a gallimaufry

Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, and The Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

I read a lot of books which I never write about here. For one thing, it takes me aaages to write a post, I’d never keep up with my reading. For another, even if I enjoy a book, I don’t necessarily have anything to say about it – other than, ‘I think it’s really good’.

In the last few weeks I’ve read two novels which fall into this category. I don’t have anything to say about them, other than, ‘I think they’re really good’. And both have been widely reviewed, so you can easily find out more about them elsewhere. Why bother to even write this, then? Well, perhaps you’ve walked past one – or both – of them in a library or bookshop and almost picked them up – and after reading this post, you might decide next time to actually pick them up and have a look.

The first one is Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi. Gyasi was born in Ghana and brought up in the US, and this is her first novel – or short-story collection, since each chapter concerns a different member of the same family and builds on what has come before but is also entirely self-contained. The novel opens in the late eighteenth century with Effia, born during a fire in Fanteland (in present-day Ghana). Effia’s mother, Baaba, seems to hate her and ruins her chances of marriage to the young chief Abeeku. Instead, Effia marries James Collins, a white Englishman, and is taken to the Cape Coast Castle. In the dungeons of the Castle languish slaves, awaiting transport to the plantations in the most horrific conditions. One of these slaves, we discover in the next chapter, ‘Esi’, is a young woman who is Effia’s half-sister.

In alternating chapters we follow each generations of these two branches of the family. One, Effia’s, remains in west Africa; Esi’s endures slavery and finally freedom in the United States. On the one side, Quey becomes a slave trader and his son flees that life; on the other, H works the mines in Pratt City and Willie longs for a career as a singer. Through their stories of hardship, hope and grief, the history of the slave trade and its consequences right up to the present day are traced. Much of it is very sad but also fascinating, as each character struggles to carve a life and a destiny from what they have inherited. They are fiction, but they stand in for real people and this makes their suffering more appalling.

The other book is probably the most stressful novel I have ever read: The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, translated by Philip Boehm (the German title is Der Reisende). It’s Kristallnacht and Otto Silbermann, a wealthy Jewish businessman, belatedly realises he needs to flee Germany. Forced to escape from his apartment as Nazi storm-troopers bang on the door, he makes for the railway station. Can he escape?

The novel is amazingly tense. We are kept close to Silbermann, we feel his emotions and follow his trains of thought as if they are ours. Every encounter could lead to Silbermann’s arrest. ‘Don’t trust him!’ you are muttering as he engages someone in conversation. ‘Keep hold of your suitcase!’ Apart from keeping you on the edge of your seat, the great strength of this novel is that it shows how everyone, including Silbermann and we readers, becomes implicated in the horrors of Nazism. Silbermann does not ‘look like a Jew’. He resents how his non-Jewish friend Becker is embarrassed – afraid even – to be seen with him, and we resent this too. ‘Help him!’ But then, when Silbermann meets more ‘obviously’ Jewish people, he is anxious and we are anxious too – and then, Silbermann tries to distance himself just as Becker tries to distance himself, and we accept that too because we fear for him. And everything is all the more stressful because we ‘know’ what will happen to most of the Jewish characters, and even though they are fictional, they represent real people who really died. Just as in Homegoing. And the tension of The Passenger is maintained right up until the very end.

next year’s reading week

As I mentioned in my round-up post, this year was the last Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week that I shall host. I have loved doing it. Each year I’ve learnt more about STW and been ever more impressed with her writing. She will always have a special place in my heart and I’ll continue reading and re-reading her for ever.

But it is time for a change and so next summer I’m going to devote a reading week to a different writer. There was some discussion in the comments to the round-up post of who that might be. As an indecisive person, I found the enthusiasm for both Storm Jameson and Alice Thomas Ellis – unhelpful. !!! For making a decision, I mean. It’s great that they both have champions.

Therefore: a compromise! Next year, a Storm Jameson Reading Week. The year after – unless I became too addicted to Storm Jameson’s work, for there’s plenty of it to sustain several reading weeks – an Alice Thomas Ellis Reading Week.

