a gallimaufry

Halloween, by John Burnside

This is the first poem in John Burnside’s 1994 collection, The Myth of the Twin. I have recently started reading it, having had it all these years, because of my new book arrangement. (Here we see why some of us benefit from having physical, paper books instead of digital books; I had quite forgotten I owned it until I picked it up.) It’s a lovely collection, and this poem is obviously fitted for this time of year.

I have peeled back the bark from the tree
to smell its ghost,
and walked the boundaries of ice and bone
where the parish returns to itself
in a flurry of snow;

I have learned to observe the winters:
the apples that fall for days
in abandoned yards,
the fernwork of ice and water
sealing me up with the dead
in misted rooms

as I come to define my place:
barn owls hunting in pairs along the hedge,
the smell of frost on the linen, the smell of leaves
and the whiteness that breeds in the flaked
leaf mould, like the first elusive threads
of unmade souls.

The village is over there, in a pool of bells,
and beyond that nothing,
or only the other versions of myself,
familiar and strange, and swaddled in their time
as I am, standing out beneath the moon
or stooping to a clutch of twigs and straw
to breathe a little life into the fire.

To me, the poem has a sort of smudgy quality, like old black-and-white photographs that are faded and sometimes over-exposed. It speaks to traditions, it doesn’t feel modern, and I wonder if the ‘I’ of the poem is a ghost ‘version of myself’, walking the place that they haunt but aware of other selves, other times, other villages that are peopled or abandoned. Anyway, I like it very much and I hope you do too.

(The photograph is of Tyneham, the village in Dorset that the villagers were forced to leave during the Second World War and never permitted to return to; found in the Dorset Echo, here. It doesn’t quite have the right atmosphere for the poem, but almost...)

 

catching up

Oh dear! Where did the time go? I am almost embarrassed to come back here after so long. How are you all? Did you enjoy the summer?

I have mainly been having a lovely time. International travelling rules were relaxed just in time for me to pop over to the UK in August to see my family. I fell upon the charity bookshops of Ipswich with joy and managed a small but respectable haul (I am limited by what I can carry back on the Eurostar and my suitcase also held the Folio Society edition of The Lord of the Rings which is possibly the heaviest three-volume set ever published, my arms are now six inches longer).

Here is my swag, rounded out with a few books I filched from my mother’s box of books to go to Oxfam:

But! Not a single work by Storm Jameson! It seems my dreams of second-hand bookshops stuffed with her books are indeed dreams with no basis in reality. Bother.

I have mentioned before that I decided to rearrange the majority of my fiction, poetry and plays chronologically. Dear friends, do not do this. In theory it was a wonderful plan which would reveal very clearly the development of (mainly) English literature; in practice it is difficult to sustain because you have to keep checking publication dates every time you want to shelve a book (so you don’t bother and shove books in where there’s space and then everything becomes even more chaotic) – quite apart from what to do about books published many years after they were written, collected works, etc. I had known that it would take longer to find any book I wanted but I thought this would yield pleasant rambles through my books as I sought a particular volume. In fact it’s just annoying. But I am too lazy to re-organise everything again.

Anyway, an unexpected drawback of scattering slender volumes of modern verse among novels is that you can’t really see them any more. So, when we redecorated my daughter’s bedroom and a small bookcase became surplus to requirements, I stole it for them. It’s right beside the door to the kitchen and already I’m reading more poetry than I’ve done for years. Hurrah!

At the moment I am having a Brontë fest. I reread Jane Eyre – it’s so good! And then I read Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës by Isabel Greenberg, which was fun and led me back to Juliet Barker’s The Brontës. It was abandoned half-read a couple of years ago but I am now fully absorbed in it. It is too unwieldy for the bus, so I am also rereading Wuthering Heights and loving it all over again.

And now, although I ought to be preparing a four-hour English lesson on answering the telephone and takng a message (four hours! I know! my lucky, lucky students), I will leave you with a quick list of books I’ve read recently that I recommend to you!

