a gallimaufry

Picnic at Porokorro, by Hugo Charteris

Well, from one state of tense uncertainty and disintegration to another: colonial West Africa. Picnic at Porokorro, first published in 1958, has just been re-issued by Mike Walmer, who very kindly sent me a review copy.

(Photograph of Hugo Charteris from a newspaper archive, possibly the Daily Telegraph, hence the markings; found here)

Hugo Charteris, novelist and journalist, and his old friend Nicholas Mosley (yes son of Sir Oswald) spent three months in 1957 on safari in West Africa as colonial rule was coming to an end. This novel is the direct fruit of that. It takes place in an unnamed West African land, where the British Mineral Trust operates a diamond mine. The administration is white; the actual mining is done by ‘licensed native diggers’, black Africans from across British and French West Africa. The narrator is one of the white BMT administrators.

We quarrel easily here. We all have to be careful – no one more so than Number One and Dickson, who are the most isolated of us all.

People at home will find it hard to understand the extent to which we all feel isolated. [...] It is not merely a question of being surrounded and vastly outnumbered by countless Africans with whom we can only communicate in a sort of baby talk. It is in the very air we breathe. You may say we exaggerate this, ‘imagine’ it, just as one of us sometimes suddenly imagines it is so much hotter than it is and succumbs to panic deciding, usually one midnight, that he can’t stand it another minute. Perhaps we do ‘imagine’ things, on the other hand it is only eight months since ‘last year’ – the riots – when, for 48 hours, communications were cut and it looked as if every single inland European would lose his life.

At this particular moment, the country is in a state of transition, moving from colony towards independence. While the British colonialists remain in charge of security and finance, a native administration has been established to deal with day-to-day matters and to evolve towards a parliamentary democracy through which the country will rule itself after independence.

All of the context is laid out clearly in the introduction to this edition, by Andrew Lycett. (You really ought to read it before you read the novel; however, be warned that there is a major spoiler in paragraph 8...) The novel begins with the abduction of the BMT’s head of security, Roberts, by ‘the Cowboy’ and his followers, a group of discontented native diggers. The BMT struggles to respond to this crisis, complicated as it is by the arrival of MacPherson, the local Provincial Commissioner, on a visit and, by coincidence, of a tabloid journalist, Warner. MacPherson is convinced that with his experience of ‘Africans’ he can easily calm the situation and he insists on going on a picnic to the centre of the trouble, Porokorro.

Porokorro means ‘the Place of Bones’.

So we know things are not going to end terribly well.

I thought this was a remarkable novel for two main reasons. The first is the way that Charteris winds up the tension. He writes in short, fragmented paragraphs. He scorns overly expository passages and leaves the reader to piece things together from the elliptical observations of the characters, many of whom speak mainly in some defunct public-school argot. He shifts unexpectedly, jerkily, between dialogue and the narrator’s perception in a way that is very discombobulating. His sentences are very spare, even flat.

The narrator himself – and I assume he’s a man because almost all of the whites are male and because of his misogyny – is also an enigma. We never learn his name or his job, although he speaks of the BMT as ‘us’ and it’s clear that he works there. Yet he is privy to scenes and thoughts that he cannot possibly witness. So who or what is he? He uses ‘I’ occasionally to speak of himself, but more frequently ‘we’ and ‘us’, as if he is a collective consciousness. Certainly there is something about this book, about the way that the narrator speaks of ‘us’ and observes the action without ever participating it, that reminds me of the choruses in Greek tragedies.

The second reason I think this novel is remarkable is the immense subtlety with which it reveals the utter absurdity of colonialism in West Africa and its destructiveness.

Even during a crisis we remain a very ordinary-looking lot at the BMT.

I think of us at our most typical playing cricket on Saturdays during the dry season, when the grass is bleached. There we sit waiting our turn to bat, under a palm leaf shelter with rather blank, uniform expressions, all wearing white linen, watching the efforts of our two representatives at the wicket.

