Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  Sylvia was still a loyal Communist, though not a very active one. ‘My mood is centrifugal,’ she wrote to Nancy Cunard in 1949, apropos an invitation to attend another congress, this time in France. ‘I can’t at this moment of history warm to the thought of a congress about anything. Why, indeed? There is so much to be anxious about: but somehow I can’t believe that anything will come of congressing and gathering just now. A sitting on already boiled eggs, a clucking of past hatchings.’2 In the elections of February 1950 and October 1951, she and Valentine voted for the Liberal, ‘dubiously, since it is only a negative vote.’ They still took the Daily Worker along with The Times, and Sylvia continued to support Stalin, though what she knew of him is impossible to ascertain. Stalin was not yet a mauvais sujet, nor the Communists of the Thirties red-faced apologists. The trouble with British Communists in the early Fifties was just that; they were ‘of the Thirties’, rather thin on the ground and somewhat dated. As Sylvia had written to Nancy Cunard in the late Forties, ‘far too many of the up and growing intellectuals are now POUM [Trotskyists], or going in that direction. And one has to face it, the communist intellectuals are mostly on the wrong side of forty, look old-fashioned, etc.’3 Sylvia despised the ‘careerists’ who had left the Party for this reason. When the King died in February 1952 and Sylvia and Valentine went into Dorchester for the Proclamation, she noticed how ‘only a very few old-fashioned people like ourselves (all communists, I presume) had attempted to be subfusc.’

  For many years after the war rationing was still in operation, petrol scarce and cigarettes – Sylvia’s and Valentine’s lifeline – sometimes scarcer. There was not a great deal to buy, but Sylvia found herself suddenly well-off again with the money from Nora’s estate and the New Yorker. Following the dry years of 1949 and 1950, Sylvia was writing well; ideas for stories seemed to present themselves at every turn, and she had so many acceptances from her ‘gentleman friend’, that she began to qualify for bonus payments, in addition to the basic fee and the retainer she received under her First Reading Agreement. All this – and in dollars – made it possible for them to think of moving from Frome Vauchurch to something grander, to buy another new car and begin to travel abroad regularly, to France mostly, and Italy. It also made it possible for Valentine to think of giving up her work at Dr Gaster’s, a drain on her energies for its £150 per annum.

  Leaving the job at Gaster’s was only a wrench for Valentine in so far as she liked to feel she was paying her way. She hoped, though, that by having the time and peace of mind in which to write, she might again be able to earn something as a writer. It did not help her fragile self-esteem in the least to hear Sylvia, in one of her flashes of insensitivity, describe ‘what Valentine does’ to Marchette and Joy Chute, two American writers paying their first visit to Frome Vauchurch: ‘Valentine works for a local doctor.’ The incident prompted the following entry in Valentine’s diary:

  I do not dare announce to myself that I am only a writer as earlier generations of women were tatters and cross-stitchers or blanketted the poor … nor, knowing now that a demon of vanity and self-deception has occupied me, can I without hypocrisy make a gesture of giving it up – this business of writing and filling in forms, at ‘occupation’ as ‘writer’ – Nor do I dare give up trying to write. But I can’t reconcile myself, yet, to accepting it as a hobby.

  […] So I am trying to accustom myself, in my head, to seeing myself as others see me: as the younger and duller of a pair: as one who is part-friend, part-secretary: as Dr Gaster’s woman who comes in for part-time and does the cards: as ‘I believe she writes too, but I don’t know what – little bits here and there, I think –’ (which is perfectly true): as the person no one can understand what Sylvia sees in her – and so on.4

