a gallimaufry

Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940, edited by Melissa Edmundson

(Steps, by Simon Marsden)

I started to write this at the beginning of the half-term holiday, for Hallowe’en and to participate in Witch Week. It was a sullen, grey day, we’d had to cancel the little party for my daughter due to tighter Covid restrictions and even the prospect of an extra week’s half-term holiday was failing to lift my spirits. So I did not get far with it, but now that the sun is shining and the positive rate of new infections is at last falling, everything seems a lot better and I seem to be regaining the urge to write.

Here, belatedly, are my thoughts on Women’s Weird, a most enjoyable collection, and on ‘ghost stories’ in general. It is Friday 13th, so a not inauspicious day for something uncanny.

The book is exactly as the title describes it and includes work by American and British authors from the tail end of the Victorian period until 1940. Although many of them are well known (if surprising: I had no idea that D.K. Broster wrote ghost stories, although why shouldn’t she?) – and include These include E. Nesbit (of course!), Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edith Wharton – only a couple of the stories appear in other, similar anthologies (of which I seem to have rather more than I thought, perhaps they have been spawning while I wasn’t looking), so there is plenty of new material here for long-standing fans of creepiness.

Crucially, these aren’t just effective ghost stories. Edmundson has been looking specifically for ‘Weird’ stories, and she discusses what Weird is in her (excellent) introduction to the collection. As a very bald summary of her definition, Weird stories engage with the supernatural but are ‘something more than the traditional ghost story’, eliciting ‘a profound sense of dread [H.P. Lovecraft’s words]’ as well as ‘a stirring, a touching of nerves not usually sensitive, an awakening to more than fear – but to something like awareness or conviction or even memory [Mary Butts’ words]’, ‘an alternative path for the exploration of the numinous [Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s words]’. The stories seek to unsettle through disturbing manifestations of the supernatural, shaking our complacent view of reality. This collection, Edmundson explains, reflects the fact that ‘During the late Victorian period and into the early twentieth century, women’s supernatural fiction became much darker as newer, more ominous presences emerged [...] This collection surveys some of these experimental forms to show how these authors moved beyond the traditional ghost story and into areas of Weird fiction and dark fantasy.’

For me, a spooky story provides two experiences: the story while you’re reading it, and the story when you’ve finished it. Obviously all literary forms do this, but it seems to me especially significant in this genre. While you’re reading it, you should feel chilled, horrified, unsettled. This is difficult for a writer to achieve. Readers are cynical and they know the tropes. Don’t disturb the ancient grave or hiding place; don’t ignore the old tales. Evil deeds have consequences. Don’t be a sweet young wife or (in this collection anyway) a dog. (In fact, it may be wisest to focus on a sense of inevitability about the story than to attempt a shocking twist.) But the end of a ghost or Weird story often forces you to reinterpret what has gone before: perhaps it offers an explanation, perhaps a catharsis. A good story does both elements satisfyingly well; an exceptional story explores something else at the same time and means that you can reread the story even if you ‘know the ending’ and still find new and interesting aspects.

So, the first story in the collection, ‘The Weird of the Walfords’, contains few surprises for the seasoned reader of haunted tales. The young heir to the Walfords hates the ancestral family bed in which so many of his forefathers have died; when he inherits Walford Grange he takes an axe and chops it to pieces. Of course, bad things ensue. But what is young Humphrey really trying to destroy along with the bed? What does it represent to him – death, the stifling responsibilities of an aristocrat to the buildings and things he is supposed to keep in trust for the next generation? And in a weird and horrible way, does he get what he wants in the end?

(Ecclescraig House, by Simon Marsden)

I like best stories that don’t explain away too much. For me, ‘Let Loose’ – a truly spine-tingling account of an architect (and his dog!) who descends into a bone-stacked crypt to copy a wall-painting – is most effective when you don’t quite know what’s happening. The explanation was a bit weak, frankly, in comparison with the power of the haunting and left me with too many questions which I won’t pose here because I don’t want to spoil it for you. In creating an atmosphere of dread and winding up the tension, it is supremely skilful. It is also significant because it invents a structure of ghost story (according to Wikipedia: 1. characterful setting; 2. gentleman scholar; 3. antiquarian object whose disturbance awakens a supernatural being) which was later to be associated with M.R. James. Let it now be associated with Mary Cholmondely!

‘The Twelve Apostles’ by Eleanor Scott follows in this Cholmondely tradition and is also an excellent example of its kind. Even though you know what’s coming, and are muttering to yourself, ‘No no no don’t do it’, it’s still shocking.

(Melrose Abbey, by Simon Marsden)

‘The Shadow’, by E. Nesbit, is as different as can be from ‘Let Loose’. There is no ghost, only a shadow haunting a modern house and three people in it: a young married couple and their friend Miss Eastwich who visits them after the (never-named) husband asks her to come and cheer up his sweet young wife Mabel, who is poorly. The husband fears it is some curse; he must have a guilty conscience but he claims he does not, and we never find out – though perhaps it is connected somehow with Miss Eastwich...

Specifically feminist concerns feature in many stories, such as ‘The Giant Wistaria’ and ‘Kerfol’, while Margery Lawrence subverts a symbol of ordinary domesticity and the feminine rôles of wife, nurse and cook in the delightfully sinister ‘The Haunted Saucepan’. ‘The Book’, by Margaret Irwin, describes the collapse of a middle-class family in a truly nasty case of evil influence.