• The Absolute Book, by Elizabeth Knox. (Whenever I clap eyes on the spine of this novel, in my head I hear a voice saying ‘The absolute BOOK!’ with exactly the emphasis of a Georgette Heyer heroine gasping ‘You absolute SWINE!’) This is a novel which is always changing, never quite what it seems – characters move through different worlds and we move through different genres. A mash-up of Ruth Rendell, The Shadow of the Wind and Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale, streaked with darkness and splendidly evocative, it is an enjoyable read slightly let down, I felt, by the neat ending.
• The Trick is to Keep Breathing, by Janice Galloway. I’ve had this book for twenty-five years and finally its moment arrived and it was worth it. In it Joy Stone, a drama teacher, chronicles her struggle with grief and mental breakdown; this sounds grim but it is clever and witty and hopeful as well as sad. I want to read more of her work now.
• The Queen of Air and Darkness, by T.H. White. Darker and crueller than The Sword in the Stone, this is an excoriation of the chivalric code with which Arthur’s court has become associated. White depicts it as either violent or ridiculous and the novel lurches between these two extremes. I found it uncomfortable to read, I think that’s the point. Soon: The Ill-Made Knight.

Happy October, everyone!

 

next year’s reading week

As I mentioned in my round-up post, this year was the last Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week that I shall host. I have loved doing it. Each year I’ve learnt more about STW and been ever more impressed with her writing. She will always have a special place in my heart and I’ll continue reading and re-reading her for ever.

But it is time for a change and so next summer I’m going to devote a reading week to a different writer. There was some discussion in the comments to the round-up post of who that might be. As an indecisive person, I found the enthusiasm for both Storm Jameson and Alice Thomas Ellis – unhelpful. !!! For making a decision, I mean. It’s great that they both have champions.

Therefore: a compromise! Next year, a Storm Jameson Reading Week. The year after – unless I became too addicted to Storm Jameson’s work, for there’s plenty of it to sustain several reading weeks – an Alice Thomas Ellis Reading Week.

At the moment I know very little about Margaret Ethel Storm Jameson, to give her full name. Her Wikipedia page, with a list of works, is here. There’s a rather better short life here, and more detail in this review of a biography by Elizabeth Maslen. Born in 1891, she was the first woman to receive a first-class degree in English from Leeds University and won a scholarship to pursue an MA. She wrote to support her family (she married twice and had a son), producing almost a book a year as well as reviews, articles and short stories. She also helped to found English PEN, supported refugees from Nazi Germany and was politically active. It was a full life, which continued until 1986 – too long, she felt.

Elizabeth Maslen writes, in ‘The Case for Storm Jameson’:

Her reputation was very high in her lifetime, as a novelist and as a writer of non-fiction — she was, like Winifred Holtby, very much in demand both as a literary critic and as a commentator on social and political issues.

She continues:

One reason why I’m interested in her is because, in my view, she offers a much-needed counterbalance to Virginia Woolf and the high modernists as regards the practice and perceived function of fiction. For there has been something very restrictive in the way academics in the Western anglophone world have tended to categorize the literature of the twentieth century. My argument is that Storm Jameson’s novels, like those of Christina Stead and Angus Wilson, for instance, have in part suffered because of this mania to define fictions by such labels as modernist, postmodernist, realist (this last usually in a derogatory sense and cited as in opposition to modernism, implying a medium which is incapable of manipulation, being in essence conservative, reactionary, old-fashioned). Throughout the twentieth century, the tendency to pigeonhole fiction within one of these categories has shown remarkable resilience, despite lessons to be learnt from post-colonial and diasporic writings – and as a result, writers who cannot be slotted into one or other of these categories have tended to be at best viewed with suspicion, at worst dismissed as ‘middlebrow’, by many academics in the West.

As far as I can see, most of Jameson’s novels were contemporary realist fiction – but she also wrote science fiction. One of her novellas is entitled: Women Against Men. Her Modern Drama in Europe (1920), an examination of the development of drama in the twentieth century, is controversial. Wikipedia describes it thus:

Though most of her commentaries are highly critical and sometimes malicious, her boldness reaches its peak when she asserts that William Butler Yeats "represents the last state in symbolic imbecility".

Well, I’ll be hunting for a copy of that...

To give you a flavour of Storm Jameson, I’ve found a few reviews of her novels online. I wrote about her novel of secrets and betrayals in post-war France, A Hidden River, and heavenali has reviewed Company Parade and Love in Winter. If you know of any more, please add the links to the comments!

Intrigued? I can’t see that any of Jameson’s work is currently in print (I may very well be completely wrong) but she is such a staple of second-hand bookshops, and doubtless online sellers, that I cannot believe it will be hard to find copies of her work. You’ve all got a year to do so! For me, this is going to be a journey of exploration, I really do not know what to expect...

