Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  But if that week saw Sylvia’s side of the scales weighed down, by the middle of the following, penultimate week they were moving upwards to something like a balance. On a day when Elizabeth was in London seeing Ruth, Sylvia went to Frome Vauchurch and spent the morning with Valentine, walking in the garden, talking, and in the afternoon, while Valentine was at work, cast herself into acts of domesticity, cleaning, making soup and apple jelly. With the end of her stay in view, Elizabeth had begun to press for firm plans and decisions, when really Valentine was no nearer knowing what to do than before. Day-to-day life with Elizabeth was more stressful and less comfortable than with Sylvia, and Elizabeth herself had a partner in America to be considered, or abandoned. Valentine still loved Elizabeth, though she no longer wanted to live with her, or felt it right. She began to speak of applying for a three-year visa for the United States, or of having Elizabeth to live nearby. Listening to all this in the excitement of a day at home with Valentine made Sylvia feel hopeful once more, and she went back to Yeovil with ‘fuel for my HMS Implacable, and steadied on My Love’s love’. Considering the alternatives, Sylvia was in no doubt that Elizabeth in Dorset ‘and myself always with one hand on the back-door knob’ was infinitely preferable to Valentine moving to the USA, so much so ‘that I can’t allow myself to think of it. Better a running fight than to sit besieged by fears …’41

  The last week rounded into view, and Sylvia moved, for variety’s sake, to Hillside Hotel, half a mile further into Yeovil. At Frome Vauchurch, planning had turned into nagging and evenings of monologue – ‘what Eliz: so rightly calls getting down to fundamentals’ – such as Sylvia had overheard at Warren in 1939. Letters from Elizabeth’s lover in America, which Elizabeth produced probably to impress on Valentine her need for protection, only convinced Valentine that they should each return to their former partners. The harangues went on, and Valentine was exhausted and saddened by them, but there was something else too, as Sylvia noticed when Valentine came to take the books and typewriter home in the car: she was grieving for Elizabeth’s imminent departure.

  During that week, Sylvia spent a day in Paignton with Nora, who had fallen out of bed and bumped her head and seemed ‘in brilliant health, glittering’ as a result. She told Sylvia that she was going to have a baby and that her old aunts had been to see her. She asked Sylvia where her mother was and, looking at her own reflection in the wardrobe mirror, wondered who was that old woman. ‘Her wheel turned – odd words get into it. “No wolves” she said “No value in life. Like Swift.” This pierced my heart.’

  Valentine’s mother was piercing too, in a different way. She and Elizabeth liked each other very well, even looked like each other, in Valentine’s opinion. Ruth’s long and fussy letters to Valentine at this time prompted Sylvia to remark in her diary, ‘How she [Ruth] will make God bite his lip that he ever thought of harps – or indeed, heaven.’ The evening before Sylvia went to Paignton, Ruth had phoned her to say ‘she was glad that I at any rate was having such a splendid time – declining into quite, quite splendid, like a collapsing top. I suppose she is angry because I am not at home to support Valentine. Very proper too.’ What Ruth did or didn’t know about the situation is unclear. Apart from her conversations with Alyse, Sylvia had kept her own counsel. Even to an old friend such as Bea Howe she said little, and what she did say was deliberately misleading. A letter to Bea, explaining why she was not at home, said ‘I have at this moment basely deserted her [Valentine], though it is by mutual agreement. She has an American friend staying with her, not an infliction, for Valentine likes her; but so do not I, said the cookmaid, and so I am staying at a funny hotel in Yeovil, and wallowing in walks on Sedgemoor.’42

  On 29 September Sylvia was driven home by Mrs King, the local garage-keeper’s wife. Valentine was taking Elizabeth to the airport and was due back the next day. The house was autumn-smelling and melancholy and Sylvia wandered about in it like a stranger. The next morning she still felt unelated as she walked up to meet Valentine’s train. Valentine looked exhausted and said little. Her arm was aching and her spirits were low. That night, Sylvia was woken by Valentine calling out in her sleep in a despairing voice, ‘I am so cold!’: ‘[She] cast herself against me, still in her sleep. I lay with her head on my shoulder, and I tried to warm her; and as she warmed the smell of love came from her, that smell of corn and milk that I shall never smell from her again except love for another causes it.’43

