Seducers in Ecuador and the Heir

by Vita Sackville-West

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  Vita Sackville-West

  SEDUCERS IN ECUADOR

  &

  THE HEIR

  With a new Introduction by Lisa St Aubin de Terán

  To

  Virginia Woolf

  Contents

  Introduction

  Seducers in Ecuador

  Foreword

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Introduction

  The name of Vita Sackville-West is well known for many reasons, ranging from notorious scandals to exquisite gardens, and from famous court cases to the authorship of poetry and prose. Born in 1892, she was the daughter of two cousins, Lionel Sackville-West and Victoria, an exotic despotic woman with a strain of Spanish gipsy in her veins. Their daughter, an only child, grew up at Knole, the family seat, and the largest house in England, spanning four acres with its halls and corridors. Here she developed an intense love of places, of buildings, of things. She lived in the rarified atmosphere of the English aristocracy before the Great War, thriving on the luxuriant mixture of excessive attention and comparative neglect.

  When her father died, she, the presumed heiress of Knole, that adored Elizabethan palace that had been in the Sackville family for so long, was passed over in favour of a male cousin. Her sense of identity seemed to go with her birthright. Had she been a boy, Knole would have been hers. Perhaps much of her subsequent sexual ambiguity stemmed from that twist of fate. Even as a child, she must have known that she was really expected to have been a boy.

  Meanwhile, Vita sunk her house-passions, albeit vicariously, in a villa in Constantinople, and then in her English Long Barn where she lived with her husband, Harold Nicolson. They had met at a dinner party in 1910, and they married in 1913. Their life together was a tapestry of tempestuous episodes interlaced with years of calm. They shared each other, with varying degrees of resistance, with many others, but her most intense love affair was with Violet Trefusis (née Keppel). This was a love begun in childhood that was to rage and wane for much of her adult life. However, Harold Nicolson’s biographer, James Lee-Milne, has written that it was “Vita’s deep atavistic love of Knole which Harold had to understand was the really serious rival he had to face”.

  Many of her other friendships were passions, and many of her passions were later distilled into friendship. Virginia Woolf, who was once (literally) Vita’s lover, wrote her novel Orlando as a tribute to Vita Sackville-West and to the dream house of her childhood, Knole.

  The two short novels in this volume were also written as tributes: The Heir was a homage and a farewell to Knole, and Seducers in Ecuador was an offering to Virginia Woolf. The latter was written while Vita and Harold were on holiday in the Dolomites in July, 1924. She wrote from there to Virginia Woolf in England “you asked me to write a story for you on the peaks of mountains and beside green lakes I am writing it for you”.

  Superficially, the two stories would seem very different, both in their subject matter and their style. And yet, they are both tales of chivalry, both improbable in their plots, and both heavily allegorical. Seducers in Ecuador is a short ironic fantasy wherein the hero, or rather, anti-hero, Arthur Lomax wages a Quixotic and sadly destructive battle to behave well and honourably. Like a fly, he enmeshes himself further and further into the web of intrigue and deceit that surrounds him. The story begins in Egypt, and adopting the fashion of the times there, Lomax takes to wearing blue spectacles. From the moment he dons these protective lenses, his whole perception of the world is altered, not only is he shielded from the sun, but from reality as well. Each character in the tale lives in a world of their own fantasy, and Lomax manages to stumble into most of them, wreaking a trail of desolation born entirely of his good intentions.

  The Heir, written two years earlier, is clearly deeply rooted in Vita’s own background. Although the house that she describes with such tender detail is not literally Knole, the feelings there stem directly from her own knowledge and love of country houses and their power to bind those who live in them. The Heir is subtitled A Love Story, and it describes the awakening of true love in the heart of Peregrine Chase upon his arrival at the Elizabethan Manor house of his old aunt. She has died and is lying in state upstairs, while the greedy estate agent and executor wait below to carve up the property that the dull young nephew has inherited. Chase initially finds the house dusty and its attractions veiled, but his senses gradually keen to his surroundings. The house devours and calms all his anxieties. The gardens, the peacocks, the servants and furniture and even the greyhound Thane, flesh out from their first introduction as liabilities into bastions of all that is good and pure of traditional values. The tenants welcome him, the dog pines for him and the once “ghostly” garden fruits as luxuriantly as the spilling out of a cornucopia. Amongst so much fertility the house itself is eroticised into a sensual woman. “Blackboys”, as the house is called “laid the hands more gentle and more detaining than the hands of any woman about his heart”.

