a gallimaufry

Notes from the Henhouse, by Elspeth Barker

Do not be misled by the cover of this book, or even the title, both of which suggest the memoirs of Barbara from The Good Life. If you pick up a copy of Notes from the Henhouse, you are picking up a collection of essays and stories whose loose theme is perhaps Et in Arcadia ego written by someone with a sharp eye, a dry wit and a deep love for animals and poetry.

Born in 1940, Barker grew up in a Scottish castle where her parents ran a prep school for boys. (I can’t help thinking of Jane Gardam’s Bilgewater here, although there probably wasn’t much similarity at all.) Here she rescued a jackdaw with a crossed bill, named him Claws, fed him with a silver mustard spoon and raised him (her bedroom becoming ‘a guano-ridden cavern’) to become her constant companion:

The most marvellous of all his gifts to me was in essence metaphysical. I would see him, a dark speck among the tumbling clouds, and see him swoop from the heavens in an unfaltering ellipse to my shoulder. To call a bird from the air is so extraordinary, rivalled in my experience only by the appearance of one’s abstraction of thoughts and images in the tangible form of a book. And even then, the bird wins.

Claws lived with Barker for eleven years before tragedy struck when she left to study Classics at Oxford. From childhood she ‘used to pray to the moon with tightly clasped hands and pray “Bring me a poet”, and when she was about twenty-one she met and fell in love with George Barker. They moved to a ‘ramshackle’ farmhouse in Norfolk where they had five children, zillions of animals and plenty of parties oiled with ‘Bulgarian vintage’. Barker taught Latin and wrote a single, brilliant novel, O, Caledonia, she also clearly charmed everyone who met her and, while being clear-sighted about life’s realities, sprinkled a sort of wild magic over everything she encountered. Perhaps you might describe her writing as revealing the quotidian as pulsing with the dark, eternal forces of the classical past.

I mention all of this because Barker drew on her own life for her fiction and non-fiction; often it is hard to guess where one begins and the other ends in the pieces in Notes from the Henhouse and one can’t help feeling that she didn’t much care about drawing a line between them since they are both full of truth. She was a storyteller and it’s the story that matters.

(Photograph of Elspeth Barker from The Times, here)

Barker writes with great pleasure about animals. Her hens are ‘romantic, racist, cruel, heroic beings’, who huddle ‘malevolently along the kitchen dresser shelves, beady eyes fixed in triumph on the egg cups smashed below’. Her brave Bantams are slaughtered by dogs as they attempt to protect their chicks. She rescues a frog, massaging it back to life, only for a passing hen to swallow it down. Portia the pig, wine drinker and kitchen haunter, ‘a gambolling pig, a pig fleet of foot, bucking and caracoling’, dislikes ‘most men’ and bites them. There’s a ‘gallimaufry of dogs’:

Dogs are us in heart and soul, but better. How privileged we are to love them and know them and make guesses about them, and how painfully do we even as infants learn that the price of love is loss, but also that love and memory will outlive death.

(Some of the dogs do sound horrific: there is the Dobermann pinscher which roams the village terrorising people and trapping them in the telephone box; for reasons undisclosed but perhaps not too mysterious, Barker is forbidden from keeping lurchers after ‘problems with a nearby commercial enterprise involving pheasants’; and of course there are the hen murderers.)

This love infused with the knowledge of death runs through the whole book. Barker writes about the death of a mother, perhaps in part her own; about the loss of her beloved animals; about her widowhood and immense longing for her departed husband. Even her driving lessons end in a fatal accident. In ‘Dogs of Athens’, the narrator (who may be Barker, but not exactly) arrives in Athens to visit her acquaintance Christina, passing in the airport some ‘cheerful’ stray dogs and :

Three ancient crones, wrapped in black. The Three Fates, Clotho, Lachesis and something. Why couldn’t I remember the third one’s name? It is depressing to survive for fifty years only to begin to forget things you have always known.

