VITA SACKVILLE-WEST

All Passion Spent

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Joanna Lumley

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Copyright © Vita Sackville-West 2016

Vita Sackville-West has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Vintage Classics in 2016

(First published in the United Kingdom by Random House in 2016)

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Contents

Introduction

It is always exciting to join a story just as a tumultuous event occurs, in this case the death of a distinguished statesman, Lord Slane, paterfamilias beyond reproach, whose rather ghastly children are themselves already of advanced years, and whose widow (‘Mother is wonderful’) is widely held to have ‘lived only for Father’ and to have ‘no will of her own’. We have all been there: the hushed voices and changed behaviour of families at death’s bedside, trite sentiments veiling underlying anxieties about one’s own life being inconvenienced and altered. There is a rustle of expectation about who will be left what, who shall own the jewels, who will benefit from the money, ‘the loot’, that will have been left. There is the dilemma of who should take responsibility for the bereaved relict, who for the few days between death and funeral is of paramount importance but thereafter becomes an encumbrance.

Although published in 1931, All Passion Spent could have been written yesterday, so sharp and relevant are the observations about an old person, in Lady Slane’s case eighty-eight years old, who must be cared for as her own days dwindle down. She must be kept safe, and at a convenient distance to visit – perhaps she should be shunted about regularly so that each of her offspring can help to share the burden. When Lady Slane decides to follow her heart to a house in Hampstead, and live there alone with her devoted and ancient French maid Genoux, it is like a window opening into a different world – a world very shocking to her children. Only Edith, her youngest daughter, thinks her mother ‘not mad, but most conspicuously sane’. Edith, the most sympathetic of the tribe, is Lady Slane’s favourite child, along with Kay, a strange bachelor figure obsessed with globes, compasses and astrolabes, who cherishes his solitary monkish existence, enlivened by dinners at the club with odd Mr FitzGeorge. The family members are drawn with a keen eye for the absurd, and yet every one is recognisable in our own circle of acquaintances. Sackville-West writes simply wonderfully and many passages make me laugh out loud, for example Lady Slane’s first glimpse of Mr Bucktrout as he taps the imaginary barometer on the wall of her new home. Others are utterly beautiful: the butterflies flittering around the carriage as the Slanes travelled through the Persian desert. ‘All tiny things, contemptibly tiny things, ennobled only by their vast background, the background of Death.’

As Lady Slane travels to view the property she remembers so well, even though she last saw it thirty years before, she begins her reveries: memories of her past are punctuated by the stations on the Underground, as she passes from the respectable streets of South Kensington into what was then a remote village in north London. The delight that the house inspires in her is infectious; how strange that Vita Sackville-West aged only thirty-eight should have such a clear grasp of an old woman’s yearnings. I am halfway between her age when she wrote the book and that of her delicious protagonist, and already I am longing for my own version of her shabby red-brick Georgian house, with its big windows and intruding ivy tendrils, its sunshine and her unexpected and charming companions, Mr Bucktrout, the owner, and Mr Gosheran, the splendid old jack-of-all-trades.

The house is repaired and decorated, and Lady Slane’s own life unfolds as she daydreams under the peach tree in the south-facing garden; a character emerges that is very different from the passively serene Vicereine of India known to the outside world. Inside her, waiting to escape but never doing so, is a shy tomboy, a girl who longs to paint, to cut off her hair and dress like a boy, but who somehow stumbles into marriage and hears the door slam forever on her ambitions and hopes. Even though she understands the extent of the sacrifices she will have to make, expectations are such that she feels there is no other choice open to her:

Lady Slane becomes ‘an appendage’ to her husband on marriage, always falling in line with his wishes; a way of life which in her own marriage Vita Sackville-West chose to reject. Vita, in contrast to her fictional heroine, kept her own name, and although she too was married to a diplomat, Harold Nicolson, her writing remained her professional priority. Instead of travelling abroad with her husband on his diplomatic assignments, she chose to remain at home in order to pursue her own career. Eventually Vita persuaded Harold to abandon his diplomatic career entirely so that he was able to stay in England with her. The role of women was a burning issue of the day, and Lady Slane’s situation reflects many of the concerns raised in the feminist essay A Room of One’s Own, written by Vita’s friend and lover Virginia Woolf, and published only two years before.