(Author photographs from Bloomsbury.com and the National Portrait Gallery)

SNB review: Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer's Journey, by Sarah LeFanu

Being an idiot I have completely forgotten to mention that I’ve a book review up over at Shiny New Books.

It’s of Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journey, by Sarah LeFanu, reissued by Handheld Press.

This is the journal Sarah LeFanu kept while researching her biography of Rose Macaulay, and it’s absolutely fascinating. I wolfed it down in about two sittings. Highly recommended! (Also: read the review!)

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week 2021 round-up – and competition!

Thank you to everyone who has written a post and sent me the link to it! There are some wonderful reviews out there for any readers or potential readers of Sylvia Townsend Warner to look at – and I recommend you do...

Lory at Entering the Enchanted Castle wrote about The Corner That Held Them:

The Corner That Held Them is a striking evocation of medieval life, with all its stinks, vermin and diseases, along with the persistent human doggedness that was needed to keep people going through all that. Lively and discursive as Chaucer’s pilgrims, it’s not at all a conventional narrative, leading the reader along a winding road that seemingly goes off into thin air at the end. Though it’s set within and around a community of women religious, the imaginary English convent of Oby, it never becomes otherworldly and distant from the everyday; the world and its concerns are always present in the microcosm of this subset of flawed humanity.

So did Harriet Devine:

What, then, is this book really about? STW is too complex and original a writer for there to be an obvious answer. On one level it just looks like a meander through a series of everyday events, with some dramatic interludes. But that seems in many ways to be the point - this tiny microcosm presents a little slice of human life which, though far distant from us in time, represents the way people have always adapted to living together and still do today.

Meanwhile, Ali at HeavenAli has written about English Climate: Wartime Stories:

It feels as if these are the very people Sylvia Townsend Warner saw around her, perhaps interacted with, took part in, or listened to, their conversations – there is such an authenticity to the exchanges between characters. [...] These stories are really excellent providing some rich texture to the times in which they were first written. Witty, lively with a slight seam of darkness running through them, these show Sylvia Townsend Warner to have been a consummate short story writer.

Simon at StuckInABook wrote about another collection of short stories, from the 1960s, A Spirit Rises:

In her novels, Sylvia Townsend Warner travels widely through time and space. In her short stories, she tends to stick to contemporary England – and this is doubtless one of the reasons I love them so much. She doesn’t need to take us to another world; she can turn her observant eye to the world directly in front of her. And nobody is as good as Warner at the slightly unexpected twists of wording that show deep below the surface of people and their relationships with one another. [...]
A Spirit Rises isn’t quite as meteorically wonderful as [Swans on an Autumn River], but it’s not all that far off – it certainly includes the finest writing I’ve read this year, and I know will reward careful, slow, luxurious re-reading. If you’ve only encountered Warner the novelist, please don’t hesitate in exploring her extraordinary talent as a writer of short stories.

Hayley at Desperate Reader enjoyed The Flint Anchor:

The book is also surprisingly open about homosexuality in the fishing community of Loseby. It was still a criminalized when the book was published, and considered as an unspeakable sin by the Barnard family, but in the working part of the town love is love and they're not fussy about where it's found. It's a powerful contrast to the Barnard's who remain in Anchor house with their limited understanding of love and the petrifying value they place on respectability. […]
What I most admire about Sylvia Townsend Warner, and find in abundance here, is her clear eyed ability to pick something apart and lay it out for our inspection without judgement or emotion. We might feel sorry for the Barnard's, we might recognise something of ourselves in them, or we might just be fascinated by the spectacle - I found this book compelling for all of those reasons and more.

And David at David’s Book World wrote a double review – of Mr Fortune’s Maggot and The True Heart:

Mr Fortune’s Maggot is focused tightly on these two characters, and in that it makes broader points about faith and colonialism. The change in Fortune’s thinking is carefully drawn, and I found the ending deeply affecting.
There’s a heightened quality to The True Heart that I really appreciated – Sukey even takes her plight to Queen Victoria – as well as a vivid sense of place.

lethe also read The True Heart and reviewed it on GoodReads:

The story has a certain dreamlike quality, which is heightened by a few sudden time-lapses. It is also probably the most light-hearted and fairytale-like of all STW's novels. There is never really any doubt that Sukey will succeed in her quest. Whenever things start to look hopeless, there is always a kind stranger that will help her on her way, so that even being received by Queen Victoria, whom she intends to implore for assistance, does not seem quite such an outlandish idea.

lethe wrote about Lolly Willowes too – a re-read, which is always interesting, especially if you can compare it to your first encounter:

I still love Parts 1 and 2 as much as I did when I first read it back in 2002, but I'm still not happy about the turn of events in Part 3.