But Christina is now in hospital, which the narrator reaches despite her fifth-century Attic Greek. Christina is ‘in disguise; she had dolled herself up as some kind of invalid country and western lady’. The narrator tells her a story, and then:

I felt a pang of terror. [Christina’s] eyes seemed to have receded into her skull; she gazed out as though from a cavern, withdrawn from the rest of the world, unreachable. And then she was back...

Then Christina tells a story, of how she once met Rudolf Nureyev on a path by a lake.

When the narrator gets home, in London, she learns that Christina has died. ‘I thought of Christina and the crones and the dogs of Athens, sleeping by their own cathedral, littered in shaggy heaps about its glassy forecourt’. Nothing is insignificant; on the contrary, everything is freighted with ancient and enduring symbolism. An airport lounge, three old ladies and some dogs suggest other journeys to other realms; in the particular is the universal.

(Photograph of Elspeth Barker at home, from the Telegraph, here)

From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with my Nine-Year-Old Self, by Katherine Langrish

When I was nine years old I wrote a book called Tales of Narnia, and I still have it. In spiky blue ink, written in my best handwriting with only occasional crossings-out and spelling mistakes, it runs for eighty-six numbered pages and fills an old hard-covered notebook from front to back. [...] I covered the notebook with a paper wrapper which I painted dark blue, and stuck a poster-paint picture I’d made of Aslan on the front. He looks very stiff, very yellow and rather cross.

So begins this lovely ramble through C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. It is really for people who, like Langrish, adored the books when they read them as a child but perhaps have not revisited them since. So a chapter is devoted to each book, including a detailed retelling each story and extensive quotes. As we explore, Langrish considers how Lewis’s personal beliefs, the historical situation (shortly after the Second World War and during the Cold War) and literary and folkloric works contributed to each book. Her knowledge is impressive but lightly worn, so that it’s like reading along with a good friend whose ideas you mostly but not completely agree with.

Langrish is even-handed, although she admits she likes some books more than others (and does anyone truly love The Last Battle?), she is alert to beautiful writing wherever she finds it. She considers the darker side of the books: racism? Yes, definitely. Misogyny? More mixed. There are strong girls in every book, and some great villainesses; but on the other side there is the Susan problem and, though I don’t think Langrish mentions it, no strong and likeable adult females. Do these problems mean that we shouldn’t read the books any more? Of course not!

And I had not realised it, until Langrish pointed it out, how thoroughly Lewis loathed schools. There are plenty of references to them in the books and they are always awful places.

I was impressed by Langrish’s tracing of motifs and plots to their source material. This includes Victorian and Edwardian children’s books and fantasy literature, Mediaeval and Renaissance poetry, fairy tales, Greek, Roman and Norse myths, the Arabian Nights, Christian theology and of course the Bible. Lewis’s uses of these gives different flavours to the books: for instance, there is a strong debt to E. Nesbit in much of The Magician’s Nephew, but more of a Mediaeval romance feeling to The Silver Chair. Langrish also argues persuasively for the influence of more recent history on some of the books. So Maugrim’s secret police surely draws on the Cheka and the Stasi, Nickabrick on the struggles of Irish revolutionaries, and the silver chair on the horrors of trench warfare.It is all very illuminating and gave me a new respect for Lewis’s skills as a children’s writer and as someone who understood children. (The only real remaining mystery: why did Edmund love Turkish Delight so much?) Langrish’s emphasis on her own responses to the books keeps it from ever threatening to become dry. Passages such as Aslan’s death and rebirth, or the creation of Narnia, still move and delight her; Caspian’s lengthy back story bores her.  A particular joy is how she contrasts her adult reactions with her child ones. At the end of The Silver Chair, grown-up liberal Langrish disapproves of the way Jill and Eustace deal with the bullies but nine-year-old Katherine loved it.

This is the kind of book to read on a rainy Sunday afternoon with the kind of tea and toasted muffins you would eat in a faun’s cave in Narnia. Although you will then spend your Sunday evening grubbing about in the attic looking for your battered Puffin paperbacks...