At the moment I know very little about Margaret Ethel Storm Jameson, to give her full name. Her Wikipedia page, with a list of works, is here. There’s a rather better short life here, and more detail in this review of a biography by Elizabeth Maslen. Born in 1891, she was the first woman to receive a first-class degree in English from Leeds University and won a scholarship to pursue an MA. She wrote to support her family (she married twice and had a son), producing almost a book a year as well as reviews, articles and short stories. She also helped to found English PEN, supported refugees from Nazi Germany and was politically active. It was a full life, which continued until 1986 – too long, she felt.

Elizabeth Maslen writes, in ‘The Case for Storm Jameson’:

Her reputation was very high in her lifetime, as a novelist and as a writer of non-fiction — she was, like Winifred Holtby, very much in demand both as a literary critic and as a commentator on social and political issues.

She continues:

One reason why I’m interested in her is because, in my view, she offers a much-needed counterbalance to Virginia Woolf and the high modernists as regards the practice and perceived function of fiction. For there has been something very restrictive in the way academics in the Western anglophone world have tended to categorize the literature of the twentieth century. My argument is that Storm Jameson’s novels, like those of Christina Stead and Angus Wilson, for instance, have in part suffered because of this mania to define fictions by such labels as modernist, postmodernist, realist (this last usually in a derogatory sense and cited as in opposition to modernism, implying a medium which is incapable of manipulation, being in essence conservative, reactionary, old-fashioned). Throughout the twentieth century, the tendency to pigeonhole fiction within one of these categories has shown remarkable resilience, despite lessons to be learnt from post-colonial and diasporic writings – and as a result, writers who cannot be slotted into one or other of these categories have tended to be at best viewed with suspicion, at worst dismissed as ‘middlebrow’, by many academics in the West.

As far as I can see, most of Jameson’s novels were contemporary realist fiction – but she also wrote science fiction. One of her novellas is entitled: Women Against Men. Her Modern Drama in Europe (1920), an examination of the development of drama in the twentieth century, is controversial. Wikipedia describes it thus:

Though most of her commentaries are highly critical and sometimes malicious, her boldness reaches its peak when she asserts that William Butler Yeats "represents the last state in symbolic imbecility".

Well, I’ll be hunting for a copy of that...

To give you a flavour of Storm Jameson, I’ve found a few reviews of her novels online. I wrote about her novel of secrets and betrayals in post-war France, A Hidden River, and heavenali has reviewed Company Parade and Love in Winter. If you know of any more, please add the links to the comments!

Intrigued? I can’t see that any of Jameson’s work is currently in print (I may very well be completely wrong) but she is such a staple of second-hand bookshops, and doubtless online sellers, that I cannot believe it will be hard to find copies of her work. You’ve all got a year to do so! For me, this is going to be a journey of exploration, I really do not know what to expect...

(Author photographs from Bloomsbury.com and the National Portrait Gallery)

SNB review: Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer's Journey, by Sarah LeFanu

Being an idiot I have completely forgotten to mention that I’ve a book review up over at Shiny New Books.

It’s of Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journey, by Sarah LeFanu, reissued by Handheld Press.

This is the journal Sarah LeFanu kept while researching her biography of Rose Macaulay, and it’s absolutely fascinating. I wolfed it down in about two sittings. Highly recommended! (Also: read the review!)

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week 2021 competition winners!

This is Manky Cat. He likes flowers and English Breakfast tea, one sugar. When I was expecting my daughter, I made him for her out of an old sock.

Manky Cat generously agreed to do the draw for the Sylvia Townsend Warner book competition.

The deadline for entries was midnight on Sunday, and so Manky Cat really should have drawn the names yesterday. Alas! He is very lazy and he didn’t do it.

However, today he has performed his duty and I can now announce the lucky winners.

For the copy of The True Heart:

Lory of Entering the Enchanted Castle.

For the copy of The Flint Anchor:

Ali of heavenali.

Congratulations to Lory and Ali! Please email me postal addresses so that I can send them off to you. (I will not entrust this to Manky Cat, who is now recuperating with a cup of English Breakfast and will take at least three days to recover from this morning’s exertion.) My email address is hejparry <at> fastmail <dot> co <dot> uk.