‘She never laid brush to canvas’, it is true, but when Lady Slane was discovered arranging flowers on the floor in the vice-regal residency in India, with her small son in a cot beside her, she was engrossed in her painterly placing of colours and shapes (later reflected in Mr Bucktrout’s own offerings of flowers in the Hampstead house). Vita Sackville-West’s own talents as a gardener seem to fill the pages with a peculiar visual brilliance, as bright as her observations on human behaviour. The revelation that Lady Slane’s son’s friend, the eccentric and miserly Mr FitzGeorge, was part of her young life comes as a shock, for he too was a different man in those far-off days, when a chance encounter with the beautiful young vicereine as she knelt arranging flowers altered his life forever. He, with a keen collector’s eye, loves and amasses things of beauty, but is obsessed by their value; she, like Mr Bucktrout, just loves beauty for itself. He re-enters her life in the most unexpected manner, altering her last months in a way that brings her companionship and a new fortune for her children to worry about.

Events and circumstances are shown as if in a fading photograph in an album, pored over as time ticks by for Lady Slane. A peaceful acceptance of the certainty of death comforts her, and her excellent friend Mr Bucktrout, whose friendship she grows to treasure as much as her visits from Mr FitzGeorge, has philosophies which chime exactly with her own. She loved her husband, but does not miss him, does not miss the splendour of a life that was bounded only by the extent of the British Empire at its peak: horizons begin to shrink as you get older, desires fade away, and belongings become an encumbrance. Her memories parade before her eyes ceaselessly, and become more important than the actual world. By looking back she seems to be searching for an explanation of how her life turned out the way it did, so that she may be reconciled to it before death comes for her.

How marvellous and strange that a book which begins and ends with death should be so joyous and so wickedly funny. This is Vita Sackville-West writing at the height of her powers, and when I finish this introduction I shall pick up the book again and reread it immediately, savouring every sentence, sitting with Lady Slane as the afternoon sunlight slants through the windows into her cosy little drawing room, where she sits, all passion spent, dreaming of days gone by.

