Well Maybe More of an Abstract Portrait of a Marriage

After the April book club discussion of Bel Canto, the member who had selected Caleb's Crossing for May said she wanted to change her pick.  (Damn, I really hated CC, another one of those colonial historical New England novels about an important male figure relayed by an oppressed female subject to the chauvinistic, hyper-Neanderthal Christians of her day and age.  Coincidentally, the local paper did a feature story about a group of women who had been convening their book club for 50 years, starting with the Feminine Mystic and teeing up Lean In but talking about Caleb's Crossing.  And another tangent, Caleb, the first American Indian to attend Harvard dies from malnutrition and consumption, hardly a stellar launch for an expansion into students of another culture; as contrasted to my taxi driver's story in DC earlier this week:  he told me he was going to Boston Friday to attend his nephew's graduation; when I politely asked which school, he said Harvard.  His nephew was given a full scholarship to come from Ethiopia and he graduated with a 4.0 in math and computer sciences, going to work in two weeks after a signing bonus, more money focused than his elder brother who was pursuing his PhD at Princeton).

So anyway, back to the story, the host for May changed the book to Portrait of a Marriage - Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, as compiled and recalled by their son, Nigel Nicolson.  And I will quote at length about Nigel finding his mother's diary after her death in 1962 and then the opening paragraphs of said diary because these two selections are "hookers" perfectly written and reader engaging.

" I took a final look round her sitting room in the tower ... a room I had entered only half a dozen times in the previous thirty years ... and came upon a locked Gladstone bag ... The bag contained something ... and having no key, I cut away the leather from around the lock to open it.  Inside there was a large notebook ... page after page filled with her neat pencilled script.  I carried it to her writing table and began to read.  The sixth page was headed July 23rd, 1920, followed by a narrative in the first person that continued for eighty more.  I read through it to the end without stirring from her table.  It was an autobiography written when she was twenty-eight, a confession, an attempt to purge her mind and heart of a love that possessed her ..."

And this hidden away diary that has so much delicious sound, lilting, caressing, scandalizing, whispering, that I had to reread it immediately out loud to my sole audience, JJ:

"Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life, involving as it naturally does the lives of so many other people, but I do so urged by a necessity of truth-telling, because there is no living soul who knows the complete truth; here, may be one who knows a section; and there, one who knows another section:  but to the whole picture not one is initiated.  Having written it down I shall be able to trust no one to read it; there is only one person in whom I have such utter confidence that I would give every line of this confession into his hands, knowing that after wading through this morass -- for it is a morass, my life, a bog, a swamp, a deceitful country, with one bright patch in the middle, the patch that is unalterably his -- I know that after wading through it all he would emerge holding his estimate of me steadfast."

I loved the book.  Two things I found wanting:  first Nigel Vita's son after admitting that he could not put the diary down once he started reading it has interspersed her chapters with pictures and his backdrop story to explain the characters and the time.  Maybe no one would read such interpretation if it was appended as an epilogue; certainly Nigel is too wordy to use footnotes that would make his mother's scandalous life too pendacious and scholarly.  
 
And then there's Vita herself:  a girl who romps through childhood unrestrained exploring the natural surroundings unaccompanied.  A young woman whose sense of freedom is starkly curtailed by the culture of her family to marry well.  Her ultimate selection of Harold as he goes off to war and spends most of his life thereafter in the diplomatic corps oversees mopping up the consequences of the war, again leaving Vita to her own device.  Although Vita had several lovers during her marriage, that part reads to much like a travelogue, running  off to Paris, Venice wherever with her husband's blithe acceptance, how very English "carry-on" of him.  What I want is an exploration of the landscape of Vita's libidinous soul.  Her lust motivates her wandering, but I don't want a story of wanderlust, just give me an idea of the lust part.  So discrete.  

For a woman who lives to be alone, in her tower, in her garden, in her thoughts, she does not disclose to her diary any inner turmoil or side by side analysis of what she has at home and what she seeks away from it.  When her lover marries, the boiling pot of her compulsive love is not kept on simmer but seems extinguished.  I wanted a candy thermometer reading of this affair.  I want my generation's TMI.  Wait wasn't I the person who complained about self-promoting celebrities in an earlier blog this year?

Vita's portrait is on the cover of the book.  She strikes an aloof, unapproachable pose, almost of indeterminate or questionable gender.  Virginia Wolfe wrote Orlando to describe her aura and Tilden Swinton, of similar allure, portrays her in the film, which I cannot find at my library, alas.