Andrew Marvell!

Our book today - the last in our batch of what turned out to be mostly very superannuated musty old biographies cleared out of church basements in Iowa (ah, the wonders of Stevereads) - is Andrew Marvell, a slim, sparkling 1929 volume by the great Vita Sackville-West. It was supposed to be the first volume in a new series called, somewhat unfortunately, "The Poets on the Poets," although I'm not sure the series ever really took off, poets being so notoriously awful about deadlines. The first curiosity of the thing today is the governing identification of Sackville-West as a poet at all: it would have been routine in her own day, but to the very limited extent she's known to the common reader today, it's as a novelist or even a biographer of her ancestral home, not as a poet.

Still, 90 years ago she was well enough known to kick off this "The Poets on the Poets" series (as far as I know, it petered out almost immediately), and she chose to write a very slim volume on Marvell by concentrating almost exclusively on reading through his poems rather than retailing the facts of his life and times. She states up front that she won't be indulging in more than a scraping of biography, intent instead on concentrating on the poems. In a brochure for next summer's series of seminars at the National Humanities Center, we're told: "Scholarship over the last fifteen years has made it plain that Andrew Marvell's poetry cannot be adequately studied apart from his life" - and it's safe to say Sackville-West knew that even in her own day (one of her cited sources, a life of Marvell by the great Edwardian critic Augustine Birrell, specifically makes that same National Humanities Center claim). Her pose of aesthetic purity - just the poems, not the tawdry life - is just that: a pose, an old and trusty trick to let a freelancer off the hook of doing a load of extra research. And at least she's eloquent about it:

The apparent facts of a man's life are rarely absolute, even to himself; he draws the strokes, one by one, and is surprised at the final design of the picture. What hope is there, then, for the reconstruction of the biographer? It is no reconstruction that he can hope for, but merely interpretation - a rather more well-intentioned form of fiction.

The reader - if this thin volume had any readers anymore, which I doubt - can more readily tolerate such stuff because a) it speeds us to Sackville-West's thoughts on the poetry, and b) she doesn't really ignore biography anyway - some of her comments are almost admonishing in their personal tone:

Two strange reflections her suggest themselves. The first, that Marvell should never have published any of these poems - did he not know how good they were? The second - which appears almost to grow out of the first - that so true a poet should have abandoned the writing of poetry and turned, as the old lady said, to writing sense instead. From first to last, it was certainly a cavalier way of treating so pretty a muse. Marvell's muse, indeed, if her spirit survives, has much to complain of. Not only did Marvell himself behave towards her with the utmost ingratitude and nonchalance, but posterity for well over a century did very little better.

Like many critics before her, Sackville-West locates the bulk of Marvell's first-rate poetry early in his life, during the usurpation of Oliver Cromwell, dismissing most of the later work and implying that most work of all poets should be likewise dismissed:

Poets vary, but most are more prolific than they should be; less fastidious than they might be, that is to say, in the chosen residue of their work that they expose to the judgment of the world. (Yes fecundity in itself is often a measure of a poet's greatness, provided the quality maintain a sufficient, even though intermittent, standard; and no poet, as experience proves, can be expected to act as his own editor. Wordsworth and Tennyson, not to mention Swinburne, were their own worst enemies.) Time and posterity, fortunately, act as sieves, and in the end it is often for a few pages of print, at most, that a poet is remembered; a few moments distilled out of all the years of his life.

It's hard not to read a note of personal experience into lines like those, but then, Andrew Marvell is a very personal essay, an informal and somewhat unstructured reflection of one writer on another - with perhaps more attendant ironies than Sackville-West herself ever saw. She tsk-tsks at how long it took the literary world to realize the worth of Marvell's work - and her own work is waiting for exactly that kind of realization. And we won't even hold our breath for poor Birrell.

(One last thing: my own much-battered copy of this particular book didn't come from a church basement in Iowa - it was a gift from an old friend, who formally bestowed it on me only after he noticed that I'd pinched it from his shelves without his knowledge)

 

All Passion Spent!

Our book today is Vita Sackville-West's brilliant, problematic 1931 novel All Passion Spent, which she published in the unexpected critical and financial afterglow of her brilliant, not-at-all-problematic novel The Edwardians. The two books were a formidable announcement of assured powers, the type of shot across the literary bow that customarily changes both the landscape and the shooter (as indeed famously happened with another one-two punch of novels written by a very different author in 1930 and '31). And yet, nobody reads Vita Sackville-West anymore, and any presence she has on college syllabi is more to prove some splinter-studies point than to celebrate her literary worth. Her posthumous fate has been the reverse of her friend Virginia Woolf's, and the explanation has always eluded me. It's simply insufficient to say Woolf is the better writer and leave it at that; Sackville-West wrote a third again more novels than Woolf, but if they're across-the-board lesser quality as a species, it's only by a whisker (especially if we recall that, pace Woolf, it takes more than a recondite style to make a good book) - and I don't even agree to that.

