Books: Mother & Child

PEPITA—V. Sackville-West—Doubleday, Doran ($3).

Not many writers owe as much to a house as does Victoria Mary (“Vita”) Sackville-West, wife of Diplomatist-Biographer Harold Nicolson. Vita Sackville-West grew up in an Elizabethan castle which contains 365 rooms, 52 staircases, seven courts, covers seven acres—an environment where, says Hugh Walpole, dukes meant no more to her than Scotland Yard men did to Edgar Wallace. To this background, tall, brunette Author Sackville-West, now 45, owes the subject matter for The Edwardians, a novel which (in the U. S. at least) made her literary reputation, also her semi-legendary fame as heroine of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

In Pepita she now offers the two latest portraits of her “too prodigal, too amorous, too weak, too indolent, and too melancholy” family. The first is of her gypsy grandmother Pepita Duran y Ortega; the second of her mother, who died last year at 73. Tall, Andalusian Pepita was descended from a hot-blooded family of old-clothes peddlers, smugglers, bandits fruit sellers, gypsies. Too clumsy to succeed as a dancer in Madrid, in Paris her beauty and Spanish charm were more than enough. Tall, blond, 25-year-old Lione’ Sackville-West, of the British diplomatic corps, made her his mistress on sight.

Her odd family (who said her lover was “the Emperor of Germany”) she set up in gaudy splendor in Spain, ran open house for them in her villas all over Europe. She continued to support her first husband, making no bones about it; nor about her occasional affairs on the side. For his part, Lionel made no secret of Pepita. Ample tribute to his diplomatic finesse is that he “managed to keep Pepita as his mistress and Queen Victoria as his employer concurrently for nearly twenty years.” When Pepita died in childbirth at 40 she left five children. Queen Victoria’s namesake, Victoria Josefa Dolores Catalina, Author Sackville-West’s mother, was the second oldest. Pepita’s story, because she herself never speaks in it, has the atmosphere of the old silent cinema. Victoria’s is well wired for sound, even some fury.

After seven years in a French convent, 18-year-old Victoria arrived in England to make her own way as a governess. But Lady Derby, her aunt, had a better idea: to install her as hostess at the British Embassy at Washington, where her father was now British Ambassador. Skillful wangling won the consent of Queen Victoria, President Garfield’s wife, balky U. S. Cabinet members’ wives. A sensation from the start, dark, blue-eyed, naïve Victoria, with her heavy French accent and “marvellously curving mouth,” did in Washington “exactly what she liked with everybody.”

Her first marriage proposal came from bachelor President Arthur. Accepting one of the hundreds that followed, she backed out hurriedly when she learned about the facts of married life. Her seven-year conquest ended when British Ambassador Sackville-West was sacked for putting his nose into a U. S. election campaign. A month later he became Lord Sackville, finished out a long, lazy life “reading right through Gibbon every other year and whittling paper-knives from the lids of cigar-boxes.” As mistress of Knole Castle and pet of Edward VII, Victoria took London into camp as she had Washington, married the heir to Knole, first cousin Lionel Sackville-West, shy, quiet. the perfect English country gentleman, five years her junior.

Author Sackville-West was their only child. By the time her memories begin, her mother was well launched on a career of making married life interesting. “How my mother puzzled me, and how I loved her!” she declares. Recklessly extravagant in gaudy gimcracks, her mother saved wrapping paper and string, wrote letters on toilet paper. When she got a fresh air mania, she propped open all the doors, ate outdoors, snow notwithstanding. War came “as a personal insult.” Her own War service consisted of taking in five wounded Belgians, whom she quickly turned out again as spies because they bored her. When her husband came home from the army with nerve enough to make a mild suggestion, she left him for good.

“A powerful dynamo generating nothing,” her crotchets finally became almost surrealistic. She bought a hideous house at Brighton, spent $250,000 to remodel it into something worse. Her gardens were planted with tin and china flowers. She built a staircase of imitation books with joke titles, was delighted to see visitors try to pocket a half crown painted on her doorstep. For house wear her favorite garb was a cheap flannel nightgown, fastened by an emerald and diamond brooch, from which hung a sixpenny police whistle. She had more lawsuits than she could count and called her house Writs Hotel. Half-blind, bedridden, living in pigsty disorder, she stayed up half the night filling gaily bound notebooks with illegible maxims intended to be sold at Woolworth’s. A typical letter of her last days reels off to her daughter a fearful jeremiad of grievances, dark suspicions, comments on the latest trunk murder, cries out: “Oh! how I admire that man Hitler!” She was, said Kipling, “the most wonderful person I have ever met. … It is outside all my experience, and of a type to which I know no duplicate.”