Thank you to everyone else who took part! I am sorry I don’t have more books so that I could send one to all of you.

is a writer obligated to give readers the pleasures they expect?

In the comments on last Monday’s post on The Flint Anchor, Lory asked this excellent question:

‘Is a writer obligated to give readers the pleasures they expect?’

I have many Thoughts about this, which I couldn’t really cram into a reply to her there; instead, I’ll bore you with them here. As Sir Humphrey might say, ‘Well, yes and no.’

(Constantin Hansen, The Artist’s Sisters Signe and Henriette Reading a Book, 1826; Statens Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Denmark; found here)

A writer is of course not obliged to anyone in their writing, they are completely free. I am still pottering about writing my second attempt at a children’s book and I am doing whatever I please. I cannot say, however, that the results so far are anything I’d want anyone else to read. The characters are weak and keep shifting about, they mess up the vague plot I am trying to follow, or I change my mind, or I realise there’s a massive hole in it, or it gets just dreadfully boring. If a reader bought it from a bookshop or borrowed it from a library, they would be appalled.

Therefore, I would argue that a writer does have to fulfil a few obligations if they expect readers to read their work. And I termed those obligations as ‘pleasures’ – not perhaps the best word to use. However, I do believe that a novel, like any work of art, should provide a form of pleasure to at least some of its readers; and by ‘pleasure’ I mean it should provide some sort of aesthetic, emotional, intellectual or even educational satisfaction. And when you slide a book off a shelf and open it, you do so in expectation of one of those forms of satisfaction.

That satisfaction might take the form of characters who feel ‘real’ to you, it might be a delight in the language the writer has used, it might be in the recognition that the writer has expressed something true about the world, it might be an eagerness to find out what happens next, it might be learning about life in sixteenth-century Florence... When you read a novel that provides you with no form of satisfaction on any of these levels, you feel that the novel is ‘bad’ or ‘poorly written’. And this is what I mean by ‘pleasure’, ill-chosen as the word is.

Some of these pleasures – the emotional ones, I’d say – are more easily evoked in the reader. Bestsellers tend to provide them: excitement, fear, identification with the characters. Others are harder to discern or are those that many readers don’t enjoy. We might here think of the difference between Riders and The Waves, both of which offer pleasure to readers but of different sorts, reflected in their respective sales figures.

The ‘expectation’ of such a pleasure is not unreasonable in a reader, and so to that extent I would answer, yes, the writer does have an obligation here. But this is one interpretation of Lory’s question and it’s not I think what she meant by it. (I could be wrong! Lory – tell me!) She is, I believe, thinking of readers’ expectations in terms of dictating how that pleasure is delivered. And to that I would answer, with her, ‘No’.

Does a novel have to have characters who feel ‘real’ to you? No. Nor does it have to have characters who are likeable or admirable. It doesn’t have to be moral or tell you how to live. It doesn’t have to have a compelling plot, or beautiful writing, or strike you at a deep emotional level. A reader might expect or hope for or want these elements, and might be annoyed if they didn’t find them in a novel – but that might well be a failure of reading. We don’t read Agatha Christie for complex characterisation; we don’t read James Joyce for unicorns; we don’t read Tolstoy for laughs.

There are plenty of writers, like Sylvia Townsend Warner, who choose to subvert expectations in their work. This may upset some readers. It can lead to novels which are challenging, not easy to read, but it can create exciting fiction. A ‘good’ writer does this while retaining some element of pleasure, even if some or perhaps many readers do not notice it: a ‘bad’ writer makes a mess. A ‘good’ reader, in my opinion, tries to approach every book with an open mind and let the book show them how to read it. (This doesn’t mean we should all ‘enjoy’ every novel published but if we want to pass an informed judgement on it we should be alert to ‘pleasures’ that we may not personally enjoy.)

Here’s an example of the difference between the expectations a writer should satisfy and the expectations a writer should not. You want to read a detective novel, you’re in the mood for it. Detective novels have certain conventions, the most obvious being: there’s a crime and the detective solves it. You, an avid reader of detective fiction, understand these conventions.

