a gallimaufry

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.

The Corner that Held Them, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Well, I missed Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week with this review and so I am grateful to myself for extending the week by a fortnight... I am also very grateful to have read The Corner that Held Them. While it hasn’t quite dethroned After the Death of Don Juan from its place as favourite in my heart, it is a close-run thing.

A tray of buns, a tray of nuns...

I must admit to a slight sense of trepidation since the little ‘nun fiction’ I have read tends to favour hysteria in convents, but the only bout of this in The Corner that Held Them occurs when a group of novices tries to levitate while playing Flying St Katherine, and all is handled with STW’s customary sense of absurdity tempered with compassion. (Even the murder is low key.)

The novel concerns a nunnery in Norfolk and the lives of those who inhabit it during the main part of the fourteenth century. Like After the Death of Don Juan, it dips in and out of different characters’ consciousnesses, here to emphasise not only the sense of shared community but also to give a sense of time passing. Essentially plotless but more interwoven and inconclusive than a series of short stories, it often feels more historical than novel, more a record of something unfolding than a constructed narrative. Perhaps one might compare it to a mediaeval chronicle, which wove fact and fiction seamlessly together (although little here is unmediated historical fact so perhaps one might not). It is certainly an unusual structure.

(This lovely picture of some nuns I found here)

The convent of Our Lady and St Leonard at Oby has an inauspicious beginning. Alianor de Retteville is surprised in flagrante by her husband Brian and his cousins and forced to watch the murder of her lover. Her life is spared and continues miserably for some years, yet on her death Brian discovers a dormant affection for her – perhaps – and after a sumptuous funeral he founds a Benedictine nunnery to her memory. Although the nuns do not know Alianor, the spectre of such a marriage hangs over them. While they generally possess no vocation and are given to the convent by their families, for them the community offers a potentially pleasanter existence than wedlock and childbirth. Within the convent, life can be harsh and restrictive, but the nuns have a modicum of independence and responsibility. Those with talents, like Dame Susanna for music or Dame Matilda for figures, have the chance to make use of them. And it is generally a safe place compared to the outside world, as Dame Adela learns to her cost.

In this rich and dense novel two motifs recur: the tuft of wormwood by the gatehouse and the spire raised by Prioress Alicia. The wormwood is from the natural world at the mercy of which mediaeval people existed, the spire from the world of human achievement. Wormwood is edible but bitter and, in excess, toxic. It was used as a flavouring for mead in the Middle Ages and more recently in absinthe; it is also mentioned in the Bible as being mixed with vinegar and given to the dying Jesus. Its presence at the gate of the convent warns of a life of bitterness but also of succour. The raising of the spire is a long business, fraught with problems and delays, and in its first incarnation it collapses during a gale and kills one of the nuns. Yet finally it stands, a landmark for miles around. For many, like Sir Ralph, it is an object of beauty. For others, a sign of the nuns’ arrogance and profligacy. For Dame Lilias it is a symbol of failed escape. In collapsing it ‘had tried to get away’, as she has failed to do.

The fourteenth century was a dramatic period in British history: famine, war, plague and revolt ravaged it. Oby is fairly remote but suffers like everywhere else from the horrors of the Black Death, the subsequent labour shortages, the violence that followed the Peasants’ Revolt. Nor is the nunnery immune to dramatic occurrences such as the collapse of the first spire and the murder in the fishpond. But such incidents are exceptional. The rhythm of life at Oby is one of observing the rules, bickering and trying to balance the books and keep in with whoever is the current bishop. Worldly affairs and the relationships between the sisters take precedence over spiritual matters. The Black Death poses a threat but so does a possible lawsuit, the failure of tenants to pay their rents.

STW has presented us with an alternative for women to marriage, but she certainly has not idealised the religious life. In fact, she even slyly undermines it. St Leonard, to whom the convent is dedicated, is the patron saint of prisoners and captives. Few of the women – girls, when most of them arrive – have any influence over whether or not their families hand them over to the nunnery and while most settle in and appreciate their freedom from husbands some, like Dame Lilias, feel trapped. The novel ends abruptly with an escape by another nun who resents confinement. It’s an ending that is destabilising, for us as readers as well as the convent as institution.

(Nuns smuggling a man into a convent; from here)

There are other fundamental problems with life at Oby. Sir Ralph, the priest who serves the convent for most of the book, is not only idle, self-indulgent and lecherous (if loyal and good-hearted), and thus hardly an example of the religious life, he is also not really an ordained priest, just a lay clerk, and as such has no right to administer Holy Communion to the nuns or hear their confessions. Unwittingly, they are all living in a state of sin. Then there is the collapse of the spire – what, wonder the nuns, might that mean? Nothing good. And finally, the constant resentment of the peasants who have to work for what they perceive as a parcel of idle, pampered women reminds us of the unfairness of the social system in which they all struggle to survive. What really is the point of the convent?