(All the illustrations on this page are by Pauline Baynes; this last one is the cover illustration for The Last Battle - rather different from the one on my Puffin edition!)

on Kate Clanchy

The unfortunate Kate Clanchy has been in the news again this week. Clanchy’s publisher, Picador, announced they would no longer be publishing or distributing her work. They had ‘parted company by mutual agreement’. I haven’t seen any comment from Clanchy about this and without any further information, it is hard to know the reasoning behind it. This has not stopped people assuming that it is a cowardly dumping of the writer as cover for Picador’s failures to address its own shortcomings in the saga, which it may well be. The result is that not only will Clanchy’s memoir be ‘cancelled’, so too will a forthcoming collection of poetry written by the pupils at her school that she was editing. Everyone loses.

‘Being cancelled’ is a term that is used to cover a wide range of actions, from losing your job to simply having someone dare to disagree with you. Pressure to ‘cancel’ someone in the most serious interpretation of its meaning – to silence them by removing their ability to speak publicly, or to take away their job or position – is often used in an aggressive manner by people who lack power, and sometimes in a disingenuous manner by powerful people to shore up their power and shut down criticism. While the people who make the ultimate decision to ‘cancel’ someone are those in a more powerful position – the employer, Twitter, etc.

The Kate Clanchy story, painful as it must be to many of those who are or were involved in it, is worth rehashing because it is such an interesting example of how ‘cancelling’ is framed. The topic is so emotive it is hard to be dispassionate about it. It is important because if we all carry on like this, we will end in a culture where many people will no longer dare to speak out and it is minorities and vulnerable groups who may well most suffer in that situation.

The trouble started innocuously enough, with a review on GoodReads. Someone read Clanchy’s Orwell-Prizewinning book Some Kids I Taught and What they Taught Me and criticised passages within it as containing anti-Semitic and racist tropes, which were quoted. Clanchy reacted by Tweeting to her followers that the review contained made-up quotes and urging them to flag it. This they did, and many people expressed outrage on Twitter and support for Clanchy, including prominent writers such as Philip Pullman.

So far so fair, until someone, a journalist named Monisha Rajesh, actually read the book. The GoodReads quotes were sloppy but pretty much what Clanchy had written. Clanchy conceded the point, but argued her words were taken out of context. Rajesh, plus Professor Sunny Singh and Chimene Suleyman, two other women who criticised Clanchy, were then subjected to a deluge of racist abuse on Twitter. You can read Rajesh’s account of the affair in the Guardian. Clanchy herself also came in for a lot of nasty Tweets, including some I saw suggesting that she was a terrible and even abusive teacher (based on no evidence whatsoever).

Clanchy then apologised fully. I cannot link to her Tweets because – unsurprisingly – she has protected them, but you can read the Guardian article about her apology here. Picador waded in and announced they would work with Clanchy to revise the book and remove the offensive passages. And now, for one reason or another, that work has broken down and Clanchy’s contract has ended.

What to make of all this? The first point is that it was Clanchy who demanded a ‘cancellation’ in the form of censoring a review she disliked and whipping up support on Twitter to have it flagged. Worse, she denied she had written passages that she demonstrably had. Her critics had taken issue with her language and been entirely within their rights to do so; instead they were abused and shouted down. In this exchange, Clanchy, with her 40,000 supporters, many of them famous, was the more powerful and used her power.

But it was Picador, not Clanchy or her critics, who in the end actually did the ‘cancelling’. They chose to revise Clanchy’s work, with her, an unnecessary overreaction for most of the people involved in the controversy. Yet they had allowed the problematic language to slip through their editorial filters. As Rajesh rightly pointed out in her piece for the Guardian, publishing lacks diversity, being overwhelmingly white and middle class. A more diverse publisher might not have missed this, and then, when faced with criticism, might have reacted more moderately.

Because everyone has strong views on racism and on freedom of speech, this story has tended to be flattened out and trimmed to fit the preconceptions of the person discussing it. Clanchy made a mistake, a bad one, but she apologised for it and tried to make amends. That should count for something and should be respected. In notable contrast, the Jewish community forgave and supported the cricketer Azim Rafeeq, after he apologised for his anti-Semitic comments and committed to learning about the discrimination Jews face.

