The Write Thing

As I struggled with its difficult verbose style at times, ages ago in a small room of my own in Paris, Vita Sackville-West’s The Land became an unwanted axis of a thesis that I would have fancied more gossipy, had gossip been accepted as a literary genre in those days. Perhaps today it should, and people would write far funnier theses.

It must have been that Orlando had been brilliantly coded by Mrs Woolf to give Vita some form of ownership after her beautiful childhood home of Knole was repossessed by the male family line. It must have been that her larger loss of a home with English ancestry bleeding from every wall paradoxically mirrored my minimal family betrayal at the hands of a brother. It must have been the “land” inside the word Orlando, the modern history of Vita as Woolf re-wrote it and installed it as a classic of all times, or simply the fact that I miss those days of piecemeal research and the promise of a finding, somewhere, that would give the work its originality.

Regardless of the remoteness or lucidity of these memories, today it all came back to me, as it can happen at times when some episodes of one’s own soap opera become bad karma. It must be that, years later, I still do not own the land that is rightfully mine, but I do have the vision.

The country habit has me by the heart,
For he’s bewitched for ever who has seen,
Not with his eyes but with his vision,
Spring
Flow down the woods and stipple leaves
with sun.

(“Winter”, from The Land)

By the way, for those who want a peak (or an “ear”?) of Vita’s voice, here’s an excerpt of this poem, read by the authoress herself.

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.