There is so much more to this novel, it definitely requires rereading. I haven’t quoted very much because it doesn’t really lend itself to being quoted, all the strands of life are so neatly woven together that it’s difficult to extract a chunk. It’s also quite hard to write about as it has no central plot or characters and refuses the shapeliness, if you like, of conventional novel forms in favour of attempting to reflect more closely the vagaries of life as it is lived, rambling, inconclusive. This unusual structure and the distance it keeps from its characters make it difficult to place, perhaps it is not unlike Virginia Woolf’s The Years? But to anyone who fancies steeping themselves in the weirdness of mediaeval life as mediated by STW’s brilliant mind it is highly recommended.

(Bagpipe-playing bishop and dancing nun, from here)

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week: A Round-up

(Sylvia Townsend Warner, photographed by Janet Stone, 1970; National Portrait Gallery)

And thus we reach the end of the week – though not quite the end of Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week. Some of us (me!) didn’t quite finish in time and so we’ll be posting more over the next week or two. If you are also still reading or thinking about STW, let me know when you write something and I’ll add a link here.

It’s been such a joy to read everyone else’s thoughts about STW and I feel I’ve learnt a lot from them, so thank you very much for joining in! She seems to me to be a writer who really understands people in a compassionate but clear-sighted way, and who is not afraid to document their cruelties nor to satirise their weaknesses. She delights in the fantastical as well as the mundane. She can turn on a pin-head from comedy to tragedy, lyricism to bathos. Her stories stray and bite in unexpected ways. There is a strain of melancholy in her work, but also joy, and I think it is no stretch to say that her musical education informs her poetry and much of her prose, she has a very sensitive ear for how language sounds.

It’s been suggested that I might do this again next year, and I have to say I am very tempted as I now have even more STWs I’d like to read... Would you be interested?

Anyway, here are your posts, divided up per genre:

NOVELS

Lolly Willowes (1926)

Harriet writes: ‘This is a truly wonderful book and Warner is an exceptional writer. The novel, her first, was a critical success, though Warner was saddened that people viewed it as simply charming whimsy.’

Sandra writes: ‘This is a book of originality and accomplishment, of charm, humour and wry satire. As such I thoroughly enjoyed it. But I am not unaware of the deeper message behind its idiosyncrasy. And for that I applaud its writer.’ She also includes links to two other fascinating articles about the novel.

Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927)

Hayley writes: ‘a gem of a book, quiet, thoughtful, sensitive, and devastating by the end. I feel stupid for taking this long to understand just how good Sylvia Townsend Warner was, but at least have the pleasure ahead of reading through the rest of her books.’

lethe, who read this together with its sequel The Salutation (1932), writes of Mr Fortune: ‘It is a rather melancholy story, and as always, STW's writing is beautiful’; and of The Salutation: ‘I did not really care for this story. Mr. Fortune's Maggot's ending is fine as it is, this felt superfluous to me.’

The Flint Anchor (1954)

lethe has reading one of STW’s less well-known novels, about John Barnard and his family, and writes: ‘Although some are worse than others, there is not one sympathetic character in the whole extended family, and yet I loved reading about them. This, I feel, is thanks to STW’s brilliant writing and sometimes sardonic wit. I'm giving 4 stars for now, but in time I may change it to 5 stars.’

 

SHORT STORIES

The Cat’s Cradle Book (1960)

Sandra writes: ‘Written in the straight-forward manner of human fairy tales, many [of the stories] do not feature cats at all although there are plenty of animals to be found.  The stories are mostly short and are varied.  Grimm, Aesop and others echo through the pages but in new guise [...] it’s unique: an oddity.  Dark and macabre perhaps, but different and thus memorable.’

Swans on an Autumn River / A Stranger with a Bag (alternative titles for the same collection) (1966)

Harriet writes of one of the stories, ‘A Love Match’: ‘I can't help wondering if this heart-warming, wholly non-judgmental story might have been a way for Warner to write obliquely about her own unconventional life style - she lived for nearly forty years in a relationship with another woman, the poet Valentine Ackland. Whatever the case, it was a bold move and a wonderfully successful one to take such a taboo subject and turn it on its head.’

Lizzie, a long-time fan of STW, writes: ‘I [...] found myself back in familiar Townsend Warner territory: unsettling glimpses into the lives of people who, even half a century later, I feel I could probably meet on the next corner.  [...] the insights into why people do what they do are so powerful, that I find myself, story after story, drawn in’ (there are links in her post to her other reviews of STW’s short-story collections too).

The Innocent and the Guilty (1971)

Simon writes: ‘Warner always writes great sentences. She is a delicious stylist, and often very funny. And these stories might be right up some readers’ streets. For me, having discovered what exceptionally striking, immersive, satisfying stories she could write, in the other collections I’ve read – The Museum of Cheats and Swan on an Autumn River – these ended up being the smallest bit disappointing. And I think that’s because those other two collections rank among my favourite ever short stories.’

