The sincere incompatibility could not have existed if they had not remained the centre of each other’s life, remained, from two different perspectives, true to the same love. Unlike in 1949, when she was worn down by hoping, Sylvia did not hope for anything, and Valentine did not pray behind Sylvia’s back for a conversion or change of mind. They had learned to ‘accommodate’ each other fairly quickly: what took some getting used to was that many things had not changed. When Valentine was talking, in October 1958, of what would give her most pleasure, it was ‘lying in a meadow beside a river looking at swallows with Tibbie beside [me]’ and a conversation about the Mass that looked as though it might turn nasty was saved by an image Valentine employed, as Sylvia recorded in her diary: ‘[the sacrament] is everywhere, but only complete in the mass itself, which is the rainbow, though rainbow elements exist in every drop of dew, every splash of water. Such a poet!’
It was to remind Valentine of herself that Sylvia prepared a small collection of Valentine’s poems for private printing, Twenty-Eight Poems, in the autumn of 1957, but Valentine was not excited by it and hardly looked at the proofs. She was not writing much, for she had little confidence or creative energy left, and no illusions. She had passed from being ‘Dr Gaster’s woman’ to being the lady who ran the little antiques shop, one of the Catholic women who breakfasted together at the King’s Arms on a Sunday morning, the tall lady in gent’s suiting who walked around Dorchester with a black poodle in attendance. To the gypsies who called every Michaelmas, she was Sylvia’s ‘lovely daughter’. It was only Sylvia’s eyes that saw Valentine the poet.
Sylvia herself had a book of poems published in 1957, Boxwood, a collection with an odd genesis. Reynolds Stone had been commissioned by Ruari Maclean of the Monotype Corporation to make sixteen engravings and find suitable quotations to match them for a book which was primarily designed as a specimen for a newly-cut type, Dante Roman and Italic. Reynolds was having difficulty finding any appropriate quotations for his lovely engravings of trees, lanes, streams and hillsides and Sylvia offered to help him out by writing some short verses herself to ‘illustrate’ the illustrations. When Norah Smallwood saw Boxwood after it was printed, she wanted Sylvia and Reynolds to enlarge it for publication by Chatto & Windus. Sylvia at first ‘gently blew on the project, which I feel is rather to[o] Georgian and precious to do any of us any good’, but later relented, to please the Stones, and Chatto’s slightly longer version of the book appeared in 1960.
To Alyse Gregory, at a time when Alyse was desperate and defeated, Sylvia had written the following advice:
I think as one grows older one is appallingly exposed to wearing life instead of living. Habit, physical deterioration and a slower digestion of one’s experiences, all tend to make one look on one’s dear life as garment, a dressing-gown, a raincoat, a uniform, buttoned on with recurrent daily breakfasts, and washings-up, the postman, the baker, the one o’clock and the six and the nine o’clock wireless bulletins. I know I am exposed to this vile temptation myself, however much I abhor it; but for myself I found one remedy, and that is to undertake something difficult, something new, to reroot myself in my own faculties. But even to make a kettle-holder is better than nothing – and indeed, if one is unaccustomed to making kettle-holders, it can be a most reviving experience. For in such moments, life is not just a thing one wears, it is a thing one does and is. […] [Do] something you wouldn’t do normally, which will tax your wits without involving your heart, which will benefit nobody but yourself and therefore contain no original sin of disillusion, which will be both abstract and self-regarding. Probatum est. I would often have been lost without such little tricks. We are never too old for technical exercises, my dear; and a woman who can whistle Justus ut palma while she paints the portrait of a thistle has already put up a new defence between herself and dying – because while she does so, she is living.38
Levity, fortitude and cunning: the older Sylvia got, the better she knew how to use them and the more her ‘despicable’ grasp on life strengthened. She had Valentine’s company, the river, the garden – in which she worked extremely hard and happily – the cats, both loved and admired, and Niou the favourite, the confidant. She had numerous domestic and artistic skills – it was another of her dicta that one should never give up anything one does well – sewing, painting, making collages and découpages, being thrifty – her old self-indulgence – cooking idiosyncratic, extraordinary meals, making dolls, which she did occasionally for her closest friends (‘When I am making them they mean Everything’). Above all, she had an enormous capacity for enjoying herself, and a capacity for joy: ‘In the evening the Amadeus played opus 132; and I danced to the last movement, I rose up and danced, among the cats, and their saucers and only when I was too far carried away to stop did I realise that I was behaving very oddly for my age – and that perhaps it was the last time I should dance for joy.’39
