Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  At committee meetings there was ‘the usual slight clash’ between Ramsbotham and Fellowes and often the discussion was conducted entirely by Sylvia and Buck, who was sometimes openly irritated by Fellowes. An afternoon’s entertainment for Sylvia at this time was often a specialised conversation about medieval music with a visiting parson or academic over tea, or a lunch at the Royal College, where she was on advice-giving terms with Malcolm Sargent. But a feeling that she was growing grey in its service, and that its service paid poorly, was discouraging Sylvia from musicology. When Tudor Church Music was just about to ‘pay off and could have secured her a lifetime’s further jobs, she chose to cut down her commitments in that field.

  In November 1927 Sylvia’s uncle, Frank Hudleston, was dying of diabetes in a London nursing home. Nora came up from Devon to see her brother, but went home two days later, even though Frank was sinking fast (and died within twelve hours), because she didn’t want to change some arrangement she had made about her dogs – not returning, it seems, for the funeral. Sylvia arranged a wreath of roses and pussy-willow and re-jigged a hat and dress for the funeral, thinking of Frank’s persistent charm and good manners the last time she had seen him. In the War Office a memorial tablet (an unprecedented honour for a civilian) was raised to him which read ‘Scholar, Historian and Wit’.

  A fortnight after Frank’s death, Purefoy and Arthur Machen had to move from Melina Place, following a change of landlord, to 28, Loudoun Road, also in St John’s Wood – ‘excessively refined’, Sylvia noted, ‘with an airy basement full of black beetles. Whenever Arthur went to fetch another shovelful of coal we heard him crunching.’ The Machens were a cheerful, improvident family, and rather unlucky. At Loudoun Road they were particularly badly-off and had to remove Hilary from Merchant Taylors School and put him into an apprenticeship at Walker’s, the organ builders, a job arranged by Percy Buck. The schooling of the Machen’s other child, ten-year-old Janet, had ground to a halt for a year until it was noticed and she was sent back, paid for by Aunt Nora. Sylvia admired Arthur Machen for his connoisseurship of the morbid and the unusual combination of a vivid and free imagination with an unillusioned, professional approach to the job of writing. Admirers have often depicted him as a Welsh seer of the cloak and staff variety, but Machen was more of a Londoner than anything else, and knew only a few words of Welsh. Almost all his writing was done under pressure of bread-winning, not composed in a trance on a hillside. He worked hard and was rarely satisfied. His wife Purefoy was the most congenial of all Sylvia’s relations. She had the delightful part of the Hudleston oddity with none of its drawbacks of temperament. She was generous and magnanimous to a fault and completely lacked affectation. But Loudoun Road quelled even Purefoy’s good spirits, for the ‘Saturdays’ which had been her delight had not moved with them and she began to speak sorrowfully of ‘the Melina ghosts’.

  One of their ‘ghosts’ who was also an acquaintance of Sylvia was the composer John Ireland, who set three of Sylvia’s poems from The Espalier as songs: ‘The Scapegoat’, ‘The Soldier’s Return’ and ‘Hymn to a Child’, and who in 1928 had recently composed a sonatina with a last movement based on the witches’ Sabbath in Lolly Willowes. He was also considering writing an opera based on Mr Fortune’s Maggot. Sylvia liked Ireland, while finding him ‘a trifle con molto sentimento’ at times, but a bad experience in March 1928 was to put her off knowing him better. They had gone back to Ireland’s studio after a dinner and he was about to play her the sonatina when he suddenly launched into an angry catalogue of his woes and an account of his miserable early marriage: ‘with a ghastly exactitude he recalled one quarrel, the girl sitting on the piano and swinging her legs and singing a ragtime. He stopped, musicianly, to give a rather incorrect musician’s revision of “I Want To Be Happy” and how he had wanted to murder her. He raged across the room strangling a ghost and then when I jumped up and told him to have done with such tormenting nonsense he stood quite still and dazed.’ The worst aspect of this ‘evening out of D.H. Lawrence’ was its painful similarity to others she had striven to forget: ‘he was like Tommy on the worst evening: speaking like an automaton, a rather sentimental automaton, and saying the same thing over and over again. Perhaps he was a little drunk. I tried to think so.’