  Greed and modern times, the urge to destroy the past, then enters into unarmed combat, as it were, with Chase who is “poor and hard working in a cheerless fashion; he managed a branch of a small insurance company in Wolverhampton and expected nothing further out of life”. Without the aid of any coloured spectacles, Chase’s vision of the world is altered. He arrives to dispose of his unwanted inheritance and he quite simply falls in love with it, echoing more suddenly, but in many ways, closely, Vita’s own love of place and property. There is no element of commercial interest here, or pleasure at a “good investment”, this is the love of sacrifice, a preservation of beauty, a championing of the weak by the strong. Chase, who enters the story as a hopeless wimp is transformed into a strong man by his quest, but although he becomes the master of his own emotions, “the centre of all was always the house, that mothered the farms and accepted the homage of the garden. The house was the heart of all things.”

  Paradoxically, Peregrine Chase sees Eden (Blackboys) itself as the snake, since it stirs feelings and responsibilities that threaten the anonymity of his dreary life. The story unfolds with a constant spur of suspense: will Chase bite the apple and taste the fruits of paradise, or will he sell up and return to his office in Wolverhampton? Will he save the tenants from eviction? Will the beautiful peacocks who roam the grounds be put down? Will the hoards of sightseers buy his house when it is put up for auction? Or will it be the symbolic Saracens: the
exotic, bejewelled and decadent Brazilians who have their eye on Blackboys? Chase is defending the old world from the new. He is not just “Fighting for his house? No, No! more, far more than that: fighting for the thing he loved. Fighting to shield from rape the thing he loved.” Vita Sackville-West has made of this simple tale a medieval romance and a chivalric adventure. There are ingredients of a challenge by a mysterious opponent, a love quest, and the seduction of the knight by the bewitching temptress. However, Chase (whose name suggests chastity, an essential value for a knight), has no white charger and no funds to save his metaphorical castle, nor has he, at least to start with, the usual attributes of an Arthur or a Launcelot.

  The theme of The Heir is one of nostalgia for a passing England and dissolving values, it is at once both a celebration and an invitation to mourn the loss of a great house and the unchanging values that remain cocooned within it.

  Given the author’s almost obsessive love for houses, The Heir is a much more sincere book than the apparently flippant Seducers in Ecuador. Neither of these stories are particularly significant in the context of her writing as a whole. Compared to All Passion Spent or The Edwardians or her long poem, The Land or her journals, they carry much less weight. And yet, they are both interesting and, each in its own way, unique. The one becoming a testimony of her greatest love and frustration, and the other being a metaphorical view of the author’s own strange predicament. The preposterous plot of Seducers in Ecuador with its hanging of a man for a crime that was not a crime and the scapegoating of Lomax, the anti-hero, also has roots in Vita Sackville-West’s own life. Arthur Lomax puts on a pair of glasses and finds that the whole world becomes “more than curious; it was magical”. With his eyes shielded, “his common sense was divinely in abeyance; and he kept it that way”. Lomax ventures in and out of the real world by the device of his coloured lenses, experimenting in all the colours, thus making the world of fantasy and make-believe become the real world, at least for him.

