A review by morgandhu
Grand Canyon by Vita Sackville-West
4.0
In 1942, Vita Sackville-West published Grand Canyon, a speculative novel - a future history with a strong element of the fantastic - in which Germany has overrun all of Europe, and established a sort of truce with America. The time period is vague; it’s far enough in the future for a means if extracting electricity from the air to have been discovered, for new dance crazes to have developed. European emigres wander through the American landscape, detached and lost, while life goes on around them.
The novel is set in a tourist hotel by the Grand Canyon. Among its guests are the serene and enigmatic Englishwoman, Helen Temple, the cynical Lester Dale, the exotic and emotional Madame de Retz, the blind Czech refugee with his silent German attendant, the deaf Englishman who carries a skate around his neck to enable communication, and a gaggle of young American college students, co-eds, on holiday, one of whom, Lorraine Driscoll, is worried about something. Most of the staff are nameless, save for the consumptive maid Sadie. A band of black musicians perform “whizz music” on the dance patio. Next to the hotel is a village of deliberately picturesque Hopi, who sell overpriced souvenirs and perform “Indian dances” as part of the evening entertainment.
Nearby is a camp of military personal preparing for “manoeuvres,” not much further as the crow flies is an airbase; some of the soldiers and airmen frequent the hotel for dinner and evening entertainment.
Living secretly in a long-abandoned cave dwelling is an English author and professor, his presence apparently known only to Mrs. Temple and the local Hopi people, who is referred to only as the hermt.
And finally there is Mr. Royer, the Hotel Manager, an obnoxious man who also happens to be a German agent, waiting for orders to set fire to the hotel.
All these things we learn in the first few pages, as Sackville-West slides the perspective from one character to another as they interact in the course of an early evening, preparing for dinner at the hotel, setting the scene and characters.
At the core of the novel is the developing relationship between Mrs. Temple and Mr. Dale. Too detached, in their own ways, to be actively romantic, nonetheless a kind of intimacy develops between them, contrasted against the flirtatious social lives of the young college students and energetic servicemen who fill the dining room and dance floor of the Grand Canyon Hotel. This unfolding takes place in the midst of the up-to-now unthinkable - a blackout order in the vicinity of the canyon, intended to protect the nearby airbases and army camps from anticipated bombing runs by long-range German planes based in Hawaii, Mexico, and perhaps Brazil. Both Mrs. Temple and Mr. Dale know war, know the nature if the enemy; in their conversations over the course of the novel’s action is the larger debate over the great irony of having to meet the violence of evil with violence for good.
Sackville-West wrote of her choices in writing this novel:
“In Grand Canyon I have invented a cautionary tale. In it I have contemplated the dangers of a world in which Germany, by the use of an unspecified method of attack, is assumed to have defeated Great Britain in the present war. […] The terrible consequences of an incomplete conclusion or indeed of any peace signed by the Allies with an undefeated Germany are shown.”
Written in the midst of the war, and the daily bombing of England, it’s not difficult to see this novel as a warning to an isolationist America that there can be no peace with Nazi Germany, that they must engage before Britain falls, or risk eventually fighting a more powerful enemy on their own soil. But it’s a timely message today as well, as the hateful rhetoric of Hitler’s Nazi Party spreads across Europe and North America, and white supremacists take to the streets and to the parliaments of the West. It reminds us that some things must not be tolerated, cannot be politely contained, and have no place whatsoever in a civil and just society. And it contains a plea, that someday, humans will learn to exercise “the one faculty that mattered, the faculty of being able to arrange his life in accordance with his fellows” - the ability to live in harmony and peace.
The novel is set in a tourist hotel by the Grand Canyon. Among its guests are the serene and enigmatic Englishwoman, Helen Temple, the cynical Lester Dale, the exotic and emotional Madame de Retz, the blind Czech refugee with his silent German attendant, the deaf Englishman who carries a skate around his neck to enable communication, and a gaggle of young American college students, co-eds, on holiday, one of whom, Lorraine Driscoll, is worried about something. Most of the staff are nameless, save for the consumptive maid Sadie. A band of black musicians perform “whizz music” on the dance patio. Next to the hotel is a village of deliberately picturesque Hopi, who sell overpriced souvenirs and perform “Indian dances” as part of the evening entertainment.
Nearby is a camp of military personal preparing for “manoeuvres,” not much further as the crow flies is an airbase; some of the soldiers and airmen frequent the hotel for dinner and evening entertainment.
Living secretly in a long-abandoned cave dwelling is an English author and professor, his presence apparently known only to Mrs. Temple and the local Hopi people, who is referred to only as the hermt.
And finally there is Mr. Royer, the Hotel Manager, an obnoxious man who also happens to be a German agent, waiting for orders to set fire to the hotel.
All these things we learn in the first few pages, as Sackville-West slides the perspective from one character to another as they interact in the course of an early evening, preparing for dinner at the hotel, setting the scene and characters.
At the core of the novel is the developing relationship between Mrs. Temple and Mr. Dale. Too detached, in their own ways, to be actively romantic, nonetheless a kind of intimacy develops between them, contrasted against the flirtatious social lives of the young college students and energetic servicemen who fill the dining room and dance floor of the Grand Canyon Hotel. This unfolding takes place in the midst of the up-to-now unthinkable - a blackout order in the vicinity of the canyon, intended to protect the nearby airbases and army camps from anticipated bombing runs by long-range German planes based in Hawaii, Mexico, and perhaps Brazil. Both Mrs. Temple and Mr. Dale know war, know the nature if the enemy; in their conversations over the course of the novel’s action is the larger debate over the great irony of having to meet the violence of evil with violence for good.
Sackville-West wrote of her choices in writing this novel:
“In Grand Canyon I have invented a cautionary tale. In it I have contemplated the dangers of a world in which Germany, by the use of an unspecified method of attack, is assumed to have defeated Great Britain in the present war. […] The terrible consequences of an incomplete conclusion or indeed of any peace signed by the Allies with an undefeated Germany are shown.”
Written in the midst of the war, and the daily bombing of England, it’s not difficult to see this novel as a warning to an isolationist America that there can be no peace with Nazi Germany, that they must engage before Britain falls, or risk eventually fighting a more powerful enemy on their own soil. But it’s a timely message today as well, as the hateful rhetoric of Hitler’s Nazi Party spreads across Europe and North America, and white supremacists take to the streets and to the parliaments of the West. It reminds us that some things must not be tolerated, cannot be politely contained, and have no place whatsoever in a civil and just society. And it contains a plea, that someday, humans will learn to exercise “the one faculty that mattered, the faculty of being able to arrange his life in accordance with his fellows” - the ability to live in harmony and peace.