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)