Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  Sylvia’s musicological work was not confined to her job, for she had done a great deal of original research on sixteenth-century notation, contributing a chapter to the Oxford History of Music on that subject. In February 1919, when she was twenty-five, Sylvia lectured to the Musical Association on ‘The Point of Perfection [a notational mark] in XVI-century notation’, suggesting that the ‘point’, which was already known to have a half-dozen or so uses, had an additional, extra-mensural use. One of George Warner’s perjoratives had been ‘Il y a de la mystique la dedans’ and from him Sylvia had learned never to substitute the workings of ‘la mystique’ for those of human nature when assessing a historical problem. This gave her the insight behind her assertion about the ‘point’, which though it could not be argued conclusively was argued most persuasively, citing Marinetti and the Futurist poets as examples of ‘innovators […] who do not invent their innovations’ and concluding ‘I do not put forward this surmise as to the origin of the extra-mensural use of the dot in the flippancy of despair, as one who can find no more reasonable explanation. I offer as a serious contribution to the philosophy of music the suggestion that notation throughout its development has reflected the mingled traditionalism and improvidence of man – man, who has never yet put in a new boot-lace till the old one was broken in two places.’4 Percy Buck, who was in the chair, said in his vote of thanks: ‘I think the best we professional people can do when we find an amateur like Miss Warner […] who knows far more about her subject than we do, is simply to adopt the attitude of learners.’5

  Committee meetings for Tudor Church Music usually took place in the evenings, at the Charterhouse, the Guildhall, or sometimes Sylvia’s flat, since she had no family to be inconvenienced. For the same reason she did more travelling than the other editors, a joyless undertaking for the most part, involving long hours in trains and modest hotels, where she accumulated a vast stock of speculations and imaginings about the people she observed, the lone and lonely characters who haunt her short stories. At the end of the journey would be a day in the Bodleian, listening to the rain beat down outside, or a dusty room in a provincial church, where she would be undisturbed for hours at a time, her head full of music which had remained unsung for centuries:

  The patient organist

  Who scrolled this clef;

  The boy who drew him horned

  On Gibbons in F;

  Singers and hearers all

  Are dumb and deaf –

  ‘Dumb and deaf, dead and dust,’6

  The solitary life which this work imposed suited Sylvia. At home in London she developed a foolproof method of repulsing unwanted company. Whenever the bell rang, she put on her hat, ‘so that in case of bores I could mendaciously exclaim, “Oh, how unfortunate! I am just going out”, and walk as far as the Underground with them – a mere hundred yards and well worth it.’7 The bores were usually adjuncts to a group of young men from Harrow among whom she had made friends in her last few years at the school and who were now, when not up at university, as often as not down in London taking advantage of Sylvia’s hospitality and sofa-bed. They were centred around one brilliant and unhappy young man, Stephen Tomlin, who was of the type characterised by L.P. Hartley in his memoir of Harrow as ‘non-conformers’, ‘who treated the school as a kind of hotel, useful as providing a night’s lodging, but quite inadequate as a stage for the drama of their lives.’8 This sort of boy did not sprint enthusiastically down to the football fields; there was more irony than gusto in his rendering of ‘Rome was not Built in a Day’. He was the antithesis of Ronald Eiloart: highly-strung, sexually ambivalent – not George Warner’s sort of boy at all. Sylvia, generally viewed as eccentric and outcast at Harrow, seven or eight years their senior and now embellished with a London flat, appealed strongly to Tomlin and his friends as a mentor. They conceded little to her femininity, nothing to her youth, but if Sylvia was prepared to offer them food, shelter, intelligent conversation and advice, they were more than happy to take it.

  In 1918 Stephen Tomlin (always known as ‘Tommy’) was up at New College, Oxford reading Greats and being miserable. There was a great deal of pressure on him from his father, a successful K.C. soon to be a judge, and later a peer, to keep his nose to the grindstone, to apply himself and to enjoy neo-Gothic architecture, but after a term Tommy had had enough and ran away to Cornwall. There he decided to chuck up his degree and become a sculptor, a decision which met with fierce opposition at home but, once digested, was paid for handsomely; and Tommy, who had considerable talent, became a student of Frank Dobson.