  What Sylvia saw in Valentine was the person she admired above all others, whom she loved with her whole heart and who had been restored to her, seemingly against the odds. Watching Valentine in a crowd of people at London Zoo, Sylvia thought her ‘as elegant and aloof as an unicorn’; among the swans at Abbotsbury she was ‘like a goddess borne on a cloud’. But Sylvia’s degree of love and admiration was so unusual, so strong and strongly-willed, that it is hardly surprising Valentine could sometimes not believe it possible, or believe that it applied to herself, feeling, as she did, guilty and debased by the events of 1949. She still loved and was fascinated by her own ‘vision’ of Elizabeth, though the real woman irritated her now, and she still loved Sylvia, although a sort of physical embarrassment had grown up between them. ‘So often lately I have felt longings towards her,’ Valentine wrote in her diary, ‘and every time they have been quenched by self-mistrust. Maybe it is better so, after so long – I am getting old. It is a pity I do not always remember it.’5 In the light of this, it seems there was a sombre truth as well as a simple one in what Sylvia wrote to a friend at about the same time, imploring him not to be tormented by fantasies of losing his lover: ‘think of me,’ she said. ‘Here I am, grey as [a] badger, wrinkled as a walnut, and never a beauty at my best; but here I sit, and yonder sits the other one, who had all the cards in her hand – except one. That I was better at loving and being loved.’6

  That letter was unusual in referring to the rift between Valentine and herself. Sylvia’s correspondences, which were increasingly important to her during the Fifties, were primarily conducted for pleasure. The posthumous selection of her Letters, published in 1982, is an indication of her genius as a letter-writer; her powers of observation and description and her humane, sardonic wit are evident on every page. The letters are a gauge of her intense interest in life and the value she placed on friendship. Those she wrote to most frequently were all practitioners of one or another kind of art; Paul Nordoff the musician, George Plank, the American artist and illustrator, the poet Leonard Bacon, the novelists Anne Parrish and William Maxwell, Nancy Cunard and Alyse Gregory. She wrote very quickly in her elegant, elongated hand, and her letters, like her diary, convey the same sense of speed and mental agility, as if her ideas were occurring to her at that very minute, as they probably were. And, remarkable in someone who habitually covered the same day’s events in several totally dissimilar letters and a diary entry, Sylvia hardly ever felt the temptation to repeat even her best jokes.

  In the summer of 1950, Sylvia had been asked to write an essay for the British Council’s ‘Writers and Their Work’ series on Jane Austen. She enjoyed writing it so much that she longed to do ‘a longer book on J.A. called the Six-fold Screen, a book on the novels, really applying criticism to them.’ She had often been compared with Miss Austen herself, by reviewers who mistook both writers as essentially genteel, but there was more to the comparison than they may have intended. As her title suggests, Sylvia’s view of Miss Austen was of a worldly writer with a subversively satiric purpose. She was pleased with her essay, ‘a neat piece of work, but nothing to what the Sixfold Screen will be, if I get round to it.’ Unfortunately, she didn’t.

  In August 1950 Sylvia flew to Ireland alone to inspect a large property in County Clare, which she and Valentine hoped might be ‘the new Frankfort’, but wasn’t. They were both keen to move at the time; it seemed the most clear-cut way of making a new start and shaking off the melancholy hangover of Elizabeth. Later in the year the Deuchars announced that they had been posted to Hong Kong and would be leaving Little Zeal. Sylvia and Valentine debated the advantages of moving there, but found more in the disadvantages to deter them. And though they had once thought of possibly rebuilding on the site of Miss Green’s cottage in Chaldon, they dismissed that too and when a man from Winfrith offered to buy the plot in the summer of 1950, Sylvia and Valentine did not hesitate to accept his £50.

  Valentine was more enthusiastic than Sylvia to leave Maiden Newton. One reason, and a factor in rejecting Ireland and Devon, was that Ruth was getting old and Valentine wanted to be nearer Winterton and in a house large enough to accommodate her mother if need be. Valentine had been told in confidence by the doctor that Ruth�
��s heart could carry her off at any moment, and this news made her extremely anxious. Sylvia also expected the worst, for in her opinion, ‘[Ruth] will probably go on like this for a long while yet; for she is set in her ways, and one can stay almost indefinitely at Death’s door if one has planted one’s camp-stool in a sunny corner of it.’7

