POETS Day! Vita Sackville-West

Veda Sealbinder Bonds and Vita Sackville-West were not alike. One was an award-winning poet who had lady sex with Virginia Woolf and the other was a put-upon innocent who made do speaking with only her tongue and lips as her jaw was clenched rictus fast when she said things like “Yew liddle brayats!”

They inhabit the same rhythmic space despite Veda bringing an extra syllable along for the ride. The -er in Sealbinder is nearly dropped and the -ville in Sackville is drawn out so they’re exchangeable timing wise. I wish I could say that Sealbinder is a dactyl substitution but I always over think feet. Veda Sealbinder Bonds could be trochees followed by an iamb? It’s enough to say that if you were writing a song about Vita and suddenly roved an eye toward Veda, an eraser’s all you’d need. Three stresses and the song remains the same. I think of one and the other comes along mnemonically.

Two friends in seventh grade scoured the phone book for strange names, and poor Veda’s made them laugh. For a decent chunk of 1984 or 85 she was subject to increasingly elaborate though decreasingly coherent prank calls with a giggling chorus of their fellows listening in on other phones throughout the house. Her name was so funny to us.

I want to stress that those two guys scoured the phone book. They didn’t just happen upon Veda. They had a list of their goofy name discoveries but other than Veda, all I can remember is Irol Nesredneh. Irol was funny until we realized that it’s Lori Hendersen backwards and rather than being silly was a clever way to get the benefits of an unlisted number your friends could still find and not pay Ma Bell’s anonymity fee. Hats off, Lori.

It’s POETS Day, so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Weasel your way out of work early and do something stupid and scampish to make you feel young. Caller ID has killed the prank call and phone books are few on the ground, but kids are still doing things they shouldn’t. Do that… Arson? I don’t know. Ask around the mall.

Whatever you get up to, make time for a little verse beforehand.

***

In later years Vita came to bear a strong resemblance to a crusty Anglo-Indian colonel, but in 1927 she seemed to Mary an endlessly fascinating being.”
– Peter Alexander, Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography

Vita Sackville-West was inbred in fine aristocratic fashion. Reabsorption into the Barony by marriage to her first cousin brought respectability to her illegitimate mother despite a scandalous nascence involving the 2^nd Baron’s fascination with a Spanish dancer named Pepita. In addition to being a popular writer during her lifetime, Vita’s notable for being Virginia Woolf’s inspiration for the titular character in the novel Orlando.

She was a noted gardener. I’ve known one transcendent gardener. Her side yard looked great and she’d spend summers lecturing various groups in England. Lots of people garden but some notch up their enthusiasm to “passionate.” A “passionate” gardener’s friends will always say of him that he’s a wonderful, top notch, terrific, or brilliant gardener. In school I knew several mathematicians who were introduced to me by other mathematicians, but it wasn’t until much later when I was introduced socially by someone who knew nothing of math that I met a brilliant mathematician. There are practices where people equate dedication with expertise so friends with opinions on flour brands “make the best breads” regardless of whether the speaker has ever tasted the touted loaves.

Sackville-West was certainly a “brilliant” gardener, but she was brilliant gardener as well. From the anonymous biographer at Poetry Foundation:

“A founding member of the National Trust’s garden committee, Sackville-West wrote a weekly gardening column for The Observer and was awarded a Veitch Memorial Medal from the Royal Horticultural Society. She died of cancer at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, where the gardens she created with her husband, writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson, remain open to the public, preserved by the National Trust.”

She was a laurelled poet and I’ve enjoyed a good bit of what I’ve read but I’ve also found a lot of it to be lifeless. Per Alexander of the above “Anglo-Indian colonel” comparison in his Roy Campbell biography, “[Campbell] wrote to a South African friend, ‘Vita Sackville-West… won the Hawthornden this year with her long poem, The Land. It isn’t much of a poem, but she is very nice and has a wonderful library…” Campbell would later find great reason to dislike Sackville-West, but this was written when he was chummy with her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson, and before he knew Vita was having sex with his wife. It’s likely this is a fair account of his estimation.

I’ve not read the book-length poem, “The Land,” but the excerpts I’ve come across are what you’d expect from an award-winning work. Her husband said that she fashioned it after Virgil’s “Georgics,” a long pastoral. Obviously, when seeing her poem referred to as “georgic” I immediately knew it to mean “agricultural” rather than assuming it was an odd way of saying “Georgian” in reference to the monarch reigning during its composition and didn’t have to look it up to find out why the “G” was a “g.”

“The Land” is divided into four seasonally themed sections.

from The Land

That was a spring of storms. They prowled the night;
Low level lightning flickered in the east
Continuous. The white pear-blossom gleamed
Motionless in the flashes; birds were still;
Darkness and silence knotted to suspense,
Riven by the premonitory glint
Of skulking storm, a giant that whirled a sword
Over the low horizon, and with tread
Earth-shaking ever threatened his approach,
But to delay his terror kept afar,
And held earth stayed in waiting like a beast
Bowed to receive a blow. But when he strode
Down from his throne of hills upon the plain,
And broke his anger to a thousand shards
Over the prostrate fields, then leapt the earth
Proud to accept his challenge; drank his rain;
Under his sudden wind tossed wild her trees;
Opened her secret bosom to his shafts;
The great drops spattered; then above the house
Crashed thunder, and the little wainscot shook
And the green garden in the lightning lay.

