Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  A prior engagement of Elizabeth’s gave Sylvia and Valentine two days alone at the Kibbe farm house, ‘two long days of childish happiness’, in which Sylvia felt restored and hopeful. With Elizabeth’s return, however, things fell back into their former pattern; Valentine and Elizabeth sharing the front room, Sylvia down the passage by herself. During the day, they went for endless motor tours of Connecticut, seeing the ‘sights’ in the methodical way Sylvia and Valentine both disliked. At night, in thundery heat, Sylvia lay awake listening to Elizabeth’s voice complaining to Valentine, for by this time Elizabeth had become determined that Valentine should make a choice, commit herself, begin to treat her – Elizabeth – with some respect, with some gratitude, with some consideration. The weather got hotter and hotter and the news on the radio, crackling with static, was of war brewing up in Europe.

  Two visitors helped to relieve Sylvia’s unhappiness at Warren; Paul Nordoff was one, coming over from a cottage he had rented to work in and bringing with him a great deal of carefree conversation and a stranger’s prerogative to be irresponsibly amiable. Elizabeth didn’t like him, and saw Sylvia’s immediate revitalisation in his company as a form of indirect criticism, an impression which Sylvia made no attempt to correct. Elizabeth was, in Sylvia’s opinion, in a monomaniac state, and impermeable to the obvious. They maintained a rigid politeness, but did not converse. The other welcome visitor was Janet Machen, in the States on what turned out to be a very long stay, twenty-two and full of youthful candour about Sylvia’s situation as she saw it. The family tone and a release into light-heartedness and familiarity were tonic to Sylvia, but the visit did not last long.

  On their last day at the Kibbe house, in early September 1939, news reached them that Britain was at war with Germany. They were all ready for the journey to their next destination, Celo, in North Carolina, where they had been offered the use of a cabin half-way up Mount Mitchell, and they went ahead with the trip, passing through New York, animated with war news, on the way. While Sylvia and Valentine were at Celo, without Elizabeth, it became clear to them both that they would have to return home, though Valentine was still in the grip of her affair, and was confused and exhausted. Nothing had been resolved and a large gulf of unshared experience was growing between Sylvia and Valentine which made their stay at Celo a constrained one. Valentine was ill for part of the time, and troubled for the rest of it. Sylvia was in an agony of solicitude for her, and at the same time waited to see what her own fate was to be. On one of her solitary walks, Sylvia was attacked by a swarm of wild bees; on another, she was confronted by the sight of a black snake devouring another snake: ‘The swallower was firmly coiled, to get a good stance, and the top third of it was erect. The swallowed was about half-way down, and protesting with wavings and wrigglings. I hoped to watch this to the end, but the swallower saw me and flounced away, still with raised head.’19

  Elizabeth was in New York when they returned to the city at the end of September to try to book a passage home. New York was extremely humid and uncomfortable, the war news – of the Courageous sunk with five hundred lives lost – was bad, and Sylvia felt that there was a certain hostility towards the English in America: ‘We carried the infection of war, we were lepers.’20 Sylvia became more and more dejected waiting about in the hotel where Valentine and Elizabeth shared a room and where she again was in a room by herself. Despite her unhappiness, Sylvia maintained her excellent manners and her charm, though subdued, was as potent as ever. On a visit to the offices of the New Yorker, she met her young editor, William Maxwell, who was to become a dear and valued friend. Many years later, she wrote to him: ‘It is strange to think that during that summer when I was feeling as hollow as a hemlock stalk you were there all the time; and that when I came to The N. Y. office I was so accomplished in dissimulation that you thought I was the person who wrote so airily and securely.’21 Maxwell was immensely impressed by her: ‘her voice had a slightly husky, intimate quality. Her conversation was so enchanting it made my head swim. I did not want to let her out of my sight.’22 Maxwell tried to persuade Sylvia to stay in the United States, ‘where bombs were less likely to fall on her’, but she declined, writing in a letter to him soon after, ‘I have the profoundest doubts about this war. I don’t feel that it is being fought against Nazidom, and while Chamberlain is around I doubt if it will be. And I can’t suppose that going back will better it or me. But for all that, I feel that my responsibilities are there, not here.’23

  Sylvia did not, however, want to leave America alone. Elizabeth, who had been calm and cheerful on their return to New York, tried to pin Valentine down: she should make a choice, and, because of the war, why not stay in America? Several hot evenings passed in the statement and reiteration of this theme until one when Valentine fell exhausted into Sylvia’s room and, eventually, explained how Elizabeth had driven her past all patience with the suggestion that Valentine should become an American citizen – for safety’s sake. Valentine had damned such an idea outright – it was indeed a major miscalculation of what she could or could not bear – and immediately she and Sylvia began packing for another hotel.

  Their only subsequent meeting with Elizabeth on that trip was a formal farewell at Elizabeth’s club before boarding the SS Manhattan, bound for Southampton. In their cabin, Valentine collapsed onto Sylvia, reassured her that they would recover their love, and in an instant the old intimacy seemed to be restored.

