a gallimaufry

don't let the rogue prorogue

As ever, the news at the moment is depressing, especially if you happen to live in Hong Kong, Kashmir, Yemen or Syria. While our situation is small potatoes in comparison, it’s not the best time to be British either. I cannot say I was anticipating Boris Johnson’s accession to power with joy, but I am astonished to find that he is prepared – or so he says – to prorogue Parliament, to deliberately delay any General Election in order to gain his ends. Even if you support leaving without a deal – and may I say you are a nutcase if you do – surely you can agree that doing so in this manner, which prevents either Parliament or the country having their say, is shameful, dishonourable and undemocratic.

And no deal isn’t an end in itself. The British will then have to return to Brussels anyway – to agree a deal.

And one of my hens is very poorly.

There is perhaps little we can do to help our fellows in Kashmir or Syria. Or Daisy Chicken, currently subsisting on yoghurt. But – if you are feeling powerless and frustrated, please don’t forget that there are things you can do in the UK.

Write to your MP and urge him or her, whatever their stance on Brexit, to stand up for parliamentary democracy. You can find your MP’s email address and contact details on the parliamentary website here.

Write to the leaders of the other parties – Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green, SNP, Plaid Cymru – asking them to work together.

And if you have time, do write to some of the MPs who have spent the last three years holding the government to account over Brexit and thank them – they receive a lot of abuse, it’s nice for them to read a message of support at a time when they face a great struggle.

Finally, the Good Law Project along with 70 MPs are challenging the government’s attempt to prorogue Parliament in the courts. The GLP succeeded last year in a case brought before the EU Court of Justice, which ruled that the UK could unilaterally revoke Article 50 if it chose. The present case is being fast-tracked and if you would like to contribute to their costs you can donate here. You can read more about the GLP and the case here.

If any readers have other suggestions of what we can do to thwart this attack on democracy, please add them in the comments. Bon courage everyone!

How to Be Idle, by Tom Hodgkinson

A week or so ago an author whom I admire posted on her blog that she was burned out. When she described her life, it was full of impressive achievements but did seem frenetic. She wrote about trying to make time to do things that ‘sparked joy’ and weren’t connected with work, as a way of recuperating. Let us hope that it restores her.

Ruminating on this and on the pressures of modern life on us to work hard and even in our ‘leisure time’ remain busy, I remembered How to Be Idle, a charming little book which was a bestseller in – gasp! 2004, that’s a long time ago. I was given this as a present and I remember being slightly offended – I yield in no one in my ability to laze. But I did read it and found that much of it accorded with my own views, albeit far more brilliantly articulated, wider ranging and better researched. It’s fun and flawed and having reread it just now I do recommend it, to anyone who likes entertaining arguments and anyone who feels the need for more sloth in their lives.

[I am] a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has for many years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and with tea welcomes the morning. (Dr Johnson, something of a hero in these pages)

The title is misleading. This isn’t a how-to book, although if you need some inspiration you will surely find it here; it’s a manifesto, a call to arms. For Tom Hodgkinson, laziness is a mark of a counter-culture, part of a proud tradition of rebellion and sticking it to the Man. The art of idleness lies in understanding that it should never be a full-time occupation but should be part of an elegantly balanced life. Periods of sloth should be interspersed with intervals of intense activity (Hodgkinson’s own life being an excellent illustration of this: when he wrote the book, in his mid-thirties, he had already established a career as a writer and journalist, founded and edited a magazine, set up a company importing absinthe and begotten a family while doing his best to maintain his idling principles in a farmhouse in North Devon).

(Author photograph from here)

The book is laid out in twenty-four chapters, each chapter associated with an hour of the day or night. Drawing on a ‘canon of idle writing, from the philosophy, fiction, poetry and history of the last three thousand years’, Hodgkinson discusses different aspects of loafing about, from fishing to drinking martinis, skiving to star-gazing, ignoring the alarm clock to not going on holiday, so that you, dear reader, can start to question your drone life and inject a bit of joy into your existence. He is clever and entertaining and this is a delightful book which will cheer you up if you are feeling low and stiffen your lip if your boss is bullying you.

Importantly, idleness is associated with freedom:

Being idle [...] is about being free to live the lives we want to lead, freedom from bosses, wages, commuting, consuming and debt. Being idle is about fun, pleasure and joy.

Asserting your right to do as you please with your own time is a revolutionary act in a world which values wealth and conformity. The next time you skive off work, take proper sick leave or arrive late at the office, consider yourself a rebel fighting against the current of corporate enslavement! It’ll make you feel much better about it. Furthermore, idleness is not just a pleasurable end in itself: it may have purpose. Time spent daydreaming, dozing late in bed or drinking a pint with friends can generate new ideas, useful if you are an artist or some sort of creative in a company (less useful if you’re the cleaner, who ever asks the company cleaner for ideas about new products? And why don’t they?).

I have to say, I took issue with this second point. Call me a foaming purist but lazing about to generate ideas seems to me like covert work and thus not truly in the spirit of proper idling. I admit that calls into question the nature of work and Hodgkinson is very keen on people working for themselves and earning money doing what they love rather than mindlessly commuting to an office every day to churn out consumerist crap.

My own theory is that the world is divided into two types: the idle and the anti-idle. The anti-idle I hereby christen ‘botherers’. Botherers are people who simply cannot help interfering in other people’s lives. They lack imagination, believe in hard work, exploitation and hypocrisy, and make perfect politicians, bureaucrats and fat cats. They want to make something happen, but don’t really care what it is. They impose their beliefs on others by force of law, coercion and newspapers, and justify their actions by saying they have created jobs, or cut costs, or increased spending or made profits for their shareholders.

While I am in the spirit of carping, there were other things I took issue with in How to Be Idle, though it seems mean to do so since the book never takes itself overly seriously. (Fortunately, I am mean.) Very rightly, the uselessness of slaving away to buy unnecessary consumer goods and expensive status symbols is derided: work less and consume less is a motto many of us could support. Yet even back in 2004, before the recession, stagnation of wages and rise of zero-hours contracts, many people did have to work long hours or two jobs simply to make ends meet. This was rather dismissed, I felt.

