Love Letters - Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West
Status: #stone
At first you think she is plain; then a sort of spiritual beauty imposes itself on you, and you find a fascination in watching her.
She is both detached and human, silent till she wants to say something, and then says it supremely well.
She is a pronounced Sapphist, and may, thinks Ethel Sands, have an eye on me, old though I am. Snob as I am, I trace her passions five hundred years back, and they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine.
How right she is when she says that love makes everyone a bore, but the excitement of life lies in ‘the little moves’ nearer to people. But perhaps she feels this because she is an experimentalist in humanity, and has no grande passion in her life.
my head swimming with Virginia
But the lady’s smocks are very nice, along the hedges, and my tulips are coming out.
I told you once I would rather go to Spain with you than anyone, and you looked confused, and I felt I had made a gaffe – been too personal, in fact – but still the statement remains a true one, and I shan’t be really satisfied till I have enticed you away.
Either I am at home, and you are strange; or you are at home, and I am strange; so neither is the real essential person, and confusion results. But in the Basque provinces, among a horde of zingaros, we should both be equally strange and equally real.
Do you ever mean what you say, or say what you mean? Or do you just enjoy baffling the people who try to creep a little nearer?
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 […]
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.
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
you may see in my underlining, a readiness to throw over any other engagement in order to fall in with your plans
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.)
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.
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.
I like the sense of one lighted room in the house while all the rest of the house, and the world outside, is in darkness. Just one lamp falling on my paper; it gives a concentration, an intimacy. What bad mediums letters are; you will read this in daylight, and everything will look different. I think I feel night as poignantly as you feel the separateness of human beings; one of those convictions which are so personal, so sharp, that they hurt. It seems to me that I only begin to live after the sun has gone down and the stars have come out.
How I shall enjoy writing to you; how poignant it will be to feel that ink is one’s only means of communication; how ruthlessly I shall lay upon you the burden of writing to the absent friend.
Talked to her till 3 a.m. – not a peaceful evening.
I think she is one of the most mentally exciting people I know.
These Sapphists love women; friendship is never untinged with amorosity.
It might seem strange, at first sight, that I should have talked of you so little, having thought of you so much.
Yes, my dear Creature, do come tomorrow, as early as possible
You angel, you have written.
Please, in all this muddle of life, continue to be a bright and constant star. Just a few things remain as beacons: poetry, and you, and solitude. You see that I am extremely sentimental. Had you suspected that?
But it is a great comfort to think of you when I’m not well – I wonder why. Still nicer – better to see you.
I’d travel all the way to Egypt with the fever heavy upon me sooner than not see you – so rule that out please.
So you see that if my letters are dumb, my actions aren’t. They are a practical demonstration of my wish to be with you
I’m longing to see you. Someday I’ll write and tell you all the things you mean to me in my mind. Shall I?
I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way.
I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have
– But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly.
But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.
I have been dull; I have missed you. I do miss you. I shall miss you. And if you don’t believe it, you’re a long-eared owl and ass.
Yes, I miss you, I miss you. I dare not expatiate, because you will say I am not stark, and cannot feel the things dumb people feel. You know that is rather rotten rot, my dear Vita. After all, what is a lovely phrase? One that has mopped up as much Truth as it can hold.
I miss you horribly, and apart from that am permanently infuriated by the thought of what you could make of this country if only you could be got here.
Yes, I often think of you, instead of my novel; I want to take you over the water meadows in the summer on foot, I have thought of many million things to tell you.
and very difficult to look at the coast of Sinai when I am also looking inward and finding the image of Virginia everywhere.
You make a wonderful cynical kindly smiling background to the turbulence of my brain.
Not like Virginia, who has inquisitive habits, but is a dear creature, and for whom I have a terrible and chronic homesickness. It is a persistent complaint, – sortes virginiana.
(pages 53)
Yes, dearest Vita: I do miss you; I think of you: I have a million things, not so much to say, as to sink into you.