III
Sylvia’s friendship with Joy Finzi had deepened since Gerald Finzi’s death in 1956, and through Joy Sylvia met again her protégée from Harrow, Ruth Moorsom, who was married to the composer Antony Scott. The old affection for ‘Puss’ had stayed completely intact, and it was pleasant to have this solid link with the past, so much of which seemed ghostly, including her past self in it. The future was more invigorating; Sylvia loved young people, for their youthful grace, ardour, candour and sincerity. During the Fifties there were a number of young girls especially who caught Sylvia’s imagination and admiration in this way; Vera Hickson’s daughter Rachel, Oliver Warner’s daughter Polly, the Stones’ daughter Phillida and Anne, the daughter of a Catholic friend of both Sylvia and Valentine, Jean Larson. These were ‘nymphs’ to Sylvia, just as the young Bea Howe had been. The magic tended to wear off: the nymphs fell from grace, or became bogged down in adult life, but while it lasted was potent. Here was another talent Sylvia did not want to give up, the talent for friendship. Sometimes it was frustrated, or seemed to be, as in the case of Phillida’s elder brother Edward: ‘I wish he would like me,’ Sylvia wrote in her diary after the family had been to tea, ‘I should be so good for him.’40
The garden was immensely important to Sylvia. On Good Friday 1957, she noted the things in bloom in it, which included polyanthus, clematis, bluebells, daffodils, narcissus, anemone, fritillary, rocket, tulips, strawberries, leopard’s bane, forget-me-not, wallflowers, auriculas, hyacinths, laurel, lilac, crocus, rosemary, columbine, Solomon’s Seal, violets, pansies, pear, apple and cherry blossom. One year, listing her roses, she named thirty-three varieties in flower, most of them old roses. The flower garden was informally planned and Sylvia was, in the words of a friend, ‘unorthodox but inspired’41 in her care of it. The vegetable garden, which lay behind a large bed known as the Massif Central, was run on stricter lines and provided many of the ingredients for Sylvia’s cooking, which was also inspired and somewhat unorthodox. A summer lunch which she noted down in 1957 consisted of fresh sardines, olives, radish, cucumber with mint and chives, rye-biscuit, followed by sweetbreads in cream with green peas, followed by strawberries scalded with a vinous syrup and iced, with Frascati. She also excelled at curries and idiosyncratic soups.
Sylvia’s translation of Proust, By Way of Sainte-Beuve, was published in the spring of 1958. Her title is not a literal translation of ‘Contre Sainte-Beuve’ but nicely captures the digressive nature of Proust’s work, in which the critique of Sainte-Beuve’s method forms the centre from which many other ideas branch, including much material later incorporated into À la recherche du temps perdu. Sylvia had been enthralled to be able to share Proust’s mind for a while in the process of translating, ‘And as, even at my best, I could never write like that, for I have not got that stuff of genius, that steady furnace, only a few rockets and Catherine wheels, I am grateful that I have had at least the experience of seeing, line by line, precept upon precept, how it is done.’42 Her translation is remarkable in being both clear and fluent and true to the tone of Proust, able
to convey his changes of register, pace and mood. George D. Painter, the distinguished biographer of Proust and Chateaubriand, wrote to Sylvia, ‘I think your translation, besides being a true re-creation of Proust, is a new achievement in English prose.’43
