Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  She was a lonely little girl, who at a very young age yearned to be a poet. In the attic at Brook Street, she had two games; one was ‘Men of Harlech’, the other ‘Land of my Fathers’ – the first martial, the second ‘a song of spiritual matters […] by which I worked myself into a curious state of exalted melancholy’ because of the line ‘the land in which heroes AND POETS rejoice’. She was tormented by having to choose between these songs, wanting the ‘careless, debonaire, light and easy and famous and brave and swaggering’ Men of Harlech – ‘but I always felt guilty when I chose that game.’ When she chose to be the poet rather than the hero she became ‘at ease in sadness, and felt myself to be in harmony, set rightly in the pattern.’3

  Robert Ackland was a melancholic man, unhappy in his family life and convinced that he had not achieved his full potential. He had wanted to be a doctor but had not, he said, been able to afford the training. He was senior dental surgeon at St Bartholemew’s Hospital for many years and was awarded the C.B.E. for his work during the war on pioneer plastic surgery. He had organised and run two special Red Cross hospitals for the treatment of facial injuries, where with painstaking skill he rebuilt the faces of the wounded, impressing his daughter very strongly with the idea of miraculous repair, an important concept throughout her life. Ackland was dedicated to this work and was remembered for his ‘never-ending sympathy, kindness and care for all who were suffering or in distress’, but it was also very tiring; ‘he never really recovered from the strain.’4 His manner with his children could be gruff and distant, but he was never indifferent to them. As Valentine wrote later, ‘My father did love me, and sometimes I knew it.’5

  In August 1923, when Molly was seventeen and had just ‘come out’ in the grand manner of the London debutante, Robert Ackland died suddenly of cancer. Molly was stunned, but her mother decided to ignore the usual period of mourning and ‘forced upon us […] a strange desperation of enjoyment – as though I owed it to her as a duty to be as reckless and assertive as I could manage.’6 The year leading up to Robert’s death had been overshadowed by the Acklands’ discovery, in the summer of 1922, that Molly was in love with a young woman she had met at finishing school in Paris. It had been a very innocent affair, but the horrified parents were convinced otherwise and punished their daughter by sending her to a domestic science college in Eastbourne, an establishment which Molly hated and which, unknown to them, was given over to the very vice from which they were trying to separate her. Robert died never having forgiven Molly for her ‘unnaturalness’. He had told her, in abusive rantings following the discovery of her ‘lesbianism’, that she would go blind, and possibly mad; that no man would want to marry her, that she would be a spinster, a social outcast. Believing all this, and at the same time knowing that there had been nothing wrong in her love for the other girl, Molly practised typing and playing the piano with her eyes shut, and encouraged herself to become engaged, which she did twice in one year, with a sense of relief from doing the right thing at last.

  During the first of these engagements (to a planter in Java she had not seen for six or seven years who proposed to her by cable), a cheerful twenty-eight-year-old woman, Bo Foster, fell in love with Molly, and they had a long-lasting affair. Molly did not by that time see anything incompatible between having a woman lover and preparing her trousseau. Love was one thing and marriage another. Molly had been part-way converted to Roman Catholicism under the influence of Bo when she met a young man at a dinner party, and so enthused him with a fervour for religion that he proposed to her the next day. She accepted, excited by the detachment and speed of the ‘romance’. ‘I have thought of no one else since last night,’7 said the young man, whose name was Richard Turpin. This was the high point of the relationship. He kissed her and she was shocked and revolted by how violent it was and immediately began to have second thoughts, but Ruth, like a character in a farce, entered the room at that very moment and went into hysterics, protesting that Molly was already spoken for; the presents; the tickets – ‘but in her groan I detected the same enjoyment that I was feeling.’8

  The marriage took place at Westminster Registrar’s Office on 9 July 1925. In a fit of impatience, Molly had given her fiancé a day’s notice, despite his protestations that they had not yet been received into the Church and that his parents had not met her. Molly pointed out that a civil marriage would force the Church to hurry up, which it did. They were received, baptised and confirmed within a week and had their wedding at Westminster Cathedral on 17 July.