(Portrait of Samuel Johnson, champion idler, from here)

I also thought his historical analysis was disputable. A lover of the eighteenth century, Hodgkinson is convinced that everything went to pot for us with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution – and to a certain extent he is right, working life did become grim for many people. However, it is misleading to suggest that everyone before that lived the sort of independent existence of the Birmingham weavers he describes. Labourers and servants, to mention but two of the larger groups of pre-industrial workers, were very much subject to the whim of their employers and thus not especially free. And he rashly overlooks the role of the Enclosure Acts!

And there is another large group of people who had little if any time to loaf about in Britain before, during and after the Industrial Revolution: women. I didn’t notice this when I first read the book but this time it really leapt out at me. There are hardly any women in this call to laziness and none at all in the canon of idle writing Hodgkinson alluded to creating. There are a couple of female academics whose work is quoted, Geri Halliwell and Madonna, who are mostly scorned for being try-hards rather than idlers, and Penny Rimbaud, founder of CRASS and practiser of self-sufficiency (which seems rather hard work for an idler but as I mentioned, idling is counter-culture). All the poets, musicians, thinkers and artists who are quoted are (white) men. Oh! With the notable exception of Florence Nightingale in the chapter on sex. Hm. Why might this be? And who was washing the socks and cooking the meals of the creators of the canon of idle writing, I wonder?

(Jerome K. Jerome, another heroic idler, from here)

I further notice the kind of activity that qualifies as idling. Skiving, going to raves and pubs, fishing, reading (e.g. poetry and philosophy), rioting, drinking, smoking, napping and walking are all acceptable forms of idling; watching television, gardening, sewing, knitting, window-shopping or going to the hairdresser’s are not. To me, there’s a whiff of class as well as gender complicating the idle life that’s championed in these pages.

All in all, idleness is a complex subject and in fact historically at least has been a privileged state. However, we can still strive for it on behalf of ourselves and others, and the world would probably be a better place if everyone were persuaded to read How to Be Idle. I promise it will make you laugh, at any rate, and feel fond of Dr Johnson. And remember:

Greatness and late rising are natural bedfellows. Late rising is for the independent of mind, the individual who refuses to become a slave to work, money, ambition. In his youth, the great poet of loafing, Walt Whitman, would arrive at the offices of the newspaper where he worked at around 11.30 a.m., and leave at 12.30 for a two-hour lunch break. Another hour’s work after lunch and it was time to hit the town.

The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together. This to me is the true spirit of anarchy; each feeds off the other in a happy circle of our own creation.

The Corner that Held Them, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Well, I missed Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week with this review and so I am grateful to myself for extending the week by a fortnight... I am also very grateful to have read The Corner that Held Them. While it hasn’t quite dethroned After the Death of Don Juan from its place as favourite in my heart, it is a close-run thing.

A tray of buns, a tray of nuns...

I must admit to a slight sense of trepidation since the little ‘nun fiction’ I have read tends to favour hysteria in convents, but the only bout of this in The Corner that Held Them occurs when a group of novices tries to levitate while playing Flying St Katherine, and all is handled with STW’s customary sense of absurdity tempered with compassion. (Even the murder is low key.)

The novel concerns a nunnery in Norfolk and the lives of those who inhabit it during the main part of the fourteenth century. Like After the Death of Don Juan, it dips in and out of different characters’ consciousnesses, here to emphasise not only the sense of shared community but also to give a sense of time passing. Essentially plotless but more interwoven and inconclusive than a series of short stories, it often feels more historical than novel, more a record of something unfolding than a constructed narrative. Perhaps one might compare it to a mediaeval chronicle, which wove fact and fiction seamlessly together (although little here is unmediated historical fact so perhaps one might not). It is certainly an unusual structure.

(This lovely picture of some nuns I found here)

The convent of Our Lady and St Leonard at Oby has an inauspicious beginning. Alianor de Retteville is surprised in flagrante by her husband Brian and his cousins and forced to watch the murder of her lover. Her life is spared and continues miserably for some years, yet on her death Brian discovers a dormant affection for her – perhaps – and after a sumptuous funeral he founds a Benedictine nunnery to her memory. Although the nuns do not know Alianor, the spectre of such a marriage hangs over them. While they generally possess no vocation and are given to the convent by their families, for them the community offers a potentially pleasanter existence than wedlock and childbirth. Within the convent, life can be harsh and restrictive, but the nuns have a modicum of independence and responsibility. Those with talents, like Dame Susanna for music or Dame Matilda for figures, have the chance to make use of them. And it is generally a safe place compared to the outside world, as Dame Adela learns to her cost.

In this rich and dense novel two motifs recur: the tuft of wormwood by the gatehouse and the spire raised by Prioress Alicia. The wormwood is from the natural world at the mercy of which mediaeval people existed, the spire from the world of human achievement. Wormwood is edible but bitter and, in excess, toxic. It was used as a flavouring for mead in the Middle Ages and more recently in absinthe; it is also mentioned in the Bible as being mixed with vinegar and given to the dying Jesus. Its presence at the gate of the convent warns of a life of bitterness but also of succour. The raising of the spire is a long business, fraught with problems and delays, and in its first incarnation it collapses during a gale and kills one of the nuns. Yet finally it stands, a landmark for miles around. For many, like Sir Ralph, it is an object of beauty. For others, a sign of the nuns’ arrogance and profligacy. For Dame Lilias it is a symbol of failed escape. In collapsing it ‘had tried to get away’, as she has failed to do.

The fourteenth century was a dramatic period in British history: famine, war, plague and revolt ravaged it. Oby is fairly remote but suffers like everywhere else from the horrors of the Black Death, the subsequent labour shortages, the violence that followed the Peasants’ Revolt. Nor is the nunnery immune to dramatic occurrences such as the collapse of the first spire and the murder in the fishpond. But such incidents are exceptional. The rhythm of life at Oby is one of observing the rules, bickering and trying to balance the books and keep in with whoever is the current bishop. Worldly affairs and the relationships between the sisters take precedence over spiritual matters. The Black Death poses a threat but so does a possible lawsuit, the failure of tenants to pay their rents.