Unfortunately, some people are unforgiving. If you rootle about on Twitter, you can find people who have decided on no other evidence that Clanchy is a dreadful person, and unfit to teach or publish. (There is certainly evidence that she inspired and is regarded with affection by many of her pupils.)

More widely, the story has frequently been reported not as a news article but to bolster an opinion piece, with the bits sheared off that do not fit with the writer’s argument. These have tended to present Clanchy as a martyr to the woke mob in order to present free speech as under threat from people who complain about racist or sexist language and demand disproportionate punishment.

Debates about free speech are very emotive; using a distorted version of this story as handy ammunition for your position on it only stokes the anger and denies the complexities. If you look down to the comments on the Unherd article, you will see that already people are unfairly blaming Rajesh and Clanchy’s critics for Picador’s actions. The anger against people complaining about racism is stoked, and it becomes that much harder for people of colour to dare speak up and criticise texts. At the same time, if like Picador you don’t engage with criticism but just wipe out anything that anyone might consider offensive, it will become more attractive to stick with ‘safe’ books that won’t attract any controversy. On this occasion, we may well have lost out on Clanchy’s anthology of her students’ poetry. In the long term, we may lose out on so much more.

 

Shiny New Books review: Inventory of a Life Mislaid, by Marina Warner

I’ve written about Marina Warner’s new biography of her parents, Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir, for Shiny New Books, and you can read it here.

If you can’t be bothered to click through: it’s a fascinating and charming study not just of Esmond and Ilia Warner, but of vanished post-war cultures in Europe and the Middle East. Highly recommended!

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...

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)

Corvus: A Life with Birds, by Esther Woolfson

It began when Esther Woolfson settled down in Aberdeen with her family. Despite never having kept birds before, she was asked if she would take on some doves, looking for a good home. Fortunately, there was a coal-shed which the family swiftly repurposed as a dove-cot or doo’cot. Then one of her daughters asked for a pet bird and Bardie the cockatiel came to live with them.

Then word got round.

People started bringing injured wild birds and abandoned nestlings to the Woolfson house. The pet-shop lady gave them a parrot with French moult whom she could not sell. Another parrot and some canaries were given to them by people who could no longer keep them, as was Max, a sweary starling. Woolfson bought a book called Feeding Cage Birds: A Manual of Diet for Aviculture by Kenton C. and Alice Marie Lint, and so began her life with birds.

The two birds who dominate this book are both corvids, of the crow family. One spring the bird-requesting daughter and her friends found a fledgling rook near their Guide camp. The little bird had fallen from her nest, or been pushed out, or had tried to fly and got lost. Of course, they brought her to Woolfson. Unlike previous wild birds, she thrived and received the fantastically inappropriate name of Chicken (short for Madame Chickeboumskaya). Spike, another fledgeling, fell from a nest near Woolfson’s home. He was a magpie, who learnt to talk a little (‘Spike, Spikey. Hello! Spikey? SPIKE!’ and ‘Bugger off!’ being typical remarks). Spike and Chicken became house birds, hopping about, perching on people’s knees and stuffing their food in holes in walls, under carpets and even in trouser turn-ups. The Woolfson home was soon crammed with cages, sprinkled with poo and liable to odd whiffs from food stashed in unexpected places, yet the humans adapted with grace to their fellow residents’ eccentricities and valued them as they should.

(Photograph of Esther Woolfson and Chicken by Simon Chubb; found here)

Feeding Cage Birds only gets Woolfson so far; soon she is reading about avian evolution and physiology, natural history and culture, bird habits and bird reputations, and she shares the fruits of her reading in Corvus, balancing anecdote with information, enthusiasm with consideration. However, it is the quality of her observation of her corvid companions and her thoughtfulness about human and bird relationships which made this book special in my eyes.