  Sylvia was his mainstay throughout this period of trauma and soul-searching. She loved his regard, ‘so serious, and so open’,9 his mature intellect and mordant wit. He had a devious mind and loved to argue with Sylvia, or, by making some carefully placed remark, set her off on an imaginative flight of her own. This was the benign side of an ability to manipulate people which Tommy habitually misused. He was not conventionally handsome; short, with a sallow skin, deep-set grey eyes under a prominent brow and a crooked nose, yet he held an almost mesmeric charm over men and women alike. In David Garnett’s words, ‘there can never have been a young man so much run after and so unfailingly charming to all of his pursuers’, and ‘there was no one […] whose laughter expressed a wider range of the emotions. Tenderness, indulgence, confession, apology, accusation, forgiveness, criticism: all such states of mind were expressed in laughter: besides which he would laugh long and merrily, or with tragic bitterness.’10 But long before he became the most intimate friend of everyone in Bloomsbury, Tommy and Sylvia were walking miles at night in the country together, or sitting up late at 125, singing duets from Purcell, composing songs of their own – words by Tommy, music by Sylvia – or reading the poems of Blake, which moved Tommy more than any others. He was an easy weeper.

  One day in 1919 Tommy brought another Old Harrovian, George Howe, and George’s elder sister Bea to Sylvia’s flat. Bea, a charming and beautiful twenty-year-old, was struck by Sylvia’s appearance: carelessly dressed, angular, excessively thin and gawky, they could hardly have been less similar. Bea was observant rather than critical and felt that the young men from Harrow ‘treated her more like the Universal Provider that Mr William Whiteley called himself down her road than as a young woman of intellect and unusual looks’.11 It also seemed to Bea that Sylvia lived off cups of black coffee and cigarettes, as indeed she did, bar a few winkles and the odd scrambled egg. Bea, who had Latin blood, English manners, the colourful background of being recently transported from Chile, and an affectionate heart, seemed to Sylvia a personification of all kinds of elusive feminine virtues and became lodged in Sylvia’s imagination as a ‘nymph’. A mutual interest soon grew to liking, and liking to a deep, long-lasting friendship. Sylvia, Tommy, Bea and George formed a convivial group, whether they were fashionably exploring the East End and Dockland together or jaunting off to the country for the day. The only reason which would make Sylvia send them away was if ‘Doctor Buck’ was coming.

  One day in 1919 Ronald Eiloart turned up at Queen’s Road to see Sylvia. He had survived the war and come back to take up architecture again, with moderate success. Now aged thirty-one, he was as amiable as ever, tall, easy-mannered and still slightly dull. George’s death had shocked him profoundly, for he had been virtually a member of the Warner family for years, and the disintegration of the household which had been his support left him feeling homeless and lonely. Over tea he came to the purpose of his visit and asked Sylvia formally for Nora’s hand in marriage.

  Whether Sylvia had wind of Ronald’s intentions before then is impossible to say, but she quickly and delightedly accepted the proposition. Ronald’s family, however, disapproved deeply of the match. A bossy fifty-three-year-old widow was not their idea of a hero’s welcome, and Nora did nothing to ameliorate their impressions, quarrelling with Ronald’s female relations one by one until all of them were cut off. At the wedding, which took place in September 1919 at St Petroc
’s, South Brent, the Eiloart side of the church dressed in black.

  When Ronald went to live at Little Zeal, Nora supported him and there was no need for him to practise as an architect. He led the life of a leisured countryman and George’s fishing tackle and carpentry tools were brought back into use again. He set up a small poultry farm in the field adjacent to the house and assisted Nora in her latest enthusiasm, which was for chow-breeding (Nora, like her father before her, was a ‘besotted dog-worshipper’).12 If Nora depended on Ronald, she didn’t let it show, at least not to Sylvia, and was widely assumed to have had him under her thumb from the first. Sylvia said later of her step-father that he was ‘gentle, affectionate, rather dunderheaded, inexhaustibly kind. She [Nora] scorned him in her heart, and had no kindness for him, and no respect for him, and he wasn’t so dunderheaded that he didn’t know it.’13 Nora’s burial instructions remained unchanged, undersigned ‘E.M. Eiloart, September 1919’. In some ways, what Nora and Ronald were espousing as well as each other was the absence of George.