 

 

If you have written a review and haven’t sent me a link yet, please do! Even if it’s after the end of the week – I can still add it over the next fortnight or so.

Thank you to everyone who has joined in this week, reading and/or writing, and thank you to everyone who has taken part in any of the STW Reading Weeks. For me, this is the last one – though I’d be delighted if anyone else felt like continuing it. To mark this, I am holding an actual competition, the first one I’ve ever done.

COMPETITION!!!

I have an unread Penguin Modern Classics edition of each of The Flint Anchor and The True Heart. (The back story: I ordered them a few months ago from the Book Depository and they did not arrive; the Book Depository very kindly sent me replacement copies and then of course another week later the original books arrived, their packaging plastered in cross yellow stickers about infringing some article or other, and the Book Depository said I could keep them.)

If you would like to win a copy, please write your name in the comments + which book you’d prefer (you can write both and I’ll add your name to both draws) before midnight next Sunday (10th July). The competition is open to anyone in the EU or UK but not further afield for regrettable reasons of stinginess.

NEXT YEAR?

And finally! I think I’d like to host another reading week next year – but who should it be? Ideally it’s someone who should have a bit more attention, whose work is reasonably easy to acquire. I’m thinking about Storm Jameson or Alice Thomas Ellis at the moment, but if you’ve any ideas I’d love to hear them.

'Earl Cassilis's Lady', by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Meeting her on the heath at the day’s end,
After one look and one sigh, he said,
Did a spine prick you from the goosefeather bed?
Were the rings too heavy on your hand?
Were you unhappy, that you had to go?
No.

Was it the music that called you down the stair,
Or the hot ginger that they gave you then?
Was it for pleasure that you followed them
Putting off your slippers at the door
To dance barefoot and blood-foot in the snow?
No.

What then? What glamoured you? No glamour at all;
Only that I remembered I was young
And had put myself into a song.
How could time bear witness that I was tall,
Silken, and made for love, if I did not so?
I do not know.

(From, Sylvia Townsend Warner: Selected Poems, edited by Claire Harman, Manchester: Carcanet)

According to Wikipedia, the ballad of ‘The Gypsy Laddy’ became associated with Jean Hamilton, the first wife of John Kennedy, Sixth Earl of Cassilis (pronounced Cassels). There was no particular reason for this, though it must be said that the Earls of Cassilis did tend to lead exciting lives. (You can read ‘The Gypsy Laddy’ here.)

When I first read the poem I didn’t know this background; the use of ‘glamoured’ suggested to me that the lady had run away with the fairies. It’s a variation on STW’s perennial theme of escaping women, whether wives or spinsters. I love it, down to the very tone of the conversation the two of them are having.

(Arthur Rackham, illustration for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’; found here)

English Climate: Wartime Stories, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

This is a very nice and cohesive collection of short stories, written by Sylvia Townsend Warner between 1940 and 1946 for the New Yorker, and put together by Persephone Books. The stories centre on the Domestic Front: an ideal location for STW since domestic realism is one of her fortes and with most of the men out of the way she can concentrate on the women and the elderly, characters who always attract her attention.

The stories are stuffed with the detail of everyday life in wartime: the salvage drives (including Bone Salvage?!), the rations, the rabbit-breeding, the mouldy jam (not enough sugar). Mrs Campion, in ‘From Above’, is evacuated – liberated? – when a time bomb is discovered in Albion Terrace. A tobacconist hides the last packet of cigarettes from a customer, to keep for his own wife. In ‘England, Home and Beauty’, Mr Sillery and Major Puncheon are training the local women in how to use a machine gun:

‘Well,’ said Mrs Johnson, the last to rise. ‘Well, thank you very much, I’m sure. I daresay we could all manage that, at a pinch.’ Which was one of the comforts, Mrs Goose was murmuring to Miss Cutler, about being a woman. One had to turn one’s hand to anything, almost. One thing more or less didn’t make much difference. Miss Cutler replied that, speaking for herself, she’d always had quite a liking for machinery. Once you got the hang of it, you must admit it was very reasonable. ‘Though I’d be scared stiff if I had to drive a car,’ she said. ‘Think how you’d feel if you hurt someone accidentally.’

