Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  In 1926 there was a crisis between Sylvia and Tommy and an irrevocable, deeply wounding break. The cause is unknown, but it seems to have been inextricably bound up with two things: the imbalance in their affections for each other, and Tommy’s confused state of mind. Psycho-analysis had encouraged him to hunt out explanations for his behaviour, a habit which aggravated his strict conscience. Possibly, analysis made him irresponsible, shifting the blame for his actions onto the past, much in the way that he had shifted the charge of insensitivity from himself onto Garnett’s guests at the party. He was a coward in difficult personal situations, and may have put off for years telling Sylvia what he readily told Bea, that he found Sylvia’s open affection for him embarrassing and her person physically repulsive. Once his best and most admired companion, by the mid-Twenties Tommy had relegated Sylvia to a lowlier position, calling on her when in the grip of one of his partially-demented attacks of self-disgust, ranting and railing with ghastly lucidity. Sylvia bore all this out of love and the impulse to support him, but perhaps on one of those disturbing evenings he turned on her and told her what he felt.

  In the winter of 1926, Tommy ran off to Paris with his friend Oliver Strachey’s daughter Julia, whom he married the following July. Virginia Woolf, who was at the wedding, was amused to see Judge Tomlin locked into his pew, having mistaken the hinge for the latch, but wrote to her sister Vanessa, ‘I repeat for the thousandth time: I cannot see the physical charm of that little woodpecker man.’66 The marriage degenerated fairly quickly. Julia was a bright and naive girl, not Tommy’s match intellectually and perturbed by his drinking, infidelity, depressions and remorseful guiltiness. She was later to think he had a ‘daemon’ and ‘an illness of the soul’,67 and that he lacked a capacity for ordinary human affection. His work did not attract the attention it deserved and he became increasingly bitter. It is interesting to note that the piece which is considered his best, a head of Virginia Woolf, was never officially finished, as Mrs Woolf ‘took a shudder at the impact of his neurotic clinging persistency’68 and would not complete the sittings. In the tiny cottage in Wiltshire, Julia Strachey saw Tommy’s hold on his talent loosen: ‘every day Tommy would come out from his studio, where perhaps he had been working, perhaps sitting motionless, simply staring desperately ahead. Perhaps weeping. When he emerged, he would stand about, looking out of the kitchen window, but soon stray back into his studio, shutting the door behind him.’69 From 1927 onwards, Sylvia did not speak of him.

  Early in 1927, Sylvia finished her second novel, ‘Mr Fortune’s Maggot’, ‘in a state of semi-hallucination’. ‘I remember writing the last paragraph, and reading the conclusion and then impulsively writing the envoy, with a feeling of compunction, almost guilt, towards this guiltless man I had created and left in such a fix.’70 Sylvia had had the idea for the book in the winter of 1925 in the form of a vivid dream: ‘A man stood alone on an ocean beach, wringing his hands in an intensity of despair; as I saw him in my dream I knew something about him. He was a missionary, he was middle-aged and a deprived character, his name was Hegarty, he was on an island where he had made only one convert and at the moment I saw him he had realised that the convert was no convert at all. I jumped out of bed and began to write this down and even as I wrote a great deal that I knew from the dream began to scatter; but the main facts and the man’s loneliness, simplicity and despair and the look of the island all remained as actual as something I had really experienced.’71 In the evening Duncan Grant came to dinner, but as soon as he had left, Sylvia went back to writing. What she wrote that day remained the beginning of the book ‘with hardly a word’s alteration’. There was a break between this first inspired spurt and the main effort of writing, which was during the latter half of 1926, ‘Elinor Barley’ having been shelved. Sylvia was suspicious of the book flowing so obligingly. In August 1926, she wrote to David Garnett: ‘My missionary is an impossible length, fatally sodomitic, alternately monotonous and melodramatic, his only success is an aigre-doux quality which will infuriate any reader after the third page. I love him with a dreadful uneasy love which in itself denotes him a cripple,’72 but she remained completely engrossed in her story. In the middle of writing the storm on the island, she took William the chow out for his midnight walk and had got half-way down Inverness Terrace under a raincoat and umbrella before she noticed that in Bayswater it was a mild autumn night.