  By the time they went to Norfolk on 4 October, it was clear that there was to be no miraculous restitution of love. Valentine was completely preoccupied with thoughts of Elizabeth and could not be happy. The house at Horsey they had rented was austerely comfortable, isolated and very near the sea, but its likeness to Lavenham and Winterton brought sad comparisons of then and now to Sylvia’s mind. Then she was Valentine’s pride and delight; now she was unavailing, almost a nuisance: ‘Sorrow comes over me like a mist, and I feel myself lost and fading, and at a touch or a word, the mist thins; but then it comes on again.’44 Valentine was now rising early in order to write to Elizabeth, just as, in September, she had for Sylvia. Drives out were drives to cable or post. While Valentine was sending a cable from Yarmouth one day, Sylvia saw in the harbour an old battered boat called Trustful. In her diary she remarked, ‘I wish I were painted Trustful – or that I were not haunted with this feeling that something is going to fall on me. I wish I were not such an abject coward.’ For they said very little about Elizabeth – much less than in September – and what Valentine did say made it clear she was looking forward to a ‘next time’, implying, by her reticence to speak yet, some news she was withholding. The ‘disease of Elizabeth’, Sylvia felt, had got hold of Valentine more strongly than ever before, and would consume her. As for herself, Sylvia believed that ‘soon […] I shall lose my last power to hold out, it will become such an obsession of helpless anxiety, of impotence, of insignificance.’ She began to have disturbing dreams again, all in brown, ‘the madman’s colour’, and hoped she was not going insane. Almost automatically, she started to make contingency plans, and force herself to write again.

  They went on from Horsey to Winterton, and from there home to Dorset, with Valentine gradually becoming more forthcoming about Elizabeth’s plans, and showing Sylvia copied-out parts of the letters which contained them. Sylvia was appalled more at the ‘cold and cruel’ style of these letters, ‘hideously eloquent’, than at Elizabeth’s proposal to come over for two long visits to England in the new year. Dreadful too was the discovery that when Valentine wrote back to Elizabeth ‘she writes like Elizabeth, with the same superfoetation of provisoes, qualifications, sub-clauses.’ Towards the end of October an all-or-nothing demand arrived, so potentially damaging to Valentine that Sylvia suggested that she herself should leave home to minimise the hurt. The first part of Sylvia’s diary entry that day is reminiscent of what she decided in 1929 when Percy Buck’s love for her was failing: ‘For now it seems to me that the only way in which I can save her anguish is to love her less: that she can only reach a peace of mind, and a wholesomeness of mind, and retrieve some sort of good out of this calamity, by ceasing to know that she is my only love and my only life.’ Then, in a slightly changed hand, as if added later, ‘And yet I will not accept this, for it is of an unclean spirit. I love.’45

  Valentine wrote to Elizabeth the same day, saying there must be a trial year together. It was a clear offer, and sternly worded. She and Sylvia waited with growing impatience almost a fortnight for an answer, which, when it came, was so indecisive that Sylvia could contain her wrath no longer:

  I felt myself shaking, everything grew brilliantly light, I knew I was going into action, and at last would use all my guns. I spoke – I heard my voice harsh and loud – and said exactly what I thought of such a letter, and of the heart that could write it.46

  What she thought was increasingly vituperative over the following weeks and months, for Sylvia no longer felt any obligation to protect Valentine from her opin
ions. After this flagrant proof, in Sylvia’s eyes, that Elizabeth was ‘a fool, a bore, selfish and faithless’, it could only be wrong to remain silent. Valentine herself had been deeply offended by Elizabeth’s response and wrote back that she could never again consider living with her. She needed no prompting: her judgement was confirmed, not swayed, by seeing Sylvia ‘going into action’. Valentine was one of the very few people, possibly the only one, who could have witnessed such a sight and not been intimidated.

  There was a lull in letter-writing following this, and things seemed to settle for a while. Sylvia celebrated her fifty-sixth birthday quietly, surprised that she was able to: ‘While one goes on living all the time, and because one goes on living, one does not realise the extremity which one has lived through.’ Forcing herself to write had produced one story, ‘The Sea is Always the Same’, based on a visit to Cromer with Valentine during their stay in Norfolk. Sylvia had been very pleased to finish it, the first real creative work she had completed since ‘The Sea Change’ the previous spring, and in her diary wrote ‘one is not grateful enough to the poorer gods, the demi-urges, who run out with their vulgar little cups of gin and peppermint when the real gods turn away the cup of nectar.’ But gin and peppermint – if such it was – was not good enough for the New Yorker, who turned it down.

