Published in 1919, the year of my late mother's birth, this is by Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962).

I didn't know much about her. In 1992, I note in my diary a lovely passage that I think comes from one of her letters to Virginia Woolf: "... It is necessary to write if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? for the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone..."

So true...

And in 1995, I read The Edwardians (published in 1930, but set in 1905). This is a novel, but it documents the era wonderfully (I still remember being utterly horrified at the description of the layers and layers of clothing women were expected to wear...).

Otherwise, nada.

Heritage is Sackville-West's first novel. Which probably explains a lot. Because although it keeps your attention, and serves up some beautiful passages, it's also slightly weird.



There are three parts.

In the first, we have a narrator (never named), who recounts a series of conversations with a man called Christopher Malory, while both are trying to learn Italian in the Apennine village of Sampiero. Malory, a man of leisure with a private income, decided at one point to try his hand at agriculture, and went to stay on a farm in Kent, run by the Pennistan family. He definitely romanticizes the "country people", but he loves his work and his environment.

Yet there was something, he tells the narrator, that was slightly amiss. And sure enough, he eventually becomes aware of a streak of Spanish heritage in this wholesome English family. It's embodied in the ancient, chestnut-roasting great-grandmother (Concha), whose lineage is not only Spanish, but also gypsy. She belongs, as the long-ago Pennistan who fell in love with her discovers, in "a society of Bohemians -- bull fighters, mountebanks, acrobats, hunchbacks, thieves, fortune tellers, all the riff-raff of the gipsy quarter".

Malory recounts family memories of the (stereotypically) fiery streak that Concha brought to her parenting: "The children had an uneasy time of it, blows and kisses distributed alternately between them, now hugged to their mother’s breast, now sent reeling across the room.... She had been gay, it seemed, that ancient woman, deliciously gay, light-hearted, generous, full of song, but of sudden and uncertain temper."

It's not heritage, however, if you don't pass it on, and the way this works is nothing if not arbitrary. Most of the family are solidly English, but the wild streak has come out in two of Concha's descendants: Ruth, the young woman with whom Malory falls in love (without realizing it); and Rawdon, her cousin, whom she eventually marries, even though the two are embroiled in the archetypal love-hate relationship.

Listening to this recital of Malory's, the narrator is a bit nonplussed. He can't understand the strange detachment with which his interlocutor regards the family ("you held a microscope over their emotions..."); he's sceptical when Malory declares he was always conscious of Ruth, but was not in love with her; and he divines Ruth's feelings for Malory where the man himself is completely oblivious.

What Malory does want to do, though, is get her away from Rawdon, and (to her complete bewilderment) he tries to pair her off with an able young thatcher from the village. She accepts. But fate will not be defied, and that inner fire will out... She elopes with Rawdon: "Who knows what southern blood, what ancient blood, what tribal blood, had stirred in her from slumber? what cry of the unknown, unseen wild had drawn her towards a mate of her own calibre?" To modern ears, of course, this is all hopelessly essentialist. But anyway...


Vita Sackville-West

In the second part, there are a couple of letters from Malory (full of his usual destiny-filled stuff), but here the narrator takes centre-stage. Injured in WWI, which broke out after he left his Italian village, he decides that he will do his recuperating on the Pennistans' farm. He is astonished by Ruth's beauty, and thinks what a fool Malory has been.

Then Rawdon returns from the war. He's not at all a reformed character, and is often drunk and violent. At one point, Ruth runs back to her parents. Rawdon comes after her, and she fires a pistol at him. She misses, and they go home together. No doubt Malory would say this was fate... Concha finally dies. And the narrator goes away again.

When Part III opens, 10 years have passed, and this section is almost entirely made up of a long, long, long letter from Malory. (You see why I say this is a very strange structure?)

Malory explains how he returned to Kent after the war, and -- quite out of the blue -- told Ruth she must come away with him... She refused. Malory still feels there's something powerful and mysterious that unites her and Rawdon, despite everything.

He now knows, however, what an idiot he has been in not recognizing his own feelings -- or hers. Distraught and hopeless, he flees. First back to Sampiero. Then to Central Africa for a while. And finally to a bit of desert near Smyrna, where a chance acquaintance, Angus MacPherson, is busy excavating. He helps out, and sets about constructing a house and garden that are as near as possible to the ones Ruth inhabits in Kent. He even writes to her to ask her to send him seeds. Which she does...


Many of the descriptions are very evocative, particularly those of Kent: "A mist lay over the gentle hills, as the bloom lies on a grape; a great stillness sank over the meadows, and that mellow melancholy of the English autumn floated towards me on the wings of the evening..." The photo depicts a Manx autumn, as opposed to an English one, but still...

