
to her husband after their first meeting.
You
would fall quite flat before her charm and personality…. She is utterly
unaffected: there is no outward adornments—she dresses quite
atrociously. At first you think she is plain; then a sort of spiritual
beauty imposes itself on you…. She is both detached and human, silent
till she wants to say something, and then says it supremely well….
Darling, I have quite lost my heart.
Not many pages of Love Letters go
by between their meeting in 1922 and their becoming lovers in late
1925. But, of course, that is three years—three years in which they were
hardly focused on each other. Three years in which Vita had a love
affair with a man, Geoffrey Scott, author of The Architecture of Humanism (1914), which resulted in the breakup of his marriage. Three years in which Virginia published both a fiction masterpiece, Mrs. Dalloway, and a nonfiction masterpiece, The Common Reader, began to make some money from her work, and became famous.
They
became friends before they were lovers. Vita took Virginia to lunch
with her father, Lord Sackville, in the family home: “His Lordship lives
in the kernel of a vast nut. You perambulate miles of galleries; skip
endless treasures—chairs that Shakespeare might have sat on…. Then there
is Mary Stuart’s altar, where she prayed before execution.” Virginia
asked Vita to write something for Hogarth, and Vita tossed off the
novella Seducers in Ecuador while on a walking trip in Italy with
her husband. Who was doing whom a favor in this case is unclear. Vita
had a good commercial publisher, Heinemann, but being published by the
Hogarth Press represented a different kind of prestige, and in return
she brought with her a large fan base. Seducers in Ecuador sold
well, and the two women, now with an editorial relationship, became
closer. Vita was a guest at Monk’s House, the Woolfs’ place in Sussex;
Virginia was a guest at Long Barn, the Nicolsons’ country house in Kent.
In
December 1925 Vita and Virginia spent three days together at Long Barn.
Harold had been posted to the British Legation in Tehran, where Vita
was to join him later that winter. It was the first time they had been
alone overnight, and something happened that marked a turning point.
Vita’s references to this night suggest that Virginia declared herself
or threw herself at Vita, but Virginia did not see it that way. “These
Sapphists love women,” she wrote in her diary upon returning home.
Friendship
is never untinged with amorosity. I like her and being with her, and
the splendour—she shines in the grocer’s shop in Sevenoaks with a
candle-lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing,
grape clustered, pearl hung…. In brain and insight she is not as highly
organised as I am. But then she is aware of this, and so lavishes on me
the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always
most wished from everyone.
Whatever happened changed
their relationship forever, deepening it, allowing Virginia to think of
Vita as her lover and to be jealous of all the other women with whom she
continued, over the years, to have affairs, while Vita had to reassure
an increasingly nervous and jealous Harold that she would not be swept
away by Virginia as she had been by Violet Trefusis.
Their
feelings for each other became even more intense when Vita left to join
Harold in Persia and they were in merely epistolary contact. I say
“merely,” but there is nothing negligible about the arousal capacity of
letters from distant friends, the traveler treasuring the connection to
home with the desperation of a drowning swimmer, and the stay-at-home
living on the traveler’s passion. On the long voyage through the
Mediterranean and Red Seas and across the Indian Ocean to Bombay, Vita
had time to contemplate, with characteristic generosity, her beloved’s
talents and difficulties, telling her, “I don’t know whether to be
dejected or encouraged when I read the works of Virginia Woolf. Dejected
because I shall never be able to write like that, or encouraged because
somebody else can?”
Three days later she wrote:
You
are the only person I have ever known properly who was aloof from the
more vulgarly jolly sides of life. And I wonder whether you lose or
gain? I fancy that you gain,—you, Virginia,—because you are so
constituted and have a sufficient fund of excitement within yourself,
though I don’t fancy it would be to the advantage of anybody else.