STW has presented us with an alternative for women to marriage, but she certainly has not idealised the religious life. In fact, she even slyly undermines it. St Leonard, to whom the convent is dedicated, is the patron saint of prisoners and captives. Few of the women – girls, when most of them arrive – have any influence over whether or not their families hand them over to the nunnery and while most settle in and appreciate their freedom from husbands some, like Dame Lilias, feel trapped. The novel ends abruptly with an escape by another nun who resents confinement. It’s an ending that is destabilising, for us as readers as well as the convent as institution.

(Nuns smuggling a man into a convent; from here)

There are other fundamental problems with life at Oby. Sir Ralph, the priest who serves the convent for most of the book, is not only idle, self-indulgent and lecherous (if loyal and good-hearted), and thus hardly an example of the religious life, he is also not really an ordained priest, just a lay clerk, and as such has no right to administer Holy Communion to the nuns or hear their confessions. Unwittingly, they are all living in a state of sin. Then there is the collapse of the spire – what, wonder the nuns, might that mean? Nothing good. And finally, the constant resentment of the peasants who have to work for what they perceive as a parcel of idle, pampered women reminds us of the unfairness of the social system in which they all struggle to survive. What really is the point of the convent?

There is so much more to this novel, it definitely requires rereading. I haven’t quoted very much because it doesn’t really lend itself to being quoted, all the strands of life are so neatly woven together that it’s difficult to extract a chunk. It’s also quite hard to write about as it has no central plot or characters and refuses the shapeliness, if you like, of conventional novel forms in favour of attempting to reflect more closely the vagaries of life as it is lived, rambling, inconclusive. This unusual structure and the distance it keeps from its characters make it difficult to place, perhaps it is not unlike Virginia Woolf’s The Years? But to anyone who fancies steeping themselves in the weirdness of mediaeval life as mediated by STW’s brilliant mind it is highly recommended.

(Bagpipe-playing bishop and dancing nun, from here)

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week: A Round-up

(Sylvia Townsend Warner, photographed by Janet Stone, 1970; National Portrait Gallery)

And thus we reach the end of the week – though not quite the end of Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week. Some of us (me!) didn’t quite finish in time and so we’ll be posting more over the next week or two. If you are also still reading or thinking about STW, let me know when you write something and I’ll add a link here.

It’s been such a joy to read everyone else’s thoughts about STW and I feel I’ve learnt a lot from them, so thank you very much for joining in! She seems to me to be a writer who really understands people in a compassionate but clear-sighted way, and who is not afraid to document their cruelties nor to satirise their weaknesses. She delights in the fantastical as well as the mundane. She can turn on a pin-head from comedy to tragedy, lyricism to bathos. Her stories stray and bite in unexpected ways. There is a strain of melancholy in her work, but also joy, and I think it is no stretch to say that her musical education informs her poetry and much of her prose, she has a very sensitive ear for how language sounds.

It’s been suggested that I might do this again next year, and I have to say I am very tempted as I now have even more STWs I’d like to read... Would you be interested?

Anyway, here are your posts, divided up per genre:

NOVELS

Lolly Willowes (1926)

Harriet writes: ‘This is a truly wonderful book and Warner is an exceptional writer. The novel, her first, was a critical success, though Warner was saddened that people viewed it as simply charming whimsy.’

Sandra writes: ‘This is a book of originality and accomplishment, of charm, humour and wry satire. As such I thoroughly enjoyed it. But I am not unaware of the deeper message behind its idiosyncrasy. And for that I applaud its writer.’ She also includes links to two other fascinating articles about the novel.

Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927)

Hayley writes: ‘a gem of a book, quiet, thoughtful, sensitive, and devastating by the end. I feel stupid for taking this long to understand just how good Sylvia Townsend Warner was, but at least have the pleasure ahead of reading through the rest of her books.’

lethe, who read this together with its sequel The Salutation (1932), writes of Mr Fortune: ‘It is a rather melancholy story, and as always, STW's writing is beautiful’; and of The Salutation: ‘I did not really care for this story. Mr. Fortune's Maggot's ending is fine as it is, this felt superfluous to me.’

The Flint Anchor (1954)

lethe has reading one of STW’s less well-known novels, about John Barnard and his family, and writes: ‘Although some are worse than others, there is not one sympathetic character in the whole extended family, and yet I loved reading about them. This, I feel, is thanks to STW’s brilliant writing and sometimes sardonic wit. I'm giving 4 stars for now, but in time I may change it to 5 stars.’

 

SHORT STORIES

The Cat’s Cradle Book (1960)

Sandra writes: ‘Written in the straight-forward manner of human fairy tales, many [of the stories] do not feature cats at all although there are plenty of animals to be found.  The stories are mostly short and are varied.  Grimm, Aesop and others echo through the pages but in new guise [...] it’s unique: an oddity.  Dark and macabre perhaps, but different and thus memorable.’

Swans on an Autumn River / A Stranger with a Bag (alternative titles for the same collection) (1966)

Harriet writes of one of the stories, ‘A Love Match’: ‘I can't help wondering if this heart-warming, wholly non-judgmental story might have been a way for Warner to write obliquely about her own unconventional life style - she lived for nearly forty years in a relationship with another woman, the poet Valentine Ackland. Whatever the case, it was a bold move and a wonderfully successful one to take such a taboo subject and turn it on its head.’

Lizzie, a long-time fan of STW, writes: ‘I [...] found myself back in familiar Townsend Warner territory: unsettling glimpses into the lives of people who, even half a century later, I feel I could probably meet on the next corner.  [...] the insights into why people do what they do are so powerful, that I find myself, story after story, drawn in’ (there are links in her post to her other reviews of STW’s short-story collections too).

The Innocent and the Guilty (1971)

Simon writes: ‘Warner always writes great sentences. She is a delicious stylist, and often very funny. And these stories might be right up some readers’ streets. For me, having discovered what exceptionally striking, immersive, satisfying stories she could write, in the other collections I’ve read – The Museum of Cheats and Swan on an Autumn River – these ended up being the smallest bit disappointing. And I think that’s because those other two collections rank among my favourite ever short stories.’

