An intriguing inscribed first edition copy of Edward Sackville West’s third novel, a mannered family drama set on the Channel Islands, with a nod to the occult, centring on Godfrey Leboucher and kin (suggestively misspelt as “Labouchère” in the blurb), whose “total effect is that aimed at by surrealist poetry [... ] one closes the book with the impression of awakening from a hypnotic trance” (cited in De-la-Noy, 1988); inscribed by ESW, during a happy period living in Berlin and thrilling in its queer subculture, in his usual turquoise ink (setting off the dust jacket highlights): “For Harold Kamp with best wishes from the author”.
In 1927 Edward Sackville West’s musical interests had taken him to Dresden, where he “immersed himself in the German language, music and literature”; that December he travelled to Berlin to visit his brother-in-law Harold Nicolson, the chargé d’affaires at the British Embassy (whose wife, ESW’s cousin, Vita Sackville-West, was at Knole). Here, “the gregarious Nicolson introduced him both to the chic social world of diplomatic circles and to the city’s nightlife. The unpretentious, open and occasionally squalid atmosphere of the Berlin gay and transsexual scene had a powerfully liberating effect on Eddy” (TORCH, 2021). ESW wrote in detail to E. M. Forster: “I was dragged about at night from one homosexual bar to another. The behaviour is perfectly open. There are even large dance places for inverts.” Taken by the city and its queer subculture, ESW returned to Berlin for a longer stay in the autumn of 1928 (when this copy was inscribed to Harold Kamp), moving into a pension at 109 Kurfürstenstraße. It was a “very happy” and apparently transformative time for the author, with VSW observing in a letter around Christmas 1928, that Eddy was “in his nicest mood” and changed: “he has acquired a large black ring and a thin gold bracelet, and his conversation consists almost entirely of the most idiomatic German exclamations and interjections” (cited in De-la-Noy, 1988).
Michael De-la-Noy (1988) Eddy: The life of Edward Sackville-West, London: Bodley Head; TORCH (University of Oxford), (c. 2021) ‘Edward (Eddy) Sackville West,’ Happy in Berlin: Berlin through English eyes Website.
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