  She dined with him a few weeks later when the sonatina was performed at the BBC and, finding him perfectly normal and unabashed, persuaded herself that it had indeed been the fault of drink. But she made no attempt to see him again.

  In the late spring Sylvia’s second collection of poetry, Time Importuned, was published. It was dedicated to Victor Butler. Sylvia was enjoying a great ease in writing poems and had written in her diary the previous November ‘I want to read and write nothing but poetry’. On the day before the typescript for Time Importuned went off to Chatto & Windus, she was finishing one poem, ‘The Visit’, ‘and then went mad and wrote “The Mortal Maid” ’. The proofs came through astonishingly quickly by today’s standards, in eight days, and Percy Buck looked over them and asked ‘if I knew that these were a great deal better than The Espalier.’ The favourite forms and themes were there and the same characteristic flattening of the end of many poems, but if anything had changed it was the tone rather than the style, and though Buck said in praise that her latest poems were ‘better-oiled’, Sylvia felt that a truer judgement would be that they were ‘more-vinegared’.

  A list which Sylvia made a year or so later (having just read I.A. Richards’s Practical Criticism) indicates the aims of her own poetry:

  I am prejudiced: against poems that are in vers libre

  express soul-states and interior rumpuses

  talk much about love, unless sub-acidly

  go on for a long time

  are verbally rich

  sonnets if petrarchan

  end on a soul-stirring note ask questions and exclaim describe in favour of poems that are formally tight in thought and construction

  evoke frames of mind, mention death,

  contain conceits, and intellectual stresses

  look neat

  use few images, especially visual contain references to Christian faith and mythology

  end cynically

  appear very self-controlled state 83

  These lists represent prejudices, not judgements. Sylvia was thinking seriously about her poetry, trying to define it, but still composed primarily for her own pleasure.

  Many of the poems in Time Importuned ‘evoke frames of mind’, but one is particularly odd. ‘Triumphs of Sensibility II dramatises in the first person narrative a state of psychosis difficult to link with Sylvia in any way other than through Tommy. The strong and deliberate echoes of Blake enforce this idea, as does the poem’s spleen:

  Sometimes my friends and lovers come

  Like trippers to the Aquarium;

  They peer, they tap upon the pane,

  And presently they’re gone again.

  I know they are alive because

  I see their breath besmirch the glass;

  But be it sigh or be it scoff

  It takes the same time to fade off.

  And I am glad when they are gone;

  For Hug Me Tight will come anon,

  And all their looks and all their sighs

  Dismember and anatomise

  Till they as I are cold and vile,

  Guttering friendship to beguile

  An itch of self-complacency.

  Only my fiend is true to me.84

  Early in 1928 Sylvia had a notice from the Ecclesiastical Commission that she would have to leave 121 Inverness Terrace, as they wanted to turn the flats back into one house. She was deeply averse to the idea of moving, feeling that it would disrupt the benign routine life had taken on. However kindly Vera Raymond flitted about unsuitable flats in Mayfair and Kensington on her behalf, Sylvia could not bring herself to be grateful, saying ‘my bowels long to stay in Inverness Terrace and walk over the same paving-stones to the same shops.’ After a di
smal couple of months’ house-hunting, a solution presented itself in the form of Mr Oliver Warner, the reader at Chatto & Windus, and his wife Dorothy who were also looking for a house and who, being young and expecting their first child, could not afford a whole one. Together with Sylvia they put in an offer on an early-Victorian house only a few doors away at 113 Inverness Terrace. In the middle of March an agreement was signed for it at a price of £1,150. Mr and Mrs Oliver moved into the top part in May, Sylvia into the basement and ground floor in July and the house was immediately dubbed ‘The Warnerium’.

  Sylvia’s part of 113 included ‘a magnificent Victorian kitchen and two period coal cellars’,85 one of which she converted to a rose-pink bathroom at considerable cost and effort but which kept trying to revert to its original state. Her sitting-room was decorated in vivid colours; the walls were terracotta and yellow, the cushions bright red and ‘Duncan and Vanessa’ still drew together on her curtains at night. Louise Morgan, in an interview conducted with Sylvia in 1929, said of the flat that ‘one would say it belonged to a painter – a painter who had lived a great deal in the south of Europe and loved the sun’.86 There was also a garden at 113, so small and urban that, in Oliver Warner’s opinion, ‘the works of nature appear almost as miracles.’87 Here Sylvia was able to enjoy a garden of her own for the first time. Weeding and digging provided a ‘debauch of emotion’. She often gardened at night and never stopped on account of bad weather, even though a gale once blew the trowel out of her hand.