My favourite of all, however, was the last one: ‘With and Without Buttons’, by Mary Butts. Two bored sisters are irritated by their neighbour and decide to cook up a ghost to frighten him. Is what follows their own creation, gone horribly out of control, or something else that was just waiting for an opportunity? It is one of a pair of stories – the other being D.K. Broster’s ‘Couching at the Door’ – which turns articles of women’s clothing into something life-threatening (to men).

Hallowe’en and Witch Week may have ended but this time of year is perfect for stories like this – and a second volume, Women’s Weird 2, was published just a few weeks ago. And remember: Covid 19 restrictions are depressing, but at least you’re not being menaced by powers beyond the grave.

(The photographs in this post are all by Simon Marsden, whose beautiful book The Haunted Realm captured my imagination as a teenager. His pictures derive their eerie, Weird atmosphere from his use of infrared film)

The King of Elfland's Daughter, by Lord Dunsany, at SNB

There are some books that are a little bit special, that may not be very popular but really speak to you. The King of Elfland’s Daughter, by Lord Dunsany, is one of them. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful fantasy novel, first published in 1924 and now reissued by Gollancz with the introduction by Neil Gaiman from their 1999 edition of the book.

I originally wrote about it here in 2015 but I’ve revised (and, I hope, improved) the piece for Shiny New Books – you can read it here.

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week 2020 round-up

It is the end of this year’s reading week! I come to it feeling happy to have read so much more of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s work, and feeling I understand it and know her just a little better than I did before. This week I read a collection of short stories, Of Cats and Elfin, and a selection of her poems in Voices from Fairyland; I also read some of her letters, which were utterly delightful and revealed her as a kind and witty friend, keenly alive to life’s comedy, and her novel Summer Will Show, which I would recommend whole-heartedly if you have not yet tried any of her work. I also read the sad and beautiful memoir For Sylvia by her partner, Valentine Ackland; if you have read STW’s diaries you might feel that Ackland treated STW badly but this casts her actions in a more sympathetic light (ironically, since she is so hard on herself).

But what have you been reading? Here I shall post links to all of your reviews. Let me know in the comments to any of this week’s posts of anything you’ve written for STW Reading Week and I’ll add it.

‘It’s only two years since I discovered STW but on the strength of what I’ve read of her so far I have no hesitation in saying she’s become one of my all time favourite authors,’ writes Harriet in her review of Mr Fortune’s Maggot. She describes it as: ‘warm, witty, frequently surprising. Yes there are obvious parallels between Lueli’s and Mr Fortune’s loss of their gods, but STW is far too subtle and complex a writer to drive this home. Just read it for its charm and humour and wisdom.’

Harriet also links to previous reviews she’s written: of the short story collections Swans on an Autumn River, Kingdoms of Elfin and Of Cats and Elfins, and the novel Lolly Willowes.

STW wrote a biography of T.H. White and Simon of Stuck in a Book reviewed it: ‘I had expected something a little more distinctive stylistically from this deeply distinctive writer. But perhaps she decided not to make herself the star of the book. Yet she cannot help sometimes writing as an exasperated friend – ‘Of course, he should have gone to see her. Rush on by new projects, he didn’t.’ – and sometimes as a fellow author giving her opinion on a work in progress.

‘There is enough in here to delight the reader who comes because they love Warner. There could be more, and I would have welcomed it, but then it might have cloaked the emerging of the curious, sad, impassioned, conflicted, enthusiastic, inventive, restricted T.H. White.’

Hayley at Desperate Reader has read Lolly Willowes, years after first trying and failing with it. She writes: ‘What I really can’t understand though is how I missed the humour and sharpness of this book last time around when it’s the first thing that hit me this time. It doesn’t much matter because I got here in the end, which feels like the greatest good luck.

‘I'm really beginning to wonder if Sylvia Townsend Warner might be the most under rated writer though, and why that should be.’

lethe wrote about Of Cats and Elfins over at Goodreads: ‘Both cats and elfins are heartless creatures, and therefore perfectly suited to STW's sometimes sardonic wit. [...] Since we had a spell of gorgeous weather, I started off with The Cat's Cradle Book. [...] I liked them all, [...] especially "Bluebeard's Daughter". "Bluebeard" has always been one of my favourite fairytales and I enjoyed reading about the life of his forgotten offspring.’

‘I was hooked and mainlining right from page one and spent a wonderful week or so in late January, totally lost in the universe Warner created.  Have any of you watched Bladerunner, with its AI replicants who were “more real than real”?  Although the comparison jars a bit, it pretty accurately describes how I experienced the small corner of the medieval universe Warner creates.  In this I found her skill to be comparable to the great 19th century realists, whose fictional universes are so skillfully constructed that we readers are deceived into thinking them snapshots of reality when of course they are no such thing.’ Janakay has written a fascinating post in which she not only reviews The Corner That Held Them but discusses more widely her love of STW’s books including her experience of Lolly Willowes:

‘I was totally entranced; I had simply never encountered anything quite like Warner’s combination of sharp social observation, realistic depictions of nature and delicate fantasy, all heightened by the mythic overtones of Lolly’s nocturnal ramblings through the dark woods adjacent to the village of Great Mop.  Lolly Willowes remains one of my favorite books and I return to it every few years, when a certain mood strikes me; unlike Lolly, I don’t ditch home and hearth but I do spend a day or two immersing myself in that singular world that Warner creates in this wonderful novel.’

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week is over for this year, but Sylvia Townsend Warner’s work is for always and worth celebrating. To me, she is a very special writer who deserves a central place in twentieth-century British literature. Thank you for reading and for taking part!

