It might seem odd to include something by another writer in Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week. But if you know a little about STW’s life, you’ll know that Valentine Ackland was her partner for thirty-nine years, from shortly after their first meeting in 1930 until Ackland’s death in 1969. And if you have read any of STW’s diaries and letters, you will already know a little about Ackland: shy, clever, well-dressed, passionate; poet, gardener, antiques dealer and animal lover. Not very good at promoting herself, her poems were mainly championed by STW and fell out of the public eye until they were collected and (re)published by Carcanet in 2008 as Journey from Winter (edited by Frances Bingham).
(Gertrude Mary Powys, Valentine Ackland; Dorset County Museum; found at Art UK)
For Sylvia is a very short memoir. It was written under special circumstances in 1949 and not published until 1985. The published edition has an extremely useful introduction by Bea Howe, a writer who was friends with both Ackland and STW for many years. The book was originally written, as entitled, For Sylvia, and as such was presumably a private document. However, it doesn’t read like that. It has a tone of great authenticity and is direct and confessional, occasionally irresolute and contradictory, as you might expect; but it is also thoughtful, structured, conscious of itself. The first few pages discuss the importance of the writer’s anonymity in ‘the honest account of a life’, yet clearly the writer was not anonymous to her reader in this case. While much of the memoir covers Ackland’s life before Sylvia and therefore might not have been known to her, there is no sense that it is written for her, no sense of a specific you in place of a general and unknown reader who requires explanations, background to be filled in. Indeed, Ackland writes about STW as ‘Sylvia’, not ‘you’. All of which leads me to suspect that it was never intended as an entirely private record, even if it wasn’t intended either to be entirely public. (Unless, of course, the only way that Ackland could bring herself to write something so personal and so exposing was to distance it even from Sylvia, her reader, and turn it into a story.)
At the beginning of the memoir, Ackland explains that she has reached a crisis, and this is what has prompted the writing of it. The crisis was that she had fallen in love with another woman, the American writer Elizabeth Wade White, while still loving STW. It was decided that STW would move out to a hotel while EWW and Ackland lived for a while in Ackland and STW’s cottage. Obviously, this was distressing for STW. On the eve of EWW’s arrival, Ackland wrote this memoir and gave it to STW who, upon reading it, became convinced that their love would endure. And, in fact, EWW left after a few months, never to return.
So this memoir is Ackland’s attempt to explain to STW her divided feelings and to root them in her experience of life. You could not really call it a justification. The portrait she presents, beautifully written, is of a self that has been split and damaged. It is also often very sad: she never spares herself and relentlessly presents her weaknesses and cruelties.
(Photograph of Elizabeth Wade White (left), Valentine Ackland (right), Sylvia Townsend Warner (seated); found at A Reader’s Footprints, a blog which looks fascinating)
Ackland begins with a crisis – but it is not the crisis of her two loves, it is the crisis of her alcoholism, a few years previously, as if she can’t yet name the current crisis involving Wade White. She describes how, one ‘strange night’, desperate to free herself from it after many years, she demands the ‘Emptiness’: ‘Is God there?’
There was no reply. Everything was completely dead. I had no sense except of emptiness and the rushing swirling dark.
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘There is no hope anywhere, and no sound and no promise. So now I know that there is nothing that can save me. I don’t believe, and I don’t know anything at all. But without faith or hope, in the utmost despair, I swear to You that I will never drink again. And I know that that can’t be true unless You are.’
And the next evening, she ‘suddenly realized that I was walking in tranquillity and with perfect confidence’ and this strengthened her and enabled her to finally stop drinking.
To return to that word ‘divided’: this seems a divided beginning to a memoir inspired by a different crisis. And indeed, I would say that the hallmark of Ackland’s life was being divided, being torn between two alternatives that she could not resolve. Loving both STW and Wade White at the same time being a powerful example. Her family was rich but convinced they were financially struggling. Her parents doted on her but her elder sister, presumably jealous, was often abusive and bullying and so were the nurses who took care of her. She considered falling in love with another girl the most natural and beautiful thing in the world: her parents called it filthy and her father never forgave her. She convinced herself she should marry but jilted one fiancé; she wavered over another and did eventually marry him but the marriage was annulled. She was devoutly religious but also sceptical and doubting. She stole and she took lovers and treated them badly, despite being essentially a kind and very sensitive person. She became an alcoholic but successfully hid it from everyone, even STW, although they lived together for years.
(Photograph of Valentine Ackland found here; originally I think from here)
Have I put you off? I hope not. Ackland describes so well the fears that can distort our lives and she is a masterful chronicler of guilt and self-loathing. But her exploration of herself, her emotions, is nuanced and delicate. She describes her childhood eccentricities: longing to befriend a ghost, playing chess in a tree. Movingly, she recounts her loves and her struggles with society’s disgust at them. Her descriptions of Edwardian life, and then the Bohemian 1920s, are vivid. There is the Hunt Ball:
After a gruesome finale, when they all danced a gallop and many couples fell down flat on the floor, and the place resounded with cat-calls, yells, hunting-horns and a variety of horrible noises, we all returned home.
and wonderful times living down in Dorset, at first with her friend R, with whom she dances ‘fine high-kicks to the ceiling’ to gramophone records. They befriend T.F. Powys, whose favourite tipple at that time was gin and milk. Imagine. Her life improves, she meets STW. They live for a year in Frankfort Manor, which is a sort of magical Eden. They leave for a variety of practical reasons, but Ackland writes:
My last look at Frankfort was, alas, a look of shame: deserting that lovely, lovely house because – as I knew beyond any power to evade it – I was rotten and almost destroyed and could not heal myself, even when I was housed in that gentle, beautiful place and had the truest love that ever drew breath in the world. [...] I dream of it now, too often, and when I am dead for sure my ghost will haunt there, loving and grieving...
She was always acutely aware of her own privilege and deeply ashamed of her inability to be as happy as she thought she should be. Towards the end of the account, she writes:
To this moment, then, my life has been strange and as I have set it down here it has seemed to be unhappy. But in fact it has been one of the most blessed, one of the happiest lives ever lived on the earth: and that fills me with awe and sometimes with trouble [...] I have had very great suffering and very sharp pain, and bitter shame and grief too, and base and terrible fear; and I cannot think that I have ever done anything of myself to be worthy of the least of my joys [...]
But I think that most readers will reach a much kinder conclusion than this. In fact, the saddest thing of all now is that she did not write more and that – whisper it, lest the poets are reading – she never wrote any fiction...