American nights entertainment
prefer to sympathise with the amusement of the ultimate architect on
making the discovery that by a judicious juggling with his additions he
could bring courts, stairs and rooms up to that satisfactory total.”
ii
In 1825 the duchess Arabella Diana died and her estate devolved upon
her two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth. Elizabeth, as has been told,
became the wife of Lord de la Warr. Dying in 1870 she left Buckhurst
to her elder sons and Knole to her younger sons, one of whom was Miss
Sackville-West’s grandfather. He was eighty and she perhaps eight,
and as he shared “the family failing of unsociability” it fell to the
child’s lot to show the house to visitors. In this, as in more natural
ways, she became highly familiar with Knole and from her earliest years
must have loved the place. On receipt of a telegram that people were
coming, Grandpapa would take the next train for London, “returning
in the evening when the coast was clear.” The Cartoon Gallery, the
Leicester Gallery, the Brown Gallery; Lady Betty Germaine’s bedchamber;
the three principal bedrooms, the Spangled Room, the Venetian
Ambassador’s and the King’s chamber, “the only vulgar room in the
house” with furniture made entirely in silver and articles of silver,
“even to a little eye-bath”--the procession of the days and years was
not more certain than the procession of the curious, the inquisitive
and the wonder-struck through these. You will fashion your own picture
of the daughter of the Sackvilles standing before the portrait of
Lady Margaret Sackville (over the fireplace in Lady Betty Germaine’s
sitting room) and endeavouring, quite vainly, to do her own hair in the
elaborate manner of young Lady Margaret’s. Or, it may be, she had been
naughty that day, and had hid herself inside the pulpit of the Chapel
of the Archbishops, where, in spite of private steps leading out of her
bedroom straight into the Family Pew, “they never found me.” Grandpapa
was “a queer and silent old man,” as Miss Sackville-West remembers him.
“He knew nothing whatever about the works of art in the house; he spent
hours gazing at the flowers, followed about the garden by two grave
demoiselle cranes.... He and I, who so often shared the house alone
between us, were companions in a shy and undemonstrative way. Although
he had nothing to say to his unfortunate guests, he could understand
a child.... When we were at Knole alone together I used to go down to
his sitting-room in the evening to play draughts with him--and never
knew whether I played to please him, or he played to please me--and
sometimes, very rarely, he told me stories of when he was a small boy,
and played with the rocking-horse, and of the journeys by coach with
his father and mother from Buckhurst to Knole or from Knole to London;
of their taking the silver with them under the seat; of their having
outriders with pistols; and of his father and mother never addressing
each other, in their children’s presence, as anything but ‘my Lord’ and
‘my Lady.’ I clasped my knees and stared at him when he told me these
stories of an age which already seemed so remote, and his pale blue
eyes gazed away into the past, and suddenly his shyness would return to
him and the clock in the corner would begin to wheeze in preparation to
striking the hour, and he would say that it was time for me to go to
bed....”
iii
At the age of thirteen Miss Sackville-West wrote “an enormous novel”
about the figure of Edward Sackville, fourth Earl of Dorset, who seemed
to her the embodiment of Cavalier romance. And perhaps he was. “He had
the advantage of starting with the Vandyck portrait in the hall, the
flame-coloured doublet, the blue Garter, the characteristic swaggering
attitude, the sword, the love-locks, the key of office painted dangling
from his hip and the actual key dangling on a ribbon from the frame of
the picture.” The dashing career of this follower of King Charles, who
fought a duel with Lord Bruce and whose younger son was murdered by the
Roundheads, became “a source of rich romance to a youthful imagination
nourished on _Cyrano_ and _The Three Musketeers_.” The half-grown
girl re-examined certain old nail-studded trunks in the attics, mute
witnesses to Cromwellian violence, some of them curved to fit the roof
of a barouche. “The battered trunks were stacked near the entrance to
the hiding-place, which, without the smallest justification save an
old candlestick and a rope-ladder found therein, I peopled with the
fugitive figures of priests and Royalists. I peeped into the trunks:
they contained only a dusty jumble of broken ironwork, some old books,
some bits of hairy plaster fallen from the ceiling, some numbers of
Punch for 1850. Nevertheless, there were the gaping holes where the
locks had been prised off the trunks, and the lid forced back upon
the hinges by an impatient hand. Down in the Poets’ Parlour, where I
lunched with my grandfather, taciturn unless he happened to crack one
of his little stock-in-trade of jokes, Cromwell’s soldiers had held
their Court of Sequestration. The Guard Room was empty of arms or
armour, save for a few pikes and halberds, because Cromwell’s soldiers
had taken all the armour away. The past mingled with the present in
constant reminder; and out in the summer-house, after luncheon, with
the bees blundering among the flowers of the Sunk Garden and the
dragon-flies flashing over the pond, I returned to the immense ledger
in which I was writing my novel, while Grandpapa retired to his little
sitting-room and whittled paper-knives from the lids of cigar-boxes,
and thought about--Heaven knows what _he_ thought about.”
iv
Miss Sackville-West is writing of Knole, of course, in her long story
called _The Heir_. The manor of Blackboys with its peacocks is not
Knole; I suppose no one makes the mistake of literal identification
of people and places in fiction; at least, none should do so. What is
truly identifiable is never anything tangible at all; it is merely
an emotion. When we read _The Heir_, subtitled “A Love Story,” and
acquaint ourselves in a leisurely sufficience with the fellow Chase we
should be stupid indeed if we grasped at the substance and neglected
the shadow. It is shadow and its correspondent sunlight for which,
after all, mankind lives a life wherein the things of substance are the
final unreality....