  There is no evidence that Vita was addicted to dark glasses, though many people subsequently have hidden behind them, but, by donning male attire and, sometimes, changing her name to “Julian”, Vita used to step out of her persona as chatelaine, wife, mother of two sons, landscape gardener, novelist and respected member of a coterie of writers centring around the Bloomsbury set, and become the scandalous, often fleeing, lover of the ever ready and equally brilliant Violet Trefusis. Sometimes the two personae of Vita Sackville-West sat side by side, particularly in later years when she became more settled into Sissinghurst, the now National Trust house that she restored with Harold Nicolson and where she lived and gardened. Sometimes, though, she would just run away, often to the continent, to live a life of decadence and romance and disrepute. She had her own brand of coloured spectacles to put on whenever her world became inexplicable or even just dull. Whatever it was that ruled the phases of her life, shifting as she did from one gear to the next so readily, it must have fascinated her to create a character who could (and by a much more socially acceptable means) change his identity and the role of everyone around him.

  Seducers in Ecuador is like a challenge to the reader. It doesn’t unfold its plot, as such, it blurts it out right at the beginning. Early on in the story the author teases “the practised reader will have observed by now that the element of surprise is not to be looked for in this story”. It is a challenge to know all but still read on. However many twists and turns the story takes, there are, despite the above quotation, many surprises. However, misfortune sits so heavily on the shoulders of Arthur Lomax that, by the end, one is scarcely surprised at anything that befalls him, except, perhaps, to marvel that he was not also drawn and quartered after his hanging. Nothing is real or stable in this story, the ground shifts constantly under the reader’s feet and the rules are forever being reinvented.

  Lomax, sailing on a yacht with a party of weird and uncommunicative guests is ensnared by a Miss Whitaker, a woman who would have the world, and particularly Lomax, believe that she has been seduced by a dashing bounder who has fled to Ecuador. Lomax marries her, believing her to be pregnant and in distress. His chivalrous move merely begins a chain reaction of calamities, and all for nothing, because Miss Whitaker is neither in distress nor pregnant, she merely writes letters to an imaginary lover in South America. Oddly, by the end of the book, the one truly believable character is the missing cad in Ecuador.

  This ironic downfall of a successful man who insists on wearing shades and becomes one of life’s failures, was well received when it was first published. Virginia Woolf commented in a letter to Vita when she first received the manuscript “I’m certain that you’ve done something much more interesting (to me, at least) than you’ve yet done . . . I’m very glad we’re going to publish it.” The other members of the Bloomsbury set also approved of Vita’s new book, though Virginia Woolf was probably less pleased to see that in America, when her Mrs Dalloway was reviewed on the same page as Seducers in Ecuador, it was Vita’s book that got the top space and the better review of the two.

  Vita herself once wrote to her friend Eddie Marsh that she had written Seducers in Ecuador as a joke. Perhaps it doesn’t matter what an author’s motives are on writing a book, all that matters is the end product. And, as Vita says herself, commenting on Lomax’s trial, “how pitiable a weapon was truth—individual fantasy was the only potent defence”.

  Arthur Lomax went to the scaffold. Vita Sackville-West lived on at Sissinghurst in Kent where she died in 1962.

  Lisa St Aubin de Terán, Legnaro, Italy, 1987

  Seducers in Ecuador

  It was in Egypt that Arthur Lomax contracted the habit which, after a pleasantly varied career, brought him finally to the scaffold.

  In Egypt most tourists wear blue spectacles. Arthur Lomax followed this prudent if unbecoming fashion. In the company of three people he scarcely knew, but into whose intimacy he had been forced by the exigencies of yachting; straddling his long legs across a donkey; attired in a suit of white ducks, a solar topee on his head, his blue spectacles on his nose, he contemplated the Sphinx. But Lomax was less interested in the Sphinx than in the phenomenon produced by the wearing of those coloured glasses. In fact, he had already dismissed the Sphinx as a most overrated object, which, deprived of the snobbishness of legend to help it out, would have little chance of luring the traveller over fifteen hundred miles of land and sea to Egypt. But, as so often happens, although disappointed in one quarter he had been richly and unexpectedly rewarded in another. The world was changed for him, and, had he but known it, the whole of his future altered, by those two circles of blue glass. Unfortunately one does not recognise the turning-point of one’s future until one’s future has become one’s past.