Once
arrived in Tehran, after the overland journey from Baghdad, Vita wrote
letters that later helped Virginia create the fabulous shape-shifting
adventurer Orlando:
I have been
stuck in a river, crawled between ramparts of snow, been attacked by a
bandit, been baked and frozen alternatively, travelled alone with ten
men (all strangers), slept in odd places, eaten wayside meals, crossed
high passes, seen Kurds and Medes and caravans, and running streams, and
black lambs skipping under blossom, seen hills of porphyry stained with
copper sulfate, snow-mountains in a great circle, endless plains, with
flocks on the slopes. Dead camels pecked by vultures, a dying donkey, a
dying man. Came to mud towns at nightfall, stayed with odd gruff
Scotchmen, drunk Persian wine. Worn a silk dress one day, and a
sheepskin and fur cap the next.
The grueling journey and the austere, otherworldly beauty of Persia produced Vita’s wonderful Passenger to Teheran
and vivid letters to Virginia. Virginia responded with childlike
devotion. Vita’s departure seems to have set off a kind of panic in her,
and she clung to the letters for reassurance.
Their
reunion, after months apart, was awkward. Expected physical passion did
not immediately materialize. Still, the period of their greatest
intimacy followed. Vita had to reassure Harold again that she was not
having a love affair with Virginia, and this time she was more explicit.
Yes, they had been to bed together twice, but Vita did not consider
their relationship sexual. To have sex with Virginia, she said, would be
playing with fire. She was “scared to death of arousing physical
feelings in her, because of the madness.” In any case, Virginia was not
the kind of woman she was sexually attracted to. There was something
“incongruous and almost indecent in the idea.”
Vita had every
reason to pull her punches with Harold, downplaying her passion for and
with Virginia. Still, there was a difference between her protective love
for Virginia and her phosphorescent love for Violet Trefusis. She
adored Virginia for her brilliance, beyond any she had ever known, and
for the touching contrast between her intellectual power and her
physical fragility, but that cerebral appeal did not provoke the same
kind of passion as Violet’s wildness and flamboyance. Vita and Virginia
loved each other’s company. They looked forward to the precious times
they had alone, which certainly included physical intimacy. They
sympathized with each other’s problems, encouraged each other’s work.
Reading the proofs of Passenger to Teheran, Virginia reports to
Vita, “I kept saying ‘How I should like to know this woman’ and then
thinking ‘But I do,’ and then ‘No, I don’t—not altogether the woman who
writes this.’ I don’t know the extent of your subtleties.”
Fittingly, their relationship was consummated in a work of the imagination—Orlando,
a wholly original account of Vita’s lineage embodied in the title
character, who begins as a male aristocrat, in the Renaissance, lives
through centuries, and becomes at some point a female aristocrat—to no
one’s surprise, least of all her own. When the idea for the book came to
Virginia, she immediately wrote to Vita to ask if she minded. Vita was
thrilled. She sat for photographs of Orlando in modern times, which were
included in the design of the first edition. Dedicated to Vita, in
every sense, Orlando was a monument to their relationship, almost
a brag, claiming Vita for Virginia while Vita fell repeatedly for other
women and Virginia experienced jealousy, the most easily recognized
form of love.
Nigel Nicolson described Orlando as a
charming love letter to his mother, but it can be seen more precisely as
a love letter to Vita’s inherited certainty about who she was, a
dazzlingly imaginative and enjoyable transformation of Vita’s dutiful
book on the same subject, Knole and the Sackvilles. The change of
gender is one among many magic tricks the novel performs, the greatest
of which is the protagonist’s endurance in time. Tilda Swinton’s
performance as Orlando in the 1992 film directed by Sally Potter
captures this perfectly: nothing surprises her. She is the same person
no matter what. That certainty about continuity of self is what Vita had
that Virginia most wanted, and in writing Orlando she momentarily, imaginatively acquired it.
By
1934, the friendship was tapering off. Virginia’s closest friend became
Ethel Smyth, and Vita’s her sister-in-law Gwen St. Aubyn. Besides,
Vita, upon Harold’s retirement from the Foreign Office and commencing
work as a journalist, had bought the property at Sissinghurst, and the
couple embarked on their joint project of turning it into one of
England’s most beloved locales, famous the world over for its gardens.
