His idea for this field trip had been to take the students to visit the house that had inspired Virginia Woolf to write Orlando—Knole, Vita Sackville-West’s ancestral home—and then to see the home where Virginia Woolf wrote it—Monk’s House, as Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s home was called . There was no actual monk, as he would learn later from one of the guides—it was just the last name of the man who’d sold them the house. It seemed many people asked about the Monk.
How does a house inspire a novel? was a question on his mind as they arrived at Knole on an afternoon in late October. Other questions, too. What does it mean to live inside of a 1000 acre medeival deer park or This isn’t really my thing but here I am doing it—why? This was something he asked himself even as the bus arrived at the aforementioned deer park. And by my thing he meant the visiting of writers homes chasing after the magic that had once lived there. He had long ago felt he understood the limits of biographical criticism, the efforts of literary re-enactors. But in every study abroad program, the idea of immersive educational trips was a kind of mental dressing up as these writers. A kind of drag.
And yet his first feeling, as the bus progressed, was delight at the sight of the stags bursting out of the woods, chasing each other at full tilt. The slender wooded road to the house was full of people walking or jogging, and he wondered what it was like for them to be here regularly on any given day of the week. Going for a jog at Knole! See you later!
By the time the bus reached the entrance, he’d seen more stags than he had in his entire life previous. Though these were small, like big dogs in headresses.
“They’re in rut,” their bus driver had said blithely as two of the stags appeared from the woods and charged at each other as if otherwise alone. The bus adroitly passed them and pulled into the parking lot in front of the house where they all climbed out carefully.
He snapped a photo of the imposing gate, as his students also did, before heading to the gate where he went in and found a guide. The gate perhaps the most modest feature of the house.
Knole could almost be said to be out of a storybook, except he could not think of a place written about in stories that was as large as this. The great homes in stories and novels were usually much smaller. Stories that posed as being about the very rich that were instead about people who on reflection could not be said to be the very rich. Only Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, in his memory, and of course Orlando, had described something on this scale. Orlando which also begins with an incredibly unconfortable scene: the young prince playing with a sword and the preserved head of a Moor as if it were a ball or a balloon.
Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him.
It takes a certain kind of relationship toward people and capital to act that way. An ancient one. Seeing this place, he knew, would revise his imagination. His students too, he hoped.
This place at the center of 1000 acres of park. With 7 acres of roof alone.
*
The gray stone seemed to have been caught in the act of being a grand house, as if it might just go on to do something else once the guests left and night fell. There was a faint sense of menace and grandeur but also the statue on each side of the yard, for example, that seemed almost quaint. A woman and a man. “A Venus of some kind,” the tour guide had said, a little vague as she gestured to the left, and then she pointed to the right: “An Achilles, but with the crest of the Sackvilles on his shield. A copy,” she noted. The guide next turned her attention to the chimneys, later additions, and noted the stone leopards as the animal in the Sackville crest, added by Thomas Sackville, the first Earl of Dorset, when he renovated the house at the beginning of the 17th century, turning what had been a palace into a Jacobean great house. Or as Vita Sackville-West put it in the book she wrote about it, a “pile,” “heaped with no attempt at symmetry; it is somber and frowning.”
The house had first belonged to the Archbishops of Canterbury, until one of them made the mistake of inviting Henry VIII to visit for a hunt and while there, Henry VIII took too much of an interest in the place, eventually seizing it for himself. This was the fate of Nicolas Fouquet, the first owner of Vaux-le-Vicomte, who lost his home to Louis XIV after inviting him to the party he threw when he had finished it. It is a mistake to invite your king to dinner, he noted.
The guide was explaining that Vita often said Knole was a Calendar House, pausing to note it wasn’t a proper Calendar House, as it had more than 400 rooms. She seemed amused by this and was about to sweep on to some other point as if this was self-evident and so he decide he would have to ask about it as no one else had. So he did. “Hi, excuse me. Could you explain what a Calendar House is for the Americans?”
The guide was a little surprised but friendly all the same. Did no one ever ask? She said approximately that a calendar house was an Elizabethan affectation, a part of their craze for devices, and borrowed from the forms of the calendar: 7 courtyards like in the days of the week, 365 rooms, 52 staircases, and so on. “The house that looks like a town,” she said, with a wry smile. The area in which they were standing, which was almost overwhelming to consider alone, was just the entrance. “Filled with treasures,” she added.
The guide warned them about how to behave on the tour with the rutting season in progress. “They will battle for the highest point of the land,” she observed, “so avoid the hilltops and don’t go over there,” and she had gestured toward what looked like a meadow, slightly higher than where they were standing.
They all nodded, appreciative. “And of course,” she added, “don’t approach them. They might seem quite tame, but they are not.”
He tried to imagine Vita Sackville-West offering something like the same warning to Virginia Woolf. Or Eddie Sackville-West telling Duncan Grant. Had they? He would have to read the letters, he told himself, even as he knew he would probably never get to it.