Often, as I sit at my desk, the sounds behind me are of tearing newspaper, of beak and claw as Chicken carries out some elaborate ritual of domestic rearrangement. It may be early morning and Chicken still at breakfast, the consummate corvid process of eating and hiding, the sound of her beak closing on fragments of bread and butter alternating with the rustle and rip of the paper that carpets the floor of her house, as she hides things. I don’t know her criteria for choosing what’s to be hidden, whether, as a child might, she’s keeping the best bit until last, or if she’s storing the dull, butterless portions to be dealt with when the rest is gone, or the food runs out [..] Since I am the only person with her, I assume she is hiding it from me. [...]

When it comes to caching, nowhere, or rather no one, is sacred. Chicken is on the floor. I am eating lunch. I give her a flake of poached salmon from my plate. She takes it with alacrity and immediately begins to cache it. Her choice of site, were I a habitual cacher, would not be my own. Thrusting her beak under the hem of my jeans, she wedges the fish between the laces of my boots. I do nothing, for it will not, I know, be there for long. She hovers for a moment, then retrieves it. She carries it into the hall and, since I haven’t yet noticed the odour of rotting salmon, I have to assume that it was eaten.

Woolfson records her birds’ actions but she wants to understand them too and she instinctively wants to ascribe meaning to them. Is Chicken thinking when she is caching food? What then are her criteria for good hiding places? And how can Woolfson write about this without falling into anthropomorphism?

[...] trying to understand, for humans, is only possible through the sole means we have, the filter of ourselves and our ideas, our prejudices and often irrational beliefs. The lines we draw between sentiment and rigour are fine indeed.

For me, she succeeds in balancing between sentiment and rigour perfectly; her book charms and educates in equal measure. And it reminds us that we should cherish the urban wildlife around us and accommodate ourselves to it, rather than destroying its habitats and decrying its less salubrious behaviours.

Oh, and it has some very nice illustrations by Helen Macdonald, who went on to write H is for Hawk.

Down Below, by Leonora Carrington

(Leonora Carrington, Down Below, 1941, oil on canvas; found here)

Three days perhaps after my second Cardiazol injection, I was given back the objects which had been confiscated on my entering the sanatorium, and a few others besides. I realised that with the aid of these objects I had to set to work, combining solar systems to regulate the conduct of the World. I had a few French coins, which represented the downfall of men through their passion for money; those coins were supposed to enter into the planetary system as units and not as particular elements; should they join with other objects, wealth would no longer beget misfortune. My red-and-black refill pencil (leadless) was Intelligence. I had two bottles of eau de cologne: the flat one was the José, the other, cylindrical one, the non-José. A box of Tabu powder with a lid, half grey and half black, meant eclipse, complex, vanity, taboo, love. Two jars of face cream: the one with a black lid was night, the left side, the moon, woman, destruction; the other, with a green lid, was man, the brother, green eyes, the Sun, construction. My nail buff, shaped like a boat, evoked for me a journey into the Unknown, and also the talisman protecting that journey: the song ‘El barco velero’. My little mirror was to win over the Whole. As for my Tangee lipstick, I have but a vague memory of its significance; it probably was the meeting with colour and speech, painting and literature: Art.

Happy with my discovery, I would group these objects around each other; they wandered together on the celestial path, helping each other along and forming a complete rhythm. I gave an alchemical life t the objects according to their position and their contents. (My face cream Night, in the black-lidded jar, contained the lemon, which was an antidote to the seizure induced by Cardiazol.)

Lucid and gay, I waited impatiently for Don Luis. I said to myself: ‘I have solved the problems he set before me. I shall certainly be led Down Below.’ So I was horrified when, far from appreciating my labour, he gave me a second injection of Cardiazol.

So Leonora Carrington, incarcerated against her will in an asylum in Santandar, tries to reassert some control over her life and fate through ritual. She had been abducted from Madrid, drugged and anaesthetised, by doctors acting it seems on the instruction of her father. In the asylum she was subjected to Cardiazol, a convulsive drug therapy which induced terrifying fits; after she recovered, an escort was sent by her family to collect her and take her to a sanatorium in South Africa. When the party reached Lisbon, Carrington escaped them and took refuge in the Mexican consulate before ultimately travelling on to New York.

