All Passion Spent Book

Geoffrey Scott, one of the many people who fell in love with Vita Sackville-West over the course of her life, said that there was an "indefinable something" about her writing that raised above what it otherwise might have been.

Although he turned out to be a little crazy (that's a whole other story), I can't help but think that he was right about that. I certainly felt that way about All Passion Spent.

Many people are not able to resist the powerful temptation to compare this work to Mrs. Dalloway. It is understandable- both books are about an older upper class women looking back over her life, and the two authors had a love affair that began about the time Mrs. Dalloway was published, and essentially ended about the time Passion came out- the plots and themes of the two books even make for a really fitting metaphor about their relationship and the different conclusions that can come out of looking back and taking stock. I was tempted by that road myself.

But as the story went on, I really decided it would be a huge disservice to simply dismiss it as a lesser Dalloway. It isn't a lesser anything, and Sackville-West isn't indebted to anyone or anything but her own experiences for the story on the page.

The closest I can come to defining the appeal of Vita's writing (or what I've read of it so far) is that it speaks to me in a voice I can easily understand, a voice I feel I've heard inside my own head, describing my own feelings- but without ever descending to the middle-brow commonplaces found in so much domestic focused literature. Put it better, she says things how I would like to have said them at the time- observing obvious things it took me years to figure out how to articulate. Her truths may be easily recognized, but they are also very poetic. One of my favorite passages describes the main character, Lady Slane, driving through India with her Viceroy husband, who is describing to her the various social problems she is to address with the ladies she's about to meet. While he's doing this, she is watching some butterflies outside the window and thinking instead about:

"...moving into a cloud of butterflies which were her own irreverent, irrelevant thoughts, darting and dancing, but altering the pace of the progresion not by one tittle; never brushing the carriage with their wings; flickering always; and evading; sometimes rushing on ahead, but returning again to tease and to show off, having an independent and lovely life"

… until she is recalled to her undoubtedly important duties by her husband and has to leave her ephermeral world behind. It's touching to read this knowing that Vita must have been writing this partially to her husband Harold, who worked for the Foreign Office- perhaps an explanation as to why she could never simply follow him around the world going to tea with other diplomats' wives. He eventually quit the diplomatic service for her, actually. Had he stayed, this could have been her future- she was always afraid of any part of her life swallowing her up, especially her marriage. This is the book where she tells you why.

Lady Slane is in her late eighties. Her husband has just died, her children are elderly themselves, and there are scores of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Lord Slane was a greatly respected public figure, she was considered the perfect wife. She never really got a story of her own, having married so young- when her husband dies, her children try to go on making decisions for her, and she suddenly informs them, essentially, that she is not the person that they've taken her for their entire lives. No, thank you, she is going to live out her last years exactly as she pleases, and she is going to arrange it entirely for herself.

They took her for dumb, you see, because she was so often silent, so subservient to their father's every whim. Silly Mother, they said, can't handle anything very real. As Lady Slane herself thinks many times throughout the story, no one ever asked her what she thought, or thought that she might have an entirely different self on the inside than the one she was obliged to present to the world. There's a wonderful passage about the house she acquires to live in, speaking of the need for privacy in order to maintain any part of one's self in a world that wants to take so much from you:

"it was a very private thing, a house, private with a privacy irrespective of bolts and bars. And if this superstition seemed irrational, one might reply that man himself was but a collection of atoms, even as a house was but a collection of bricks, yet man laid claim to a soul, to a spirit, to a power of recording and perception."