  Ruth came to oversee the turn of the year, insisting on every conceivable traditional accompaniment. She stood at the open doorway to dismiss the old year, saying ‘Get out, you horrible old thing!’47 then made everyone stand in the garden to hear the bells. Valentine had to do the first-footing, and coming in clasped Sylvia and kissed her ‘a year-full’. Life seemed to be returning to normal and Sylvia woke one morning feeling relaxed – the first time since the previous May. Valentine was not feeling well, though. Back pain and the discomfort in her right breast continued and though in November the consultant had again discounted cancer, she felt unhappy about it and the hormone treatment she was still receiving. In her spiritual life she was also uneasy, for her chain of thought about the soul and God had snapped during the Elizabeth upheaval, and she was left saddened and intellectually bereaved. ‘Very little shines to me now’, she wrote in her diary. ‘It is as though I were growing old; my spirit growing slow to notice, hard of hearing, stiff-jointed and reluctant to move from its chair or its bed – or its grave.’48

  Early in the new year the whole Elizabeth business blew up again, when they heard she was coming back to England. By the end of January letters between Valentine and Elizabeth were as frequent as ever. Elizabeth had a date in March for her arrival and was seeing a psychiatrist in preparation. She also had a literary research project in hand, in case Valentine had assumed that love was the sole purpose of the visit. ‘The year turns towards Elizabeth’s determined new assault’, Sylvia wrote. ‘It will be hard to keep myself unspotted again. If need be I must go. Rather than live falsely with my love, I must go and live truly by myself, not linger out a purposed overthrow.’49

  On 12 February, Sylvia was distracted from her sorrow by a call from the nursing home to say that Nora, who had been comatose for several months, was getting weaker. Sylvia and Valentine set off by car early the next morning, but when they arrived in Paignton they heard that Nora had died in her sleep. Sylvia sat alone by the body for a while, looking at her mother calmly for the first time in years: ‘Her face was composed, stern, not sad; her little nose soared out of it like the dome of St Paul’s. It was not like my father’s death-mask – being so much older she seemed infinitely more dead, and abstract like a work of art. Only her hair when I caressed it was light and living.’

  Sylvia could not grieve that the ghastly period of Nora’s senility was over, though she sympathised deeply with those who mourned for Nora; one of the nurses at the home, Evans the faithful gardener and Mr Boucher, whom Sylvia found wandering among the graves at the crematorium when the funeral took place three days later. The little purple coffin, chosen by Sylvia, and its one bright bunch of tulips and iris, were soon despatched to the furnace. ‘Out of such bare material, out of mere birth and death, we spin the intricate web of love, we distil it from these poor bones and ashes, and with it conceive the tale that is told and ended when we die.’50

  Nora’s will, which Sylvia had been told excluded her, named Sylvia as residuary legatee. The estate included Little Zeal, which had been let to a young naval officer and his wife, David and Marion Deuchar, in order to pay Nora’s expenses. Although Sylvia never thought of evicting her tenants, she now had the security of owning a house, somewhere to go one day, if the worst came to the worst. She was also now the sole beneficiary under the terms of her father’s estate, receiving £420 in royalties from Blackie’s within the month, for George’s excellent history and English textbooks were still in common use in schools.

  Sylvia stayed in Little Zeal with the Deuchars until after her mother’s burial. On the morning after the cremation, she received a parcel addressed ‘Mrs Warner’ – it was the casket with her mother’s ashes, ‘a curious sensation to get one’s mother by post; and rather hastily I took her upstairs and unpacked a small violet cloth-covered casket, with a shiny name-plate.’ The ashes were to be buried in the garden, on whose instructions is not clear. Thirty-four years after George’s death, perhaps Nora had finally lost her desire to lie in the double plot at Harrow. She was buried under a cherry tree. Evans dug the hole and Sylvia put her in it, with some moss and snowdrop bulbs.

  Sylvia’s new ‘moderate competency’ gave her a little more room for action. When Valentine had another bad letter from Connecticut and began to dread Elizabeth’s return, Sylvia was able to suggest that they go away together to Paris, run away together, in effect. Valentine refused. Sylvia reflected that had she had money instead of debts a year before, the whole Elizabeth episode might have been avoided, and her own life’s ‘real meaning’ retained. ‘Poor Nora, she would not have wished me this.’

