Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  The warm reminiscence is of a cool meeting. Sylvia left ‘Hester Dominy’ with misgivings, but Garnett, who very much liked the story, sent it on to Charles Prentice of Chatto & Windus, a man of great intelligence and culture. When two more stories were ready, ‘The Left Leg’ and ‘Abraham Men’, Prentice prepared to publish them under the title ‘The Left Leg’. The stories were dedicated in turn to Sylvia, David Garnett and Tommy; Powys’ trinity.

  II

  In July 1922, Sylvia bought a map of Essex in a sale at Whiteley’s, attracted to it ‘because I had never been there’.24 The names intrigued her – Willingdale Spain, Willingdale Doe, Old Shrill and Shellow Powells – and so did the colouring of the map. On the August bank holiday she set off to explore. Walking out from Great Wakering, she turned off the track onto the marsh and found a creek beyond which was a low green shore: ‘I stood there for a long time, watching the slow pushing water, and an old white horse grazing on the further shore. I followed the creek, foolishly supposing there would be some way across. It curled either way, and I began to realise that the low green shore was an island. And this again was marvellous to me, and I stood for another long time, and letting my mind drift with the tidal water.’

  Sylvia had left the map at home by mistake and after her confusion over the island was fairly thoroughly lost. A storm gathered as she was trying to make her way back by the sun, and ‘the marsh instantly darkened into an alarming flatness’. When the storm broke she took to her heels in a panic, being the only object for miles tall enough to be struck by lightning. To add to the day’s odd experiences, she heard a voice calling to her from a cattle shed as she ran past it in the rain. Some farmworkers were sheltering there and took her in. ‘We watched the lightning stabbing at the marsh. It was a considerable storm.’ The man with the voice took Sylvia home, where her dripping clothes were hung in a back-kitchen and she was given a great deal to eat. Sitting in the parlour wearing a rough-textured dress lent by the daughter of the house and listening to a very loud canary, Sylvia was supremely happy. She went home in her own clothes, still wet, and the daughter’s woollen bloomers, determined to go back to the marshes as soon as possible and stay the night at an inn.

  She remembered the map next time she got on the train from Fenchurch Street, but omitted to notice that there were no inns on the part of the marshes she had chosen to visit – the Blackwater marsh near Southminster. She walked all day (seventeen miles was nothing to her) and at one point saw the sail of a boat behind some trees, seeming to move on land. She was so enraptured by the landscape that she resolved to sleep out if necessary, but a boy on the road told her of a Mrs May who would put her up and Sylvia walked back to find the house and a tall, thin woman picking runner beans. When Sylvia woke next morning in Mrs May’s spare room she remembered where she was and dashed to look out of the window: ‘I could see nothing but an intense blue sky and a thick white mist, a mushroom mist, from which the thatched roof of the barn and some low tree-tops emerged. This melting veil over my new landscape pleased me more than any clear sight could do. I watched it thin, and become stained with the presence of a barn, and some sheds, and the bean-vines in the garden, and some apple-trees, and the green of the marsh beyond. Going downstairs, I found Mrs May, and at once asked her if I could spend another night at Drinkwaters.’

  Sylvia was in a ‘solemn rapture’. She went out onto the marsh with Villon’s Testament, found a sheltered place, and sat there reading all day. ‘The nest of tall grass gave onto a little bank of shingle, the ripples clinked over it, the sun shone. I knew that mysterious sensation of being where I wanted to be and as I wanted to be, socketted into the universe, and passionately quiescent.’ On her way back to Drinkwaters, she decided to stay on indefinitely.

  The visit to the marshes marked a change in Sylvia; she felt, as she was to say later, that she had become properly her own person, having been till then ‘the creature of whoever I was with’. She was twenty-eight – en l’an de mon trentiesme aage. Her first youth, with its peculiar oppressions, was over, as were the most difficult and lonely years of her bereavement. In Essex that hot August she drew breath, took stock and in her mood of ‘passionate quiescence’ was surprised by ‘the discovery that it was possible to write poetry’.25 Her stay lasted a month, but the poetry continued to be ‘possible’ all the rest of her life. Sylvia had discovered a new country – one whose maps she had been studying for years.