  Mr Fortune’s Maggot is the story of a conscientious missionary, Timothy Fortune, trying to convert the laughing, naked inhabitants of a South Seas island to Christianity. When Mr Fortune discovers that his sole convert, a young boy named Lueli, is in fact still worshipping an old wooden idol in secret, he sets out to persuade him to destroy it:

  For a good hour Mr Fortune talked on, commanding, reasoning, expostulating, explaining, persuading, threatening. Lueli never answered him, never even looked at him. He sat with downcast eyes in utter stubborness and immobility.

  The night was sultry and absolutely still. Mr Fortune dripped with sweat, he felt as though he were heaving enormous boulders into a bottomless pit. He continued to heave his words into silence, a silence only broken by the hissing of the lamp, or the creak of his chair as he changed from one uneasy position to another, but the pauses grew longer between each sentence. He was weary, and at his wits’ end. But he could see nothing for it but to go on talking. And now he became so oppressed by the silence into which he spoke that he could foresee a moment when he would have to go on talking because he would be afraid to hold his tongue.73

  In the end, it is the priest who loses his god. He leaves the island in a state of utter disillusionment. Little wonder that Sylvia felt ‘compunction, almost guilt’ towards him, for she did not intend the book to have such a sombre undertow. She began the story in a comic vein and with a note from the O.E.D. on the second meaning of ‘maggot’, ‘a whimsical or perverse fancy; a crotchet’, but it is the first meaning which persists through Timothy Fortune’s tragedy, with its implications of infection and decay. The ultimate message of the book is extremely bleak:

  For man’s will is a demon that will not let him be. It leads him to the edge of a clear pool; and while he sits admiring it, with his soul suspended over it like a green branch and dwelling in its own reflection, will stretches out his hand and closes his fingers upon a stone – a stone to throw into it.74

  Like Lolly Willowes, Mr Fortune’s Maggot is an appealing blend of cleverness, oddity and pathos, and as such seemed to fit into the voguish Twenties genre of the ‘fantasy novel’, typified by Garnett’s Lady Into Fox. But there is much more to Sylvia’s two novels than their oddity. Both books are rich in imagery and extraordinarily sensual descriptive prose; the author’s imagination is wayward rather than whimsical. But probably her greatest achievement in the two books is her handling of the central characters; Lolly, the woman fleeing from her fate of ordinariness and Timothy Fortune, the mild man brought down by love, both mute, middle-aged English failures – the most unpromising material. Without laughing at them, glorifying them or sentimentalising them, Sylvia opens these characters up to the reader’s sympathy, and in the process they acquire a reality which overflows the books which were meant to contain them.

  Mr Fortune’s Maggot was received enthusiastically by a public – especially an American public – whose appetite had been whetted by Lolly Willowes. The reviews were sometimes embarrassingly enthusiastic, the sales again good, again Sylvia just missed a prize – this time the James Tait Black – and was selected by an American book club, the Literary Guild. Sylvia now thought of herself as a writer, though it is doubtful that her colleagues on Tudor Church Music noticed, as they were working hard on William Byrd and Thomas Tallis at the time. Oddly enough, Sylvia found it soothing that Buck remained unimpressed by her literary achievements. It was a relief ‘to be reduced to my common denomination again and to be treated just as an ordinary accustomed Sylvia and to have my life-long convictions recognised as extempore’75 – every now and then
.

  Buoyed up by her success as a writer, Sylvia conceived an ambitious project in the summer of 1927: a study of Theodore Powys. It was intended to be more of a portrait than a biography, for the phenomenon of Theo fascinated her, not his outwardly uneventful life, of which he himself said, ‘I did nothing, I went nowhere, I met nobody.’76 In his reply to Sylvia’s proposition he wrote encouragingly: ‘You have written about Satan so I daresay to write about Theodore would not be amiss. You won’t waste your time, if you wrote about a swallow’s course you would write well […] You may say anything you like. I approve of everything you could ever say here or here-after.’77 But Sylvia needed neither advice nor encouragement. This was ground she felt absolutely sure on.