The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited by Claire Harman

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a prolific diarist. In October 1927, when she was thirty-three, her friend David Garnett gave her a notebook and she decided to use it as a journal. This she kept every day until 1932, when ‘all manner of breaks, restarts and patches begin and it is impossible to say how much is missing and how much never written in the seventeen years that follow, until 1949 when the thread is resumed’ and was kept up until a few months before her death in 1978.

(Photograph of Sylvia Townsend Warner, undated, from here)

Reading someone else’s diaries, even those of a writer (since surely most writers keep their diaries with an eye to posthumous publication), is usually intrusive and ethically dubious. Not that this stops us, since they are so fascinating. In STW’s case we can set our moral scruples aside, I think. She thought carefully about whether or not they should be published and although she felt dubious, she did not destroy them or instruct anyone else to do so. According to Claire Harman’s fascinating introduction:

In the last year of her life, Sylvia Townsend Warner drew up a new will and tried to sort all her affairs so as to spare trouble to her executors. [...] But while she left very clear instructions about the eventual publication of her love letters, her feelings about her diaries were quite different, and she told her executrix, Susanna Pinney, that they were ‘too sad’ to be published.

Harman adds:

The estate has nevertheless agreed to the editing and publication of this selection from the diaries on literary grounds, judging that it is the right compromise to make.

Since there are thirty-eight surviving notebooks of diaries, Harman was forced to ‘pare’, as she puts it, rigorously.

I tended to include the following: references to her writing (never very lengthy), entries which contained interesting descriptive passages, and those which showed the variety of her interests, the persistence of her pleasure in life, her remarkable stoicism and sit and the crises in her life, both personal and political. References to some friends have disappeared in the process of editing [...] Among the material which I have excluded are a great many interesting and detailed descriptions of concerts and exhibitions, the lives of her cats, Valentine’s family, stories about friends and friends’ families, the garden ... in short, much of the ordinariness which is probably more representative of her life than what remains. What remains is, I expect, more a representation of the workings of her mind.

She has divided the diary into sections. The first, 1927–32, brings us a Sylvia who is living in a flat in London with her little dog William; she has published her first volume of poetry and two novels, and is working on another book of poems and The True Heart, as well as the project to edit and publish sacred music which became the ten-volume Tudor Church Music, edited by R.R. Terry for Oxford University Press. She is also the mistress of Percy Carter Buck, director of music at Harrow. The Sylvia of these years is busy and sociable, visiting friends in the country, attending concerts, working on Tudor Church Music, going out for dinner, and music features more strongly in her life now than later. During this section she dumps Percy Carter Buck, falls in love with Valentine Ackland and moves to the country with her.

Overslept into the ringing of church bells. Wrote Mr Cope [a poem about a clergyman] all day, and frolicked with the holy ghost. The Church has lost a great religious poet in me; but I have lost an infinity of fun in the church, so the loss is even. (17 August 1930)

The next section is much shorter, 1933–45, and scantier; there is a hiatus during the period when Ackland fell in love with the American activist Elizabeth Wade White. Disappointingly, there is nothing about STW’s and Ackland’s Red Cross work in Barcelona in 1937, but there is a more political tone to this section and of course more about the effect of the Second World War on life. STW and Ackland had a vegetable garden, trout pond and rabbits to supplement their rations and bring in a little income, these were regularly poached from by hungry people but STW was sanguine about this. There are a number of entries about the writing of The Corner that Held Them, which she seems to have enjoyed writing.

Just after lunch we heard a plane flying high, that Philippa and V. said was German. Then the Performing Spitfire came over, and did his usual acrobatics, beautiful tight turns. He vanished over the hill, we returned to coffee. A long distant growl. An explosion? Not till the third of these did we realise it was only a thunderstorm. One of the advantages of a thunderstorm is that one feels no need to locate it. I don’t know why not being allowed to know where noises off take place should irk one so. If a bomb falls, a bomb has fallen, and that should suffice a contented mind. But it doesn’t. (10 December 1940)

Gale and rain, [Women’s Voluntary Service] in the morning. I spent some time with Mr Nicholls – who had laid in large stores of sanitary towels, which he called cotton goods. During the afternoon I mentioned this to Mrs E. Musing a moment, she burst out: ‘I get so worried about those heroic women in Russia. I think of it a great deal. What will they do, for cotton is so short there?’ (30 January 1942)

The third section, 1949–69, forms the bulk of the volume. It begins with STW painfully wrestling with the resumption of Ackland’s affair with Elizabeth Wade White and at one point STW leaves her home so that the other two women can be together. Fortunately, Ackland ends the affair and she and STW remain together until Ackland’s death from cancer at the end of this section; this is painful to read about. Ackland’s waning health, STW’s sorrow at ageing and at the deaths of friends tinge this section with a greater melancholy than the earlier diaries, but STW also continues to convey her great pleasure in life, in the beauty of the natural world and in simple domesticity.

