Commonplace Book

'..."It seems to me the radical weakness of all human institutions, of all systems of thought, resides in exactly that effort to select and reject, to exalt one part as against another part, and so build not upon the rock of unity and completeness, but upon the sand of partiality and division. And sooner or later the Whole revenges itself, and the fine-fanciful fabric crumbles to ruin, just for lack of that which in our short-sighted over-niceness we have taken such mighty great pains to miss out. This has happened times out of number in respect of religions, and philosophies, and the constitution of kingdoms, and in that of fair romances which promised to stand firm to all eternity..."'

from The History of Sir Richard Calmady by Lucas Malet (Book V, Chapter XI)

Seducers in Ecuador by V. Sackville-West (1924)

This was much more than expected, in a few ways. It's rather an ignored piece of her repertoire. The key thing about it is that it was her attempt to 'get modern', after having been in some senses dismissed as a conservative writer. Coming in the middle of the twenties, it was published (by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press) at the right time, too, when more sparely, bitterly stark works were beginning to gain full traction. I think what has held it back is the fact that there is a neat peg on which to hang objections: it doesn't quite work psychologically. But that, interestingly, is its only problem - in pretty well every other respect it's by far her best work to date. Arthur Lomax, the main character, is a dour, inexpressive man who sidles through life in a civilised way. He has an unknowable quality. At his club he speaks for the first time in depth (at least, as much depth as a dour man can manage) to another regular member, Bellamy. Bellamy is wealthy, a little cynical, and equally as difficult to know. Bellamy invites Lomax, as a last minute stopgap, to Egypt on his small boat. On board, Lomax meets Evelyn Whitaker, who seems likeable and perhaps a little romantic, but is somehow very difficult to get to the bottom of. You see a theme emerging. Also on board is Artivale, a scientist, who acts as a kind of occasional chorus. In moments with each of Lomax, Bellamy and Whitaker we see fragmentary glimpses of their truths; odd things which secretly motivate them, little revelations of their inner worlds, before returning to the general vacancy. This spareness is new to Sackville-West, and it has a strange effect. In all of her previous novels her conservative, filled-out style, we now discover, has hidden and misted-over the true weight of her piercing intelligence. It is here, in these choppy, stripped-down waters that her thought gains enormously in perspective. This feels vital, concise and pointed. In Cairo, Whitaker speaks a little more honestly with Lomax and reveals that her lover is away in Ecuador, has treated her badly and hints that he has left her pregnant. In a way which characters repeat several times in this novella, Lomax has a moment of strange chivalry, a frisson of impulse, and asks her to marry him. They secretly marry at the Cairo registry office. All this while, he has been subject to another act of the moment - he has purchased several sets of coloured spectacles, and experiments with the impressions they bring. The blue ones are his choice for Egypt, almost as though he is welcoming the alteration of reality, choosing the emotional mood that results. He sticks with various colours at various times, seeming to find some sort of security that he needs in not seeing things in their standard colours. This idea of subjective truths seems to be one the author is investigating. Out at sea in the Mediterranean, off the Illyrian coast, during a storm, a soaked and invigorated Bellamy, who has been managing the boat frantically but well, reveals to Lomax in his room that he is dying - this is his last trip. Another strange grip of impulse intervenes, and before we know it Lomax has agreed to administer the veronal that will finish him off. This is accomplished back in London, but Lomax soon discovers that he has been named in Bellamy's will as his inheritor. He is quietly thrilled with the wealth, but somehow still disturbed that if anyone found out that Bellamy had not literally committed suicide, rather been helped along by him, that all would be at stake. Is the fact that he has pretty continually been wearing the black pair of spectacles more recently to blame? They seem to have a kind of sedating gloom which protects and mollifies. He continues to see Whitaker, and expands a notion he has had for a while that her seducer in Ecuador is a figment, and that she has trapped him with chivalry. He still knows her very little; their marriage is still a secret, for the reason that her brother and protector is apparently a wildly fierce man who will stop at nothing to make sure she is hemmed in and virtuous. Rumours, whose origin we never really discover, begin to circulate about Lomax's role in Bellamy's death. He gets a visit from Whitaker's brother, who, contrary to Lomax's growing surmise, is very real and very angry, warning him to steer clear. Feeling the heat, and beginning to consider himself doomed, Lomax flits to Paris to see Artivale, sensing that it's only a matter of days before the police catch up with him. He has a peculiarly honest talk with Artivale about leaving him the Bellamy fortune if he is found guilty and hanged, about which Artivale seems weirdly unsurprised. He is nabbed on Artivale's doorstep on leaving and placed on trial for murder in London. He exists through his trial in a state bordering on torpor, noting Whitaker's testimony, which suggests that their marriage was his idea and that her claim of pregnancy never happened, very calmly, resigned now to his fate. She is indeed found not to be pregnant by the medical officer. Bellamy's body is exhumed and it is discovered that he was not ill at all. The question of why he would therefore have wanted to be killed slips elusively through Lomax's shutting mind with minimal impact. In his cell, stripped of all the pairs of spectacles, seeing the white walls exactly for what they are, he softly consoles himself with the fact that the fortune will go to Artivale, in Lomax's mind therefore to science. Science has assumed primary importance in his world of changeable notions - it comforts him to think of it. The last paragraph details the fact that, after Lomax's conviction and hanging, Bellamy's relations have successfully challenged the will. The fortune is left as 'conscience money' to Her Majesty's Treasury, thereby almost amusingly defeating the hapless Lomax yet one more time. I can't help but somehow make a happy connection between Arthur Lomax and Mr Robinson, the "hero" of Stella Benson's The Man Who Missed the 'Bus, published a few years later. Both characters, and the novellas they occupy, have a sense of quixotic strangeness and the everyday sinister built into a highly coloured but spare, modernist context. Stella Benson was a master of these sorts of conceits and repeated her triumph again and again. I only wish V. Sackville-West had also pursued them, on the strength of this - all indications are that the mixed reception of Seducers in Ecuador, based on the queerness and slight dissatisfactions of its psychology, deprived her of the wish to try again. It had the promise to be her master-territory also, given some refinement. I hope I'm wrong and I find her going here again.