Letters, Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited by William Maxwell

For Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week last year, I read her Diaries, and they were wonderful.  Then lethe wrote that her letters were even better. And I know that Simon of Stuck in a Book is also a great fan of STW’s letters. So – what could I do? I want to write about as many facets of STW’s writing as possible. There are several different collections of her letters available, which focus on her correspondence with one or two people, but I chose this one because it was the most general and I thought would give me a good idea of her letter-writing.

Letters are a fascinating form because they are both a little private – in comparison with work that is formally published – and a little public – the writer is writing consciously for a reader, presenting a facet of herself, polishing the material, in comparison with a diary. So when you read letters to writers’ friends, you experience (at a remove, of course) what it might be like to be one of those friends. STW’s letters are kind, sensible and very funny. They are also brilliant in that, with a startling simile, a turn of phrase, a landscape, a person or even a pet will leap into life.

(Some letters written by STW and auctioned at Bonhams in 2018; that’s her handwriting! Found here with a very nice description that is worth reading)

William Maxwell was the fiction editor at the New Yorker, which is how he came to know STW; he was also no slouch in the fiction-writing department himself. In the introduction, he describes STW when he first met her in 1939:

She was dressed in black. Her voice had a slightly husky intimate quality. Her conversation was so enchanting it made my head swim. I did not want to let her out of my sight. Ever.

They became good friends and many of the letters in this collection are to him, as well as to Paul Nordoff, Bea Howe, David Garnett and Nancy Cunard; but there are also letters to less-famous friends and to her editors.

Maxwell notes that STW wrote a lot of letters, ‘thousands of them’. He writes:

The personal correspondence of writers feeds on left-over energy. There is also the element of lavishness, of enjoying the fact that they are throwing away one of their better efforts, for the chances of any given letter’s surviving are fifty-fifty, at most. And there is the element of confidence – of the relaxed backhand stroke that can place the ball anywhere in the court that it pleases the writer to have it go.

The letters he has brought together span 1921–78, the year of her death (in which she writes: ‘But I shall not re-read Colette. I have looked forward to doing this, & find to my grief that I have outlived her.’). Her letters encompass Significant Events, such as her visit to Spain during the Civil War and her experiences of the Second World War. She writes, especially to her American friends, about odd aspects of life during that conflict. Here she starts describing firewatching, but quickly goes off along a very STW path:

Tonight armed with whistles, perhaps fortified with whistles would be a better term for it, Valentine and I will be out firewatching. It is a most pastoral and contemplative pursuit. We walk up and down a section of quiet country lanes awaiting the descent of possible incendiary bombs. If they did, it would become our duty to blow a series of short blasts on our whistles. [...] The only snag is – as you will readily understand – one cannot rehearse the series of short blasts, in case the rehearsal gave rise to false alarms and despondencies. I have tried mine out very quietly in the toilet, it seems to go all right, but how am I to know if a mezza voce whistle is going to be as good ff? The other temptation is resisting being owls. Valentines whistle is just a whole tone lower than mine, and the same interval exists between the male and female owl, and we might have such lovely conversations. It always seems to me that owls are very happy in their married lives, perhaps because they never speak during the day. (To Paul Nordoff, 1941)

There are of course mentions of her literary work and of the world of arts:

A story demanded to be written, and that is why I have not answered your letter before: a wrong-headed story, that would come blundering like a moth on my window, and stare in with small red eyes, and I the last writer in the world to manage such a subject. One should have more self-control. One should be able to say, Go away. You have come to the wrong inkstand, there is nothing for you here. But I am so weakminded that I cannot even say, Come next week. (To Alyse Gregory, 1951)

I remember a dress rehearsal of Heartbreak House when [George Bernard] Shaw bounded on to the stage and became a young girl. He was infinitely better at it than the actress, even when she had studied him, he far out-girled her. He had a tirra-lirra twirl of the waist that I went home and practised by the hour. I couldn’t do it either. (To William Maxwell, 1952)

The letters about her partner Valentine Ackland’s illness and death are very moving. On her bereavement:

Her love is everywhere. It follows me as I go about the house, meets me in the garden, sends swans into my dreams. In a strange, underwater or above-earth way I am very nearly happy. (To Marchette and Joy Chute, 1969)

(Great Eye Folly, Salthouse, Norfolk, where STW and Ackland stayed in 1950–51; damaged in the floods of 1953, it no longer exists; from Literary Norfolk)

And she spins wonderful stories, like this one:

About a mile from Tangley [Hall] there is a deserted farm called The Warren. I came on it quite by accident for it lies in a little dell among woods, far from the road and the field-path to it is vanishing from disuse. I found a way in and walked over the house as much as I dared for the staircase is broken away and all the timber eaten with dry rot. The parlour windows are grown over with nettles and gooseberry run wild, and growing up through the broken stone floor is a flourishing elder-bush, singularly bright green from its indoor life. The doors and chimney-pieces are carved with names and dates, mostly 18th cent.
I was very pleased with my find, and when I had done with the polite part of the house I turned to the back-kitchens and wash-houses. These were even more dilapidated and darkened, and I was just thinking that I had had enough of them when I saw an archway leading into a sort of cellar with a barrel roof. I went in looking at the roof and nearly fell into a well. It was so dark and smooth and plumb with the floor that it looked like a slate. It then seemed to me that this deserted house I had been pitying so was uncommonly disappointed that I hadn’t gone a step further into its trap. It had been waiting so long for something to happen; and a drowned lady would have been a pleasant secret to hint of to the woods on a winter’s night. (To David Garnett, 1925)

Many of her letters concern domesticity, and they are so fun and so sharp. STW looks around her at her garden, her neighbours, herself, and revels in the beauty and strangeness and writes them down as little gifts for her correspondents, garnished with a sprig of laughter. She has a poet’s ear for cadence, and a novelist’s eye for the telling detail. All I want to do is quote from them. So I shall.