  On one of their increasingly frequent visits to Winterton, Sylvia and Valentine found a house near Salthouse on the north Norfolk coast to rent for the winter. It strongly appealed to both of them and they immediately arranged to let their own house and take it. Great Eye Folly was a former coastguard station which had been fortified during the war and stood four-square and castellated on the edge of a noisy pebble beach, ‘like a hooded hawk on a clenched fist – like my family’s crest, indeed’,8 wrote Valentine. The beach and the sea stretched endlessly to either side of the house, which was really a tower, and in a high wind sea spray tossed up against the living-room windows. Behind it lay the marshes and sea-water lakes which separated Great Eye from the main road and across which a narrow causeway ran. In the distance Salthouse church rose up very large in the flat landscape and on Sunday nights, with all its lights on, looked like an ocean liner.

  Sylvia and Valentine stayed at Great Eye Folly for five months, writing, walking and battling against the weather. At high sea, the car had to be parked right against the front door and in a high wind Sylvia was forced to crawl on all fours from the door to the rubbish pit. There were no mod. cons at all: no electricity, no drinking water and the bathwater was hot sea-water, pumped up by means of a small petrol engine. When the weather turned really cold in December and January, the Folly was islanded in ice, the road to Holt became impassable and the waves froze on the shore. ‘The east wind sobs and whimpers like a Brontë in the kitchen,’ Sylvia wrote in her diary. She loved the place, and Valentine talked of trying to buy it.

  But they did not buy Great Eye Folly, nor any other of the expensive, impractical houses they viewed while in Norfolk. Seeing so much of Ruth made Sylvia realise the depths of her dislike for the woman, and the extent to which Ruth and Joan manipulated Valentine. And Ruth’s lot, which Valentine had been made to feel was verging on the tragic, was not so bad as to merit a hasty removal to Norfolk. Coming back to Winterton from another viewing, Sylvia noted ‘the fire was glowing, [Ruth’s] slippers were warming, Alice had made a laid tea, and Mr Pye was in attendance. For utter discomfort, neglect and misery, it looked pretty comfortable.’ Sylvia lost interest in house-hunting and began to want to go home. ‘I want to go to something I am sure of, whose ways I know, whose demands I know are not beyond my strength. Oh Sylvia, can it be that you want to Retire?’

  They went back to Frome Vauchurch in March 1951. While Sylvia was in Norfolk, she had sold Little Zeal for £3,000, but the job of emptying the house lay ahead of her. Much of the furniture and fittings she gave away or sold in Devon, bringing back only a few favourite or useful things to Dorset. In the privacy of home, she began to go through Nora’s papers, destroying many old photographs and most of the contents of Nora’s deed-box, which contained ‘some distressing revelations’ about the management of her father’s estate, ‘but all done and destroyed now, and so much and no more for them: except to beware of heredity.’

  In many ways, Sylvia did want to ‘retire’. She wanted peace in which to garden, write and enjoy the company of Valentine and of Niou, the Siamese kitten they had bought in the summer of 1950. Niou was named after the Perfumed Captain in The Tale of Genji, and they loved him intensely from the first, so much so that their Pekinese dog, Shan, was given away to some people in Swanage because he seemed jealous. Also, Sylvia had begun another novel and longed to concentrate on it. It was about an early-Victorian family in Norfolk and she began it at great speed, writing twelve thousand words in the first week. At the sixty-third page she felt her impetus wavering and the next day, when she introduced a Mr Theophilus Templeman into the narrative, ‘everything curdled […] and I went to bed in despair.’ From then on it was work, as usual.