Like a little warm coal in my heart burns your saying that you miss me. I miss you oh so much. How much, you’ll never believe or know. At every moment of the day. It is painful but also rather pleasant, if you know what I mean. I mean, that it is good to have so keen and persistent a feeling about somebody. It is a sign of vitality. (No pun intended.)
I am amused at my relations with her: left so ardent in January – and now what? Also I like her presence and her beauty. Am I in love with her? But what is love? Her being ‘in love’ with me, excites and flatters; and interests. What is this ‘love’? Oh and then she gratifies my eternal curiosity: who’s she seen, what’s she done –
Not much news. Rather cross – Would like a letter. Would like a garden. Would like Vita. Would like 15 puppies with their tails chopped off, 3 doves, and a little conversation.
Have I been to bed with Virginia yet? If not, am I likely to do so in the near future? If not, will I please give it my attention? As it is high time Virginia fell in love.
I must get on with writing; you would seduce me completely
But really, my sweet, one’s love for Virginia is a very different thing: a mental thing; a spiritual thing, if you like, an intellectual thing, and she inspires a feeling of tenderness, which is, I suppose, owing to her funny mixture of hardness and softness – the hardness of her mind, and her terror of going mad again. She makes me feel protective. Also she loves me, which flatters and pleases me.
I can’t get you out of my mind tonight; the corner of the sofa where you sat is haunted for me by your presence, the whole flat seems full of you –
Oh Hadji, she is such an angel. I really adore her. Not ‘in love’ – just love – devotion. Her friendship has enriched me so. I don’t think I have ever loved anybody so much, in the way of friendship; in fact, of course, I know I haven’t. She knows that you and I adore each other. I have told her so.
I should like to startle you again, – even though I didn’t know then that you were startled.
Please come, and bathe me in serenity again.
Now never say that I don’t love you. I want dreadfully to see you. That is all there is to it
It’s time I either lived with Virginia or went back to Asia, and as I can’t do the former I must do the latter. I’m feeling, you see, like a person who has eaten too many sweets […] Till tomorrow then, my dear – and very nice too. You’ll be nice to me, won’t you? And I’ll be nice to you. And we’ll arrange about Knole. I shall pin you down.
Beloved Virginia, one last goodbye before I go. I feel torn in a thousand pieces – it is bloody – I can’t tell you how I hate leaving you. I don’t know how I shall get on without you – in fact I don’t feel I can – you have become so essential to me. Bless you for all the happiness you give me.
Oh damn it, Virginia, I wish l didn’t love you so much. No I don’t though; that’s not true. I am glad I do. I don’t know what to say to you except that it tore the heart out of my body saying goodbye to you – I am thankful to have had yesterday, a real gift from the Gods – Oh my darling you have made me so happy, and I do bless you for it – and I oughtn’t to grumble now – ought I?
Why aren’t you with me? Oh, why? I do want you so frightfully.
I want more than ever to travel with you; it seems to me now the height of my desire, and I get into despair wondering how it can ever be realised. Can it, do you think? Oh my lovely Virginia, it is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid.
And how angry it makes me that you shouldn’t be here, and I do ache for you so all the time – damn it – it gets no better with time or distance – and I foresee that it won’t – Nor shall I have a word from you for ever so long – oh damn, damn, damn – You would be pleased if you knew how much I minded –
But the main good was that I’ve been kept on the hop the whole time: so I’ve been restless and scattered; it’s like taking sleeping draughts: I try my best to put off thinking about you […]
It gets worse steadily – your being away. All the sleeping draughts and irritants have worn off, and I’m settling down to wanting you, doggedly, dismally, faithfully – I hope that pleases you. It’s damned unpleasant for me. I can assure you. I had a sort of idea that I’d cheat the devil, and put my head under my wing, and think of nothing. But it won’t work – not at all. I want you this Saturday more than last and so it’ll go on.