  In mid-Atlantic foundered the island of Atlantis.

  There toll the bronze bells of the city of Ys.

  There driftingly dance upon the unvexed tides

  Drowned sailors with their Atlantidean brides

  (But the head being heaviest they dance heels uppermost).

  And there, mid-way between one coast and another coast,

  Dimming, merging, falling from the light of day,

  Past colour sombred and past texture sodden,

  Wallowing downward towards the lost, the foundered, the forgotten

  Down, down to the innocence of legend it recedes –

  My sorrow, embossed with mountains, darkened with forests, laced

  With summer lightning, quilted with rivers and dirt roads

  My sorrow, stately as a cope, vast as a basilica –

  My sorrow, embroidered all over with America,

  That at a word from you in mid-Atlantic I threw away.24

  III

  The Manhattan docked at Southampton on 11 October 1939, after a crossing made worse by the fact that its proper ballast of pig-iron had been requisitioned for munitions. As the passengers were waiting to disembark, a lone voice launched into ‘Land of Hope and Glory’: ‘For a moment it was remarkably like being torpedoed. And people who had looked perfectly brave and sedate during the voyage suddenly turned pale, and looked round for escape. There was of course no escape. The singing came from a large fur-coated white-haired lady surrounded (rather like Britannia) with a quantity of parcels. And she sang all through that embarrassing stanza. Then she paused, and looked round challengingly. We all pretended we had heard nothing unusual, nothing, in fact, at all. After a while she sang the doxology. After that she sang no more.’25 There really was nothing to sing about yet. Sylvia and Valentine returned to Frome Vauchurch with their newly issued gas-masks, to the black-outs, evacuees and air-raid shelters of the Phoney War.

  On the boat, Sylvia and Valentine seemed to have been restored to each other, but the protracted unhappiness of their stay in America had left them both very vulnerable to doubt. Rather than a true reintegratio amoris, what Sylvia later called a ‘long iron frost’26 set in. Neither wanted to offend the other; both had lost confidence in their power to love, and so things went on, very cautiously, each waiting for signs that their marriage had survived intact.

  The signs which Sylvia saw appeared to prove that there was little hope. She was not naturally cautious or passive, but America had worn her down, and Valentine was still in part committed to Elizabeth. On 25 October,
as a lone diary entry for 1939 records, Sylvia was alone in the house when the phone rang:

  It was a cable from Elizabeth, I can remember this much: Yes to all your questions. I guessed the sort of questions. Embarrassed and sick at heart I went into the bathroom, and looked out of the window. There, between the dip of the two green hillsides and a level storm-cloud, was a new sea. The pale, early morning sky, but it had a quality of the water element, seemed at once thicker and more lustrous than air. It was a heavy, milk pale, faintly sparkling sea, pushing and brimming in to this new bay between our two hillsides. And beyond this pale sea was the heavy purple cloud, heavy with rain and dark in the morning.

  I could not doubt but that it was the sea, though no one but I would ever know of it. All day I saw it, new, cold, pale, a heavy and absolving weight of water. And could not but think it a sign to my uneasy unhappiness that is now almost inattentive, so natural does it seem to me to get such cuffs as this morning’s, so rare is it now, to be surprised by any moment of illumination. And this seemed as though it were the last, and with the validity of a last thing.

  Another cable accident occurred a few months later, as Sylvia was preparing to leave for Rat’s Barn where she was going to finish her collection of stories, ‘The Cat’s Cradle Book’. The telephone operator called with a query about a cable, and read back to Sylvia the words Valentine had intended for Elizabeth. This incident so impressed on Valentine the falsity of her position that she wrote to Elizabeth to say things could not go on; but the wariness between Sylvia and Valentine still continued: certain actions, certain words had become invalid because of their associations.

  Valentine had been drinking heavily all through the American trip and did not stop when she returned to England at the beginning of the war, when, she once said, she was drinking a bottle of spirits a day (though wartime shortages may soon have regulated this). Worried by her dependence on drink, she consulted her doctor in Weymouth, who told her that the only way out was through an exercise of will-power, that very few people were successful and that the prognosis was bad. This made Valentine depressed, and her dependence if anything greater, and so her drinking went on – Sylvia, apparently, never aware of it as a problem.

