One of the charms of this tawny south Somerset stone is its great variability. Not only does it weather from its first butter-colour through every shade of golden tabby down to a greenish tint which is almost as dark as pond-water, but these hues respond like a chameleon to changes of light and humidity. I had never thought Crewkerne a town of much distinction (though it has a handsome large church with an acrostical epitaph in it, and a fair in late summer: it was at this fair in the innocent nineteen-twenties that I saw on a placard outside a booth the boastful claim: ‘All Our French Artist’s Models are Alive’); but one evening when the sun came suddenly out after a day of rain I saw Crewkerne light up with an intensity of colour I have never forgotten: topaz and beer-bottle brown, and tawny yellows beyond comparison.15
The book is also full of recondite information and surprising digressions from the usual guide-path – notably a description of the seasonal modulations in the smell of apple. It is a sensualist’s book, written in a style which conveys the intimate quality of conversation.
The Corner That Held Them was published while Sylvia was finishing work on Somerset. It is her most ambitious novel, one in which she abandoned many conventional elements of novel-writing, such as the use of a protagonist or a plot, and set out instead a long, well-paced and consistently well-imagined chronicle of life in a Fenlands convent, Oby, between the years 1345 and 1382. It was the period of the Peasant Revolt and the Black Death, ‘one of the salient events of economic history, one of the few that possesses a date,’ as George Townsend Warner had written in Trade, Tillage and Invention. Economics dominate the book, as they dominated the lives of the nuns; Sylvia was to say much later that she began the story, ‘on the purest Marxian principles, because I was convinced that if you were going to give an accurate picture of the monastic life, you’d have to put in all their finances.’16
It is, indeed, a very worldly book; not a historical novel, but a piece of highly artificial ‘realism’. It is full of suppressed ironies, but deliberately empty of significance; idiosyncratic, absorbing and entertaining. Detail (often the smaller the better) is of great importance to the author in describing lives – and deaths – which were ‘essentially trivial’, and there is no overall pattern to the book, except that of time passing:
The weather was intensely sultry. Thunderstorms rattled overhead but did not break the drought. The little rain they wrenched out of the clouds had scarcely touched the earth before it rose up in a steaming mist. The nuns, exhausted by kneeling round Dame Isabel and repeating the prayers for the dying on behalf of a woman who seemingly could not die, found it hard to conceal their weariness and disillusionment (for it is disillusioning to discover that compassion, stretched out too long, materialises into nothing more than a feat of endurance). […] there lay Dame Isabel, mute as a candle, visibly consuming away and still not extinguished. Every time she opened her eyes they were more appallingly brilliant. It was an exemplary end, but not a consolatory one. Even her patience seemed to take on a quality of deceit and abstraction, it was as though she were calculating the hours that must pass before they would leave her alone. When at length she was dead the reflection that they had done everything they could for her was confused by a feeling that they and not she had stayed too long.17
Freed from the pressure of plot and the pressure to be consecutive and significant, Sylvia was able to examine, slowly and carefully, how society functions, illustrating through the lives of the Oby nuns the delicate interdependence between one person’s behaviour and another’s. She could not have done this by writing a conventional novel, nor by filling up her book with facts and a bogus sense of history. It was her genius to be able to imagine a time, place or person so fully as to be as good as real – or better – and she always seemed to find exactly the right and revealing detail to convey her meaning with astonishing freshness and force. ‘Just a shift in a cloud will transform a landscape however well you know it,’ she once said. ‘There are details about it you never noticed before, and I think it’s so with ordinary daily life. There’s a shift of lighting and you see everything quite differently, and if you can catch that moment before the effect has gone then you can hope to write something that is convincing.’18
The Corner That Held Them remained Sylvia’s own favourite among her novels. She had had to struggle to write it during the war and it was in many ways a book purely for herself, using a technique which exactly suited her. She had used the trick of not having a protagonist before, in After the Death of Don Juan, and had found that it afforded her a new freedom to introduce a large number of characters and attend to a multiplicity of ‘points of view’. The Corner That Held Them has many more characters, covers a much longer period of time, and is more slowly paced than the earlier novel, and the effect of universal sympathy is so pronounced that one no longer sees the author’s controlling hand in it. Little wonder that Sylvia felt the book had taken on a life of its own, and that she could not ‘finish’ the novel in any other way than simply stopping it. She tampered more with this book at the proof stage than with any other, and even when it was printed and bound – ‘in its coffin’ – could hardly let it go, and began to write a sequel.