  Whether he pushed the glasses up on to his forehead, and looked out from underneath them, or slid them down to the tip of his nose, and looked out above them, he confronted unaided the too realistic glare of the Egyptian sun. When, however, he readjusted them to the place where they were intended to be worn, he immediately re-entered the curious world so recently become his own. It was more than curious; it was magical. A thick green light shrouded everything, the sort of light that might be the forerunner of some undreamed-of storm, or hang between a dying sun and a dead world. He wondered at the poverty of the common imagination, which degraded blue glasses into a prosaic, even a comic, thing. He resolved, however, not to initiate a soul into his discovery. To those blessed with perception, let perception remain sacred, but let the obtuse dwell for ever in their darkness.

  But for Bellamy, Lomax would not have been in Egypt at all. Bellamy owned the yacht. A tall, cadaverous man, with a dark skin, white hair, and pale blue eyes, he belonged to Lomax’s club. They had never taken any notice of one another beyond a nod. Then one evening Bellamy, sitting next to Lomax at dinner, mentioned that he was sailing next day for Egypt. He was greatly put out because his third guest, a man, had failed him. “Fami
ly ties,” he grumbled; and then, to Lomax, “somehow you don’t look as though you had any.” “I haven’t,” said Lomax. “Lucky man,” grumbled Bellamy. “No,” said Lomax, “not so much lucky as wise. A man isn’t born with wife and children, and if he acquires them he has only himself to blame.” This appeared to amuse Bellamy, especially coming from Lomax, who was habitually taciturn, and he said, “That being so, you’d better come along to Egypt to-morrow.” “Thanks,” said Lomax, “I will.”

  This trip would serve to pass the time. A yachting trip was a pleasant, civilised thing to undertake, and Lomax appreciated pleasant, civilised things. He had very little use for the conspicuous or the arresting. Such inclinations as he had towards the finer gestures – and it is not to be denied that such inclinations were latent in him – had been judiciously repressed, until Lomax could congratulate himself on having achieved the comfortable ideal of all true Englishmen. From this trip, then, he anticipated nothing but six or seven agreeable weeks of sight-seeing in company as civilised as his own. It is, however, the purpose of this story to demonstrate the danger of becoming involved in the lives of others without having previously tested the harmlessness of those others, and the danger above all of contracting in middle-age a new habit liable to release those lions of folly which prowl about our depths, and which it is the duty of every citizen to keep securely caged.

  Of course one cannot blame Lomax. He knew nothing of Bellamy, and for Miss Whitaker his original feeling was one of purely chivalrous compassion. Besides, it must be remembered that under the new influence of his spectacles he was living in a condition of ecstasy – a breathless condition, in which he was hurried along by his instincts, and precipitated into compromising himself before he had had time to remove his spectacles and consult his reason. Indeed, with a rapidity that he was never well able to understand, he found himself in such a position that he no longer dared to remove his spectacles at all; he could not face a return to the daylight mood; realism was no longer for him. And the spectacles, having once made him their slave, served him well. They altered the world in the most extraordinary way. The general light was green instead of yellow, the sky and the desert both turned green, reds became purple, greens were almost black. It produced an effect of stillness, everything seemed muffled. The noises of the world lost their significance. Everything became at once intensified and remote. Lomax found it decidedly more interesting than the sights of Egypt. The sights of Egypt were a fact, having a material reality, but here was a phenomenon that presented life under a new aspect. Lomax knew well enough that to present life under a new aspect is the beginning and probably also the end of genius; it is therefore no wonder that his discovery produced in him so profound and sensational an excitement. His companions thought him silent; they thought him even a little dull. But they were by that time accustomed to his silence; they no longer regarded him as a possible stimulant; they regarded him merely as a fixture – uncommunicative, but emanating an agreeable if undefined sense of security. Although they could not expect to be amused by him, in each one of them dwelt an unphrased conviction that Lomax was a man to be depended upon in the event of trouble. The extent to which he could be depended upon they had yet to learn.