Her translation was a great success, and when Chatto & Windus were planning a revision of the existing translation of À la recherche, they turned to Sylvia again. Scott Moncrieff’s famous translation, completed after his death by Sydney Schiff (Stephen Hudson), had been shown by the scholarly 1954 Pléiade edition of Proust’s works to be based on a very defective text – the only one available in the twenties. The new French text demanded a completely revised English translation and early in 1960 Sylvia was set to ascertain the extent of the discrepancies between Scott Moncrieff and the Pléiade. Even with the promise of a helper/collaborator later on, it was a daunting task, but, trained in Tudor Church Music methodology, Sylvia fell on it with relish; ‘what one monkey can do, another monkey bis.’ After a month at it, she wrote to Norah Smallwood listing the variants she had found in the first section, ‘Combray’: ‘although I would not exactly call them Legion, they are numerous.’44 In the summer she met her collaborator, Andreas Mayor, when he and his wife called at Frome Vauchurch. The arrangement for them both to work on emending the translation was slightly clumsy and constraining, with its own inherent problems. ‘The Recherche can’t just be divided between us like a carcase’, Sylvia wrote to Norah Smallwood. ‘In a work of this kind there must be some sort of editorial consultation, […] Ideally, we should each of us go through the complete text, and then pool and adjust our findings. Even if this is too demanding for 1960, we must at all costs work jointly on each other’s findings. Otherwise there is every risk that the revised translation will fall into Warner’s half and Mayor’s half, and all the value of two heads being better than one go for nothing.’45 They worked on until October, when Sylvia went to London to meet Scott Moncrieff’s executors, his nephew and niece, at dinner at the Garrick with Norah, Ian Parsons and George Painter, whom Sylvia admired greatly, ‘a kind of infra-red intelligence glows from him, invisible but powerful.’46
There was a shock in store. The Scott Moncrieffs would not countenance any revision of their uncle’s translation. This was baffling (Sylvia thought it not only stupid, but malicious), but against their refusal of permission, there was nothing to do but go home and wait for a possible relenting. ‘[It] is like having a corpse in the house,’ she wrote, thinking of the piles of paper work in her sitting-room and mulling over what the real objections could be. Personal animosity was a likely one, she thought, and went as far as suggesting to Norah Smallwood that the executors, both Catholics, might have taken exception to her on religious grounds (a suggestion which Norah instantly dismissed). But the episode was never explained and Sylvia was left with the frustration of having done good work for nothing. The desirability of revising an out-moded text was, for her, not a matter for question, and when she found herself in a similar situation two years later – when O.U.P. wanted to revise some Tudor Church Music pieces in the light of new manuscripts – she agreed without demur.
All this was happening at a time when Valentine was recovering from a small operation to her right temple to remove a piece of artery. The headaches which Sylvia had lain at the door of ‘Church’ were in fact one of the symptoms of a condition known as temporal arteritis, an inflammation of the artery in the temple, diagnosed in March 1960. Valentine had been put on cortisone, a diet to counteract the cortisone, and a regime of rest in the afternoons. There was a risk to her eyesight, and a slight risk of having a stroke. Valentine began to learn braille and drenched herself in Lourdes water every morning. Sylvia was as fearful as Valentine during these months, and superstitious. She was alarmed by a comment by Lucy Powys, looking from her garden at Katie and Valentine cast in shadow indoors: ‘Don’t they look strange? said Lucy. As if they were behind a veil. […] it was as blood-curdling as anything of T.F.P’s.’47
At the end of June, when Joy Finzi was making a drawing of Sylvia (she wanted the effect of animation, and asked Sylvia to talk a great deal), Joy told her of the Oxford witches who had helped Gerald through his operations. Sylvia was intrigued, but dared not mention it to Valentine, for fear of a rebuff, so Joy broached the subject herself and left the house with a drop of blood, ready to put Valentine ‘on the box’. Valentine’s well-being came and went pretty much as usual, but the black box certainly comforted Sylvia, who believed in it quite irrationally, as was fitting. In the summer, they moved to a new doctor, Dr Hollins, who considered that cortisone was having no good effect on Valentine, and that a small operation and biopsy of the extracted tissue were necessary. She was admitted to a private nursing home in Weymouth, and had the operation on 4 August. When Sylvia went to visit, Valentine was propped up in bed, ‘her head bandaged to one side, delicate fronds of hair rising above the bandage, like an exquisitely elegant Byronic brigand’. The biopsy showed that the artery had been completely blocked, but there was no evidence of enlarged cells, making a clot the more likely cause than arteritis. Valentine continued to have headaches from time to time, but also had periods of feeling entirely well, a rarity in her life.