The reviews were good, but on the whole rather short, and, as usual, seemed to view Sylvia’s work as tame and comfortable, just the effect she never intended. Late in her life, she wrote to Norah Smallwood, her editor at Chatto & Windus from 1939, that ‘if I ever hear the word style about myself again I shall burst and die.’19 But it was her fate to be thought of as a stylist. The expression of her ideas was so unusual and stimulating that it often proved more memorable than the ideas themselves. In the early novels, the ideas were not so directed or so important as in the novels from Summer Will Show onwards, but the stylistic effects were very marked, and perhaps this disparity is what gives those earlier books their sense of adding up to less than the sum of their parts. In the later novels, where her purpose was more serious and her fanciful side subdued, Sylvia was still thwarted by her own manner of writing, which was essentially surprising and diverting.
Much of the ‘charge’ of Sylvia’s books comes from the fact that they are highly emotional and yet highly controlled by the intellect. The surprise and freshness of her style, though, is very largely due to the construction of her similes. In them she chooses apparent incongruities to illuminate a real relation, often juxtaposing two or more totally different sense impressions to discover possibilities in description quite outside the expected. Consider her description of Nissen huts – ‘as melancholy as yaks’. The phrase perfectly and succinctly conveys a number of impressions; the curving downward shape of both objects, their droopiness and slight absurdity, shagginess and solitariness. These effects are very glancing, for the pace of Sylvia’s prose is fast. Often an image suggests itself as she is writing, as in this description of holding a dead poodle, written in a letter to George Plank, ‘so limp, George, and so touchingly rounded and curly: like a sleeping puppy, like a cluster of grapes’. This is both tender and striking. The visual image is perfect, and the choice of the word ‘cluster’ infinitely more expressive than any ‘bunch’ could have been. A single word could often carry a whole extra level of meaning in Sylvia’s similes, as in the flavour of the tart in this description of ‘the Sunday burst of hymnody … from church or chapel’, ‘so much like the gush of juice when one cuts open a rhubarb tart’.20
In the years after the war Sylvia was writing some of her best poems, poems with a strong interest in narrative and character, such as ‘Seven Conjectural Readings’ and ‘Gloriana Dying’. These were quite different in kind from the intensely personal love poems she wrote occasionally for Valentine; they were technically and intellectually tight and the sort of work which would have made into a satisfying and successful book. Twenty years had passed since the publication of The Espalier and Time Importuned, but Sylvia had never ceased to compose poetry. It was in many ways the medium most natural to her, giving expression to her musicali
ty and her essentially verbal intelligence at one and the same time. Her manner as a poet had changed: she no longer imitated other poets for ironic effect or relied so heavily on pastoral and allegorical subjects. Her subjects were still consciously unfashionable though, and increasingly drawn from myth and history. She continued to use archaisms, inversions, the transposition of parts of speech, and occasionally coinage, to stretch the language over her meaning. This penchant for old words, or the second meaning of words, makes her poems appear quaint at first glance, but they are not quaint. As Donald Davie has written, she was the ‘most English of poets’,21 whose register was deliberately chosen.