Yes yes yes I do like you. I am afraid to write the stronger word.
Oh, how I wish you would explain life to me, so that I might see it steadfastly and see it whole, or whatever the quotation is. I find it more and more puzzling as I grow older
Do you realise how devoted I am to you, all the same? There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you, dearest Honey.
Sweet Honey, Yes I want you more and more.
People become so different once they are taken away from their own surroundings – however well one knows them one discovers that one doesn’t know them to the extent of being able to predict how they will react
Yes, I am glad you miss me, even if it is ‘damned unpleasant’. I thought from your first letter that you didn’t miss me at all, and was sad about it. Now I am all pleased again. Selfish, isn’t one? But I go through it too, you know, – this missing you, and wanting you, – so that I know exactly how damned unpleasant it is, and probably even better than you do.
Oh God, I wish I were going to be in Greece with you, lucky lucky Leonard. Please wish that I might be there. Please miss me. You say you do. It makes me infinitely happy to think that you should, though I can’t think why you should, with the exciting life that you have,
But I am going to Shiraz, it’s true. This would be heaven if I didn’t so much want Virginia.
How I wish you’d walk into the room this moment, and laugh as much as you like.
Why do I think of you so incessantly, see you so clearly the moment I’m in the least discomfort? An odd element in our friendship. Like a child, I think if you were here, I should be happy.
Please go out into the Campagna as much as possible, and let your phrases match the clouds there, and think of me.
but I love you, Virginia – so there – and your letters make it worse – Are you pleased? I want to get home to you – Please, when you are in the south, think of me, and of the fun we should have, shall have, if you stick to your plan of going abroad with me in October, – sun and cafés all day, and? all night. My darling […] please let this plan come off. I live for it […]
I’m in a queer excited state, – largely owing to your letter, – I always get devastated when I hear from you. God, I do love you. You say I use no endearments. That strikes me as funny. When I wake in the Persian dawn, and say to myself ‘Virginia … Virginia …’
I’ll be sweeter to you than ever in my life before –
Please darling honey come back safe. We will have a merry summer: one night perhaps at Long Barn: another at Rodmell:We will write some nice pieces of prose and poetry: we will saunter down the Haymarket.
I was in a towering passion
Darling, darling Virginia, it’s quite incredible that I shall see you tomorrow.
Oh darling! It is nice being back, and seeing you.
Darling, it makes me afraid of you. Afraid of your penetration and loveliness and genius.
I do really love you more than before, for it. You always said I was a snob, and perhaps that is a form of snobbishness. But I do. Only if I had read it without knowing you, I should be frightened of you. As it is, it makes you more precious, more of an enchanter.
Now I must go to bed, but there will I think be more dreams than sleep. All your fault. Bless you, my lovely Virginia.
Harold says be as rude about God as you would be at Cambridge.
dearest donkey
My darling, I’m still under the spell of being with you.
I wish you could see my garden. It is really pretty, and will be over if you don’t come till the week after next.
You’re the only person I want to see when I have a headache – that’s a compliment
Write, dear honey, a nice letter to me.
My poor darling – I do hate these damned headaches that you get. I wish you were ROBUST.
Vita very free and easy, always giving me great pleasure to watch, and recalling some image of a ship breasting a sea, nobly, magnificently, with all sails spread, and the gold sunlight on them.
And why have you such an art of keeping so much of yourself up your sleeve? As to make me suspect that after twenty years there would still be something to be unfolded, – some last layer not uncoiled. I like making you jealous; my darling (and shall continue to do so), but it’s ridiculous that you should be.
Honey dearest, don’t go to Egypt please. Stay in England. Love Virginia. Take her in your arms.
And I still have some of your lovely flowers to remind me of the happy time I had with you,
she refreshes me, and solaces me.
I will certainly lay myself out to please you.
I send you a supplementary photograph, which I had in Persia, and which lived stuck into my looking glass there, and one which I took here the other day.
