a gallimaufry

Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars, by Francesca Wade

Glossing over my long absence from the Internet, I am back to enthuse about a book that most of you have already heard of and maybe read. (If you have read it, write your Thoughts in the comment section below this post!) I shall have to write about it from memory, because I do not actually have a copy, I borrowed my mother’s while I was in Britain. Perhaps this is no bad thing, it will curb my propensity to ramble on. (Or will it?)

Quite by chance, Francesca Wade discovered that between the two world wars five women writers lived in Mecklenburgh Square in London: HD, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jane Ellen Harrison, Eileen Power and Virginia Woolf. (I hadn’t ever heard of Harrison and Power: Harrison was a brilliant classical scholar who left Cambridge University in her seventies to set up house with Hope Mirrlees and translate and promote Russian literature; Power was a distinguished mediaeval historian who argued the importance of economic and social history, as well as being a Sinophile, prominent socialist and pacifist, and holder of wild parties.) At that time, Mecklenburgh Square was a place where a middle-class woman of modest means could rent a room of her own, alongside artists, radicals and poor families; a little rackety and Bohemian though not too much, certainly quite cheap and in close proximity to the British Library and University College, London.

A group biography of this sort explores the ways in which five women found, and then fought to keep, their rooms of their own. Not all of the women lived in Mecklenburgh Square very long – Woolf hardly at all – so Wade explores her five lives by moving back and forth in time around their sojourns there. She also uses the geographical centre of Mecklenburgh Square to pull together numerous threads of cultural life between the wars. Certain preoccupations absorbed all five. How did talented, curious and clever women navigate a world which denied them equality? Harrison and Power had to work for an institution, Cambridge University, which refused to award degrees to women; Woolf wasn’t even permitted a proper education and had to teach herself. Was it possible to marry – or have a fulfilling relationship – without sacrificing one’s work, if one was a woman? For HD and Sayers, pregnant outside wedlock, this involved particularly painful choices.

Shaping one’s own story was also important. HD wrote and rewrote versions of her autobiography many times over her life, as if trying on different dresses; Woolf skived off labouring away on her biography of Roger Fry to dash out ‘A Sketch of the Past’, scatterings of childhood memories. During the Blitz she watched London’s physical past being bombed to smithereens; eventually her own home and many of her possessions were also obliterated, tangible links with her youth and family gone for ever. Harrison and Power both destroyed their papers (Harrison burnt hers almost gleefully when she left Newnham), with terrible consequences for their posthumous reputations, their radical contributions to history forgotten or reattributed to men.

(Photograph of Mecklenburgh Square, ca 1930; Camden Local Studies and Archives, found here)

Other interests were more particular. Power was a socialist and her story encompasses developments in socialist thought as well as the rise of the League of Nations Union, pacifism and internationalism, all of which shaped post-WWI society. Both Power and Woolf became increasingly uncomfortable with the knowledge of their privileges and their reliance on the labour of working-class women. Through Harrison, we learn about the Russian diaspora and its influence on western European culture. Through HD, we learn about the Imagists and the difficulty of living a truly Bohemian life. (Also: that HD was a total slob who never emptied her ashtrays or washed up her wine glasses.)

Square Haunting is a book which has deservedly won a lot of praise. It is a marvellous group biography, full of detail and perceptiveness. It not only brings to life five women and their era; it also reminds us of the importance of taking the time and having the space to think, as imperative now as it was one hundred years ago.

 

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)

is a writer obligated to give readers the pleasures they expect?

In the comments on last Monday’s post on The Flint Anchor, Lory asked this excellent question:

‘Is a writer obligated to give readers the pleasures they expect?’

I have many Thoughts about this, which I couldn’t really cram into a reply to her there; instead, I’ll bore you with them here. As Sir Humphrey might say, ‘Well, yes and no.’

