a gallimaufry

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.’

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?

special offer at Handheld Press: Kingdoms of Elfin

Because I live under a stone I have only just seen this offer at Handheld Press!

Until midnight tonight you can buy a copy of Kingdoms of Elfin at the discounted price of £10 (free p&p in the UK). (They are also the publishers of Of Cats and Elfins, which I wrote about earlier this week, just letting you know...)

It is a great collection of stories and Handheld do produce very nice editions. Treat yourself!

For Sylvia: An Honest Account, by Valentine Ackland

It might seem odd to include something by another writer in Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week. But if you know a little about STW’s life, you’ll know that Valentine Ackland was her partner for thirty-nine years, from shortly after their first meeting in 1930 until Ackland’s death in 1969. And if you have read any of STW’s diaries and letters, you will already know a little about Ackland: shy, clever, well-dressed, passionate; poet, gardener, antiques dealer and animal lover. Not very good at promoting herself, her poems were mainly championed by STW and fell out of the public eye until they were collected and (re)published by Carcanet in 2008 as Journey from Winter (edited by Frances Bingham).

(Gertrude Mary Powys, Valentine Ackland; Dorset County Museum; found at Art UK)

For Sylvia is a very short memoir. It was written under special circumstances in 1949 and not published until 1985. The published edition has an extremely useful introduction by Bea Howe, a writer who was friends with both Ackland and STW for many years. The book was originally written, as entitled, For Sylvia, and as such was presumably a private document. However, it doesn’t read like that. It has a tone of great authenticity and is direct and confessional, occasionally irresolute and contradictory, as you might expect; but it is also thoughtful, structured, conscious of itself. The first few pages discuss the importance of the writer’s anonymity in ‘the honest account of a life’, yet clearly the writer was not anonymous to her reader in this case. While much of the memoir covers Ackland’s life before Sylvia and therefore might not have been known to her, there is no sense that it is written for her, no sense of a specific you in place of a general and unknown reader who requires explanations, background to be filled in. Indeed, Ackland writes about STW as ‘Sylvia’, not ‘you’. All of which leads me to suspect that it was never intended as an entirely private record, even if it wasn’t intended either to be entirely public. (Unless, of course, the only way that Ackland could bring herself to write something so personal and so exposing was to distance it even from Sylvia, her reader, and turn it into a story.)

At the beginning of the memoir, Ackland explains that she has reached a crisis, and this is what has prompted the writing of it. The crisis was that she had fallen in love with another woman, the American writer Elizabeth Wade White, while still loving STW. It was decided that STW would move out to a hotel while EWW and Ackland lived for a while in Ackland and STW’s cottage. Obviously, this was distressing for STW. On the eve of EWW’s arrival, Ackland wrote this memoir and gave it to STW who, upon reading it, became convinced that their love would endure. And, in fact, EWW left after a few months, never to return.

So this memoir is Ackland’s attempt to explain to STW her divided feelings and to root them in her experience of life. You could not really call it a justification. The portrait she presents, beautifully written, is of a self that has been split and damaged. It is also often very sad: she never spares herself and relentlessly presents her weaknesses and cruelties.

(Photograph of Elizabeth Wade White (left), Valentine Ackland (right), Sylvia Townsend Warner (seated); found at A Reader’s Footprints, a blog which looks fascinating)

Ackland begins with a crisis – but it is not the crisis of her two loves, it is the crisis of her alcoholism, a few years previously, as if she can’t yet name the current crisis involving Wade White. She describes how, one ‘strange night’, desperate to free herself from it after many years, she demands the ‘Emptiness’: ‘Is God there?’

There was no reply. Everything was completely dead. I had no sense except of emptiness and the rushing swirling dark.

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘There is no hope anywhere, and no sound and no promise. So now I know that there is nothing that can save me. I don’t believe, and I don’t know anything at all. But without faith or hope, in the utmost despair, I swear to You that I will never drink again. And I know that that can’t be true unless You are.’

And the next evening, she ‘suddenly realized that I was walking in tranquillity and with perfect confidence’ and this strengthened her and enabled her to finally stop drinking.