  Relations between Sylvia and her mother began to improve almost immediately. Sylvia, apart from being genuinely pleased at the marriage, was vastly relieved to have had the problem of Nora shifted from her shoulders. All the time while Nora had been being brave at Little Zeal by herself, she had not managed to be pleasant, and visits to Devon had taken on the aspect of a dreaded duty. But now there was Ronald, and several dozen hens, ducks and chows to visit as well.

  There was still no prospect of Sylvia getting married, though she was now in her late twenties. Her relationship with Buck was predominant over a number of more casual affairs, one with Geoffrey Sturt, the old family friend. Like Buck, he was older than her, had been a friend of her father and had a wife with whom Sylvia was on very friendly terms. It has been suggested14 that had not Sylvia – and Percy – been so fond of Mrs Buck they might have brought their affair out into the open. As it was, Sylvia was constrained to behave with absolute decorum veiled as indifference. With Tommy, though, there was no need to conceal her feelings and possibly as a result of this, and because of his open manner and charm, Sylvia fell in love with him. Tommy admired her very much and valued her as a uniquely entertaining and affectionate friend, but did not return Sylvia’s feelings. Sylvia’s adoption of a rather sentimental maternal tone when talking of him – ‘the dear boy’ and ‘the poor child’15 – is perhaps a measure of how she appreciated the situation and was trying to come to terms with it.

  In the Easter of 1921, Tommy, Sylvia, George and Bea went on a holiday together to the Weld Arms, an inn at East Lulworth. Dorset was new ground for all of them and they fell in love with the beautiful coast, the rolling chalk downs and a cove at Arish Mell Gap where Sylvia surprised George Howe by stripping off in front of them all and wading into the sea. Tommy, who was to a greater or lesser extent in love with each of his three companions, was particularly charming and lively during the holiday and it was with regrets that they left him to explore Dorset further by himself as they wobbled off to Wool station in the back of a wagonette.

  What Tommy found was a village about five miles west of Lulworth called Chaldon Herring, or East Chaldon. The village lay in a fold of the downs, separated from the vast expanse of Winfrith Heath to the north by a ridge on which stood five ancient tumuli, the Five Marys, and to the south separated from the steep cliffs at the sea by a mile and a half of incomparably beautiful downland. Tommy, approaching along the valley at night, knew he had found the ideal spot for a retreat, and set about finding a cottage to rent. He approached the vicarage first and found it occupied by a lady called Mrs Ashburnham and a number of scottie dogs. She suggested a couple in the village who had a half-cottage to spare and after some delicate preliminary negotiations, Tommy came to an agreement with Mr and Mrs Wallis to rent their two-bedroomed cottage at a pound a week.

  In September Tommy was back in London packing up his sculptures and farewelling his friends. He was going to spend the winter working in Chaldon. There was, he told Sylvia, a remarkable man who lived on the outskirts of the village: a recluse and a philosopher, with a very fine head, who was thought to be a writer. Sylvia did not attend very much to this news, I had known so many of Tommy’s swans – indeed I had been one myself.’16 Every village in England had its ‘Dostoievsky Corner’, inhabited for the most part by bores. Chaldon Herring was unlikely to be an exception.

  But enthusiasm for his recluse bulked Tommy’s letters from Dorset and Sylvia, stung into action, bought the only available work by the man, Mr Theodore Francis Powys, Soliloquies of a Hermit, which begins:

  Am I a fool? Is not a fool the best title for a priest? And I am a good priest. Though not of the Church, I am of the Church. Though not of the faith, I am of the faith. Though not of the fold, I am of the fold; a priest in the cloud of God, beside the Altar of Stone. Near beside me is a flock of real sheep; above me a cloud of misty white embraces the noonday light of the Altar. I am without a belief; – a belief is too easy a road to God.17