(Constantin Hansen, The Artist’s Sisters Signe and Henriette Reading a Book, 1826; Statens Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Denmark; found here)

A writer is of course not obliged to anyone in their writing, they are completely free. I am still pottering about writing my second attempt at a children’s book and I am doing whatever I please. I cannot say, however, that the results so far are anything I’d want anyone else to read. The characters are weak and keep shifting about, they mess up the vague plot I am trying to follow, or I change my mind, or I realise there’s a massive hole in it, or it gets just dreadfully boring. If a reader bought it from a bookshop or borrowed it from a library, they would be appalled.

Therefore, I would argue that a writer does have to fulfil a few obligations if they expect readers to read their work. And I termed those obligations as ‘pleasures’ – not perhaps the best word to use. However, I do believe that a novel, like any work of art, should provide a form of pleasure to at least some of its readers; and by ‘pleasure’ I mean it should provide some sort of aesthetic, emotional, intellectual or even educational satisfaction. And when you slide a book off a shelf and open it, you do so in expectation of one of those forms of satisfaction.

That satisfaction might take the form of characters who feel ‘real’ to you, it might be a delight in the language the writer has used, it might be in the recognition that the writer has expressed something true about the world, it might be an eagerness to find out what happens next, it might be learning about life in sixteenth-century Florence... When you read a novel that provides you with no form of satisfaction on any of these levels, you feel that the novel is ‘bad’ or ‘poorly written’. And this is what I mean by ‘pleasure’, ill-chosen as the word is.

Some of these pleasures – the emotional ones, I’d say – are more easily evoked in the reader. Bestsellers tend to provide them: excitement, fear, identification with the characters. Others are harder to discern or are those that many readers don’t enjoy. We might here think of the difference between Riders and The Waves, both of which offer pleasure to readers but of different sorts, reflected in their respective sales figures.

The ‘expectation’ of such a pleasure is not unreasonable in a reader, and so to that extent I would answer, yes, the writer does have an obligation here. But this is one interpretation of Lory’s question and it’s not I think what she meant by it. (I could be wrong! Lory – tell me!) She is, I believe, thinking of readers’ expectations in terms of dictating how that pleasure is delivered. And to that I would answer, with her, ‘No’.

Does a novel have to have characters who feel ‘real’ to you? No. Nor does it have to have characters who are likeable or admirable. It doesn’t have to be moral or tell you how to live. It doesn’t have to have a compelling plot, or beautiful writing, or strike you at a deep emotional level. A reader might expect or hope for or want these elements, and might be annoyed if they didn’t find them in a novel – but that might well be a failure of reading. We don’t read Agatha Christie for complex characterisation; we don’t read James Joyce for unicorns; we don’t read Tolstoy for laughs.

There are plenty of writers, like Sylvia Townsend Warner, who choose to subvert expectations in their work. This may upset some readers. It can lead to novels which are challenging, not easy to read, but it can create exciting fiction. A ‘good’ writer does this while retaining some element of pleasure, even if some or perhaps many readers do not notice it: a ‘bad’ writer makes a mess. A ‘good’ reader, in my opinion, tries to approach every book with an open mind and let the book show them how to read it. (This doesn’t mean we should all ‘enjoy’ every novel published but if we want to pass an informed judgement on it we should be alert to ‘pleasures’ that we may not personally enjoy.)

Here’s an example of the difference between the expectations a writer should satisfy and the expectations a writer should not. You want to read a detective novel, you’re in the mood for it. Detective novels have certain conventions, the most obvious being: there’s a crime and the detective solves it. You, an avid reader of detective fiction, understand these conventions.

The novel proceeds in the usual way, crime, detective, but then, at the end – the author doesn’t tell you who the murderer was! You’re outraged! But that’s the point. Now you’re thinking about why you’re outraged, you’re re-evaluating what you’ve just read... The novelist has subverted your expectations but in a way that causes you to question them, to re-categorise the novel not as a whodunnit but as something else... It’s a form of satisfaction.

Now you pick up a second detective novel. The writing is ridden with clichés, the characters are stereotypes and the reason for the crime implausible – the whole thing is silly. On no level are you satisfied. This book has abided by the conventions, the expectations of a detective novel, but it has failed to deliver any form of satisfaction.