The light is so intense that even sunburnt faces have, like the grass, a white withered look; and our women are as white-powdered as scones, against sweat. The whole effect is of a party grouped for security, on a raft, suddenly consoled with a mirage of cricket.

In this passage you can see the unnaturalness of the BMT’s situation, its vulnerability and isolation, its dangerous passivity. That image of the women powdered like scones is brilliant: not just are they scone-like (pale, warm, floury) but the scone is a food completely out of place in West Africa. Cricket is of course a very public-school activity and the BMT is riven with social divisions: which school you attended, what you did during the War, and who your aunt is, are all crucially important. In the essentially dreary and soulless world of the BMT, spite is one of the few energising principles.

By taking a narrator who gives a BMT point of view (albeit an acerbic and melancholic one), and is someone who holds racist and misogynistic attitudes, Charteris might seem to risk providing a one-sided look at colonial West Africa. However, the BMT’s cruelty is not glossed over and is perhaps more effective for coming from an insider. Gradually, we learn of the conditions to which the licensed diggers are subjected. They are expected to risk their lives mining, but give up all the diamonds they find to the BMT, and are searched rigorously and humiliatingly to enforce this. Frequently, the shafts they dig collapse, burying some of them alive. Nobody rescues them. Why has the Cowboy abducted Roberts? Initially, it seems sheer mischief-making, but in fact there is a shocking reason behind it.

This is a portrait of a minority exploiting a majority without compassion, destroying the living land in pursuit of tiny, dead jewels; a minority that is unhappy and frightened and peevish, existing in an atmosphere akin to ‘a Thames country club, circa 1938’. It is a fascinating counterpart to The Heart of the Matter and No Longer at Ease, and Mike Walmer has done well to bring it back into print.

whither the monarchy

obviously this is not the most important question at the moment but I do wonder what is the point of having a monarch if she can’t swathe herself in ermine and crowns, leap on a white charger, gallop into the House and revoke Article 50 with a swish of her sword while shouting ‘One’s had enough of this balderdash!’ I expect she regrets not beating old Johnson over the head with her handbag when she had the chance

What’s Bred in the Bone, by Robertson Davies

Reading the second volume of a trilogy when you haven’t read the first is perhaps not the greatest plan, but I decided to read this second part of the Cornish trilogy for Lory’s Robertson Davies Reading Week purely because all my other RDs are in three-in-one volumes and I was going on holiday and didn’t fancy heaving a huge book about with me. I have What’s Bred in the Bone as a single-vol. Waterstone’s freebie and that is what went into the suitcase. And I am here to say that although I am ready to believe it would be better read in sequence after The Rebel Angels it certainly works perfectly well as a standalone novel.

The novel begins with a row between the three trustees of the Cornish Foundation for Promotion of the Arts and Humane Scholarship. One of them, Arthur Cornish, a respectable banker, has commissioned another of them, the Reverend Simon Darcourt, to write the autobiography of his recently deceased uncle, Francis Cornish. Darcourt complains that the book is proving impossible to write because Francis was such a private man. He can discover nothing about Francis’s childhood and childhood, Darcourt believes, is fundamental to understanding a person, ‘the first key to the mystery of a human creature’. Even worse, the little he has discovered is scandalous and reveals Francis to be not at all the reclusive and rather unwashed art collector of moderate wealth they all knew. Faced with the prospect of making ‘the Foundation and the Cornish name stink’, Arthur is now keen to suppress the book:

‘Oh my God!’ said Arthur Cornish. ‘First you suspect he was a picture-faker and now you tell me he was a poofter. Any other little surprises, Simon?’

Invoked during this conversation are the Lesser Zadkiel, who is the Angel of Biography (and also the Archangel of Jupiter, which fits with the novel’s astrological concerns), and the Daimon Maimas, who was ‘the Tutelary Spirit, the Indwelling Essence’ assigned to Francis. They agree that Darcourt will never know the half of it and together recreate the life of Francis, which forms the core of this novel.