  David Garnett wrote of Theodore that he ‘created works of art which have practically no direct representational relationship to the reality of the country life which inspired them, but which have a convincing reality of their own.’78 It was the creator of the works of art who was Sylvia’s subject, and in the seventy-six pages of her typescript which survive, she never writes about his environment, East Chaldon, ‘straight’, but always humorously or ironically, to fit in, as it were, with Theo’s tone. She had only ever known Chaldon as an adjunct to Theodore and the oblique original of his fictional villages, Madder, Dodder, Maids Madder, Dodderdown. She ‘wrote it up’ out of enthusiasm and as a compliment to him. But the enthusiasm was too much, and burdened the seventy-six pages with the most whimsical and fanciful prose she was ever to compose, shouting down several passages of supreme percipience and subtlety about Theodore’s character.

  Mrs Way, Mrs Wallis, Granny Moxon, old Mrs Pitman (at whose request Theo grew a beard, shaving it off when she died), Mr Goult the carrier, Mrs Hall the driver, Billy Lucas the village drunk and intellectual, Florrie Legg at the inn and Mrs Lucas the postwoman were ‘characters’ to Sylvia at this time, purposely viewed two-dimensionally, and romantic because they moved about in Theo’s element. Nomenclature encouraged it, for in Chaldon the farmers were called Child and Todd and there was a shepherd called Mr Dove – exactly as if Theo had had a hand in the font.

  Sylvia had a manner which, though it may not have countered her eccentricity in the eyes of the village, excused it. As Bea Howe has said, ‘[Sylvia] had this extraordinary, this very cultured voice, but she never altered her talk when she was speaking either to her daily or a roadmender, or anybody she wanted to have a talk with.’79 Possibly the inhabitants of Chaldon took the influx of newcomers less amiss than one imagines. Business at the post office had increased dramatically since Theodore became a published writer (Sylvia thought his correspondence with Charles Prentice wholly responsible for the introduction of a letter-box at West Chaldon), and the flow of wealthy young Londoners to the village’s empty cottages, sure that ‘a woman would cook for us’,80 caused no displeasure. And it was at least diverting to watch the town-dressed lady with the lolloping walk calling across the green in a high voice to a dog which some of the village children thought was a small black bear. Indeed, Sylvia was treated like royalty when the first village bastard of 1927 was named after her.

  There was one person at least, however, who took pains to avoid her and this was the young woman who had come to Mrs Wallis’s cottage in 1925 as ‘Mrs Turpin’ and was now known as Valentine Ackland, Ackland being her maiden surname, Valentine an adopted Christian name. She was a young poet and friend of Theodore, six foot tall with smooth, straight, Eton-cropped hair, a quiet melodious voice and reserved manner. The hair, the height and the trousers, which she always wore in the country, made her look like a handsome youth and on more than one occasion visitors to Beth Car had supposed her to be one of the Powyses’s two sons. Throughout the winter of 1925 ‘Molly’ spent the evenings with Theo and Violet, talking, reading aloud, borrowing and lending books and sharing their meals. She was a good typist and helped Theo prepare the typescript of ‘Mr Weston’s Good Wine’ and, later, correct proofs. Sylvia first heard about her from Violet, and heard too that the cottage in Chaldon was in effect a bolt-hole from an unhappy marriage which had ended in annulment early in 1927, when Valentine was still only twenty years old. And one day when Sylvia was at Beth Car having tea, Valentine came in.

  The meeting was not a success. Although very much impressed by Valentine’s slender and romantic figure, her elegance and self-containment, and her scent, Sylvia felt that she was not herself making a favourable impression at all, and this was a blow to her pride. Valentine, who had bought The Espalier before Sylvia was someone to be reckoned with, had read it often and thoroughly and with a young poet’s professional eye, had come to meet the respected poetess, not an ‘aggressively witty and overbearing’81 woman, and was disappointed. Sensing a failure and also conscious that Valentine was ‘young, poised and beautiful, and I was none of these things’,82 Sylvia decided to be dismissive and was in effect rude.

  On subsequent visits to Chaldon, Sylvia heard of Valentine’s movements – off to her mother’s in Norfolk, to her Bloomsbury flat, to the Continent, but was relieved that they never seemed to meet at the Powyses’ any more. Little did she realise what use Valentine was making of Beth Car’s back door.

  IV

  In October 1927, Sylvia began the diary she was to keep, with few breaks, for the next fifty years. It is a long, detailed and remarkably unself-conscious account of her life, beginning in 1927 as a busy, entertaining record, a writer’s way of salting down experience, developing into a part of her life, her soul’s debating-ground and one of the most moving personal diaries ever written.