As for the cold – the north-wind is raving, and the air is bruised and black, and even William [the pug] has come in and settled down by the fire for the rest of the day. (To Oliver Warner, 1933)

We have eaten cold partridge legs out of doors, sitting on a heap of dry rushes on a heath, and watched, very disapprovingly, by two church towers, one to the east and one to the west. It is impossible to frolic anywhere in this country without a church tower on the horizon to eye one. There they rear themselves, like melancholy teeth from an old jaw.(On Norfolk; to Llewellyn Powys, 1934)

Your lovely parcel came, thank you very much for it. Valentine, like a wasp, has already got at the maple syrup. You send the most understanding parcels, it is as though your astral body came across to inspect our store-cupboard. (To Marchette Chute, 1953)

I have been sent a diary, and on the title-page is printed: The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on – Which of course is indisputable, but yet casts a rather sombre shade over the dotted lines on which I shall note that Mary Tomkins is coming to tea, that the chimney sweeper is coming to sweep. (To William Maxwell, 1957)

Oh, and I also learnt from these letters that she wrote libretti as well! Is there nothing to which STW could not turn her hand?

Summer Will Show, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Dedicated to Valentine Ackland, Summer Will Show was the first novel Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote after the two women had met and fallen in love. It is a sort-of historical novel, although – as in the two other historical novels of hers I have read, After the Death of Don Juan and The Corner That Held Them – it is unusual for a historical novel. It is written in four ‘movements’ and in a decidedly modernist manner – the action is entirely from the perspective of one character, Sophia Willoughby; the characters are fluid and mysterious; there is little historical detail, just enough to locate the novel in 1848, a vinaigrette hurled here, a fashionable bonnet pawned there. In fact, I had to look up the 1848 revolution in France because there is absolutely no info-dumping in this novel.

(Barricades rue Saint-Maur, Paris, June 1848; found here)

At the beginning of the novel Sophia Willoughby, young and beautiful, is the mother to two young children and heiress to the estate of Blandamer. Unfortunately, her husband Frederick has taken up with Minna Lemuel:

A byword, half actress, half strumpet; a Jewess; a nonsensical creature bedizened with airs of prophecy, who trailed across Europe with a tag-rag of poets, revolutionaries, musicians and circus-riders snuffing at her heels [...]

and lives with Minna in Paris on an income Sophia provides for him. Sophia’s children are delicate and she takes them to be swung over the lime kiln, a treatment she believes has been responsible for her own good health but which causes their deaths. Until now, Sophia’s life has had purpose, to manage Blandamer, breed and pass on the estate, she has been a link in a chain. Now her life is without purpose. Clearly the solution is to breed more heirs, so Sophia sets off for Paris and Frederick, whom she expects to do his duty. However, she arrives in time for the overthrowing of the French king Louis Philippe in February 1848 and, searching for Frederick, finds herself in Minna’s apartment during a party at which Minna is telling a story:

 At that moment the slowly flickering glance touched her, and rested. It showed no curiosity, only a kind of pondering attention. Then, as though in compliance, Minna’s large supple hands gently caressed themselves together in the very gesture of her thought. Sophia started slightly. The glance, mournfully numbering, moved on. But answering Sophia’s infinitesimal start of surprise there had been a smile – small, meek, and satisfied, the smile of a dutiful child.

In my post on Voices from Fairyland we saw that STW’s poems found a way of speaking about a love which could not be spoken about, lesbian love. And so in this novel STW is actually quite circumspect. It is both abundantly clear that Sophia and Minna fall in love and yet at the same time if you were wilful you could read it as concerning a close friendship. Sophia feels, her emotions fluctuate, through her we experience them too; but she is not given to romanticism and her expressions of love tend to take a practical turn such as managing finances, shopping or comforting.

The story which Minna is telling when Sophia first meets her is a story of her childhood, in Lithuania, and it is a story of poverty and violence, a pogrom of the Jews. Later she tells Sophia a little more about her youth, again a tale of cruelty and penury. Her background is as different from Sophia’s as it could be; and so are her philosophies of life. She is an artist, without youth or beauty; she is an excellent thief, ‘magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent, and interfering’. She is Jewish, a complete outsider. Most of all, she is a liar but one whose lies and stories contain a greater truth than any fidelity to facts could provide. Her improvidence and generosity counter Sophia’s hereditary avarice and soon Sophia finds a sort of exhilaration in having to scrabble for money and sing for her supper (she sings hymns in the street, pretending to be an escaped Protestant nun).

Sophia is drawn into the shabby, artistic world of the revolutionaries by her love for Minna; it is only gradually that she rejects the exploitative system from which she had until that moment profited. The exploitation is of peasants, workers and former slaves. Blandamer, so bucolic and ordered, prettifies this repression, in contrast to the dirty, populated city of ideas that is Paris. The political philosophy of the novel is supplied by the Communist Ingelbracht. Ingelbracht distinguishes between ‘true’ revolutionaries and revolutionaries like Minna, romantic, undisciplined and doomed to one grand gesture only. Sophia he characterises as a bourgeois hanger-on and a danger to the movement. But at the end of the novel, Sophia sits alone reading Ingelbracht’s tract, penniless, surely herself now a true revolutionary.

