a gallimaufry

A Day to Remember to Forget, by Rosalind Brackenbury

It’s the late 1960s and Phil and Lucy have just decided to get married; they are still students but have fallen in love with an old farmhouse they intend to buy even if it’s not entirely clear how they’ll pay for it (‘when the loot runs out, I’ll sell books and vegetables,’ says Phil airily). They are on their way to Phil’s childhood home in suburbia, for his mother’s fiftieth birthday. This novel centres on that birthday and on the relationships between the members of Phil’s family, the Ridgelys. It explores the tensions between generations, the frustrations of love and the power of domesticity. By soaking the reader in the thoughts of Lucy, Phil, Phil’s mother Felicity, and Mrs Fletcher, the Ridgelys’ elderly neighbour, Rosalind Brackenbury weaves a striking and acute novel that has stayed with me. Unlike a lot of ‘stream-of-consciousness-type’ novels, it has a physicality, an earthiness to it. The characters are so deeply and solidly imagined that it’s impossible not to believe in them and I catch myself wondering what happened to them all, where is Lucy now aged almost seventy?

(Carel Weight, The Departing Angel, 1961; Royal Academy of Arts; found here)

Felicity Ridgely is the very definition of house-proud. Her home is spotlessly clean, she works ceaselessly to ensure that her kitchen is ordered and her linen ironed. Why this is so important, she no longer knows. She spends most of her birthday cooking, preparing and clearing up meals for the rest of the family: breakfast, a roast lunch, afternoon tea, supper. Her husband, George, and her sons try to lure her away, to have a drink, to rest, but she refuses. She takes no pleasure in all this housework – in fact, she deeply resents it and plays the martyr constantly. But if it were to be taken away from her, her life would be empty. She has nothing else.

She and George are conventional in their attitudes – pathologically so, in Phil’s eyes. They mistrust Mrs Fletcher, who lives next door in a dark, decaying house: her husband was a conscientious objector and died unhappily. They cannot express their love for their sons. Felicity feels her blunders painfully, but cannot pull herself out of the pattern that elicits them. But their worst crime, according to Phil, is their dishonesty. They lie about the past and Phil’s childhood.

Andrew, Phil’s elder brother, is kinder to them:

‘I see they had to invent it all,’ Andrew said, ‘because they’re so bloody miserable now. Because they can’t stand not having had a happy past to gloat over, so they invent one, they allow themselves to see it all different because otherwise life would be intolerable. [...] So don’t take it away from them. Because it’s cruel, and unnecessary. [...] Shit, they didn’t even have a chance to find out who they were and where they lived before they were slap-bang in the middle of a bloody war, shooting hell out of a bunch of other kids on the other side of Europe. They didn’t have a chance. They couldn’t say, me first, and this is what I want, and I want to live in a big house in the country and nobody bugging me please.’

Andrew has followed the path laid out by his parents – university, job, marriage, child – but he has adapted it to suit himself and sublimated his resentment. Phil, however, wants none of it, rejects ‘all the rubbish’ of this sort of life, ‘nothing natural or living or real’. Rejection is the only way he believes he can survive.

Phil said, ‘But how can one have a choice, really? Everything’s there before you’re born. All the things other generations have done, in their turn, I suppose, without a choice. And they go on after one’s dead. You can’t change anything. You can only decide not to accept it. You just have to go and do your own thing, as they say, and let the rest get stuffed, if they want to. It’s too late. One doesn’t have time.’
‘Just one life,’ Mrs Fletcher said, not answering him, her eyes blurred now with fatigue. ‘Just a few years. You make choices all the time, of a sort. But who’s to tell you if you were right?’

Yet of course it’s a qualified rejection, because the life he envisages is, like Andrew’s, ultimately only a different version of the same thing. It’s property ownership, marriage and children, just with long hair and cigarettes and swearing. When he and Lucy visit Mrs Fletcher for a glass of sherry, they describe their dreams with great enthusiasm:

‘But a house,’ Lucy plunged in, her thin hands in the air, gesturing around a shape. ‘A house can mean more than just walls, more than just a place. You know? One makes something, expresses something. And sometimes, one just finds the perfect thing, the perfect place, something that’s been sort of waiting for one.’
‘And if one falls in love,’ said Mrs Fletcher, ‘one must act.’
‘Yes! That’s just what happened! It was as if it had been left there for us, just at the right moment. That’s why we have to have it, at whatever risk. Because I do think, don’t you...’ her hands moved again, swiftly, ‘that if one is offered something great one is offered a risk too; and if you can accept the risk, you get the greatness. Oh, dear, I am explaining it badly. But no, this is what happens, if you fall in love with a person, isn’t it? You risk your whole self, you give yourself away – oh, completely – and it’s the most awful risk, but if the person accepts you, then you have the greatness too, oh, and everything.’

Mrs Fletcher, who once also defied convention for the love of a man named Phil, is gently sceptical. And underneath, Lucy is a little sceptical too. Does she really want to marry Phil? (She’s only nineteen.) She imagines the perfect life, but will the house provide that, or will it prove a trap like the one that has caught Felicity? Will her marriage be a union of equals, or will she end up afraid of Phil? At the end of the novel she and Phil drive out at dusk to see the house, and it is surrounded by little fires as the farmers burn the stubble: a potent and ambiguous image.

Lucy and Phil’s dream is essentially static. They will achieve the perfect house, the perfect state. What will happen after they are perfectly married and living in the perfect house? They don’t seem to know, other than that it will be wonderful. Yet, Brackenbury’s novel warns, do not expect romantic love to endure, do not stake all your happiness on it. Do not assume that loving your children will be enough, because you will easily warp and damage that love. ‘You make choices all the time, of a sort. But who’s to tell you if you were right?’