Dear me, I do wish I had you always in the house.
Do you like me? Would you miss me if I disappeared?
Don’t go right away from me. I depend on you more than you know.
My darling, why melancholy? I thought you were not quite yourself the other day, and wondered if it was all my imagination […] I wish I were with you today, damn it all; I want to know what is the matter.
But I own I’d like to see you. Then I’d tell you about my melancholy and a thousand other things.
and it’s all about you and the lusts or your flesh and the lure of your mind
Also, I admit, I should like to untwine and twist again some very odd, incongruous strands in you:
But how right I was, all the same; and to force myself on you at Richmond, and so lay the train for the explosion which happened on the sofa in my room here when you behaved so disgracefully and acquired me for ever. Acquired me, that’s what you did, like buying a puppy in a shop and leading it away on a string.
I am Virginia’s good puppy, beating my tail on the floor, responsive to a kind pat.
our intercourse is tinged with this melancholy on my part and desire to be white nosed and so keep you half an instant longer, perhaps, as I say we gain in intensity what we lack in the sober comfortable virtues of a prolonged and safe and respectable and chaste and cold blooded friendship
I want to see you in the lamplight, in your emeralds. In fact, I have never more wanted to see you than I do now – just to sit and look at you, and get you to talk, and then rapidly and secretly, correct certain doubtful points.
Dearest Creature, I’m afraid you are feeling lonely tonight. I wish I were with you.
But look here, remember and believe that you mean something absolutely vital to me. I don’t exaggerate when I say that I don’t know what I should do if you ceased to be fond of me, – got irritated, – got bored.
My love for you is absolutely true, vivid, and unalterable.
Bless you, darling darling Virginia – you don’t know how much I love you – how deeply – and how permanently.
If I saw you would you kiss me? If I were in bed would you –
Darling honey, This is only to send you my love – You don’t know how much I care for you.
In the meantime, please love me, as you say you do –
My darling, what an angel you are to me.
Darling, I do love you so, and you are so sweet to me. I do so want to see you.
when all one wants to do is to garden and write and talk to Potto
I have been coming to the not very original conclusion that Virginia is in every way the most charming person in the world – in fact I have spent the last three or four days thinking of very little else and being very happy in my absorption; it has been like living a little secret life that nobody knew anything about.
That’s my life. Not as exciting as yours, no doubt, but I think a lot about Virginia – which makes up for much – and really I have been loving Virginia enormously lately – in an intense, absent way (absent in distance, I mean), which has been a great satisfaction to me – like a tide flowing in and filling a lot of empty spaces.
Darling I do love you
I think a lot about Virginia – which makes up for much – and really I have been loving Virginia enormously lately – in an intense, absent way (absent in distance, I mean), which has been a great satisfaction to me – like a tide flowing in and filling a lot of empty spaces.
And you are definite to me, – my goodness, you are. My silly Virginia. My darling, darling, precious Virginia.
women stimulate her imagination, by their grace & their art of life.
Virginia is very sweet, and I feel extraordinarily protective towards her. The combination of that brilliant brain and fragile body is very lovable. She has a sweet and childlike nature, from which her intellect is completely separate. I have never known anyone who was so profoundly sensitive, and who makes less of a business of that sensitiveness.
My dearest, I do love you. All the Sibyls and Tom Eliots in the world don’t love you as much as I do. I do bless you for all you’ve been to me. This is not a joke, but very sober truth.
How I watched you! How I felt – now what was it like? Well, somewhere I have seen a little ball kept bubbling up and down on the spray of a fountain: the fountain is you; the ball me. It is a sensation I get only from you. It is physically stimulating, restful at the same time.
Darling, you’re my anchor. An anchor entangled in gold nuggets at the bottom of the sea.
Do you really love me? Much? Passionately not reasonably?
Because, really, you have no idea how miserable I am here. I almost cease to exist. I shall revive when you come, like a watered flower.