Joanna Lumley, 2011

Henry Lyulph Holland, first Earl of Slane, had existed for so long that the public had begun to regard him as immortal. The public, as a whole, finds reassurance in longevity, and, after the necessary interlude of reaction, is disposed to recognise extreme old age as a sign of excellence. The long-liver has triumphed over at least one of man’s initial handicaps: the brevity of life. To filch twenty years from eternal annihilation is to impose one’s superiority on an allotted programme. So small is the scale upon which we arrange our values. It was thus with a start of real incredulity that City men, opening their papers in the train on a warm May morning, read that Lord Slane, at the age of ninety-four, had passed away suddenly after dinner on the previous evening. ‘Heart failure,’ they said sagaciously, though they were actually quoting from the papers; and then added with a sigh, ‘Well, another old landmark gone.’ That was the dominant feeling: another old landmark gone, another reminder of insecurity. All the events and progressions of Henry Holland’s life were gathered up and recorded in a final burst of publicity by the papers; they were gathered together into a handful as hard as a cricket-ball, and flung in the faces of the public, from the days of his ‘brilliant university career,’ through the days when Mr Holland, at an astonishingly early age, had occupied a seat in the Cabinet, to this very last day when as Earl of Slane, K.G., G.C.B., G.C.S.I., G.C.I.E., etc. etc. – his diminishing honours trailing away behind him like the tail of a comet – he had drooped in his chair after dinner, and the accumulation of ninety years had receded abruptly into history. Time seemed to have made a little jump forward, now that the figure of old Slane was no longer there with outstretched arms to dam it back. For some fifteen years he had taken no very active part in public life, but he had been there, and on occasion the irrefutable suavity, common sense, and mockery of his eloquence in Parliament had disturbed, though it could not actually arrest, his more extreme colleagues upon the brink of folly. Such pronouncements had been rare, for Henry Holland had always been a man to appreciate the value of economy, but by their very rarity they produced a wholesome sense of uneasiness, since men knew them to be backed up by a legend of experience: if the old man, the octogenarian, the nonagenarian, could bestir himself to the extent of stalking down to Westminster and unburdening himself, in his incomparable way, of opinions carefully, soberly, but cynically gestated, then the Press and the public were compelled into attention. Nobody had ever seriously attacked Lord Slane. Nobody had ever accused Lord Slane of being a back-number. His humour, his charm, his languor, and his good sense, had rendered him sacrosanct to all generations and to all parties; of him alone among statesmen and politicians, perhaps, could that be said. Perhaps, because he seemed to have touched life on every side, and yet never seemed to have touched life, the common life, at all, by virtue of his proverbial detachment, he had never drawn upon himself the execration and mistrust commonly accorded to the mere expert. Hedonist, humanist, sportsman, philosopher, scholar, charmer, wit; one of those rare Englishmen whose fortune it is to be born equipped with a truly adult mind. His colleagues and his subordinates had been alternately delighted and infuriated by his assumed reluctance to deal with any practical question. 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 governmental 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.

His personal idiosyncrasies, too, were dear to the public as to the caricaturists; his black satin stock, his eyeglass swung on an extravagantly wide ribbon, the coral buttons to his evening waistcoat, the private hansom he maintained long after motors had come into fashion – by all this was he buttressed through the confused justice and injustice of legend; and when, at the age of eighty-five, he finally succeeded in winning the Derby, no man ever received a greater ovation. His wife alone suspected how closely those idiosyncrasies were associated with a settled policy. The least cynical of people by nature, she had learned to lay a veneer of cynicism over herself after seventy years’ association with Henry Holland. ‘Dear old man,’ said the City men in the train; ‘well, he’s gone.’

He was gone indeed, very finally and irretrievably gone. So thought his widow, looking down at him as he lay on his bed in Elm Park Gardens. The blinds were not lowered, for he had always stipulated that when he came to die the house should not be darkened, and even after his death nobody would have dreamed of disobeying his orders. He lay there in the full sunlight, sparing the stone-mason the trouble of carving his effigy. His favourite great-grandchild, to whom everything was permitted, had often twitted him, saying that he would make a handsome corpse; and now that the joke had become a reality, the reality gained in impressiveness for having been anticipated by a joke. His was the type of face which, even in life, one associates prophetically with the high dignity of death. The bony architecture of nose, chin, and temples, stood out in greater relief for the slight sinking of the flesh; the lips took a firmer line, and a lifetime of wisdom lay sealed behind them. Moreover, and most importantly, Lord Slane looked as soigné in death as he had looked in life. ‘Here,’ you would say, even though the bedclothes covered him, ‘is a dandy.’

Yet, for all its dignity, death brought a revelation. The face which had been so noble in life lost a trifle of its nobility in death; the lips which had been too humorous to be unpleasantly sardonic now betrayed their thinness; the carefully concealed ambition now revealed itself fully in the proud curve of the nostril. The hardness which had disguised itself under the charming manner now remained alone, robbed of the protection of a smile. He was beautiful, but he was less agreeable. Alone in the room his widow contemplated him, filled with thoughts that would greatly have surprised her children, could they but have read her mind.