The novel proceeds in the usual way, crime, detective, but then, at the end – the author doesn’t tell you who the murderer was! You’re outraged! But that’s the point. Now you’re thinking about why you’re outraged, you’re re-evaluating what you’ve just read... The novelist has subverted your expectations but in a way that causes you to question them, to re-categorise the novel not as a whodunnit but as something else... It’s a form of satisfaction.

Now you pick up a second detective novel. The writing is ridden with clichés, the characters are stereotypes and the reason for the crime implausible – the whole thing is silly. On no level are you satisfied. This book has abided by the conventions, the expectations of a detective novel, but it has failed to deliver any form of satisfaction.

What do you think? How would you answer the question?

And many thanks to Lory, for posing it.

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week 2021 round-up – and competition!

Thank you to everyone who has written a post and sent me the link to it! There are some wonderful reviews out there for any readers or potential readers of Sylvia Townsend Warner to look at – and I recommend you do...

Lory at Entering the Enchanted Castle wrote about The Corner That Held Them:

The Corner That Held Them is a striking evocation of medieval life, with all its stinks, vermin and diseases, along with the persistent human doggedness that was needed to keep people going through all that. Lively and discursive as Chaucer’s pilgrims, it’s not at all a conventional narrative, leading the reader along a winding road that seemingly goes off into thin air at the end. Though it’s set within and around a community of women religious, the imaginary English convent of Oby, it never becomes otherworldly and distant from the everyday; the world and its concerns are always present in the microcosm of this subset of flawed humanity.

So did Harriet Devine:

What, then, is this book really about? STW is too complex and original a writer for there to be an obvious answer. On one level it just looks like a meander through a series of everyday events, with some dramatic interludes. But that seems in many ways to be the point - this tiny microcosm presents a little slice of human life which, though far distant from us in time, represents the way people have always adapted to living together and still do today.

Meanwhile, Ali at HeavenAli has written about English Climate: Wartime Stories:

It feels as if these are the very people Sylvia Townsend Warner saw around her, perhaps interacted with, took part in, or listened to, their conversations – there is such an authenticity to the exchanges between characters. [...] These stories are really excellent providing some rich texture to the times in which they were first written. Witty, lively with a slight seam of darkness running through them, these show Sylvia Townsend Warner to have been a consummate short story writer.

Simon at StuckInABook wrote about another collection of short stories, from the 1960s, A Spirit Rises:

In her novels, Sylvia Townsend Warner travels widely through time and space. In her short stories, she tends to stick to contemporary England – and this is doubtless one of the reasons I love them so much. She doesn’t need to take us to another world; she can turn her observant eye to the world directly in front of her. And nobody is as good as Warner at the slightly unexpected twists of wording that show deep below the surface of people and their relationships with one another. [...]
A Spirit Rises isn’t quite as meteorically wonderful as [Swans on an Autumn River], but it’s not all that far off – it certainly includes the finest writing I’ve read this year, and I know will reward careful, slow, luxurious re-reading. If you’ve only encountered Warner the novelist, please don’t hesitate in exploring her extraordinary talent as a writer of short stories.

Hayley at Desperate Reader enjoyed The Flint Anchor:

The book is also surprisingly open about homosexuality in the fishing community of Loseby. It was still a criminalized when the book was published, and considered as an unspeakable sin by the Barnard family, but in the working part of the town love is love and they're not fussy about where it's found. It's a powerful contrast to the Barnard's who remain in Anchor house with their limited understanding of love and the petrifying value they place on respectability. […]
What I most admire about Sylvia Townsend Warner, and find in abundance here, is her clear eyed ability to pick something apart and lay it out for our inspection without judgement or emotion. We might feel sorry for the Barnard's, we might recognise something of ourselves in them, or we might just be fascinated by the spectacle - I found this book compelling for all of those reasons and more.