To return to that word ‘divided’: this seems a divided beginning to a memoir inspired by a different crisis. And indeed, I would say that the hallmark of Ackland’s life was being divided, being torn between two alternatives that she could not resolve. Loving both STW and Wade White at the same time being a powerful example. Her family was rich but convinced they were financially struggling. Her parents doted on her but her elder sister, presumably jealous, was often abusive and bullying and so were the nurses who took care of her. She considered falling in love with another girl the most natural and beautiful thing in the world: her parents called it filthy and her father never forgave her. She convinced herself she should marry but jilted one fiancé; she wavered over another and did eventually marry him but the marriage was annulled. She was devoutly religious but also sceptical and doubting. She stole and she took lovers and treated them badly, despite being essentially a kind and very sensitive person. She became an alcoholic but successfully hid it from everyone, even STW, although they lived together for years.

(Photograph of Valentine Ackland found here; originally I think from here)

Have I put you off? I hope not. Ackland describes so well the fears that can distort our lives and she is a masterful chronicler of guilt and self-loathing. But her exploration of herself, her emotions, is nuanced and delicate. She describes her childhood eccentricities: longing to befriend a ghost, playing chess in a tree. Movingly, she recounts her loves and her struggles with society’s disgust at them. Her descriptions of Edwardian life, and then the Bohemian 1920s, are vivid. There is the Hunt Ball:

After a gruesome finale, when they all danced a gallop and many couples fell down flat on the floor, and the place resounded with cat-calls, yells, hunting-horns and a variety of horrible noises, we all returned home.

and wonderful times living down in Dorset, at first with her friend R, with whom she dances  ‘fine high-kicks to the ceiling’ to gramophone records. They befriend T.F. Powys, whose favourite tipple at that time was gin and milk. Imagine. Her life improves, she meets STW. They live for a year in Frankfort Manor, which is a sort of magical Eden. They leave for a variety of practical reasons, but Ackland writes:

My last look at Frankfort was, alas, a look of shame: deserting that lovely, lovely house because – as I knew beyond any power to evade it – I was rotten and almost destroyed and could not heal myself, even when I was housed in that gentle, beautiful place and had the truest love that ever drew breath in the world. [...] I dream of it now, too often, and when I am dead for sure my ghost will haunt there, loving and grieving...

She was always acutely aware of her own privilege and deeply ashamed of her inability to be as happy as she thought she should be. Towards the end of the account, she writes:

To this moment, then, my life has been strange and as I have set it down here it has seemed to be unhappy. But in fact it has been one of the most blessed, one of the happiest lives ever lived on the earth: and that fills me with awe and sometimes with trouble [...] I have had very great suffering and very sharp pain, and bitter shame and grief too, and base and terrible fear; and I cannot think that I have ever done anything of myself to be worthy of the least of my joys [...]

But I think that most readers will reach a much kinder conclusion than this. In fact, the saddest thing of all now is that she did not write more and that – whisper it, lest the poets are reading – she never wrote any fiction...

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)

the detective novels of Joan Smith

The most unexpected way in which the past few months have affected my reading is that it is completely dominated by whim and obsession. There’s no discipline any more and no urge to read anything even remotely demanding. If I want to read something, I REALLY want to read it and I want to read it right now and then I want to read EVERYTHING like it. I have completely eschewed the literary equivalent of a wholesome balanced diet in favour of stuffing my face with chocolates. I owe two reviews and Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week looms and I am sticking my fingers in my ears and singing.

(June will be the Month of Responsibility.)

(Felix Vallotton, A Woman Reading, 1922; oil on canvas, private collection; found here)

So, first there was the Frances Hardinge obsession. Then the Diana Wynne Jones. Then the Dorothy L. Sayers. (Actually, that is continuing, I just ran out of her work and so am awaiting three more at the point of whose arrival the obsession will resume.) And then I saw my copy of Joan Smith’s A Masculine Ending, which I bought about twenty years ago in a charity shop and quite liked. Suddenly, it was the ONLY book in the house I wanted to read. And then I wanted to read ALL the rest of the books in the series, so I ordered them and read them in less than two days.

Joan Smith is a respected British journalist and in the late 1980s and early 1990s she published a series of five ‘detective’ novels featuring a lecturer in English literature at London University, Loretta Lawson. I’ll list them all, not least because the titles are so good:

• A Masculine Ending (1987)
• Why Aren’t They Screaming? (1988)
• Don’t Leave Me This Way (1990)
• What Men Say (1993)
• Full Stop (1995)

I freely admit that for me much of their appeal is nostalgia. They cover the years of my late teens and early twenties, and during that time I studied English literature at university and went on to live in London for a while (as Loretta does). Detective novels are often concerned with the minutiae of everyday life, what people were doing and when, and so are full of reminders of things we did and technology we used. Smith’s novels focus very intensely on a few days and there is plenty of minutiae to please. Loretta sends faxes and uses answerphones, word processors and floppy disks – upgrading to a laptop in the last novel. There are a few fashion moments – a shocking pink handbag, a tube skirt, harem pants. There’s fresh pasta from the deli and Habitat sofas. There’s a sobering reminder of the casual sexism that still abounded at the time. And there’s plenty of politics: Why Aren’t They Screaming? is set around a women’s protest at a US air base similar though smaller to Greenham Common, the academics in What Men Say scoff about the government’s cutbacks to education and insistence on courses’ ‘relevance’.