The edition of A Day to Remember to Forget which I read is a new one published by Michael Walmer (and sent to me to review months ago – I am really sorry Mike to have taken so long). It has an excellent introduction by Margaret Drabble, which places it in its context (1971) and discusses its novelty and even shockingness. But it’s worth reading not just as a historical document of a particular socio-cultural shift in British society, between the Boomers and their parents, but because it is a really good novel and a painfully honest description of the limits of family love. In the end, we are all alone.

(Carel Weight, The Silence, 1965; Royal Academy of Arts; found here)

The end of the holidays (warning! a long post!)

(Boats at Pin Mill, Suffolk)

With the beginning of September, Belgian teachers and students return to school like swallows to the south. Last week I squeezed into the tiny study, nearly breaking my neck on assorted heaps of books, to start preparing for the new school year. Quite how it will pan out, of course I do not know, although early signs indicate that a great deal more cleaning than usual will be involved.

So here I am at the computer again after a lovely summer. Despite lurking Covid-19, the horror of the explosion in Beirut and the absolutely disgusting re-emergence of immigrant hatred expressed by British politicians and public, I have enjoyed myself. I have even been travelling! And what is peculiar is that I have travelled more than usual (well, I did in July; since I came home I’ve barely left the house...).

First, we visited some friends in France, in the mountains near Chamonix. It was astonishingly beautiful! My daughter, who has never been in mountains before, went slightly crazy – it was a mighty contrast to the flat Flemish countryside.

Then, we took advantage of what turned out to be a relatively brief period of time when one could travel to the UK without quarantining, and visited my family for the first time since the world turned topsy-turvy. This was a strange but also happy experience.

(This is the house in Essex designed by Grayson Perry, which we peered at through the hedge.)

Back here in Belgium I have started going for a run a few times a week in a feeble effort to become fitter – and I do mean feeble: dog walkers overtake me as I wheeze along. Surely at some point I will (a) improve and stop looking such a wally and (b) actually start to enjoy the experience, aren’t there supposed to be endorphins involved somewhere?

I am also – roll of drums – taking driving lessons. After I passed my theory test a hundred years ago my husband said he would teach me to drive. Readers, this will surprise you, but our lessons were not a success. So now I am taking lessons from a proper instructor, who specialises in teaching weedy people who are scared of everything and don’t really want to learn to drive anyway. (That is me.) So far no one has died, although my heart did almost give out when we had to drive on the motorway last week. So. Much. Terror. And my instructor shouting, ‘You must drive faster Helen!’ when I swear my molars were flying out the back of my head there was so much g-force.

Naturally I have been reading... and here are a few books I read.

I am working my way verrrry slowly, for it is BIG, through Fiona McCarthy’s biography of William Morris. Morris attended the boys’ public school Marlborough College not long after it had been founded. It turns out that there was a massive riot there in 1851, ‘the Rebellion’, in revenge for disciplinary measures taken against boys for bullying peasants and dancing by moonlight; the boys went berserk and threw fireworks at the masters, trashed the school and marched on the local town. For weeks on end! They even burnt the headmaster’s manuscript copy of his translation of Sophocles! School life has become considerably duller since the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps for the best.

I am also working my way, less slowly, through She Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India by Katie Hickman. This is a fascinating book and if the beginning of term doesn’t kill me dead I plan to write about it here.

Some months ago I read an article by Samantha Shannon recommending Under a Pendulum Sun, a novel by Jeanette Ng. With such a splendid title I was reaching for my purse even before I saw that it is about Victorian missionaries in Fairyland, with strong Brontë overtones. The Revd Laon Helstone has travelled to Arcadia, land of the Fae, to convert the inhabitants to Christianity. When his letters to his sister Cathy cease, she goes in search of him but no sooner arrives in Arcadia than is pent up in the creepy house of Gethsemane. Cathy’s problem is as much ‘reading’ the land and its people as it is finding Laon and surviving her encounter with Queen Mab and her fairy court. Ng’s Arcadia is properly weird and her Brontë references add depth (her version of Jane Eyre’s first encounter with Rochester is particularly cleverly done). Either I or the book ran out of steam a bit at the end – me, probably – but I do recommend this anyway.

Back in the day Ruth Rendall was pitched as P.D. James’s rival to queen of crime writers. But for me, Rendall has always been superior: James is good at place but Rendall’s characters are acutely (dispassionately!) observed and even her monsters have a credible psychological depth to a degree that James never achieves. The House of Stairs is one of her Barbara Vine novels, and is narrated by Lizzie who, by chance, encounters Bell, a woman she had known in the 1960s who has just been released from prison. Feeling compelled to write down the experiences that led to that long-ago murder, Lizzie allows herself to be drawn back into Bell’s life due to a sense of complicity in what happened and with possibly yet further terrible consequences. You may consider it as a warning against reading too much Henry James...

So how was your summer?

The King of Elfland's Daughter, by Lord Dunsany, at SNB

There are some books that are a little bit special, that may not be very popular but really speak to you. The King of Elfland’s Daughter, by Lord Dunsany, is one of them. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful fantasy novel, first published in 1924 and now reissued by Gollancz with the introduction by Neil Gaiman from their 1999 edition of the book.

I originally wrote about it here in 2015 but I’ve revised (and, I hope, improved) the piece for Shiny New Books – you can read it here.

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week 2020 round-up

It is the end of this year’s reading week! I come to it feeling happy to have read so much more of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s work, and feeling I understand it and know her just a little better than I did before. This week I read a collection of short stories, Of Cats and Elfin, and a selection of her poems in Voices from Fairyland; I also read some of her letters, which were utterly delightful and revealed her as a kind and witty friend, keenly alive to life’s comedy, and her novel Summer Will Show, which I would recommend whole-heartedly if you have not yet tried any of her work. I also read the sad and beautiful memoir For Sylvia by her partner, Valentine Ackland; if you have read STW’s diaries you might feel that Ackland treated STW badly but this casts her actions in a more sympathetic light (ironically, since she is so hard on herself).