Made a blue & white nightgown, interrupted by Valentine coming back with a coffee ice and a nosegay of pinks, Williams, and a central pink rose: a portrait of her young self. Today I remembered that though I had overseen everything else of my income tax return I had not remembered to look at the balance. It was so large (swelled by New Yorkers & that sale of Little Zeal) that I sat down feeling quite faint. Nevertheless I spent some time mending one of my old linen sheets. (13 July 1951)

In the final section, 1970–78, STW has unsurprisingly lost enthusiasm for diary-keeping, although in the first year after Ackland’s death she kept two diaries concurrently. Harman explains that one of the diaries was more conventional, the other more intimate, and sometimes the same incidents were recorded in both of them but as if experienced by two different women.

I set out to restore her sitting-room to look inhabited, it seemed an insult to leave it so scattered with files & boxes and parcels, and legacies to be parcelled. I spent the morning at it [...] The room looked no better & I felt guilty and appalled that I had not been of much succour to her. [...] Then, to pull myself out of this perplexed straying of the past, I re-read & checked the first letters, and then it was time to go upstairs & draw the curtains round this empty house. On the stairs, in the narrow window, she halted me to look at the two birch-trees in their lacework, the moon shining over them, a mist, a mermaid mist rising through them. I felt her, then; her compassion. So I went out & walked the drive and came in chilled & drank whiskey and caressed the cats. I know nothing, nothing. (18 January 1970)

That section is from the intimate diary, the more conventional one giving a more prosaic account but both alluding to the ‘mermaid’ mist and the feeling that Ackland was still with her. That felt presence seems to comfort STW on more than one occasion in her grief.

Harman compares STW’s purpose in writing her diary with that of Virginia Woolf, and writes perceptively:

While Woolf uses her journal predominantly to analyse her life, Warner is much more interested in description, and how to make sense, make something, of everyday things through observation. Warner was intellectually isolated for most of her life, and lonely, despite her deeply contented domestic life with the poet Valentine Ackland. When she wrote her diary it was ‘for her own eye’, as if she were writing letters to herself.

Even though STW’s eye is not turned in on herself in quite the same way, reading her diary gives you a sense of ‘knowing’ her. For one thing, she seems incapable of writing a boring sentence (and if you keep a diary you will know what a rare talent that is). She has an eye for detail, an ear for a story, a flair for using a word that is both surprising and absolutely right to describe something. She is satirical as you might guess from her fiction, but also immensely compassionate and patient, and with an enormous capacity for joy. To be absolutely honest, I am surprised that these diaries are not as popular as those by Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin. For as well as providing an insight into the life of a great writer, they remind you to look around you at the beauty of the world, the frozen aconites, the soft wind, and to take pleasure in a cheap fish supper, the dusting of your books, a cat lying on your rosy coat, singing with friends.

A blackbird just by the window squirted – there is no other word for it – into song, then cocks and cuckoos. I stayed till half-past four, then [...] I went out into the garden. It was very sweet, bees humming with a warm noise among the snap-dragons. I lay down on the grass – the dew was so thick and cold that for the first minute it was like going into the sea – and looked at the pear-tree and a sky of pale milky blue mottled with high pale pewter-coloured clouds. But at last I began to shiver and think of agues and went in. (21 June 1930)

(Photograph of Sylvia Townsend Warner in bed, probably in the 1930s, from here)

Selected Poems, by Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited by Claire Harman

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a published poet before she ever succeeded as a novelist, her debut collection, L’Espalier, coming out in 1925. For about the next decade she interspersed fiction with verse, until the publication of Whether a Dove or a Seagull in 1933/4. Claire Harman explains in this fascinating article about STW’s poetry why this collaboration with her love, Valentine Ackland, effectively ended her career as a poet. STW continued to write poetry for the rest of her life, though not to publish much of it. Shortly before her death in 1978, a Collected Poems was mooted and she wrote excitedly to her prospective publisher, ‘I intend to be a posthumous poet!’ Although all her poetry is currently out of print (with the notable exception of some of her fantastical poems, which are collected along with work by Mary Coleridge and Charlotte Mew in Voices from Fairyland edited by Theodora Goss), some of it is on the internet and second-hand copies of the Collected Poems and Selected Poems can be readily found, so while it’s true that her fiction still overshadows her poetry, the latter is not entirely forgotten.

The poems in the Selected Poems display STW’s ability in a wide range of forms and genres. She was as versatile in her poetry as she was in her fiction. I can’t find an interesting way to write about the collection as a whole, so I have picked out some poems which appealed to me. Overall there is less evidence of her spiky wit in the poetry in this collection, more melancholy.

One of my favourite poems is ‘King Duffus’:

King Duffus

When all the witches were haled to the stake and burned;
When their least ashes were swept up and drowned,
King Duffus opened his eyes and looked round.