Although she wrote in ‘professional’ quantity, Sylvia no longer put her poems forward for publication, except occasionally in magazines. Possibly she had ceased to think of herself as a poet in that way, though it seems more likely that she had Valentine’s feelings at heart, having, albeit with the best intentions, made such a mistake with Whether a Dove or Seagull. Valentine could barely look at the book any more, and had crossed out the half-title in her own copy, writing ‘Almost Opposite’ instead. On the fly-leaf she had copied out part of a poem by Robert Graves: ‘Who rhyming here have had/Marvellous hope of achievement/And deeds of ample scope,/Then deceiving and bereavement/Of this same hope.’ Valentine’s poems were as commercially unsuccessful as ever, and she as disheartened over them: ‘I have come to thinking that I shall not try any more at all,’ she wrote to Alyse Gregory, ‘except to make money by the little articles I can sometimes turn out; for that I badly need to do. I cannot write with my tongue in my cheek, and I cannot make a thing look palatable when I feel myself that it is poisonous. This is as much lack of technical skill as possession of integrity, I think; but in any case, it means nothing like a steady income.’22
Valentine’s and Sylvia’s lives had diverged considerably since the war, a fact that was to have serious consequences. There was the business of Valentine’s new spirituality, an essentially private matter, but also one she felt instinctively she could not share with Sylvia. In addition, the differences in their ages was more marked than at any previous time: at the end of 1948 Sylvia was fifty-five, greying and the possessor of a dental upper plate. Her interests were increasingly centred around her writing, the house and the garden, in which she had begun to take a passionate pride since the purchase of the house in 1946. Valentine was forty-two and still handsome and lithe. Through her work at Dr Gaster’s she made several close friends among local people, most of whom admired Valentine without, at first, knowing her as a writer at all. Many of her general acquaintances never knew her as a poet, and many bored Sylvia to tears, a fact of which Valentine was painfully aware. Sylvia’s own friends usually came from further afield and corroborated her identity as an intellectual and a writer. Sylvia’s persistent success meant that it was no longer possible, in this matter of writing, for them to treat each other as equals, an admission which cost them both dear.
The surprised pleasure with which Valentine had found herself on a spiritual ‘journey’ in 1947 had dissipated by the end of 1948, for the process of starting life again in the awareness of having a soul brought with it other, painful awarenesses. Viewed in the new light, Valentine’s past was an unadorned wasteland of selfishness, destruction and insensitivity. She became filled with a sense of her own worthlessness and wastefulness; a list of past loves became the occasion for violent self-reproach and remorse for the ‘damage’ she had done them; thinking of herself as a child only led her to thinking she had betrayed that child, wasted the talent which should have increased. She began to believe that there was no good in her, not because of inherent badness, but because she had wilfully driven out the good:
And all those years, those lovely years and months and weeks and days and hours – all beautiful with an eternal beauty, I wasted and fouled – debauching them with such grossness of behaviour, such horrible profusion of badness, that by now, at this age, I am more than half an idiot – […] idiotic almost to despair.23
Valentine showed Sylvia this and a number of other entries in her diary to do with the ideas she was developing about her soul and about God, a gentle way of indicating which way her journey was taking her. Sylvia saw all too clearly, and abhorred the change which was robbing Valentine of her self-esteem. She answered several points raised in Valentine’s diary in as detached a way as possible, but without masking her criticism. It was the last time she felt confident enough to speak directly and with control on this subject. To Valentine’s assertion in her diary that ‘Only the eternal Creator could conceivably forgive what I have done,’ Sylvia replied:
You are aligning yourself with the great majority of Xian thinkers in thus expressing a latent dislike of God; for to draw this rigid line between what you can do and what God can do is, in effect, to assert that you and God have nothing in common, that though you may love him (odi et amo) you do not think that humankind can accept him as a fellow-citizen of the universe. This arbitrary quarantining of the creator is the odder in the sentence quoted because it is so plainly unjustified. It is ridiculous to assert that forgiveness is only possible to God. To err is human, and to forgive is human, too […]
If you want to have a personalised God then I think you must admit that he is made in your image (you cannot make him otherwise), that he is the sum of what you consider humanly good and admirable, and that though he may be different in essence he is similar in nature. In fact, if you have a personalised God then I think you should recognise him as so much a human conception that belief in him involves you in the obligation of not considering him as alien to you … the only forgiver, the only creator, the only this and that. […]
Though if you do not have a personalised God, none of these troubles need arise.24
But this did not change Valentine’s position, which was already very firm, nor did it, apparently, alert her to the vehemence of Sylvia’s feelings. The entries in Valentine’s diary became longer and more Christian by the day, until a few months later, in April 1949, when her preoccupation with God was swept aside: Elizabeth Wade White, against Valentine’s wishes, was coming to visit.