But what have you been reading? Here I shall post links to all of your reviews. Let me know in the comments to any of this week’s posts of anything you’ve written for STW Reading Week and I’ll add it.

‘It’s only two years since I discovered STW but on the strength of what I’ve read of her so far I have no hesitation in saying she’s become one of my all time favourite authors,’ writes Harriet in her review of Mr Fortune’s Maggot. She describes it as: ‘warm, witty, frequently surprising. Yes there are obvious parallels between Lueli’s and Mr Fortune’s loss of their gods, but STW is far too subtle and complex a writer to drive this home. Just read it for its charm and humour and wisdom.’

Harriet also links to previous reviews she’s written: of the short story collections Swans on an Autumn River, Kingdoms of Elfin and Of Cats and Elfins, and the novel Lolly Willowes.

STW wrote a biography of T.H. White and Simon of Stuck in a Book reviewed it: ‘I had expected something a little more distinctive stylistically from this deeply distinctive writer. But perhaps she decided not to make herself the star of the book. Yet she cannot help sometimes writing as an exasperated friend – ‘Of course, he should have gone to see her. Rush on by new projects, he didn’t.’ – and sometimes as a fellow author giving her opinion on a work in progress.

‘There is enough in here to delight the reader who comes because they love Warner. There could be more, and I would have welcomed it, but then it might have cloaked the emerging of the curious, sad, impassioned, conflicted, enthusiastic, inventive, restricted T.H. White.’

Hayley at Desperate Reader has read Lolly Willowes, years after first trying and failing with it. She writes: ‘What I really can’t understand though is how I missed the humour and sharpness of this book last time around when it’s the first thing that hit me this time. It doesn’t much matter because I got here in the end, which feels like the greatest good luck.

‘I'm really beginning to wonder if Sylvia Townsend Warner might be the most under rated writer though, and why that should be.’

lethe wrote about Of Cats and Elfins over at Goodreads: ‘Both cats and elfins are heartless creatures, and therefore perfectly suited to STW's sometimes sardonic wit. [...] Since we had a spell of gorgeous weather, I started off with The Cat's Cradle Book. [...] I liked them all, [...] especially "Bluebeard's Daughter". "Bluebeard" has always been one of my favourite fairytales and I enjoyed reading about the life of his forgotten offspring.’

‘I was hooked and mainlining right from page one and spent a wonderful week or so in late January, totally lost in the universe Warner created.  Have any of you watched Bladerunner, with its AI replicants who were “more real than real”?  Although the comparison jars a bit, it pretty accurately describes how I experienced the small corner of the medieval universe Warner creates.  In this I found her skill to be comparable to the great 19th century realists, whose fictional universes are so skillfully constructed that we readers are deceived into thinking them snapshots of reality when of course they are no such thing.’ Janakay has written a fascinating post in which she not only reviews The Corner That Held Them but discusses more widely her love of STW’s books including her experience of Lolly Willowes:

‘I was totally entranced; I had simply never encountered anything quite like Warner’s combination of sharp social observation, realistic depictions of nature and delicate fantasy, all heightened by the mythic overtones of Lolly’s nocturnal ramblings through the dark woods adjacent to the village of Great Mop.  Lolly Willowes remains one of my favorite books and I return to it every few years, when a certain mood strikes me; unlike Lolly, I don’t ditch home and hearth but I do spend a day or two immersing myself in that singular world that Warner creates in this wonderful novel.’

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week is over for this year, but Sylvia Townsend Warner’s work is for always and worth celebrating. To me, she is a very special writer who deserves a central place in twentieth-century British literature. Thank you for reading and for taking part!

Letters, Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited by William Maxwell

For Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week last year, I read her Diaries, and they were wonderful.  Then lethe wrote that her letters were even better. And I know that Simon of Stuck in a Book is also a great fan of STW’s letters. So – what could I do? I want to write about as many facets of STW’s writing as possible. There are several different collections of her letters available, which focus on her correspondence with one or two people, but I chose this one because it was the most general and I thought would give me a good idea of her letter-writing.

Letters are a fascinating form because they are both a little private – in comparison with work that is formally published – and a little public – the writer is writing consciously for a reader, presenting a facet of herself, polishing the material, in comparison with a diary. So when you read letters to writers’ friends, you experience (at a remove, of course) what it might be like to be one of those friends. STW’s letters are kind, sensible and very funny. They are also brilliant in that, with a startling simile, a turn of phrase, a landscape, a person or even a pet will leap into life.

(Some letters written by STW and auctioned at Bonhams in 2018; that’s her handwriting! Found here with a very nice description that is worth reading)

William Maxwell was the fiction editor at the New Yorker, which is how he came to know STW; he was also no slouch in the fiction-writing department himself. In the introduction, he describes STW when he first met her in 1939:

She was dressed in black. Her voice had a slightly husky intimate quality. Her conversation was so enchanting it made my head swim. I did not want to let her out of my sight. Ever.

They became good friends and many of the letters in this collection are to him, as well as to Paul Nordoff, Bea Howe, David Garnett and Nancy Cunard; but there are also letters to less-famous friends and to her editors.

Maxwell notes that STW wrote a lot of letters, ‘thousands of them’. He writes:

The personal correspondence of writers feeds on left-over energy. There is also the element of lavishness, of enjoying the fact that they are throwing away one of their better efforts, for the chances of any given letter’s surviving are fifty-fifty, at most. And there is the element of confidence – of the relaxed backhand stroke that can place the ball anywhere in the court that it pleases the writer to have it go.

