A Note of Explanation Read online




  First published in the United States of America in 2018 by Chronicle Books LLC.

  Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Royal Collection Trust.

  Royal Collection Trust /© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018

  Text copyright © 2018 by The Beneficiaries of the Estate of Vita Sackville-West.

  Illustrations copyright © 2018 by Kate Baylay.

  Afterword by Matthew Dennison, copyright © Royal Collection Trust.

  The right of Vita Sackville-West to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1-4521-7004-6 (epub, mobi)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

  ISBN: 978-1-4521-6996-5 (hc)

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  Contents

  A Note of Explanation 4

  AFTERWORD 44

  Once upon a time there was a doll’s house that belonged to a Queen . . .

  . . . a doll’s house so marvellously made that from far and near people came to look at it, and wished that, like Alice, they could discover a cake or a bottle, so that they might eat or drink, and grow small enough to walk up the blue and white marble staircase, seat themselves on the throne, pass into the painted bedroom, and bathe themselves in the malachite bath whose silver taps ran hot or cold water at will.

  But because they lived in London, and not down a rabbit-hole, and had paid a shilling to look into the doll’s house, and must pass on to allow other people in the queue their turn, they were not able to do any of these enchanting things.

  Moreover, peer into the house as they might in consideration of their shilling, being greedy of every second allotted to them, there were some things which they could never see in the house, which nobody had ever seen, or would ever see, not even the maker of the house, although he wore big spectacles, nor even the Queen herself, even when she had her crown on, nor even the royal children, though everybody knows that children see a great deal which is hidden from grown-ups.

  There was, for instance, the doll’s-house ghost, because naturally the doll’s house was haunted, being a completely appointed house, and all really nice houses being haunted, thick and variously, if only by the vows of love that have been exchanged there (and where they survive unbroken), or by the songs that have been sung there out of a happy heart.

  Perhaps it is not fair to call the doll’s-house ghost a ghost, for that implies that she was dead, and, far from being dead, there was never a more lively or inquisitive spirit or one who prided herself more on being up to date.

  She had, in fact, that particular genius for being in the right place and in the right company at the right moment which under other circumstances would have made of her a conspicuous social success.

  She was fond of boasting, for instance, that it had been she who had encouraged Jack to set his foot upon the first rung of the Beanstalk and that she had waved Cinderella off to her ball . . .

  . . . that one of her most treasured possessions, worn as a locket, was the pea which had given the Princess such a sleepless night, that she had been present when the Prince kissed the Sleeping Beauty, and even—though this was an episode she did not much care to dwell upon—that she had witnessed the death of Bluebeard’s first wife.

  So naturally, with this record behind her, it was only to be expected that she should arrive in London in 1924 to establish herself in the doll’s house that had been built for the Queen of England.

  I ought, perhaps, to say a word as to her appearance at this date. She prided herself— it was only in keeping with the rest of her principles—on following the fashion of the country and the day; thus, when she had gone to lend an ear to Scheherazade (whom she thought long-winded and a bore), she had affected the yashmak, which she thought very becoming, and abandoned with regret.

  When she was staying with the Marquis of Carabas she had powdered her hair, worn a riding-habit and a tricorne, and had reddened the heels of her shoes; and on her flying visit to China to hear the Emperor’s famous Nightingale, which everybody was talking about, she had accommodated herself to the fashions prevalent among the Chinese women, but although she appreciated their silks and their embroideries, she did not care for their style of hair-dressing, and was relieved when the Nightingale was banished from the empire in favour of the new artificial bird, and she was able to return to Europe.

  Now in England, in the twenties of the twentieth century, she was in two minds as to whether she should or should not bob her hair, but the work of a painter named John (whom she found represented in one of the passages of the doll’s house) decided her, and she found herself greatly delighted by the brilliant jerseys and short skirts with which she provided herself for daytime wear, and by her own dark little clubbed head, which gave her a boyish, page-like appearance unfamiliar to her since the ten days she had once spent in listening to the stories of Boccaccio and his friends in a villa above Florence, way back (this was one of her new expressions) in the fourteenth century.

  Established in the doll’s house, she amused herself by sleeping every night in a different bedroom; indeed, there was no end to her amusements, for she found in the doll’s house a great many things she had never seen before and whose use she was obliged to discover for herself.

  Needless to say, there were at first a few disasters. There was the day when, fully dressed, she brought the shower-bath about her ears; and there was the day when, going up in the lift, she accidentally touched the “stop” button, and remained stuck between two floors for the rest of the afternoon. But such minor inconveniences were as nothing beside the pleasure which these mechanical contrivances brought her.

  It must be remembered that all modern inventions were new to her, for she had dallied much in the past, and electric light, a hot-water system, a kitchen range, and a passenger lift were things which caused her to compare Aladdin’s palace most unfavourably with the doll’s house.

  But there was one result of her investigations which has hitherto sorely perplexed the guardians of the doll’s house.

  Every morning on going to take off the coverings and unlock the front, they have found the lights turned on, the baths full, the beds disarranged, the blinds raised where they should have been lowered, the lift upstairs when they were quite sure they had left it on the ground floor overnight, the books pulled out of the shelves, and even on one occasion they found in the dining-room the remains of a meal (for two) and the little silver platters scattered dirty all over the dining-room table.

  At last they bethought themselves to ask the maker of the house whether he could furnish any explanation, for he was well known for his love of a joke. But though he came and looked at the house in a puzzled way through his biggest pair of spectacles, he finally said no, this was certainly not a joke of his providing.

