Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  I don’t think I have ever met so many congenial people in the whole of my life, liking overleapt any little bounds of language. My substantives were Spanish, my verbs, being picked up locally, were Catalan. I got on beautifully. Barcelona, by the time we saw it, was I suppose the nearest thing I shall ever see to the early days of U.S.S.R. … the very first days, when everything was proceeding on the impulse of that first leap into life. After the military rising, combatted in its first showing by an almost unbelievable mixture, police and middle-class (it happened all of a sudden when the workers were boxed in the factories) after a couple of days fighting, Barcelona was taken over by committees of trades union men, and the workers’ militia; in other words, it is a Soviet town. […] And you cannot imagine, after this mealy-mouthed country, the pleasure of seeing an office with a large painted sign, Organisation for the Persecution of Fascists.93

  Sylvia was very much impressed with the tranquillity of Barcelona only two months after the ‘July days’, when soldiers from the nearby barracks of Montjuich opened fire in the Plaza de Catalonia, triggering days of fierce and bloody fighting. Evidence of the battle was in the state of the churches, all gutted and boarded up, and in the wreath of flowers, replaced every day, which hung on one particular tram, used by the citizens to storm the military barricaded in the baroque church on the Ramblas. Sylvia and Valentine looked approvingly on the graffiti and posters asserting No Pasarán and the little stalls around the Plaza: ‘Mixed with the old wares, the flowers, the shaving brushes, the canaries and lovebirds, the watermelons, are new wares: militia caps, pistols (toy-pistols to our shame be it spoken), rings and badges and brooches carrying the initials of the anarchist F.A.I. and C.N.T., the Trotskyist P.O.U.M., the Communist P.S.U.C. and U.G.T.’94 They bought a selection of these things and some less politically pertinent objects such as handkerchiefs and ties and, on their return to England, donated them to the Daily Worker to auction for the Spanish Fund.

  Sylvia admired the people of Barcelona, their sober determination and spirit as they drilled with broomsticks, having sent most of their weapons to threatened Madrid. The Spaniard Sylvia got to know best on this visit, and the one she admired most, was a large, generous woman called Asunción at whose house on the Calle Joaquin Costa Sylvia and Valentine were lodged and who personified for Sylvia the common sense and right-thinking of the ordinary people, ‘a people naturally intellectual, and with a long standard of culture’.95 ‘People like Asunción have not any nationality at all, I feel. They just belong to the good, with a few local traits and a language.’96 Also billeted at Asunción’s house was a young Englishman called Steven Clark who was in Barcelona to make a report for a group sending medical aid to Spain. Valentine had first seen him through the window of a hotel in the city and had been impressed by his carriage and handsome head. When Steven came down with influenza during their stay, and Sylvia and Valentine helped to nurse him, a long friendship began.

  One of the jaunts for foreign visitors was an inspection tour of the torres, the large villas on the hills overlooking the city where the rich had so recently lived. The houses had been preserved, their art works and heavy taste in sideboards all in place. Only the valuables which were meltable and considered by the Comité as being of no artistic interest had been removed. All this was in keeping with the Government’s policy of protecting Spanish art from the civil war, but it was not this moral contrast with the destructive behaviour of Franco’s men which interested Sylvia most. In an article for Left Review, published in December 1936, she noted something else about the phenomenon:

  The works of ecclesiastical art are in the museums, the churches are bare and barred. Apologists in this country have tended to stress the first statement, but the second is the more significant. Those systematically gutted interiors are the more impressive when one contrasts them with the preservation of the villas. In the villas was as great, or greater, a demonstration of luxury, idleness and superbity. In the villas were objects infinitely more desirable as loot than anything the churches could offer. Had the churches been sacked, as some say they were, by a greedy and envious mob, that mob would have sacked the villas with more greed and better satisfaction. But the villas are untouched, and the churches are gutted. They have been cleaned out exactly as sick-rooms are cleaned out after a pestilence. Everything that could preserve the contagion has been destroyed.97

  And, as Sylvia pointed out in the same article, what went on in Barcelona was not, as assumed by many at home, a Marxist-inspired plot, though she might have wished it to be. Barcelona was an anarchist town and ‘it was the people themselves who, deliberately and systematically, put the churches out of action.’ Sylvia nursed a soft spot for anarchists all her life. In a letter written soon after her return from Barcelona, she said of anarchism, ‘the world is not yet worthy of it, but it ought to be the political theory of heaven.’98

