a gallimaufry

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):

The Flint Anchor, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

The Flint Anchor was Sylvia Townsend Warner’s last novel, published in 1954. Like The Corner That Held Them, which preceded it by six years, it is concerned with passage of time and its workings on a small group of people. It is even more detached from its characters than Corner and, to the probable horror of modern writing instructors across the land, it eschews ‘showing’ what happens for relating it, like a history told by a rather wry old person. Partly because of this technique and the distance between reader and characters, there are no stabs to the heart, as one gets from reading After the Death of Don Juan or Summer will Show. It is comic and beautiful, but increasingly bleak.

Have I put you off yet? (And ’tis only the start of STW Reading Week.) To be sure, it’s not STW’s easiest book, and perhaps not the place to begin if you want to read her, but we are readers not wimps and The Flint Anchor is fascinating and, yes, very enjoyable too. The more I think about it, the more clever the structure seems, the way that scenes and images resonate with each other, the more impressive the whole book becomes.

(Robert Ladbrooke, Yarmouth Harbour, Moonlight, c.1813; Norwich Museums; found here)

The action takes place over the first half of the nineteenth century, during the adult life of John Barnard. Barnard inherits a thriving import-export business from his father and the family home, Anchor House, in Loseby on the Norfolk coast. The house is decorated with a flint anchor embedded in the brickwork between two first-floor windows. This anchor is clearly symbolic: it is the house itself, which physically holds the Barnard family and keeps its members on chains of various lengths; it is John Barnard, who controls the lives of his dependents as only a Victorian paterfamilias can; and going even farther in it is John Barnard’s stony heart, which holds down the ship of his family. This heart remains impervious to love for his wife or children with one, disastrous exception: his daughter Mary, upon whom he dotes to an unhealthy degree. Here he is, watching her in the garden:

Mary was walking up and down the gravel path with a book on her head. To the gate into the kitchen garden, overhung by the elder bush’s swag of purple berries and bronze leaves, and back to the arbour, and to the gate again, she passed and repassed. [...] She wore a white dress and her long white drawers reached her ankles. It was as though all the colours of the autumnal garden were in a conspiracy to enrich her whiteness with their scarlet and crimson and purple and gold, just as rich aunts might bestow their Indian shawls on a favourite niece, knowing that they themselves had only a little longer to wear them. Seeing her so white and dutiful, he naturally began to think of angels [...]

He calls her to him and demands that she repeat to him ‘the sixth of Dr Watts’s Divine Songs’.

Barnard’s love for his daughter is excessive but it has no physical expression. Instead, it lays him briefly open to a sensitivity to beauty he does not otherwise experience; a sense of beauty that is tinged with mortality and which then shades into an association with his Christian faith and ultimately to a need to control and direct her behaviour. It is no coincidence that Mary is in the garden; nor that the garden brings forth thoughts of ripeness, angels and death since just under Barnard’s consciousness is the symbol of the Garden of Eden, with its overtones of innocence, knowledge, disobedience and mortality. Later in the novel, Mary will be seen in the garden kissing Thomas Kettle.

And STW sandwiches this loving, anguished scene of Barnard and his beloved Mary, with the news that his son Joseph has been sent down from Cambridge in disgrace because ‘to win a wager of ten pounds he had climbed onto the roof of the college chapel, naked, and carrying a stuffed owl which he placed on a crocket’, and then the news from Joseph himself that he is emigrating. He will run a plantation in the West Indies.

(Samuel Palmer, In a Shoreham Garden, 1820s or 1830s; Victoria and Albert Museum; found here)

Barnard’s wife, Julia, bears him eleven children, four of whom die young, and then takes to her sofa and discreet alcoholism: ‘It was called keeping her strength up’. Barnard doesn’t notice – or he does, briefly (‘Might not Julia be as comfortable with peppermint tea?’), before turning away from it. Those who flee the flint anchor (like Joseph) can only do so by putting the sea between them, a different sort of liquid escape. The younger two children, Ellen and Wilberforce, have slightly more freedom. Ellen is born with a large port-wine stain on her face and thus seems to be liberated from the expectations placed upon her sisters; clearly no one could possibly want to marry her and at times the family consider her somewhat ‘backward’, yet she carves out the space to do as she pleases and by the end of the novel is establishing a (genteel) literary career of sorts. On the other hand the adored Mary grows into the Victorian male ideal of womanhood and oh how limited that turns out to be.

