Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  The funeral was on 10 June 1961, but it was not until September that Sylvia and Valentine went to Winterton to bury the ashes and clear up Ruth’s house, which she had left in 1959, thinking she would be back in a few months. Nothing had been seen to since that date, though Mr Pye, the eighty-four-year-old factotum, had been charged with its upkeep. As in the worst sort of fairy tale, Sylvia and Valentine found moth and mice and dust everywhere, bins overflowing, food mouldering in corners. On the floor by Ruth’s chair was a bowl of 1959 sugar, now liquified. In the spare-room cupboard was a maggoty fox-stole in a chamber pot, beneath which was ‘a miscellany of papers about the local Mothers’ Union, and at the bottom was a framed photograph (glass broken, of course) of three nuns having tea in a garden.’51 They spent a week cleaning up and sorting out. At the end of it ‘Timbers’ looked so tidy and bare that Sylvia felt ‘as if I had broken into a strange house’.

  Unlike Sylvia, Valentine missed her mother very much and turned for comfort to the company of her sister Joan. Joan’s visits to Frome Vauchurch became so frequent (and, Joan being newly converted, so Catholic) that Sylvia was forced back on the expedient of escape, visiting friends such as Ian Parsons and his wife Trekkie at Juggs Corner, near Lewes, or Joy Finzi. Sylvia looked forward to these breaks: ‘It unsours me after so much reluctant listening to church and family. When I reflect how I reprobate both, I think pretty well of my social talents. But nice to relax them from time to time.’ Her cousin Janet was a congenial person to escape with. When Alyse Gregory left Chydyok in 1958 for a less remote house in Devon, Janet had taken the tenancy of the cottage, and used it as a bolt-hole. When she and Sylvia were there together in July 1961, a storm broke and the power failed just as they were going to bed. ‘Janet cried “I’ve put my hand in a mug of milk” & I answered with “I’ve found my teeth by lightning.” ’

  In August, run down by depression and mysterious aches and pains, Valentine visited a psychotherapist, but came back declaring it a failure: ‘He told her it all stemmed from frustrated maternity – and was rheumatoid arthritis.’ Valentine was dieting again, having become heavy on cortisone. There are no pictures of her at this date, for she refused to be in them, but at fifty-five she was said to be still remarkably young-looking. When Betty and Hope Muntz called on them one summer day, Sylvia was struck by how decrepit they looked by comparison, ‘Strange that Valentine, whose health is so much worse than all these, should look so young, so stately, so elegant, with scarcely a grey hair or a wrinkle.’52 The disappointment to Sylvia was that Valentine did not take her elegance into society more often.

  Misunderstandings, rebuffs, inadequate response one to the other were increasingly frequent, and increasingly difficult to avoid, given their differences over politics and religion. A cold word or gesture would plunge Valentine into a ‘fever of pain’, ‘something very much like despair – or illness.’53 These things were lacerations, but not quarrels, borne privately by one of them and apparently unnoticed by the other, for there are no incidents of this kind reported by both women in their separate diaries. They did not realise how they hurt each other, only that they were hurt. Love and dependence had rendered them both extraordinarily vulnerable:

  Scarcely any speech possible between us now, unless I insist on it (as I did about Pacifism the other day) & then it costs me, at any rate, so much strain that I am almost crippled by it for days afterwards. […] Niou has just come into my sitting-room. I look at him with the most sorrowful love. He has taken my place completely now, and is her care and her love and her refreshment and her rest and her support. […] But I know she does still love me – though now, I sometimes think, not loves me, but loves the fact of loving, and loyalty and fealty and quite a lot of stubbornness makes her firm in that love. But love for ME?

  (Valentine, 27 September 1961)

  I look in my heart and see only the shape and colour of events: all substance, all backing has vanished from them, they are like glass-pictures made from prints, they are bodiless. This is not sublimation, merely a process of time, actuality transformed to memory. It is no business of mine, I had no hand it it – so it cannot be sublimation which is a deliberate or sub-deliberate process.