  Bo Foster did not attend the wedding, but a young friend of hers, Rachel Braden, did. Turning aside from her wedding procession, Molly said to her in controlled tones, ‘I’m fainting for a sausage.’ Molly, who at five foot eleven and a half was the same height as her husband, wore as a head-dress a white medieval-style nun’s coif, framing her pale face and completely concealing her hair, which during the morning she had had Eton-cropped secretly. In 1925 this was still novel enough to be shocking, and coming downstairs in her going-away clothes she was ‘gratified by the sensation I caused’.9 She liked the very boyish look it gave her as well as the sensation, and never grew her hair long again.

  The honeymoon was postponed because Richard had to have an unspecified operation, but to dissemble this, Ruth insisted they drive off from the reception as if to the station. Once round the Park and they were back at the Acklands’ service flat in St James’s Court. The honeymoon, when it happened, confirmed their incompatibility. Molly did not like to be near Richard and ‘his hands seemed too large and curiously insensitive. I was thinking about [Bo] all the time.’ Richard himself had distracted thoughts: his relationships before marriage had been exclusively homosexual. After repeated attempts to feel desire for each other and consummate the marriage, it was decided that Molly should have an operation to remove her hymen, and she went into a nursing home. During her stay there, with constant loving messages from Bo and angry scenes from Richard, she received an invitation from Rachel Braden to convalesce in Dorset, in the small village some of Rachel’s artist friends knew of, East Chaldon. Molly bought some men’s flannel trousers, and went.

  Thus her marriage ended. Though Richard came down to Chaldon to try to reclaim her, Molly was increasingly determined never to live with him again. She loved the liberty offered by Chaldon, the reviving company of Rachel and of the Powyses, whom she quickly came to ‘revere’. She had changed her appearance dramatically – now she changed her name, and though Ruth, Joan and Richard all imagined that these were temporary aberrations, that ‘Molly’ would soon be back in Mayfair, settling down to married life, Valentine had other ideas.

  While Sylvia was enjoying fame as the authoress of Lolly Willowes and writing Mr Fortune, Valentine was living between the cottage at Chaldon and a small flat she had taken in Bloomsbury and mixing with an artistic set to which Rachel had introduced her. She sat to several artists for the figure, among them Eric Gill, Betty Muntz and Oliver Lodge, son of Sir Oliver Lodge the spiritualist and a friend of Tommy Tomlin. Towards the end of 1926, when she was still officially married to Richard and still attached to Bo, Valentine became pregnant as a result of a brief affair, with whom is unknown. She was very pleased at the turn of events and became preoccupied with the idea of having a daughter, who would be called Tamar, and whom she must have intended to raise alone, or perhaps with Bo’s help, for though Richard was prepared to acknowledge the child, Valentine spurned him again and they agreed to divorce on the grounds of nullity. The proceedings took place early in 1927 and Valentine, pregnant and promiscuous, swore before a series of secular and ecclesiastical courts that she was virgo intacta.

  At Chaldon in the spring she fell down a bank and miscarried, at somewhere between sixteen and twenty weeks of the pregnancy. It was a great blow to her from which she attempted to distract herself by drink and an increasingly hectic sexual life. All the time she was writing poems with certainty and fervour. ‘They were always very bad,’ she wrote, ‘but I was c
onfident that I was a poet.’10 Valentine had a real, undeniable and delicate gift but was never a ‘professional’ and wasted years of her life trying to be one. The craving for fame as a young woman and too much leisure in which to feel guilty for not being able to write, or not write well enough, set patterns of disappointment and guilt which seriously impoverished her creative life. Her sensibility, poised so precariously between the despair with which she perceived her work as failed and the ecstacy which occasioned that work, was a fine one, completely attuned to poetry. She lived for it.

