a gallimaufry

After the Death of Don Juan, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

(Don Giovanni and Doña Ana, from here)

‘Don Saturno. Prepare yourself for solemn and terrible news. Your son, Don Juan, is no longer on earth.’

‘You will forgive me,’ he said, ‘if I sit down?’

Leaning back in his chair by the writing-table, Don Saturno signalled to Ana to go on.

[Ana] went on. [...] Don Saturno listened with attention. It shocked Ottavio to see how sympathetically, how naturally, as it were, he followed the course of Ana’s narrative, fine shades of surprise, critical interest, disapproval or compassion flickering over his countenance. Hearing of Don Juan’s taunting visit to the cemetery he shook his head, but he might, so Ottavio thought, have been shaking it over a false note in a sonata.

‘The evening came. Supper was prepared, supper for two. At the appointed hour a heavy knocking was heard. Your son, reckless with wine, lost in some dreadful transport of impiety ordered his valet to open the door. More terrified of the dead than of the living, the man refused. The door opened, my father, in his living likeness but white as alabaster, appeared. He rebuked your son. He bade him take this last chance of heaven’s mercy. He spoke in vain. Pointing downwards with a marble finger he consigned Don Juan to perdition. And the jaws of hell opened. With shrieks, with lamentations, with vain appeals, Don Juan struggled in the clutch of demons. The lightning quivered around them, the sentence of heaven spoke in a peal of thunder. And they bore him down to hell.’

Pale as death, with the stately exhaustion of the martyr, she sank into a chair.

[...] ‘And there was no trace of my son’s body?’

‘How could there be?’ enquired Don Isidro reasonably. ‘Your son was taken to hell.’

‘Frankly,’ said Don Saturno, ‘I find this story very difficult to make head or tail of.’

After the Death of Don Juan begins shortly after the end of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. Don Juan had tried to assault the virtuous young lady Doña Ana, but had been interrupted by the arrival of Doña Ana’s father, whom Don Juan then murdered. Subsequently, Don Juan visited the cemetery to invite the father’s ghost to dinner. This occasion did not end happily for him, according to his servant Leporello, who maintains that Don Juan was dragged down to hell by demons. Doña Ana is moved to travel to Tenorio Viejo to inform Don Juan’s father, Don Saturno, of his son’s demise, accompanied by her new husband Don Ottavio, her duenna and her priest, Don Isidro (how I love that ‘reasonably’ in the quotation above).

(Design for the cemetery scene in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, French, nineteenth century; British Museum)

The journey lasts a relentless seven days and Tenorio Viejo is far from the earthly paradise Leporello, now in Doña Ana’s employ, had led the party to believe. Clinging to the dusty mountainside, the village is no more than a few dozen hovels surrounded by olive groves that, lacking water, wither in the heat. The villagers are aware that Don Saturno’s meagre interest in their livelihoods has been diverted for years by the need to pay for Don Juan’s lavish lifestyle. But now that the heir is dead, surely Don Saturno could be persuaded of the benefits to everyone of funding an irrigation system for the village fields?

While Doña Ana embarks on a vigil of prayer ostensibly for her father’s soul, her husband frets about ghosts shrieking at him while he sleeps and Doña Pilar, the duenna, embroiders grey pansies on a petticoat with sour little stabs of her needle, Don Saturno wrestles with the improbable story of his son’s death and the peasants dare to hope for a better future.

I first read this novel about twenty years ago and although I vaguely remembered most of what happened I had forgotten how extraordinarily good it is. It is a novel about rural Spanish society (which makes it sound boring – it is not boring) and so, rather than tracing the story of any particular character, it is told from multiple perspectives, the points of view of many characters from all social strata. While the focus begins with Doña Ana and her party, once they arrive at the village it expands to encompass Don Saturno and many of the peasants – the creepy sacristan and his housekeeper, the miller and his daughter, the schoolmaster and the thoughtful Ramez. Everyone is brought vividly to life. We are privy to Don Ottavio’s musings on his astonishing attractiveness as well as Celestina’s desire to flee the mill and join a convent. Just as Jacob’s Room built up a portrait of Jacob by presenting the memories and consciousnesses of a group of people who knew him, so After the Death of Don Juan reveals an entire society through the individuals that comprise it.

After the Death of Don Juan was published in 1938 and although it is ostensibly a historical novel, set in the 1760s, it was STW’s response to the Spanish Civil War – which, as an ambulance driver, she witnessed first-hand. The novel exposes the tensions within Spanish society – the desperately poor peasants, the aristocratic landlords who fail to invest in their tenants for one reason or another, the controlling hand of the Church – and the story it tells, ending in a violent clash, foreshadows the conflict of the 1930s. Ultimately, it is the values of Don Juan, the cynical, cruel and dishonest parasite, which will prevail in the village. (In the Virago edition there is a really brilliant foreword by Wendy Mulford which explores all of this, though if you don’t like spoilers, wait to read it until after you’ve finished the novel.)

If there are tensions between peasant and aristocrat, however, there are other tensions in the novel too: between town and country, between some of the villagers (the miller and the sacristan are particularly unpopular). The book maintains an exquisite balance between the demands of a parable (of the Civil War) and fiction (which requires that Tenorio Viejo feel like a ‘real’ place, its inhabitants like ‘real’ people), between realism (the daily tasks of peasant life) and fantasy (Don Juan’s terrifying death), between comedy and tragedy. There is a whiff of artifice about some of the scenes, either their setting or in the reliance of dialogue, which reminds us of the story’s roots in opera. It’s a very funny novel, alert to absurdity and delusion, until it becomes a tragic novel. It has a Comynsish feeling for the grotesque. It is now my new favourite STW novel – until the next one, perhaps...

