Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  At the time when Valentine wrote this, she was feeling restless at home and was even wishing her old job back, if only to give her a sense of being useful and to assuage slightly the embarrassment of living off Sylvia. When the possibility of another job came up, that of secretary to a rich young widow, Sylvia opposed the plan strongly, on the grounds that it would waste Valentine’s time and strength. She suggested that Valentine should work for her instead, doing secretarial chores and housework which would free Sylvia, the earner, to write, and still leave Valentine, the writer, some time for poetry. Though kindly meant, there was much in this to upset and offend Valentine, but she swallowed the pill to her pride as if it were a familiar dose and continued to ‘work’ at home, doing little and feeling lonely, for Sylvia often shut herself away for the whole day when she was writing. ‘Busy and idle’ is how Valentine saw her life; ‘I am almost quite sure that I am done for.’11

  Valentine’s health was not good, pestered with numerous small complaints she felt were all part of a general malaise stemming from the emotional turmoil over Elizabeth. One of these complaints was arthritis, which prevented Valentine from doing any heavy gardening. Ruth’s suggested remedy was that Valentine should become a Roman Catholic, and thereby be able to go to Lourdes and be cured. Sylvia thought she should go to Manchester and see a specialist. Though fatalistic about her health, Valentine was too well-informed to be a hypochondriac, and was generally better at diagnosing conditions than the doctor. When Sylvia came down with a mysterious spotty illness in April 1952, Gaster and his assistant at first thought it was gallstones, then a chill, then chicken-pox, then possibly small-pox, and a man from Dorchester was sent in to scratch her feet. Valentine said from the start that it was shingles, as it was. Her own chronic swelling and ache in the breast, for which she had undergone a series of painful injections in 1950, was always called mastitis by the doctors. Valentine, however, was doubtful, and could only write the word in her diary using inverted commas.

  There seemed to be nothing to do to combat her depression but practise fortitude, though she was often tempted to find some easier way out, tempted especially to drink again, for she had been able to overcome fearfulness when drunk and, importantly, felt it had freed her to write: ‘when I was thoroughly sodden I wrote with a kind of stumbling blind felicity – didn’t I? And now I am merely good – and DUMB.’12 It was hard to refuse drink, when Ruth was always rattling bottles at her and when guests drank with Sylvia, or, like Nancy Cunard, got drunk with Sylvia. And Valentine was, as ever, worried about money. Ruth had alarmed her with the news that she was mortgaging off parts of the family estate in Northern Ireland, the property on which Valentine’s future income depended. Her annual allowance had not changed since her majority, when she had felt it only just adequate. Unknown to her, Sylvia, also alarmed by Ruth, was putting away vast sums of money in an account in Valentine’s name, against her ‘widowhood’: £1,000 in March 1953 and all her subsequent First Reading money £4,000 invested in shares. Valentine, thinking herself on the brink of insolvency, concentrated hard on making economies, often in ridiculously small matters. An enormous expense did not frighten her half so much as the price of a new pair of stockings, though enormous expense could always awe Sylvia, as when she had to write the cheque for their latest car, ‘£1121 10. 0. Purchase tax £401 10. My God.’13 Sylvia’s answer to this was her usual one. The afternoon the car was delivered, she was busy planning a new story for the New Yorker.

  When a family friend sent Valentine £30 out of the blue for a holiday in Cornwall, Sylvia was pleased until Valentine remarked that it was clearly the answer to a prayer she had made three nights before, when in a money panic. Sylvia found this irritatingly superstitious, and unnecessary: ‘It is as if she prayed for cabbage when the garden is full of it.’ At the same time, Valentine was observing a private Lenten fast, giving up sweets and cakes to combat both greed and overweight at one blow. She had also given up ‘talking about Elizabeth’.

  In 1952 Valentine earned nothing whatever from her writing, the first completely barren year since she began to write in 1926. But she had another idea for money-making taking shape. Sylvia and Valentine had become very friendly with the Siamese cat breeders from whom they had bought Niou, Vera and Arthur Hickson, and Vera, a keen auction-goer, had taken Valentine with her to sale rooms on several occasions. Valentine loved the excitement of getting a bargain and discovered in herself a remarkable talent for spotting unusual and valuable items among the mixed lots. When the house began to fill with these objects, Valentine thought of a way to continue the pleasure of buying without having to face the inconvenience of possessing, and suggested to Sylvia that they could turn the long sun-parlour – the larger of their two glass-built lean-tos – into a ‘semi-shop’. Sylvia had a few minor misgivings, but soon they were clearing out the room and arranging what seemed at first rather too few wares on Sylvia’s piano, which she rarely played any more, and on the bookshelf which contained their left-wing and Communist books, demurely hidden from the eyes of the county by means of a curtain.