  Sylvia and Valentine left Port Bou on 14 October and arrived back in Chaldon on the 22nd. Valentine immediately set about writing articles and reports based on what she had seen in Spain. One letter to the News Chronicle appealed for food ships to be sent out to counter the acute shortages occasioned by floods of refugees into the cities. It was a humanitarian appeal, not a political one, and stressed that groceries ‘cannot possibly be considered as dangerous weapons’. This was published on 7 November, the day on which the rebels reached the suburbs of Madrid and the Republican Government left the city – all except the leader, Largo Caballero. The next day, the first International Brigade was on the streets of Madrid, driving Franco’s rebels back, the first of many such tentative holdings-on. The fall of the capital seemed so imminent that Germany and Italy recognised Franco’s ‘Government’ on 18 November, though in fact the general did not take Madrid for another two and a half years.

  On 24 November, Valentine was called to London by Party officials. She was needed to drive one of two lorries going out to Valencia, just the sort of job she had longed to do. Back at ‘24’, Sylvia waited in agonies, contemplating the risks Valentine was taking: ‘I sat alone in the house, frozen with cold and despair, rigid with courage and party loyalty.’99 But when Valentine reached London, she found she had a temperature of 103 degrees and a pain she attributed to colitis which got progressively worse, and on 26 November she was waving the lorries off, rather than driving one away. Sylvia came to fetch her home, where she remained ill for about a week, and the Party, unsurprisingly, never made Valentine another like offer.

  VI

  Summer Will Show was published while Sylvia and Valentine were in Spain and Country Conditions soon after their return. The political significance of Sylvia’s novel was lost on the reviewers, most of whom were struck rather by the difference between this book and her novels of the 1920s. ‘The small but devoted public of her past,’ wrote the Chicago Tribune, ‘may regret her abandonment of a genre distinctly her own, but “Summer Will Show” will bring her a wider public’, while another paper put it more crudely by referring to Sylvia as ‘the woman who wrote Mr Fortune’s Maggot nine years ago’. During those nine years, Sylvia had gradually fallen out of the public view, and she was never fashionable again, though she always had appreciative readers and sold reasonably well. In America, where her initial impact had been greater, her memory stayed greener, and the appearance of her distinctive stories in the New Yorker ensured her a small but devoted following. In England, her new political commitment did nothing to enhance her popularity with reviewers, nor did authorship of Lolly Willowes cut much ice with Communists. Fortunately for Sylvia, the dynamic behind both her inconsistency and her unshakeable opinions was a complete indifference to the opinions of people outside her sphere of affection. According to Valentine, Sylvia never read reviews of her own books, though she valued the comments of friends and fellow-writers very much. The pecking-order of writers did not interest her. ‘People always want to fix a standard for everything,’ she once said. ‘I do wish they would just let something happen and watch it without
thinking they must look it up in Crockford’s or somewhere.’100

  Country Conditions, which was published by Lawrence & Wishart at two shillings, was reviewed well, but not much outside ‘the Party parish’. The book’s political argument was very clear and expressed without melodrama in Valentine’s portrait of a depressed agricultural village, a thinly veiled East Chaldon, and a put-upon family, the Dorys, based on Jimmy and May Pitman, who were still Sylvia’s and Valentine’s tenants at Miss Green’s cottage. Valentine included in the appendices figures comparing farm wages across Britain to prove that her depiction of life in Wessex was not untypical of conditions throughout the country. Finally she set out comparisons of the hours and wages of workers in the USSR with those in Germany and Italy, to widen the field of her argument. It was this that riled the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement, who dismissed the whole book as distorted propaganda, ‘resolutely arguing from the particular to the general. The particular hamlet set before us by the author may exist precisely as she describes it: to hold it up as an example of the English village is quite unfair.’101 This was the only really unfavourable review; many were enthusiastic, and what was constantly noticed was the effectiveness of Valentine’s method: ‘eloquent in its restrained indignation’.102 As for the sales (it was a very short book, almost a tract), the publisher reported that they were ‘keeping up quite well’ and that he had sold 402 copies in the first month. Her first royalty cheque was for £4 0s 4d – hardly a fortune, but a distinct improvement on her dealings with Viking Press, where her account never broke even due to the quantities of copies of Whether a Dove or Seagull she ordered for her family and friends.