And David at David’s Book World wrote a double review – of Mr Fortune’s Maggot and The True Heart:

Mr Fortune’s Maggot is focused tightly on these two characters, and in that it makes broader points about faith and colonialism. The change in Fortune’s thinking is carefully drawn, and I found the ending deeply affecting.
There’s a heightened quality to The True Heart that I really appreciated – Sukey even takes her plight to Queen Victoria – as well as a vivid sense of place.

lethe also read The True Heart and reviewed it on GoodReads:

The story has a certain dreamlike quality, which is heightened by a few sudden time-lapses. It is also probably the most light-hearted and fairytale-like of all STW's novels. There is never really any doubt that Sukey will succeed in her quest. Whenever things start to look hopeless, there is always a kind stranger that will help her on her way, so that even being received by Queen Victoria, whom she intends to implore for assistance, does not seem quite such an outlandish idea.

lethe wrote about Lolly Willowes too – a re-read, which is always interesting, especially if you can compare it to your first encounter:

I still love Parts 1 and 2 as much as I did when I first read it back in 2002, but I'm still not happy about the turn of events in Part 3.

 

 

If you have written a review and haven’t sent me a link yet, please do! Even if it’s after the end of the week – I can still add it over the next fortnight or so.

Thank you to everyone who has joined in this week, reading and/or writing, and thank you to everyone who has taken part in any of the STW Reading Weeks. For me, this is the last one – though I’d be delighted if anyone else felt like continuing it. To mark this, I am holding an actual competition, the first one I’ve ever done.

COMPETITION!!!

I have an unread Penguin Modern Classics edition of each of The Flint Anchor and The True Heart. (The back story: I ordered them a few months ago from the Book Depository and they did not arrive; the Book Depository very kindly sent me replacement copies and then of course another week later the original books arrived, their packaging plastered in cross yellow stickers about infringing some article or other, and the Book Depository said I could keep them.)

If you would like to win a copy, please write your name in the comments + which book you’d prefer (you can write both and I’ll add your name to both draws) before midnight next Sunday (10th July). The competition is open to anyone in the EU or UK but not further afield for regrettable reasons of stinginess.

NEXT YEAR?

And finally! I think I’d like to host another reading week next year – but who should it be? Ideally it’s someone who should have a bit more attention, whose work is reasonably easy to acquire. I’m thinking about Storm Jameson or Alice Thomas Ellis at the moment, but if you’ve any ideas I’d love to hear them.

The True Heart, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Published in 1929, following Mr Fortune’s Maggot, The True Heart shares with Lolly Willowes the claim to be Sylvia Townsend Warner’s sunniest and most charming novel. Which doesn’t mean nobody is gored to death by a bull, but does mean that both tone and ending are predominantly happy and the whole book is infused with a spirit of optimism, of a love of nature and of the naturalness of love. This isn’t a spoiler: The True Heart is based on Apuleius’ story of Eros and Psyche, as STW explains in her foreword. Set in Victorian England, this isn’t a straightforward re-telling of the story; before STW wrote her foreword, only her mother (she claims) recognised the origins of the novel. Instead, STW transforms the tale into an entirely original work.

Sukey Bond is an innocent orphan sent off to work on a farm (New Easter) on the Essex marshes. Here she falls in love with Eric, a kind and gentle young man who is referred to by the other characters as an ‘idiot’ but whose fine qualities Sukey soon appreciates. Sukey believes him to be one of the farmer’s sons, but in fact his parents are the Rector of Southend and his wife. After a crisis, Mrs Seaborn takes Eric away back to Southend. But Sukey determines to find Eric and marry him. Her adventures take her even to London, where she intends to meet Queen Victoria.

(Edward Seago, Ludham Marshes From Upper Horning; found here)

This is a very beautiful book, full of lovely moments. Sukey and Eric’s love for each other develops outdoors, among the animals and trees, it is entirely natural and right – although the natural worlds is not sentimentalised. Here, the Essex marshes are both beautiful and menacing:

Sukey shuddered and looked reproachfully about her. The solitude of the landscape weighed upon her vision; she felt afraid of the marsh. Turning once more to Eric, she found he was gone. Her fears blazed up like a straw fire [...]
‘Oh, where are you?’ [...]
‘Here – in the orchard.’
The words came from beyond a straggling belt of thorn-trees. She ran towards them and scrambled through their defences.[...]
‘Now you can pick all the apples you want.’
The thorns had once hedged in a little orchard. Here were cankered apple-trees, plum-trees weighed down with fruit small and thickly-bloomed as grapes, cherries, sloes and bullaces, and in the midst of these, like a queen, a pear-tree with its straight round stem. The fruit lay scattered in the long grass – small, sour apples, insipid pears fallen unripe from the tree, sloes tasting of iron [...] Sukey spread out the contents of the darning basket and wondered at her fears: this was a peaceful place in which to play at keeping house.