The letters he has brought together span 1921–78, the year of her death (in which she writes: ‘But I shall not re-read Colette. I have looked forward to doing this, & find to my grief that I have outlived her.’). Her letters encompass Significant Events, such as her visit to Spain during the Civil War and her experiences of the Second World War. She writes, especially to her American friends, about odd aspects of life during that conflict. Here she starts describing firewatching, but quickly goes off along a very STW path:

Tonight armed with whistles, perhaps fortified with whistles would be a better term for it, Valentine and I will be out firewatching. It is a most pastoral and contemplative pursuit. We walk up and down a section of quiet country lanes awaiting the descent of possible incendiary bombs. If they did, it would become our duty to blow a series of short blasts on our whistles. [...] The only snag is – as you will readily understand – one cannot rehearse the series of short blasts, in case the rehearsal gave rise to false alarms and despondencies. I have tried mine out very quietly in the toilet, it seems to go all right, but how am I to know if a mezza voce whistle is going to be as good ff? The other temptation is resisting being owls. Valentines whistle is just a whole tone lower than mine, and the same interval exists between the male and female owl, and we might have such lovely conversations. It always seems to me that owls are very happy in their married lives, perhaps because they never speak during the day. (To Paul Nordoff, 1941)

There are of course mentions of her literary work and of the world of arts:

A story demanded to be written, and that is why I have not answered your letter before: a wrong-headed story, that would come blundering like a moth on my window, and stare in with small red eyes, and I the last writer in the world to manage such a subject. One should have more self-control. One should be able to say, Go away. You have come to the wrong inkstand, there is nothing for you here. But I am so weakminded that I cannot even say, Come next week. (To Alyse Gregory, 1951)

I remember a dress rehearsal of Heartbreak House when [George Bernard] Shaw bounded on to the stage and became a young girl. He was infinitely better at it than the actress, even when she had studied him, he far out-girled her. He had a tirra-lirra twirl of the waist that I went home and practised by the hour. I couldn’t do it either. (To William Maxwell, 1952)

The letters about her partner Valentine Ackland’s illness and death are very moving. On her bereavement:

Her love is everywhere. It follows me as I go about the house, meets me in the garden, sends swans into my dreams. In a strange, underwater or above-earth way I am very nearly happy. (To Marchette and Joy Chute, 1969)

(Great Eye Folly, Salthouse, Norfolk, where STW and Ackland stayed in 1950–51; damaged in the floods of 1953, it no longer exists; from Literary Norfolk)

And she spins wonderful stories, like this one:

About a mile from Tangley [Hall] there is a deserted farm called The Warren. I came on it quite by accident for it lies in a little dell among woods, far from the road and the field-path to it is vanishing from disuse. I found a way in and walked over the house as much as I dared for the staircase is broken away and all the timber eaten with dry rot. The parlour windows are grown over with nettles and gooseberry run wild, and growing up through the broken stone floor is a flourishing elder-bush, singularly bright green from its indoor life. The doors and chimney-pieces are carved with names and dates, mostly 18th cent.
I was very pleased with my find, and when I had done with the polite part of the house I turned to the back-kitchens and wash-houses. These were even more dilapidated and darkened, and I was just thinking that I had had enough of them when I saw an archway leading into a sort of cellar with a barrel roof. I went in looking at the roof and nearly fell into a well. It was so dark and smooth and plumb with the floor that it looked like a slate. It then seemed to me that this deserted house I had been pitying so was uncommonly disappointed that I hadn’t gone a step further into its trap. It had been waiting so long for something to happen; and a drowned lady would have been a pleasant secret to hint of to the woods on a winter’s night. (To David Garnett, 1925)

Many of her letters concern domesticity, and they are so fun and so sharp. STW looks around her at her garden, her neighbours, herself, and revels in the beauty and strangeness and writes them down as little gifts for her correspondents, garnished with a sprig of laughter. She has a poet’s ear for cadence, and a novelist’s eye for the telling detail. All I want to do is quote from them. So I shall.

As for the cold – the north-wind is raving, and the air is bruised and black, and even William [the pug] has come in and settled down by the fire for the rest of the day. (To Oliver Warner, 1933)

We have eaten cold partridge legs out of doors, sitting on a heap of dry rushes on a heath, and watched, very disapprovingly, by two church towers, one to the east and one to the west. It is impossible to frolic anywhere in this country without a church tower on the horizon to eye one. There they rear themselves, like melancholy teeth from an old jaw.(On Norfolk; to Llewellyn Powys, 1934)

Your lovely parcel came, thank you very much for it. Valentine, like a wasp, has already got at the maple syrup. You send the most understanding parcels, it is as though your astral body came across to inspect our store-cupboard. (To Marchette Chute, 1953)

I have been sent a diary, and on the title-page is printed: The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on – Which of course is indisputable, but yet casts a rather sombre shade over the dotted lines on which I shall note that Mary Tomkins is coming to tea, that the chimney sweeper is coming to sweep. (To William Maxwell, 1957)

Oh, and I also learnt from these letters that she wrote libretti as well! Is there nothing to which STW could not turn her hand?

special offer at Handheld Press: Kingdoms of Elfin

Because I live under a stone I have only just seen this offer at Handheld Press!

Until midnight tonight you can buy a copy of Kingdoms of Elfin at the discounted price of £10 (free p&p in the UK). (They are also the publishers of Of Cats and Elfins, which I wrote about earlier this week, just letting you know...)

It is a great collection of stories and Handheld do produce very nice editions. Treat yourself!