  In the summer of 1928 Valentine began an affair with Dorothy Warren, owner of the Warren Galleries in Maddox Street, the niece of Lady Ottoline Morrell and a god-daughter of Henry James. She was handsome, rich and sophisticated and was immediately attracted to Valentine’s apparently haughty, silent presence. The extent to which Valentine allowed herself to be carried along by events at this time shows a detachment from her fate which was both reckless and desperate. Dorothy was a sadist and Valentine emerged from her first ‘attack’ – it was literally that – bleeding profusely from her wrists and ankles, sick and swooning under the laudanum Dorothy had administered. Within ten days Valentine was half-demented and nursing ‘a hope that I may kill myself’,11 for she was at once revolted and fascinated. Fortunately, though the liaison with Dorothy Warren lasted on and off for two years, they slept together infrequently. Dorothy became engaged at the end of 1928, writing to Valentine, ‘We have the same religion, Philip and I.’ Her fiancé was a dealer in jade and Dorothy intended to turn the Warren Galleries over to it after she had completed her current series of exhibitions. The last of these was the notorious show of D.H. Lawrence’s pictures which took place in June 1929 and which, coming on the heels of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, provoked a police raid and the confiscation of thirteen paintings.

  Valentine’s other affairs were of a less alarming nature. She had several male lovers, but as she said herself, ‘I was naturally more inclined to love women than men’12 and her women lovers, especially in quiet Chaldon, were legion. Bo Foster was the only enduring relationship she had and Valentine always returned to her – until she fell in love with Sylvia.

  Lying awake after she had sent Sylvia back to bed that first night, Valentine listened to the inn sign creaking and realised that the six-year affair with Bo had been dealt its death-blow. She longed for the new love to be a lasting one, but from the start doubted her worthiness of it. She decided not to tell Sylvia of her drinking: if the relationship were to be short-lived there was no point; if not, as she hoped, the problem might disappear of its own. Sylvia had also been entertaining thoughts of unworthiness. She felt ugly, old and soiled by the compromises of the last ten years. Her doubts were the reflexes of a cautious mind, unwilling to put itself into a vulnerable position, but they evaporated under the realisation that caution, too, was one of the dingy habits she wanted to throw off. Valentine assured her that to protest unworthiness would be a denial of Valentine’s own fastidiousness, upon which she prided herself. And that settled it.

  I, so wary of traps,

  So skilful to outwit

  Springes and pitfalls set

  Am caught now, perhaps.

  Though capture, while I am laid

  So still in hold, is but

  The limb’s long sigh to admit

  How heavy freedom weighed.13

  II

  Having fallen in love, Sylvia rapidly changed her plan of spending the winter in London. She was to come back to Chaldon in November, having dispensed with all her other commitments during October. Hours later, this plan too was abandoned and they were counting the minutes to a meeting in London. In this separation, which lasted four days, their extraordinary correspondence began. On the train from Wool to Waterloo Sylvia wrote the first of hundreds of love-letters. Valentine despatched hers, with a mourning-ring as love-token, as soon as she got back to the empty cottage.

  Once Valentine was in London, Sylvia spent as much of her time as possible at 2 Queensborough Studios, Valentine’s dusty, usually untidy attic room. There they made love at leisure: ‘I had not believed it possible to give such pleasure, to satisfy such a variety of moods, to feel so demanded and so secure, to be loved by anyone so beautiful and to see that beauty enhanced by loving me. The nights were so ample that there was even time to fall briefly asleep in them.’14 Valentine’s room was covered in drafts of poems, books, expensive accessories and beautifully tailored clothes. There was also a Siamese cat called Haru and Valentine’s collection of tiny objects, one of which was a working silver revolver. Sylvia marvelled at how precariously she had come by her happiness, ease and delight having been markedly absent from her earlier loves: ‘What ecstacy to sit up in bed looking out on that Gothic prospect of chimney-tops, drinking tea and eating a ham sandwich, and watching her detached collected movements about the large and lofty room, Haru’s shadow prancing upon the ceiling.’15 She watched Valentine’s face too; ‘the stillest face I have ever known. Amusement sharpens it slightly into that fox’s smile, but it disdains to smile for pleasure, or turn aside from its melancholy beauty.’16