The Corner that Didn’t Hold Them

Oh dear. I’m sorry, I haven’t finished this. Every time this week I sat down to read, some husband or child or cat bobbed up and started talking at me.

However, Sylvia Townsend Warner is for ever, not just for a week, and I will post something about The Corner that Held Them when I’ve finished it. And if you too are a little behind with your STW reading, well, if you leave a link in a comment during the next two weeks I’ll add your posts and reviews retrospectively to Sunday’s round-up post.

Happy weekend, and happy reading!

(Photograph of Sylvia Townsend Warner in her flat at 113 Inverness Terrace, London, from here)

The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited by Claire Harman

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a prolific diarist. In October 1927, when she was thirty-three, her friend David Garnett gave her a notebook and she decided to use it as a journal. This she kept every day until 1932, when ‘all manner of breaks, restarts and patches begin and it is impossible to say how much is missing and how much never written in the seventeen years that follow, until 1949 when the thread is resumed’ and was kept up until a few months before her death in 1978.

(Photograph of Sylvia Townsend Warner, undated, from here)

Reading someone else’s diaries, even those of a writer (since surely most writers keep their diaries with an eye to posthumous publication), is usually intrusive and ethically dubious. Not that this stops us, since they are so fascinating. In STW’s case we can set our moral scruples aside, I think. She thought carefully about whether or not they should be published and although she felt dubious, she did not destroy them or instruct anyone else to do so. According to Claire Harman’s fascinating introduction:

In the last year of her life, Sylvia Townsend Warner drew up a new will and tried to sort all her affairs so as to spare trouble to her executors. [...] But while she left very clear instructions about the eventual publication of her love letters, her feelings about her diaries were quite different, and she told her executrix, Susanna Pinney, that they were ‘too sad’ to be published.

Harman adds:

The estate has nevertheless agreed to the editing and publication of this selection from the diaries on literary grounds, judging that it is the right compromise to make.

Since there are thirty-eight surviving notebooks of diaries, Harman was forced to ‘pare’, as she puts it, rigorously.

I tended to include the following: references to her writing (never very lengthy), entries which contained interesting descriptive passages, and those which showed the variety of her interests, the persistence of her pleasure in life, her remarkable stoicism and sit and the crises in her life, both personal and political. References to some friends have disappeared in the process of editing [...] Among the material which I have excluded are a great many interesting and detailed descriptions of concerts and exhibitions, the lives of her cats, Valentine’s family, stories about friends and friends’ families, the garden ... in short, much of the ordinariness which is probably more representative of her life than what remains. What remains is, I expect, more a representation of the workings of her mind.

She has divided the diary into sections. The first, 1927–32, brings us a Sylvia who is living in a flat in London with her little dog William; she has published her first volume of poetry and two novels, and is working on another book of poems and The True Heart, as well as the project to edit and publish sacred music which became the ten-volume Tudor Church Music, edited by R.R. Terry for Oxford University Press. She is also the mistress of Percy Carter Buck, director of music at Harrow. The Sylvia of these years is busy and sociable, visiting friends in the country, attending concerts, working on Tudor Church Music, going out for dinner, and music features more strongly in her life now than later. During this section she dumps Percy Carter Buck, falls in love with Valentine Ackland and moves to the country with her.

Overslept into the ringing of church bells. Wrote Mr Cope [a poem about a clergyman] all day, and frolicked with the holy ghost. The Church has lost a great religious poet in me; but I have lost an infinity of fun in the church, so the loss is even. (17 August 1930)

The next section is much shorter, 1933–45, and scantier; there is a hiatus during the period when Ackland fell in love with the American activist Elizabeth Wade White. Disappointingly, there is nothing about STW’s and Ackland’s Red Cross work in Barcelona in 1937, but there is a more political tone to this section and of course more about the effect of the Second World War on life. STW and Ackland had a vegetable garden, trout pond and rabbits to supplement their rations and bring in a little income, these were regularly poached from by hungry people but STW was sanguine about this. There are a number of entries about the writing of The Corner that Held Them, which she seems to have enjoyed writing.

Just after lunch we heard a plane flying high, that Philippa and V. said was German. Then the Performing Spitfire came over, and did his usual acrobatics, beautiful tight turns. He vanished over the hill, we returned to coffee. A long distant growl. An explosion? Not till the third of these did we realise it was only a thunderstorm. One of the advantages of a thunderstorm is that one feels no need to locate it. I don’t know why not being allowed to know where noises off take place should irk one so. If a bomb falls, a bomb has fallen, and that should suffice a contented mind. But it doesn’t. (10 December 1940)

Gale and rain, [Women’s Voluntary Service] in the morning. I spent some time with Mr Nicholls – who had laid in large stores of sanitary towels, which he called cotton goods. During the afternoon I mentioned this to Mrs E. Musing a moment, she burst out: ‘I get so worried about those heroic women in Russia. I think of it a great deal. What will they do, for cotton is so short there?’ (30 January 1942)

The third section, 1949–69, forms the bulk of the volume. It begins with STW painfully wrestling with the resumption of Ackland’s affair with Elizabeth Wade White and at one point STW leaves her home so that the other two women can be together. Fortunately, Ackland ends the affair and she and STW remain together until Ackland’s death from cancer at the end of this section; this is painful to read about. Ackland’s waning health, STW’s sorrow at ageing and at the deaths of friends tinge this section with a greater melancholy than the earlier diaries, but STW also continues to convey her great pleasure in life, in the beauty of the natural world and in simple domesticity.

Made a blue & white nightgown, interrupted by Valentine coming back with a coffee ice and a nosegay of pinks, Williams, and a central pink rose: a portrait of her young self. Today I remembered that though I had overseen everything else of my income tax return I had not remembered to look at the balance. It was so large (swelled by New Yorkers & that sale of Little Zeal) that I sat down feeling quite faint. Nevertheless I spent some time mending one of my old linen sheets. (13 July 1951)

In the final section, 1970–78, STW has unsurprisingly lost enthusiasm for diary-keeping, although in the first year after Ackland’s death she kept two diaries concurrently. Harman explains that one of the diaries was more conventional, the other more intimate, and sometimes the same incidents were recorded in both of them but as if experienced by two different women.