Summer Will Show, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Dedicated to Valentine Ackland, Summer Will Show was the first novel Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote after the two women had met and fallen in love. It is a sort-of historical novel, although – as in the two other historical novels of hers I have read, After the Death of Don Juan and The Corner That Held Them – it is unusual for a historical novel. It is written in four ‘movements’ and in a decidedly modernist manner – the action is entirely from the perspective of one character, Sophia Willoughby; the characters are fluid and mysterious; there is little historical detail, just enough to locate the novel in 1848, a vinaigrette hurled here, a fashionable bonnet pawned there. In fact, I had to look up the 1848 revolution in France because there is absolutely no info-dumping in this novel.

(Barricades rue Saint-Maur, Paris, June 1848; found here)

At the beginning of the novel Sophia Willoughby, young and beautiful, is the mother to two young children and heiress to the estate of Blandamer. Unfortunately, her husband Frederick has taken up with Minna Lemuel:

A byword, half actress, half strumpet; a Jewess; a nonsensical creature bedizened with airs of prophecy, who trailed across Europe with a tag-rag of poets, revolutionaries, musicians and circus-riders snuffing at her heels [...]

and lives with Minna in Paris on an income Sophia provides for him. Sophia’s children are delicate and she takes them to be swung over the lime kiln, a treatment she believes has been responsible for her own good health but which causes their deaths. Until now, Sophia’s life has had purpose, to manage Blandamer, breed and pass on the estate, she has been a link in a chain. Now her life is without purpose. Clearly the solution is to breed more heirs, so Sophia sets off for Paris and Frederick, whom she expects to do his duty. However, she arrives in time for the overthrowing of the French king Louis Philippe in February 1848 and, searching for Frederick, finds herself in Minna’s apartment during a party at which Minna is telling a story:

 At that moment the slowly flickering glance touched her, and rested. It showed no curiosity, only a kind of pondering attention. Then, as though in compliance, Minna’s large supple hands gently caressed themselves together in the very gesture of her thought. Sophia started slightly. The glance, mournfully numbering, moved on. But answering Sophia’s infinitesimal start of surprise there had been a smile – small, meek, and satisfied, the smile of a dutiful child.

In my post on Voices from Fairyland we saw that STW’s poems found a way of speaking about a love which could not be spoken about, lesbian love. And so in this novel STW is actually quite circumspect. It is both abundantly clear that Sophia and Minna fall in love and yet at the same time if you were wilful you could read it as concerning a close friendship. Sophia feels, her emotions fluctuate, through her we experience them too; but she is not given to romanticism and her expressions of love tend to take a practical turn such as managing finances, shopping or comforting.

The story which Minna is telling when Sophia first meets her is a story of her childhood, in Lithuania, and it is a story of poverty and violence, a pogrom of the Jews. Later she tells Sophia a little more about her youth, again a tale of cruelty and penury. Her background is as different from Sophia’s as it could be; and so are her philosophies of life. She is an artist, without youth or beauty; she is an excellent thief, ‘magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent, and interfering’. She is Jewish, a complete outsider. Most of all, she is a liar but one whose lies and stories contain a greater truth than any fidelity to facts could provide. Her improvidence and generosity counter Sophia’s hereditary avarice and soon Sophia finds a sort of exhilaration in having to scrabble for money and sing for her supper (she sings hymns in the street, pretending to be an escaped Protestant nun).

Sophia is drawn into the shabby, artistic world of the revolutionaries by her love for Minna; it is only gradually that she rejects the exploitative system from which she had until that moment profited. The exploitation is of peasants, workers and former slaves. Blandamer, so bucolic and ordered, prettifies this repression, in contrast to the dirty, populated city of ideas that is Paris. The political philosophy of the novel is supplied by the Communist Ingelbracht. Ingelbracht distinguishes between ‘true’ revolutionaries and revolutionaries like Minna, romantic, undisciplined and doomed to one grand gesture only. Sophia he characterises as a bourgeois hanger-on and a danger to the movement. But at the end of the novel, Sophia sits alone reading Ingelbracht’s tract, penniless, surely herself now a true revolutionary.

(Chettle House, Dorset, from here; perhaps Blandamer looked a bit like this)

Politics is central to the novel, as it is in After the Death of Don Juan, but this is a wonderful book because of the way that it is written, the light touch of Sophia’s particular gaze and responses, the dispassionate air, the patter of conversation, the comedy and affection beside the pain. It has great charm and the characters, even Frederick and wicked old Léocadie, have great charm too. Trying to discuss it makes me realise how leaden my writing is and how much better it is to lay a quote at your feet to sample – this is a conversation between Sophia and Minna, when Sophia has returned to Minna to find her in deep poverty:

‘You would never believe, Sophia, how filthily that Natalia kept everything. My beautiful dish-cloths all rolled up in dirty balls, my china broken, verdigris on the coffee pot ... she would have poisoned me if I had kept her a day longer.’
‘Was that the servant who ate pickles because she had known so many sorrows?’
‘Ate pickles? She engulfed them. She drank the brandy, she stole the linen, she was in league with the concierge, she lowered down bottles of wine to him from the balcony, she had the soul of a snake, the greed of a wolf, the shamelessness of a lawyer. [...] And after she had gone I found a monkey’s tail in the rubbish-bin.’
‘A monkey’s tail?’
‘A monkey’s tail. Judge for yourself if she was depraved or no.’ [...]
‘I suppose,’ [Sophia] said, thoughtlessly voicing her thought, ‘it’s because you’re so patently a liar.’
‘A liar? I a liar, my lovely one? Alas, I am incapable of lies. I am a poor recounter of stories only, I cannot make them up.’
And she flipped the dusters out of the window [...]
‘Was it from this balcony,’ enquired Sophia, ‘that the wine was lowered?’
Minna feigned inattention to this lure.
‘I would lay down my life for the truth,’ she added serenely.