  1937 began bleakly with the news first of the death of Ralph Fox, an English novelist fighting in Spain, and then the deaths, printed in the same newspaper column, of Stephen Tomlin and Dorothy Warner. Tommy’s marriage to Julia Strachey had broken up finally in 1934 and his life had been increasingly miserable and uncreative since then. ‘For the past 3 or 4 years we had scarcely seen him,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary on 19 January 1937, ‘when we did he seemed ravaged by his own misery; couldn’t work, had been a failure; tore everyone & everything to bits in a kind of egotistical rage. Rosamund L. said he would sit on the lawn there by the hour denouncing women, complaining of his own lot. And he had grown immensely fat, white unwholesome looking, & was said to drink.’ Tommy had been taken into hospital just before Christmas suffering from blood-poisoning after what had seemed a routine tooth-extraction under gas. He became very ill with pneumonia on top of the septicaemia, seemed to be improving, but died suddenly on 5 January, aged thirty-five. ‘A tragic, wasted life;’ wrote Mrs Woolf, ‘something wrong in it, & wrong that we shouldn’t feel it more. Yet one does, by fits & starts, this very fine spring morning.’ Whatever Sylvia’s feelings were, she did not share them unless with her diary of that period which no longer exists, and there was no question of her wishing to attend the funeral at Ash in Kent.

  Dorothy Warner’s death was just as unexpected. The history of the Warnerium since Sylvia’s departure in 1930 had not been happy: Dorothy had had recurrent bouts of mental illness, Oliver had attempted suicide. By 1936 the couple had separated and were considering a divorce, but Dorothy contracted pneumonia following a blood-transfusion, and died the day after Tommy, aged thirty-seven.

  On January 17th, Sylvia and Valentine received more alarming news in a report that Tom Wintringham had been killed in the particularly fierce fighting in and around Madrid during those weeks. He was not dead, as it turned out, though he was wounded soon after. The intensification of the war and the death of acquaintances such as Fox and another Communist, Jerry Birch, gave a sense of urgency to Sylvia’s and Valentine’s political activities at home. They attended Peace Council meetings in Bridport, Labour Party meetings in Weymouth, a Peace Rally in Yeovil. They were esteemed sufficiently – either for their mild publicity value or for their sheer reliability – to be put on the platform at a Labour meeting alongside the local Parliamentary candidate and Sir Stafford Cripps. And all the time, Valentine was writing articles and reviews, sending out pamphlets, answering correspondences with earnest readers of her book and writing a great many poems. It was at this time too that she and Sylvia used to drive round nearby Bovingdon Camp, placing small anti-war leaflets on the Army’s tanks.

  Late in June, 1937, Sylvia and Valentine were invited to attend the 2nd International Congress of Writers in Defence of Culture, which had been organised before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and was to take place in three centres, Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid at the beginning of July. Sylvia and Valentine were to be part of what Sylvia described as ‘a depressingly puny and undistinguished British delegation’103 which also included Edgell Rickword, Ralph Bates, Frank Pitcairn (Claud Cockburn), John Strachey and the twenty-eight-year old, newly converted Comrade Stephen Spender. Despite the Foreign Office’s refusal to validate any of the delegates’ passports for Spain, on the grounds that ‘cultural reasons’ were not sufficient, the party set off, late, for Paris – Sylvia’s first, and not pleasurable, experience of air travel. They crossed the Spanish border at Port Bou on 3 July, using false passports arranged for them by André Malraux. Malraux then accompanied them in the fleet of luxury cars which bore the defenders of culture along the mountainous coastal road to Barcelona.

  The Congress itself, made up of one hundred and ten delegates from twenty-seven countries, many of them experienced congress-goers, had already moved on to Valencia, the capital of Republican Spain, for the official opening on 4 July by Juan Negrine, the President of the Spanish Government. The Writers’ Congress was the most prestigious of no fewer than five congresses going on in Valencia during the first two weeks of July, all supported by the Government as part of a propaganda push. When the British party arrived in Valencia on the evening of 4 July, they were taken immediately to the Consistorial Hall where the second session of the Congress was about to begin, and were greeted enthusiastically. The hall, though gashed and pitted by bombs, had been decorated for the congress with two enormous panels hung behind the platform on which the names of defenders and martyrs of the Republican cause had been inscribed. Between these panels hung the five-pointed red star, symbol of the Popular Front and of the International Brigades. On the platform were several members of the Government and the chairman of the Congress, Alexei Tolstoi.