What do you think? How would you answer the question?

And many thanks to Lory, for posing it.

Told by an Idiot, by Rose Macaulay

This is the third novel of Rose Macaulay’s I’ve read, the other two being The World My Wilderness, a very
long time ago, and The Towers of Trebizond, which I reread more recently.  I loved them both, and so when I saw a copy of Told by an Idiot in a second-hand bookshop I snapped it up. (I note that its previous owner was H.P. Hulbert of St Barnabas Vicarage in Bristol, who dated its acquisition as 23rd June 1938, and I (another HP) paid £5 for this nice hardback copy and brought it to Belgium; where will it go next, I wonder?) And then I didn’t read it for twenty years. Ah well, its time has finally come.

Told by an Idiot was first published in 1923 and follows the fortunes of the Garden family from the late nineteenth century until after the First World War. It has an arresting opening:

One evening, shortly before Christmas, in the days when our forefathers, being young, possessed the earth, – in brief in the year 1879, – Mrs Garden came briskly into the drawing-room from Mr Garden’s study and said in her crisp, even voice to her six children, ‘Well, my dears, I have to tell you something. Poor papa has lost his faith again.’

Papa being a vicar, this loss of faith is rather a pity, especially since the Gardens really like the vicarage they are living in. However, Papa, an inveterate seeker of truth, has had and continues to have during the novel many losses of faith and many discoveries of new faiths: Anglicanism, Roman Catholicisim, Unitarianism, Quakerism, Theosophy, Spiritualism, he works through them all...

His six children, all very different characters, grow up, marry (or not), work (or not), have children (or not). The years pass. Indeed, this book reminded me very strongly of Virginia Woolf’s (later) The Years, which I had read as an undergraduate and not since. When I got it down to look at it, I found it quite different to Macaulay’s novel. Woolf focuses on the individual’s experience in the moment. Macaulay, however, shifts the emphasis so that it is on time passing and on the larger movements – political, social, artistic – that churn through the years. Her characters play out their little lives against this.

(Undated photograph of Rose Macaulay, found here)

So, Macaulay discusses the Irish Question, militant suffragettes, nationalism, imperialism. Her discussions are dry, amused and partisan, they are not histories. (One thing surprised me, in these days of the pandemic: not one mention of the Spanish flu outbreak of 1919.) She gives her novel two epigraphs which form the principal themes of the novel and explain its emphasis. One is the quote from King Lear from which the title is drawn, and which expresses the smallness of our lives, ‘full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing’. The other is a line by Paul Morand, from Fermé la nuit: ‘L’histoire, comme une idiote, mécaniquement se répète’ – history repeats itself. And what is striking, and perfectly illustrates her point, is that we are still discussing the same ideas today – for instance:

To make up for the stagnation of home politics, there was, in 1906 and 1907, plenty of international activity. The nations of Europe were ostensibly drawing together, a happy family. [...] A rapprochement took place between ourselves and Russia, for it was quite the fashion in Europe to fraternise with Russia, her armies were so huge, even if not, apparently, very good at what armies are supposed to be good at. There were those in this country who held that it was not quite nice to fraternise with Russia, disapproving of her governmental system, and of the Tsar’s very natural suppression of the Duma that had for a few days and by an oversight so strangely existed and actually dared to demand constitutional reform. There were those in Great Britain who said that we should not be at all friendly with a government so little liberal in mentality. But, after all, you must take nations as you find them, and their domestic affairs are quite their own concern, and one should not be provincial in one’s judgements[...]

More subtly, Macaulay notes the latest vogues in literature, for example the rise of George Bernard Shaw, but infuses her own prose with echoes of earlier writers (most obviously Shakespeare). Thus in art it is the same: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

There are six Garden children: Vicky, conventional and full of joy in life; Maurice, the embittered editor of a radical magazine; Rome, the distant cynic; Stanley, enthusiastic and idealistic; Irving, comfortable and rich; and Una, placid and content. They possess characteristics of their parents but are also very much themselves. The ones who interest Macaulay most are Maurice, Rome and Stanley, as well as Imogen, Vicky’s daughter, who longs to be a boy and join the Navy.

