The History of Sir Richard Calmady by Lucas Malet (1901)

Now I can guess why Malet's last two novels were of her shorter, more pointed variety. This one was in the offing as the latest of her broad, sprawling pieces which alternated between the shorter ones, but it was so much longer, double the length of anything she had previously attempted. Presumably this took loads of her brainspace, and much more refining and working up led to the delay; it also has all the hallmarks of a magnum opus, where cumulation was intended to make her points sing at quite a significantly higher pitch. It was so long that it made two volumes in Britain. It is a singular and evocative piece. It starts as the story of a great love in exalted circles just as Victoria is ascending the throne. But the Calmadys are posited as a blighted race, where an ancient misdemeanour has brought ill-luck raining down in the form of early death in the main male line. Richard Calmady the elder is the hero-lover dream of his beautiful young wife, Katherine, herself a scion of an equivalent heritage, the Ormistons, whose main residence is in the north. She and Richard settle at Brockhurst, the family seat in the Calmady homelands, which appear to be concentrated around eastern Berkshire and northern Hampshire. Katherine becomes pregnant, and joy seems all-availing. Then the family curse is realised: Richard is fatally injured in a riding accident. Katherine is devastated and has the horse involved shot on the lawns of the house as a kind of emotional revenge on life. Her son is duly born, and it seems that the curse has visited again. He is severely physically disabled in the sense that his legs are very curtailed. This devastates Katherine a second time, and all of her extreme emotion and need for love is channelled into this younger Richard, who is our man, the eponymous hero. This is a significant fact in itself, a flag that this novel can wave to accord it a place in history. It must be one of the first treatments of disability in a modern sense in fiction, and Richard Calmady is almost definitely the first 'positive' main character to have these traits. We travel with him through an overprotected youth and his emergence into the full inheritance of the title. One of the key experiences of his childhood is a humiliation which comes at the hands of a young girl, friend to a cousin, who is very pretty, quite pert. Helen seems at first to be friendly, and Richard is taken with her, starts to trust her, only to find a little while later that she has none of the fellow-feeling that he was imagining. Her mocking laughter haunts him, and hurts him badly, but he can't help some residual fascination at her prettiness and bright strength, laced with fear though it may be. Later in life, on the verge of Richard's full adulthood, they meet again and achieve an adult rapprochement. Helen, now Madame de Vallorbes, married to a philandering Frenchman, becomes Richard's ideal of enticing womanhood, and she is also taken with him, loving the power she has over him. One night an overprotective Katherine discovers them with Helen draped over Richard, obviously about to consummate their desires. Katherine and Helen have a tough stand-off, and Helen leaves. This keeps Richard fascinated and starts for him a sense of frustration, only too easily encourageable given his physical limitations. Slowly he disengages from his mother, bleak-mindedly believing that he is made to suffer and has been deluding himself with any notion that the world is a good place. Eventually he leaves to pursue wine, women and song via extensive travels on his personal yacht. Four years later, Richard is in Naples, having enjoyed himself to the hilt courtesy of the family's great wealth. He and Helen have kept in touch by letter. She is blasted with boredom by her fatuous French writer lover, and escapes to Italy. She comes to the villa where Richard is staying, and decides that the time has finally come for them to pursue what has been in abeyance for so long. It finally happens, but Richard's response is unusual - I feel a little limitingly so. He turns from her, almost as though her sexual availability has disgusted him. Now, if he had caroused as Malet implies, I think the likelihood of this reaction is a great deal lessened. Yes, I guess she could be an ideal which couldn't survive reality. But, somehow, this plot bend doesn't seem to work. He shuns her, and a major crisis is precipitated in his life. The sensuous life he has lived is proved not to be the answer. He gets dangerously ill at the same time. At a night at the opera, a wildly ego-hurt Helen, now returned to her lover, makes sure that Richard receives a punch which sends him flying. This proves the turning point. His mother comes to Naples, having had word that he may not survive, to nurse him. With her is a fairly constant companion, a toughly independent young woman, a distant cousin or niece, who was Helen's friend in childhood (and into adulthood) and witness to Richard's humiliation. Honoria is a very vital character, 'not the marrying sort', who wants to be understood for her intelligence and capability. Proto-feminist indeed: another pennant added to this novel's flagpole. She has been consistently wary of Richard, fighting between a sense of shying away from his disability and a sense of irritation with his arrogance as an adult. Richard and she have never 'clicked', but, all the same, she has always been of sterling support to Katherine, her special favourite 'aunt', and her feelings are reciprocated. Against all odds, Richard survives. Back at Brockhurst, after years overseas, he locks himself away, completely uninvolved with the running of the estate, which used to be a specially loved skill. In his absence, Honoria has assited Katherine in running things, and now does so again when she can. Richard, led by the family chaplain, starts researching the family curse. The chaplain, Julius March, recognises that something he found in the library long ago, when he first came to the family, must now be revealed. A chap-book relates in medieval verse the 'vulgar story' of family shame, the resulting accursedness, and the prophecy of a 'Child of Promise' that will come to restore the family good. This development is perhaps the novel's weakest juncture; the vulgarity is not explicated, and the superstition somewhat ridiculous. We are clearly meant to understand that Richard, in all his imperfection, is the chosen one - in fact, I'm surprised that this piece wasn't named The Child of Promise; I wonder what led Malet away from that title? Anyway, somehow, we never really understand how, as it's not strictly possible, Richard's mind changes. He begins to think of emergence from his self-imposed exile, and having rejoined the family circle, much to Katherine's delight, begins to think of others, rejecting his former selfishness. A young local lad of the estate is maimed dreadfully by being dragged through a machine, and this terrible event inspires Richard to start a house near one of the villages for all the 'imperfect people' like himself, hoping that its first inhabitant will be this young fellow. The boy dies, but Richard's dream doesn't. In a moment of inspiration and unusual warmth and intensity he shares it with Honoria, who is staying for a few days before she goes off to chaperone a silly young relative who needs a steady hand to avoid disaster. Honoria is astonished that this man from whom she has shied in both disgust and annoyance now shows this unselfishness and human feeling. In a long penultimate chapter of great beauty and very well wound-up spiralling intensity, Malet shows a revolution come over Honoria as she realises that not only can she now respect this damaged, 'damaged' man, but that she can love him. Despite the brilliance of this chapter, and indeed several at heightened moments before it, where Malet is able to pull focus in and pinpoint storms of concentrated feeling in waves of recognisable force, this conclusion finally feels unsupported psychologically. I can't find the place in my mind where Richard and Honoria's personalities could easily meet, and that sense of mutual satisfaction arise which would make this real. So, ultimately I think this is an extraordinary reading experience, mainly as a result of the power of the wordsmithing, though this is a little Jamesian and wordily cluttered sometimes. But this greater power is put to the use of a plot and psychology of character which is not quite so deeply efficacious, and which has occasional strong faultlines; a heady admixture.

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.