  Sylvia soon became very fond of the young Warners and found an unverifiable link in their pedigrees – an aunt called Mary Esther – to substantiate the fancy that they were all, indeed, of one family. Dorothy was a passionate young woman with haunting grey eyes and an undisciplined but acute intelligence which found an ideal tutor in Sylvia. For a writer to be as generous with time as Sylvia was with hers, sitting up late into the night with Dorothy discussing books or listening to problems, is a true mark of affection. To Dorothy, Sylvia was ‘a free Greek spirit’ and the only one of her friends ‘that she could find nothing to pity in’, a pleasing compliment, if hard to live up to. Sylvia also loved Oliver, a very different character from his wife: a literary man, quiet, self-effacing and infinitely patient. Sylvia had been painting her flat one day when Dorothy came in for ‘an afternoon of amateur metaphysics’. Oliver came back hot and tired from the office in the middle of this to be greeted with ‘ “Sylvia says –” ’ – as Sylvia said in her diary – ‘and then the whole of Bishop Berkeley. My heart bled for Oliver, but no, in a moment he was down talking about the absolute.’

  The Warnerium was a civilised and domesticated place. In the darkening evenings the three young people would take it in turns to choose a book for reading aloud: Oliver chose Paradise Lost, Dorothy Sanditon and Sylvia Mr Weston’s Good Wine. They dined out together too, at the Raymonds’ or at favourite restaurants – Boulestin’s, Martinez and Mrs Diver’s oyster bar – and it was pleasant not to come home alone, to sit drinking tea on Dorothy’s bed, a cultured, un-intimate family group portrait.

  Dorothy’s baby was due in October, but she had made little provision for it. When Vera Raymond asked if she was ready for her confinement, Dorothy said certainly, for she had a pot of Vaseline. On the appointed day, Sylvia accompanied her to the nursing-home, wearing a wedding-ring (bought, presumably, to deal with hotel visitors’ books), in order to ‘throw my womb about if the matron was uppish’. It was not necessary. As Sylvia wrote that night in her diary, ‘We crawled upstairs like criminals. She [the matron] said “I suppose you are ready for bed.” Dorothy turned a wild eye on me. “Bed?” said I, in a voice that strove to be confident. “Bed?” We were left alone in a room with an empty cradle and a large box full – it said so on the lid – of umbilical pads. While we were striving to put a good face on it, the light went out. But it was only a bulb bust, fortunately, not prison discipline as we thought. Home sad.’

  The baby, a girl, was born the next day. Dorothy, as psychologists would now say, ‘failed to bond’ with her: she behaved exactly as before and her involvement with the child was minimal. When Sylvia brought a seed-pearl necklace to the home a few days later, Dorothy said without irony to the baby, ‘Don’t cry, you’ve got a pearl necklace.’ ‘Fortunately,’ Sylvia observed, ‘there will always be Oliver to mitigate our detachment and leaven the child’s life with a little foolishness.’ It was Sylvia’s first baby too, and though she was to grow very fond of little Bridget, babies as a class rather alarmed her. During her life she frequently wished for an heir, but never regretted not having had a child.

  In the preceding weeks, Sylvia had been struggling with the ending of her latest novel, ‘The True Heart’, writing, she thought, ‘like a verbose guinea-pig’. While Dorothy was still in the nursing-home, Sylvia finished the epilogue at a gallop. Sukey Bond, the ‘true heart’ of the title, is lying in bed, awaiting the birth of her first child:

  It is the childbed, and not the marriage-bed, that changes women. With the first child is born the mother, a new, a different being, who, even should she seek to do so, can never more re-enter the habitation of her maiden self. For a while yet, in the glimmering room where the clock ticked and the light fingered this and the other, the former Sukey watched with her, a faithful presence, a sister; but even now she was unsure of her tenure: at each pang she covered her face, and at the sound of Mrs Lucy’s step on the stairs she hid under the bed; at the child’s first cry she would vanish like a ghost at cock-crow.88

  Sylvia finished correcting the proofs of the book in December and sent them off sighingly: ‘Goodbye, my dear Sukey; first child of my middle-age’.

