Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  Something had to be done about Buck, and in her heart she knew what:

  For since loves have their date

  Why should we seek to renew

  Ours for a year or two

  That must die soon or late,

  When we, my dear, of all the many

  Conclusions, now chose the best and kindest of any?100

  On the evening of 22 January, after a day of trying to keep her mind made up, Sylvia let Percy Buck into her flat, ‘to the slaughter’. She said her piece, staring at some dead freesias, then sat down sweating and trembling. ‘He talked for a very long time, very slowly and gravely, and I couldn’t make anything out. My own theory of his Freudian distaste he scotched, but there was something that kept mounting; and presently he was saying words like “complementary” and “incompatible” […] It was beyond all – the feeling I had – that I had torn my whole life out of myself, that it was in jeopardy, might fall into the sea and be lost.’ But there was no slaughter. An absurdity made them both laugh, and immediately they were in love again. Sylvia was relieved to have unburdened herself, but at their parting was even further convinced that she could not love him any less, ‘even to preserve our delight’.

  The redintegratio amoris was, predictably, short-lived. By March Sylvia was again perturbed by Buck’s behaviour. He had started to take her out – to the buffet at Paddington station, to a board-school concert, anywhere but to the flat. ‘I find it hard to accept that he should prefer this as an evening’s entertainment to coming here,’ Sylvia wrote in her diary, ‘but every day defeats me a little more, and though I am bewildered, I feel there is nothing to be done, and take it for granted, let go, be silent over the loss of it, since I am too sad and middle-aged for whistling.’ She faced the new decade feeling weepy, sleepless and suffering from migraine. To her horror, she heard herself singing to herself out of tune, and two odd throwbacks to her Harrow days disturbed her disproportionately. One was meeting a friend of Victor Butler, a balding business-like man in whom she could just recognise a Harrow schoolboy of twenty years before. The other was a friend of her father’s from Cambridge who came to talk for a while and on leaving said, ‘ “It is strange to see you. You are extraordinarily like your father.” And a feeling of ghostliness came over me, I the ghost straying in this old man’s mind, touching, calling up I know not what there.’101

  In this emotional period she wrote the rhapsody to spring in ‘Opus 7’, saying afterwards ‘I am still so moved I dare not think how bad it may be’ and, on re-reading Mr Fortune’s Maggot, was swept away by the sequel she had always wanted to write, the coda to guiltless Timothy’s story: ‘after tea I sat down and wrote about 2000 words – all most injudiciously, everything that David [Garnett] says is, and himself proves to be, so fatal, for I have no notion what will happen.’ A dream that night sorted out the whole plot of ‘The Salutation’, a filip after the struggles she had been going through for months with ‘Early One Morning’.

  Not being in a very decisive or practical frame of mind, her friends’ problems loomed large and oppressive to Sylvia. She felt helpless when Dorothy Warner was ill in the winter and was deeply affected by news that Francis Powys, Theodore’s younger son, might have consumption. Dickie, the elder son, ‘steadfast and sensible’, saw the family through that crisis, but trouble brewed up again when Francis came to live at home and Theo began to feel threatened, almost bullied, by what he likened to a young bull coming into an old bull’s field. Theodore was in an unusually confiding mood with Sylvia in December, one day putting up an umbrella in order to kiss her, the next telling her of his secret contingency plan to go away and live by himself, in defence of, as he said, ‘that curious part of a man he calls his soul. I will guard that. I will fight for it if need be.’

  Unknown to Sylvia, she was the subject of not exclusively admiring and charitable conversation at Beth Car. But Theo was fonder of her than ever; the fact that she seemed to have dropped ‘Eikon Animae’, and his perception of her private unhappiness made him tender and supportive. Sylvia had been especially preoccupied on a visit to Chaldon with Charles Prentice in February 1930, only a fortnight after the attempted show-down with Buck. Looking at a mist hanging on High Chaldon, the grassy hill near Theo’s house, she thought ‘at first it seemed to me that the mist was my sorrow, and I stared, feeling that this would explain everything if only I could attend. Then the mist was me, transiently obscuring the outline of a lasting grief. I had just settled this when Theo put his arm around me, and carried me back against the wind, still talking to Charles about Lucretius.’