  Sylvia was the fourteenth of the delegates to speak at that session; they included Julien Benda, José Bergamin, Alexei Tolstoi, Tristan Tzara, Anna Seghers and Ralph Bates, leader of the British section. She made a short speech in French which was then translated into Catalan, saluting the Spanish people and reminding the Congress that culture only belongs to the people if it is defended. Not all the contributions were as concise as hers, and after a banquet – all laid on by the Government – she and Valentine fell into bed at their hotel in a state of exhaustion.

  The next day the whole Congress moved on to Madrid, one of the front lines of the war, where the main business was to be done, or at least where the ten set themes were to be discussed: The Role of the Writer in Society, Dignity of Thought, The Individual, Humanism, Nation and Culture, The Problems of Spanish Culture, Cultural Inheritance, Literary Creation, Reinforcing Cultural Ties, Aid to the Spanish Writers. On the way from Valencia to Madrid, the convoy stopped at a village called Minglanilla where the mayor immediately offered to provide an impromptu lunch. As the delegates waited in an inn, drinking lemonade, some of the village children crept in under the tables to have a closer look at los intelectuales. ‘An Englishwoman’104 gave them mint pastilles from her pocket; another delegate did tricks for them. The extravagantly hospitable meal which the mayor provided was interrupted by the sound of singing outside, and when the delegates went over to the window and onto the balcony they saw the village children gathered to sing ‘The Internationale’ and the Republican song known as ‘Riego’s Hymn’. The delegates applauded and called down greetings; the children, who
had probably never themselves eaten a meal like the one cooling indoors, shouted back, ‘Viva la republica!’ ‘Viva los intelectuales!’ – ‘that extraordinary, unbelievable greeting’105 as Valentine later described it.

  The stop at Minglanilla made a vivid impression on many of the writers present. The enthusiasm with which they were greeted and the hopeful confidence of the village women (there were no healthy young men left there) in the power of the literate brought many of the delegates up sharp. Some, like Valentine, found it very moving and saw in the spirit of the village ‘the real future of culture’106 – a culture in which the word intellectual was never used ironically. Others, like Stephen Spender (in his 1951 account, it must be said, not in the article he wrote in 1937) saw little but irony in the whole episode: ‘Speeches, champagne, food, receptions, hotel rooms were a thick hedge dividing us from reality.’107 The women who, in tears, urged delegates to make known their private and collective tragedies, or who pressed on the foreigners their last scraps of food had, in Spender’s eyes, pathetically misplaced their hopes. ‘Somehow the villagers of Minglanilla thought that the Congress of Intellectuals was a visitation which would save them’ and there was ‘something grotesque about it’.108

  This difference in perception illustrates some of the causes of the pronounced antipathy which grew between Stephen Spender and Sylvia on the trip to Spain in 1937. What she resented in him was the apparent shallowness of his Communism, his almost perverse individualism, his youthful conceit and a tendency to hog publicity. She would have taken his unease at Minglanilla as proof that he was politically compromised and socially embarrassed. For his part, Spender was obviously irritated by Sylvia’s voice, manner and apparently blind Party faith, and he caricatured her fairly mercilessly in his memoir World Within World as the ‘Communist lady writer’ who ‘looked like, and behaved like, a vicar’s wife presiding over a tea party given on a vicarage lawn as large as the whole of Republican Spain. Her extensory smiling mouth and her secretly superior eyes under her shovel hat made her graciously forbidding. She insisted – rather cruelly, I thought – on calling everyone “comrade”, and to me her sentences usually began, “Wouldn’t it be less selfish, comrade”, which she followed by recommending some course of action highly convenient from her point of view’.109 ‘An irritating idealist, always hatching a wounded feeling’110 is what Sylvia wrote of Spender in a letter to Steven Clark. During her visit to Spain, Sylvia was not in the least interested in the phenomenon of herself abroad; what passionately engaged her were the Spanish people themselves and the practical application of the abstractions of the Congress. Anyone floating around being disruptively cynical or simply furthering their own ends she treated with contempt.