The Write Thing

I have been meaning to write a posting on this for quite some time, but have kept postponing it unnecessarily. Yesterday, as I finished watching the second part of Portrait of a Marriage, a magnificent BBC miniseries first broadcast in 1990 depicting the tumultuous relationship and ill-fated elopement of Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis in the 1920s, I decided to materialize my intention. The story is a peculiar one. Both Vita and Violet were married to loving husbands, but bound by the tempest of a love for each other that completed them and destroyed them with equal force.
One day, I may discuss Woolf’s Orlando on these pages at length, and attest to its literary value as much more than the “longest love letter in literature” from Potto to charming Donkey. However, tonight I would like to give some room on this screen for Violet to express her feelings, those of a sixteen-year-old child in love. She originally wrote the text of the letter quoted below in French, but Nigel Nicholson’s Portrait of a Marriage reveals it to us in an English translation. Even despite (or because of) the English, her words resound to me as a manifest of bold, relentless, full and passionate love. Let’s read it for Miss Keppel:

I love you, Vita, because I have had to fight for you so hard. I love you because you never gave me back the ring I lent you. I love you because you will never capitulate. I love you for your fine intelligence, for your literary ambition, for your innocent flirtatiousness. And I love you because you never seem to doubt my love. I love in you what I know is also in me, that is, imagination, a gift for languages, taste, intuition, and a mass of other things. I love you, Vita, because I have seen your soul.

…But don’t you see, donkey West, that you’ll be tired of me one of these days (I’m so much older) and so I have to take my little precautions. Thats why I put the emphasis on ‘recording’ rather than feeling. But donkey West knows she has broken down more ramparts than anyone. And isnt there something obscure in you? There’s something that doesn’t vibrate in you: It may be purposely — you don’t let it: but I see it with other people, as well as with me: something reserved, muted — God knows what…It’s in your writing too, by the bye. The thing I call central transparency — sometimes fails you there too….

Virgina Woolf, letter to Vita Sackville-West. November 19, 1926

As I read this I thought of how many of us would identify with Woolf’s words. Human beings have different ways of showing and hiding emotions. Here Woolf speaks about “precautions”. Who doesn’t take precautions in relationships? Maybe some of us don’t even when we feel that something does not “vibrate” in the other, and when we start assessing what the other is like in the presence of other people but us.

History would claim Vita was a free woman, able to do as she pleased. Maybe her freedom resided in the way she did not have to take precautions, in this non-vibration Woolf so clearly felt. There is nothing more difficult than to chase a vibration that does not exist. Paradoxically, the other is not aware of what goes on inside, and becomes a rampart like the ones Vita herself “broke down”. That is the cost of freedom.