Vita Sackville-West

How preposterous is it that Vita Sackville-West, the best-selling bisexual baroness who wrote over thirty-five books that made an ingenious mockery of twenties societal norms, should be remembered today merely as a smoocher of Virginia Woolf? The reductive canonization of her affair with Woolf has elbowed out a more luxurious, strange story: Vita loved several women with exceptional ardor; simultaneously adored her also-bisexual husband, Harold; ultimately came to prefer the company of flora over fauna of any gender; and committed herself to a life of prolific creation (written and planted) that redefined passion itself.

Take as a representative starting point the comically deranged splendor of Vita’s ancestry. Her grandfather Lionel, the third Baron Sackville, fell in love with Pepita, the notorious Andalusian ballerina, and by her fathered five illegitimate children. When Lionel became the British minister in Buenos Aires, he sent those children to live in French convents. Upon transferring to the British Legation in Washington, DC, he summoned his nineteen-year-old eldest daughter to serve as his diplomatic hostess. Vita’s mother charmed Washington senseless with her bad English and so-called gypsy blood, receiving alleged marriage proposals from the widowed President of the United States Chester A. Arthur, Pierpont Morgan, Rudyard Kipling, Auguste Rodin, and Henry Ford. Somehow, from among these suitors, she chose to marry her first cousin, another Lionel. She returned to England and gave birth to their only child, Vita Sackville-West, on March 9, 1892.

By the age of eighteen, Vita had written eight full-length novels and five plays. She describes her childhood self in a diary as “rough, and secret,” frequently punished for “wrestling with the hall-boy,” fondest of her pocketknife, and inspired to start writing at age twelve by Cyrano de Bergerac. Still, when she formally entered society at age eighteen (“four balls a week and luncheons every day”), she was seen as a refined beauty, and took after her mother in attracting various glossy admirers. First among the failed wooers stood Lord Henry Lascelles, Sixth Earl of Harewood and first cousin of Tommy Lascelles, everybody’s favorite right-hand mustache in the Netflix series The Crown (when Vita rejected Lascelles, he married the Princess Mary, sister of King George VI).

But Vita wasn’t dazzled by men of great heritages or homes. She grew up at Knole, the Sackville estate, built in 1455 on a thousand acres and said to contain fifty-two staircases. More saliently, she was already smitten: with Rosamund Grosvenor, “the neat little girl who came to play with me when Dada went to South Africa.” Vita’s son Nigel (more on Nigel later—I have the utmost respect for Nigel) learned of this affair and many others when, after Vita’s death, he opened a locked gladstone bag in her sitting room and discovered her sensational written confessions.

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Young Eudora Welty (courtesy The Eudora Welty Foundation)

In The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty introduces the idea of confluence—of two rivers merging, inexorably, magically, disturbingly. Fate gently takes the reins from Chance. We can rest, we can be held. And the life we thought was singular turns out, reassuringly, to be a strand in a larger pattern.

I became a young woman in the house where Welty spent six months as a young woman. We touched the same walls with our same searching fingers. We grew up shopping at the same grocery store—the Jitney 14—where also, I should mention, a thousand other people shopped; there is nothing sacred about a Jitney. We learned gardens from our mothers, who were always more skilled in dirt than we were; we trailed behind them, gathering blooms, starting our own plots of earth. We left home for college at the age of sixteen, we tried on the North for size. It didn’t fit. I imagine she looked back at the South with that same disturbed wonder that I did—missing it, accusing it, forgiving it. We started publishing in our midtwenties, and we began to migrate: around the world, between jobs, across stories.

You can want to become someone without fully understanding them. Welty was never my favorite author; she was too roundabout. In high school, I got lost in her sentences. Her Southernness felt too artful. Besides, she was notoriously single, one of the many maiden aunts of literature. She found herself in the tradition of women writers who pursued craft at the expense of family—or whose craft was repellent to suitors—or who believed art meant freedom, and freedom meant solitude. To a young girl who still believed in a soulmate-based romanticism, Welty’s aloneness felt damning.

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W. H. Auden.

W. H. Auden had rented variously inadequate apartments since arriving back in New York at the end of the summer of 1945, and had most recently been living with Chester Kallman in a warehouse building on Seventh Avenue, an especially unsatisfactory place that lacked both hot water and a functional front door. So when he and Kallman moved to 77 Saint Mark’s Place on the Lower East Side, in February 1954, it promised to be a significant improvement; and he was certainly very pleased with the place from the start—“my N.Y. nest,” he called it. Auden would stay there until his ill-fated departure for Oxford in 1972, making it his longest single habitation. From 1949 he summered in Europe—in Ischia until 1957, when he bought a small farmhouse in Kirchstetten in Austria, which delighted him: he devoted a sequence, “Thanksgiving for a Habitat,” in his collection About the House (1965), to a celebration of his domestic existence there. It was in these summerhouses that he tended to write poems: New York was largely for his distinct life as a “man of letters,” a label he applied to himself. “It is a sad fact about our culture,” he once wrote, “that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it”; but at the same time he prided himself on his professionalism as a reviewer, essayist, anthologist, and commentator, work that in turn often suggested subjects for poems; and that work principally happened on Saint Mark’s.