But her first book, which was brought to the attention of the American
publisher by Hugh Walpole, was a novel called _Heritage_, an unusual
story of young lovers. The breath of distinction upon the tale more
than redeemed its faults of construction, of which, perhaps, after all,
the most serious was merely the device of a letter immensely longer
than any epistle probable to be written. Then, in point of publication,
at least, came _The Dragon in Shallow Waters_, also a novel. Some two
years elapsed before the appearance of her third novel, _Challenge_, a
piece of work of such a character as to demand our earnest scrutiny.
_Challenge_ is being followed by _Grey Wethers_ and _The Heir_.
I have been speaking of American publication; in England Miss
Sackville-West first came to notice as a poet. Her _Poems of West and
East_ was followed by another collection called _Orchard and Vineyard_.
Her work in verse exhibited austerity of expression joined to an
emotional and descriptive power difficult to appraise. Although it may
be, as has been said, that the chief use of poetry, written when one is
young, is to produce a finer prose when one is older.
Of _The Heir_ it is best to say little since a few betraying words
can so easily spoil its secret for the reader. In the same volume
appear _The Christmas Party_, _Patience_, _Her Son_ and _The Parrot_,
a vignette dedicated to “H. G. N.” All the qualities present in _The
Heir_ may be found in the other tales, so varyingly shorter--delicacy,
precision, dramatic power and a perception of beauty translated almost
without the use of a single emotional word. In _The Christmas Party_ we
have the deferred revenge of a woman, a theatrical costumer, upon her
strait-minded family; _Patience_ is an elderly man’s recollection, in
perfectly domesticated surroundings, of his youthful affair; _Her Son_
is the inevitable cruelty inflicted upon a mother by the passage of the
years; the story of _The Parrot_ points to the only escape from the ...
cage.
The “H. G. N.” of its dedication is the Honourable Harold G. Nicolson.
Except as an author, the lady of Knole is no longer Victoria
Sackville-West but the Honourable Mrs. Harold G. Nicolson.
v
_Challenge_, a novel that may instructively be compared with Joseph
Conrad’s _Nostromo_, had the curious fortune to be published first in
America and--what is more remarkable--only in America. It might seem
altogether extraordinary that one of the most noteworthy novels by
an Englishwoman in years should not only not be published first in
England but should not be published there at all. It might seem very
extraordinary; and it is. The circumstances were perhaps without a
precedent and, it may be hoped, will be without a duplication. In
1920 an English publisher had accepted _Challenge_ and prepared it for
issuance. That is to say, type had been set, plates had been cast,
the sheets of the novel had been printed, folded and sewed. Nothing
remained but to encase them in cloth--a matter of a week, usually--when
the book would be ready to go on sale. It was the eleventh hour; 11.59
to be precise. Then fate intervened.
It transpired (or was allowed to transpire) that Miss Sackville-West
had written her novel about an actual family, portraying that family in
general and possibly in particular. The family was part of her own, or
shall we say, connected with her own; and it was not without influence.
This influence was immediately exerted to secure the suppression of
_Challenge_. How far the influence succeeded, by virtue of its own
force and considerations, and how far it was aided by the peculiarity
of the English libel law, which recognises technical libel, I am
unable to say; but succeed it did. _Challenge_ remained unbound and
the English house either put it down as a loss or, with a sanguineness
born of much publishing experience, carried it in its inventory. There
were all those folded and sewed sheets constituting a very fair-sized
edition, as English editions go, packed away in some sufficiently dry
place. At Knole and in Cornwall and it may be in other places Miss
Sackville-West continued writing.
Probably the only challenge to the suppressors of the novel in England
lay in the single figurative word of the title. Miss Sackville-West
could be said to be writing of the actual family only in the same
sense that we can say, in alluding to the manor of Blackboys in _The
Heir_, that she writes of Knole. Some South American republic, indeed,
any South American republic, would be equally justified in beginning
suit for libel against Conrad for the picture of Costaguana in
_Nostromo_--could a court be discovered in which such a suit would be
justiciable? It is charitable to suppose that the suppressors beheld
themselves mirrored in the pages of _Challenge_ because they were
victims of a narcism complex. However, the interesting disabilities
of these people were of no serious importance on this side of the
Atlantic; Miss Sackville-West had done no work of such importance
as the unborn _Challenge_; and after all those unbound sheets had
lain untouched for two years or longer the day came when an American
publisher took the whole lot, together with the plates to enable him to
print more, and _Challenge_ saw the light in the United States early in
1923.
It is still unpublishable in England and seems destined indefinitely to