*
The house did then unfold for him like a calendar, in a way. It made sense to him differently, as he passed the carved leopard in the staircase, as he noted that the the tour took them through two of the seven courtyards, the rest kept, it seems, as a private residence for the family.
The house had been prepared at some point early in its ownership by the 1st Earl of Dorset, Thomas Sackville, for a visit by King James I that had never happened. It had so nearly happened though that someone had covered the beams surrounding the bedroom with witch marks meant to protect him, and they were discovered only recently, the wood eventually dated to the era of the Gunpowder plot and Guy Fawkes.
The room for James I radiated a kind of deadening splendor by comparison to the rest of the home, the silver furniture, gold and metal threads, and a heavily curtained bed gleaming in the light more suitable perhaps for Persephone. The bed curtains used to be funny to him until he learned they were to keep you warm in winter, and seeing these now he wondered for the first time if they might help him back home in Vermont.
A small sign noted that the Earl of Dorset had the right to take any unused furniture from the royal residences and that this was how the room had been furnished. As grand as it was and all of it, or much of it, well, an act of economy. Of a kind. The spare furniture of royals.
The great portraits of famous royals in the hall of portraits was mixed in with art that was sometimes quite striking but lacked a context, like the portrait of Sofonisba Anguissola, an Italian woman painter; or the portrait of the French courtesan, literary patron and writer, Ninon de L’Enclos. These hung alongside esteemed British royals… was it a democratization of a kind?
He came to a stop in front of a painting that seemed to demand his attention and took a picture. His eye was drawn everywhere around in it in some way that felt different from the other paintings.
In the days after he left, he would look at the picture he took to feel again the pleasure of the painting, of the images. Eventually he found more information about it: No painter named, just “The French School,” and the title Aurora, Tithonus and Cephalus. A scene with everyone’s attention on someone else, and no one in the painting seeming to acknowledge each other as they headed off on their mythological day—a kind of candid photo of the gods. The story was that Aurora, the goddess of the dawn, with the last two of her four lovers, Tithonus and Cephalus. Cephalus however is leaving, returning to his wife with his dog; Tithonus will remain with her, immortal but not immortally youthful and doomed to age forever, per the cruel bargain Zeus made with Aurora, who forgot to ask for his immortal youth. The cherubs hold torches to help bring the dawn.
The weariness of the dog moves him. Also the face of Cephalus. Also Tithonus, waving at Cephalus but being ignored, this moves him as well. And Aurora’s turned face, somehow impatient with her cherub as she is left with her last lover of the four, the man doomed to diminish forever and yet never die.
*
He’d known of Vita’s role in inspiring Orlando but he hadn’t known about her cousin Eddy, also an inspiration, it seemed. The shorthand version of the history here is that Vita had wanted to inherit Knole and did not. Her cousin Eddy Sackville-West did not want to inherit Knole and eventually did. It is of course more complicated but some more shorthand in the meantime: the two cousins were both writers, both part of the Bloomsbury set. Eddy was a lover of Duncan Grant’s and Vita was a lover of Virginia Woolf’s. Eddy would seem to have been popular as a person but not perhaps as a writer. Vita, a best-selling writer in her day, loomed much larger in posterity except perhaps here.
Eddy had lived in the gatehouse, upstairs from what is now the ticket office and the gift shop, in apartments set up as if he was going to personally defend Knole himself. And for all anyone knows, he did. The apartment rooms had been decorated by Grant in what would become a familiar style to him, the beautiful painted fire screen catching his eye in particular. A record player, books on shelves, a bathroom that looked cold. Dustin noted how much attention the little signs under the various displays there paid to Eddy’s male lovers, almost like he was a queer Henry VIII. The National Trust scholars took his queerness and his lovers, even the minor ones, seriously.
As he read the captions he populated the room with his imagined versions of these characters: Duncan Grant painting Eddy’s rooms, Eddy filling it with furniture. Making drinks and drinking them as the records played. In the book he buys a few hours later downstairs in the gift shop, Rooms of Their Own, is an account of Eddy and Duncan Grant in love in 1926, painting the rooms, making art, listening to records, and passing the hours blissfully.
And it would have been so incredibly cold, of course he’d need many people in his bed.
As he ascended the stairs to the roof, and he took in the great distance between Eddy’s rooms and the residences of the rest of the family, he wondered if it was a distance sought or a distance imposed? Or perhaps it was an effort to live a new way in rooms that had never literally housed any of his ancestors. He could inherit Knole and also his trip to the outside of the house was as short as going down the stairs and opening the gate.
It wasn’t the insight he’d come for, exactly, not that he knew what he was looking for, but it was the one that found him.
And then it was almost time to leave. He made that dash through the bookstore and gift shop, feeling faintly ridiculous at last, the grasping tourist at the end, and then making his way to the bus where after he made a head count of the students, and then they were on their way, passing safely again through the rutting deer.
That house is lavish ❤️