  Clothes, books and Bea were all requested by post from London and all, in due course, arrived, but no other friends were asked out to share the beauty of the marshes, for it was too private a pleasure. Later in the year she returned to Blackwater for a day with David Garnett. His view of the landscape was less lyrical than Sylvia’s and his objection to mud was greater, but he at least acknowledged that ‘the grey marshes had a melancholy eerie beauty that was all their own.’ He paid more attention to his new companion’s behaviour and the turns her frenetic mental energy could take: ‘Sylvia gave an extraordinary display of verbal fireworks. Ideas, epigrams and paradoxes raced through her mind and poured from her mouth as though she were delirious […] But by late afternoon, when we had climbed in the dark into another empty, badly-lit railway carriage and were being trundled half-frozen from Nowhere back to London, Sylvia was silent and exhausted. Brilliance and shyness were alike forgotten.’26

  1922 was the year in which the first volume of Tudor Church Music appeared, William Byrd’s English Church Music, Part 1. In 1923 it was followed by the first of three John Taverner volumes. The impact made by these authoritative and fascinating books on the musical world was considerable, and the editors began to enjoy a muted celebrity. Sylvia was in one way more professional about her job than previously – she was not working all hours at it. Among the things she brought home with her were dozens of smooth, blank rotographs which would otherwise have been thrown away as wastepaper. On these she wrote poems – about one a week in 1922 – with a delicious sense of indulging a secret vice.

  Poetry was not her only self-indulgence. In 1921 she had sent a play to Powys, and in 1922 she wrote another one while at Drinkwaters, a morbid one-act piece called ‘The Sin-Eater’. It was Tommy who had told her of sin-eating – the consumption of a collection of cold scraps, peelings and bits of hair by a vocational ‘eater’ to dispose mystically of a dead man’s sins – and with Theo, Tommy had concocted a one-act play of his own on the subject. Sylvia’s play shows evidence of her growing admiration for Powys’s work in the depiction of the ranting, thuggish Craddock and the kindly Sin-Eater, Abel Morgan. There is a generally malevolent air to it which was not repeated so crudely in any later work, and which attempts to be imitative of Powys, but the rest is all Sylvia trying hard not to be amusing, and succeeding. Her heroine, Hester, has just stifled her husband with a bolster, only to be reviled by the man for whom she did it, who is suspected of the murder. Her passions thwarted, Hester denounces him and freely confesses to adultery and murder. She poisons the scraps, her husband’s ‘sins’, and intends to eat them herself, narrowly preventing the Sin-Eater, a gentle and contented man, from getting there first. The hypocrisy of the local Chapel congregation prevents them from accepting Hester’s confession – she is taken to an asylum – and the Sin-Eater is arrested for the murder.

  ‘The Sin-Eater’ is dramatically neat and economical, observes the unities and encompasses in its fifty-one small, handwritten pages several convincing portraits and a complex plot. There is also room for some of Sylvia’s favourite ironies and her preoccupation with the distribution of innocence and guilt, her most persistent theme:

  Hester: Tell me, is it hard to take away sins?

  Abel: I can hardly say, ma’am. I’ve done it for so long, I hardly think about it now.

  Hester: Do you suffer with all the sins you take on you?

  Abel: No ma’am. I’m a very healthy man.

  This will remind any reader of Sylvia’s poetry of the argument of ‘The Scapegoat’, written in 1924
(and, incidentally, a sort of joke about Sylvia’s own position on the Church Music committee):

  See the scapegoat, happy beast,

  From every personal sin released

  And in the desert hidden apart

  Dancing with a careless heart.27

  Tommy and Theo’s version of ‘The Sin-Eater’ had been written the previous winter, to while away the long evenings at Chaldon. Tommy’s life was dividing quite sharply in two: in Chaldon he worked hard, was thoughtful, charming and footloose, sleeping under hedges if he wished. Theodore’s brother, John Cowper Powys, had noticed the changes wrought at Beth Car by ‘Mr Tom Tomlin the Sculptor, a bewitching gipsy-like young William Blake, with the most caressing respect for Theodore, who he calls “Theo” and makes the old rogue laugh and chuckle till he’s red in the face.’28 In London on the other hand, Tommy was becoming well-known in Bloomsbury, owing partly to his friendship with David Garnett and partly to Frank Dobson’s connections with the London Artists’ Association, run by Maynard Keynes. During the Twenties and early Thirties Tommy sculpted some of the leading Bloomsbury figures; Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, David Garnett and Virginia Woolf, who alone of the four did not find Tomlin attractive. Frank Dobson painted a quasi-Futurist portrait of Sylvia in 1921, but Tommy never used her as a model, though Bea Howe did sit to him. By 1923 Tommy was a predictable guest at the most fashionable parties in London, had been nominated by Vogue as the most promising young sculptor of the month and was enjoying a certain notoriety as a promiscuous lover. He did not take Sylvia with him into this higher sphere.

