Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  Sylvia arranged, with Oliver Warner, to sell the remainder of the lease on 113 Inverness Terrace, for she neither needed nor could afford the flat now. At last they would have a house large enough to hold all their belongings, a stately and beautiful house, fit for Valentine. Early in July, all the negotiations done with, Sylvia and Valentine, in the Triumph’s successor, a green MG Midget, drove up Frankfort Manor’s sweeping approach.

  IV

  Frankfort Manor was a seventeenth-century house with a Dutch gable and a Norfolk reed thatch. It had been partly remodelled in the early nineteenth century, and retained a Georgian elegance inside, with some confusing later additions, including ‘an intact Edwardian long hall, complete with carved oak staircase and c.1900 beams’.50 The house was composed of two long, low storeys and was made of brick, coated with worn yellow limewash: ‘the colour of the brick showed dimly through, so the general tint of the house was that of a ripening pear with streaks of vague rose and pale madder flushing its sallow skin.’51 Dozens of trees stood around the three-acre garden; beech, oak, Spanish chestnut, elm and ash, providing a barrier around the house while not overshadowing it, and beyond the trees were cornfields and farm land. The outbuildings were numerous and fascinating: a large stable, ‘rustling with rats’, harness room, coach-house, wash-house, vinery, pigsty and privy, In one of the loose-boxes they found a rusty bayonet, in the vinery a curled and faded notebook recording the weather of 1887. There was a nuttery, two asparagus beds and a kitchen garden an acre in size, divided into four plots and surrounded by flower borders and a fruit wall. Beyond that was an orchard and a paddock. An ancient pear tree stood propped on a crutch in the orchard; there was an apricot trained against the stable wall, soft fruit, shrubs and, inside the house, the delicious scent of Gloire de Dijon roses which put their heads in at the upstairs windows. Quite by chance, Sylvia and Valentine had found themselves a ‘kind paradise’.

  Valentine was completely at home in the ‘landed’ atmosphere of Frankfort. She stalked the grounds with her rifle, shooting at rats; she chopped wood, perused the outbuildings by lantern-light at dusk, dug the garden. Every day brought her a new delight exactly tailored to her tastes; a greenfinch’s nest, a white-currant bush, a family of stoats playing on the lawn, which she could observe with the small pocket telescope Sylvia had given her. ‘Another day, […] we met a hedgehog walking up the drive,’ Valentine wrote in her autobiography, ‘another day, in full sun, I was picking green peas into a colander and saw the earth near my feet heaving, and a mole emerged, and I caught it instantly, in the colander, and carried it in to Sylvia, who was writing in her room, and set it down beside the typewriter on her table.’52 They had a writing-room apiece, an airy sitting-room made larger by an enormous speckled mirror, and four large bedrooms, of which they chose the grandest, the one with the powder closet. The kitchen was large, with an uneven brick floor and old-fashioned range. There was no electricity at Frankfort Manor: the county gentleman who was landlord to most of the village and had his own private generator, refused to have electricity cables strung across his land.

  Almost as soon as they had moved in, William the chow began to sicken and fail, and on 31 July he had to be put down. Sylvia grieved profoundly for him: ‘one of my roots has been cut through, and for a while I thought I could not endure this place, which had promised such kindness and struck with such slyness and flattered with the bland mockery of turtle-doves.’ As a result of William’s death, the ‘rough’ cats began to show themselves – a family of thick-furred scavengers who lived in the grounds and outbuildings and did much to keep down the corresponding families of rats. Soon they were coming to the back door for food, though they did not mix with the three house cats Valentine had acquired – a tabby called Meep and two grey kittens called Caspar and Boots, the first cats Sylvia had lived with since her Mister Dive. There was a goat, too, named Victoria Ambrosia.