No, I think it boils down to the Edwardians - not the novel, but the 'long' version of the era, and all the artistic types who got their labyrinthine genesis during those years. The 'long' Edwardian era has always seemed to me to be characterized not by action but by an almost craven re-action, in which so many things from Victorian times were not only rejected but inverted - in this case, the prolific-author paradigm associated with Dickens and Trollope. Suddenly, the literary reaction was a conception of author-as-sufferer that tended to convey an aura of extra legitimacy to smaller bodies of work. Anthony Burgess quips somewhere that it was Forster who ruined things for prolific authors by making 'serious author' synonymous with eking out eight novels and then dying. I think Woolf benefits from that new paradigm in ways that have nothing to do with the quality of her work, and if I'm right, that same paradigm has worked against Vita Sackville-West, who, in addition to these two great novels, wrote some obviously tossed-off novels, some utterly delightful gardening-books, and at least one truly great travel-memoir, all while conducting an active and public social life. That clearly goes against the grain of the whole bogus writing-as-agony pose pioneered by those pesky Edwardians and perfected (if that's the right word) in the present day by frauds like Jonathan Franzen, and it may account for the odd eclipse covering authors like Sackville-West (or, for that matter, Burgess). The idea that they somehow weren't serious dies hard.

This novel, All Passion Spent (thought I'd forgotten, didn't you?) should dispense with that idea. It opens with the death of ninety-four-year-old Henry, first Earl of Slane, and it immediately gives Sackville-West occasion to indulge in the character-cutting that was her signature strength as a writer:

It was difficult to get a yes or a no out of the man. The more important a question was, the more flippantly he dealt with it. "Yes," he would write at the bottom of a memorandum setting forth the advantages of two opposite lines of policy; and his myrmidons passed their hands over their brows, distraught. He was destroyed as a statesman, they said, because he always saw both sides of the case; but even as they said it with exasperation, they did not mean it, for they knew that on occasion, when finally pushed into a corner, he would be more incisive, more deadly, than any man seated four-square and full of importance at a government desk. He could cast his eye over a report, and pick out its heart and its weakness before another man had had time to read it through. In his exquisitely courteous way, he would annihilate alike the optimism and the myopia of his correspondent. Courteous always, and civilised, he left his competitors dead.

Once Lord Slane himself is dead at last, a quiet emancipation unfolds inside the heart of his elderly wife Edith, Lady Slane. She finds herself surrounded by her appalling children (themselves all in their sixties) and immediately caught up in their obtuse, stuffy assumptions about her. But she's done every conceivable social duty and finds she has no desire to do more - her courteous defiance hits her children like an affront:

"About the house, Mother," began Carrie. "Would to-morrow suit you to see it? I think I have a free afternoon," and she began to consult a small diary taken from her bag.

"Thank you, Carrie," said Lady Slane, setting the crown upon the surprises she had already given them, "but I have made an appointment to see the house to-morrow. And although it is very nice of you to offer, I think I will go there alone."

She leaves the family home and takes a small house in Hampstead, and there she muses not only on the physical vagaries of old age itself (something our author evokes throughout with extremely thoughtful skill):

This consciousness, this sensation, of age was curious and interesting. The mind was as alert as ever, perhaps more alert, sharpened by the sense of imminent final interruption, spurred by the necessity of making the most of remaining time; only the body was a little shaky, not very certain of its reliability, not quite certain of its sense of direction, afraid of stumbling over a step, of spilling a cup of tea; nervous, tremulous; aware that it must not be jostled, or hurried, for fear of betraying its frail inadequacy.

... but also on the nature of a long life full of memories:

Sitting there in the sun at Hampstead, in the late summer, under the south wall and the ripened peaches, doing nothing with her hands, she remembered the day she had become engaged to Henry. She had plenty of leisure now, day in, day out, to survey her life as a tract of country traversed, and at last become a landscape instead of separate fields or separate years and days, so that it became a unity and she could see the whole view, and could even pick out a particular field and wander round it again in spirit, though seeing it all the while as it were from a height, fallen into its proper place, with the exact pattern drawn round it by the hedge, and the next field into which the gap in the hedge would lead.

For a book with such a deceptively simple premise, there's quite a bit more than this going on in All Passion Spent (indeed, the book's title gets more ironic with every passing page) - there are dramas, and suitors past and present, and the whole thing is so assuredly autumnal that the reader is constantly surprised that Vita Sackville-West was forty, not eighty, when she wrote it. The quirks the author imports to Lady Slane can be irritating at times, but no more so than the quirks of a great many Woolf characters who are much better known to the intelligent reading public. Sic transit gloria mundi, I suppose, but in this case - as in so many cases here at Stevereads - I could wish it weren't so.

 

Knole & The Sackvilles

Our book today is Knole & The Sackvilles by Vita Sackville-West, first published in its present form in 1922, and it is a slim little treasure-trove of biographies. Dozens of Sackvilles, many Earls of Dorset and Lords Buckhurst stride across its pages, along with their attendant wives, children, servants, and hangers-on (and shadowed always by their various monarchs, from Elizabeth I to
George VI, when in 1947 Knole was turned over to the National Trust for safekeeping (and tourism). It is the great good fortune of this huge and remarkable crowd that out of their midst should come a writer as thrillingly talented as Sackville-West, Bloomsbury member, object of scandal, and venerated in her lifetime for virtually all of her writings except this, her odd, idiosyncratic masterpiece.