This training is not without controversy among the local men, and the women, having had their turn with the gun, are directed to fill ammunition belts – dull but useful work, more appropriate to them, as the men fondly imagine, until they overhear them discussing the merits of Sten guns with savage relish.

Many of the stories are very funny social comedies. In ‘It’s What We’re Here For’, two nice middle-class ladies at the Women’s Voluntary Services, eager to help the deserving poor, struggle with Mrs Leopard, who is not quite as deserving as she might be. At first it seems that Mrs Larpent and Mrs Bogle are just obtuse and patronising, but this is not it. Is it that they take their job of helping very, very seriously (as implied in the title)? Is it that Mrs Leopard is too much for them? That they wish to protect her?

(Stanley Spencer, Village Gossip, 1939; Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum; found here)

This social comedy tips easily into pathos, however. In ‘Bow to the Rising Sun’, how quickly Colonel Prowse switches his allegiance in the Fuel Control Office! He brings in flowers for pretty young Button which he then bestows upon the older Mrs Stanley, who will replace Button as the Fuel Controller’s assistant. Button tries to save face:

‘Don’t you think he’s rather sweet? So touching, the way he brings his flowers along and then gets all shy about them and dumps them down anywhere. Well, thank God it’s lunchtime! We’ll go to the Old World, shall we? Want to wash your hands? You go first.’
In the cloakroom Mrs Stanley found herself crying, weeping unavailing tears for the desperate idiot valour of the young.

There is sadness too for Gunner Brock in the title story, whose happy expectations of homecoming on leave are dashed by discoveries in the town’s salvage drive which cause him to reassess his relationship with his family. The argument about differences in risk perception in ‘Daphnis and Chloe’ will be familiar to many of us after the last year of pandemic. More darkly, ‘The Mothers’ seethes with frustration and dislike. In ‘Arsace, Il Faut Partir’, actual combat comes frighteningly close to Odette de Boulay in her night-time orchard, apples pattering down about her like the parachuting soldiers just a few miles away.

Etiquette can come under strain in a wartime situation, as in ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound’. Attending a funeral, the mourners are forced to jump into the open grave as a landmine is dropped on the cemetery. Fortunately, Mr Kedge the funeral director rises to the occasion:

Reg seized Alan, and dropped him into the grave. The he grabbed Cathie, and dropped her in beside the child.
‘Jump in, jump in! It’s a landmine coming down.’
One after another the mourners got into the grave. The mutes came to the edge, hesitated, seemed inclined to follow. Mr Kedge, with a recalling gesture, pointed them to some bushes. Remembering their position they retired there, and lay down. The clergyman still remained standing. Mr Kedge touched his elbow, pointed to the grave. The clergyman, on such an occasion, would rank as one of the family.

In other stories, we see shifts in social relations. ‘Poor Mary’ is about a serving officer on home leave – but the officer is Mary, who is in the ATS, and the spouse at home is Nicholas, a conscientious objector. The war has highlighted their differences, which in peacetime had seemed so refreshing. One of my favourite stories is ‘Sweethearts and Wives’, in which three women set up house together with their children. One of the husbands, William, coming home on leave, is appalled at their slovenly housekeeping, opportunistic behaviour and failure to feed him well. Bearing no useful gifts for them and lacking any practical skills, he seems – surplus to requirements.

(Leonora Carrington, The Kitchen Garden on the Eyot, 1946; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; found here)

In STW’s fiction, the elderly are frequent causes for concern – you never quite know whether they’re going to behave themselves – they haven’t much to lose any more and care little for convention. There is Miss Gauntlett, daughter of the famous writer, who is kindly invited into her childhood home by its present resident, Mrs Hawley. Mrs Hawley feels that Miss Gauntlett is ‘not quite worthy’ of her father and her reactions as she’s shown around are not quite what they should be. Then there are the elderly Ryders in ‘The Cold’, who have taken to their beds because they are unwell. Their daughter-in-law ruminates:

It is very nice to be cultivated, of course, but somehow in wartime it does jar to labour upstairs with a heavy supper tray and hear, beyond the door, two animated voices discussing Savanorola; and then to hear the voices silenced, like mice when one throws a shoe in their direction, as one knocked on the door and called out brightly, ‘Supper, darlings!’ and to know, as clearly as if one had seen it, that old Mrs Ryder was stubbing out one of her cigarettes. That jarred too, especially as she smoked such very heavy ones.

