Love Letters Read online

  Letter from Vita

  66 Mount Street, London

  6 November

  I came to Tavistock Square today. I went upstairs and rang your bell – I went downstairs and rang your bell. Nothing but dark inhospitable stairs confronted me. So I went away disconsolate. I wanted

  a) To see you.

  b) To ask you whether any copies of our joint progeny had been sold, and if so how many.

  c) To ask for some more circulars.

  d) To ask you to sign two of your books which my mother had just been out to buy.

  e) To be forgiven.

  I came away with all these wants unappeased.

  Now I am going back to my mud till December 1st when I remove to Knole.

  I await reviews in some trepidation.

  Letter from Virginia

  52 Tavistock Square

  9 November

  You have added to your sins by coming here without telephoning – I was only rambling the streets to get a breath of fresh air – could easily have stayed in, wanted very much to see you […]

  I will sign as many books as Lady Sackville wants. No: I will not forgive you. Won’t you be coming up for a day later, and won’t you let me know beforehand?

  Letter from Vita

  Long Barn

  13 November

  This in haste.

  I shan’t be up till December now, but will then take the precaution of telephoning! Only I hate bothering people on the telephone.

  I was grateful for the little bulletin – I hope the 430 copies will increase in splendour.

  SINS:

  Saying V.W. looked on friends as copy.

  Coming without telephoning.

  What else?

  I will try to make up by passing on some remarks I got in a letter today, ‘I am reading Jacob’s Room again. I think it is one of the first [rate] books of the day. It terrifies me. It is a book that leaves every other book both commonplace and common. One’s own stuff seems horrible and vulgar.’

  There now: incense to your censer.

  Virginia’s Diary

  21 December

  Really it is a disgrace – the number of blank pages in this book! The effect of London on diaries is decidedly bad. This I fancy is the leanest of them all […]

  How sharply society brings one out – or rather others out! Rogerfn4 the other night with Vita for instance […] The effect on Vita was disastrous […] His Quaker blood protests against Vita’s rich winy fluid; and she has a habit of praising & talking indiscriminately about art, which goes down in her set, but not in ours. It was all very thorny until that good fellow Clive came in, and addressed himself to conciliate dear old obtuse, aristocratic, passionate, Grenadier-like Vita.

  1925

  At the start of the year, Vita and Virginia occasionally met in London. Vita began to write her long poem The Land, and between bouts of illness Virginia started to write To the Lighthouse.

  Letter from Vita

  Long Barn

  26 May

  I have been horribly remiss in writing to thank you for Mrs Dalloway, but as I didn’t want to write you the ‘How-charming-of-you-to-send-me-your-book-I-am-looking-forward-to-reading-so-much’ sort of letter, I thought I would wait until I had read both it and The Common Reader, which I am sorry to say I have now done. Sorry, because although I may and shall read them again, the first excitement of following you along an unknown road is over, and nothing gives way so quickly as surprise to familiarity. I feel however that there are passages of The Common Reader that I should like to know by heart; it is superb; there is no more to be said. I can’t think of any book I like better or will read more often. Mrs Dalloway is different; it is a novel; its beauty is in its brilliance chiefly; it bewilders, illuminates, and reveals; The Common Reader grows into a guide, philosopher and friend, while Mrs Dalloway remains a will-of-the-wisp, a dazzling and lovely acquaintance. One thing she has done for me for ever: made it unnecessary ever to go to London again, for the whole of London in June is in your first score of pages. (Couldn’t you do a winter London now? With fogs and flares at the street corners, blue twilights, lamps, and polished streets?)

  How I envy you your English – How do you manage to make it as limpid as French, and yet preserve all the depth of its own peculiar genius?

  When will you come here? For a weekend or in the week? And who am I to ask to meet you? You did promise to come in the summer, you know, – if a promise given on your area steps can bind you. I am going away for Whitsun, but apart from that I propose to be here immovably for several months. I cannot write, so I am keeping chickens instead.

  Please come. I shan’t think you ‘nice’ any longer if you don’t.

  Letter from Virginia

  52 Tavistock Square

  27 May

  Hah ha! I thought you wouldn’t like Mrs Dalloway.

  On the other hand, I thought you might like The Common Reader, and I’m very glad that you do […] I’m trying to bury my head in the sand, or play a game of racing my novel against my criticism according to the opinions of my friends. Sometimes Mrs D. gets ahead, sometimes the C. R.

  Virginia’s Diary

  5 June

  And we have had Vita, Edith Sitwell, Morgan,fn1 Dadiefn2 – old Vita presenting me with a whole tree of blue Lupins, and being very uncouth and clumsy, while Edith was like a Roman Empress, so definite, clear cut, magisterial, and yet with something of the humour of a fishwife […] tremendously pleased by Morgan’s compliments (and he never praised Vita, who sat hurt, modest, silent, like a snubbed schoolboy).