This is like a little East Anglian Garden of Eden before the Fall; and indeed Sukey eats apples (or apple pies) at significant moments; they symbolise perhaps the getting of wisdom.

Something I really liked about this novel is the presentation of Eric. He has what we would call today a learning disability, but although Prudence and some other characters are dismissive of him, he is shown to us as a sensitive, gentle person who is fun, likeable and affectionate. He is not shown at all as lacking in any way. Also, Sukey is exactly the right person for him – or becomes exactly the right person.

As in many fairy tales in which the heroine must embark on a journey or undergo a series of trials, Sukey must develop to be ‘worthy’ of Eric. When she leaves New Easter to follow Eric, she is still little more than a child: indeed, she believes that she must be pregnant simply because she loves Eric. Her experiences draw out qualities she will need to love and support Eric: practical skills, such as the ability to run a household, as well as courage and tenacity. Throughout she retains her innocence and an inner happiness to which people respond by wanting to help her. They seem to feel this connection of naturalness and goodness in her, and feel it is natural and good to help her.

When she is working for the Mulleins, Sukey becomes fascinated by an engraving of a painting on their parlour wall:

The title was: The True Secret of England’s Greatness. The story was simple, but at the same time magnificent. Queen Victoria stood on the steps of her throne, as upright as a pillar-box. Round her, at a lower level and in a suitable shading of perspective, were grouped statesmen, courtiers, field-marshals, bishops, pages, and ladies-in-waiting. At the foot of the throne knelt a negro, a heathen obviously, but how different from those other heathen, for with her gloved hand she was extending to him the gift of a Bible. Sukey would stand in front of this picture and sigh. She wanted to marry Eric beyond all things, but she had also a natural wish to go to court.

 In the description of this image STW is – successfully, I think – listing the principal elements of the picture, conveying the distastefulness of it while also evoking Sukey’s naïve and admiring response. Already she is connecting the picture with her desire for Eric; in her mind she calls it The True Secret, an echo of the novel’s title which suggests its central importance to the book. Sukey imagines herself in the place of the African receiving the Bible; the powerless subject, the recipient of imperial benevolence. However, Sukey’s ‘stratagem’, as it transpires, is to receive the Bible but use it to win Eric’s freedom ‘by barter’. She will trade the gift, placing herself in the Queen’s position as donor: the position of power.

(Thomas Jones Barker, The Secret of England’s Greatness, 1862–63; National Portrait Gallery; found here; the addition of the word ‘true’ to the painting’s title in the novel suggests that STW wanted to highlight the connection of the ‘secret’ and the ‘heart’)

But in the world of the novel, the ‘true secret’ does not really hold. Gifts are given, especially to Sukey, but they are freely given out of kindness, not with an ulterior motive. And when Sukey does meet the Queen to receive her Bible, first she lies to her and then later she leaves the book ruffling its pages in the wind in a Herefordshire meadow. Relationships are not transactional or to establish domination, despite the painting. In The True Heart it is love that is the great power, that conquers all, and kindness that oils its wheels. This is perhaps not the most STWish sentiment, but it is a happy place on which to finish my reading of her work this week.

'Earl Cassilis's Lady', by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Meeting her on the heath at the day’s end,
After one look and one sigh, he said,
Did a spine prick you from the goosefeather bed?
Were the rings too heavy on your hand?
Were you unhappy, that you had to go?
No.

Was it the music that called you down the stair,
Or the hot ginger that they gave you then?
Was it for pleasure that you followed them
Putting off your slippers at the door
To dance barefoot and blood-foot in the snow?
No.

What then? What glamoured you? No glamour at all;
Only that I remembered I was young
And had put myself into a song.
How could time bear witness that I was tall,
Silken, and made for love, if I did not so?
I do not know.