And in another of my favourite stories, ‘Scorched Earth’, the ‘septuagenarian fogies’ Colonel Pomeroy and his wife have enthusiastically devoted themselves to self-sufficiency: digging up the lawn for potatoes, raising mushrooms in the air raid shelter, turning everything into jam and saving ‘heeltaps from soap, and tobacco pried from cigarette stubs’. But there is one thing that gives them even greater pleasure than all of this – fantasising how to destroy it all.

I could drone on for ever about the stories in English Climate: it would be better if you just read them. All of STW’s formidable talents are on display here and it’s a pleasure to read, full of subtleties, humour and sadness. If you haven’t yet read any of STW’s work, this is an excellent place to start.

'Winter Moon', by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Tycho, a mountain in the moon
Has long ago put out his fires –
Or so astronomers avow –
And dark the crater, and cold, yet now
About my hand, about the quires
Where this night through my hand has strewn
Words unavailing, frustrate phrases,
Tycho’s malignant bale-fire blazes.

A licking frost, a lambent chill,
It lights the unkindled sacrifice
And plays about me to benumb.
The words I wait for will not come,
And cowering down, as under ice
Dumb water cowers, my lost thought still
Shows me a tree upon the wold,
That stands, and cracks its heart for cold.

(From, Sylvia Townsend Warner: Selected Poems, edited by Claire Harman, Manchester: Carcanet)

I like the sounds and the rhythms of this poem very much. The poet identifies the cold, extinct volcano with her lack of inspiration and through that discovers the ‘tree upon the wold’ and writes her poem...

And here is a close-up photo of Tycho, found on this page (which has lots more information about it):

The Flint Anchor, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

The Flint Anchor was Sylvia Townsend Warner’s last novel, published in 1954. Like The Corner That Held Them, which preceded it by six years, it is concerned with passage of time and its workings on a small group of people. It is even more detached from its characters than Corner and, to the probable horror of modern writing instructors across the land, it eschews ‘showing’ what happens for relating it, like a history told by a rather wry old person. Partly because of this technique and the distance between reader and characters, there are no stabs to the heart, as one gets from reading After the Death of Don Juan or Summer will Show. It is comic and beautiful, but increasingly bleak.

Have I put you off yet? (And ’tis only the start of STW Reading Week.) To be sure, it’s not STW’s easiest book, and perhaps not the place to begin if you want to read her, but we are readers not wimps and The Flint Anchor is fascinating and, yes, very enjoyable too. The more I think about it, the more clever the structure seems, the way that scenes and images resonate with each other, the more impressive the whole book becomes.

(Robert Ladbrooke, Yarmouth Harbour, Moonlight, c.1813; Norwich Museums; found here)

The action takes place over the first half of the nineteenth century, during the adult life of John Barnard. Barnard inherits a thriving import-export business from his father and the family home, Anchor House, in Loseby on the Norfolk coast. The house is decorated with a flint anchor embedded in the brickwork between two first-floor windows. This anchor is clearly symbolic: it is the house itself, which physically holds the Barnard family and keeps its members on chains of various lengths; it is John Barnard, who controls the lives of his dependents as only a Victorian paterfamilias can; and going even farther in it is John Barnard’s stony heart, which holds down the ship of his family. This heart remains impervious to love for his wife or children with one, disastrous exception: his daughter Mary, upon whom he dotes to an unhealthy degree. Here he is, watching her in the garden:

Mary was walking up and down the gravel path with a book on her head. To the gate into the kitchen garden, overhung by the elder bush’s swag of purple berries and bronze leaves, and back to the arbour, and to the gate again, she passed and repassed. [...] She wore a white dress and her long white drawers reached her ankles. It was as though all the colours of the autumnal garden were in a conspiracy to enrich her whiteness with their scarlet and crimson and purple and gold, just as rich aunts might bestow their Indian shawls on a favourite niece, knowing that they themselves had only a little longer to wear them. Seeing her so white and dutiful, he naturally began to think of angels [...]