There is a necessary difficulty to writing a novel like this, which is keeping in balance the discussions of the wider context of the times with the individual lives of the characters. Macaulay’s characters are vivid and interesting and sometimes one wants more of them and less of the politics, or at least I did. But that would be to wish the novel to be something other than it is. The strength of this strategy is that the reader gets a real taste of the times, in particular the intellectual currents of the times, which would not be easily – not so pithily, anyway – conveyed in a more character-centric novel.

(Philip Wilson Steer, The Swiss Alps at the Earls Court Exhibition, 1887; Tate Gallery)

Some of the most sensitive writing is about Imogen, so I will end with a particularly lovely passage about her when she is in her early twenties and writing.

Imogen was happy. She felt her life to be pleasure-soaked; a lovely, an elegant cry of joy. [...] Imagination brimmed the cup of her spirit like golden wine. She felt happy and good, like a child in an orchard, ripe apples and pears tumbling in soft grass about her, the silver boat of the moon riding in a green sky. For her birds sang, sweet bells chimed and clashed, the stars made a queer, thin, tinkling song on still and moonless nights. The people hurrying about the city streets and squares were kind and merry and good, like brownies; the city itself was a great, gay booth, decked and lit. Dawn came on a golden tide of peace; noon drove a flaming chariot behind the horses of the sun; evening spread soft wings, tender and blue and green; night was as sweet as a dream of apple blossoms by running water. When she wrote, whether by day or by night, her brain felt clear and lit, as by a still, bright taper burning steadily. Her thoughts, her words, rose up in her swiftly, like silver fishes in a springing rock pool; round and round they swam, and she caught them and landed them before they got away.

What I particularly like about this description is I think it tells you something of Imogen’s writing, joyful and romantic, original and with echoes of earlier writers, and that she writes in response to the world around her but that her writing then further shapes that response. in an endless loop of delight.

The Corner that Held Them, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

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

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

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

(This lovely picture of some nuns I found here)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Venice, Tokyo and London by Lauren Elkin

Shiny New Books 12 is out today (have there really been 12 issues?), always a cause for celebration, and I have written a review for it. Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Venice, Tokyo and London was just as good as I’d hoped (I’ve been awaiting its publication impatiently). If Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, Sophie Calle, revolution and loitering interest you, then you know where the nearest library or bookshop is...

Meanwhile, I’m settling down to read the rest of Shiny and bankrupt myself.

‘Paris’, by Hope Mirrlees

Hope Mirrlees’ long poem, ‘Paris’, was published by the Hogarth Press in 1920. Virginia Woolf typeset it herself. Sandeep Parmar, in her introduction to the Collected Poems, describes this process as ‘incredibly frustrating’: not only was the poem technically difficult to set, but it was riddled with spelling mistakes (not all of which Woolf corrected) and Mirrlees was constantly revising it, even at proof stage. Woolf must have felt pretty murderous by the time the book was printed. When I worked as an editor, I occasionally dealt with authors who never stopped making changes, and ‘incredibly frustrating’ is a nice way of putting it. I sympathise with Woolf, while also marvelling: imagine having your poem typeset by Virginia Woolf!

Here is the beginning of ‘Paris’ (not really laid out properly, I’m afraid):

I want a holophrase

NORD-SUD

ZIG-ZAG
LION NOIR
CACAO BLOOKER

Black-figured vases on Etruscan tombs

RUE DU BAC (DUBONNET)
SOLFERINO (DUBONNET)
CHAMBRE DES DEPUTES

Brekekekek coax coax we are passing under the Seine

DUBONNET

The Scarlet Woman shouting BYRRH and deafening
St John at Patmos

Vous descendez Madame?