  Letter from Virginia

  52 Tavistock Square

  24 August

  I have a perfectly romantic and no doubt untrue vision of you in my mind – stamping out the hops in a great vat in Kent – stark naked, brown as a satyr, and very beautiful. Don’t tell me this is all illusion […]

  But please tell me about your poem. Are you writing it? Is it very beautiful? I rather think I shall like it […] What I wish is that you would deal seriously with facts. I don’t want anymore accurate descriptions of buttercups, and how they’re polished on one side and not on the other. What I want is the habits of earthworms; the diet given in the workhouse: anything exact about a matter of fact – milk, for instance – the hours of cooling, milking etc. From that, proceed to sunset and transparent leaves and all the rest, which, with my mind rooted upon facts, I shall then embrace with tremendous joy. Do you think there is any truth in this? Now, as you were once a farmer, surely it is all in your head ready.

  Letter from Vita

  Long Barn

  25 August

  Last Friday at midnight I stood on the top of your Downs, and, looking down over various lumps of blackness, tried to guess which valley contained Rodmellfn3 and you asleep therein. And now comes your letter, making me think that on the contrary you were probably awake and in pain.fn4 But knowing nothing of that at the time, I reluctantly recovered my dogs who had been galloping madly across the Downs, climbed into the motor, and drove on along deserted roads and through the sleeping villages of Sussex and Kent, with the secret knowledge in my own mind that I had paid you a visit of which you knew nothing, – more romantic, if less satisfying, than the cup of tea to which Leonard had bidden me on Saturday.

  I like extremely your corybantic picture of me […] dancing in the vats. Please preserve it. I will not tell you the truth […] Yet a page later you contradict yourself in your magnificent manner, and call loudly for exactitudes of the most prosaic description. Oddly enough, you have hit on the very things which my poem (which is not at all beautiful) does deal; you could run a small-holding on the information supplied […] I have come to the conclusion that there is no longer any room for merely purple poetry; only for the prosaic (which has its own beauty), or for the intellectual. A bad definition but no doubt you will get my meaning. Purple occurs incidentally, but only with its roots ground stalworth in heavily manured soil – My interest in my own poem was dying down like an old fire, but you’ve fanned the embers and today there is quite a little blaze […]

  If ever you feel inclined, let me come and carry you off from Rodmell. I know that road so well, from going to see my mother at Brighton, that I can bundle along it with my eyes shut. I could devise many places to take you to.

  Letter from Virginia

  52 Tavistock Square

  1 September

  How nice it would be to get another letter from you – still better, to see you. I haven’t suggested it since the headache has been an awful nuisance this time, and I have had another week in bed. Now, however, even Leonard admits that I’m better.

  My notion is that you may be motoring past and drop in and have tea, dinner, whatever you will, and a little conversation. One day next week? I’m going to be awfully quiet, and don’t dare suggest what I long for – a drive to Amberley. But when I’m in robust health, as I shall be, could it really be achieved? […]

  I must stop: or I would now explain why it’s all right for me to have visions but you must be exact. I write prose; you poetry. Now poetry being the simpler, cruder, more elementary of the two, furnished also with an adventitious charm, in rhyme and metre, can’t carry beauty as prose can. Very little goes to its head. You will say, define beauty –

  But no: I am going to sleep.

  Letter from Vita

  Long Barn

  2 September

  How much I like getting letters from you.

  With what zest do they send me to meet the day.

  So much do I like getting them, that I keep them as the last letter to open of my morning post, like a child keeps the bit of chocolate for the end –

  But I like it less when I read that you have been ill for a week. It makes me feel guilty for every moment that I have spent, hearty and well, in such gross pursuits as gardening and playing tennis –

  I shall be going to see my mother next week, one day. May I stop at Rodmell for dinner on my way back? (But not if it is a bore.) I would let you know which day. This depends on my mother. Early in the week, I expect. I shall suggest, to her, Monday or Tuesday. And Amberley any time you like – you may see in my underlining, a readiness to throw over any other engagement in order to fall in with your plans –

  What nonsense you talk, though. There is 100% more poetry in one page of Mrs Dalloway (which you thought I didn’t like) than in a whole section of my damned poem […]

  There are two people in the room, now, talking; and such fragments of their talk as reach me make me write frenziedly and-in-italics to you – out of a furnace of indignation – If my letter seems disjointed and hysterical, you must forgive it on that account […]

  I have been making a tiny garden of Alpines in an old stone trough – A real joy. It makes me long for the spring. My botanical taste tends more and more towards flowers that can hardly be seen with the naked eye – Shall I make an even tinier one for you? In a seed pan, with Lilliputian rocks? I’ll bring it next week. But you must be kind to it, and not neglectful. (This all fits in with the theory that people who live in the country and like flowers are good.)

  Letter from Virginia

  52 Tavistock Square

  7 September

  Well, I don’t see why you don’t write to me, but perhaps it is my turn, only you are better situated for writing letters than I am. There are two people in your room, whom you can hear talking. There is one dog in my room, and nothing else but books, papers and pillows and glasses of milk and quilts that have fallen off my bed and so on. This has bred in me such a longing to hear what your two people are saying that I must implore you to tell me […] Tell me who you’ve been seeing; even if I have never heard of them – that will be all the better. I try to invent you for myself, but find I really have only 2 twigs and 3 straws to do it with. I can get the sensation ‘of seeing you’ – hair, lips, colour, height, even, now and then, the eyes and hands, but I find you going off, to walk in the garden, to play tennis, to dig, to sit smoking and talking, and then I can’t invent a thing you say – This proves, what I could write reams about – how little we know anyone, only movements and gestures, nothing connected, continuous, profound. But give me a hint I implore.