  It shows Sylvia in 1927 leading a very diverse London life. She dined out two or three times a week at least, usually with a single partner – Charles, Wobb, Victor, ‘Bunny’ (David) Garnett, her uncle Robert, her young friend William Empson – and she had developed an aversion to parties. One party at Edith Sitwell’s house made her feel ‘degraded’: ‘The room full of young male poets and old female rastas’; at another, ‘first I was bored. Then I was disgusted by the sight of Nina Hamnett in a black shiny belly-fitting dress, looking as though she had just swum the Channel […] I fled with Cecil Beaton to the shelter of the cloakroom where we sat on the bed and I read aloud from The Fairchild Family.’ Beaton, another Old Harrovian, admired Sylvia very much and made several photographs of her the following year, her hair fringed and cut in a bob, her look imperious, posed against one of his characteristic shiny backgrounds.

  Her evenings were very often spent at concerts and recitals, at the Royal College or the BBC or the Philharmonic Hall, where she and Buck were familiar figures. Buck had retired from teaching at Harrow in 1927 and taken the position of Musical Adviser to the London County Council, while still lecturing at the Royal College, editing Tudor Church Music and writing books. Once a week he would spend the evening at Sylvia’s flat, ostensibly on music business. She found him as surprising a character as ever, with ‘a mind so queerly stored with such queerly assorted riches I cannot expect it to have told me everything, although it has been telling me for eighteen years’.

  Hers was a life of comparative leisure now, as her income from writing so far outstripped her Carnegie salary. She was writing poetry steadily and had also begun a third novel, this time a love story set in the Essex marshes in the late Victorian period. Having no tie but William, Sylvia was able to depart with her manuscripts into the country to various cottages, one at Idbury, another at Wayford in Somerset, and her favourite, The Barn at Lavenham, Suffolk, where she would stay for weeks at a time, inviting Bea, the Raymonds and Charles Prentice up for visits. Vera Raymond, a keen matchmaker, doubtless thought something ought to come of Sylvia’s and Charles’s friendship and invited them as a pair to numerous dinners and weekend jaunts. At this time Sylvia saw more of Charles than of anyone else – even Buck – but despite a deepening of their friendship, which could now support as much silence as talk, there was a reservedness on Charles’s part which precluded intimacy. One evening in December when Charles was leavin
g Inverness Terrace after supper he turned faint and collapsed: ‘His hands were icy cold, his eyes went quite black, but his politeness was like the moon behind a cloud. When the cloud had cleared a little, I took him back to Earl’s Terrace. Poor moon, I wanted to warm it, and put it to bed, but it must sink behind its decent hill alone.’

  Sylvia’s circle of friends included at its edges people interested in cinematography, literary journalism, architecture and science. She was always interested in a new subject and attended with intelligence, becoming so stimulated by James Jeans’s new quantum theory that she entered into a correspondence with him. This was at Buck’s suggestion, because he had not been able to answer her query himself, and it niggled him. Conversation with Buck remained one of Sylvia’s great pleasures. Their debates were intense and energetic, although Sylvia’s incomprehension of algebra was irritating and, like Mr Fortune with Lueli, Buck spent many fruitless hours trying to teach algebra to Sylvia, substituting the words ‘Aunt Mary’ for the symbol ‘x’, ‘since “x” bewilders you’. On one occasion when Sylvia argued at length about the impossibility of having an idea of infinity, Buck threw up his hands and exclaimed, ‘If only I had got hold of you earlier, and made you learn mathematics!’

  The preparation of the last volumes of Tudor Church Music was in its final hectic stages, with the Carnegie Trust prodding the editors towards completion. Three volumes appeared in 1928 alone: Thomas Tallis, Thomas Tomkins and the third volume of William Byrd. Proof revision and tidying were tiresome and time-consuming jobs, throwing up more work in their wake. Sylvia was still taking on the most irksome jobs, such as searching hundreds of pages of a score for an unidentified part. She did it still in a spirit of her superior effectiveness, though she tried her best to get out of proof correction, attempting to hand Buck concealed packages of Byrd as he left her flat. Unfortunately, he was always sufficiently alert to refuse them.