Her children, however, were not there to observe her. They were collected in the drawing-room, all six of them; two wives and a husband bringing the number up to nine. A sufficiently formidable family gathering – old, black ravens, thought Edith, the youngest, who was always flustered and always trying to confine things into the shape of a phrase, like pouring water into a ewer, but great gouts of meaning and implication invariably ran over and slopped about and were lost. To attempt to recapture them after they had spilt was as hopeless as trying to hold the water in your hand. Perhaps, if one had a notebook and pencil always ready – but then the thought would be lost while one was looking for the right word; and, moreover, it would be difficult to use a notebook without everybody seeing. Shorthand? – but one must not let one’s thoughts run on like this; one must discipline one’s mind, keeping one’s attention on the present matter, as other people seemed to do without any difficulty; though, to be sure, if one had not learnt that lesson by the time one was sixty, one was never likely to learn it. A formidable family gathering, thought Edith, coming back: Herbert, Carrie, Charles, William, and Kay; Mabel, Lavinia; Roland. They went in groups: the Hollands themselves, the sisters-in-law, the brother-in-law; then they sorted themselves differently: Herbert and Mabel, Carrie and Roland; Charles; William and Lavinia; and then Kay all by himself. It was not often that they all met together, none missing – curious, Edith thought, that Death should be the convener, as though all the living rushed instantly together for protection and mutual support. Dear me, how old we all are. Herbert must be sixty-eight, and I’m sixty; and Father was over ninety, and Mother is eighty-eight. Edith, who had begun making a sum of their total ages, surprised them all very much by asking, ‘How old are you, Lavinia?’ Thus taken aback, they rebuked Edith by their stare; but that was Edith all over, she never listened to what was being said, and then suddenly came out with some irrelevant remark. Edith could have told them that all her life she had been trying to say what she meant, and had never yet succeeded. Only too often, she said something precisely the opposite of what she wanted to say. Her terror was that she should one day use an indecent word by mistake. ‘Isn’t it splendid that Father is dead,’ she might say, instead of, ‘Isn’t it terrible’; and there were other possibilities, even more appalling, by which one might use a really dreadful word, the sort of word that butcher-boys scrawled in pencil on the white-washed walls of the basement passage, and about which one had to speak, most evasively, to the cook. An unpleasant task; the sort of task that fell to Edith in Elm Park Gardens and to a thousand Ediths all over London. But of these preoccupations her family knew nothing.

They were gratified now to see that she blushed, and that her hands went up nervously to fiddle with the grey strands of her hair; the gesture implied that she had not spoken. Having reduced her to this confusion, they returned to their conversation, suitably hushed and mournful. Even the voices of Herbert and Carrie, habitually insistent, were lowered. Their father lay upstairs, and their mother was with him.

‘Mother is wonderful.’

Over and over, thought Edith, they had reiterated that phrase. Surprise was in their accents, as though they had expected their mother to rant, rave, scream, give herself up for lost. Edith knew very well that her brothers and sister privately entertained a theory that their mother was rather a simpleton. From time to time she let fall remarks that could not be reconciled with ordinary sense; she had no grasp on the world as it was; she was apt to say impetuous things which, although uttered in English, made no more sense than had they been uttered in an outer-planetary language. Mother was a changeling, they had often said politely, in the bitter-sweet accents reserved for a family joke; but now in this emergency they found a new phrase: Mother is wonderful. It was the thing they were expected to say, so they said it, several times over, like a refrain coming periodically into their conversation and sweeping it upwards on to a higher level. Then it drooped again; became practical. Mother was wonderful, but what was to be done with Mother? Evidently, she could not go on being wonderful for the rest of her life. Somewhere, somehow, she must be allowed to break down, and then, after that was over, must be stowed away; housed, taken care of. Outside, in the streets, the posters might flare: DEATH OF LORD SLANE. The journalists might run up and down Fleet Street assembling their copy; they might pounce on the pigeon-holes – that macabre columbarium – where the obituary notices were stored in readiness; they might raid each other’s information: ‘I say, is it true that old Slane always carried his cash in coppers? wore crêpe soles? dipped his bread in his coffee?’ Anything to make a good paragraph. Telegraph-boys might ring the bell, propping their red bicycles against the kerb, delivering their brown messages of condolence, from all over the world, from all parts of the Empire, especially where Lord Slane had served his term of government. Florists might deliver their wreaths – already the narrow hall was full of them – ‘indecently soon,’ said Herbert, peering jealously nevertheless at the attached cards through his monocle. Old friends might call – ‘Herbert – so dreadfully sudden – of course, I didn’t expect to see your dear Mother—’ But obviously they had expected it, had expected to be the sole exception, and Herbert must turn them away, rather enjoying it: ‘Mother, you understand, is naturally rather overcome; wonderful, I must say; but just at present, you’ll understand, I’m sure, is seeing nobody but Us’; and so with many pressings of Herbert’s hand they took their departure, having got no further than the hall or the doorstep. Reporters might loiter on the pavement, dangling cameras like black concertinas. All this might go on outside the house, but inside it, upstairs, Mother was with Father and the problem of her future lay heavy upon her sons and daughters.