  Letter from Vita

  Long Barn

  8 September

  I am so sorry […]

  Your tale of fallen quilts really wrings my heart. And I am going to Brighton today, over your Downs, and shall leave this letter on your door step together with your garden-in-a-saucer. It looks dull at present, but in the spring it will give you flowers. You must keep it well watered.

  The two people in my room were really Bulldog Drummond and Benjamin Constant. They didn’t know it, and elected to go about their business under quite other names, but that’s who they were. You may imagine that there were many points on which they didn’t see eye to eye; and what irritated me was that I kept finding myself in agreement with both of them at the same time. My contrariness was aroused both ways at once. I disliked Drummond for his bulldoggery, and Constant for his inconstance, yet wanted to inoculate each with a dash of the faults of the other. This however appears to be an impossibility to the English character.

  I went hop-picking, and have written half an article for Leonard. I’ll try to finish it today or tomorrow, or all the hops will have turned into beer by the time it reaches The Nation.

  My spaniel has seven puppies. My cat has five kittens. The spaniel steals the kittens, and, carrying them very carefully in her mouth, puts them into the puppies’ basket. She then goes out for a stroll and the cat in search of her progeny curls up in the basket and suckles the puppies. The spaniel returns, chases out the cat, curls up in the basket, and suckles the kittens. I find myself quite unable to cope with this situation. The kittens will bark and the puppies will mew, – that’s what will happen. But at present it makes a charming family party, – such a warm soft young heap.

  I wish you were well and that I could see you. This is not really as selfish as it sounds, because most of all I wish that you were well, even if I were not to benefit. Is there anything you would like and that I could get you? Books, – but like the housemaid’s mother, ‘She’s got a book.’ I feel quite helpless, yet would like to please you. So you have only to say.

  It will be very tantalising, stopping at your house. I shan’t even ring the bell, but trust to luck that Leonard will fall over the saucer as he goes out.

  Letter from Virginia

  52 Tavistock Square

  15 September

  Oh you scandalous ruffian! To come as far as this house and make off! When the Cook came up to me with your letter, and your flowers and your garden, with the story that a lady had stopped a little boy in the village and given him them I was so furious I almost sprang after you in my nightgown.

  Letter from Vita

  Long Barn

  18 September

  You are a very, very remarkable person. Of course I always knew that, – it is an easy thing to know, – the Daily Xpress knows it, – the Dial [Of New York] knows it, – organs so diverse, – the Daily Herald quotes you as an authority on the vexed question as to whether one should cross the road to dine with Wordsworth, – but I feel strongly that I have only tonight thoroughly and completely realised how remarkable you really are. You see, you accomplish so much. You are one perpetual Achievement; yet you give the impression of having infinite leisure. One comes to see you: you are prepared to spend two hours of Time in talk. One may not, for reasons of health, come to see you: you write divine letters, four pages long. You read bulky manuscripts. You advise grocers. You support mothers, vicariously. You produce books which occupy a permanent place on one’s bedside shelf next to Gerald MANLY Hopkins and the Bible. You cast a beam across the dingy landscape of the Times Literary Supplement. You change people’s lives. You set up type. You offer to read and criticise one’s poems, – criticise (in the sense which you have given to the word) meaning illumination, not the complete disheartenment which is the legacy of other critics. How is it done? I can only suppose that you don’t fritter. Now here am I, alone at midnight, and I survey my day (the first that I have spent in peace for some weeks), and I ask myself what I have done with it. I finished the hops for Leonard, found an envelope and a stamp, and sent it off. I planted perhaps a hundred bulbs. I played tennis with my son. I endeavoured to amuse my other son, who has whooping-cough, and tries to crack jokes between the bouts. I read a detective story in my bath. I talked to a carpenter. I wrote five lines of poetry. Now what does all that amount to? Nothing. Just fritter. And yet it represents a better day than I have spent for a long time.

  Do you do it by concentration? Do you do it by organisation? I want a recipe so badly.

  I assure you, it was misery to stop your anonymous little village boy and turn him into the Mercury who would ultimately reach your cook who would ultimately reach you. It was unselfish, wasn’t it? Also, to be honest, I was frightened of Leonard. I knew he would look disapproving if I appeared at the house. He would look the more disapproving because he wouldn’t know how much I approved, – of his care of you, I mean. After leaving Rodmell I took a road that wasn’t a road at all; that is to say, it started by being a road and then melted away into grass, so that the last five miles of my journey were accomplished over pure Down, – very bumpy, but full of larks. A shepherd whom I met stared incredulously at the appearance of a blue motor in the middle of miles of rolling turf.