(Chettle House, Dorset, from here; perhaps Blandamer looked a bit like this)

Politics is central to the novel, as it is in After the Death of Don Juan, but this is a wonderful book because of the way that it is written, the light touch of Sophia’s particular gaze and responses, the dispassionate air, the patter of conversation, the comedy and affection beside the pain. It has great charm and the characters, even Frederick and wicked old Léocadie, have great charm too. Trying to discuss it makes me realise how leaden my writing is and how much better it is to lay a quote at your feet to sample – this is a conversation between Sophia and Minna, when Sophia has returned to Minna to find her in deep poverty:

‘You would never believe, Sophia, how filthily that Natalia kept everything. My beautiful dish-cloths all rolled up in dirty balls, my china broken, verdigris on the coffee pot ... she would have poisoned me if I had kept her a day longer.’
‘Was that the servant who ate pickles because she had known so many sorrows?’
‘Ate pickles? She engulfed them. She drank the brandy, she stole the linen, she was in league with the concierge, she lowered down bottles of wine to him from the balcony, she had the soul of a snake, the greed of a wolf, the shamelessness of a lawyer. [...] And after she had gone I found a monkey’s tail in the rubbish-bin.’
‘A monkey’s tail?’
‘A monkey’s tail. Judge for yourself if she was depraved or no.’ [...]
‘I suppose,’ [Sophia] said, thoughtlessly voicing her thought, ‘it’s because you’re so patently a liar.’
‘A liar? I a liar, my lovely one? Alas, I am incapable of lies. I am a poor recounter of stories only, I cannot make them up.’
And she flipped the dusters out of the window [...]
‘Was it from this balcony,’ enquired Sophia, ‘that the wine was lowered?’
Minna feigned inattention to this lure.
‘I would lay down my life for the truth,’ she added serenely.

As ever, the last STW I read is always my favourite STW, until the next one...

Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited and with poems by Theodora Goss

(Edmund Dulac, Circe, the Enchantress, 1911; from here)

Following on from yesterday’s post about some of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s fantastical stories, a quick look at some of her fantastical poetry.

In last year’s Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week I wrote about the Selected Poems published by Carcanet; they also publish STW’s New Collected Poems. However, I have a little book of poems called Voices from Fairyland and it brings together some of STW’s fantastical poems with works by Mary Coleridge and Charlotte Mew. It’s a collection that works really well together because of the shared theme, and it has good introductions by Theodora Goss. (It’s published in the US by Aqueduct Press but if you’re in the UK you can obtain it with a little ingenuity.)

When I first proposed Voices from Fairyland as a title for this anthology, I meant that Coleridge, Mew, and Warner were writers who had heard voices from fairyland, calling to them as Mew’s changeling hears the fairies calling.[...] But now I think that these poets are the ones calling from fairyland: from a strange, dangerous, and enchanted country. They are calling to us with voices that I am not certain we can understand, because we have not yet learned to understand the fantastical in poetry.

Goss discusses how STW uses fantastical poetry, based on stories we already know, to give voices to those who cannot usually speak and whose voices in those stories are silent: the wife, the child, the lesbian.

How do you speak when speech becomes impossible? The figure for such impossible speech is Echo, who speaks although she cannot. She speaks through repetition and revision. She speaks by saying what others have said, with a different meaning [...]

In this way she can write about a desire that cannot be spoken, a woman’s love for a woman. And she can question whether the way we live our lives, with our mortgages and our three square meals, is sufficient. For example, ‘The Sleeping Beauty woke’, tips the happy ending right over:

The Sleeping Beauty woke:
The spit began to turn,
The woodmen cleared the brake,
The gardener mowed the lawn.
Woe’s me! And must one kiss
Revoke the silent house, the birdsong wilderness?

There is a yearning, in this and other poems, for something beyond the mundane (fairyland?). It can be reached in silence, in wilderness, in dreams, in desire. In the next poem, the poet is called by a voice from this place beyond, this fairyland, and responds:

In the Cotswolds

All day the rain
Fell on the wheat
And dripped from the gable
On to the stone;
And all day long
I sat alone
Save for the dog
Who slept at my feet.

Slept – till a-sudden
He roused in fear,
And snuffed at the door,
And would not be quelled.
I opened – and there
An old crone I beheld,
And round about her
The dusk drew near.

Something she said –
But her voice was hollow,
And chill was the hand
She laid on mine.
Her words were a riddle
I could not untwine;
And when she turned onward
I knew I must follow.

I felt the watery
Stubble souse
My ankles, and round me
Saw corn-shocks blurred.
And faint and fainter
Yet I heard
The dog bark on
In the empty house.

The disquiet of this poem has sunk into its very structure. There is a rhyme scheme – lines 2 and 8 rhyme with each other and 4 and 6 rhyme with each other. But the rhyme is so unusual and the first so delayed that you almost don’t hear it, although you expect it and want it. So there is a sense of waiting and unease to it, which reflects the waiting in the house and then the arrival of the mysterious, icy crone with her alluring riddle. The flatness of the monosyllables of the first stanza is like the raindrops falling, and there seems to be a hard music of ‘o’ and ‘d’ to the rest of the poem as the rain continues to fall and the poet to walk. We end with an empty house, not silent as Sleeping Beauty’s (that dog barking!); the poet wasn’t happy there but the journey on which s/he has set forth with the crone is unsettling in every possible meaning of the word.