Now I won’t say any more, except that there are 483000 seconds between now and your arrival, and that that is the moment I am living for.
My darling lovely Virginia It is so empty here without you
It’s odd how I want you when I’m ill. I think everything would be warm and happy if Vita came in.
Oh damn, it is so tantalising to be such miles away, and not able to do anything for you, except make suggestions which I greatly fear you will scorn. But everything which is mine is yours, as you very well know – even to my heart.
to miss you by an hour is dreadful.
One writes and writes, and at the end of the time one re-reads and decides that it might all just as well have remained unwritten
What is love or sex, compared with the intensity of the life one leads in one’s book?
Virginia would like her nice big bed and coffee at eleven, – and all the affection that would be shown her at hours licit and illicit
I am obsessed at nights with the idea of my own worthlessness, and if it were only to turn a light on to save my life I think I would not do it.
A thousand different varieties of love are rained upon you, like the showers from a gigantic watering pot by Virginia.
Two nights ago, Vita was here; and when she went, I began to feel the quality of the evening – how it was spring coming; a silver light; mixing with the early lamps; the cabs all rushing through the streets; I had a tremendous sense of life beginning; and all the doors opening; and this is I believe the moth shaking its wings in me; ideas rush in me.
And how happy the sound of your voice made me,
But Vita, on the other hand, should write a long poem for Virginia; and before she does that she should sit down and write ever so long and intimate a letter to Virginia.
It is rather appalling, to think what things people live through, – people one loves, – when one isn’t there with them. Yes, I do wish I were with you […]
Let them slip in one word to say Vita loves Virginia better than the whole world wrapped in a nutshell. Better than all those ardent but anaemic herring grillers with whom – Lord love her soul! – she consorts.
And how I miss you! You wouldn’t believe it. I want coloured windows, red towers, moats and wans, and one old Bull walking up and down an empty stable: you, in short. But you don’t want me. You are enchanting, chiefly with the glamour of your title and the glow of your pearls, all the Coons in Canada.
Yes it was nice to see you, but I feel rather like a starving man given one solitary crust. Oh I’ve got so much to say to you – but it takes hours – I mean, the sort of things I want to say to you require prolonged intimacy before they can squeeze themselves out.
I’m longing for an adventure, dearest Creature. But would like to stipulate for at least 48½ minutes alone with you. Not to say or do anything in particular. Mere affection – to the memory of the porpoise in the pink window.
My mind is filled with dreams of romantic meetings.
Darling Virginia – I wish I could do or even say something. You are so very dear to me, and you are unhappy – and I can do nothing – except be your ever very loving
Oh my dear, what an enchanting person Virginia is! How she weaves magic into life! Whenever I see her, she raises life to a higher level.
How funny: I had just thought to myself overnight, ‘It is a long time since I heard anything from Virginia, – I will write to her tomorrow,’ – and then your letter came. So our thoughts clashed and clicked
Now more than ever seems it rich to die … I would like to correct that into, Now more than ever seems it rich to live …
I’ve been walking on the marsh and found a swan sitting in a Saxon grave. This made me think of you.
Virginia was so sweet and affectionate to me. I was touched.
And how I long to hear from your own lips what’s been worrying you – for you’ll never shake me off – no, not for a moment do I feel ever less attached.
Potto here licks the page in love of you.
Thank you for letting me come to stay with you and for being so permanently loving towards me
What can one say – except that I love you and I’ve got to live through this strange quiet evening thinking of you sitting there alone.
You have given me such happiness.
Your rare expressions of affection have always had the power to move me greatly, and as I suppose one is a bit strung-up (mostly sub-consciously) they now come ping against my heart like a bullet dropping on the roof. I love you too; you know that.
Your loving, very and permanently loving
How nice it was to be with you – how much I enjoyed my visit. I like being with you more than I can say. You know I love you,
Darling – thank you for my happy hours with you. You mean more to me than you will ever know.