(An English Delegate [Sylvia Townsend Warner] (The International Congress of Writers, Valencia 1937), by Gerda Taro, who was also a fascinating figure, 1937; International Center for Photography, The Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive, Gift of Cornell and Edith Capa, 2002; from here)

The Skin Chairs, Barbara Comyns

Once a guinea-pig had died in the kitchen and one of the maids had held a small mirror to its mouth to see if its breath left a mark and ever after I seemed to see the mark of the guinea-pig’s last breath on it.

Barbara Comyns is a writer whose best work, to my mind, reveals the extreme strangeness of the world alongside the ordinary in prose which seems effortlessly innocent, and The Skin Chairs is one of my favourite novels by her. This isn’t really a book review – more of a waffle – and if you (yes you, o readers I do not have) haven’t read it I do give away a lot of the plot so be warned.

Ten-year-old Frances is enduring a stay with her horrible horsey relations, the Lawrences, when her father suddenly dies. Left in reduced circumstances, Frances’s mother is cajoled by Aunt Lawrence into taking a dreary little house nearby into which she must cram her six children. Here they muddle along as best a family can when accustomed to servants and ponies; Mother dons tea-gowns as an economy and makes the family bilious with her occasional forays into extravagant cookery, the eldest daughter Polly rules the kitchen and permits only striped bacon for breakfast and Aunt Lawrence interferes constantly and unpleasantly. Two other widows befriend Frances for their own ends: beautiful Vanda who uses Frances as a babysitter for her neglected infant Jane, and the terrifying Mrs Alexander, who keeps sad animals in her conservatory, makes her chauffeur paint her slippers gold and keeps one room of her house as a surgery and one as a shrine to her dead daughter. The novel, told from Frances’s point of view, is suffused with Comyns’s characteristic charm, humour and sense of the grotesque.

Relationships between mothers and daughters, abusers and victims, pervade the novel, but I was intrigued by the symbolism of the skin chairs of the title and have been thinking particularly about them. According to Ursula Holden, who wrote the introduction to the edition I have, Comyns declared of the novel that ‘Only the skin chairs are true. I saw them.’ In the novel, the chairs belong to the General who lives in a grand house in the village. Frances relates three significant encounters with them, the first being on a visit with her cousin Ruby:

They were dark and churchified, and the backs and seats were covered in what appeared to be vellum, blackish and cracked in places. The General’s wife looked at them ruefully and admitted that the chairs were covered in human skin. ‘He brought them back with him after the Boer War, isn’t it horrible? Five of them are black men’s skins and one white. I believe if you look carefully you can see the difference.’ [...] With a feeling of awe I gazed at the chairs thinking of the poor skinless bodies buried somewhere in Africa. Did their souls ever come to see what had happened to their skins or had they forgotten all about them?

Here the macabre is tempered by Frances’s pity and perhaps even identification with them as bereft and powerless. Later Frances sneaks back into the house to show the chairs to Esmé, her sister. They notice a biscuit barrel on the table with a ram’s head for a lid and real horns on it: ‘I knew that if there were any biscuits in the barrel they would taste disgusting.’ From behind a door they hear breathing: ‘There was something very red and white inside – most likely a hassock, I thought, or even a huge cherry pie.’ In fact it is the General suffering a fatal stroke, and the girls flee in terror leaving him to die alone. This time it is the horror and revolting physicality of death that is evoked.

At the end of the book Vanda and Mrs Alexander and their exploitative relationships with Frances have been banished from the little girl’s life and Mother has married the new occupant of the General’s house, to which the family now moves. Frances is convinced she can hear the chairs ‘rumbling and grumbling together’ in the library and they seem a threatening presence and constant reminder of horror, cruelty and guilt. Yet when Mother banishes the chairs to the attic, Frances feels sorry for them again. One night she creeps out of bed and downstairs to them, clutching her school prayer-book (‘As I did so, the rumbling-grumbling noises stopped and I seemed to hear a great sigh’) to read the Burial Service to them. First, though, she baptises them with water from a flower vase, naming them after her favourite poets (Percy Shelley, George Byron, Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Tennyson, William Yeats and Anon. Circa) in an act which renders them safer and almost friendly. The novel ends as she falls asleep on Percy Shelley while reading out the Burial Service.

To me, therefore, the chairs represent death and the grief and horror of death, while offering Frances a way of absorbing that into herself. While she never sees her father’s corpse nor is permitted to attend his funeral, and in fact hardly refers to him after the initial devastation of his death, the chairs may provide her with a physical manifestation of his dead body and her reading of the Burial Service her own private obsequy for him.

There is a great deal more to The Skin Chairs than this (for a start, it's very funny, you wouldn't guess that from this post though) and although it’s now out of print I think you can find second-hand copies quite easily. An excellent article about this and Comyns’s other novels, which has influenced what I have written here, is ‘Skin Chairs and Other Domestic Horrors: Barbara Comyns and the Gothic Female Tradition’ by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik (2004; Gothic Studies 6 (1): 90–102). And there’s a really good review of it by Simon of Stuck in a Book here. The photograph opposite of Comyns in later life is taken from the Virago Press site and it is my favourite of the photographs of her which are publicly available.