He calls her to him and demands that she repeat to him ‘the sixth of Dr Watts’s Divine Songs’.

Barnard’s love for his daughter is excessive but it has no physical expression. Instead, it lays him briefly open to a sensitivity to beauty he does not otherwise experience; a sense of beauty that is tinged with mortality and which then shades into an association with his Christian faith and ultimately to a need to control and direct her behaviour. It is no coincidence that Mary is in the garden; nor that the garden brings forth thoughts of ripeness, angels and death since just under Barnard’s consciousness is the symbol of the Garden of Eden, with its overtones of innocence, knowledge, disobedience and mortality. Later in the novel, Mary will be seen in the garden kissing Thomas Kettle.

And STW sandwiches this loving, anguished scene of Barnard and his beloved Mary, with the news that his son Joseph has been sent down from Cambridge in disgrace because ‘to win a wager of ten pounds he had climbed onto the roof of the college chapel, naked, and carrying a stuffed owl which he placed on a crocket’, and then the news from Joseph himself that he is emigrating. He will run a plantation in the West Indies.

(Samuel Palmer, In a Shoreham Garden, 1820s or 1830s; Victoria and Albert Museum; found here)

Barnard’s wife, Julia, bears him eleven children, four of whom die young, and then takes to her sofa and discreet alcoholism: ‘It was called keeping her strength up’. Barnard doesn’t notice – or he does, briefly (‘Might not Julia be as comfortable with peppermint tea?’), before turning away from it. Those who flee the flint anchor (like Joseph) can only do so by putting the sea between them, a different sort of liquid escape. The younger two children, Ellen and Wilberforce, have slightly more freedom. Ellen is born with a large port-wine stain on her face and thus seems to be liberated from the expectations placed upon her sisters; clearly no one could possibly want to marry her and at times the family consider her somewhat ‘backward’, yet she carves out the space to do as she pleases and by the end of the novel is establishing a (genteel) literary career of sorts. On the other hand the adored Mary grows into the Victorian male ideal of womanhood and oh how limited that turns out to be.

(Henry Raeburn, The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch, 1790s; National Gallery of Scotland: found here)

It is not that he is malignant; on the contrary, he dispenses a large part of the profits of his successful business to the poor of Loseby and he has a very strict moral code. It is that he lacks any understanding of himself or other people, and, lacking love, he has no curiosity about them. It is easy for him to deceive himself. Long before his death, he is spending his days sitting in a graveyard (another sort of garden, I suppose). The book begins and ends with his headstone; it is only when we reach the end that we understand the inscription upon it and how utterly inadequate and false it is.

Falseness and hypocrisy are endemic to the middle classes in The Flint Anchor and to some extent contrasted with the working-class culture of Loseby, which is rough but less devious. STW also gives free rein to her talent for portraying the delicate spite of middle-class manners:

Speaking with a strong Yorkshire accent, [Miss Mutley] began to probe Euphemia about Madame Bon; was she not a wonderful lady, so well educated too, a quite remarkable mind, so Mr Kettle said, almost masculine in its grasp of business. It was a pity that she should have these headaches, but they always come if a female is so very intellectual. Miss Mutley expressed a warm desire to see more of Madame Bon, and Euphemia got an impression that she would be glad to hear that Madame Bon was at the bottom of the sea.

In the end, as John Barnard begins to perceive the sham of his life, it is to Sophie Bon’s hypocrisy that he is drawn for comfort.

If you’re interested in reading more about The Flint Anchor, there’s a superb examination of it on the Mumpsimus blog in which, among other excellent points, the author makes a case for STW as a perverse author wilfully denying the reader the pleasures they crave from a novel of this sort (here the novel is the flint anchor which traps us with John Barnard in Loseby when we’d rather be on the high seas with Thomas Kettle). There’s also a link to a truly fascinating paper: ‘Rum Histories: Decolonizing the Narratives of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Flint Anchor’, by Jennifer P. Nesbitt, I cannot recommend this enough.

(John Crome, Road with Pollards; Norwich Museums; found here)

reminder: Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week 2021

It’s coming soon! In two weeks, to be exact.

Rush to your library or bookcase, seize that STW novel or poem or short story you’ve always wanted to read, pour yourself a nice G&T and settle down in the lovely June sunshine...