For half a year they had trussed him in their spell:
Parching, scorching, roaring, he was blackened as a coal.
Now he wept like a freshet in April.

Tears ran like quicksilver through his rocky beard.
Why have you wakened me, he said, with a clattering sword?
Why have you snatched me back from the green yard?

There I sat feasting under the cool linden shade;
The beer in the silver cup was ever renewed,
I was at peace there, I was well-bestowed:

My crown lay lightly on my brow as a clot of foam,
My wide mantle was yellow as the flower of the broom,
Hale and holy I was in mind and in limb.

I sat among poets and among philosophers,
Carving fat bacon for the mother of Christ;
Sometimes we sang, sometimes we conversed.

Why did you summon me back from the midst of that meal
To a vexed kingdom and a smoky hall?
Could I not stay at least until dewfall?

King Duffus’s awakening immediately follows on from the destruction of the witches; it is surely their power that has held him for six months in this wonderful dream world. The water of his ‘freshet’ tears contrasts with his ‘blackened’, coal-like physique and the ‘smoky hall’ of his responsibilities. These externals are further linked, through the metaphor of fire, with the burned witches and their ashes. King Duffus’s dream was of harmony and flowers, a crown light as ‘foam’, a feast under ‘linden’ trees in a ‘green yard’. There he was nourished as much by the song and conversation he had with poets, philosophers and Christ’s mother as by the ‘fat bacon’ he carved and the ‘cool beer’ he drank. The world to which he wakens is hard and sterile, a ‘vexed kingdom’ of clattering swords. He cries (petulantly?) that he wished to dream longer. But these dreams were also bonds, a ‘spell’ that ‘trussed’ him and perhaps the kingdom is vexed because he has been indulging himself too long in his beautiful fantasies and avoiding his responsibilities.

‘King Duffus’ is a poem containing a story, and another such is ‘Road 1940’. This poem is very different, however.

Road 1940

Why do I carry, she said,
This child that is no child of mine?
Through the heat of the day it did nothing but fidget and whine,
Now it snuffles under the dew and the cold star-shine,
And lies across my heart heavy as lead,
Heavy as the dead.

Why did I lift it, she said,
Out of its cradle in the wheel-tracks?
On the dusty road burdens have melted like wax,
Soldiers have thrown down their rifles, misers slipped their packs:
Yes, and the woman who left it there has sped
With a lighter tread.

Though I should save it, she said,
What have I saved for the world’s use?
If it grow to hero it will die or let loose
Death, or to hireling, nature already is too profuse
Of such, who hope and are disinherited,
Plough, and are not fed.

But since I’ve carried it, she said,
So far I might as well carry it still.
If we ever should come to kindness someone will
Pity me perhaps as the mother of a child so ill,
Grant me even to lie down on a bed;
Give me at least bread.

Inspired I should think by the German invasion of France in May 1940, it’s a poem in which a woman laments picking up an abandoned baby on what is presumably her flight ahead of the invading troops. Her initial act of kindness has soured, as war sours the generous impulses in us. The child, already depersonalised as ‘it’, is nothing but a burden comparable to a soldier’s rifle or a miser’s pack. Its only use might be as a means to food or somewhere to sleep for the woman. The woman despairs that the child is just one of a multitude in an overpopulated world, destined either to be a hero who will ‘die or let loose / Death’ or a starveling, faceless worker. Yet she too is depersonalised, an anonymous woman on a road with thousands of other refugees. Why should she deserve succour and not the child? She knows that her best hope of charity is to make herself less anonymous by using the child to garner pity, otherwise she remains just another face in the crowd. Repenting of rescuing the child strips her of some of her humanity though it is sadly understandable in her desperate circumstances.

(Photograph of refugees in France, 1940, from here)

Everything should come in threes so the final poem that I’ve chosen the last poem in the book, ‘How fare my ash-trees now?’ Like many of the poems included in this collection, it is about death and about life continuing anyway, and seems to form a conversation between a ghost and someone still living who loved them:

‘How fare my ash-trees now?’

How fare my ash trees now?
Do my fruit-trees bear?
The gnarled apple and the stately pear –
How do they grow, and I not there, not there?

Neither more nor less
Than when you walked below.
Apple and pear tree fruit, and ash-trees grow,
And the ripe fruit falls, and leaves begin to snow.

Yes, I remember well
The plunge of apple and pear,
The whirled whisper of ash-elaves flocking down air –
But is it all as when I was there, was there?

Yes and no.
Nettles and weeds grow tall
Muffle each fruit fall:
Unsought-for lie apple and pear, and rot one and all.

(Andrew Wyeth, In the Orchard, 1972; watercolour and pencil on paper; Adelson Galleries; from here)

 

(Picture of King Duffus from here, where you can read more about him and the witches)

The Innocent and the Guilty, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

“It was nothing of the sort,’ said Mr. Partridge furiously. After a pause he resumed with arrogant patience. ‘Then there was Vera Valetta. She was in pantomime – a Principal Boy. She wore a top hat tilted over one eye and sang patriotic songs. She weighed twelve stone, she had a tiny waist, splendid legs. A regular Edward VII type. Then she vanished into the Midlands and when she came back she did the Widow Twanky line for a year or two. But her weight got too much for her, her splendid legs ulcerated; finally one of them had to be cut off!”