Freshly installed, he excitedly invited round his young friend Charles Miller (“Come! I’ll take you on a tour”):

The large first (entry) room with high ceiling had a green marbled fireplace flanked by built-in bookshelves, which also incorporated Wystan’s battered turntable with speaker equipment and his much-used collection of records and albums. A big shabby sofa and a swamped antique coffee table centered the cluttered room. I followed Wystan through an arch into a similar room at the front with another green marbled fireplace. This room was hardly furnished, except for built-in bookcases and Wystan’s small work table just touched by sunlight from the generous nineteenth-century windows. To the right of this room, as we faced Saint Mark’s Place, was a small room with its door to the stair hall nailed shut; the room had only a cot bed, on which Wystan slept, he said.

Just touched by sunlight, one imagines: as an undergraduate at Oxford, Auden had preferred to keep his curtains drawn at all times, and he seems to have adopted the same policy in America. When Stephen Spender had visited him in the forties he unwisely attempted to open the curtains and brought them crashing to the ground: “You idiot!” Auden scolded him, “why did you draw them? No one ever draws them. In any case there’s no daylight in New York.” Wystan’s succession of rooms gave his friend Margaret Gardiner “the sensation of brownish caverns, a brown that seemed to pervade everything, even the air itself.” Read More

Paulina Olowska, Crossword Puzzle with Lady in Black Coat, 2014

When I began to research the history of crosswords for my recent book on the subject, I was sort of shocked to discover that they weren’t invented until 1913. The puzzle seemed so deeply ingrained in our lives that I figured it must have been around for centuries—I envisioned the empress Livia in the famous garden room in her villa, serenely filling in her cruciverborum each morning­­. But in reality, the crossword is a recent invention, born out of desperation. Editor Arthur Wynne at the New York World needed something to fill space in the Christmas edition of his paper’s FUN supplement, so he took advantage of new technology that could print blank grids cheaply and created a diamond-shaped set of boxes, with clues to fill in the blanks, smack in the center of FUN. Nearly overnight, the “Word-Cross Puzzle” went from a space-filling ploy to the most popular feature of the page.

Still, the crossword didn’t arise from nowhere. Ever since we’ve had language, we’ve played games with words. Crosswords are the Punnett square of two long-standing strands of word puzzles: word squares, which demand visual logic to understand the puzzle but aren’t necessarily using deliberate deception; and riddles, which use wordplay to misdirect the solver but don’t necessarily have any kind of graphic component to work through.

WORD SQUARES

The direct precursor of the crossword grid is the word square, a special kind of acrostic puzzle in which the same words can be read across and down. The number of letters in the square is called its “order.” While 2-squares and 3-squares are easy to create, in English, by the time you reach order 6, you’re very likely to get stuck. An order 10 square is a holy grail for the logologists, that is, the wordplay experts.

The ancient Romans loved word puzzles, beginning with their city’s name: the inverse of ROMA, to the delight of all Latin lovers, is AMOR. The first known word square, the so-called Sator Square, was found in the ruins of Pompeii. The Sator Square (or the Rotas Square, depending on which way you read it; word order doesn’t matter in Latin) is a five-by-five, five-word Latin palindrome: SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS (“the farmer Arepo works a plow”).

Sator square, Oppède, France

The Sator Square is the “Kilroy Was Here” of the Roman Empire, scrawled from Rome to Corinium (in modern England) to Dura-Europos (in modern Syria). It’s unclear why this meme was such a thing. “Arepo” is a hapax legomenon, meaning that the Sator Square is the only place it shows up in the entire corpus of Latin literature—the best working theory is that it’s a proper name invented to make the square work.

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© Olga Demchishina / Adobe Stock.

How tempting to describe Wallis Wilde-Menozzi’s memoir Mother Tongue as a page-turner, as it surely was for me more than twenty years ago. But really, it’s a page-pauser. The instantly trustworthy voice invites the reader to slow into its fine focus, its acute parallels and oppositions, the deft leaps from the frustrations of a Renaissance abbess commissioning Correggio to paint her room in Parma, say, to the homely act of buying bread at the corner store in the same city almost five hundred years later. Much underlining, notes and exclamations crammed in the margins. I’ve been in conversation with this book for many years.

And now, yet again, with the undertow of the pandemic clutching Italy in its fierce grip, the book speaks. Wilde-Menozzi and her husband are “hunkered” (the new verb form of our lives) in Parma, where she continues to take her keen-eyed notes. In an email this week, she reports that the caskets wait in long lines and the nurses weep because they can’t find words to give to those who are frightened.

The signal of a reliable reporter—journalist, memoirist, poet, historian—is the capacity to see oppositions and contradictions with unblinking acceptance: this is reality. Finally, she writes: “All in all, though, spring is unstoppable—after all, it, as well as the virus, is part of nature’s ways. Italy is doing a good job, with many people making sacrifices and being selfless.”

Just now, in the midst of the growing pandemic, my latest consideration of her book underscores its uncanny immediacy. My enthralled first reading probably had something to do with its moment in modern literary history. Mother Tongue appeared in the early wave of personally voiced books in which the narrator is not a heroine, though she’s the protagonist, the seeking soul. This was nonfiction (wasn’t it?), but also lyric, essayistic, inquiring, thoughtful prose. Yet not dowdy “belles lettres.” Research underlay some of it, but it wasn’t scholarly—just reliable. There was even stealth poetry. A mind was revealing itself—to itself. And I, the reader, got to eavesdrop. Read More

Alexander the Great, detail of an ancient Roman floor mosaic from the House of the Faun in Pompeii

All right, this particular canard has had all its feathers pulled off many times. I claim no originality. People explain it over and over on blogs. Every twenty seconds, somebody asks about it, and the explainers go to work.

The “quote” goes like this:

And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.

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