A very short novella by Vita Sackville-West #ABookADayInMay no.21

I read Vita Sackville-West’s The Death of Noble Godavary back in 2019, as part of another book-a-day project, but it’s taken me another five years to read the second novella in the slim volume. It’s not mentioned on the cover, but there is a 60-page novella in there too, called Gottfried Künstler. I’m pretty sure it’s a novella rather than a long short story, but who’s counting. (Well, me, I suppose.)

The story is slightly inexplicably set in Germany in 1523, though the dialogue and most of the details feel a lot more 20th-century than 16th. It is the depths of winter and opening scene is the whole town gathered to skate on the frozen river. Everybody is there, from every class and community. Among them is our hero, Gottfried. As with everything in this beautifully written novella, Sackville-West describes his skating in a lovely way:

Besides – for he was fastidious and proud – he liked the idea of cutting his patterns as it were in space; if he left a mark at all, it would soon be obliterated; he liked doing something very difficult, which no eye would observe or be able to follow, and which he himself would not be able exactly to repeat. Indeed, one of the reasons why he loved the ice was because it so soon dissolved and was lost without trace into the commonwealth of waters; so fine, so enchanted, so steely, so perfect in itself, when it was there, it was yet so brief; in such a way, he thought, he would wish the best of himself to crystallise once into existence and then be lost and forgotten.

The novella was published in 1932 but there is a note saying it was written in 1929 – I wondered if Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf compared notes on their skating scenes, since there is such memorable skating in 1929’s Orlando.

Off he glides, but everything changes when he falls and hits his head. The local doctor assists, but doesn’t take him home – since he worries his wife would object, and he is scared of her disapproval (an enjoyable dose of character comedy in these side figures). Physically, he is not too bad – but he has lost his memory completely. He has absolutely no idea who he is.

The only person who will help him in Anna. She lives alone, always seen hooded, and rumours abound that she is a witch. The townspeople seem content to gossip about and ostracise her, rather than anything more concrete, and nobody puts up much of a fuss when she invites Gottfried to stay with her. At which point, Sackville-West breaks the fourth wall in a way I appreciated.

The sophisticated reader of novels will long before now have completed this story according to lending library experience, by assuming either that (a) Gottfried Künstler fell in love with Anna Rothe, (b) that Anna Rothe fell in love with Gottfried Künstler, (c) that – most promising of all – Gottfried Künstler and Anna Rothe fell in love with one another. A great disappointment is in store for the sophisticated reader of novels: none of these three things happened.

As she adds, again rather beautifully, ‘Love is not the only thing in the world, though novelists appear to believe so; and fortunately there are other ways of resolving the confusion of life into some sort of synthesis.’ For much of the novella, Sackville-West depicts and celebrates the chaste, sweet, naive friendship that springs up between the two. We don’t know all that much about Gottfried before his accident, but he has clearly transformed – into a man with a simple, fervent love of the natural world and the small adventures of life. They make a snowman together, for goodness’ sake.

There is almost no dialogue for most of Gottfried Künstler, which I think helps us remain at a bit of a distance – watching the two get to know each other and find great joy in that. Usually I love dialogue in a story, but in this novella its absence helped prevent it becoming cloying or fey. It felt in many ways like a fable.

And, like a fable, there is a darker twist in the tale – which I shan’t spoil. It felt fitting, and was done very well, but it was appropriately sad too.

More or less every time I write about Sackville-West, I mention that we do her a disservice when we only think of her in relation to Woolf. She is an exceptionally good writer, and this little-known example of her work is another instance of that writing. It might, in fact, be the purest distillation of it that I’ve read.