  There was a great deal to be done at Frankfort. Their lease specified that Sylvia and Valentine should keep the garden up and cut the deep, mossy lawn at the front of the house only by scythe. When they arrived, the kitchen garden was given over to potatoes and bindweed. They lifted the potatoes and sold them to the local fish-and-chip shop, then began the long work of digging over and planting winter vegetables. They worked hard, and as long as the daylight allowed, leaving writing until the evenings, and when Sylvia was not in the garden or her writing-room, she was in the kitchen, making jams, jellies and pickles of every conceivable kind. As the autumn advanced, the extent of the damp in the house declared itself: some floorboards needed replacing, doors were warped off their level. There was a rat-hole in the bathroom window-sill. They soon realised that they could not attend properly to both house and garden and employed a local girl called Irene to live in and housekeep. They also had to employ a man to do the heavier outdoor jobs, such as the required scything. All this required money.

  Sylvia was working sporadically at her novel about 1848, ‘Summer Will Show’, but had to give most of her time to writing stories, poems, articles and reviews which could be sold to some of the many periodicals of the day. Sylvia’s income from royalties on her Chatto & Windus publications amounted to only £74 in 1932 and £127 in 1933, compared with the record year, 1927, when she earned over £1,200, and her father’s royalty payments were falling year by year as well. An indication of how concerned she was about making an adequate income from writing at this time is the painstaking listing in her diary of finished pieces, where they had been sent, how much they fetched and who owed her the odd guinea. On 25 August 1933 she wrote, ‘Try as I will, and live as we do on vegetables, I can’t keep within my estimate; and today there was nothing for poor yowling Meep and if Irene hadn’t wisely breakfasted off Meep’s liver, there would have been little for Irene.’ When the apples were ready, they sold apples and when the cats kittened, kittens, and by the end of the year Sylvia was drafting the following notice for the local post office window, a mile away from Sloley, as there was no village shop:

  Christmas 1933 is imminent

  Send your friends a carton of

  home-made CHESTNUT JAM. An epicurean jam.

  Tastes like marrons glacés, makes a delicious

  winter desert. 2/6 a carton

  or Rhubarb chutney 2/

  Apple chutney 2/

  pickled nasturtium seeds 1/6

  lemon-scented verbena sachets 1/

  Trade was not brisk, and the friends who were sent chestnut jam as a Christmas present were mostly Sylvia’s and Valentine’s.

  In November 1933 their joint collection of poems was published in the United States by Viking Press – the title, Whether a Dove or Seagull, derived from a poem of Valentine. Chatto & Windus bought in printed sheets from America for their own edition of only 622 copies, which came out in March 1934. The names of both women appeared in full on the title-page and the following rather stern ‘Note to the Reader’ served as a sort of manifesto, a subtle modulation on their original idea:

  Of the poems in this book, fifty-four are by one writer, fifty-five by the other. No single poem is the result of a collaboration nor, beyond the fact that it contains the work of two writers, is the book collaborative. The authors believe that by issuing their work under one cover the element of contrast thus obtained will add to the pleasure of the reader; by witholding individual attributions on the page they hope that some of the freshness of anonymity may be preserved. The book, therefore, is both an experiment in the presentation of poetry and a protest against the frame of mind which judges a poem by looking to see who wrote it.

  As soon as the American edition was in her hands, Valentine began to have serious doubts about the efficacy of the method. American reviewers seemed to concentrate solely on comparisons between the two poets – inevitably, as their attention had been tweaked thither and Sylvia’s comment, printed on the dust-jacket, that Valentine was ‘a more promising poet than ever I was, am or shall be’ seemed tantamount to a challenge. One revie
wer said of Valentine’s style (having used up twenty column inches guessing which were her poems) that it ‘moves […] sweetly’. This irritated Valentine intensely. ‘What I have got to say is not sweet,’ she protested, ‘and what I want to say is not sweet either.’53 On 9 November, Sylvia wrote to Charles Prentice, asking him to include a key at the back of the English edition, indicating who wrote which poems. Valentine, she said, did not mind about the American edition, but felt that anonymity ‘would exasperate our island critics. She also smarts under the fact that when we gave the book to Llewelyn Powys and told him to mark what, in his opinion, was who’s, he gave all her best poems to me.’54