As ever, the last STW I read is always my favourite STW, until the next one...

For Sylvia: An Honest Account, by Valentine Ackland

It might seem odd to include something by another writer in Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week. But if you know a little about STW’s life, you’ll know that Valentine Ackland was her partner for thirty-nine years, from shortly after their first meeting in 1930 until Ackland’s death in 1969. And if you have read any of STW’s diaries and letters, you will already know a little about Ackland: shy, clever, well-dressed, passionate; poet, gardener, antiques dealer and animal lover. Not very good at promoting herself, her poems were mainly championed by STW and fell out of the public eye until they were collected and (re)published by Carcanet in 2008 as Journey from Winter (edited by Frances Bingham).

(Gertrude Mary Powys, Valentine Ackland; Dorset County Museum; found at Art UK)

For Sylvia is a very short memoir. It was written under special circumstances in 1949 and not published until 1985. The published edition has an extremely useful introduction by Bea Howe, a writer who was friends with both Ackland and STW for many years. The book was originally written, as entitled, For Sylvia, and as such was presumably a private document. However, it doesn’t read like that. It has a tone of great authenticity and is direct and confessional, occasionally irresolute and contradictory, as you might expect; but it is also thoughtful, structured, conscious of itself. The first few pages discuss the importance of the writer’s anonymity in ‘the honest account of a life’, yet clearly the writer was not anonymous to her reader in this case. While much of the memoir covers Ackland’s life before Sylvia and therefore might not have been known to her, there is no sense that it is written for her, no sense of a specific you in place of a general and unknown reader who requires explanations, background to be filled in. Indeed, Ackland writes about STW as ‘Sylvia’, not ‘you’. All of which leads me to suspect that it was never intended as an entirely private record, even if it wasn’t intended either to be entirely public. (Unless, of course, the only way that Ackland could bring herself to write something so personal and so exposing was to distance it even from Sylvia, her reader, and turn it into a story.)

At the beginning of the memoir, Ackland explains that she has reached a crisis, and this is what has prompted the writing of it. The crisis was that she had fallen in love with another woman, the American writer Elizabeth Wade White, while still loving STW. It was decided that STW would move out to a hotel while EWW and Ackland lived for a while in Ackland and STW’s cottage. Obviously, this was distressing for STW. On the eve of EWW’s arrival, Ackland wrote this memoir and gave it to STW who, upon reading it, became convinced that their love would endure. And, in fact, EWW left after a few months, never to return.

So this memoir is Ackland’s attempt to explain to STW her divided feelings and to root them in her experience of life. You could not really call it a justification. The portrait she presents, beautifully written, is of a self that has been split and damaged. It is also often very sad: she never spares herself and relentlessly presents her weaknesses and cruelties.

(Photograph of Elizabeth Wade White (left), Valentine Ackland (right), Sylvia Townsend Warner (seated); found at A Reader’s Footprints, a blog which looks fascinating)

Ackland begins with a crisis – but it is not the crisis of her two loves, it is the crisis of her alcoholism, a few years previously, as if she can’t yet name the current crisis involving Wade White. She describes how, one ‘strange night’, desperate to free herself from it after many years, she demands the ‘Emptiness’: ‘Is God there?’

There was no reply. Everything was completely dead. I had no sense except of emptiness and the rushing swirling dark.

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘There is no hope anywhere, and no sound and no promise. So now I know that there is nothing that can save me. I don’t believe, and I don’t know anything at all. But without faith or hope, in the utmost despair, I swear to You that I will never drink again. And I know that that can’t be true unless You are.’

And the next evening, she ‘suddenly realized that I was walking in tranquillity and with perfect confidence’ and this strengthened her and enabled her to finally stop drinking.

To return to that word ‘divided’: this seems a divided beginning to a memoir inspired by a different crisis. And indeed, I would say that the hallmark of Ackland’s life was being divided, being torn between two alternatives that she could not resolve. Loving both STW and Wade White at the same time being a powerful example. Her family was rich but convinced they were financially struggling. Her parents doted on her but her elder sister, presumably jealous, was often abusive and bullying and so were the nurses who took care of her. She considered falling in love with another girl the most natural and beautiful thing in the world: her parents called it filthy and her father never forgave her. She convinced herself she should marry but jilted one fiancé; she wavered over another and did eventually marry him but the marriage was annulled. She was devoutly religious but also sceptical and doubting. She stole and she took lovers and treated them badly, despite being essentially a kind and very sensitive person. She became an alcoholic but successfully hid it from everyone, even STW, although they lived together for years.

(Photograph of Valentine Ackland found here; originally I think from here)

Have I put you off? I hope not. Ackland describes so well the fears that can distort our lives and she is a masterful chronicler of guilt and self-loathing. But her exploration of herself, her emotions, is nuanced and delicate. She describes her childhood eccentricities: longing to befriend a ghost, playing chess in a tree. Movingly, she recounts her loves and her struggles with society’s disgust at them. Her descriptions of Edwardian life, and then the Bohemian 1920s, are vivid. There is the Hunt Ball:

After a gruesome finale, when they all danced a gallop and many couples fell down flat on the floor, and the place resounded with cat-calls, yells, hunting-horns and a variety of horrible noises, we all returned home.

and wonderful times living down in Dorset, at first with her friend R, with whom she dances  ‘fine high-kicks to the ceiling’ to gramophone records. They befriend T.F. Powys, whose favourite tipple at that time was gin and milk. Imagine. Her life improves, she meets STW. They live for a year in Frankfort Manor, which is a sort of magical Eden. They leave for a variety of practical reasons, but Ackland writes:

My last look at Frankfort was, alas, a look of shame: deserting that lovely, lovely house because – as I knew beyond any power to evade it – I was rotten and almost destroyed and could not heal myself, even when I was housed in that gentle, beautiful place and had the truest love that ever drew breath in the world. [...] I dream of it now, too often, and when I am dead for sure my ghost will haunt there, loving and grieving...