“Poor thing!”

“Ha-ha-ha! That wasn’t the end of it. She had it embalmed, kept it in her bedroom. And during the blitz – she lived on into the blitz – when she was carried down into the shelter the leg had to be brought too.”

He looked at his watch and remarked that it was time for bread and milk.

After leaving the ground-floor flat in Canonbury, Ronald could not disabuse himself of the notion that Mr. Partridge, preserving more than a memory of Vera Valetta, kept her leg in a drawer of his desk and gnawed on it when alone. (‘The Green Torso’)

Sylvia Townsend Warner published no more novels after The Flint Anchor in 1954, but she had always been a prolific short-story writer and continued to be so for the rest of her life. This collection of stories, The Innocent and the Guilty, appeared late in her career in 1971 although six of the nine stories had previously been published in the New Yorker. ‘But at the Stroke of Midnight’ and ‘Oxenhope’ were included in the 1988 Chatto and Windus Selected Stories, edited by Susanna Pinney and William Maxwell (and published in paperback by Virago).

(Photograph of Sylvia Townsend Warner from the back cover of the Viking Press edition of The Innocent and the Guilty; I like the way she is just sitting on the step with her mug of tea and nothing seems at all posed)

Unlike Kingdoms of Elfin, the only other collection of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s stories I have read, The Innocent and the Guilty does not have a theme or unifying concept. Indeed its title is all-embracing: everyone is innocent and guilty, including the characters in these stories. They are all flavoured with that distinctive tincture of generosity and satire which mark Sylvia Townsend Warner’s work: how alive she is to our comedies and delusions, and how relentless in her exposure of our frailties and cruelties. However, many of the stories do include escapes or ideas of escape, and this seems a way to approach writing about them.

‘But at the Stroke of Midnight’ was perhaps my favourite story, a riff on Lolly Willowes, funny and devastating. Lucy Ridpath, middle-aged and unremarkable, walks out of her life one day. Exactly what is unsatisfactory about her home and marriage is never spelt out, but clearly something is. The problem for Lucy is that she does not know who she is any more; she takes on the name of her dead cousin Aurelia, whom she admired and even parroted, so that even her ‘liberated’ identity is not her own. When she adopts a tom-cat she gives him her name, Lucy, and this splitting of her self appears helpful. Here she is, planning on blackmailing her husband Aston:

Aurelia looked deeply at the speaker. It might be worth trying. There is no harm in blackmail, since no one is obliged to give in to it. On the other hand, it is no good unless they do.

She composed two letters: “Unless you send me fifty pounds in notes, I shan’t be able to come back.” “Unless you send me fifty pounds in notes, I shall be forced to return.”

Combing out fleas to a new rhythm of “he loves me, he loves me not,” she weighed these alternatives. [...] She did not, of course, mean to return, in either case. Since her adoption of Lucy, she had become so unshakably Aurelia that she could contemplate being Lucy, too, so far as being Lucy would further Aurelia’s designs. But Lucy, the former Lucy, must be Aurelia’s property. There must be no little escapades into identity, no endorsing of checks, no more slidings into Lucy Ridpath. [...] All that remained was to decide which letter to send, and to post it from Bedford, which was nearby and noncommittal. The envelope had been posted before she realized that both letters were enclosed. (‘But at the Stroke of Midnight’)

This error works to her advantage: Aston sends her money and a letter (grudgingly) reminding her she can always return and his sister sends her more money and a letter saying, ‘I will thankfully pay you to keep away.’ Aurelia/Lucy’s indecisiveness here has paid off. But ultimately her lack of self-knowledge will prove fatal. This is a masterly story and so funny until suddenly the unbearable ending.

Escape is also the principal theme of the story ‘Bruno’. Gilbert Brodie returns to ‘the house of his forebears [...] Squat, darkling, battlemented, it was not even ludicrous. It was too remote to be turned into a hotel, and too small to sell to a religious community.’ He is accompanied by his much-younger lover Bruno, who has been given to understand that he will inherit the house. Years earlier, Gilbert had fled the house and his mother when she had tried to push him into marrying his second cousin, Lilah Mackenzie. Now, Gilbert ‘throve in his rude native air, stumped about in wet boots, ate like a hog, snored all night, belched with enthusiasm, and sang in his bath’ but Bruno, ‘a hearthrug cat: a handsome, bright-eyed, lissom specimen’ whom Gilbert had ‘found’ on the beach ‘like a beautiful shell’ is stupefyingly bored. For Bruno, Gilbert is:

a loving and rather touching bore. And not, above all, the only bore on the beach. It was the nonvariety of bores which made Bruno’s present life so wearing. Even a wife would rebel. And he was not a wife. [...] If he had been a wife, he could have quarrelled, and done so with a quiet mind, since nothing worse than alimony would have come of it. Or he could have cooked. (‘Bruno’)

Bruno’s status is precarious; Lilah returns, convention is upheld and once again someone drives away from the house of the Brodies in search of freedom.