Of Cats and Elfins: Short Tales and Fantasies, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

This very pretty collection of stories was published earlier this year by Handheld Press (who also publish a companion collection, Kingdoms of Elfin) and it’s the book I’ve chosen to start off 2020’s Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week. It’s made up of two parts: the first is hitherto-unpublished stories about Elfin, fairy kingdoms, with a story of metamorphosis ending it and forming a bridge to the second part, stories told by cats (and originally issued as the collection Cat’s Cradle). These two parts work very nicely together and are unified by a feeling that there is a great deal more to the world (fairy queens, talking cats) than most of us are able to perceive.

 [William] Blake was fortunate. It is not given to many humans to see the Little People so clearly, still less to assist at their ceremonies; a peaked face looking down for a moment from the dusk of an ash-tree, a sudden small fierce nip on one’s arm, a vapoury streak across the snap-shot of a picnic-party... that is as much as the commonalty have any reason to expect.

Each of the two parts has some sort of ‘introduction’, to frame the fantastical stories that follow as some sort of ethnographic project. The first story, ‘The Kingdom of Elfin’, purports to be a factual essay explaining some characteristics of the fairy world and drawing some analogies with human societies. STW’s fairies live in rigidly hierarchical societies, ruled by queens and governed by arcane rituals – not, in fact, so very different from ours. In addition to the powers of flight (only actually practised by vulgar fairies) and invisibility, the Elfin differ from (most of) us only in that they are entirely without pity or compassion.

Of the Elfin stories in this collection, three are enjoyable but it’s ‘The Duke of Orkney’s Leonardo’ which is truly great. The identity of the central character is built around his sense of his physical beauty and as a child, his mother values him for his appearance: ‘though he was now an expense, he might become an asset’. One day he is bathing naked in a pool when he is discovered by another fairy, Sir Glamie:

Overcome by the boy’s remarkable beauty, he had a rush of benevolence, and casting round in his mind remembered the worms, small and smooth and white, that fishermen call gentles, and impale on the hook when the water is too cloudy to use a fly. ‘I shall call you Gentle,’ he declared.

The fate of Gentil, as he becomes known, is not dissimilar to that of the worms: he is taken to court, snatched up in marriage by Princess Lief and forced to live with her in Caithness whose fairies survive by wrecking. There follows a tale of unrequited love, loss of self, a sort of redemption through the beauty of art. It is discussed brilliantly by Greer Gilman in the foreword.

The other Elfin stories strike a less melancholic and more satirical note. In ‘Narrative of Events Preceding the Death of Queen Ermine’ a fairy community is threatened by the development of a mine by humans. They hope that revolution among the workers will save them, observing the situation with impassive logic:

Every seventh day the wretched mortals, no better than slaves, were forced to attend a judicial review of their conduct. The solo voice harangued them on their negligences, in efficiencies, and lack of zeal. Then they were scourged till they howled and groaned.[...] After a final harangue and a final scourging, they were released, to limp and writhe their way home. No better than slaves, in the end they would take the slaves’ revenge, would revolt, kill their taskmasters, break the machinery and leave in a body. So it was merely a question of waiting.

‘Queen Mousie’ tells of a reluctant Elfin queen, while ‘An Improbable Situation’ relates a fairy’s obsession with a human philosopher. The ‘bridge’ story, ‘Stay Corydon, Thou Swain’, concerns a middle-aged draper who longs to meet a nymph. STW is drawn here (also in stories in the cat section) to the idea of metamorphosis as both release and prison, a revelation of one aspect of the self and a destruction of others.

And then we move to the cats. Their stories are introduced by a human narrator, who stumbles upon a beautiful seventeenth-century manor house, ripe as a ‘pear’ and inhabited by an extraordinarily handsome young man and dozens of cats:

With artful inconsequentiality, [the fourth cat] said:
‘You should see my kittens! They’re wonderful – and what appetites! But praise be, all my kittens are fine feeders.’ [...]
It was then that I heard a human voice, saying: ‘So you speak Cat?’
‘A little, I replied. ‘I understand it better than I can speak it.’

The young man invites the narrator to stay and explains that he is collecting the cats’ stories, like a nineteenth-century collector of fairy-tales, with a view to their publication.

Alas, the ripe perfection of the house and this idyll cannot last long and tragedy follows. The narrator then selects some of the stories to publish – which forms the rest of this collection. This introduction offers some clues about how to read them: there are comparisons with Aesop, so we know to expect animal fables (‘although don’t run away with the idea that these stories have anything in common with the ordinary moral tales’), and mention of the ballad of the Twa’ Corbies, the story of Bluebeard. The young man tells the narrator that he was inspired to begin collecting the stories after a passionate love affair in Turkey with a cat named Haru – which introduces a flavour of the Arabian Nights and foreshadows elements in the story of ‘The Traveller from the East and the Traveller from the West’.

The stories are funny, sad, wild, unexpected. They may reflect a cat’s view of the world, although they aren’t  usually about cats. Many concern gifts of one form or another – usually unwanted by the recipients. So in ‘The Widow’s Portion’ an old woman whose only joy is her miserliness. Accidentally, she helps another person, who wants to reward her. But what good are rubies to someone who enjoys torturing herself with avarice?

Life had no more joys for her. She no longer dared to take her favourite walk along the cliffs, in case she inadvertently rescued another benefactor. The thought that she was rich poisoned all her little economies; it was no longer a pleasure to find raw turnips gave her heartburn.