(From, Sylvia Townsend Warner: Selected Poems, edited by Claire Harman, Manchester: Carcanet)

According to Wikipedia, the ballad of ‘The Gypsy Laddy’ became associated with Jean Hamilton, the first wife of John Kennedy, Sixth Earl of Cassilis (pronounced Cassels). There was no particular reason for this, though it must be said that the Earls of Cassilis did tend to lead exciting lives. (You can read ‘The Gypsy Laddy’ here.)

When I first read the poem I didn’t know this background; the use of ‘glamoured’ suggested to me that the lady had run away with the fairies. It’s a variation on STW’s perennial theme of escaping women, whether wives or spinsters. I love it, down to the very tone of the conversation the two of them are having.

(Arthur Rackham, illustration for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’; found here)

English Climate: Wartime Stories, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

This is a very nice and cohesive collection of short stories, written by Sylvia Townsend Warner between 1940 and 1946 for the New Yorker, and put together by Persephone Books. The stories centre on the Domestic Front: an ideal location for STW since domestic realism is one of her fortes and with most of the men out of the way she can concentrate on the women and the elderly, characters who always attract her attention.

The stories are stuffed with the detail of everyday life in wartime: the salvage drives (including Bone Salvage?!), the rations, the rabbit-breeding, the mouldy jam (not enough sugar). Mrs Campion, in ‘From Above’, is evacuated – liberated? – when a time bomb is discovered in Albion Terrace. A tobacconist hides the last packet of cigarettes from a customer, to keep for his own wife. In ‘England, Home and Beauty’, Mr Sillery and Major Puncheon are training the local women in how to use a machine gun:

‘Well,’ said Mrs Johnson, the last to rise. ‘Well, thank you very much, I’m sure. I daresay we could all manage that, at a pinch.’ Which was one of the comforts, Mrs Goose was murmuring to Miss Cutler, about being a woman. One had to turn one’s hand to anything, almost. One thing more or less didn’t make much difference. Miss Cutler replied that, speaking for herself, she’d always had quite a liking for machinery. Once you got the hang of it, you must admit it was very reasonable. ‘Though I’d be scared stiff if I had to drive a car,’ she said. ‘Think how you’d feel if you hurt someone accidentally.’

This training is not without controversy among the local men, and the women, having had their turn with the gun, are directed to fill ammunition belts – dull but useful work, more appropriate to them, as the men fondly imagine, until they overhear them discussing the merits of Sten guns with savage relish.

Many of the stories are very funny social comedies. In ‘It’s What We’re Here For’, two nice middle-class ladies at the Women’s Voluntary Services, eager to help the deserving poor, struggle with Mrs Leopard, who is not quite as deserving as she might be. At first it seems that Mrs Larpent and Mrs Bogle are just obtuse and patronising, but this is not it. Is it that they take their job of helping very, very seriously (as implied in the title)? Is it that Mrs Leopard is too much for them? That they wish to protect her?

(Stanley Spencer, Village Gossip, 1939; Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum; found here)

This social comedy tips easily into pathos, however. In ‘Bow to the Rising Sun’, how quickly Colonel Prowse switches his allegiance in the Fuel Control Office! He brings in flowers for pretty young Button which he then bestows upon the older Mrs Stanley, who will replace Button as the Fuel Controller’s assistant. Button tries to save face:

‘Don’t you think he’s rather sweet? So touching, the way he brings his flowers along and then gets all shy about them and dumps them down anywhere. Well, thank God it’s lunchtime! We’ll go to the Old World, shall we? Want to wash your hands? You go first.’
In the cloakroom Mrs Stanley found herself crying, weeping unavailing tears for the desperate idiot valour of the young.

There is sadness too for Gunner Brock in the title story, whose happy expectations of homecoming on leave are dashed by discoveries in the town’s salvage drive which cause him to reassess his relationship with his family. The argument about differences in risk perception in ‘Daphnis and Chloe’ will be familiar to many of us after the last year of pandemic. More darkly, ‘The Mothers’ seethes with frustration and dislike. In ‘Arsace, Il Faut Partir’, actual combat comes frighteningly close to Odette de Boulay in her night-time orchard, apples pattering down about her like the parachuting soldiers just a few miles away.

