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.