(Angel and demon chatting over a deathbed; Bohun Psalter, Egerton MS 3277, British Library; found here)

The title comes from a mediaeval English proverb, ‘What’s bred in the bone will not out of the flesh’, given as an epigraph by Davies at the start of the novel. A later version of this is ‘What’s bred in the bone will come out in the flesh’, suggesting that ‘Lifelong habits or inherited characteristics cannot be concealed’ (Oxford Reference). The earlier proverb emphasises the inescapability of a person’s genetic inheritance and childhood experiences and the novel devotes much of its energy to exploring Francis’s genesis and childhood in the backwater Canadian town of Blairlogie. It also gives importance to the stars and to the practice of astrology: Francis’s astrological chart and his painting The Marriage at Cana are the two keys to understanding him (and to some extent understanding this novel).

The title also touches on another concern in the novel, the difference between the inner (the bone) and the outer (the flesh). Francis’s life appeared uneventful and the trustees do not consider him a ‘great man’. Yet in fact he was both a spy and a considerable artist. Both these rôles remained hidden: a spy is necessarily a secret job but Francis’s artistic talents went unrecognised because they were directed – not exactly into forgery, but into the creation of two paintings which were passed off as by an undiscovered Old Master and to which he therefore could never lay claim.

In fact, this novel could be subtitled ‘Art and Lies’. Deception, through spying, faking and smuggling, riddles the story. Art and beauty can trick the eye and confuse the mind. Illegitimate babies are passed off as legitimate. Francis appears to be the eldest surviving son of his parents. However, there was a first Francis, whose death as a baby was faked. This first Francis, the Looner, is kept secretly in the attic. The Looner is illegitimate and none of the characters ever know his true father; his mother and grandmother try unsuccessfully to induce a miscarriage and this affects him, leaving him with mental and physical disabilities. The Looner is described in ways that emphasise his animal-like nature, yet he inspires great love and tenderness in those who take care of him. In the Jungian symbolism of which I am too ignorant to discuss in any meaningful way, but which forms an important element of the novel, the Looner may be Francis’s shadow self and he is one of the forces which shape Francis’s character.

(Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, oil on wood, c. 1545; National Gallery, London; found here; the painting is called Allegory of Love in the novel but is also known as An Allegory of Venus and Cupid and The Triumph of Venus)

Art is profoundly important to Francis, from the religious prints in his grandparents’ house, to his own talents in drawing and painting, to his deep expertise in the history of art. In this novel, art’s fundamental significance derives from two things: its beauty and its symbolism. Bronzino’s Allegoory of Love attracts Francis for its beauty but when explained to him helps him to understand his mother: it has beauty and truth, meaning. The two paintings Francis paints – Drollig Hansel and The Marriage at Cana – are his greatest achievement in life: they are rich and beautiful and symbolic. Ironically though, as modern paintings they would be considered anachronistic (like the work of the Pre-Raphaelites whom the young Francis so loved) and without much merit. Their value in the eyes of the world lies in their age. (Another irony is that Francis complains that most modern art contains symbolism which is personal to the artist and often inaccessible to the viewer: his own two paintings contain portraits of his family and acquaintances and thus also layers of meaning inaccessible to anyone who believes them to be sixteenth-century artworks.) But Francis is out of step with the times, unable to paint in a ‘modern’ manner but only in a style taken to be that of a Renaissance artist.

I too find this double standard in art perplexing. A painting may triple in value when someone decides it is by someone famous, yet actually it remains exactly the same thing as before.

So beauty and truth can be found in fakes. And surprisingly – or perhaps, not surprisingly – the picture that remains closest to Francis’s heart throughout his life is not a Renaissance oil but a cheap print of a sentimental Victorian painting, Love Shut Out by Anna Lea Merritt. And other neglected art forms are promoted in this novel. Francis learns to draw first by copying from a book on caricatures by Henry Furniss, an Irish illustrator. Caricatures reveal the inner truth of a person, disguised by the flesh. Francis improves his ability by sketching corpses in a funeral parlour, while his great friend Zadok practises another art form, painting the faces of the dead and arranging them ‘for the viewing. At the end they must look as they’d have looked on their wedding-day, or better. Probably better,’ Zadok tells the boy Francis. Here too a sort of falsification reveals a deeper truth about the deceased and winkles forth a ‘best’ version of them.