I set out to restore her sitting-room to look inhabited, it seemed an insult to leave it so scattered with files & boxes and parcels, and legacies to be parcelled. I spent the morning at it [...] The room looked no better & I felt guilty and appalled that I had not been of much succour to her. [...] Then, to pull myself out of this perplexed straying of the past, I re-read & checked the first letters, and then it was time to go upstairs & draw the curtains round this empty house. On the stairs, in the narrow window, she halted me to look at the two birch-trees in their lacework, the moon shining over them, a mist, a mermaid mist rising through them. I felt her, then; her compassion. So I went out & walked the drive and came in chilled & drank whiskey and caressed the cats. I know nothing, nothing. (18 January 1970)

That section is from the intimate diary, the more conventional one giving a more prosaic account but both alluding to the ‘mermaid’ mist and the feeling that Ackland was still with her. That felt presence seems to comfort STW on more than one occasion in her grief.

Harman compares STW’s purpose in writing her diary with that of Virginia Woolf, and writes perceptively:

While Woolf uses her journal predominantly to analyse her life, Warner is much more interested in description, and how to make sense, make something, of everyday things through observation. Warner was intellectually isolated for most of her life, and lonely, despite her deeply contented domestic life with the poet Valentine Ackland. When she wrote her diary it was ‘for her own eye’, as if she were writing letters to herself.

Even though STW’s eye is not turned in on herself in quite the same way, reading her diary gives you a sense of ‘knowing’ her. For one thing, she seems incapable of writing a boring sentence (and if you keep a diary you will know what a rare talent that is). She has an eye for detail, an ear for a story, a flair for using a word that is both surprising and absolutely right to describe something. She is satirical as you might guess from her fiction, but also immensely compassionate and patient, and with an enormous capacity for joy. To be absolutely honest, I am surprised that these diaries are not as popular as those by Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin. For as well as providing an insight into the life of a great writer, they remind you to look around you at the beauty of the world, the frozen aconites, the soft wind, and to take pleasure in a cheap fish supper, the dusting of your books, a cat lying on your rosy coat, singing with friends.

A blackbird just by the window squirted – there is no other word for it – into song, then cocks and cuckoos. I stayed till half-past four, then [...] I went out into the garden. It was very sweet, bees humming with a warm noise among the snap-dragons. I lay down on the grass – the dew was so thick and cold that for the first minute it was like going into the sea – and looked at the pear-tree and a sky of pale milky blue mottled with high pale pewter-coloured clouds. But at last I began to shiver and think of agues and went in. (21 June 1930)

(Photograph of Sylvia Townsend Warner in bed, probably in the 1930s, from here)

Selected Poems, by Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited by Claire Harman

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a published poet before she ever succeeded as a novelist, her debut collection, L’Espalier, coming out in 1925. For about the next decade she interspersed fiction with verse, until the publication of Whether a Dove or a Seagull in 1933/4. Claire Harman explains in this fascinating article about STW’s poetry why this collaboration with her love, Valentine Ackland, effectively ended her career as a poet. STW continued to write poetry for the rest of her life, though not to publish much of it. Shortly before her death in 1978, a Collected Poems was mooted and she wrote excitedly to her prospective publisher, ‘I intend to be a posthumous poet!’ Although all her poetry is currently out of print (with the notable exception of some of her fantastical poems, which are collected along with work by Mary Coleridge and Charlotte Mew in Voices from Fairyland edited by Theodora Goss), some of it is on the internet and second-hand copies of the Collected Poems and Selected Poems can be readily found, so while it’s true that her fiction still overshadows her poetry, the latter is not entirely forgotten.

The poems in the Selected Poems display STW’s ability in a wide range of forms and genres. She was as versatile in her poetry as she was in her fiction. I can’t find an interesting way to write about the collection as a whole, so I have picked out some poems which appealed to me. Overall there is less evidence of her spiky wit in the poetry in this collection, more melancholy.

One of my favourite poems is ‘King Duffus’:

King Duffus

When all the witches were haled to the stake and burned;
When their least ashes were swept up and drowned,
King Duffus opened his eyes and looked round.

For half a year they had trussed him in their spell:
Parching, scorching, roaring, he was blackened as a coal.
Now he wept like a freshet in April.

Tears ran like quicksilver through his rocky beard.
Why have you wakened me, he said, with a clattering sword?
Why have you snatched me back from the green yard?

There I sat feasting under the cool linden shade;
The beer in the silver cup was ever renewed,
I was at peace there, I was well-bestowed:

My crown lay lightly on my brow as a clot of foam,
My wide mantle was yellow as the flower of the broom,
Hale and holy I was in mind and in limb.

I sat among poets and among philosophers,
Carving fat bacon for the mother of Christ;
Sometimes we sang, sometimes we conversed.

Why did you summon me back from the midst of that meal
To a vexed kingdom and a smoky hall?
Could I not stay at least until dewfall?

King Duffus’s awakening immediately follows on from the destruction of the witches; it is surely their power that has held him for six months in this wonderful dream world. The water of his ‘freshet’ tears contrasts with his ‘blackened’, coal-like physique and the ‘smoky hall’ of his responsibilities. These externals are further linked, through the metaphor of fire, with the burned witches and their ashes. King Duffus’s dream was of harmony and flowers, a crown light as ‘foam’, a feast under ‘linden’ trees in a ‘green yard’. There he was nourished as much by the song and conversation he had with poets, philosophers and Christ’s mother as by the ‘fat bacon’ he carved and the ‘cool beer’ he drank. The world to which he wakens is hard and sterile, a ‘vexed kingdom’ of clattering swords. He cries (petulantly?) that he wished to dream longer. But these dreams were also bonds, a ‘spell’ that ‘trussed’ him and perhaps the kingdom is vexed because he has been indulging himself too long in his beautiful fantasies and avoiding his responsibilities.