  Over the next month, Sylvia sank further and further into a profound melancholy. Her bad dreams continued: Valentine faceless and wrapped in a brown shawl, Elizabeth arriving with a furniture van. One evening she had an ‘overwhelming impression’ of Charles Prentice, who had died in Africa the previous summer, in the room, about to take her out for the evening and treat her kindly. She was feeling ghostly herself, and extremely lonely – the sound of her own voice talking to the ailing Thomas or to the cows in the next-door field frightened her. The week before Elizabeth’s arrival, Sylvia felt helpless: ‘I am as much outside the action as the chinese stagemanager who trots through the players in a black suit and ridiculous bowler hat, laying down cushions for the suicides and removing the swords he previously handed to the aggressors. I dug in the garden, and sat with my back to the window, and did all I could to hide my fallen face.’51 Valentine, seeing that Sylvia was distressed, told her sadly that she could give no more reassurances, no more promises, having broken so many. She then kissed Sylvia violently – ‘It was like blows on my face, saying “I will kiss you if I want to”. I have never been an obstacle, God wot! I am too much of an animal to keep even a self-defensive lent.’ How Valentine had come to the conclusion that Sylvia no longer wanted or needed passionate love puzzled her a good deal, but there was no changing it. Valentine interpreted all Sylvia’s remarks in that light, and Sylvia herself had lost her spontaneity over such matters. ‘She deceives herself about me far more than I deceive her,’ Sylvia wrote. It seemed now too late for the holidays Valentine wanted to plan for ‘after Elizabeth’, too late for hope, which had brought Sylvia nothing but shame and self-contempt over the past year, and she stopped writing her diary: ‘It is all written and re-written.’

  But, like a miracle, Valentine came back from London saying it was all over, which, bar a few extra flourishes, it was. Valentine had known, before she went, where her real commitment lay, and it was with Sylvia. In her diary she had written of the difference she perceived in her two loves – not only a difference in nature but also in quality. The
greatest unhappiness was her failure to show her love to Sylvia, and to her prayer, made three years before, ‘that I may be as Thou wouldst have me’, she added ‘But next, oh very close on that, “that I may be restored to Sylvia as she would have me”.’52

  She went to London, not in a cynical state of mind, but longing to enjoy herself. She was not in the least ashamed of this, only regretful that she did not enjoy herself more often. The three days with Elizabeth, however, were an unmitigated disaster, and Valentine saw that Elizabeth’s moods were so unpredictable and so often draped in black, that there was no point in deluding herself any longer: ‘It is not love of her. I loved, I still love, my fancy, nothing else.’53 Elizabeth came down to Dorset, lingering out the last few bars of the piece, but the affair, that had been so much more than an ‘affair’, was over. Sylvia was at home when she heard the Dorchester to London train going by that was bearing Elizabeth away. On a sudden impulse, she threw open the window of Valentine’s room, ‘feeling that something was being borne out of the house … and at the same time I think I counted every second of that pause in M[aiden] N[ewton] station, as consciously in pain for Eliz: as she could be.’

  The same afternoon, Sylvia noticed that Thomas was dragging his back legs. He was ill and in pain. They nursed and soothed him overnight, and early the next morning Valentine took him out into the garden and shot him. He was the Frankfort kitten, survivor of the murrain, and Sylvia’s best companion in her loneliness. ‘It will always seem to me,’ she wrote, ‘that he did, in his faithfulness, stay by me till she came back.’54

  6

  1950–1969

  I

  The early 1950s were full of threats of war, unstable and uncomfortable years in which Britain’s dependence on the United States weighed heavily on the nation’s self-esteem. The atomic and hydrogen bombs, and a manifest readiness to use them, had given the United States world military dominance, unchallenged until 1953 when Russia developed its own bomb. The cold war polarised nations into two crudely-delineated factions: the Communist bloc, dominated by the Soviet Union, and the capitalist West, increasingly under the influence of America. Sylvia deplored this influence, in both its cultural and political aspects, and felt it was eating away at Europe. After the invasion of South Korea by North Korea in 1950, it seemed to her that America was bent on war, and would certainly drag her dependent allies into it: ‘I realised with horrible clearness what Europe would be like when there is no more Europe,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘The Vatican, the industrialists, Monte Carlo and Spitzbuhel – and the Americans, remaking everything so as to have more of what they want.’1