  The book’s odd mixture of rhetoric and candour, its exposition of the amoral ‘moods of God’, and the author’s intriguing self-portrait, written in the third person, excited Sylvia’s curiosity. At Tommy’s suggestion, she sent Powys a short play she had been writing – on what subject is unknown – and a correspondence began, Powys’s first letters being supremely cautious and artful. Soliloquies of a Hermit had been published in 1918 and Powys’s only other published work, An Interpretation of Genesis, was privately printed in 1911, but he had been writing short stories and novels steadily since 1916 and putting them away, unread, in cupboards and drawers. One by one they were taken out and lent to Tommy, whose company and encouragement brought Powys out of a slough of disillusionment and depression. Soon a parcel arrived at Sylvia’s flat addressed several times over in Theodore’s small spidery hand, and contained a manuscript, ‘Mr Tasker’s Gods’, for Sylvia’s opinion. ‘As I read on, though I grew more and more enthralled I also grew more and more frightened and oppressed by this genius – I knew it was genius – which for all its creative power could see in Creation nothing but the blackening of an ancient curse, a curse which dooms all creatures to destroy or to be destroyed.’18 She was shocked – it was a bleaker version than the finally published one – and she was intrigued.

  In March 1922 Sylvia went to Chaldon to stay with Tommy and meet Mr Powys. They arrived at Beth Car, the Powys’s small redbrick villa, after a walk in the rain over the Five Marys and round by West Chaldon. They stood dripping in the parlour while Theodore and his young wife Violet, a local woman, assessed this latest of Tommy’s visitors from London. Once she had dried her glasses, Sylvia was able to do some observing of her own: ‘I know that I must have expected him to look like something hagiological – a hermit or a prophet consumed with the fire of God’s word, because the first thing that struck me about him was that his beauty was of a pagan and classical kind, and that instead of a hermit or a prophet I was looking at a rather weather-beaten Zeus.’19 Stories had gone before Sylvia of her great learning and intellect, and Powys gently teased out of her responses to a number of exaggerated claims of this sort. It was a polite form of cross-examination, and Sylvia stood up to it well:

  – I daresay you can read Hebrew quite easily, my dear.

  – I can read no language but English and French.

  – Violet, do you hear that? Sylvia says she can read French. And astronomy … I’m sure you must know a great deal about the stars, for you are not afraid of walking in the dark.

  – I know nothing about the stars. Perhaps that is why.

  – Yes, my dear, I think that is very likely.20

  Two days after this Theo was standing behind the eagle at St Nicholas’s Church, Chaldon Herring, assuring the congregation at evening prayer that ‘he shall come unto us as the rain, the latter rain that watereth the earth’, as near a reference to Sylvia as he could decently get (Tommy being the former rain, Sylvia the latter), having searched the Apocryp
ha to no avail for ‘a passage about a young lady coming down from London’.21 Despite the fact that Sylvia and Theodore were fairly mercilessly exploiting each other for entertainment and despite, also, Powys’s extreme caution about strangers and Sylvia’s high, loud voice, a genuine and immediate friendship sprang up on this first visit to Chaldon. Sylvia was wildly enthusiastic about the village and before she left had evolved a plan for living at Rat’s House, a tiny cottage appended to a barn and sheepfold on Chaldon Down, lacking any amenity but an outdoor tap. It came to nothing more than a few after-dinner conversations at Queen’s Road, but Theodore perversely encouraged the idea for months afterwards.

  Braced by these draughts of urban air, Powys was soon writing again and the new story, ‘Hester Dominy’, was brought up to London by Tommy and discussed with Sylvia. They agreed that a publisher ought to be found but that one story alone might not excite publication. Sylvia was left with the manuscript and the task of taking it to Tommy’s only influential acquaintance in the literary world, David Garnett, who ran the Nonesuch Press and a bookshop on Taviton Street. There went Sylvia to do battle on Theodore’s behalf:

  In the bookshop I found an extremely young-looking man whose hair was long and thick and untidy and whose suit was so blue that I felt he might blow up his horn at any moment. When I entered he retreated behind a desk, like some innocent wild animal that has never seen man before but who knows by the promptings of instinct that man is something to be mistrusted.22

  What the innocent wild animal was fleeing from was this:

  an alarming lady with a clear and minatory voice, dark, dripping with tassels – like a black and slender Barb caparisoned for war – with jingling ear-rings, swinging fox-tails, black silk acorn hanging from umbrella, black tasselled gloves, dog chains, key rings, tripped lightly in and speaking to me in sentences like scissors told me … it was you, dearest Sylvia.23