But that crowd of Sackvilles and Dorsets and Buckhursts was not the only beneficiary of Sackville-West's genius as a writer, nor even the main such. No, the best, most strongly-drawn and most sympathetic character in Knole & The Sackvilles is the great house of Knole itself, as big as four city blocks, as old as the Romans, and more steeped in story than any single mortal life could possibly be. Thousands of tourists visit it each year, chaperoned around carefully-managed segments of the house and grounds, and all but the most cynical are awestruck by tour's end, but to the shy, hyper-sensitive little Vita Sackville, it was home. Indeed, since she was the one who signed the National Trust papers in 1947, she may well have been the last person to call the place home.

The sheer elegaic beauty of her prose when she's describing the place is as strong and as wistful as anything Evelyn Waugh ever wrote about his fictional Brideshead, only the admixture of actual autobiography here gives the added punch of memory. As Sackville-West tells us, she was never frightened at Knole. "I loved it; and I took it for granted that Knole loved me."


This autobiographical note runs throughout the book and is an almost mystical thing; the author is the last voice of an era that could very naturally, very organically feel itself linked with all the preceding eras Knole had seen - eras of horse-powered travel and candlelit writing tables and tapestries and bed-hangings meant for warmth, not decoration. Her book glitters all over with tiny vignettes no later writer encamped at Knole would ever see:

A stone lobby under the oriel window divides the Green Court from the Stone Court. In summer the great oak doors of this second gate-house are left open, and it has sometimes happened that I have found a stag in the banqueting hall, puzzled but still dignified, strayed in from the park since no barrier checked him.

Such vignettes are priceless, but they do not make up the bulk of the book. Instead, Sackville-West spends most of her allotted space taking her readers on a biographical tour of the house's various great lords and royal advisers. In the process, she creates a series of portraits not just of people but of ages - in addition to everything else, this odd, gorgeously-written volume is an excellent, engaging history of England (albeit from a distinctly Kentish point of view) from the late Elizabethan to the late Georgian era.

This history includes some indelible accounts of figures the main movements of most such narratives might overlook, such as the 18th century Lady Betty Germain, frequent house guest at Knole, whose shock at receiving a scornful letter from Jonathan Swift about her host's self-serving nature is gently, sardonically mocked:

One wonders whether such suggestions troubled Lady Betty. Was it possible that her great-souled friend would not be Lord Steward and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Lord Warden and Lord Lieutenant of Kent, did he not also happen to be Duke of Dorset? Was it possible that such people as the Sackvilles occasionally occupied positions due to their birth rather than to their intellect?

Another figure obscured by time, Lady Anne Clifford (mistress of Knole during the time of James I), is invoked with genuine sympathy and a trace of awe, no doubt provoked by this lady's unbending determination to fight off all legal claimants to the property that was rightfully hers:

In the end she got the better of them all, and the last picture of her left by the "Lives" is that of a triumphant and imperious old lady, retired to the stronghold of her northern castles, where her authority could stand "against sectaries, almost against Parliaments and armies themselves"; refusing to go to court "unless she might wear blinkers"; moving with feudal, with almost royal state between her many castles, from Appleby to Pendragon, from Pendragon to Brougham, from Brougham to Brough, from Brough to Skipton; building brew-houses, wash-houses, bake-houses; kitchens; stables; sending word to Cromwell that as fast as he should knock her castles about her ears she would surely put them up again; endowing almshouses; ruling over her almswomen and her tenants; receiving, like the patriarchal old despot she was, the generations of her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren.

But in the end, it's always Knole itself that brings out her most glowing prose. Just as two generations of television viewers will forever hear Jeremy Irons' resonant voice when they read the descriptions of Brideshead in Brideshead Revisited, so too does this prose deserve its great embodier, to fully convey its beauties to the listening ear. Imagine the mighty Eileen Atkins reading this as a voice-over to some mini-series as yet unborn:

It [Knole House] has a deep inward gaiety of some very old woman who has always been beautiful, who has had many lovers and seen many generations come and go, smiled wisely over their sorrows and their joys, and learnt an imperishable secret of tolerance and humour. It is, above all, an English house. It has the tone of England; it melts into the green of the garden turf, into the tawnier green of the park beyond, into the blue of the pale English sky; it settles down into its hollow amongst the cushioned tops of the trees; the brown-red of those roofs is the brown-red of humble farms and pointed oast-houses, such as stain over a wide landscape of England the quilt-like pattern of the fields.

Those of you who should find yourself in the beautiful country of Kent are urged to make time (during its open season, that is - 15 March to 2 November) to see at least that portion of Knole's beauty that is ever open to the public. Those of you who should find yourself in the good city of Boston are urged to make time to visit the great Museum of Fine Arts to see two of the tapestries that once hung at Knole. And those of you who can't easily get to either can still find their way to Powell's website and revel in this wonderful book.