Joan L. Cannon Reviews: All Passion Spent

Joan L. Cannon Reviews: All Passion Spent, The Book and a DVD

ALL PASSION SPENT
by Vita Sackville-West
Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1931, 294 pp.

Perhaps this wonderful old book should be required reading for everyone of a 'certain age'.

Even today, in our hurried, abbreviated attention to a printed page, we still value distinguished diction, carefully guarded and guided irony, and especially meticulous observation. It's worth the effort to enjoy this kind of writing once again. Economy of events substitutes for economy of explanation and description. The book isn't very long, but its shadow is. Not a lot happens, but what does pierces through to a layer below everyday intercourse.

Here's a novel about that time of life when, according to what the author could know in her own time, there's not much left to the central character but waiting. Today's reader won't have too much trouble managing a subliminal disagreement with the picture of an eighty-eight-year-old woman in good health and command of her faculties. The same woman today would not be so passive, indeed would not have had such a passive history. All the same, we understand her life and sympathize with it even now because its constrictions are made so clear. It may even cross the contemporary reader's mind that some of the serene acceptance demonstrated by Lady Slane could be a useful stance for her present-day counterparts.

An example of the startling precision that appears repeatedly in this story might be:

Carrie, like her father, would drastically have intervened, shattering thereby a relationship which had grown up, creating itself, as swiftly and exquisitely as a little rigged ship of blown glass, each strand hardening instantly as it left the tube and met the air, yet remaining so brittle that a false note, jarring on the ethereal ripples, could splinter it.

Lady Slane has lost her husband, and is left with their children, who are so distant from her own personality and desires that they are like mildly disliked acquaintances who insist on imposing on what she regards as her right to fade into death on her own terms. If that sounds like a gloomy tale, it isn't. Full of sly humor and bedrock acceptance of what is and what can't be changed, the reverberations after finishing the story are as soothing as the overtones after the ringing of a bell.

If the world is getting to you, if you're feeling your age, if you're tired of the acidity of contemporary politics and the seeming hopelessness of bettering the world, retire into this period piece that offers so much comfort to its readers, one at a time.

Editor's Note:

We saw the 1989 Masterpiece Theater mini-series, and indeed, Amazon has the DVD. But it's for a dear price and you might be able to find it in your local library and it is carried by Netflix. It stars Wendy Hiller, whom some of you might remember as Eliza Doolittle in the 1937 filmed version of Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (titled My Fair Lady on Broadway and in cinemas), also starring Leslie Howard. Mr. Howard took the role of Vivian Leigh's unrequited love, Ashley Wilkes, in the filmed version of Gone With the Wind and perished in a plane shot down in WWII.

The author of All Passion Spent, Vita Sackville-West, was equally famous as Virginia Woolf's lover and as the creator of the celebrated garden at Sissinghurst Castle.

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Joan L. Cannon Reviews: All Passion Spent, The Book and a DVD

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