II
Between February, when she and Valentine had been on holiday together to Italy, and April, when Elizabeth came to Dorset, Sylvia had been entirely given over to writing a libretto for Paul Nordoff, who had a commission from Columbia University to write an opera. Italy had given her the theme – the last days of Shelley – and the theme had fired her with enthusiasm. Her libretto, ‘The Sea-Change’, was a work she fell upon with complete enjoyment. It was a form new to her, and invigoratingly liberating: ‘I wish I could write librettos for the rest of my life. It is the purest of human pleasures, a heavenly hermaphroditism of being both writer and musician. No wonder that selfish beast Wagner kept it all to himself.’25 Sylvia was still glowing with excitement from this when the day came on which Valentine was to meet Elizabeth in Yeovil, and by the end of that day, Valentine was in love again, very strongly, and with very strong reservations:
Elizabeth has been here. Towards her I feel a violent desire to possess, a profound obligation to love, a feeling of assertiveness and a dangerous excitement because of this. I can look at her with dislike, and feel bored by her; I can find time drag when I am with her and feel perfectly alien to her – and then at a touch all that is blown away and all I need in the world is to know that she is mine. I could readily kill her, obviously; but not kill myself because of her – and I would die, I think, without Sylvia.26
I think. Valentine’s torment was that she did not know, and was in a ‘doubled’ state of mind, being differently and sincerely in love with two people at once. But this uncertainty could not last long and when Elizabeth came back in May to spend three nights in Dorchester at a hotel with Valentine, Valentine felt the time had come to commit herself. She promised to take Elizabeth to live with her, ‘not any longer as mistress, not any longer with reservations’:27 it was a promise of marriage.
&n
bsp; Seeing Valentine come home from her days in Dorchester, made suave and handsome by love, Sylvia realised that her hope that Elizabeth might blow over was a misplaced one. Valentine told her how things stood: Elizabeth’s mother was ill, dying of cancer, but when Elizabeth was free to come to England, she would, and from then on they would live together. An even greater shock came later when Sylvia understood that Valentine meant for them to live together all three: Valentine and Elizabeth as lovers, Sylvia as companion. This plan, with its ghostly repetition of the arrangement under which they lived at Warren in 1939, was instantly and vehemently rejected by Sylvia. Her realisation of how degraded she would be by such a way of life released her from the first stupor of grief, and she began to think of the practical implications of leaving the house, the cat, the dog (a Pekinese called Shan), the river, for leave she felt she must: ‘I would rather have the sting of going than the muffle of remaining. Practically, too, it is much easier to find a roof for one than for two.’28
She and Valentine went on as before, but very subduedly, waiting for news of Mrs White’s health that might trigger off the mechanism of separation. They went for drives to the places they had always meant to visit together, entertained Ruth on her birthday and went for other sorts of drive, to places where Sylvia might find a suitable new home. They both conducted themselves very calmly. For Sylvia, there was an air of unreality about it which was impossible to overcome. As she wrote to Alyse Gregory, the only person in whom she confided what was going to happen, ‘the new solitary life I shall lead has come suddenly nearer, like the leap the moon makes from a sky of wind and vapour. And that, too, I cannot really believe in. I can visualise everything about it except myself in it. It is like looking into a mirror that reflects everything but one’s face. For all that, I believe I welcome this sudden gesture of time. Yes, certainly, I do. The attrition of waiting is as dangerous as a wound that may turn to gangrene.’29
Sylvia Townsend Warner Page 26