Of course, she would not question the wisdom of any arrangements they might choose to make. Mother had no will of her own; all her life long, gracious and gentle, she had been wholly submissive – an appendage. It was assumed that she had not enough brain to be self-assertive. ‘Thank goodness,’ Herbert sometimes remarked, ‘Mother is not one of those clever women.’ That she might have ideas which she kept to herself never entered into their estimate. They anticipated no trouble with their mother. That she might turn round and play a trick on them – several tricks – after years of being merely a fluttering lovable presence amongst them, never entered into their calculations either. She was not a clever woman. She would be grateful to them for arranging her few remaining years.

They stood in the drawing-room in a group, uncomfortably shifting from one foot to the other, but it never occurred to them to sit down. They would have thought it disrespectful. For all their good solid sense, death, even an expected death, disconcerted them just a little. Around them hung that uneasy, unsettled air which attends those about to set out on a journey or those whose lives have been seriously disturbed. Edith would have liked to sit down, but dared not. How large they all were, she thought; large and black and elderly, with grandchildren of their own. How lucky, she thought, that we all wear so much black habitually, for we certainly could not have got our mourning yet, and how terrible it would have been for Carrie to arrive in a pink shirt. As it was, they were all black as crows, and Carrie’s black gloves lay on the writing-table with her boa and her bag. The ladies of the Holland family still wore boas, high collars, and long skirts which they had to hold up when they crossed the road; any concession to fashion was, they felt, unbecoming to their age. Edith admired her sister Carrie. She did not love her, and she was frightened of her, but she admired and envied her tremendously. Carrie had inherited her father’s eagle nose and commanding presence; she was tall, pale, and distinguished. Herbert, Charles, and William were tall and distinguished also; only Kay and Edith were dumpy. Edith’s thoughts were straying again: we might belong to a different family, she thought, Kay and I. Kay in fact was a chubby little old gentleman, with bright blue eyes and a neat white beard; there, again, he differed from his brothers who were clean-shaven. What a queer thing appearance was, and how unfair. It dictated the terms of people’s estimate throughout one’s whole life. If one looked insignificant, one was set down as insignificant; yet, one probably didn’t look insignificant unless one deserved it. But Kay seemed quite happy; he didn’t worry about significance, or about anything else; his bachelor rooms, and his collection of compasses and astrolabes seemed to satisfy him quite as well as public esteem, or a wife and a more personal life. For he was the greatest living authority upon globes, compasses, astrolabes, and all kindred instruments; lucky Kay, thought Edith, to have concentrated so contentedly upon one little department. (Curious symbols to have chosen, though, for one who had never loved the sea or climbed a mountain; to him, they were collector’s pieces, ranged and ticketed, but to Edith, the romantic, a vast dark world rose beyond their small brass and mahogany, their intricacy of pivots and gimbals, discs and circles, the guinea-gold brass and the nut-brown wood, the signs of the Zodiac and the dolphins spouting up the ocean; a vast dark world where nothing was charted on the maps but regions of danger and uncertainty, and ragged men chewed bullets to allay their thirst.) ‘Then there is the question of income,’ William was saying.