  Sylvia had an elaborate birthday party on 5 December, the eve of her thirty-fifth birthday. With a few exceptions – Dorothy Wadham, George Howe (Bea was travelling abroad), Edie Sturt and Angus Davidson – the guests were made up from her newer publishing friends. On New Year’s Eve, unwillingly facing the prospect of having to leave William and her comfortable flat to go to New York – she had been invited there as guest editor of the New York Herald Tribune – she looked back on 1928 as ‘a kind year in which I have felt safe and serene, and I think at last forgiven the hurt heart of other years’. Safe, serene and ‘middle-aged’. Charles Prentice was ‘domesticated kind and peaceful’. Percy Buck was as reliable – and as cool – as a rock. She had finished her third novel, had almost finished with Tudor Church Music, and her book on Theodore was ticking along nicely. All was calm, all was bright. Sylvia stood alone in the open doorway of 113 at midnight to let the old year out. In Wiltshire, Tommy, in pyjamas, was leaning out of a window, listening to the Tisbury bells.

  V

  I woke with a thud to discover the gale over, the ship speeding. A sunny, blowing day. Elling Aanestad and I picnicked, leaping up with sandwiches and claret to see land, the high French coast-line. Presently we saw towers, buildings, a beech-clump, a hay-rick and were at Cherbourg. There was a smell of land in the wind, sea-gulls flew round us, weed and wisps bobbed in the water, fishing-boats were around, the sun shone on the yellow limestone breakwaters and remembering the word “jetty” I had a sudden sensation that I was in some way returned to my native language. We sighted England about 5.30 – Dartmoor a grey dome, with hairy rain-clouds streaking up from it.89

  The Aquitania was coming in to the Solent, rolling like a drunk, bringing Sylvia home from seven weeks in New York City. She shuffled along with the crowd coming off the boat, feeling like ‘a dreg trying to escape down a blocked pipe’ and temporarily farewelled Elling Aanestad, a young editor with the American firm of W.W. Norton, whom she had met on the boat. She arrived back in London just after midnight on 9 March 1929, to William’s ecstatic welcome.

  Sylvia’s stay in New York had been an endless social round. Her only commitment to the Herald Tribune had been to write them four articles during her stay; for the rest she had been feted mercilessly. She had met and made friends with Dorothy Parker, Elinor Wylie, the novelist Ann
e Parrish and Louis Untermeyer’s wife Jean, a literary hostess who introduced Sylvia to her circle. Everyone wanted to meet her. Anne Parrish was worried that ‘anyone so famous and sought-after wouldn’t want to be bothered’, and was astonished when Sylvia asked her to tea. Recalling these beginnings of their friendship in a letter to Sylvia years later, Anne Parrish wrote ‘the publicity lady was young, pretty, well-dressed, and not shy of anyone, and I wished she would take her cup and her plate and go and have her tea in Jericho. You had on a dress, dark, sprigged with little flowers, with a full skirt. Later, another day and without publicity lady, we went up a high building and talked about Jane Austen and the back view of tulips and the look of falling snow.’90

  Sylvia found herself a celebrity in New York, for her novels had been ‘taken up’ by some weighty trend-setters. Alexander Woollcott, who is said to have been the highest-paid book reviewer ever, liked to cite Sylvia’s evocation of the South Seas in Mr Fortune’s Maggot as a great imaginative triumph, and Christopher Morley, another influential reviewer, could hardly find superlatives enough to express his enthusiasm for her work. Morley had been one of the judges who chose Lolly Willowes as the Book-of-the-Month Club’s first selection, and his opinion of the novel, though absurdly worded – ‘that most pungent and cordially satisfying kind of thing that one hugs to one’s tenderest ribs …’ – was nonetheless so valuable that it was reprinted on Sylvia’s American publications for ten years. In New York in 1929 Lolly Willowes had gone through numerous reprintings from the Viking Press, who published most of Sylvia’s books in America, and a first edition had a rarity value four times that of its original published price.