  The key to the poems in the English edition undermined the stated aims of the book as set out in the ‘Note to the Reader’ and, if anything, puzzled reviewers more. Austin Clarke, writing in the New Statesman and Nation, said the authors failed to see ‘the mundane flaws in their syllogism’, and added ‘the reader will be tempted to test his own powers of literary detection until, darting backwards and forwards from one end of the book to the other, he develops a crick in the neck.’55 It was generally assumed that Valentine was a man, and two papers went as far as suggesting that Sylvia had invented ‘him’ as a pseudonymous decoy. Few of the reviewers got past the novelty of the presentation to discuss the poems themselves, though those who did were praising, on the whole. Humbert Wolfe, a keen admirer of Sylvia’s poetry, was unusual in supposing Valentine to be a woman and finding in the book ‘a growing together – accidental perhaps in fact but not in essence – which gives a strange unity to the whole.’56

  Whether a Dove or Seagull was dedicated to Robert Frost, a poet whom Valentine revered. Frost was sent a copy of the book by Louis Untermeyer, who had championed Sylvia’s early poetry, but it was more than a month before Sylvia and Valentine received his polite letter of thanks. Frost had found the book disturbing, writing to Untermeyer, ‘I hardly know what to write either to you or to them. If you could have got along without two or three of the more physical poems in the book, you can imagine how much more philosophically I could with my less cultivated taste […] It is possible to make too much of the episode – whether joke or clinical experiment. I am well past the age of shock fixation. But if I promise not to make too much of it, will you promise too? You won’t take it as an infringement of the liberty of the press if I ask you not to connect me with the book any more than you have to in your reviewing and lecturing. Don’t you find the contemplation of their kind of collusion emasculating? I am chilled to the marrow, as in the actual presence of some foul form of death where none of me can function, not even my habitual interest in versification. This to you. But what can I say to them?’57 Three weeks later he was writing again to Untermeyer: ‘For goodness sake be quick and write me out or print me plainly the address of that couplet in England. I can’t seem to read the writing of the only letter of theirs I can lay my hand on. And I must say something polite to them soon or the silence will get too hard to break […] The book has beauties, of course, and they should be acknowledged.’58 So the ‘couplet’ never suspected that by dedicating their book to Frost, they had earned his disapprobation, nor how many other people, including Untermeyer, found it disturbing.

  Untermeyer’s wife, Jean Starr, had no reservations in her admiration of Sylvia and Valentine, and included some interesting observations of them made in the summer of 1934 in her book, Private Collection. Of Sylvia she wrote: ‘she is so alive that her vital awareness is translated into everything she thinks and does. She can make an event of the fact that the carrots have come up large and healthy in her garden; a casual stroll on the lookout for mushrooms becomes a kind of picnic; a passing remark on one’s appearance is, by an affectionate inflection, almost a caress. […] [Sylvia] is all in one piece. Everything has been assimilated – music and learning and country lore and wit. And her letters flow spontaneously into form like her conversation.’59 Of Valentine she wrote, ‘she was like a very handsome boy, with her high-bred and somewhat haughty features, her close-cropped nut-brown hair, and the look of a real dandy […] her trim shirts and sports jackets, even in the country, were comme il faut.’60 Jean was living by herself at Miss Green’s cottage during that summer and found it disappointingly plain – ‘there was no thatch, there were no climbing roses, no leaded casements’61 – and excessively small, a fact impressed upon her by her large black wardrobe trunk, which refused to go up the stairs and had to darken the living room. The discomforts of the place were, to her, obvious, and she set about to cheer it up, much to the horror of Valentine and Sylvia who, on a visit to Chaldon during Jean’s stay at the cottage, hardly recognised Miss Green under her rustic make-up.