‘King Duffus’ is a poem containing a story, and another such is ‘Road 1940’. This poem is very different, however.

Road 1940

Why do I carry, she said,
This child that is no child of mine?
Through the heat of the day it did nothing but fidget and whine,
Now it snuffles under the dew and the cold star-shine,
And lies across my heart heavy as lead,
Heavy as the dead.

Why did I lift it, she said,
Out of its cradle in the wheel-tracks?
On the dusty road burdens have melted like wax,
Soldiers have thrown down their rifles, misers slipped their packs:
Yes, and the woman who left it there has sped
With a lighter tread.

Though I should save it, she said,
What have I saved for the world’s use?
If it grow to hero it will die or let loose
Death, or to hireling, nature already is too profuse
Of such, who hope and are disinherited,
Plough, and are not fed.

But since I’ve carried it, she said,
So far I might as well carry it still.
If we ever should come to kindness someone will
Pity me perhaps as the mother of a child so ill,
Grant me even to lie down on a bed;
Give me at least bread.

Inspired I should think by the German invasion of France in May 1940, it’s a poem in which a woman laments picking up an abandoned baby on what is presumably her flight ahead of the invading troops. Her initial act of kindness has soured, as war sours the generous impulses in us. The child, already depersonalised as ‘it’, is nothing but a burden comparable to a soldier’s rifle or a miser’s pack. Its only use might be as a means to food or somewhere to sleep for the woman. The woman despairs that the child is just one of a multitude in an overpopulated world, destined either to be a hero who will ‘die or let loose / Death’ or a starveling, faceless worker. Yet she too is depersonalised, an anonymous woman on a road with thousands of other refugees. Why should she deserve succour and not the child? She knows that her best hope of charity is to make herself less anonymous by using the child to garner pity, otherwise she remains just another face in the crowd. Repenting of rescuing the child strips her of some of her humanity though it is sadly understandable in her desperate circumstances.

(Photograph of refugees in France, 1940, from here)

Everything should come in threes so the final poem that I’ve chosen the last poem in the book, ‘How fare my ash-trees now?’ Like many of the poems included in this collection, it is about death and about life continuing anyway, and seems to form a conversation between a ghost and someone still living who loved them:

‘How fare my ash-trees now?’

How fare my ash trees now?
Do my fruit-trees bear?
The gnarled apple and the stately pear –
How do they grow, and I not there, not there?

Neither more nor less
Than when you walked below.
Apple and pear tree fruit, and ash-trees grow,
And the ripe fruit falls, and leaves begin to snow.

Yes, I remember well
The plunge of apple and pear,
The whirled whisper of ash-elaves flocking down air –
But is it all as when I was there, was there?

Yes and no.
Nettles and weeds grow tall
Muffle each fruit fall:
Unsought-for lie apple and pear, and rot one and all.

(Andrew Wyeth, In the Orchard, 1972; watercolour and pencil on paper; Adelson Galleries; from here)

 

(Picture of King Duffus from here, where you can read more about him and the witches)

The Innocent and the Guilty, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

“It was nothing of the sort,’ said Mr. Partridge furiously. After a pause he resumed with arrogant patience. ‘Then there was Vera Valetta. She was in pantomime – a Principal Boy. She wore a top hat tilted over one eye and sang patriotic songs. She weighed twelve stone, she had a tiny waist, splendid legs. A regular Edward VII type. Then she vanished into the Midlands and when she came back she did the Widow Twanky line for a year or two. But her weight got too much for her, her splendid legs ulcerated; finally one of them had to be cut off!”

“Poor thing!”

“Ha-ha-ha! That wasn’t the end of it. She had it embalmed, kept it in her bedroom. And during the blitz – she lived on into the blitz – when she was carried down into the shelter the leg had to be brought too.”

He looked at his watch and remarked that it was time for bread and milk.

After leaving the ground-floor flat in Canonbury, Ronald could not disabuse himself of the notion that Mr. Partridge, preserving more than a memory of Vera Valetta, kept her leg in a drawer of his desk and gnawed on it when alone. (‘The Green Torso’)

Sylvia Townsend Warner published no more novels after The Flint Anchor in 1954, but she had always been a prolific short-story writer and continued to be so for the rest of her life. This collection of stories, The Innocent and the Guilty, appeared late in her career in 1971 although six of the nine stories had previously been published in the New Yorker. ‘But at the Stroke of Midnight’ and ‘Oxenhope’ were included in the 1988 Chatto and Windus Selected Stories, edited by Susanna Pinney and William Maxwell (and published in paperback by Virago).

(Photograph of Sylvia Townsend Warner from the back cover of the Viking Press edition of The Innocent and the Guilty; I like the way she is just sitting on the step with her mug of tea and nothing seems at all posed)

Unlike Kingdoms of Elfin, the only other collection of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s stories I have read, The Innocent and the Guilty does not have a theme or unifying concept. Indeed its title is all-embracing: everyone is innocent and guilty, including the characters in these stories. They are all flavoured with that distinctive tincture of generosity and satire which mark Sylvia Townsend Warner’s work: how alive she is to our comedies and delusions, and how relentless in her exposure of our frailties and cruelties. However, many of the stories do include escapes or ideas of escape, and this seems a way to approach writing about them.

‘But at the Stroke of Midnight’ was perhaps my favourite story, a riff on Lolly Willowes, funny and devastating. Lucy Ridpath, middle-aged and unremarkable, walks out of her life one day. Exactly what is unsatisfactory about her home and marriage is never spelt out, but clearly something is. The problem for Lucy is that she does not know who she is any more; she takes on the name of her dead cousin Aurelia, whom she admired and even parroted, so that even her ‘liberated’ identity is not her own. When she adopts a tom-cat she gives him her name, Lucy, and this splitting of her self appears helpful. Here she is, planning on blackmailing her husband Aston:

Aurelia looked deeply at the speaker. It might be worth trying. There is no harm in blackmail, since no one is obliged to give in to it. On the other hand, it is no good unless they do.