QUI SOUVENT SE PESE BIEN SE CONNAIT
QUI BIEN SE CONNAIT BIEN SE PORTE

CONCORDE

I can’t
I must go slowly

When I first read this, I was utterly bemused. What on earth is going on? I recognised a reference to Aristophanes’ comedy The Frogs, but really that wasn’t much help in understanding the poem. The Collected Poems includes Julia Briggs’s commentary on the poem and unless you are extremely well-versed in French cultural, social and political history, the French language, the Classics, the geography of Paris and the Bible, you will need it if you’re to understand what is going on in this poem. Without it, the poem veers towards unintelligibility for most of us. In fact, Mirrlees knew very well that her poem wasn’t easy because she included notes to it. She didn’t want to make it easy.  Her notes tell us, for instance:

Nord-Sud, one of the underground posters of Paris. Dubonnet, Zig-zag, Lion Noir, Cacao Blooker are posters. Rue du Bac, etc. are names of stations.

If we look at just the opening lines with Briggs to help us, what is going on? For starters, what’s a holophrase? Briggs writes:

‘holophrase’, a single word standing for a phrase, sentence or complex of ideas, and according to Jane Harrison [Mirrlees’ close friend and Classics scholar] characteristic of an early stage of language development [...] . ‘I want’ can also mean ‘I lack’. ‘Holophrase’ puns on ‘hollow phrase’.

So we begin with a need for words or ideas, an implication of a hollowness which requires filling. Then there’s a list of posters, which suggests that the poet is moving through space, specifically on the Paris métro: she’s going on a journey underground. She passes ‘under the Seine’. This reminds her of ‘Brekekekek coax coax’ (pronounced co-ax), the chant of the frogs who live in the river Acheron, which you must cross on your way to Hades. In The Frogs Dionysos, who is travelling to Hades to bring Euripides back from the dead because all modern tragedians are crap, is annoyed by the croaking of the frogs and asks them to stop, but they retort that the Muses, Pan and Apollo all adore their music and they will carry on, thank you very much. Is the poet also going on a quest under the earth, driven by dissatisfaction with contemporary arts?

Briggs tells us that ‘Vous descendez Madame?’ was what you said while trying to leave a crowded metro carriage if you were polite, and ‘Those who weigh themselves [up] often, know themselves well. Those who know themselves well, stay healthy’ was the motto on station scales. Amid the swirl of thoughts about Ancient Greece and art, these observations anchor us to the present and the concrete. They remind us that the poet is not only a consciousness but also a physical body moving through space. She alights at ‘Concorde’ –  both a reminder of strife (the Place de la Concorde was where the guillotine stood) and one of peace – concorde means ‘agreement’. Later on, after this opening extract, the poem makes direct reference to the date on which it claims to occur: 1st May 1919. At that time, peace negotiations were being held in Paris to settle the First World War, and Mirrlees refers directly to the war and the peace in her poem. This too grounds us in the present moment but situates it in the shadow of the past conflict.

‘Black figured vases on Etruscan tombs’ alludes again to death and the underworld (black-figure being a style of decoration which flourished in Greece in the 7th to 5th centuries). In the poem’s present there are too many new tombs and an overcrowded underworld. The ‘blackness’ of the painted and incised figures is taken up in the posters, for ‘Zig-Zag’ cigarettes were advertised with a picture of the head of an Algerian soldier, ‘Lion Noir’ was black shoe polish and Cacao Blooker is a Dutch make of drinking chocolate. The poem thus starts pulling in ideas of empire and colonialism, of a world beyond France, Paris, the métro.

In Revelation 17: 3–6 the Scarlet Woman is the Whore of Babylon who appears to St John, but she doesn’t shout ‘BYRRH!’ (Ahem, I initially thought this was an Ancient Greek adjuration!) Actually, Byrrh is, like Dubonnet, a fortified wine, and was advertised in Paris in 1919 by a poster of a woman dressed in scarlet, playing a drum and shouting. The woman looks soldierly, lewd, threatening. The poem has been dedicated to the Virgin Mary, but here the voice of sin and death, that of the Whore of Babylon, ‘deafens’ St John. Perhaps modern culture is challenging old culture but it’s complicated: women against men, advertising and commerce against religion and contemplation, noise against silence.