Etiquette can come under strain in a wartime situation, as in ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound’. Attending a funeral, the mourners are forced to jump into the open grave as a landmine is dropped on the cemetery. Fortunately, Mr Kedge the funeral director rises to the occasion:

Reg seized Alan, and dropped him into the grave. The he grabbed Cathie, and dropped her in beside the child.
‘Jump in, jump in! It’s a landmine coming down.’
One after another the mourners got into the grave. The mutes came to the edge, hesitated, seemed inclined to follow. Mr Kedge, with a recalling gesture, pointed them to some bushes. Remembering their position they retired there, and lay down. The clergyman still remained standing. Mr Kedge touched his elbow, pointed to the grave. The clergyman, on such an occasion, would rank as one of the family.

In other stories, we see shifts in social relations. ‘Poor Mary’ is about a serving officer on home leave – but the officer is Mary, who is in the ATS, and the spouse at home is Nicholas, a conscientious objector. The war has highlighted their differences, which in peacetime had seemed so refreshing. One of my favourite stories is ‘Sweethearts and Wives’, in which three women set up house together with their children. One of the husbands, William, coming home on leave, is appalled at their slovenly housekeeping, opportunistic behaviour and failure to feed him well. Bearing no useful gifts for them and lacking any practical skills, he seems – surplus to requirements.

(Leonora Carrington, The Kitchen Garden on the Eyot, 1946; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; found here)

In STW’s fiction, the elderly are frequent causes for concern – you never quite know whether they’re going to behave themselves – they haven’t much to lose any more and care little for convention. There is Miss Gauntlett, daughter of the famous writer, who is kindly invited into her childhood home by its present resident, Mrs Hawley. Mrs Hawley feels that Miss Gauntlett is ‘not quite worthy’ of her father and her reactions as she’s shown around are not quite what they should be. Then there are the elderly Ryders in ‘The Cold’, who have taken to their beds because they are unwell. Their daughter-in-law ruminates:

It is very nice to be cultivated, of course, but somehow in wartime it does jar to labour upstairs with a heavy supper tray and hear, beyond the door, two animated voices discussing Savanorola; and then to hear the voices silenced, like mice when one throws a shoe in their direction, as one knocked on the door and called out brightly, ‘Supper, darlings!’ and to know, as clearly as if one had seen it, that old Mrs Ryder was stubbing out one of her cigarettes. That jarred too, especially as she smoked such very heavy ones.

And in another of my favourite stories, ‘Scorched Earth’, the ‘septuagenarian fogies’ Colonel Pomeroy and his wife have enthusiastically devoted themselves to self-sufficiency: digging up the lawn for potatoes, raising mushrooms in the air raid shelter, turning everything into jam and saving ‘heeltaps from soap, and tobacco pried from cigarette stubs’. But there is one thing that gives them even greater pleasure than all of this – fantasising how to destroy it all.

I could drone on for ever about the stories in English Climate: it would be better if you just read them. All of STW’s formidable talents are on display here and it’s a pleasure to read, full of subtleties, humour and sadness. If you haven’t yet read any of STW’s work, this is an excellent place to start.

'Winter Moon', by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Tycho, a mountain in the moon
Has long ago put out his fires –
Or so astronomers avow –
And dark the crater, and cold, yet now
About my hand, about the quires
Where this night through my hand has strewn
Words unavailing, frustrate phrases,
Tycho’s malignant bale-fire blazes.

A licking frost, a lambent chill,
It lights the unkindled sacrifice
And plays about me to benumb.
The words I wait for will not come,
And cowering down, as under ice
Dumb water cowers, my lost thought still
Shows me a tree upon the wold,
That stands, and cracks its heart for cold.

(From, Sylvia Townsend Warner: Selected Poems, edited by Claire Harman, Manchester: Carcanet)

I like the sounds and the rhythms of this poem very much. The poet identifies the cold, extinct volcano with her lack of inspiration and through that discovers the ‘tree upon the wold’ and writes her poem...

And here is a close-up photo of Tycho, found on this page (which has lots more information about it):