But politics is not just a surface issue to the novels. As a series, they examine the often brutal nature of the power imbalance between men and women. Most significantly, they demonstrate how men’s potential for violence impacts women’s behaviour (and, in some cases, ability to live) while women’s concerns are easily dismissed as hysterical or unimportant. Against the macho world of the police forces she has to deal with and the rarefied sexism of some academics, Loretta strives to live a feminist life. She remains on good terms with her ex-husband, John (conveniently for many of the plots, he is a journalist), although he is convinced that their marriage was destroyed by Loretta’s joining a women’s group. She is loyal to her friends, most notably Bridget, a lecturer at Oxford University whose own late marriage and high-risk pregnancy are the focus of What Men Say. In A Masculine Ending and Don’t Leave Me This Way it’s her over-developed sense of guilt – a very female trait, Smith implicitly suggests – which spur her on to investigate.

The final and probably the best novel, Full Stop, finds Loretta staying in a friend’s apartment in an oppressively humid New York. She starts receiving obscene telephone calls. Gradually, her judgement is undermined. Is she being followed? Can she trust the police? Was the man in the theatre just being friendly or did he have another motive? She even starts to distrust her ex-husband. How can you navigate the world in this state of constant suspicion and alertness – and yet, how can you not? The discombobulation of being in a slightly alien culture adds to the sense of menace.

Smith is pretty meta in her approach and plays around a bit with the conventions of detective novels. Her heroine is not a detective (although this is nothing new in the genre) and not always very good at detecting. Still, the identity of the murderer is usually pretty clear and Smith isn’t interested in sudden twists – outwitting the reader is not her aim here. Every novel denies the reader a comfortable ending. The guilty often profit from their crimes; sometimes, the innocent are imprisoned.

Crime fiction is not really perceived as ‘women’s fiction’ and yet some of its greatest practitioners have been women. Perhaps, Loretta suggests, that is why it is looked down upon. In Don’t Leave Me This Way one of her lovers, Robert, sneers when she tells him she’s going to set up a course on female crime writers: he doesn’t believe that Agatha Christie is a fit subject for academic study (now that dates the novel! Things have moved on a lot since then). Later, she discusses the writers she’ll include on the course with a colleague:

‘[...] If it’s Americans you’re after, how about Sara Paretsky?’
‘I’ve got her. She’s wonderful.’
‘Amanda Cross?’
‘Oh, maybe.’ The conversation was having a calming effect on Loretta, and she elaborated. ‘I’m not so sure about academic mysteries. I tried one by Joan Smith the other day and she got all the details wrong...’

Guffaw. These novels aren’t great forgotten masterpieces, though I miss the characters, but I can only say that they hit the spot for me and if you see them, try them.

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.

Picnic at Porokorro, by Hugo Charteris

Well, from one state of tense uncertainty and disintegration to another: colonial West Africa. Picnic at Porokorro, first published in 1958, has just been re-issued by Mike Walmer, who very kindly sent me a review copy.

(Photograph of Hugo Charteris from a newspaper archive, possibly the Daily Telegraph, hence the markings; found here)

Hugo Charteris, novelist and journalist, and his old friend Nicholas Mosley (yes son of Sir Oswald) spent three months in 1957 on safari in West Africa as colonial rule was coming to an end. This novel is the direct fruit of that. It takes place in an unnamed West African land, where the British Mineral Trust operates a diamond mine. The administration is white; the actual mining is done by ‘licensed native diggers’, black Africans from across British and French West Africa. The narrator is one of the white BMT administrators.

We quarrel easily here. We all have to be careful – no one more so than Number One and Dickson, who are the most isolated of us all.