Although the Scott Moncrieffs would not allow revision of their uncle’s work, the part of À la recherche previously translated by Schiff was able to be given a completely new translation by Andreas Mayor, who sent pieces of his work to Sylvia for her comments and advice. ‘I am sincerely glad that he can sail on,’ she wrote in her diary, but worried that, for her own part, the business might have checked the growth of her friendship with her publishers, Ian Parsons and Norah Smallwood. However, within two months they had asked her to undertake another translation, more of a distraction than a compensation, of a contemporary French novel called La Côte Sauvage, by Jean-René Huguenin. She accepted, for she needed a project to help dispel the sense of futility which was descending on her. She was writing well for the New Yorker, and earning a lot – in the year 1960–61 she earned £3,928 from writing – but she had never before felt less impetus: ‘idle and unenterprising and disinclined, with pains in my spleen’ is how she saw herself. She was feeling her age, too, and had begun to clear the decks towards feeling more of it, sending her manuscripts of Lolly Willowes and Mr Fortune’s Maggot to an American buyer and throwing out many of her papers. She felt vaguely ill most of the winter, sometimes putting it down to pleurodynia (a form of fibrositis), ‘my old February friend’, sometimes to ‘mors et vita duello-ing’.
The rift caused by Valentine’s Catholicism, though no less wide than before, had ceased to infuriate Sylvia. She saw that religious observance was a great solace to Valentine, possibly the only solace. They had not shared a bedroom for some years, Valentine’s back and Candy’s fleas being two of the reasons. Sylvia had the old bedroom at the front of the house, and the double bed. Valentine had the room past her study at the other end of the landing, a pleasant room with two windows, one overlooking the river. Up early one morning and at the airing cupboard outside Valentine’s room, Sylvia noticed the table loaded with oblateries and guessed that there was more to Valentine’s recent visits to Buckfast Abbey than met the eye. Valentine had, indeed, been received as a novice-oblate of the Third Order of St Benedict just a few days before. In her diary, Valentine had written, ‘It seems to me of immense importance: so immense that I find I am not telling anyone at all, and I am hoping never to have to – or at any rate until for some serious reason it has to come out.’48 It is a mark of how far Sylvia had resigned herself to the inevitable that she did not take mortal offence at being kept in the dark like this, in fact she didn’t take offence at all: ‘It is her life’, Sylvia sighed into her diary, ‘and I am twelve years older than she – and it must seem very sad and hard to her that I cannot listen and rejoice.’49
Sylvia was sometimes able to rejoice – in her way. When they heard of the recovery from an accident of a friend’s cat, Sylvia was so thankful that she lit a
ll six of Blessed Martin Porres’s candles at once. Unfortunately, she then went out to Dorchester to have her hair cut and forgot all about them, and an anxious dash home ensued. Valentine was particularly devoted to Blessed Martin Porres, and found his power of retrieving lost property superior to that of Saint Anthony, although it sometimes mystified Sylvia. She could not understand, for instance, why he replaced Valentine’s cigarette lighter upright in the middle of the drive when he had finished with it.
Valentine was frequently away at this time, for Ruth was ill and sometimes the luggage was scarcely unpacked before another alarm put Valentine on the road again to her cousins’ home, Apsley Farm. The sting had gone out of Sylvia’s feelings for Ruth, too; Ruth was eighty-four, weakening fast and constantly in and out of a nursing home in Worthing. Sylvia and Valentine were at Apsley when Ruth returned there for the last time: ‘Ruth dined downstairs, and was incited to sing in a family chorus, which she did most gallantly, and with such decision that she led us all astray like sheep into confusions of tonalities and a brief passage of consecutive fifths.’ A fortnight later, when Valentine was in Sussex and Sylvia at home, Ruth died, quietly and without fuss. Valentine was at her bedside when she died, and was the last person she recognised. Valentine had not witnessed death so close up before, nor been so bereaved: ‘[Ruth] gave me (under God) the opening through which to touch, for the first time, the end of life. It is a gift far beyond any other she gave me, except my life […] What guilt lies on people like me, who could have but did not bear a child?’50
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