Vita, now less interested in social life than Virginia was, spent most
of her time in the country, and Virginia found her less exciting. “My
friendship with Vita is over,” Virginia wrote in her diary in 1935. “Not
with a quarrel, not with a bang, but as ripe fruit falls.”
Like
any selection, this volume is partial, and different readers, from the
same mass of correspondence and diary entries, would construct a
different story. I did not find the title Love Letters justified. The volume might better have been called Portrait of a Friendship,
showing how many different forms intimacy might take, how it can change
with time and circumstance, how even the most intense and satisfying
friendships may end. The emphasis on a love story seems forced, and
somehow prurient.
Woolf is one of the great letter
writers of all time, full of wit and kindness, crafting her letters as
personal responses to each friend and never sending out blanket recaps
of events in her life. Teasing, flirtatious, charming, sophisticated,
fun to spend time with even if you don’t know half the people she talks
about or refers to, for sheer liveliness and joie de vivre, she can be
compared as a letter writer in English only to Byron and Keats. Her
descriptions of the people she sees in the course of her day are
offhandedly novelistic, and her constant socializing gave her lots of
material: “She [her cousin, Dorothea Stephen] said how d’y do in her
condescending way, and began to eat like a poor woman at a charity tea,
fast, stealthily, every crumb, thanking me with insincere sweetness.”
And all of a sudden you hear her speaking voice: “What a bore it must be
to be a painter, and need light and landscape, instead of a fire and a
book!”
Her best, fullest letters, the most like conversation
polished by a master stylist, were written to her sister throughout her
life and to Vita in the time of their great intimacy. The letters twist
and turn, from lively reports of Virginia’s own doings to vivid
imaginings of Vita’s, wherever she happens to be, surrounded by animals
and flowers at her country home or traveling in Persia. They throw off
sparks of observations about life and art:
I
had wanted to go into the matter of profound natural happiness; as
revealed to me yesterday at a family party of an English Banker; where
the passion and joys of sons and daughters in their own society struck
me almost to tears with self-pity and amazement. Nothing of that sort do
we any of us know—profound emotions, which are yet natural and taken
for granted, so that nothing inhibits or restrains—How deep these are,
and unself conscious. There is a book called Father and Son, by [Edmund]
Gosse, which says that all the coast of England was fringed with little
sea anemones and lovely tassels of seaweed and sprays of emerald moss
and so on, from the beginning of time till Jan 1858, when, for some
reason, hordes of clergy and spinsters in mushroom hats and goggles
began collecting, and so scraped and rifled the coast that this
accumulation was destroyed forever—A parable this, of what we have done
to the deposits of family happiness.
The phrase “family happiness” makes her think of Anna Karenina,
so she pivots from the thought of how sophistication has destroyed
simple emotion, embodied in the metaphor of the lost sea anemones of the
English coast, as described by Gosse, to an observation about the
Russian novel:
Its growing
unreality to us who have no real condemnation in our hearts any longer
for adultery as such. But Tolstoy hoists all his book on that support.
Take it away, say, no it doesn’t offend me that AK. should copulate with
Vronsky, and what remains?
The version I just quoted is from Woolf’s complete correspondence, and all that gets quoted in Love Letters from this delicious and revealing letter about bourgeois happiness and Virginia’s private moral code is this:
How
odd it is—the effect geography has on the mind! I write to you
differently now you’re coming back. The pathos is melting. I felt it
pathetic when you were going away; as if you were sinking below the
verge. Now that you are rising, I’m jolly again.
By focusing so relentlessly on their relationship, Love Letters
narrows our sense of who Vita and Virginia are to each other, as though
a person on a beautiful hike, instead of sending pictures of the
landscape, merely sent a string of GPS coordinates. The
helter-skelter of style, which is to say, their full selves, is edited
out, and each letter tends to be used as a marker on the path of
intimacy.
“The accent falls differently from of
old; the moment of importance came not here but there,” Woolf wrote in
her essay “Modern Fiction.” What makes her original in both fiction and
nonfiction is that the accent falls not here but there. Love Letters
tries to make the accents fall squarely where we would expect them to
be—two people meet, they fall in love, they become lovers—and sends one
back to the original material to make up a love story of one’s own.
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