People at home will find it hard to understand the extent to which we all feel isolated. [...] It is not merely a question of being surrounded and vastly outnumbered by countless Africans with whom we can only communicate in a sort of baby talk. It is in the very air we breathe. You may say we exaggerate this, ‘imagine’ it, just as one of us sometimes suddenly imagines it is so much hotter than it is and succumbs to panic deciding, usually one midnight, that he can’t stand it another minute. Perhaps we do ‘imagine’ things, on the other hand it is only eight months since ‘last year’ – the riots – when, for 48 hours, communications were cut and it looked as if every single inland European would lose his life.

At this particular moment, the country is in a state of transition, moving from colony towards independence. While the British colonialists remain in charge of security and finance, a native administration has been established to deal with day-to-day matters and to evolve towards a parliamentary democracy through which the country will rule itself after independence.

All of the context is laid out clearly in the introduction to this edition, by Andrew Lycett. (You really ought to read it before you read the novel; however, be warned that there is a major spoiler in paragraph 8...) The novel begins with the abduction of the BMT’s head of security, Roberts, by ‘the Cowboy’ and his followers, a group of discontented native diggers. The BMT struggles to respond to this crisis, complicated as it is by the arrival of MacPherson, the local Provincial Commissioner, on a visit and, by coincidence, of a tabloid journalist, Warner. MacPherson is convinced that with his experience of ‘Africans’ he can easily calm the situation and he insists on going on a picnic to the centre of the trouble, Porokorro.

Porokorro means ‘the Place of Bones’.

So we know things are not going to end terribly well.

I thought this was a remarkable novel for two main reasons. The first is the way that Charteris winds up the tension. He writes in short, fragmented paragraphs. He scorns overly expository passages and leaves the reader to piece things together from the elliptical observations of the characters, many of whom speak mainly in some defunct public-school argot. He shifts unexpectedly, jerkily, between dialogue and the narrator’s perception in a way that is very discombobulating. His sentences are very spare, even flat.

The narrator himself – and I assume he’s a man because almost all of the whites are male and because of his misogyny – is also an enigma. We never learn his name or his job, although he speaks of the BMT as ‘us’ and it’s clear that he works there. Yet he is privy to scenes and thoughts that he cannot possibly witness. So who or what is he? He uses ‘I’ occasionally to speak of himself, but more frequently ‘we’ and ‘us’, as if he is a collective consciousness. Certainly there is something about this book, about the way that the narrator speaks of ‘us’ and observes the action without ever participating it, that reminds me of the choruses in Greek tragedies.

The second reason I think this novel is remarkable is the immense subtlety with which it reveals the utter absurdity of colonialism in West Africa and its destructiveness.

Even during a crisis we remain a very ordinary-looking lot at the BMT.

I think of us at our most typical playing cricket on Saturdays during the dry season, when the grass is bleached. There we sit waiting our turn to bat, under a palm leaf shelter with rather blank, uniform expressions, all wearing white linen, watching the efforts of our two representatives at the wicket.

The light is so intense that even sunburnt faces have, like the grass, a white withered look; and our women are as white-powdered as scones, against sweat. The whole effect is of a party grouped for security, on a raft, suddenly consoled with a mirage of cricket.

In this passage you can see the unnaturalness of the BMT’s situation, its vulnerability and isolation, its dangerous passivity. That image of the women powdered like scones is brilliant: not just are they scone-like (pale, warm, floury) but the scone is a food completely out of place in West Africa. Cricket is of course a very public-school activity and the BMT is riven with social divisions: which school you attended, what you did during the War, and who your aunt is, are all crucially important. In the essentially dreary and soulless world of the BMT, spite is one of the few energising principles.

By taking a narrator who gives a BMT point of view (albeit an acerbic and melancholic one), and is someone who holds racist and misogynistic attitudes, Charteris might seem to risk providing a one-sided look at colonial West Africa. However, the BMT’s cruelty is not glossed over and is perhaps more effective for coming from an insider. Gradually, we learn of the conditions to which the licensed diggers are subjected. They are expected to risk their lives mining, but give up all the diamonds they find to the BMT, and are searched rigorously and humiliatingly to enforce this. Frequently, the shafts they dig collapse, burying some of them alive. Nobody rescues them. Why has the Cowboy abducted Roberts? Initially, it seems sheer mischief-making, but in fact there is a shocking reason behind it.

This is a portrait of a minority exploiting a majority without compassion, destroying the living land in pursuit of tiny, dead jewels; a minority that is unhappy and frightened and peevish, existing in an atmosphere akin to ‘a Thames country club, circa 1938’. It is a fascinating counterpart to The Heart of the Matter and No Longer at Ease, and Mike Walmer has done well to bring it back into print.