  Their first customers were Dr Gaster’s new assistant and her companion, one of the very few lesbian couples they knew, with whom they had become friends during the previous year. Valentine was enjoying the shop, (‘we cannot call it a shop’), which as well as providing a healthy £41 profit in its first month, brought her many new acquaintances, predominantly female and leisured, some of whom Sylvia found less congenial than others. To warn Sylvia that she wanted to be rescued from an over-talkative or unpleasant customer, Valentine would lean casually against a set of bells and Sylvia, emerging from her sitting-room, where she usually spent the working day, would see them off.

  Some of the new acquaintances Sylvia loved without reserve, the Hicksons especially. Their home, Cauldron Barn Farm, near Swanage, seemed to her an earthly paradise of cats, flowers, peaceable animals and graceful people. However, even an earthly paradise was no substitute for being with Valentine, as Sylvia found when she volunteered to look after the farm while the Hicksons were on holiday, and she pined for Valentine as much then as in any of their separations. During that fortnight, she finished the first draft of her Norfolk novel, now called ‘The Flint Anchor’: ‘I waded about the house among cats and old Ben [the dog], and felt as though I were in Hades among the shades. 1 longed for my love to revive me.’14

  One morning in March 1953, Valentine, who always rose early and made breakfast, woke Sylvia with the news that Stalin had had a stroke and was dying. ‘It was “Uncle Joe” she said, turning back to the former affection and loyalty.’ Sylvia was profoundly sad: ‘I have grieved and trembled. After him, there is only Churchill of the Europeans who feel Europe; and he cannot be relied on against the USA,’ but her eulogy of Stalin the man was embarrassingly concentrated on his physical attributes: a certain likeness to Thomas the cat and the memory of his voice heard once on the radio in 1943, ‘a voice so living, so warm, so sturdy, that I would like to remember it on my deathbed as an assurance of the spirit of man.’ Valentine’s diary entry was similarly swooning: ‘no one could see that grand brow and those eyebrows, and that strong, lively hair springing from the brow’15 – and so forth. Valentine disliked the way in which Stalin was being reviled already at home and in America. At the same time she had written to Harry Pollitt resigning formally from the Communist Party, a move to quell Ruth’s persistent anxieties. ‘This was a most difficult thing to do,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘for it was embarrassing, and seemed so absurd when I had been “lapsed” for so long and was at no time a member they would have noticed. […] Finland shook me first, and even before that, the attitude of Party members to Tom Wintringham [who had been expelled] shocked me, and I would not conform, even at that date, […] I was always a heretic – but in those halcyon days they tacitly allowed heretics to live: and seeing that made me think that they would come to find it possible to share the world with them in amity!’16

  Sylvia did not resign, for
mally or informally, though it seems she had not been a paid-up member of the Party for some years – probably not since the beginning of the war. She did not feel Valentine’s desire to ‘clear-up’ the matter, although the urgency of her politics had been replaced by a sort of weary pragmatism to the extent that she was able to vote, in a 1955 election, for whom she thought the best candidate, even though he was a Conservative.

  Sylvia was feeling increasingly isolated. Many of her friends were dead or dying: Geoffrey Sturt, Mrs Keates, Gertrude Powys and Edmund Fellowes all died within a year or two of each other. Percy Buck had died in 1947, the same year as Purefoy and Arthur Machen. Sylvia took a touching pleasure in the company of Janet Machen, her last remnant of close family (Janet’s brother Hilary had been out of touch for years). Janet had married soon after the war and was living in Bristol with her husband and two children, Catherine and Matthew. ‘Janet’s voice, and Janet’s familiarity of blood, are extraordinarily pleasant to have beside me. I have, with her, the rare sense that I can trust her not to dislike or misunderstand or try to re-shape me. It is restful.’