(Henry Raeburn, The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch, 1790s; National Gallery of Scotland: found here)

It is not that he is malignant; on the contrary, he dispenses a large part of the profits of his successful business to the poor of Loseby and he has a very strict moral code. It is that he lacks any understanding of himself or other people, and, lacking love, he has no curiosity about them. It is easy for him to deceive himself. Long before his death, he is spending his days sitting in a graveyard (another sort of garden, I suppose). The book begins and ends with his headstone; it is only when we reach the end that we understand the inscription upon it and how utterly inadequate and false it is.

Falseness and hypocrisy are endemic to the middle classes in The Flint Anchor and to some extent contrasted with the working-class culture of Loseby, which is rough but less devious. STW also gives free rein to her talent for portraying the delicate spite of middle-class manners:

Speaking with a strong Yorkshire accent, [Miss Mutley] began to probe Euphemia about Madame Bon; was she not a wonderful lady, so well educated too, a quite remarkable mind, so Mr Kettle said, almost masculine in its grasp of business. It was a pity that she should have these headaches, but they always come if a female is so very intellectual. Miss Mutley expressed a warm desire to see more of Madame Bon, and Euphemia got an impression that she would be glad to hear that Madame Bon was at the bottom of the sea.

In the end, as John Barnard begins to perceive the sham of his life, it is to Sophie Bon’s hypocrisy that he is drawn for comfort.

If you’re interested in reading more about The Flint Anchor, there’s a superb examination of it on the Mumpsimus blog in which, among other excellent points, the author makes a case for STW as a perverse author wilfully denying the reader the pleasures they crave from a novel of this sort (here the novel is the flint anchor which traps us with John Barnard in Loseby when we’d rather be on the high seas with Thomas Kettle). There’s also a link to a truly fascinating paper: ‘Rum Histories: Decolonizing the Narratives of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Flint Anchor’, by Jennifer P. Nesbitt, I cannot recommend this enough.

(John Crome, Road with Pollards; Norwich Museums; found here)

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week 2021 begins!

Welcome to the third and final Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week! 

No time to read a whole book? Narrow your focus and write about a single short story or a poem. STW excelled at both these forms and there are plenty to enjoy!

If you write a post, long or short, please add your link in the comments to any of this week’s posts and I will include it in the round-up on Sunday.

I’m greatly looking forward to reading your thoughts about her work!

Here is the plan for the gallimaufry:

• Monday: review of STW’s last published novel, The Flint Anchor
• Wednesday: review of the short story collection English Climate, published this last year by Persephone Books (sorry, I seem to be confused about the passage of time!)
• Friday: review of The True Heart, STW’s third novel
• Sunday: round-up of and links to all your writings and a competition announcement!

My offerings this year are all fiction, so on Tuesday and Thursday I’ll post a poem to try to balance it out a little.

Anyway, off we go! Happy reading!

reminder: Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week 2021

It’s coming soon! In two weeks, to be exact.

Rush to your library or bookcase, seize that STW novel or poem or short story you’ve always wanted to read, pour yourself a nice G&T and settle down in the lovely June sunshine...

Told by an Idiot, by Rose Macaulay

This is the third novel of Rose Macaulay’s I’ve read, the other two being The World My Wilderness, a very
long time ago, and The Towers of Trebizond, which I reread more recently.  I loved them both, and so when I saw a copy of Told by an Idiot in a second-hand bookshop I snapped it up. (I note that its previous owner was H.P. Hulbert of St Barnabas Vicarage in Bristol, who dated its acquisition as 23rd June 1938, and I (another HP) paid £5 for this nice hardback copy and brought it to Belgium; where will it go next, I wonder?) And then I didn’t read it for twenty years. Ah well, its time has finally come.

Told by an Idiot was first published in 1923 and follows the fortunes of the Garden family from the late nineteenth century until after the First World War. It has an arresting opening:

One evening, shortly before Christmas, in the days when our forefathers, being young, possessed the earth, – in brief in the year 1879, – Mrs Garden came briskly into the drawing-room from Mr Garden’s study and said in her crisp, even voice to her six children, ‘Well, my dears, I have to tell you something. Poor papa has lost his faith again.’

Papa being a vicar, this loss of faith is rather a pity, especially since the Gardens really like the vicarage they are living in. However, Papa, an inveterate seeker of truth, has had and continues to have during the novel many losses of faith and many discoveries of new faiths: Anglicanism, Roman Catholicisim, Unitarianism, Quakerism, Theosophy, Spiritualism, he works through them all...

His six children, all very different characters, grow up, marry (or not), work (or not), have children (or not). The years pass. Indeed, this book reminded me very strongly of Virginia Woolf’s (later) The Years, which I had read as an undergraduate and not since. When I got it down to look at it, I found it quite different to Macaulay’s novel. Woolf focuses on the individual’s experience in the moment. Macaulay, however, shifts the emphasis so that it is on time passing and on the larger movements – political, social, artistic – that churn through the years. Her characters play out their little lives against this.