In ‘The Quality of Mercy’ Danny notices a young girl drinking rather too much whisky in a pub; he goes over to her only to discover that she is actually ‘quite an age – thirty or forty, he supposed.’ (Aargh!) She used to play the guitar and keep the accounts for a puppet theatre, but the job came to an end and now, she explains, she is staying with her sister. If she is escaping her lot by drinking in the pub Danny too is trying to overcome his worse nature by abjuring drink and by simply being kind.

Others also seek to break out of – something in life that constricts. Johnnie rejects childhood in ‘Two Children’. Lonely Ronald in ‘The Green Torso’ tries to become friendly with counter-culture Marco, who looks like Jesus as painted by Leonardo da Vinci. These attempts at escape, at breaking out into a different sort of life, generally involve betrayal and inadequacy. The final story, ‘Oxenhope’, is more hopeful. Elderly William returns to Oxenhope, the farm where he spent an idyllic summer as a very young man. Oxenhope is not just a place, it is a ‘sensation’. Nostalgia is exactly the sort of doomed romantic feeling that Sylvia Townsend Warner would dissect with her air of wicked kindness, and it does seem to be heading for disappointment when William falls into conversation with a boy who tells him about the local geography and mythologies, one of which turns out to be the story of an escapade young William had with Oliphant:

“There’s a loch away up there,” the boy said. “It’s called the Cat Loch.”

“Why is it called the Cat Loch?”

“I couldna say. Something to do with a cat, maybe.” A vision transfigured his face as the sun had transfigured his ears. “There was a man once, set fire to it. He was in a boat, and he set fire to the water. There was flames coming up all round the boat. Like a gas ring.”

Oliphant, interminably rowing about the loch for likely places, had thrust down his oar to check the boat’s movement. Bubbles of marsh gas rose to the surface. William saw himself leaning out of the boat and touching off their tiny incandescence with a lighted match.

“What color were the flames?” he asked.

“Blue.” (‘Oxenhope’)

Now happy, William is able to drive away without ‘a backward glance [...] the exile’s farewell’ because ‘He had his tenancy in legend. He was secure.’ He has his place in Oxenhope after all.

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week begins!

Welcome to Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week! (I feel like a game-show host, typing that...)

Almost as soon as I had decided to host this I was consumed by panic and also a weird reluctance to read anything by STW, as if I were turning her into A Project and thus draining out all the fun. I kept accidentally reading Edgar Wallace... Fortunately, I was able to overcome this reluctance and actually read quite a bit of her work so we won’t be confronted with an embarrassing blank space here this week. And after all, it has been fun and I am as enthusiastic about the work as I was before I began.

So if you haven’t yet started, do rush to your bookcase and seize one of her books and join in...

Here is the plan. I am going to post here six times this week. If you’ve written a post somewhere on the internet – your blog, facebook, goodreads, whatever – leave the link in the comments to any of my STW posts and I’ll collect them all together in the final post so we can find each other more easily.

If you don’t have anywhere on the internet, you can write something in the comments and I’ll copy/paste it into the final round-up post. Or you could email it to me and I’ll put it up here as a guest post.

STW wrote in different forms and I’ve tried to reflect that in what I’ve read and written about. This is my posting schedule. Excitingly, I haven’t actually finished The Corner that Held Them yet but am terror-reading in the hope I can have something ready in time for Friday.

• Later today: After the Death of Don Juan (novel)
• Tuesday: The Innocent and the Guilty (short stories)
• Wednesday: Selected Poems
• Thursday: The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner
• Friday (I hope!): The Corner that Held Them (novel)
• Sunday: round-up post with links to all your posts

So put up your feet with a cat or two to hand, pour yourself a generous glass of sherry and light a Sobranie. Happy reading!

(Sylvia Townsend Warner by Cecil Beaton; bromide print, 1930; NPG P182; National Portrait Gallery, London; from here)

Castle Dor, by Daphne Du Maurier and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

Only very belatedly did I discover that this week has been Daphne Du Maurier Reading Week, hosted by heavenali, so this, my contribution, is rushed. As it happens the last time I was in the UK I acquired a second-hand copy of Castle Dor; obviously it was destined for this moment. Appropriate, really, since the novel concerns a sort of predestination in the guise of the past replaying itself.