  Mutual concern for Francis’s health had led to Sylvia meeting up with Valentine Ackland in London on several occasions that winter, to exchange news. Talking of Francis’s poetry (he had written a book’s-worth, and wanted advice from Sylvia on how to get them published), Sylvia asked to see Valentine’s, the poems she spent all her creative energy on, and much of her time. Sylvia read them the same evening. ‘Some were bad. None were sham. Of the comparisons which occurred to me, I went back to pebbles, poems sleeked and shaped by the workings of a restless mind. I could see they were immature; but it was as written poems they were immature: there was no immaturity in the intention.’102 Valentine did not tell Sylvia all the news from Chaldon, nor that the offer of her cottage to Sylvia had become known in the village, and that the farmer who owned it had taken umbrage at apparent sub-letting and had thrown Valentine out. Since then, she had been staying in lodgings at Florrie Legg’s, as Sylvia discovered from Violet Powys later.

  Sylvia was in Chaldon again on Easter Monday, after a weekend which had seen Violet’s birthday and silver wedding anniversary. When Sylvia, Theo, Violet and Valentine went for a walk up the Drove, the road leading northward out of the village towards the Five Marys, Violet pointed out a cottage for sale along the way and suggested that Sylvia might like to buy it. It had been the home of the late Miss Green. Fetching the key from The Sailors Return just opposite, they let themselves into the dusky, neglected living-room of one of East Chaldon’s least picturesque buildings. But it was solid, it was freehold, and might do as temporary accommodation for Valentine, whose cottage hung on Sylvia’s conscience. There and then Sylvia asked if, pending redecorations, Valentine would be the late Miss Green’s steward. With admirable lack of fluster, she accepted, and Sylvia left for London the next day full of plans and philanthropy.

  The sale of the cottage went through on 19 June and cost Sylvia £90. The surveyor’s report began: ‘This is a small undesirable property situated in an out of the way place and with no attractions whatever’,103 but went on to admit that the cottage was structurally sound and dry under its sloping slate roof. While Sylvia was collecting household gear in London and sending Ronald Eiloart over to plan a new hearth and a back door (essential for escaping from visitors), Valentine was digging over the wilderness of garden and fitting out the shed. But thinking ahead to the autumn, when the work was due to be finished, Valentine began to wonder whether or not she would want much of Sylvia’s patronage. She found Sylvia rather unsettling, and her manner abrasive. Sylvia seemed ‘intolerably nervous’104 that summer, and it was painful to Valentine, not least because Sylvia and Charles Prentice had become subjects for humour among the Powyses. ‘They must jeer at me too,’105 she concluded gloomily. Francis had been to stay with the Tomlins at Swallowcliffe and reported Tommy as saying that Sylvia’s friends ‘are now only to be found among those fools who will encourage her empty-headed wit’.106 Understandably, Valentine did not want to get involved in this slanging match, ‘But I wish I did not want to live with Sylvia. I do,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘But while I can easily bear and must often enjoy her love of power, and the consequent dominion over my liberty – I cannot and will not endure a demand for forced tact and diplomacy and, above all, that social submission which anyway I cannot give.’107 Privily, she had been observing Sylvia, her clothes, her hands, and had taken a photograph of her in a deckchair at Beth Car. She beg
an to dream of her too, dreams of beautiful houses, declarations of love – sad on waking to have lost the dream-Sylvia’s ‘eager and loving look’108 which she was sure she would never see on the real woman.

  On 23 September, the fourteenth anniversary of her father’s death, Sylvia left Inverness Terrace for Chaldon. Valentine came with her mother’s car and Willie, the chauffeur, to pick her up, standing over an undiagnosable piece of furniture saying sternly, ‘Is this wooden thing to go?’ while Sylvia tried to comfort Dorothy, who was in tears. It was not intended as a permanent removal. Sylvia’s flat at the Warnerium remained her home, and Miss Green was to be second fiddle to it. The general idea was that Sylvia would go to Dorset for a month or so at a time and that it would provide a quiet working-place. Her visits and Valentine’s would not coincide much, for Valentine had a flat and commitments in London too. It would be a convenience.

