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)