This dramatic episode in Carrington’s life began in May 1940. She was living in the south of France with Max Ernst, her much older lover, and he was arrested by the invading German army and sent to a concentration camp. Her loss and grief precipitated a psychotic break. She was taken by her friends over the border to Spain:

I was quite overwhelmed by my entry into Spain: I thought it was my kingdom; that the red earth was the dried blood of the Civil War. I was choked by the dead, by their thick presence in that lacerated countryside. I was in a great state of exaltation when we arrived in Barcelona that evening, convinced that we had to reach Madrid as speedily as possible. [...]

Once in Madrid, convinced that the city was the ‘world’s stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring this digestive organ to health’, Leonora’s state of mind deteriorated further until she was forcibly sent to the institution in Santander.

Down Under was written and told (see below) shortly after the events recounted in it had taken place. Carrington retells her experiences in a way that makes no difference between what ‘really’ happened and what she ‘thought’ happened, and with no attempts to explain what might be going on or rationalise things. We are plunged into her disordered consciousness, we see only what she saw and understand only what she understood. People, like the sinister Van Ghent or Don Mariano, behave like figures in a dream; they do things but we don’t know why. We have no sense of them as human beings, only of what they represent to Carrington at that time. There is no external world, only the world of her mind.

And that world is full of fear: rightly so, for most of the male figures and administrations in Down Under seek to control or harm her. Even at her most confused or vulnerable, Carrington is acutely aware of power and who may have it (although she is not always entirely correct about this, ascribing more influence to Moro the dog than he does in fact possess). Those in power only abuse their privilege and show little compassion for Carrington. There is a sense that her recovery and certainly her subsequent escape are despite rather than thanks to those who should be caring for her.

Many of Carrington’s experiences and hallucinations heighten her sense of connexion to the natural world. She dreams she is a white colt; she is convinced that animals find her sympathetic; at one point she acts like various animals. Furthermore, she grows or the world shrinks so that her body becomes not just a symbol but literally everything. It’s as if she’s skinless. Her dysentery is a symptom of her struggle to restore the city of Madrid to health and Van Ghent’s power over her a power that extends to the whole of Spain. Weeping, she begs her friend Catherine to look at her face: ‘Don’t you see that it is the exact representation of the world?’ In the asylum, her interest in objects symbolising a greater whole continues, and her sense of the universe expands to include the entire institution. She becomes obsessed by the largest pavilion, which is called Down Below. Convinced that this is paradise, Carrington believes she can only gain entry through meditation and realisation of the Whole Truth.

(Leonora Carrington, AB EO QUOD, 1956, oil on canvas; found here)

In an interview quoted here, Carrington said:

My love for the soil, nature, the gods given to me by my mother’s mother who was Irish from Westmeath, where there is a myth about men who lived underground inside the mountains, called the ‘little people’ who belong to the race of the ‘Sidhe.’ My grandmother used to tell me we were descendents of that ancient race that magically started to live underground when their land was taken by invaders with different political religious ideas. They preferred to retire underground where they are dedicated to magic and alchemy, knowing how to change gold. (in Susan L. Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy & Art, Lund Humphries 2010)

These stories seem to feed in both to the fantasy of Down Below as a protective haven and to Carrington’s association of a personal alchemy as a means to counter hostile forces.

The book has a convoluted history. It was first written in English in New York, 1942, and subsequently lost. Carrington then dictated it in French and it was translated into English and published in 1943 in the journal VVV. The French dictation was published in Paris in 1946. The version in the NYRB series, which is the one I read, took both the French and the English texts as its basis and was reviewed and revised by Carrington herself in 1987. This history may be responsible for the particular style of the book. As Marina Warner points out in her excellent introduction, the oral/written, bilingual (and Carrington was apparently not terribly fluent in French) ancestry contributes to the very direct, almost clinical tone of the book, so very different from her other writings. Yet the ‘memories’ she describes are fresh and vivid, shocking. Perhaps Carrington was able to effectively maintain the contrast of tone and content because while she first recorded and wrote about the experiences, she was still very close to them and could recall them with great clarity; yet the repeated re-tellings and then the final editorial input forty years later gave her useful distance. The lack of bitterness, self-justification or self-pity, even when relating a gang rape, is extraordinary.