Castle Dor is set in Cornwall in the 1860s; events are set in motion when Linnet Lewarne, the beautiful young wife of a publican, first claps eyes on Amyot Trestane, a Breton sailor saved from a beating by a French notary. This notary, Ledru, has come to Cornwall seeking the ‘true’ locations of events in the story of Tristan and Iseult. With the local physician, Dr Carfax, he becomes convinced that in Castle Dor and its surroundings he has succeeded. But Carfax is increasingly concerned about the bond between Amyot and Linnet. Could the ancient story of Tristan and Iseult be repeating itself through them? And if so, can disaster be averted?

Like The House on the Strand, published eight years later, Castle Dor explores how the past affects the present, and how it is stored up in places. In The House on the Strand, Dick accesses the past by means of a drug, but it only transports his mind and not his body. If he takes the drug in an old farmhouse, he will witness what happened in that farmhouse. It is the place that holds the history. Amyot and Iseult, on the other hand, do not time-travel. They are possessed at certain moments by powers beyond themselves: they speak or even appear different to their normal selves but remain unconscious of the drama they are re-enacting. But their actions are governed by place and what happened in that place centuries before: were they not in this particular part of Cornwall, their behaviour would be quite different.

The genesis of the book is slightly unusual: it was started by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and after his death his daughter gave the half-finished manuscript to Daphne Du Maurier to complete. I should love to know how much of the published book is his work and how much hers; certainly it hangs seamlessly together and is perfectly paced. Although it isn’t one of her best-known works it is really very good with Du Maurier’s trademark atmospheric setting, convincing characterisation and whiff of the supernatural (how much of a trademark of Quiller-Couch’s anything I cannot say since I’ve never read anything else by him).

some short reviews

Time has passed and I haven’t written here.

I’ve been busy gardening...

...collecting some odd eggs from the hens...

...releasing a frog back into the wild (don’t be like Some People in my family and bring them home, leave frogs be where you find them)...

...attending to the whims of cats...

...and actually working too.

I have also been reading! But since my reviewing energies are all focused on preparing something for Shiny New Books, I thought I’d just mention some other books briefly here.

• Bath Tangle, by Georgette Heyer – If Heyer ever wrote an anti-Heyer novel, this is it. Her hero is so atrocious that you are simply begging the heroine not to marry him, quite opposite from the usual dynamic. He shares characteristics with some of her other, more likeable, heroes, but here we see only the dark side of them. Arrogant, rude, snobbish, bullying and guilty of sexual assault if not worse (his crime is alluded to in rather vague terms), Rotherham has not one redeeming feature and after reading this I doubt you will be able to look at Avon, Beaumaris and Alistair quite so indulgently ever again.
  (Though I did always worry about Avon and Léonie, even as a teenager that struck me as rather a dodgy relationship...)
• The Immaterial Murder Case, by Julian Symons – A rather brittle but engaging spin on the detective novel which pokes fun at the art establishment. Immaterialism is an art movement that believes in the value of what is not there, so the subject of a painting is what is omitted from it. During the opening of an exhibition of Immaterial art Stephen Follett, a universally loathed art critic, is found murdered.
  The case is narrated in turn by one of the suspects, a fairly dreadful amateur detective and a professional detective, somewhat in the manner of the multiple narratives of The Moonstone. The comedy is occasionally a little heavy-handed but I enjoyed Immaterialism a lot.
• Waiting for Willa, by Dorothy Eden – I started this hoping for something Mary-Stewartesque and it had a good premise: Grace receives a letter from her cousin Willa, who now lives in Stockholm, which is signed with their childhood code for ‘help’. When she arrives in Sweden, Willa has vanished.
  Overlooking the rather leaden writing and uninspired characterisation I read on but the dénouement was disappointing and basically everyone was an idiot. The only surprise was Grace’s callous victim-blaming at the end. Eden seems to have been very popular so perhaps this is not representative of her work?
• The White Witch, by Elizabeth Goudge – I read this over quite a long time as it has a slow pace and bears being put down and picked up again well. It’s a historical novel set during the English Civil War, and explores how a group of characters are tested by the conflict: Robert Haslewood, the squire; Froniga, his cousin and the white witch of the title; and Francis, a nobleman masquerading as an artist in order to spy for the Royalists.
  Goudge shows how courage on the battlefield is only one sort of courage, and that those without much power – children, women, gypsies, the elderly – are no less brave than the rich men who are prepared to die for their ideals. It was very soothing while Brexit madness was whirling about and a helpful antidote to cynicism.
• Gingerbread, by Helen Oyeyemi – As ever Oyeyemi’s work defies expectations, categorisations, and cleverly seduces you into accepting whatever she throws at you. A country that may or may not exist? Gingerbread that tastes like revenge? A childhood friend who might be secretly influencing every step of your life?
  I can’t even begin to summarise this novel and am still reeling from finishing it last night, it’s rich, playful and mysterious to the end.
• The Diaries of Sylvia Warner, edited by Claire Harman – I am slowly reading these for Sylvia Townsend Warner week and they are wonderful.

Friday evening and a glass of wine are calling. Happy weekend everyone! Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them?