She composed two letters: “Unless you send me fifty pounds in notes, I shan’t be able to come back.” “Unless you send me fifty pounds in notes, I shall be forced to return.”

Combing out fleas to a new rhythm of “he loves me, he loves me not,” she weighed these alternatives. [...] She did not, of course, mean to return, in either case. Since her adoption of Lucy, she had become so unshakably Aurelia that she could contemplate being Lucy, too, so far as being Lucy would further Aurelia’s designs. But Lucy, the former Lucy, must be Aurelia’s property. There must be no little escapades into identity, no endorsing of checks, no more slidings into Lucy Ridpath. [...] All that remained was to decide which letter to send, and to post it from Bedford, which was nearby and noncommittal. The envelope had been posted before she realized that both letters were enclosed. (‘But at the Stroke of Midnight’)

This error works to her advantage: Aston sends her money and a letter (grudgingly) reminding her she can always return and his sister sends her more money and a letter saying, ‘I will thankfully pay you to keep away.’ Aurelia/Lucy’s indecisiveness here has paid off. But ultimately her lack of self-knowledge will prove fatal. This is a masterly story and so funny until suddenly the unbearable ending.

Escape is also the principal theme of the story ‘Bruno’. Gilbert Brodie returns to ‘the house of his forebears [...] Squat, darkling, battlemented, it was not even ludicrous. It was too remote to be turned into a hotel, and too small to sell to a religious community.’ He is accompanied by his much-younger lover Bruno, who has been given to understand that he will inherit the house. Years earlier, Gilbert had fled the house and his mother when she had tried to push him into marrying his second cousin, Lilah Mackenzie. Now, Gilbert ‘throve in his rude native air, stumped about in wet boots, ate like a hog, snored all night, belched with enthusiasm, and sang in his bath’ but Bruno, ‘a hearthrug cat: a handsome, bright-eyed, lissom specimen’ whom Gilbert had ‘found’ on the beach ‘like a beautiful shell’ is stupefyingly bored. For Bruno, Gilbert is:

a loving and rather touching bore. And not, above all, the only bore on the beach. It was the nonvariety of bores which made Bruno’s present life so wearing. Even a wife would rebel. And he was not a wife. [...] If he had been a wife, he could have quarrelled, and done so with a quiet mind, since nothing worse than alimony would have come of it. Or he could have cooked. (‘Bruno’)

Bruno’s status is precarious; Lilah returns, convention is upheld and once again someone drives away from the house of the Brodies in search of freedom.

In ‘The Quality of Mercy’ Danny notices a young girl drinking rather too much whisky in a pub; he goes over to her only to discover that she is actually ‘quite an age – thirty or forty, he supposed.’ (Aargh!) She used to play the guitar and keep the accounts for a puppet theatre, but the job came to an end and now, she explains, she is staying with her sister. If she is escaping her lot by drinking in the pub Danny too is trying to overcome his worse nature by abjuring drink and by simply being kind.

Others also seek to break out of – something in life that constricts. Johnnie rejects childhood in ‘Two Children’. Lonely Ronald in ‘The Green Torso’ tries to become friendly with counter-culture Marco, who looks like Jesus as painted by Leonardo da Vinci. These attempts at escape, at breaking out into a different sort of life, generally involve betrayal and inadequacy. The final story, ‘Oxenhope’, is more hopeful. Elderly William returns to Oxenhope, the farm where he spent an idyllic summer as a very young man. Oxenhope is not just a place, it is a ‘sensation’. Nostalgia is exactly the sort of doomed romantic feeling that Sylvia Townsend Warner would dissect with her air of wicked kindness, and it does seem to be heading for disappointment when William falls into conversation with a boy who tells him about the local geography and mythologies, one of which turns out to be the story of an escapade young William had with Oliphant:

“There’s a loch away up there,” the boy said. “It’s called the Cat Loch.”

“Why is it called the Cat Loch?”

“I couldna say. Something to do with a cat, maybe.” A vision transfigured his face as the sun had transfigured his ears. “There was a man once, set fire to it. He was in a boat, and he set fire to the water. There was flames coming up all round the boat. Like a gas ring.”

Oliphant, interminably rowing about the loch for likely places, had thrust down his oar to check the boat’s movement. Bubbles of marsh gas rose to the surface. William saw himself leaning out of the boat and touching off their tiny incandescence with a lighted match.

“What color were the flames?” he asked.

“Blue.” (‘Oxenhope’)

Now happy, William is able to drive away without ‘a backward glance [...] the exile’s farewell’ because ‘He had his tenancy in legend. He was secure.’ He has his place in Oxenhope after all.

After the Death of Don Juan, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

(Don Giovanni and Doña Ana, from here)

‘Don Saturno. Prepare yourself for solemn and terrible news. Your son, Don Juan, is no longer on earth.’

‘You will forgive me,’ he said, ‘if I sit down?’

Leaning back in his chair by the writing-table, Don Saturno signalled to Ana to go on.

[Ana] went on. [...] Don Saturno listened with attention. It shocked Ottavio to see how sympathetically, how naturally, as it were, he followed the course of Ana’s narrative, fine shades of surprise, critical interest, disapproval or compassion flickering over his countenance. Hearing of Don Juan’s taunting visit to the cemetery he shook his head, but he might, so Ottavio thought, have been shaking it over a false note in a sonata.

‘The evening came. Supper was prepared, supper for two. At the appointed hour a heavy knocking was heard. Your son, reckless with wine, lost in some dreadful transport of impiety ordered his valet to open the door. More terrified of the dead than of the living, the man refused. The door opened, my father, in his living likeness but white as alabaster, appeared. He rebuked your son. He bade him take this last chance of heaven’s mercy. He spoke in vain. Pointing downwards with a marble finger he consigned Don Juan to perdition. And the jaws of hell opened. With shrieks, with lamentations, with vain appeals, Don Juan struggled in the clutch of demons. The lightning quivered around them, the sentence of heaven spoke in a peal of thunder. And they bore him down to hell.’

Pale as death, with the stately exhaustion of the martyr, she sank into a chair.

[...] ‘And there was no trace of my son’s body?’