(Leonora Carrington, Crookhey Hall, 1947, casein on masonite; Crookhey Hall was Carrington’s childhood home and its gloomy neo-Gothic architecture had a profound influence on her; found here)

The Joy of the Snow, by Elizabeth Goudge

I am one of the fortunate for I have never lived in a place that was not beautiful, and if at the end of my life I appreciate roses more than snow it was not the case at the beginning. Then, in company with all children and most dogs, I thought snow the wonder of the world. The snow-light filling the house with magic as the white flakes drifted down in windless silence, the splendour when the sun came out and hills and fields and trees sparkled under the arc of blue sky, the thought of the things one did in the snow, tobogganing and snow balling and building a snowman; it was all ecstasy. And somewhere tucked away at the back of one’s mind was the knowledge that every crystal in the vast whiteness, though too small for the human eye to see, was fashioned like a flower or a star. How could snow not be the wonder of the world?

It was not myself as a child but the daughter of a friend of mine who gave me the title for this book. Her mother, accompanied by the dog Coach, had ploughed her way through a deep fall of snow to fetch her youngest home from nursery school. The hard going had been a weariness, the cold a misery to the flesh. Ploughing back again, her youngest attached, a small voice sang out beside her, ‘Look, Mummy! Look at Coach and the joy of the snow!’ Coach was leaping and rolling in the snow, his yeys like stars, his tail a banner. The little girl’s eyes were as bright as his, her face pink inside her hood. She glowed like a flame. Coach glowed. The mother for a few moments looked at the snow through their eyes and the earth had not smutched it.

I hadn’t realized that Elizabeth Goudge had written an autobiography until I read some excerpts from it quoted on Terri Windling’s lovely blog, Myth and Moor. Goudge wrote it in her seventies when she had finished writing novels, and it was first published in 1974. It both is and isn’t what one might expect – as sensitive to beauty and nature as her novels, drily humorous, yet also distinctly unforthcoming about many private matters and quite oblique about her writing. It is also very self-deprecating. But she explains her purpose at the beginning:

[...] this book is hardly an autobiography, it is more an attempt to recapture happy memories and with them some of the joy in places and people that I have known, and to share them. And to share, too, some of the conclusions I have come to about life and work. Neither will be in the least exciting and so my hope for this book is that it will be a good bedside book, and keep nobody awake.

and this is a delightful memoir, glowing with the enchantment of her childhood memories, her joys and her love of the natural world.

Elizabeth (it seems a bit impolite to call her Goudge) was born in 1900. Her father was vice-principal of the Theological College at Wells; her mother had wanted to be a doctor: ‘Interested in anatomy as she naturally was she carried human bones about in her handbag and tipped them out upon the seats of railway carriages when looking for her ticket.’ Agreeing to marry Dr Goudge was difficult: ‘She did not want to give up studying to be a doctor and if she had to marry the very last man she wanted to marry was a clergyman.’ Shortly after Elizabeth’s birth she had a bicycling accident which left her an invalid for the rest of her life; despite this she lived to an advanced age and seems to have been a remarkable person.

(Watercolour of Wells Cathedral, anonymous twentieth-century artist, ca 1920; found here)

Elizabeth laments that she finds it easier to love places than people and her evocations of her childhood homes and her holidays with her grandparents on Guernsey, are wonderfully and vividly recounted. Her descriptions of St Peter’s Port, the cathedral close at Wells, the wonderful Harewood House (Damerosehay) and the lush Devon countryside will be instantly recognisable to readers of her fiction. Some of her real life found its way into her novels. Every Christmas, her father insisted that she choose some of her old toys and give them to poor children; this episode is used in Sister of the Angels (I think) – however, if, like me, you were a selfish child and chilled to the bone to read of Henrietta’s giving away her favourite doll, you may be heartened to know that the real child Elizabeth was not quite as self-sacrificing of her most beloved toys. Elizabeth’s great-uncle, William, emigrated to New Zealand and wrote back to Guernsey to ask the wrong sister to marry him, which forms a major plot point in Green Dolphin Country. It’s nice to spot these moments.