A hermit decides to share his virtue with a tiger, with unforeseen consequences. (Mind you, it’s hard to foresee anything in an STW story.) A fox becomes a saint, so that the Catholic Church bestow the honour of the papacy upon him in ‘The Fox-Pope’.

Three of my favourite fables concern monster daughters. There is the baker’s daughter (inspired by Ophelia’s line in Hamlet) in ‘Bread for the Castle’, whose great pleasure is to stroll up to the abandoned castle gardens and peer through the iron gates at them, longing to enter. But the owners of the castle return and order their bread from her father, who asks her to sit up with him every night while he bakes, and sing to him. He plans to make a fortune for her dowry and is soon obsessed with money:

These sums became ever more interesting to him. And that was a good thing, for lately his daughter’s singing had become so harsh and droning that there was no encouragement in it. There she sat, perched on the edge of the kneading trough, humped up with sleepiness, and wrapped in a brown hooded cloak; for in spite of the heat from the oven she complained incessantly of feeling cold. There she sat, with her staring great eyes, ringed around with sleeplessness.

Perhaps the girl will get her wish, but not quite as she imagined.

The heroine of ‘The Trumpeter’s Daughter’ discovers she is a changeling and is turned out by her parents. What will she do? How will she find her ‘place in the world’? And Djamileh, in ‘Bluebeard’s Daughter’, has inherited, as well has her father’s blue colouring, his Castle of Shady Transports. What else might she have inherited from him? In an STW story, you never know what’s coming until you have reached the end.

(All the illustrations in this post are by Arthur Rackham)

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week 2020 is here!

Hello and a very warm welcome to Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week 2020!

Ahem.

The purpose of this Reading Week is to encourage as many people as possible to (re)discover and enjoy the marvellous writings of Sylva Townsend Warner. Of course, every week is Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week really, if you are a person with any sense whatsoever. But this is a moment to pause and celebrate.

STW wrote novels, short stories, poetry and biography; her letters and diaries are also supremely readable (especially the letters!) (but more of that later). She wrote realism (although always with a distinct flavour), fantasy, historical fiction, chronicle – her novels rarely repeated themselves, although her interest in politics and women’s voices are a theme.

During this week I’ll be posting a review of one of her books almost every day from Monday to Friday, and I have tried to reflect the variety of her writings by including a short story collection, her letters, some poems and one of her novels. On Wednesday I’ll post a review of For Sylvia, the very moving autobiography her lover Valentine Ackland wrote for her. It may not add much to your knowledge of STW as a writer but it will enhance your view of her as a person.

I hope that you too will read something of hers and write about it. If you don’t have a lot of time, read one short story, or a poem , and write about that. If you’ve already written something and are thinking, ‘Bother I should have waited’, post a link to it anyway. Post links in the comments this week and I’ll publish a round-up post on Sunday.

You don’t have a blog? That’s no problem! Write your thoughts in a comment to one of my posts – or email me something and I’ll publish it on here as a guest post. (Well – unless it’s full of filth, obviously.)

You’re not sure what to read? There are two new collections of short stories which have been recently published: Of Cats and Elfins: Short Tales and Fantasies (Handheld Press) and English Climate: Wartime Stories (Persephone). Here is a link to last year’s introductory post, if you scroll down there is a list of books in print (although The Flint Anchor is in print again as a physical book). For further inspiration, here is last year’s round-up with links to lots of reviews by readers.

Summer is here and as STW once wrote on the title page of a novel, Summer Will Show. Cancel your socially distanced engagements, settle yourself in a deckchair under an old tree and read something by STW – you won’t regret it!

(Sylvia holding a cat in her garden; photograph from The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society gallery here; the society is an all-round excellent resource for all things STW)

Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers

(I love this painting. I saw it first on someone’s Twitter, I forget whose, so please accept my apologies if it was you. I feel it beautifully expresses my mood for much of this restricted period. After Breakfast (1890) by Elin Danielson-Gambogi, a Finnish artist whom Wikipedia tells me is best known for her portraits and realist paintings; found here)

Somewhat to my surprise, I haven’t stuck terribly well to my initial coronavirus reading plans. Spending most of your time at home is not so very different to normal life for me, and I’d eagerly thought of it as giving me three extra evenings a week for reading instead of travelling to school and teaching: ideal for tackling some longer and more demanding books I had never quite felt up to. But somehow, it hasn’t worked out quite as I had anticipated. Switching to distance learning has been quite stressful; it’s involved more administration, adaptation and learning than I expected and furthermore a need to reconcile the very differing needs and capabilities of my students with the requirements of the school and the system. And there’s been other stuff too, which isn’t my business to write about here but which has been a struggle.

Still, the pleasant thing about reading plans is that you can toss them aside whenever you fancy and thus although I started No Name as soon as it arrived and love it, I had a bad patch the other day and suddenly the only book in the world I wished to reread was Gaudy Night. Fortunately, I have a copy and it was just the ticket.

I should say here that I am not an unqualified fan of Lord Peter Wimsey. I read quite a few of the Wimsey novels in my early twenties and while I enjoyed them I preferred the more silly-ass incarnation of Lord P to the character he had developed into by Gaudy Night, throwing out quotations from Latin and Elizabethan poetry and being nobly Right about everything. And don’t try to remonstrate by pointing out he has ‘faults’ – they’re the sort of ‘faults’ people claim in job interviews:  ‘And what would you say are your weaknesses, Helen?’ ‘Well now I am a perfectionist and find it difficult to stop working outside office hours.’ In fact, far from accepting any of Wimsey’s ‘faults’ that Dorothy Sayers might attribute to him, I have always secretly felt that he was deeply emotionally manipulative. And that marriage proposal! Ew.

