a gallimaufry

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week 2020 round-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letters, Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited by William Maxwell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And she spins wonderful stories, like this one:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...