  Sylvia’s friend, the novelist Anne Parrish, was almost blind and could no longer write frequent letters, though she strained her clouded vision through a magnifying glass in order to read the typescript of ‘The Flint Anchor’, which was dedicated to her. And the death of another American correspondent, the poet Leonard Bacon, left a space which Sylvia knew would never be filled again. ‘I have lost a confidant, a person to whom I could write quite freely, without reservations, without considerations, without any dross of personal circumstances. […] he found me charming, and delightful, and was content only with that. No-one to call me Charlie, Lamb lamented. I have plenty to call me Sylvia, but no-one to call me Dear Miss Warner […] And I miss his masculinity, deeply. My intellect was man-made, is still preponderantly masculine – and that part of me has lost a comrade.’17

  Another great loss came with the death of Theodore Powys. All through the summer of 1953 he was ailing. When Sylvia and Valentine visited him at Mappowder in July, he looked ‘down and marked for death’ and, propped against the door-frame, waved them off with both hands – ‘a sick man’s exaggeration of a healthy man’s gesture.’ Violet was distraught and Theo, terrified of being taken to hospital and handed over to ‘those photographers’ was often harsh with her, alternately sullen or bristling with black humour. Early in August he had to go to Sherborne Hospital – he paused at the door to inspect the sign ‘To the Chapel’ – to have a growth removed which the doctors feared might be cancerous. In the event, he was allowed home after a biopsy and told that he would have to return the next month for his operation. When the results of the tests showed that Theodore did have a cancer, he was told it was only an ‘ulcer’, but he refused to have any operation and thereby regained a little peace of mind. Next time Sylvia saw him he looked ‘physically quite different, and he was affectionate and as nearly demonstrative as he could ever be, yet I felt much amiss; […] Poor darling Theo: as I write this, the word is written on my brain, Ennui: the ennui of a violent character constrained to a doctrine of non-offensiveness.’18

  Theodore died on 27 November and was buried four days later at Mappowder. ‘[T]he coffin came out upright, as though it were walking out on its own volition, or rather, as though he were walking it out to its burial. It was a mild grey-skied day, the doors of the village church were open during the service, and while the parson was reading the lesson from St Paul a flock of starlings descended on the churchyard and brabbled with their watery voices, almost drowning the solitary cawing rook inside the building.’19 Many familiar Chaldon people were at the funeral and Harold Raymond was there too, representing Chatto & Windus. It was the first time he had seen Sylvia in over twenty years; they had corresponded over business matters, but kept out of each other’s way. Valentine wrote in her diary that night: ‘So Theodore lies in the earth, and more we do not know. But if the earth is ever a home to a man, it is a home to him – I almost feel as though it were his by right, as if it were his inheritance, as if he had come into his own by this day’s work.’20

  II

  On 6 December 1953, Sylvia surveyed her sixty-year-old self: ‘Fatter, alas! – and heavier, and growing stiff in the knees and in the eyelids, and not so supple either in my wits. But cheerful in my spirits and in my guts still, my grey hairs strong-growing. My hearing, thank heaven, as good as ever.’ She was happier, she felt, than ten years before, when Elizabeth Wade White was still a threat; she had the cats – two, since the purchase of another Siamese kitten, Kaoru – and the garden, and her writing was going well. The Flint Anchor was published in July 1954, in a decent edition of five thousand which almost sold out within the year (though the book was not reprinted). It tells the story of John Barnard, a conscience-stricken Norfolk merchant, upholder of the right and unwilling agent of endless wrongs. The characterisations of Barnard, his spoilt daughter Mary and sardonic, alcoholic wife Julia are extremely well-done and the evocation of early nineteenth-century Norfolk deft and thoroughly convincing. It was a story Sylvia was almost literally at home in, for the spark from which the narrative kindled was an event in her own family history, the departure in disgrace of her great-great-grandfather, John Warner, from the pious East Anglian family he had married into, the Townsends. It was in the next generation that ‘Townsend’ was incorporated into the surname, probably to act as chaperon to ‘Warner’, a bad influence, the first male Townsend Warner being George, that anxious and religious man who ran Highstead School. There were other links with Sylvia’s family in the book, notably an accretion of familiar attributes and incidents concerning her father, mother and grandmother which built up round the characters of John and Julia Barnard. But The Flint Anchor is a book primarily devoted to its own story, and what family myths and memories Sylvia used are made over, like Sylvia’s most ingenious needleworks, into something of quite different shape and purpose. Skating, for example, was inextricably linked in Sylvia’s mind with her father, yet when she writes of John Barnard skating on the frozen lake at Rougham Hall, the points of similarity never stray beyond the circumstantial:

  John Barnard swept by unheeding, with his arms folded across his chest and his gaze fixed on the araucaria that grew at one end of the lake – a fine specimen, and the first to be planted in Suffolk. He approached it, he passed it, and with an energetic stroke of his right foot he set off away from it on a fresh journey towards it. He did not even use it to count by, now. It recurred like a Sabbath. With every circle of the lake he travelled a stage deeper into a region that was partly the kingdom of heaven and partly Cambridge. Not since Cambridge had he felt so inoffensive. Not till the kingdom of heaven could he feel so detached. In heaven it would be possible to see one’s wife, and the children whose passport thither had been the dearest concern of one’s life, with the calmness of mind that belongs to the place where there is no marrying or giving in marriage. One would see them, and sweep by them. And there would be no speech or language, any more than there is among the heavenly bodies, but a voice would be heard among them, a solemn jubilee, as of wings, or as of the ice resounding underfoot.21

  The book was well reviewed, and Sylvia’s versatility rightly praised, though she was no longer ‘news’ to the literary press. One reviewer went so far as to say ‘A carping contemporary may wonder why, in 1954, such a book should have been written at all; but since it has been, it is easy to enjoy it.’22 In this light, Chatto & Windus’s fears that the book might be too controversial hardly seem justified, but after submission of the typescript Sylvia had been told that the passage in which the fisherman Crusoe declares his love for Thomas Kettle would not do. Sylvia was scornful when she heard this, and scornful of the firm’s prim delay in telling her, and she refused to withdraw the passage. She did, however, agree to perform ‘a little castration’, and sent the script back with a new paragraph to make the matter plainer.

  In November of 1954 Sylvia was in London, alone, for
a weekend of cultural debauch which included the British Museum, Sadlers Wells, the Diaghilev exhibition, Picasso and Courbet, the theatre, Bea, Victor Butler and her publishers, Ian Parsons and Norah Smallwood, a woman Sylvia esteemed highly. It was at Norah’s flat that she was made a tantalising offer: to translate Contre Sainte-Beuve, Proust’s evolution of his own aesthetic through the examination of that of the critic Sainte-Beuve. The book had been published for the first time in Paris that year, and Chatto & Windus wanted to publish an English translation as soon as possible. Sylvia was delighted and intrigued and began to experiment with the text as soon as she got home, to see if she could do it. Immediately, the book caught her up in its arms, and she sat at it, ‘spellbound, tongue-between-teeth’, and accepted the project.

  ‘I live in a queer duality,’ Sylvia wrote a fortnight later, ‘half of my mind busy with his Countesses, half slutting about in the kitchen.’23 Translating Proust was an absorbing occupation, but Sylvia had not anticipated how restful it would be too, freeing her from the fear of ‘going dry’, which was always a possibility in her own writing, and being much more resistant to interruptions, the bane of her creative life: ‘One of the reasons why I so much enjoy this translating is that it compels me to use my intellect hard – and without the agonising jolts of having to back out of my own work to answer door-bells and cook meals.’

  In those days, when the door bell of the shop wasn’t ringing, or the phone going, it was very likely that the dog would be barking – Candace, a black miniature poodle Valentine bought at the end of 1954. Sylvia had greeted the news that Valentine wanted a poodle with dismay, sure that the cats, whom she adored, would suffer and the peace of the household be shattered. But Valentine was longing for a new small creature to love and be loved by and thought Sylvia’s antipathy unreasonable. She had little idea, though, how theatrically ‘Candy’ could behave, left at home with Sylvia. The dog set up such a baleful howling that Sylvia began to dread Valentine’s absences. After a while, they devised a way of quietening the dog by squirting water from a water-pistol into its mouth, but the method was not always foolproof. On one occasion, Sylvia was crawling about on her hands and knees after Candy, water-pistol poised, when the vicar came to the door on one of his very infrequent visits. Sylvia was on the brink of explaining herself when she remembered her father’s advice never to apologise in such situations, and merely wished him a good morning. Mrs Finch, a character in Sylvia’s story, ‘A View of Exmoor’, refuses in a similar way to explain to a rambler why, in the middle of Exmoor, her daughters are dressed to impersonate a painting by Gainsborough, her son is wearing a blood-stained shawl over an Eton suit and she is holding a birdcage: ‘He [the rambler] looked so hot and careworn, and I expect he only gets a fortnight’s holiday year through. Why should I spoil it for him? Why shouldn’t he have something to look back on in his old age?’24