  The next eight days were spent putting the finishing touches to Miss Green. When Sylvia arrived, the cottage had been whitewashed inside and its woodwork painted pink, the flower beds were dug and raked, a potted geranium stood by the front door and Mr Miller, the carpenter, was putting up shelves. There were two adjoining bedrooms up the narrow stairway, both facing westwards with views of High Chaldon. Valentine took the inner bedroom, with her satinwood bureau in one corner, a washstand in another, a rag rug, a yellow rug, blue curtains and a madapollam cover of Sylvia’s making on the bed against the dividing wall. Sylvia’s room contained a larger bed, a dressing-table, a Japanese rug and was predominantly red. In the large living-room, they strove to eschew the quaint and cottage-like, and a sort of urbs in rure effect was gained from the Regency gilt mirror with its candle-sconces (there was, of course, no electricity or running water at Miss Green’s) in which were reflected the writing-table, two papier mâché chairs, a Persian rug, a horsehair sofa and a chest upon which lay a 1646 Bible and a Prayer Book. Beyond this room was a kitchen of the same width as the living-room, but only a few feet deep. Here was an old copper and a new oil-cooker, lamps, a meat safe and three pails; one for water, one for milk and a third full of sand as a fire precaution. Ronald’s new back door opened out onto a good-sized back garden, the water pump and privy.

  Sylvia was staying at Mrs Way’s and Valentine at Florrie’s for the week, but having been bitten in the wrist by a Great Dane from the vicarage on her first day, Sylvia had to leave the greater part of the unpacking to Valentine, whom she thought ‘like a nice son’, bandaging the dog-bite, moving furniture, lighting Sylvia’s cigarettes. ‘I lean more and more on her trousers,’109 Sylvia wrote. They sat in the pub together, Sylvia hoping to cultivate just the right balance between intimacy and sophisticated detachment. They would be, she said – more than a little ambiguously – like the Ladies of Llangollen.

  Sylvia had decided that the position of steward might be an invidious one for Valentine, and so was preparing to tell her that the cottage was an outright gift. In the event, she chose the wrong moment for the discussion and Valentine went back to London for the weekend thinking of Miss Green as indisputably ‘Sylvia’s cottage’, as indeed it remained. Sylvia had moved in by the time Valentine returned to Chaldon and greeted her with a half-cooked duck and one enormous and alarming mushroom from the Five Marys. The next morning Valentine came down, dressed in a silk dressing gown and emerald slippers, to lay and light the fire and breakfast, much to Sylvia’s irritation, off a cup of cold water only. What Sylvia did not know then, nor for many years, was that Valentine was a secret and guilty drinker. What had started as an aid to sociability and relief from menstrual pain had taken on a great significance in Valentine’s life. By some standards she may not have drunk much, but she believed herself to be enslaved to the bottle, and therefore disgusting to herself. The headaches, swoonings, migraines, collapses and ‘heart-attacks’ which soon became a cause of acute concern to Sylvia were all to some extent drink-related. Hence, when Tommy Tomlin turned up at Miss Green’s during that first week in October, 1930, it was not the tensions between Sylvia and her former love that Valentine noticed, nor Tommy’s quick and sardonic wit, but the fact that he was ‘going along my path’ and was ‘half-destroyed by drink’.110

  On 11 October, their second Saturday together in Chaldon, Sylvia and Valentine were at tea at Beth Car when they heard that the oppressed servant-girl at the vicarage, sent thither from a lunatic asylum, had tried twice that day to escape. It was not the first time, and the matter was notorious in the village, but this new development incensed the two women and they went immediately to call on the tenant of the house, a Miss Stevenson, only to be told that she was not in. They went home to eat a hurried supper, then back, wrathful and united in their determination to have the matter out. An acrimonious interview followed, with Miss Stevenson trying to exonerate herself, Sylvia loosing off threats in a dove-like tone and Valentine sitting ‘white and motionless like Justice’. ‘As we walked from the door, speechless, Valentine shook her stick in the air […] Righteous indignation is a beautiful thing and lying exhausted on the rug I watched it flame in her with severe geometrical flames.’111

  That night, as they lay on either side of the partition wall, the wind rose and a screech-owl went down the valley. Sylvia, who was already half-asleep, heard Valentine say that she hoped it would frighten the woman at the vicarage. Thus a slow, intermittent conversation began, against their custom, between the rooms. Sylvia was still slightly inattentive when she heard Valentine say solemnly, ‘I sometimes think I am utterly unloved.’ ‘The forsaken grave wail of her voice smote me, and had me up, and through the door, and at her bedside,’112 begging Valentine not to believe such a thing. In a moment, Valentine had gathered her up into bed, and they were lovers.