Malory's isolated life goes on for 10 years until MacPherson catches cholera and dies. At which point Malory is forced to return to London to notify his employer's estranged wife. While staying at his club, he is visited (highly coincidentally) by Ruth. She eventually tells him that Rawdon has left her. That tough, fearless, heedless man has become afraid of something that only he sees. We don't know exactly what it is; we can only speculate. The bottom line: Ruth is free.

Malory attempts to find explanations for the past: "Ruth loved me -- she has told me so, and I know, without argument, that she is speaking the truth -- yet she found pleasure in the love of another man, and even a certain grim pleasure in his ill-treatment of her. Or should I reverse my order, finding more marvel in her humility under his caresses than under his blows? What am I to believe? that she is cursed with a dual nature, the one coarse and unbridled, the other delicate, conventional, practical, motherly, refined? Have I hit the nail on the head? And is it, can it be, the result of the separate, antagonistic strains in her blood, the southern and the northern legacy? Did she love Westmacott with the one, and me with the other?"

Any which way, they decide to stay together.

The closing paragraph is rather beautiful: "We stood in the warm, quiet kitchen, where all things glowed as in the splendour of a mellow sunset: the crimson flowers, the sinking fire, the rounded copper of utensils, the tiled floor rosy as a pippin. In the distance I heard the lowing of cattle, rich and melodious as the tones within the room. I saw and heard these English things, but, as a man who, looking into a mirror, beholds his own expected image in an unexpected setting, I had a sudden vision of ourselves, standing side by side on the deck of a ship that, to the music of many oars, glided majestically towards the land. We were in a broad gulf, fairer and more fruitful than the Gulf of Smyrna. The water lay serenely around us, heaving slightly, but unbroken by the passage of our vessel, and the voices of the rowers on the lower deck rose up in a cadenced volume of song as we came slowly into port."



***

This strange structure -- with its series of distancing techniques that hold the reader very much at arms' length -- leaves us feeling we've not quite been made privy to what is really going on.

Yes, there's lots about fate, and there's lots about what we would now call genetics. By the end we can make more sense of the narrator's words, right at the beginning, about the absurdity of the idea that we somehow hold the levers of control: "Our conceit, I see it now, was absurd. We were dealing with a force capricious, incalculable, surprising, a force that lurked at the roots of nature, baffling alike the onlooker and the subject whose vagaries it prompted... Little of any moment occurs in my story, yet behind it all I am aware of tremendous forces at work, which none have rightly understood, neither the actors nor the onlookers."

But there's SOMETHING, you feel, that you're not being told.

So you dig away a little further. And the first thing you discover is that the whole business about the exotic ancestor is actually Sackville-West's own story. I'll quote from the account by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight: "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..."



So that's one thing. The other biographical element squirrelled away in the text is Sackville-West's relationship with Violet Trefusis (nee Kepple). This angle is presented very cogently by Mary Irene Edwards, and it's just a pity that I can't access her article in its entirety.

There's a curious parallel existence, Edwards argues, between Heritage and Sackville-West's journal (written from the period July 1920 to March 1921, but focusing on the summer of 1918, when Heritage was being written). The diary doesn't mention the novel, and the novel doesn't mention Violet. Not overtly, anyway: "While the diary directly confesses that which is hidden and disguised in the novel, the two works share a common purpose: to reveal the significance of the affair and to explain its genesis. In addition to making manifest the hidden subject of Heritage, Sackville-West's diary also retrospectively illumines the novel's structure."

In 1918, Sackville-West was 26; she had been married for over four years to Harold Nicolson, a man she describes as "a sunny harbour"; they had two young sons. And she tries to rationalize her feelings for Trefusis precisely by drawing on the idea of "duality": "I advance, therefore," writes Sackville-West, "the perfectly accepted theory that cases of dual personality do exist, in which the feminine and masculine elements alternately predominate." So here is Ruth's problem all over again: She is two things at once -- just like her creator.

The gypsy motif also reflects this conflict. In the era when Sackville-West was writing, same-sex relationships could result in social marginalization. In the work of Sackville-West, Trefusis, and Virginia Woolf, "the gypsy, who both chooses to remain marginal and is consigned to that position, suggests an ambiguity about the desirability of seeking escape and exile versus the possibility of being consigned to it". For women writers trying to articulate the complexities of same-sex attraction, "various perceptions of gypsy life, dress, behavior, and sexuality came together to construct the gypsy as a figure rich in potential".

As a novel per se, I don't think Heritage works that well. All that scaffolding does indeed distance the reader. But once you're privy to the dilemmas that gave rise to it, the whole thing becomes much more interesting.

Definitely a writer who would repay revisiting.