So what do we have so far? A quest provoked by a lack of words or ideas, by inadequate existing art forms. The quest begins with a descent into the underworld and then rises up onto the streets of Paris. We are shown a series of snapshots of a modern city as observed by the flâneur-poet, overlaid by layers and layers of history, infused with ghosts and ancient cultures. But of course, there is much more of it than these opening lines, you’ll have to read it yourself.

‘Paris’ as a whole is a poem packed with contrasts. Constantly referring to the past, it rejects and rejects and creates itself as a radical new form of poetry. It records fleeting impressions yet demands long, thoughtful analysis; it depicts a city open to everyone yet can itself only be deciphered by those with a privileged, educated background. (Or Julia Briggs’s notes!) It throws up into the air death and life, lasting (Greek vases) and ephemeral (metro posters), art and commerce, women and men, body and mind, the particular and the global, and wants them all. It’s the prototype Modernist poem. That’s what I think, anyway. At the moment. What about you?

(Illustrations: The old and the new in Paris: Eugène Atget, Cour, 7 rue de Valence, 1922, found here; Dionysos and members of his thiasos on a black-figure Attic vase in the Louvre, found here; Byrrh poster found here; photograph of the Tuileries taken in 1919 by Claude Moore, from the Presbyterian Archives Research Centre; found here)

Hope Mirrlees

A few weeks ago, feeling a bit coldy and a bit January, you know what I mean, I hunted down my copy of Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees and reread it. Should you find yourself in a similar state, I highly recommend it, and you don’t have to take my word for it: Neil Gaiman is quoted on the cover being very enthusiastic (‘The single most beautiful, solid, unearthy, and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century ... a little golden miracle of a book’). I don’t think that it qualifies as ‘forgotten’ any longer, being both in print and fairly widely read, but it doesn’t command the same sort of attention as The Lord of the Rings. Nor does Mirrlees’s modernist poem Paris, which anticipated The Waste Land, receive much discussion when compared to Eliot’s work. Yet both Mirrlees’s novel and her poem are very original works. When I’d finished Lud-in-the-Mist I was inspired to find out more about her and also, belatedly, to read Paris, which I’d bought in a volume of collected poems a couple of years ago for my modernist reading project, yes that project which seems to have stalled somewhat. And then I felt moved to post about her, because there aren’t many people who manage to be called ‘the lost modernist’ and write a highly influential fantasy novel and erase themselves from literary history. So today I’m going to write the first of a little series of posts about her and her work.

  (Photograph of Hope Mirrlees, uncredited and undated; found here)

‘obscure, indecent, and brilliant’ is how Virginia Woolf described Paris, which her Hogarth Press published in 1920 – it seems that Woolf typeset the poem herself. However, Woolf doesn’t seem to have liked Mirrlees personally, and nor did Katherine Mansfield. They found her ‘pretentious’. Woolf wrote of her:

a very self conscious, wilful, prickly & perverse young woman, rather conspicuously well dressed & pretty, with a view of her own about books & style, an aristocratic & conservative tendency in opinion, & a corresponding taste for the beautiful & elaborate in literature

and deplored at her propensity to change for dinner and match her stockings to the wreaths in her hair. (How I love that.)

Mirrlees knew but wasn’t really part of the Bloomsbury circle. She was born in 1887, to an aristocratic mother and extremely wealthy father, and studied first at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and then read classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, during which she broke off an engagement, very probably to the much older illustrator H.J. Ford. Her father’s money meant that she never had financial worries, while her mother’s upper-class lineage was important to her sense of identity. She was extremely clever and also very beautiful. At Cambridge her studies were supervised by Jane Harrison (who is mentioned as J—H— in ‘A Room of One’s Own’) and she and Mirrlees had an intimate relationship, living together, collaborating on two translations from the Russian and referring to each other as the ‘elder wife’ and ‘younger wife’ (the ‘husband’ was Mirrlees’s teddy bear). Woolf was convinced they were ‘Sapphists’ but whether they were or not is unclear but it seems likely.