  After Tommy had been young and promising for a while he began to be depressive and was psycho-analysed by an expensive and well-known consultant, Edward Glover. In one way it did not help him, because his subsequent tendency to talk at length about his own mental states inhibited the workings of his charm, at least for those onto whom he unburdened himself, Sylvia among them. The importance he set by Bloomsbury friendships, many of which were sexual and emotional as much as intellectual or artistic, indicates that he derived a comfort from them which the real achievements of his own work and his nurturing of Theo’s failed to provide. In his third volume of autobiography, The Familiar Faces, David Garnett tells an odd story of Tommy disguising himself as a beggar to tell fortunes at a party held by Garnett. From behind his disguise, Tommy was able to tell the guests, all of whom he knew well, a few home truths, but afterwards he seemed ‘subdued and ill at ease […] for his friends had spoken about him to each other in his presence with such callous indifference to his feelings, and had adopted an arrogantly patronising tone in speaking to him, which convicted them of an unforgivable lack of delicacy.’29 Such sensitivity might have been appropriate had not Tommy preluded it with his own ‘callously indifferent’ deception. That he did not judge himself but was ready to ‘convict’ others shows a large capacity for being offended.

  In May 1923, The Left Leg was published. It had already excited interest through the advance copies, and by the end of the year, when Chatto & Windus published Powys’s novel Black Bryony, Theo had acquired a group of admirers, some so keen and forward-looking that they were able to spot progressions in Powys’s art, although Black Bryony had been written several years before The Left Leg. In December, when Theo and Violet were coming on a rare trip to London, seeing off their elder son Dicky to Kenya, Tommy took the opportunity to arrange a party in Theo’s honour. The party was to be the culmination of several days’ activity. On the first day, which happened to be 6 December, Sylvia’s thirtieth birthday, both Theo and Violet were silenced and exhausted by tea-time and Sylvia felt it ‘a rather painful afternoon’.30 Her dinner party later in the week was more of a success, for when funds allowed it Sylvia was an excellent cook, and Theo was deeply impressed by the marrons glacés served as a sweetmeat: ‘It was a moral victory, for I don’t think he liked the taste of the one he ate. Certainly when I offered him another he refused it with a grave gesture as though I had pressed him to a second sacramental wafer.’31 The grand party at Tommy’s studio, just off the Fulham Road, got off to a bad start because the host – Tommy – wasn’t there. He and Sylvia arrived late and anxious, to discover the guest of honour handing round the sandwiches and the party in full swing. Theo, ‘perfectly and unaffectedly at his ease’,32 had melted the constraint of the guests as soon as he entered the room. This was the man who, in Chaldon, would go to almost any lengths to avoid the mild social challenge posed by Mrs Lucas the postwoman, or Mrs Ashburnham out walking the scotties. He once lay at full length in a field of stubble, hoping that lady might not spot him as she passed, only to hear her saying quizzically, as she stood over him, ‘Communing with Nature, Mr Powys?’33

  Tommy had made a large cake embellished with a left leg sculpted from pink icing. Theo cut the cake with a nib, the pen being mightier than the sword, and thanked all his friends profusely for their hospitality, leaving London the next day ‘unassailably determined never to come back to it’.34

  At about this time Sylvia moved from her flat on Queen’s Road to a much more comfortable one on the road parallel to it, Inverness Terrace. The ground floor of Number 121 ‘pandered to every bourgeois gene in my being; not only was it self-contained, it was positively genteel.’35 In the flat she chose bright colours for her cushions and covers, all sewn, patchworked or appliqued expertly by hand, and she brightened up the curtains in her tall windows by adding a large figure to each, which became known as ‘Duncan and Vanessa’. The bathroom was an ex-conservatory with ‘decency arabesques’ painted over its glass walls. ‘A scrupulously modest person might have judged them insufficient, but I was not obsessed with modesty, and at that time there really wasn’t enough of me to make a fuss about. Besides, there would be steam; and in the summer, trees’;36 sycamores, in the small back garden. Here, too, Sylvia acquired a Cockney charwoman, Mrs Florence Keates, and a black chow from her mother’s kennels, called William. These two objects of affection significantly improved the quality of Sylvia’s daily life.