However, this was the novel I now felt impelled to read and so I read it. Am I going soft in my old age? Was I unfair to Lord Peter all those years ago? By the end I felt actually affectionate towards him. It was a volte-face to compare with revising my opinion of Raskolnikov* and to be fair to Sayers is a tribute to her talent to write a complex and convincing character who can bear different interpretations.

I also thought that Gaudy Night was a splendid novel. Nominally a piece of detective fiction, the crime or series of crimes is seamlessly interwoven with Harriet’s central dilemma – the dilemma of educated women of her time. Career or marriage? In the 1930s, it was more or less impossible for a woman to have both. So Harriet Vane, still suffering from the notoriety of the murder for which she faced trial, returns to Oxford for her old college’s gaudy. Not all of her encounters with former friends and teachers are happy, but she falls back under the spell of her alma mater and the pleasures of scholarship. When a malicious prankster starts running amok the following term, Harriet is invited back by the fellows to investigate on the rather tenuous strength of her previous brush with justice and her detective novels giving her an insight into this sort of thing. Harriet, charmed by the beauty and intellectual rigour of the academic life, is happy to oblige and as a cover starts researching the gothic novelist Sheridan Le Fanu. But the prankster proves elusive as well as increasingly macabre and Harriet begins to wonder if she can unmask her before something truly terrible happens.

(Undated photograph of women studying at Somerville College, Oxford, I would say roughly contemporary with Harriet Vane’s sojourn; from here)

Sayers uses the spookiness of a college at night, to increase the novel’s creepy atmosphere. The prankster seems driven by a startling malevolence but is unpredictable and directs her hatred at everyone. Fellows, students and staff begin to suspect each other and fear that they will fall victim to the almost supernatural rage. The authorities being unwilling to expose the college to scandal leaves the community isolated and turned in upon itself. The pranks defy any rational, scholarly interpretation. Far from being cerebral, the place simmers with suppressed hysteria.

(Photograph of Somerville College, from here)

And Harriet is also wrestling with the problem of Lord Peter Wimsey, whose annual proposal I have to say still strikes me as borderline stalkerish – although Harriet never entirely dismisses him, either. This time, however, he strikes me as more sensitive, even uncertain, than manipulative, and more natural than poseurish. More than just Wimsey, though, Harriet’s problem is what sort of person she wants to be. Staying at Shrewsbury College allows her to explore an alternative existence, Harriet the Scholar. Like all fantasies, it proves more complex when put into practice. It will also demand sacrifices, which she may not want to make.

There is a beautiful Chinese chess set in a nearby antique shop, which Harriet admires every day as she passes it. When Wimsey begs her to allow him to make her a gift, a proper gift, she chooses that. It’s an interesting moment because Harriet has been struggling for years with her gratitude to Wimsey and the obligations it brings, the complication to their relationship. Can she ever love him if she always has to be grateful to him? By choosing an expensive gift, she seems to relinquish that sense of obligation and allow herself to receive something valuable from him. And she chooses something of high quality, to show that she appreciates him too. Yet, it is something she has no need for and will not really use as she’s hardly a chess player: it’s decorative, even a little showy. Is she accepting his greater wealth? Allowing more frivolity and pleasure into her life? Still holding something back? Perhaps she’s choosing it partly to please him; realising that in receiving, she can give too.

Every part of the novel reflects this central question of mind or heart, and it’s compellingly done, with all the charm of the Oxford backdrop and the drive of detective fiction. I appreciate this novel much more than I did before, I think it’s one of the best detective novels I’ve read. And yes, I like Wimsey better too.

Have you ever changed your mind about a character in a novel?

* When I read Crime and Punishment in my late teens I thought he was a romantic tortured hero. Revisiting the book some twenty years later I discovered he was a spoilt, selfish brat. What will I make of him in my old age?

sylvia townsend warner reading week 2020, join in, all the best people are!

Cunningly timing my announcement for the later part of January and thus after everyone has already made lots of resolutions and reading plans for the year, I am delighted to tell you that once again I intend to spend the first week in July reading and writing about the work of Sylvia Townsend Warner and I invite you to join me!

As an added lure, a new selection of her short stories has just been published, Of Cats and Elfins, by Handheld Press. The Guardian reviews it briefly here. According to Handheld Press’s website (from which you can order a copy), it brings together four of STW’s Elfin stories that were not published in The Kingdom of Elfin with the collection The Cat’s Cradle Book. It is putting my vow to buy no more books under considerable strain just days after I made it.

Here is a link to my introductory post to last year’s reading week, with a list of her books. And here is a round-up of everyone’s reviews from last year’s reading week, and here are all my STW posts. Here is a link to the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society, which is packed with information about her.

Readers, you have plenty of time to track down one of STW’s books and read it. Last year, many people* wept bitter tears over missing the Reading Week. Don’t let that be you this year! If you have never read her before, this is your moment!  And if you have – well, it’s a FACT that no one has ever disliked anything she ever wrote, so treat yourself to some more time with one of her lovely books.

STW wrote novels and stories that are witty, melancholic, waspish, fantastical and beautiful, and she was also a formidable poet. She wrote about cats, fairies, nuns, revolutionaries, aristocrats and stifled women. Her fans include Sarah Waters and Neil Gaiman. She is the antidote to all that is plodding, dull or hypocritical. She deserves to be wider read, and you deserve to have her in your life. Joining in Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week this year is thus a win–win situation for all concerned!

* Actually, no one.