She was always acutely aware of her own privilege and deeply ashamed of her inability to be as happy as she thought she should be. Towards the end of the account, she writes:

To this moment, then, my life has been strange and as I have set it down here it has seemed to be unhappy. But in fact it has been one of the most blessed, one of the happiest lives ever lived on the earth: and that fills me with awe and sometimes with trouble [...] I have had very great suffering and very sharp pain, and bitter shame and grief too, and base and terrible fear; and I cannot think that I have ever done anything of myself to be worthy of the least of my joys [...]

But I think that most readers will reach a much kinder conclusion than this. In fact, the saddest thing of all now is that she did not write more and that – whisper it, lest the poets are reading – she never wrote any fiction...

Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited and with poems by Theodora Goss

(Edmund Dulac, Circe, the Enchantress, 1911; from here)

Following on from yesterday’s post about some of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s fantastical stories, a quick look at some of her fantastical poetry.

In last year’s Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week I wrote about the Selected Poems published by Carcanet; they also publish STW’s New Collected Poems. However, I have a little book of poems called Voices from Fairyland and it brings together some of STW’s fantastical poems with works by Mary Coleridge and Charlotte Mew. It’s a collection that works really well together because of the shared theme, and it has good introductions by Theodora Goss. (It’s published in the US by Aqueduct Press but if you’re in the UK you can obtain it with a little ingenuity.)

When I first proposed Voices from Fairyland as a title for this anthology, I meant that Coleridge, Mew, and Warner were writers who had heard voices from fairyland, calling to them as Mew’s changeling hears the fairies calling.[...] But now I think that these poets are the ones calling from fairyland: from a strange, dangerous, and enchanted country. They are calling to us with voices that I am not certain we can understand, because we have not yet learned to understand the fantastical in poetry.

Goss discusses how STW uses fantastical poetry, based on stories we already know, to give voices to those who cannot usually speak and whose voices in those stories are silent: the wife, the child, the lesbian.

How do you speak when speech becomes impossible? The figure for such impossible speech is Echo, who speaks although she cannot. She speaks through repetition and revision. She speaks by saying what others have said, with a different meaning [...]

In this way she can write about a desire that cannot be spoken, a woman’s love for a woman. And she can question whether the way we live our lives, with our mortgages and our three square meals, is sufficient. For example, ‘The Sleeping Beauty woke’, tips the happy ending right over:

The Sleeping Beauty woke:
The spit began to turn,
The woodmen cleared the brake,
The gardener mowed the lawn.
Woe’s me! And must one kiss
Revoke the silent house, the birdsong wilderness?

There is a yearning, in this and other poems, for something beyond the mundane (fairyland?). It can be reached in silence, in wilderness, in dreams, in desire. In the next poem, the poet is called by a voice from this place beyond, this fairyland, and responds:

In the Cotswolds

All day the rain
Fell on the wheat
And dripped from the gable
On to the stone;
And all day long
I sat alone
Save for the dog
Who slept at my feet.

Slept – till a-sudden
He roused in fear,
And snuffed at the door,
And would not be quelled.
I opened – and there
An old crone I beheld,
And round about her
The dusk drew near.

Something she said –
But her voice was hollow,
And chill was the hand
She laid on mine.
Her words were a riddle
I could not untwine;
And when she turned onward
I knew I must follow.

I felt the watery
Stubble souse
My ankles, and round me
Saw corn-shocks blurred.
And faint and fainter
Yet I heard
The dog bark on
In the empty house.

The disquiet of this poem has sunk into its very structure. There is a rhyme scheme – lines 2 and 8 rhyme with each other and 4 and 6 rhyme with each other. But the rhyme is so unusual and the first so delayed that you almost don’t hear it, although you expect it and want it. So there is a sense of waiting and unease to it, which reflects the waiting in the house and then the arrival of the mysterious, icy crone with her alluring riddle. The flatness of the monosyllables of the first stanza is like the raindrops falling, and there seems to be a hard music of ‘o’ and ‘d’ to the rest of the poem as the rain continues to fall and the poet to walk. We end with an empty house, not silent as Sleeping Beauty’s (that dog barking!); the poet wasn’t happy there but the journey on which s/he has set forth with the crone is unsettling in every possible meaning of the word.

Of Cats and Elfins: Short Tales and Fantasies, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

This very pretty collection of stories was published earlier this year by Handheld Press (who also publish a companion collection, Kingdoms of Elfin) and it’s the book I’ve chosen to start off 2020’s Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week. It’s made up of two parts: the first is hitherto-unpublished stories about Elfin, fairy kingdoms, with a story of metamorphosis ending it and forming a bridge to the second part, stories told by cats (and originally issued as the collection Cat’s Cradle). These two parts work very nicely together and are unified by a feeling that there is a great deal more to the world (fairy queens, talking cats) than most of us are able to perceive.

 [William] Blake was fortunate. It is not given to many humans to see the Little People so clearly, still less to assist at their ceremonies; a peaked face looking down for a moment from the dusk of an ash-tree, a sudden small fierce nip on one’s arm, a vapoury streak across the snap-shot of a picnic-party... that is as much as the commonalty have any reason to expect.

Each of the two parts has some sort of ‘introduction’, to frame the fantastical stories that follow as some sort of ethnographic project. The first story, ‘The Kingdom of Elfin’, purports to be a factual essay explaining some characteristics of the fairy world and drawing some analogies with human societies. STW’s fairies live in rigidly hierarchical societies, ruled by queens and governed by arcane rituals – not, in fact, so very different from ours. In addition to the powers of flight (only actually practised by vulgar fairies) and invisibility, the Elfin differ from (most of) us only in that they are entirely without pity or compassion.