  At 121 Sylvia began to entertain more regularly and drew a more select circle of Old Harrovians than previously; Victor Butler, the son of the Governor of Burma and a brilliant and witty mathematician, Tommy, the brothers Angus and Douglas Davidson and a friend of theirs from Cambridge, Geoffrey Webb, known as ‘Wobb’. The only close friendship with a woman, apart from Bea, which Sylvia developed at this time was with Dorothy Wadham, the secretary to one of the London orchestras, who was, with Sylvia, a member of the Bach Choir. She had spotted Sylvia on the bus after a rehearsal, a tall thin figure swaying in time to unheard music, abstracted and blissfully happy. ‘Doffles’ followed Sylvia off the bus and introduced herself.

  Sylvia saw her aunt Purefoy frequently, and they often played piano duets together, the more taxing and vigorous the better. Purefoy had married the writer Arthur Machen in 1903 and they lived in Melina Place, St John’s Wood, with their two young children. The Machens kept open house for their friends every Saturday night, a motley assortment of artists, journalists, musicians and theatre people – both Arthur and Purefoy had been members of the Benson Company in the early years of the century. Frank Hudleston was often there, a lively, lonely character and perfectly eccentric: ‘he was totally detached from his environment.’37 Frank wore his clothes until they dropped – quite literally – from his back and used to attempt to throw a banana skin across the Edgware Road every morning on his way to work at the War Office. Once inside the office, however, he was regarded as ‘the most ponderously reliable of authorities’.38

  In the summer of 1923 or 1924 Sylvia was commissioned to meet Purefoy’s son Hilary on the train from Paddington to Newton Abbot. Hilary was a young schoolboy at Merchant Taylors, off to spend a holiday at his Aunt Nora’s house. Ronald Eiloart was at South Brent station to meet them with the Model T Ford which took them the mile or so to Little Zeal, and Hilary was greeted by Nora’s voice from an upper window quoting from one of the novels of Somerville and Ross: ‘Is that my
darling Major Yates? Thanks be to God! I have someone to take my part at last.’ The expansive mood could soon wear off, but it was a sign of approval if Nora talked – sometimes entirely – in quotations. Hilary had been schooled in the major source, Dickens, by his parents, who had the same habit of extravagant quoting. He could answer back appositely, but was still young enough to come a cropper at other hurdles. Looking at his aunt’s tiny hands, he remarked that Uncle Frank had warned him to be careful because ‘your Aunt Nora’s got a fist like a leg of mutton.’ A stony silence was broken by Nora’s reply, ‘Oh he did, did he?’39

  The house was not spotless. Behind the curtains in Hilary’s room lay a quantity of dead flies and there was dust everywhere. Nora’s cooking was excellent, but to the boy the servings seemed disappointingly small. Seeing an earwig in the curry one evening, Hilary exclaimed excitedly. The look Nora gave him could have killed several small boys, but Sylvia threw her head back and cackled. When it was her turn to be served, Sylvia said, ‘No really darling, I don’t think I could,’ and ostentatiously ate a little rice.

  Hilary was very much in awe of his aunt and cousin, but for the latter awe was tempered with admiration. On walks over Dartmoor together, Sylvia did not adapt her pace to his and went ahead at a lick, jumping over streams and bounding up hills, while he was left to make the best of it. Nora hired a baby grand piano for Sylvia’s longer visits in the summer, and in the evenings she was expected to play and Hilary sing. The boy disliked this, naturally enough. It was just one element in a generally uncomfortable holiday, for he noticed that Aunt Nora ‘never passed by an opportunity to scorn’.

  III

  In 1923 Sylvia had begun to write a novel alongside the poems which she now considered part of her life. It was called ‘The Quick and the Dead’, but did not develop satisfactorily, and she abandoned it in favour of another story she wanted to try out, that of a contemporary witch. She had read Margaret Murray’s book The Witch-Cult in Western Europe when it was published in 1921 and, more recently, Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials of Scotland. In Pitcairn’s account of witch trials ‘the actual speech of the accused impressed on me that these witches were witches for love; that witchcraft was more than Miss Murray’s Dianic cult; it was the romance of their hard lives, their release from dull futures.’40 At first she wrote a poem – lost or unidentifiable – on the theme of vocation to witchcraft. Later she began a novel, titled ‘Lolly Willowes’. ‘One line led me to another, one smooth page to the next. It was as easy as whistling […] I told nobody. I barely told myself. I felt no obligation to go on, let alone finish.’41 In this leisurely manner, the novel spun itself out for almost a year and in the autumn of 1924, when she answered an advertisement for a cottage to let in Idbury, Oxfordshire, she took the manuscript with her and read most of it aloud to Edie Sturt, Geoffrey’s wife, who had come to stay.