  But now, of course, if anybody cares to ruin his eyesight by reading the books in the library, the matter will once and for all be made quite clear, and it is to be hoped that the authorities will cope with this slight difficulty by the simple expedient of supplying a housemaid, and the eni
gma will once and for all be at an

  END.

  AFTERWORD

  The story Vita Sackville-West wrote for the library of Queen Mary’s Dollhouse, published here for the first time, is a jeu d’esprit. Vita was not a humorist, nor was she much given to whimsy, but her teasing children’s tale of a boastful, “lively . . . inquisitive spirit,” whose “dark little clubbed head,” like Vita’s, “gave her a boyish, page-like appearance,” is essentially a joke. As such it is unique among Vita’s fiction.

  Vita believed in what she described in her novella Seducers in Ecuador, written shortly after A Note of Explanation, as “individual fantasy.” In her writing as well as her private life, consciously or unconsciously, she was a committed fantasist. Dramatic self-inventions were her literary stock-in-trade: fictional heroines whose dilemmas mirrored her own; heroes who achieved the outcomes to which Vita aspired but from which she felt herself excluded on account of her gender—the inheritance of a great aristocratic house and title and the love of a beautiful woman. Within these fantasies were seldom grounds for levity.

  In A Note of Explanation, however, Vita is in playful mood. In the polite confines of the royal dollhouse, her ghost-who-is-not-a-ghost is unrepentantly anarchic. Like Vita, who was fascinated throughout her life by her own family history—that of the Sackvilles of Knole in Kent—her unnamed heroine “had dallied much in the past” and is a stranger to current shibboleths and innovations; like Vita, her behavior appears to suggest an assumption of domestic staff on hand to right her messiness. She is drawn to the exotic and luxurious, like the well-traveled, wealthy Vita; like Vita she enjoys dressing up, striking attitudes, play-acting.

  All Vita’s writing included autobiographical elements. Despite its whimsical premise, A Note of Explanation is no exception. Vita’s heroine visits the legendary storyteller Scheherazade. The real Vita, by then married to diplomat Harold Nicolson, had attended a matinee of Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite Scheherazade on October 11, 1918. Afterward, dressed as a soldier and calling herself Julian, she ran away to Kent with her lover Violet Keppel, the beginning of her double life as respectable wife and faithless amorist. In a villa above Florence, the spirit “listen[s] to the stories of Boccaccio and his friends,” like Vita in the hills above Ravenna in the autumn of 1921, lying in the woods with another lover, Dorothy Wellesley. Among the spirit’s treasures is the pea that caused such trouble to the Princess in the fairy tale. Coquettishly, Vita later wrote to Virginia Woolf, “My bed is at least nine feet wide, and I feel like the Princess and the Pea—only there is no Pea.” Vita imagines the dollhouse as “haunted . . . by the vows of love that have been exchanged there.” She would always regard houses as repositories of the sensations of former occupants—and she was always, always, a romantic.

  The library of Queen Mary’s Dollhouse

  First conceived in 1921, Queen Mary’s Dollhouse was the brainchild of Princess Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein, a first cousin of the Queen’s husband,George V. Vita’s inclusion among the 171 authors to whom the Princess wrote requesting a special contribution for the dollhouse library is proof of the stature she had attained early in her career. By 1923, aged thirty-one, Vita had published in the space of six years three novels, a novella, two volumes of poetry, and two nonfiction titles based on her family history: Knole and the Sackvilles and The Diary of Lady Anne Clifford. Her recent election to the committee of the PEN Club further stamped her as an established author. The Princess’s intention was to gather “a representative, rather than a complete” kaleidoscope of the period’s leading writers. Healthy sales figures and a degree of critical acclaim directed her to Vita. In this rarefied prewar world, Vita’s status as the only daughter of Lord Sackville of Knole was an added recommendation. The invitation was flattering. It placed Vita on a par with established best-sellers Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and Rudyard Kipling and, more remarkably, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and the poet laureate, Robert Bridges.

  Today Vita Sackville-West’s reputation rests largely on the magnificent plantsmanship of her garden at Sissinghurst Castle. Sissinghurst’s White Garden remains among the best-known and best-loved planting schemes in the world. Yet Vita led multiple existences. Close to her heart was her role as Sackville scion, embodying in her life and work her interpretation of the spirit of this ancient, noble family. This was the Vita who, in 1928, inspired Virginia Woolf’s fictional biography Orlando, her story of a long-lived, gender-fluid Vita, the sum of all her ancestors: every Sackville rolled into one through three centuries. A Note of Explanation reveals that Vita came up with a similar conception at least four years before Woolf began Orlando. The story’s spirit, who both is and is not a fictionalized self-portrait, has survived since time immemorial, present when Cinderella dazzled her prince and Bluebeard committed his first murder, and equally at home in the fourteenth-century Florence of the poets. She embraces old and new, fact, fiction, romance, and modernity—much like the character of Orlando . . .

  much like Vita herself.

  — Matthew Dennison

  Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) was a celebrated English poet, novelist, and garden designer. Her works include the novels The Edwardians and All Passion Spent and the poem “The Land.” Her garden at Sissinghurst is among the most famous in England. She was associated with the artists and intellectuals of the Bloomsbury Group and is also remembered as the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando.

  Kate Baylay is an artist based in London. She has worked with the Folio Society, Everyman’s Library, and Fendi, among others.

  Matthew Dennison is the author of several acclaimed works of nonfiction, including Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West.

 

 

  Vita Sackville-West, A Note of Explanation

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