She so convincingly builds tension that the lines “And held earth stayed in waiting like a beast / Bowed to receive a blow,” don’t so much expand the image as confirm what the reader knows. How does she do that and then put out paint-by-numbers meh like this?

Making Cider

I saw within the wheelwright’s shed
The big round cartwheels, blue and red;
A plough with blunted share;
A blue tin jug; a broken chair;
And paint in trial patchwork square
Slapping up against the wall;
The lumber of the wheelwright’s trade,
And tools on benches neatly laid,
The brace, the adze, the awl;

And framed within the latticed-panes,
Above the cluttered sill,
Saw rooks upon the stubble hill
Seeking forgotten grains;

And all the air was sweet and shrill
With juice of apples heaped in skips,
Fermenting, rotten, soft and bruise,
And all the yard was strewn with pips,
Discarded pulp, and wrung-out ooze
That ducks with rummaging flat bill
Searched through beside the cider-press
To gobble in their greediness.

What strikes me is that it almost gets interesting in the last stanza.

Woolf’s Orlando wasn’t the only work inspired by Sackville-West. Roy Campbell didn’t care for the Bloomsbury Group of writers and intellectuals of which Vita was a part, but he and his wife mingled amongst them for a while. He thought they were preening libertines. His wife’s affair shook him, particularly because she wasn’t the one to break it off. Mary Campbell wanted the affair to become an exclusive commitment. Campbell had an unfaithful wife who was in love with another. Compounding the humiliation, the other thought his wife a trifle, smothering, and past her days of interest.

Peter Alexander excerpts this bit of “Envoi” from Sackville-West’s King’s Daughter. Alexander also points out that the title, King’s Daughter, was a play on Roy.

from Envoi

The catkin from the hazel swung
When you and I and March were young.

The flute-notes dripped from liquid May
Through silver night and golden day.

The harvest moon rose round and red
When habit came and wonder fled.

October rusted into gold
When you and I and love grew old.

Snow lay on hedgerows of December
Then, when we could no more remember.

But the green flush was on the larch
When other loves we found in March.

Recalling Pope’s Dunciad, Campbell fired off The Georgiad (royal rather than agrarian in this instance); a broadside aimed at the Bloomsbury Group in general, but it was Sackville-West that spurred him to action. My Georgiad is bought off Amazon from one of those outfits that scour Project Gutenberg and reprint cheap on demand copies of books out of copyright. I was surprised to find that someone took a moment to include in it a photocopy of a brief review (nice touch, Hassell Street Press) fixed by captions as hailing from the 4/12/1931 Daily Telegraph but may in fact be from the 12/4/1931 Daily Telegraph.

The reviewer, Rebecca West, lauds Campbell as a genius before excoriating him for his bad taste in indecently revealing the sexual proclivities and general faults of people who allowed him into their confidence. She ends, “One could look through literature in vain to match this in its amalgam of meanness and beauty.”

That must have a place among the most enviable bits of praise any piece of writing has ever received.

Here are a few lines from it where Campbell takes aim at Sackville-West, or at least Woolf’s fictionalized version of her, Orlando, who transformed from one sex to another in the novel.

Now fully armed the direst foe to meet,
This new “Orlando” flounces to his feet,
And with a virginally vulpine air,
The hair-pins falling from his frowsy hair,
First meets his own approval in the glass,
Then tries his voice, to see if it will pass,
And finds the organ, beat it if you can,
Able to lisp as sweetly as a man,
Or roll down into as deep a bass
As any lady-writer in the place.

Those are how she’s best known now: Virginia Woolf’s ex, brilliant gardener, and rouser of Roy Campbell.

“How preposterous is it that Vita Sackville-West, the best-selling bisexual baroness who wrote over thirty-five books that made an ingenious mockery of twenties societal norms, should be remembered today merely as a smoocher of Virginia Woolf?” asks Rebecca Dinerstein Knight on The Paris Review website. She then recounts briefly the writer’s romantic history climaxing with Virginia before an agreeable diminishment towards a platonic partnership with her husband. Maybe that’s why.

Knight mentions the a few of the thirty plus books as an achievement (and even the gardening, though not the brilliance of it) but her focus is Sackville-West’s unconventional love life. The books were popular in their time, but skewering twenties societal norms isn’t quite the cat’s meow it used to be. The shocking relationships aren’t that shocking anymore, saturated with sexual trend setters as we are. She put out some great poetry, but poetry’s popularity isn’t what it used to be either. Being a nearly forgotten poet counts as a distinguishment of sorts.

Full Moon
Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962)

She was wearing the coral taffeta trousers
Someone had brought her from Ispahan,
And the little gold coat with pomegranate blossoms,
And the coral-hafted feather fan;
But she ran down a Kentish lane in the moonlight,
And skipped in the pool of the moon as she ran.

She cared not a rap for all the big planets,
For Betelgeuse or Aldebaran,
And all the big planets cared nothing for her,
That small impertinent charlatan;
But she climbed on a Kentish stile in the moonlight,
And laughed at the sky through the sticks of her fan.