West, East

Vita Sackville-West’s poetry

Poems of West & East by Vita Sackville-West

It’s tempting to think of Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson as if they were ever out of the business of daily life. The two of them gardening. He writing his diaries; she her novels and poems. Rich, happy in each other’s company. Not in the world the rest of us live in. Even during the terrifying days of 1940, when invasion was on the cards, the pair were able to contemplate, if the papers they left behind are any indication, pre-emptive suicide (to get ahead of capture and torture) with some equanimity. Cheating the Gestapo of detainees, discussed with strange detachment.

There go two people, readers might think, not much like us.

Of an entirely different stamp.

This is not true. It’s not true in one macro sense: all people are a little alike, except those so deformed either practically or morally that their experience of life is necessarily occluded or foreshortened. Even those who seem different from us are only different to a point.

And it’s not true in a micro sense. Nicolson and Sackville-West left ample evidence of the people they were — of what kind. From what class and society they came. And though it’s different from us, or different at least from me, it’s not impossibly so.

For my evidence today, I hope to dangle before you Poems of West & East, a volume that includes some works of Sackville-West’s that had appeared before.

Here’s my point. This collection is not complex; it is not difficult. If you can read a letter, or a newspaper, you can read these poems. Although it has subtleties, as all literary work does — things to contemplate and to throw back and forth like a shuttlecock over a metaphorical net in the JCR — it’s not difficult. So what you see is, in effect, what you get.

And what you get is, if interestingly expressed, not remote, not impossibly exotic. Quite normal.

Sackville-West of course, as some know and others will know in a second, grew up in Knole, an extraordinary and ancient house almost falling down under the weight of its history. And there are one or two poems here that are written either explicitly or with implication about the place. The heaviness of the years even as a little girl played in the gallery. Friendly ghosts or ancient bones, apt to be disturbed. The surrounding sense that all life is folly in such a place, that tragedy is the lot of man; the house and its gardens still seem to stand bent-backed, bowed.

These are interesting thoughts, and quite uncommon. Most of us do not grow up in immense country houses. But most of us would possibly think something similar if we were literarily inclined and were reared in such a place.

The second part of this book is about travel. About far-away places, mostly Istanbul. The voices of the call of prayer. The selling of the local beans in dialect. All of that kind of thing. But I’ll return to it, if I may.

Because what I would like to talk a little about next is romantic love. We get the impression (from letters and diaries at least) that Nicolson and Sackville-West cared for each other. Really loved each other, or at least seemed to, if anyone could from their class and in their day.

What Sackville-West writes about love, then, isn’t just stuff copied out from earlier poets. It’s not something one might have in one’s mind in the course of a series of daydreams and fantasies, but not know in reality. Instead, it’s real. Or as real as something like that ever could be.

I won’t say, not for a moment, that what Sackville-West says here is vital. That you will go home having read it with a new freshness in your gait, and the sure and certain knowledge that you’ll be quoting her words for the rest of your life. No, I won’t promise that. But I will say that this is good stuff. That it’s economical when it ought to be economical, occasionally expansive when the need calls for it. That it is never sappy or vulgar or strangely boastful (or too morbid), as so many poems seem to be or to become when talking of love.

I can’t say it shook my world. But these are simple poems. It is not their job to reorder reality. It is their job to give a good airing, a solid effort, to articulating a thought or a feeling or a perspective. One perception, one idea. That’s what they’re for.

They do a good job. One without fireworks, spotlights or Hollywood.

One final subject: this book is significant, in a way, as travel poetry. Sackville-West was not a pioneer in this domain. Doughty’s Arabia Deserta was poetic and it was travel writing. And from four decades before.

But Sackville-West came before the travel poets of the latter half of the last century. People like Auden and Lawrence Durrell and later James Fenton. Sackville-West was not there first. It would be absurd to say she was. But she was there before all of them.

And her thoughts on Constantinople, as she calls it, are not revelatory. They are not novel. But they are real, because she was there. And because they are real and from a real person, someone no longer all that distant from us, they matter. At least they matter to me.