In 1913 Mirrlees took up residence in Paris, where she met Gertrude Stein, Andre Gide and Anna de Noailles; she was joined by Harrison in 1922 and they studied Russian together. By 1926 she had published Paris, three novels and, in collaboration with Harrison, two translations from the Russian. But then Harrison fell ill, dying of leukaemia in 1928. And it is as if the light was switched off. No more novels, nothing at all for forty years. Mirrlees converted to Catholicism, lost her looks, moved to South Africa. In her later life she returned to England and died in 1978; she never had another relationship as close as that with Harrison.

(Simon Bussy, Hope Mirrlees, c. 1919, private collection; found here)

Unsurprisingly, her work vanished from sight too. The original print run of Paris was tiny (175 copies), and it was not republished until 1973, when it appeared in the short-lived Virginia Woolf Quarterly. This version was significantly altered by Mirrlees to remove the ‘blasphemous’ passages, and again had a limited circulation. All her novels languished out of print until Lud-in-the-Mist was reissued in the United States in 1970 without Mirrlees’s knowledge, where it slowly built up a coterie of fans including Neil Gaiman. Mirrlees did nothing to promote her books or reputation and withdrew her co-operation from a planned biography of herself which might have increased interest in her work. And of course, she didn’t specialise, which never helps: her first two novels are, apparently, romans à clef, her third a fantasy; her first poem was avant garde, her later works much more conventional; and in 1962 she published the first volume of a biography of the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton, which has been described as ‘eccentric’ (I’d love to read it) and which she never completed. All in all, Mirrlees seems to have done her very best to have a literary anti-career.

However, her moment is finally arriving. Championed by Julia Briggs, Paris is being reassessed as a ‘lost modernist masterpiece’. Lud-in-the-Mist remains in print and easily obtainable. A volume of collected poems, edited by Sandeep Parmar, has been published by Fyfield Books and Michael Swanwick has written a biography, Hope-in-the-Mist (published by Temporary Culture). There’s even a rumour that the other novels might be republished.

To write this post I’ve relied heavily on Sandeep Parmar’s splendid introduction to the Collected Poems and an article by Michael Swanwick I found at a site called Infinity Plus.

Next: Lud-in-the-Mist.

The Angelic Avengers, by Pierre Andrézel/Isak Dinesen

(Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen at her desk at home in Rungstedlund, 1955; from the archives of her Danish publisher, Gyldendal; found here)

Recently I read a biography of Isak Dinesen by Judith Thurman (and very good it was too). Thurman naturally enough discusses Dinesen’s work and the circumstances which gave rise to it, and of course discussed the only novel she published, The Angelic Avengers. This was written during the war while Denmark was under the ‘protection’ of the Nazis; Dinesen just made it up as she went along for ‘a little fun’, in contrast to her manner of composing her tales, which involved much more polishing, and published it in Denmark in 1944 under the pseudonym Pierre Andrézel. (I don’t know if there’s any significance to Andrézel, it makes me think of donkeys! Because of the French âne and Dutch ezel.) The press quickly discovered the author’s true identity, although Dinesen steadfastly refused to admit she had written it, and it was judged by the standard of her tales and savaged. Perhaps because this experience was so upsetting, perhaps because she herself felt that the book was substandard, Dinesen only publicly acknowledged The Angelic Avengers as a work of hers in an interview with the Paris Review in 1956 (the English translation, which she made herself, was published in 1946 and 1947 when she was desperate for money; another possible reason for her to distance herself from it).