(Undated photograph of Rose Macaulay, found here)

So, Macaulay discusses the Irish Question, militant suffragettes, nationalism, imperialism. Her discussions are dry, amused and partisan, they are not histories. (One thing surprised me, in these days of the pandemic: not one mention of the Spanish flu outbreak of 1919.) She gives her novel two epigraphs which form the principal themes of the novel and explain its emphasis. One is the quote from King Lear from which the title is drawn, and which expresses the smallness of our lives, ‘full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing’. The other is a line by Paul Morand, from Fermé la nuit: ‘L’histoire, comme une idiote, mécaniquement se répète’ – history repeats itself. And what is striking, and perfectly illustrates her point, is that we are still discussing the same ideas today – for instance:

To make up for the stagnation of home politics, there was, in 1906 and 1907, plenty of international activity. The nations of Europe were ostensibly drawing together, a happy family. [...] A rapprochement took place between ourselves and Russia, for it was quite the fashion in Europe to fraternise with Russia, her armies were so huge, even if not, apparently, very good at what armies are supposed to be good at. There were those in this country who held that it was not quite nice to fraternise with Russia, disapproving of her governmental system, and of the Tsar’s very natural suppression of the Duma that had for a few days and by an oversight so strangely existed and actually dared to demand constitutional reform. There were those in Great Britain who said that we should not be at all friendly with a government so little liberal in mentality. But, after all, you must take nations as you find them, and their domestic affairs are quite their own concern, and one should not be provincial in one’s judgements[...]

More subtly, Macaulay notes the latest vogues in literature, for example the rise of George Bernard Shaw, but infuses her own prose with echoes of earlier writers (most obviously Shakespeare). Thus in art it is the same: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

There are six Garden children: Vicky, conventional and full of joy in life; Maurice, the embittered editor of a radical magazine; Rome, the distant cynic; Stanley, enthusiastic and idealistic; Irving, comfortable and rich; and Una, placid and content. They possess characteristics of their parents but are also very much themselves. The ones who interest Macaulay most are Maurice, Rome and Stanley, as well as Imogen, Vicky’s daughter, who longs to be a boy and join the Navy.

There is a necessary difficulty to writing a novel like this, which is keeping in balance the discussions of the wider context of the times with the individual lives of the characters. Macaulay’s characters are vivid and interesting and sometimes one wants more of them and less of the politics, or at least I did. But that would be to wish the novel to be something other than it is. The strength of this strategy is that the reader gets a real taste of the times, in particular the intellectual currents of the times, which would not be easily – not so pithily, anyway – conveyed in a more character-centric novel.

(Philip Wilson Steer, The Swiss Alps at the Earls Court Exhibition, 1887; Tate Gallery)

Some of the most sensitive writing is about Imogen, so I will end with a particularly lovely passage about her when she is in her early twenties and writing.

Imogen was happy. She felt her life to be pleasure-soaked; a lovely, an elegant cry of joy. [...] Imagination brimmed the cup of her spirit like golden wine. She felt happy and good, like a child in an orchard, ripe apples and pears tumbling in soft grass about her, the silver boat of the moon riding in a green sky. For her birds sang, sweet bells chimed and clashed, the stars made a queer, thin, tinkling song on still and moonless nights. The people hurrying about the city streets and squares were kind and merry and good, like brownies; the city itself was a great, gay booth, decked and lit. Dawn came on a golden tide of peace; noon drove a flaming chariot behind the horses of the sun; evening spread soft wings, tender and blue and green; night was as sweet as a dream of apple blossoms by running water. When she wrote, whether by day or by night, her brain felt clear and lit, as by a still, bright taper burning steadily. Her thoughts, her words, rose up in her swiftly, like silver fishes in a springing rock pool; round and round they swam, and she caught them and landed them before they got away.

What I particularly like about this description is I think it tells you something of Imogen’s writing, joyful and romantic, original and with echoes of earlier writers, and that she writes in response to the world around her but that her writing then further shapes that response. in an endless loop of delight.

Shiny New Books review: Inventory of a Life Mislaid, by Marina Warner

I’ve written about Marina Warner’s new biography of her parents, Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir, for Shiny New Books, and you can read it here.

If you can’t be bothered to click through: it’s a fascinating and charming study not just of Esmond and Ilia Warner, but of vanished post-war cultures in Europe and the Middle East. Highly recommended!