Commonplace Book

'...The station, that great cavern full of shadows, swallowing up the gleaming tracks, stopping the monstrous trains as with a wall of finality; those tiny figures so senselessly hurrying; those loads of humanity discharged out of trains from unknown origins towards unknown destinations; all this appeared to him as the work of some crazy etcher, building up a system of lit or darkened masses, here a column curving into relief, there a cavernous exit yawning to engulf, here groins and iron arches soaring to a very heaven of night, there metallic perspectives diminishing towards a promise of day; and everywhere the tiny figures streaming beneath the architectural nightmare, microscopic bodies of men with faces indistinguishable, flying as for their lives along passage-ways between eddies of smoke in a fantastic temple of din and murk and machinery...'

from Seducers in Ecuador by V. Sackville-West

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)

What to say. One of the most magnificent sustained feverings in all literature? That about sums it up. Most people, it seems, can do without a lot of the talk about species of whales and whale- and whaling- and whaleship-lore. I don't find that problematic at all. Melville writes at a pitch which confounds most criticism, or at least leaves it behind swirling and submerging in his wake. I'd dare to say that the only people who can legitimately cavil are those who won't handle poetry, and won't countenance reaching for the stars. This solid earthboundness is this book's enemy. Every now and then his English will lose him in a net of sparring impressions, where so much is being attempted that the resolution seems to dim, like the gravitational drop as a wave crests. And, given that endings are important, I'll say that there's something in Tashtego continuing to try to nail the flag to the mast once he and almost all of the Pequod are underwater that niggles me a bit. There's not quite this level of nutso anywhere else here. This portrayed, to then go on to the nagging descent of the skyhawk and the accidental intercession of its symbolic wing between one hammerblow and the next from the drowning harpooneer seems an appropriate extravagance. All of the talk of raving encoded homosexuality seems wildly out, and typically ahistorical. Have these people never read into history? Seen how people talked back then? What lights they seemed to live by? The differences between then and now, in terms of how emotion was let out, and the terms of connection between men, in particular? And in those sorts of circumstances? How common was sharing a bed, and what did it signify? Beyond history, in terms of Melville's own territory of the mind as evidenced in the book itself, these assertions seem over-egged. Seem a wish to claim to this book an underlying gangway physicality which it rarely, if ever, explores. Moby-Dick is not a novel of downstairs. It may even be one of the pre-eminent novels of the metaphysical upstairs. Terrible old intellectuality, questing into the great unknown via the assaulting knowns of humanness and fallibility. It's an old recipe, and most barbarously tasty.