  The cool autumn morning into which Sylvia woke was unlike any other. Everything had changed, unsurmisably and for the good. She was joyful, and she was secure in her joy. The difference in their ages – Valentine was twenty-four, Sylvia thirty-six – and the sameness of their sex, things which in cold blood might have presented themselves as impediments to a lasting love, were simply part of the new landscape in which Sylvia moved. She was excited as never before, released and unconstrained. She was also due back in London the following day, which in the circumstances seemed intolerable. They parted the next afternoon with the intense pain of the newly-in-love.

  [13. 10.30] [London] seemed full of simulacra, and Teague took me out to dinner, and I was torn between 113 where I was, and the cottage, where my ghost walked. Yet I cannot forever besiege the past, there is a treachery to the future too, and perhaps the deadlier, and life rising up again in me cajoles with unscrupulous power, and I will yield to it gladly, if it leads me away from this death I have sat so snugly in for so long, sheltering myself against joy, respectable in my mourning, harrowed and dulled and insincere to myself in a pretext of troth.

  3

  1930–1937

  I

  Mary Kathleen Macrory Ackland was born on 20 May 1906, the daughter of Robert Craig Ackland, a West End dentist, and Ruth Macrory, the youngest daughter of a wealthy barrister. As a child, she lived at 54 Brook Street, Mayfair, a tall house which contained her father’s surgery on the ground floor. ‘Molly’ was a serious, earnest and attractive child, with grey eyes and long, nut-brown hair, and was considered to be her parents’ favourite. Her sister Joan, who was eight years her senior, was a devoted bully, painfully jealous of Molly. She watched over her younger sister’s every move and induced in the girl an abnormal degree of self-consciousness. Valentine’s youth, according to her confessional memoir, For Sylvia, was made up of a series of misfiring efforts to do right, to please her parents and be loved by her sister. She grew up with a completely unanswered need for reassurance, affection and guidance, things her parents omitted to notice in their concern to give her a decent upper-middle-class upbringing. In the process they passed on to Molly a fear of money which never left her, for though they were well-off, lived luxuriously and spent a great deal, the
Acklands worried about money constantly and often spoke to the children as though they were on the edges of poverty.

  Molly loved her mother deeply, but found her manner embarrassing, not to say intolerable sometimes. Ruth was a pious Anglo-Catholic, a pillar of the Church, a member of the Mothers’ Union at the executive level, committee woman, tea-organiser and non-stop talker. She was active rather than effective in her doings, kindly, vague and sentimental. She spent a great deal of time trying to be a friend to her daughters, but was incapable of showing them an example of maturity and left all exercise of parental authority to her husband. An incident which took place when Molly was eleven or twelve indicates some of Ruth’s inadequacies as a parent. Ruth was going away, leaving Molly in the care of Joan and the maid, Blossom, both of whom secretly persecuted the younger girl. Molly dreaded her mother’s departure so much that she became ill and Ruth, with a car at the door waiting, said she would stay if Molly’s temperature was up. Panic-stricken, the child held the thermometer against her hot-water bottle – too long. It read 110 degrees:

  It was obvious that I had somehow caused it to go up, but I denied that stoutly. My sister then demanded that I should swear on the Bible that I hadn’t made it go up. I quailed, but swore. However, my mother simply looked uncomfortable and said she expected that I would be all right. And went away.1

  ‘As a child I was stranded,’ Valentine wrote later. ‘I was without any real or solid person to hold on to. My mother was always as she is now, although when she was young it looked like vivacity, charm, recklessness, kindness of heart, and so on. But it was – she was – always totally unreal.’2