‘How could there be?’ enquired Don Isidro reasonably. ‘Your son was taken to hell.’

‘Frankly,’ said Don Saturno, ‘I find this story very difficult to make head or tail of.’

After the Death of Don Juan begins shortly after the end of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. Don Juan had tried to assault the virtuous young lady Doña Ana, but had been interrupted by the arrival of Doña Ana’s father, whom Don Juan then murdered. Subsequently, Don Juan visited the cemetery to invite the father’s ghost to dinner. This occasion did not end happily for him, according to his servant Leporello, who maintains that Don Juan was dragged down to hell by demons. Doña Ana is moved to travel to Tenorio Viejo to inform Don Juan’s father, Don Saturno, of his son’s demise, accompanied by her new husband Don Ottavio, her duenna and her priest, Don Isidro (how I love that ‘reasonably’ in the quotation above).

(Design for the cemetery scene in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, French, nineteenth century; British Museum)

The journey lasts a relentless seven days and Tenorio Viejo is far from the earthly paradise Leporello, now in Doña Ana’s employ, had led the party to believe. Clinging to the dusty mountainside, the village is no more than a few dozen hovels surrounded by olive groves that, lacking water, wither in the heat. The villagers are aware that Don Saturno’s meagre interest in their livelihoods has been diverted for years by the need to pay for Don Juan’s lavish lifestyle. But now that the heir is dead, surely Don Saturno could be persuaded of the benefits to everyone of funding an irrigation system for the village fields?

While Doña Ana embarks on a vigil of prayer ostensibly for her father’s soul, her husband frets about ghosts shrieking at him while he sleeps and Doña Pilar, the duenna, embroiders grey pansies on a petticoat with sour little stabs of her needle, Don Saturno wrestles with the improbable story of his son’s death and the peasants dare to hope for a better future.

I first read this novel about twenty years ago and although I vaguely remembered most of what happened I had forgotten how extraordinarily good it is. It is a novel about rural Spanish society (which makes it sound boring – it is not boring) and so, rather than tracing the story of any particular character, it is told from multiple perspectives, the points of view of many characters from all social strata. While the focus begins with Doña Ana and her party, once they arrive at the village it expands to encompass Don Saturno and many of the peasants – the creepy sacristan and his housekeeper, the miller and his daughter, the schoolmaster and the thoughtful Ramez. Everyone is brought vividly to life. We are privy to Don Ottavio’s musings on his astonishing attractiveness as well as Celestina’s desire to flee the mill and join a convent. Just as Jacob’s Room built up a portrait of Jacob by presenting the memories and consciousnesses of a group of people who knew him, so After the Death of Don Juan reveals an entire society through the individuals that comprise it.

After the Death of Don Juan was published in 1938 and although it is ostensibly a historical novel, set in the 1760s, it was STW’s response to the Spanish Civil War – which, as an ambulance driver, she witnessed first-hand. The novel exposes the tensions within Spanish society – the desperately poor peasants, the aristocratic landlords who fail to invest in their tenants for one reason or another, the controlling hand of the Church – and the story it tells, ending in a violent clash, foreshadows the conflict of the 1930s. Ultimately, it is the values of Don Juan, the cynical, cruel and dishonest parasite, which will prevail in the village. (In the Virago edition there is a really brilliant foreword by Wendy Mulford which explores all of this, though if you don’t like spoilers, wait to read it until after you’ve finished the novel.)

If there are tensions between peasant and aristocrat, however, there are other tensions in the novel too: between town and country, between some of the villagers (the miller and the sacristan are particularly unpopular). The book maintains an exquisite balance between the demands of a parable (of the Civil War) and fiction (which requires that Tenorio Viejo feel like a ‘real’ place, its inhabitants like ‘real’ people), between realism (the daily tasks of peasant life) and fantasy (Don Juan’s terrifying death), between comedy and tragedy. There is a whiff of artifice about some of the scenes, either their setting or in the reliance of dialogue, which reminds us of the story’s roots in opera. It’s a very funny novel, alert to absurdity and delusion, until it becomes a tragic novel. It has a Comynsish feeling for the grotesque. It is now my new favourite STW novel – until the next one, perhaps...

(An English Delegate [Sylvia Townsend Warner] (The International Congress of Writers, Valencia 1937), by Gerda Taro, who was also a fascinating figure, 1937; International Center for Photography, The Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive, Gift of Cornell and Edith Capa, 2002; from here)

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week begins!

Welcome to Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week! (I feel like a game-show host, typing that...)

Almost as soon as I had decided to host this I was consumed by panic and also a weird reluctance to read anything by STW, as if I were turning her into A Project and thus draining out all the fun. I kept accidentally reading Edgar Wallace... Fortunately, I was able to overcome this reluctance and actually read quite a bit of her work so we won’t be confronted with an embarrassing blank space here this week. And after all, it has been fun and I am as enthusiastic about the work as I was before I began.

So if you haven’t yet started, do rush to your bookcase and seize one of her books and join in...

Here is the plan. I am going to post here six times this week. If you’ve written a post somewhere on the internet – your blog, facebook, goodreads, whatever – leave the link in the comments to any of my STW posts and I’ll collect them all together in the final post so we can find each other more easily.

If you don’t have anywhere on the internet, you can write something in the comments and I’ll copy/paste it into the final round-up post. Or you could email it to me and I’ll put it up here as a guest post.

STW wrote in different forms and I’ve tried to reflect that in what I’ve read and written about. This is my posting schedule. Excitingly, I haven’t actually finished The Corner that Held Them yet but am terror-reading in the hope I can have something ready in time for Friday.

• Later today: After the Death of Don Juan (novel)
• Tuesday: The Innocent and the Guilty (short stories)
• Wednesday: Selected Poems
• Thursday: The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner
• Friday (I hope!): The Corner that Held Them (novel)
• Sunday: round-up post with links to all your posts

So put up your feet with a cat or two to hand, pour yourself a generous glass of sherry and light a Sobranie. Happy reading!

(Sylvia Townsend Warner by Cecil Beaton; bromide print, 1930; NPG P182; National Portrait Gallery, London; from here)