  At the time of the publication of Whether a Dove or Seagull in America, Valentine was writing a great deal and, it seems, contemplating setting up a magazine of some sort, for a letter from Llewelyn Powys endorses such an idea enthusiastically. Llewelyn had already shaped the project to his own philosophy and preoccupations: ‘a revival of the Religion of Aknaton and the removal of all restraints that interfere with man’s natural happiness’.62 ‘This very exciting idea of yours’ was already far from what Valentine had envisaged, and, unsurprisingly, the magazine never came to birth. Valentine’s correspondence with Llewelyn was bearing fruit in other ways though. In the winter of 1933 Valentine was beginning to read political tracts and pamphlets, about the Nazi regime in Germany, atrocities in Africa, colonial misdemeanors, drawn on from one to another with increasing horror and concern. Sylvia was not conscientious in following up the lists of leaflets Valentine recommended her to read, but Llewelyn was, and soon he and Valentine were swopping outrages by every post. Sylvia did not share Valentine’s deep sense of responsibility towards the world nor see the necessity to spring-clean her own assumptions and attitudes so thoroughly. She rather preferred a set opinion to an open one, while genuinely admiring the opposite trait in Valentine, seeing it as a mark of Valentine’s integrity that she wished to question and investigate so much. Valentine’s glory as well as her bane was that she had no capacity whatever for indifference.

  The deaths of Granny Moxon and Shepherd Dove – ill-handled by the panel doctor – and the generally bad conditions of agricultural labourers in Chaldon and Sloley were not academic matters to Valentine, but of the first importance. Being counted as gentry, she felt a further responsibility to her oppressed fellow-creatures, and the ways in which she helped them (often by driving them to and fro or writing to officials) were never patronising, nor mistaken as such. More so than Sylvia, she had an unobtrusive way of going about these things, and was quieter. Her reading of political tracts had set off a chain of thought about social problems, but though Fascism, growing stronger by the day in Europe, revolted her completely, she still questioned the left-wing views which stood opposite it:

  I think it well to develop the conscious part of our minds individually. Individually we can do anything.

  It is collective action that I fear.

  I think we shall find ourselves reduced to being like the ants that walked in an unbroken circle around the rim of the basin, or we should be like them, if ever the genuine Bolshevik regime got us. Because we should have agreed to follow each other always, to behave always each one like the next one.63

  Valentine had been reading the New Country poets – Auden, Day Lewis, Michael Roberts and Stephen Spender – and their technique as well as their left-wing views caused her to reassess her own position as a poet. Having always thought of the poet’s role as an exalted one, that of a prophet, it was an easy transition to begin to think of the poet as a spokesman. She began to test out different forms and deliberately manipulate her style, trying to follow, as she felt her challenging contemporaries were, a ‘time-instinct’, ‘the only true guide an artist has’.64 Painters and sculptors, she observed, were much more at liberty to do so, but the poet had to risk appearing incomprehensible at first, before his readers had acquired a ‘trained eye and ear’. Valentine, esse
ntially a lyric poet, showed no subsequent incomprehensibility in her work, for it was beyond her to be wilfully difficult, but had, in all the important ways, taken on board the contemporary developments in her art.

  Between the American and English editions of Whether a Dove or Seagull, Sylvia had been working at a satirical roman-à-clef, intended to be a much-needed money-spinner. ‘Some of it strikes me as very funny’, she wrote to Oliver Warner, and related how Valentine had been alarmed and ‘slightly reproachful’65 to find Sylvia laughing hysterically at her own jokes. She wrote it under the name Franklin Gore-Booth, and intended to preserve strict anonymity over its authorship, as it contained portraits of Theodore and Llewelyn ‘to the life’.66 Such scruples proved unnecessary when the novel was rejected by Chatto & Windus in the spring, the first such blow Sylvia had ever received, and one which she took with remarkable grace, writing to Harold Raymond, ‘don’t let us be hurt, either of us, over what is only a traffic. I have the greatest esteem for my butcher, whose fillet steak is all I could desire; but when I thought there were too many lights […] in the cats-meat, I told him so without flinching. Nor did he, from what I saw, flinch much either. I should hate to think I had less philosophy than my butcher has …’67