  It was a relief to Sylvia to find another novel in herself, for she had begun to doubt she could write any more. She had also begun to doubt the worth of her short stories, feeling that she was becoming too slick with them. A comment by Chekhov which she had found in a book struck Sylvia as applying so nearly to herself that she copied it out in her diary: ‘You have grown heavy, or, to put it vulgarly, you have grown stale and you already belong to the category of stale authors. Your style is precious, like the style of very old authors.’ After rereading a story which she had written in 1927, Sylvia discerned ‘a shocking weakness about the amiable characters, which I suspect still persists’. It persisted to some degree in her humorous stories, which could sometimes, as she admitted herself, sail near to archness; but the facility which she considered potentially dangerous was more a mark of having strengthened her style rather than having weakened it, and the period following these proddings of self-doubt was the beginning of her most assured and mature years as a short-story writer. The first book to come out of it, Winter in the Air in 1955, was the first of her collections to seem all-of-a-piece – not unvarious, but more controlled. She did not include in it any of the comical stories she wrote for the New Yorker during the same period dealing with her family and childhood, which were collected after her death in Scenes Of Childhood, nor her series about Mr Edom, the antiques dealer. As she had written to Harold Raymond in 1937 when he first suggested publishing her New Yorker stories in England, they could be seen as ‘too English for the English’. Scenes of Childhood, an anecdotalised autobiography of Sylvia’s youth, certainly seems stranger than fiction, and rather funnier. ‘I can always appease my craving for the improbable’, she wrote to William Maxwell, ‘by recording with perfect truth my own childhood.’

  The New Yorker did not always accept Sylvia’s stories at their first submission, and they were not in the habit of paying for stories they would not use. Often pieces were sent back with suggestions for revision, carefully considered by her editor and devoted admirer, William Maxwell. ‘Farewell My Love’ (retitled ‘Winter in the Air’ for the later collection), a moving story based loosely on Sylvia’s situation in September 1949, was one such, and a story, being close to her heart and written very flowingly and fast, which Sylvia was unwilling to tamper with. But although she did not agree with Maxwell’s suggestion to change the ending, she accepted it, for, she had to admit, other stories she had been unwilling to change really were better afterwards.

  Valentine’s anxieties were of a more serious nature. She was so oppressed by failure that she feared to realise fully the extent of her shortcomings and the waste of her life, for then, she felt, she could only kill herself. She strove – successfully – to hide from Sylvia the pure desperation she was feeling, though she could not help appearing very subdued and often ill at this time. Sylvia accounted for Valentine’s depression by the fact that she had to keep on writing without any recognition or encouragement. ‘Perhaps if I were a Christian,’ Sylvia wrote to Alyse Gregory, ‘I could be heartless enough to admire how her character is tested by tribulation; but I am not: it is a sight that is an agony to witness at times, and at other times a dull drag on my heart. Besides, I don’t believe for an instant that characters are improved by misfortune, unless they are of the grossest and most suety kind. Hers survives: but by virtue of an original grace.’9

  Sylvia told Valentine once that she had almost been a Christian for a week in her youth, but that was all. Valentine was unsure herself whether to place Sylvia with the atheists or the agnostics. In a letter to a friend, which she copied into her diary at Sylvia’s request, Valentine gave a very interesting analysis of Sylvia’s attitude to religion:

  […] she is to a great extent ‘allergic’ to each & every form of religion, including its manifestations even in apparently unreligious individuals. […] She has a positive horror of any form of religion, which she believes to be immeasurably dangerous and destructive. […] She
bears most patiently with my excursions into various Faiths, and is interested in many of them, and sometimes charmed by the outward trappings: but always because of their association with Man as a creative artist … the imagination that conceived the idea, the fancy that contrived the ritual, the social forces of the time, which conditioned this or that form of Faith or worship.

  I do not know anyone who more consistently follows what I should privately call the dictates of the Spirit. She invariably acts on instant impulse, without taking thought, in matters of emotion or urgency, and invariably acts with a dazzling brightness. I have seen her in situations which really have been as bad as any that – say – Mauriac has imagined, and she has emerged without a stain. Her character is very complex, and of course I do not even think that I understand it as a whole, but the parts I am capable of assessing or observing are (it seems to me quite obviously) formed and conditioned by the action of the Spirit … But she is serenely determined to declare that there IS no Spirit … And what does that matter? Not a whit, thank God!10