  At the end of the month, Valentine took Sylvia for the first time to Winterton in Norfolk, which she considered her home, although ‘The Hill’ had only been a holiday house for the Acklands. ‘The Hill House’ itself was a fairly unexceptional Victorian villa but its outbuildings, greenhouses and trees all held cherished associations for Valentine, whose happiest moments as a child were spent alone, reading poetry, writing, walking over the dunes which were all that stood between the garden and the cold eastern sea. The house had been kept up since Robert’s death, but not adequately, and Valentine, who revelled in the villagers’ exclamation of how like Mr Ackland ‘Miss Maaalie’ looked in her trousers, dreamed of inheriting the place and restoring something of the old order and old happiness. Sylvia noticed how in Winterton Valentine behaved with an almost swaggering confidence, and was accepted by everyone. A former family servant, Caterina, showed Sylvia all her mementoes and photographs – ‘the Mollie-museum’ – the pretty child astride a rocking-horse, the debutante, the bride.

  The lovers lounged in the inn and on the quay, played childish games on the beach, writing their initials on the sand, and Sylvia saw with the delight ‘the secret of [Valentine’s] lovely gait: the footsteps were exactly aligned on a narrow track, regular as machine-stitching.’17 Going back to London in the Ackland family car, mesmerised by Valentine’s suave driving, Sylvia made her mind up to tell Buck how things stood. It was a calm, kind meeting. ‘My poor Teague, I can scarcely believe it is done; nothing more became it than its ending […] There was no dazzle of love in my eyes, no nursed delusion, or self-conning. Yet I have never liked him so well, seeing him thus clearly.’

  Sylvia went back to Chaldon in November in trousers and a fisherman’s jersey, having bought a tennis racket, driven the car (which she found easier to do in the dark, when there was less visible danger) and played more chess than in the whole of her life. In Chaldon, Sylvia and Valentine behaved so shamelessly that the village became rather prim and unnoticing and Katie Powys, who had been in love with Valentine, became fiercely jealous. Mrs Way, who came in to clean, found Sylvia and Valentine sitting up in bed together and cried out cheerfully, ‘Twins!’ The oil man came upon them embracing in a doorway and averted his gaze. Two women passed within feet of them rolling about on one of the Five Marys, all much to Sylvia’s delight. Valentine supposed that the old debate on her sex would break out again in the village, for it had never been satisfactorily resolved and Mr Child knew for certain that she was a man.

  There is nothing in Sylvia’s diary to suggest that she did not feel Valentine to be sharing her extreme happiness, but Valentine always slightly mistrusted good fortune. For her, moments of joy, whether caused by love, poetry or any other thing, had always to be set in the context of their own transience. She was much more attentive to Sylvia’s words than was Sylvia herself and would be plunged into
private despair – and private drinking – by implications which Sylvia certainly never intended. When Charles Prentice arrived at Miss Green for Sylvia’s birthday on 6 December 1930, Valentine began to wonder whether or not her own position was in jeopardy – an idea which would have shocked Sylvia had Valentine put it into words instead of into her diary. Sylvia’s ease with her many friends, her sharp, often cutting wit, made Valentine uneasy. It was the private and not the public Sylvia she had fallen in love with, and when they settled into a way of life together, Valentine deliberately chose not to accompany Sylvia to parties, dinners and friends’ houses except when attendance was absolutely unavoidable.

  On the day following Charles Prentice’s visit, Sylvia heard a thud upstairs and rushing up, found Valentine collapsed on the floor of her bedroom, icy-cold and insensible. When she came round, Valentine explained that it was ‘heart – a collapse’ and Sylvia spent an agonised, sleepless night at her bedside, thinking her near death. Valentine was ill for two days, and on the third day had ‘another heart-attack’, but ordered Sylvia to leave her alone. Four days later, in London, there was another collapse, this time at the wheel of the car. Coming out from the doctor’s, Valentine told Sylvia that it was migraine, ‘and potentially fatal’. The effect of all this on Sylvia’s nerves was, of course, considerable.

  It is odd that Sylvia did not, apparently, connect these collapses with drink, or smell, with her fine nose, the whisky which Valentine could not always – certainly not while collapsing – have concealed. ‘I thought sometimes that she must know,’18 wrote Valentine, who was increasingly ashamed of herself and felt trapped by her debilitating dependence. The problem complicated itself as time went on because whereas at first Valentine had lied to protect Sylvia, later she lied because she feared Sylvia’s reaction to having been deceived.