(Harry Furniss, pen-and-ink drawing showing himself barring the door to his studio to Lewis Carroll, whose Sylvie and Bruno he illustrated and who proved a trouble to Furniss; before 1901; National Portrait Gallery, London; found here)

Neither fake nor ‘authentic’ art, high art nor these other art forms, is presented as ultimately ‘better’ than the other. Davies is happy to let them sit together. The novel is packed with dualities, and they are dualities which enrich each other. The Marriage of Cana exemplifies this. Saraceni, the art expert, master artist and forger who taught Francis all he knew, interprets it as being both Christian and alchemical and both Bride and Groom seem to be portraits of Francis. They stand with portraits of his parents, his aunt and brother, his grandfather, even Saraceni himself. The painting depicts the union of the male and female aspects of Francis and comments on the figures in his life who have made him who he is.

As this long rambly post indicates, What’s Bred in the Bone is complex and interesting as well as being entertaining, and I haven’t even touched on the use of Jungian archetypes, astrology and the Grail legend. Read it! Thank you so much to Lory, for hosting Robertson Davies Reading Week and for prompting me to read him again. Now that I am home, I am contemplating getting stuck into those big trilogies I was too feeble to pack for my holiday.

(Anna Lea Merritt, Love Locked Out, oil, 1890; Tate Britain, London; found here)

writing progress

(Alas, this painting is untitled and uncredited but bears an uncanny resemblance to me in writing mode)

In February I wrote that I had revised the children’s book I wrote and, filled with hatred and loathing for it, submitted it for The Times/Chicken House Children’s Book Competition. The long list was released on the last day of May and my book was not on it. Frankly I was not surprised and had been telling myself it would not be listed since the moment I had submitted it. But still I was illogically a bit disappointed, I suppose I had hoped that it did actually have some merit I just hadn’t noticed.

I had also submitted it to a couple of agents but failed to garner the slightest interest. Two agents (or was it three?) aren’t that many but since I had lost faith in the book it seemed wrong to expect other people to slog through it.

Anyway, onwards and upwards and I’ve started on a new children’s book and am enjoying working on it. After the first chapter (not the first chapter any more) it progressed slowly as I was reading and thinking and planning some of it, but I had time in July to write down quite a lot of it, it really felt as if I was just slapping the words down on the page and much of it came more easily than the first book had done. This felt good. At the moment I am writing to find out what happens. I have some characters and a rough plot but I don’t know how it ends yet. I think about each chapter and then write it down and then think about where the next one will go. I don’t mind if it’s rough, but when something feels flat or boring, I don’t persevere with it I scrap it and try something different. This is a difference to the last book, in which I was quite wedded to the plot and I think it got dull in places but I didn’t want to change it. I am also trying to keep description to a minimum...

It’s strange and exposing writing about this here because I am shy of showing either of the books to anyone. I want them to be read but also never read. When it comes to writing books, if they are never published then it’s easy to consider yourself a failure and it’s very likely that these posts about my fiction writing are just going to turn into a very public account of my failure. But I think that’s important. Trying and failing are what most of creative work consists of, yet we prefer to speak publicly only of the successes.

I’d also like these posts to be a reminder to myself that I am writing for my own pleasure as much as anything else. And the more I think about how the story might go and what shape it might take, the more I notice and appreciate this in novels I read. Having studied English Literature at university, I am always to some extent aware of how a novel is working as I read it, but now I am stopping and analysing bits more consciously again, and going back and finding books I’ve read and looking at how they create certain effects, or move between scenes, or build up tension. And this is a good thing in itself to do. To look at the craft of the novel. It seems more physical than words in my head, on the page.

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)