  The naval war of the winter of 1939 may not have seemed too threatening to the population of West Dorset, but the events of early 1940 did. Hitler overran Denmark and Norway in April with alarming ease, and the Royal Navy had difficulty holding the position won at Narvik. By the summer, the governments of Poland and Belgium, the King and Queen of Norway and the Queen of the Netherlands were all in exile in London; the British Expeditionary Force, once so sure of hanging out its washing on the Siegfried Line, had been caught in a pincer movement, and was trapped at Dunkirk. France was within weeks of capitulation to Germany. Early measures taken at home to provide some protection for civilians now lost their air of pointless routine and were undertaken in earnest, and in the wake of earnestness came a deal of inefficiency. Sylvia wrote wearily of an ARP air-raid rehearsal in Maiden Newton: ‘It is like a knock-about farce film done in slow motion, and at intervals some member of the local gentry pipes up to say, “Well, let’s hope it will never be needed”, or “We can’t really get on with it without Mr Thompson”, or “Has it started yet, do you know?” The most melancholy thought is, that if there is a real raid they will all dauntlessly turn up to mismanage it, for their courage is as unquestionable as their artlessness.’27

  Sylvia had joined the local branch of the WVS at the beginning of the war, and was appointed Secretary, working two days a week at the headquarters in Colliton House, Dorchester. The section was led by an admiral’s wife, Mrs Anita Egerton, and had a pyramidal structure, flattening down through layers of county womanhood to the village representative and her team of workers. All the women were local, all were volunteers, most of them were middle-aged and many had other wartime jobs. The WVS performed a number of dogsbody services for Civil Defence and the ARP: mending servicemen’s clothing, organising first-aid groups and blood donating sessions, knitting by the acre. Sylvia’s section had one main responsibility, to organise rest centres for evacuees from the cities. She and Mrs Egerton had to make routine inspections of these centres, dusty halls often full of Home Guard equipment or moth-eaten blankets left by the Rural District Council. There were rehearsals for emergencies, there were checkings of supplies, but most of the time rest centres were far from being in a state of readiness.

  On 14 June 1940, Paris fell to the German Army. It was for Sylvia one of the most sombre days of the war. ‘Paris has fallen – has been abandoned,’ she wrote in her diary. The occupation of Paris, cultural pivot of Europe, and the fall of France which followed two days later, was ‘a flaring, presaging comet in all men’s eyes’.28 People had to admit now that the war was going very badly indeed and that a German invasion of Britain was the inevitable next move. For Sylvia, it revived all the vehemence of her feelings about Fascism:

  Fascism is the revolution of the bourgeoisie […] We should attack […] via their children, as the church does.

  There is a great deal to attack.

  I think I envy the French. Hearing Churchill in a very bad paragraph announce we would fight on, etc, I found in myself a sense not only of exasperation at the numbers more who must be killed and maimed in a war that never reached its purpose but also the frustrated impatience of an experimental scientist. For war – this sort of war – is no way to attack fascism. And I am fretted to think how every day my chances of seeing other methods tried out are diminished. I feel like a scientist who has to wait in a queue to get to the laboratory – while both the laboratory and he are under bombardment.29

  Two nights after this, a lovely summer night, Sylvia was lying in bed when she heard a new aeroplane noise – a German plane. Her immediate reaction was to sit up, to protect herself. A British bomber was another matter: Sylvia took a grim satisfaction in hearing them go over towards France, for she was a pragmatist. If the war had to be fought, it had to be fought effectively, though she had almost as little faith in Churchill’s effectiveness as she had had in Chamberlain’s. She looked to the Soviet Union for an example of unambiguous opposition to Fascism, overlooking as she did so the implications of the pre-war Nazi-Soviet pact and the likelihood of Stalin’s motivations being as much territorial as ideological. She felt the lassitude of one who has at last been proved ‘right all along’; for indeed, if the British Government had intervened in the Spanish Civil War, things might have turned out very differently. And she began to think of how vainly she had worked for the Spanish cause, and how she wished she could have done more: ‘Strange how there was room for one in that war: and in this – none. This war has not issued a single call for the help of intellectuals. It is just your money and/or your life.’30

  Later in the year, when large formations of bombers became a frequent sight in the sky above Frome Vauchurch, Valentine noted how, as in Madrid, her own reaction was very different from Sylvia’s. She wrote to Alyse Gregory that she felt ‘a curious kind of sad, diminished pleasure that they were “Ours” and not “Theirs”. But the main thought, at first, was a trembling fear because of the people who, while I was looking at those planes, were still walking and talking, shopping, kissing, thinking, feeling – and who, because of those planes, would be dead, very soon.’31 She had nothing to temper the workings of a sympathetic imagination, and in any tale of atrocity felt a painful identification with both the victim and the perpetrator, a sense of shared guilt. The inhumanity of the war doubly shocked Valentine because she felt culpable. Sylvia did not feel culpable, but righteously indignant.

  No will of mine, groaned metal

  Wrenched me out of the pit where I lay sleeping

  Fired me and quenched me

  Drove me out, a shadow sweeping

  Over where men and wholesome fields lie sleeping.

  No will of mine, spat the petrol

  Raised me from that still depth where I unquickened

 
; Slept, and betrayed me

  Drop by drop into a reckoned

  Into a dying quickened and darkened.

  No will of mine, shrieked metal,

  But insatiable destiny of solid fettered

  To gravitation

  Ache of homesickness implacable,

  Hurls me down to shatter and be shattered.

  No will of mine, the pilot

  Whispered, from my young wife and from my sleeping

  Children to this work

  Sent me out, a sower reaping

  The curses of women who clutch their babes unsleeping.32