(Rose Cottage, where Elizabeth lived with her friend Jessie 1952–84; found here)

Despite her lament, it is very clear that Elizabeth loved many people in her life and she recreates those of her childhood with great vividness and affection. If she is discreet about any romance she experienced, or about people who are still alive, that is perhaps part of the greater value her generation placed upon privacy. It doesn’t prevent the memoir from being truthful in the best sense, and I derived from it a very strong sense of who she was and what had shaped her. She was clearly a very humble person, and not at all greedy. When the film rights to Green Dolphin Country were sold, it was reported in the press that Elizabeth would receive a very large payment for this – and she panicked at the horrible thought of all that wealth and was heartily relieved when taxes ate up almost all of it.

(Photograph of Elizabeth, undated, from Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings)

Elizabeth mainly deals with her work as a novelist in one chapter (significantly entitled ‘Storytelling’, rather than ‘Writing’), in which she answers the questions readers most often ask her. Even then she doesn’t write a great deal about the process of writing, although later in the book she does remark of The White Witch ‘I like the book, it is one I actually enjoyed writing’, which suggests that it was not an unalloyed pleasure. She does write movingly of depression and her faith, and her attempts to reconcile suffering with her love of God. She also writes about ESP and her belief in fairies, ‘not fairies as seen in the picture book but nature spirits whose life is part of the wind and the flowers and the trees’. But it is her Edwardian childhood that she captures most vividly, in my opinion, and for which she remains nostalgic. This memoir shines with Elizabeth’s sensitivity to place, her great kindness and sympathy, her feeling for the magic of life and her joy in detail, both in nature and in people.

And now I am sure I am remembering not what was there but what I thought was there. A locked door and a key in one’s hand, and the power to unlock the door and pass from one world to another, is enough to send any child’s imagination off at the gallop. [..]

Now what I am sure was not there was the thick dense wood into which the door opened after I had turned the key. Nor do I think that a door could have been set not in a stone wall or wooden paling but in the living wall of the wood, a dense wall of twisted briers and plaited branches, thickset with crimson thorns and pointed leaves as firm and hard as onyx and chrysopase. One opened the door, went through it and beyond was the darkness of the wood. [...]

The darkness of that wood has fallen upon every memory except one of the gardens through which I ran to reach Mrs Kennion in the Long Gallery. I know that they were beautiful but I have only that one memory. It is of a mossgrown garden path arched over by nut trees in full leaf, the green moss a soft carpet under the feet, the cool green leaves making the place as secret as a shrine. There is no one to be seen but an ecstasy is alive under the trees. But did I really run along that path?

(I have written about The Joy of the Snow for Lori’s Elizabeth Goudge Day.)

shiny new books: A House in Flanders review

Souvenir Press have just published a new edition of A House in Flanders, Michael Jenkins’ memoir of a summer in northern France with a houseful of elderly ‘aunts’, and I have reviewed it for Shiny New Books here.

If your taste runs to slightly eccentric families, golden summers and a hint of nostalgia amply balanced by the reminders of two world wars, then you will enjoy this – needless to say, I did. I’m only sorry that Jenkins didn’t write more books as he has a real talent for character and atmosphere (and here’s an interesting fact: he was the nephew of Elizabeth Jenkins, author of The Tortoise and the Hare, Elizabeth I etc.).

(César Pattein or Patteyn, Landscape in Flanders, oil on canvas, found here; no date is given for the painting but according to Christie’s Pattein was a French artist who lived 1850–1931, a little early for the summer of 1951 when Michael Jenkins was there but since the ‘aunts’ continued to live as they had done for decades it seems appropriate to the spirit of the book)