Of the Elfin stories in this collection, three are enjoyable but it’s ‘The Duke of Orkney’s Leonardo’ which is truly great. The identity of the central character is built around his sense of his physical beauty and as a child, his mother values him for his appearance: ‘though he was now an expense, he might become an asset’. One day he is bathing naked in a pool when he is discovered by another fairy, Sir Glamie:

Overcome by the boy’s remarkable beauty, he had a rush of benevolence, and casting round in his mind remembered the worms, small and smooth and white, that fishermen call gentles, and impale on the hook when the water is too cloudy to use a fly. ‘I shall call you Gentle,’ he declared.

The fate of Gentil, as he becomes known, is not dissimilar to that of the worms: he is taken to court, snatched up in marriage by Princess Lief and forced to live with her in Caithness whose fairies survive by wrecking. There follows a tale of unrequited love, loss of self, a sort of redemption through the beauty of art. It is discussed brilliantly by Greer Gilman in the foreword.

The other Elfin stories strike a less melancholic and more satirical note. In ‘Narrative of Events Preceding the Death of Queen Ermine’ a fairy community is threatened by the development of a mine by humans. They hope that revolution among the workers will save them, observing the situation with impassive logic:

Every seventh day the wretched mortals, no better than slaves, were forced to attend a judicial review of their conduct. The solo voice harangued them on their negligences, in efficiencies, and lack of zeal. Then they were scourged till they howled and groaned.[...] After a final harangue and a final scourging, they were released, to limp and writhe their way home. No better than slaves, in the end they would take the slaves’ revenge, would revolt, kill their taskmasters, break the machinery and leave in a body. So it was merely a question of waiting.

‘Queen Mousie’ tells of a reluctant Elfin queen, while ‘An Improbable Situation’ relates a fairy’s obsession with a human philosopher. The ‘bridge’ story, ‘Stay Corydon, Thou Swain’, concerns a middle-aged draper who longs to meet a nymph. STW is drawn here (also in stories in the cat section) to the idea of metamorphosis as both release and prison, a revelation of one aspect of the self and a destruction of others.

And then we move to the cats. Their stories are introduced by a human narrator, who stumbles upon a beautiful seventeenth-century manor house, ripe as a ‘pear’ and inhabited by an extraordinarily handsome young man and dozens of cats:

With artful inconsequentiality, [the fourth cat] said:
‘You should see my kittens! They’re wonderful – and what appetites! But praise be, all my kittens are fine feeders.’ [...]
It was then that I heard a human voice, saying: ‘So you speak Cat?’
‘A little, I replied. ‘I understand it better than I can speak it.’

The young man invites the narrator to stay and explains that he is collecting the cats’ stories, like a nineteenth-century collector of fairy-tales, with a view to their publication.

Alas, the ripe perfection of the house and this idyll cannot last long and tragedy follows. The narrator then selects some of the stories to publish – which forms the rest of this collection. This introduction offers some clues about how to read them: there are comparisons with Aesop, so we know to expect animal fables (‘although don’t run away with the idea that these stories have anything in common with the ordinary moral tales’), and mention of the ballad of the Twa’ Corbies, the story of Bluebeard. The young man tells the narrator that he was inspired to begin collecting the stories after a passionate love affair in Turkey with a cat named Haru – which introduces a flavour of the Arabian Nights and foreshadows elements in the story of ‘The Traveller from the East and the Traveller from the West’.

The stories are funny, sad, wild, unexpected. They may reflect a cat’s view of the world, although they aren’t  usually about cats. Many concern gifts of one form or another – usually unwanted by the recipients. So in ‘The Widow’s Portion’ an old woman whose only joy is her miserliness. Accidentally, she helps another person, who wants to reward her. But what good are rubies to someone who enjoys torturing herself with avarice?

Life had no more joys for her. She no longer dared to take her favourite walk along the cliffs, in case she inadvertently rescued another benefactor. The thought that she was rich poisoned all her little economies; it was no longer a pleasure to find raw turnips gave her heartburn.

A hermit decides to share his virtue with a tiger, with unforeseen consequences. (Mind you, it’s hard to foresee anything in an STW story.) A fox becomes a saint, so that the Catholic Church bestow the honour of the papacy upon him in ‘The Fox-Pope’.

Three of my favourite fables concern monster daughters. There is the baker’s daughter (inspired by Ophelia’s line in Hamlet) in ‘Bread for the Castle’, whose great pleasure is to stroll up to the abandoned castle gardens and peer through the iron gates at them, longing to enter. But the owners of the castle return and order their bread from her father, who asks her to sit up with him every night while he bakes, and sing to him. He plans to make a fortune for her dowry and is soon obsessed with money:

These sums became ever more interesting to him. And that was a good thing, for lately his daughter’s singing had become so harsh and droning that there was no encouragement in it. There she sat, perched on the edge of the kneading trough, humped up with sleepiness, and wrapped in a brown hooded cloak; for in spite of the heat from the oven she complained incessantly of feeling cold. There she sat, with her staring great eyes, ringed around with sleeplessness.

Perhaps the girl will get her wish, but not quite as she imagined.

The heroine of ‘The Trumpeter’s Daughter’ discovers she is a changeling and is turned out by her parents. What will she do? How will she find her ‘place in the world’? And Djamileh, in ‘Bluebeard’s Daughter’, has inherited, as well has her father’s blue colouring, his Castle of Shady Transports. What else might she have inherited from him? In an STW story, you never know what’s coming until you have reached the end.

(All the illustrations in this post are by Arthur Rackham)