I really loved VSW's excellent treatment of the idea that people have many selves, many of which are private, some of which are easily misunderstood when only partially seen in the real world, or mistakenly slipped out in conversation. For instance: I adored the character of Edith, the youngest daughter of the family. She is given the first chapter, and we see how perceptive she is, what a delightful perspective she has on life. However, she can only get things out of her mouth "sideways," voicing thoughts out loud without the accompanying train of thought that got her there- so she's only seen as rude, stupid, or unfeeling. It's a fascinating and a terribly sad idea that it is two worlds meeting that were never meant to is what gets you in trouble- that's the only way to keep it intact. Lady Slane also expresses this idea beautifully. She's talking about the idea that love or relationships are indeed worthwhile and often make up for individual expression, and yet:

"Who was she, the "I" that had loved? And Henry, who and what was he?... Hidden away under the symbol of their coporeality, both in him and in her, doubtless lurked something which was themselves, but that self was hard to get at; obscured by the too familiar trappings of voice, name, appearance, occupation, circumstance, even the fleeting perception of self became blunted or confused. And there were many selves."

Do you see what I mean about taking a fairly basic truth and making it seem fresh again?- and yet, not hiding it behind any real tricks or disguising it behind images. She says what she means, but with such a keen observation that it becomes more than every day. I mean, what a wonderful thought the above is! It might boil down to what we've all heard about loving yourself first before loving anyone else, but there's something more there- that "indefinable something."

This is without a doubt a feminist novel- an argument for the voices and lives of women being allowed to matter, not being expected to give way to men. But I think it's also a general argument for anyone being allowed to make their own choice- not the choice dictated to them by the thousand little circumstances of class, gender, family, which parties one attended. It isn't just Lady Slane who has made compromises, been affected by her life: we see her recluse possible other life love and the choices he made, her landlord, her agent.

By the by, speaking of other people- It really is a novel populated by great characters. Edith, Genoux the maid, (oh, ps, if you don't speak French- there are many lines of untranslated French spoken by this character- you can get by without it, but just so you know), the agent, her sons, her horrid daughter Carrie- they're all recognizable and living in some way. I will say here that one of the things that might bother some people about the novel is its concentration on "rich, white lady problems: Vita herself brings that up when Lady Slane hears Genoux's story, for the first time in the sixty years she's been with the woman- she never asked! In 1930, it was hard not to be conscious that there were much bigger problems with the world. I kind of almost wish she hadn't brought it up, though. Which sounds awful, but- she only brings it up at the very end, and you can tell that it's in sort of a guilty way, like someone had just said to her, "I wish I had had these problems!" and she felt bad. I wish she had either brought it up much earlier to weave it into her tale or left it out entirely so we could journey with Lady Slane- and not worry that we really should be reading someone else's story. I don't know. That bothered me.

It is a regretful novel to a certain extent, and perhaps even a novel that could be taken to be making an argument for a withdrawl from life- Lady Slane does spend an awful lot of time regretting the time and self that other people took from her over the course of her life, with not much acknowledgement of the fact that she's lived what many other people would consider to be a very full life in many respects. VSW's answer to that is this:

"and she thought, if only I were young once more, I would stand for all that was calm and contemplative, opposed to the active, the scheming the striving the false- yes, the false, she exclaimed… and then trying to correct herself, she wondered whether this were not merely a negative creed, a negation of life, perhaps even a confession of insufficient vitality; and came to the conclusion that it was not so for in contemplation (and also in the pursuit of the one chosen avocation which she had had to renounce) she could pierce a to a happier life than her children who reckoned things by their results and activities"

I also struggle with whether I think this is merely a negative creed, and how much one could miss out on following these ideas- but honestly I think VSW struggled with this herself. As she wrote this book she herself was falling in love again and embarking on yet another ill-advised torrid affair: striving, active, needing, desiring. What is worth more? Difficult to say.

But either way, this novel is about a woman who ultimately does get the chance to come back to herself before the end, which she does in a splendid and engaging fashion. I don't know about you, but I think that is a triumphant, hopeful ending.

Look, I'm not saying this novel is genius or anything, it certainly has its problems, the magic is certainly quieter than the great novels of this era, and I'll even admit that there's a certain amount of "read this at the right time" in my opinion of it. But it is a novel will speak to many people for many different reasons, and for that, it deserves to be more widely read than it is now.