Commonplace Book

'"...I had convinced myself, experimentally, that human existence, human nature, was a bottomless pit and an uncommonly filthy one at that. Reaction was inevitable. Then I understood why men have invented gods, subscribed to irrational systems of theology, hailed and accredited transparently ridiculous miracles. Such lies are necessary to certain stages of development simply for the preservation of sanity, just as, at another stage, sanity, for its own preservation, is necessarily driven to declare their falsehood. And so I, after the manner of my kind, was driven to take refuge in a dream. The subjective, in some form or other, alone makes life continuously possible..."'

from The History of Sir Richard Calmady by Lucas Malet (Book V, Chapter II)

Clarimonde by Theophile Gautier (1839)

This vampire tale was originally published in a volume of novellas called A Tear of the Devil. Its title is La Morte Amoureuse, perhaps translatable as something like The Deathly Lover (Clarimonde is the invention of the translator, the celebrated Lafcadio Hearn). It is Gautier at his most sensual. A young priest, Romuald, notices at his confirmation a splendid woman of dreamlike beauty, who stares at him in a desiring manner. Her eyes are an almost luminous and trancelike green. Romuald has never been overly bothered with women before, but this is somehow different. His mind is enchanted and captive. He can't stop thinking about her. A day or so later, his Abbe comes to send him off to his first position, and they speak of her. He names her as Clarimonde, an infamous courtesan. Romuald is deeply disturbed inside himself but tries not to give in to thoughts of her. He is struggling on in his new position out in the country, when the Abbe comes on a visit and mentions that Clarimonde has died. Romuald is stricken and upset; he 'dreams' that night (but the dream almost seems more real than reality) that he is visited by a servant of Clarimonde, who whisks him off in a dark equipage with steaming horses galloping at an astonishing rate to an unknown castle. Here he meets Clarimonde, who berates him with his choice of God over her, and enraptures him once again, this time to fulfilment. Their relationship is all that Romuald had hoped for, and fantasised about; Clarimonde too is deeply affected and starts to focus in on her love for him as proof that she is far more honourable than she was ever portrayed. Romuald and she continue in this vein, to the point where he is unsure which is the true reality - his daily life as a country priest, or his nightly life as Clarimonde's votary. Romuald gets more and more worn out in trying to encompass both worlds. One night he cuts his finger and Clarimonde, who had been seeming more and more white, wan and empty, suddenly bounds up like a maniac and sucks at the wound. She is restored to blushing life. A few nights later, he spies her in a mirror putting a powder into his drink. He feigns drinking it, and throws it away. That night, aping sleep, he witnesses her vampiric ways, as she very slightly punctures his arm to suck his blood, thinking he is drugged. All the same, though, she utters loving thoughts for his continued health, as he is her wellspring of life. Finally, confronted by the Abbe, who has entertained deep suspicions of their connection, Romuald is persuaded, exhausted, to pursue her second end. They exhume her coffin and see her there well preserved with a drop of blood at the corner of her mouth. The Abbe makes the sign of the cross over her with holy water, at the slightest touch of which she disintegrates. Romuald 'sees' her only once more; she tears at him for his disloyalty and asks what she did to deserve this fate, then disappears like smoke. In the end, he tells us, he has lived to regret this action, for her love was the key of his life. In its wild language and eroticist exaggeration, this is textbook sensualism, and fun as such without being particularly edifying.