Intrigued by this, I ordered a copy at once! I must say that I think the savaging was completely unjustified, although yes yes, her tales are greater works of art. Perhaps it is to Dinesen what Orlando is to Virginia Woolf. It’s fun, a playful gothic tale of damsels in distress that’s perfectly suited to these chill dark days. It is set in Victorian England and is indeed quite silly, but there is more to it than pure melodramatic escapism and it is all written in Dinesen’s delightful, elegant prose.

[Zosine] once more turned towards the others. ‘No one, no one on earth,’ she passionately exclaimed, ‘can realize what I have gone through, what I have experienced during these days and nights! It is a terrible thing to be deceiving all the people round you! But at the same time it has in it a kind of fascination. It is an affair to exert all one’s faculties. It is a fatal game; it is wicked, I believe! But still it is a game, one feels as if one might go on for ever! But now I am more tired than I had thought it possible to be! It is when danger is over that one sits down to die. I am happy, but my strength has gone, and I am changed! I believe I have grown old!’

Orphaned Lucan Bellenden, daughter of a scientist, is forced to flee her position as a governess by the unwelcome proposition of her employer. She seeks refuge with her schoolfriend, the wealthy Zosine. However, Zosine’s fortunes are about to change drastically, and the two girls try to find work via a London agency, through which they are selected by the philanthropic, kind Reverend Pennhallow and his wife to be their companions in place of their lost daughter and receive a proper education. But all may not be as it seems – dah dah daaaaah! (For once I’ll try not to spoil the plot.)

The oppression of women is a core theme in The Angelic Avengers.The two girls must support each other and save themselves from the dreadful fate which awaits them. The masculine world is portrayed as threatening and exploitative. A male employer may propose that his children’s governess become his mistress, and her only recourse is flight (Dinesen admired Jane Eyre and there are many references to it in The Angelic Avengers: here the Mr Rochester figure is abusive). Without a male protector, young women are vulnerable; poorly educated but not working class, their avenues of employment are few and mainly labelled ‘governess’. Men devise, run and are the consumers in the (female) white slave trade. Of course the girls end up happily married at the end (I don’t think that’s a spoiler!) to nice young aristocrats whose inherited fortunes seemingly are not founded on the pain of other human beings, but in a nice twist on the traditional fairy tale of the hero who wins a princess at the conclusion of his adventures, these young men are very much rewards for the heroines’ bravery and spiritual strength rather than active helpers or interesting characters.

For when the girls face a terrible evil, the young men are no help at all, nor is the rich papa. The only support Lucan and Zosine receive comes from another woman, an apparently mad black former nanny, even more dispossessed than they, yet courageous and loving. The central moral question the book poses through their plight is: how does one respond to evil, particularly when one is powerless? Zosine and Lucan each find slightly different answers to that question. Revenge, as it turns out, causes moral sickness in the administrator. The book argues that the destruction of evil requires forgiveness and compassion. This cannot have been an easy message to write or to read in ‘protected’ and post-war Denmark.

This is a melodrama, and thus there are a lot of extremes and far-fetched elements, some of which involve playing  with literary conventions and expectations of the gothic. In another echo of Jane Eyre, the fortune of Zosine’s beloved papa has been built up in the West Indies – on slave labour. Through Olympia, the nanny, Dinesen shows this distressing basis to European wealth: yes, Dinesen’s language isn’t what we would use today, and Olympia herself doesn’t question an order in which she is expected to serve, but her story of the horrible white man feeding on slave flesh is a vivid metaphor for the exploitation of the black West Indians by the whites. Whites preying on blacks, men preying on women: the nineteenth century is an ugly time.

Despite all this, The Angelic Avengers never takes itself too seriously. Something Zosine says to Lucan has been picked out as an epigraph for the novel, and it’s very fitting:

You serious people must not be too hard on human beings for what they choose to amuse themselves with, when they are shut up in a prison, and are not even allowed to say that they areJane Eyre prisoners: if I do not soon get a little bit of fun, I shall die!

Oh, and I’ve just discovered that it was made into a film in the US in 1948!

(Images are of the British and Danish covers of the first editions of The Angelic Avengers.)