How characteristic of William to mix up Mother’s future with questions of income; for to William and Lavinia parsimony was in itself a career. An apple bruised by falling prematurely from the tree must immediately be turned into a dumpling lest it be wasted. Waste was the bugbear of William’s and Lavinia’s life. The very newspaper must be rolled into spills to save the matches. They had a passion for getting something for nothing. Every blackberry in the hedgerow was an agony to Lavinia until she had bottled it. Living, as they did, at Godalming with two acres of ground, they spent painful-happy evenings in calculation as to whether a pig could be made to pay on the household scraps, and whether a dozen hens could out-balance their corn in eggs. Well, thought Edith, they must pass the time very absorbingly with such a constant preoccupation; but how miserable it must make them to think of all the sacks of gold squandered by them since their marriage. Let me see, thought Edith, William is the fourth, so he must be sixty-four; he must have been married for thirty years, so if they have spent fifteen hundred a year – what with the children’s education and all – that makes forty-five thousand pounds; sacks and sacks of treasure, such as the divers are always looking for at Tobermory. But Herbert was saying something. Herbert was always full of information; and the surprising thing was, for such a stupid man, it was usually correct.

‘I can tell you all about that.’ He put two fingers inside his collar, adjusted it, jerking his chin upward, cleared his throat, and gave a preliminary glare at his relations. ‘I can tell you all about that. I discussed it with Father – he took me, I may say, into his confidence. Ahem! Father, as you know, was not a rich man, and most of his income dies with him. Mother will be left with a net income of five hundred a year.’

They digested this fact. William and Lavinia exchanged glances, and it could be seen that their minds were involved in rapid and experienced calculations. Edith, who passed privately among her relations for a half-wit, could on occasions be surprisingly shrewd – she had a habit of seeing through people’s words right down into their motives, and of stating her deductions with a frankness that was disconcerting rather than discreet. She knew now quite well what William was about to say, though for once she held her tongue. But she chuckled to herself as she heard him say it.

‘I suppose Father didn’t happen to mention the jewels in the course of his confidences, did he, Herbert?’

‘He did. The jewels, as you know, form not the least valuable part of his estate. They were his private property, and he has seen fit to leave them unconditionally to Mother.’

That’s a smack for Herbert and Mabel, thought Edith. I suppose they expected Father to leave the jewels, like heirlooms, to his eldest son. A glance at Mabel’s face showed her, however, that the announcement came as no surprise. Evidently Herbert had already repeated his father’s confidences to his wife – and Mabel had been lucky, thought Edith, if Herbert had betrayed no irritation against her for thus failing to turn him into a successful legatee.

‘In that case,’ said William decisively – for although he and Lavinia had hoped for a portion of the jewels, it was pleasing to think that Herbert and Mabel also had been disappointed – ‘in that case Mother will certainly wish to sell them. And quite right too. Why should she keep a lot of useless jewellery lying in the bank? In my opinion the jewels should fetch from five to seven thousand pounds, properly handled.’

‘But more important than the question of jewels or income,’ Herbert proceeded, ‘is the question of where Mother is to live. She cannot be left alone. In any case, she could not afford to keep on this house. It must be sold. Where, then, is she to go?’ Another glare. ‘Clearly, it is our duty to look after her. She must make her home among us.’ It was like a set speech.

All these old people, thought Edith, disposing of a still older person! Still, it seemed inevitable. Mother would parcel out her year: three months with Herbert and Mabel, three with Carrie and Roland, three with Charles, three with William and Lavinia – then where did she herself and Kay come in? Rising once more to the surface of her reflections, she launched one of her sudden and ill-chosen remarks, ‘But surely I ought to bear the brunt – I’ve always lived at home – I’m unmarried.’