  (Sylvia, 1 November 1961)

  Valentine was hardly writing anything except her diary and letters. She found she could no longer complete a poem or a story, partly because she felt she had not the wit, but partly because there seemed no point in it: ‘the pitiful scrawled beginnings in my books and on little scraps of paper are worse than blank would be.’54 Her stories had been relatively successful, published in the Listener and New Statesman, broadcast on the radio, and were predominantly about states of mind rather than sequences of events, but the better she got at expressing the kernel of her ideas, the less inclined she was to expand them, as she wrote to Alyse Gregory: ‘Lately I wrote three rather bare, perhaps bleak “NOTES” for stories; I am not sure why I wrote them at all, but once done they seemed to me complete as they were and that “working them up” into stories would be useless […] I suspect they will turn out to be nothing.’55

  The shop continued to prosper in its modest way but Valentine felt less enthusiastic about it than before and the chores involved – book-keeping, making and copying lists, sealing up parcels (about 300 a year) – were tiring. The many mortgages on the family estates, plus death duties, had left Valentine with more anxiety than money as her mother’s legacy. It made no difference that this was no longer a pressing matter; Valentine was still very easily ‘panicked with worry about money’, although Sylvia earned so much that to herself she had to concede ‘I am almost a wealthy woman, though I continue to behave as a poor one.’

  IV

  A great part of Valentine’s melancholy stemmed from her concern over the state of the world. The Berlin Wall, the repression practised by eastern bloc regimes, the Cuban missile crisis, all frightened her deeply, and as usual, it was stories of individuals persecuted, killed and caught up in these larger events which hung on her conscience. Having given up the Daily Worker in favour of the Daily Mail in the mid-Fifties, she now changed from the Daily Mail to the Daily Telegraph, and cut out hundreds of entries from that paper and The Times on subjects to do with what we would now call human rights violations. Valentine could no longer believe that Communism as manifested in the Soviet Union and its satellites was anything other than evil, and occasionally challenged Sylvia with the latest atrocity. Sylvia, who heard Church behind all this, usually answered in as condescending a way as possible, and dismissed newspaper ‘facts’ as propaganda. After one of these impasses, as Valentine recorded, ‘[Sylvia] said What would she have if she were to lose her belief and hope in Communism? Nothing but despair, she said. (Earlier she had said I had no idea of what isolation was: think of hers, here among these people, and so cut off –) I did my best to explain to her that her hope is not, in fact, in political communism at all … but I did not say this in so many words.’56 But hanging on to Communism was in part Sylvia’s way of holding out for their past together.

  In 1962, Sylvia was in her sixty-ninth year and in excellent health. She had occasional bouts of her pleurodynia, but was always more than willing to go to bed with it. As she had written to Alyse some years before: ‘I have had a small touch of rheumatism in my shoulder, a painful nuisance, but no more; and [Valentine] has tended and cured me with such exquisite delicacy and sureness of touch that I look back on it as a really happy experience, as a luxury. Other women may go to the opera. I had rheumatism.’57 Sylvia was, if anything, a more active gardener than ever, though since the onset of Valentine’s back trouble they had always employed someone to do the heavy work; first Mr Samways, then Mr True, and latterly a neighbour of theirs, Sybil Chase. A local boy called Colin House came in occasionally to help with the garden. He was one of several boys in whom Sylvia and Valentine took a fostering interest, encouraging them, and in some cases paying for part of their education.

  Though Sylvia was seldom ill, Valenti
ne was acutely aware of any intimations of mortality, and found them alarming. Talking of someone who was ‘wonderful for eighty’, Sylvia commented that she didn’t wish the same on herself. Valentine became distressed, and embraced her lovingly. ‘My God, it is embraces I still want,’58 Sylvia reflected, having been put to bed early with supper on a tray.

  Sylvia finished her translation of La Côte Sauvage (called A Place of Shipwreck in her version) early in 1962 and went straight into a long story, 15,000 words, intended for the New Yorker, ‘almost certainly a piece of total unprofit. But writing it I have, after so many short stories, tasted the queer excitement of giving my characters enough rope to hang themselves.’ After a month ‘The Beggar’s Wedding’ was returned, and for the first time she was not stung into wanting to write something else, but felt completely deflated – ‘I just wanted never to write again’ – although she wrote to William Maxwell the same day with her usual sense of justice: ‘The burden is unevenly distributed. You have to say the story won’t do – with nothing to mitigate the painfulness of saying it; except a good conscience, and we all know how much comfort that is.’59 He wrote immediately, explaining the rejection, but she was preoccupied by the failure of what she had thought her truer artist-self. ‘Am I so clichéd,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘that it is only as a cliché they like me?’ Three months’ ‘agonising interim of fret and complete drought’ followed, until she began another story, ‘Heathy Landscape with Dormouse’.

  In 1962, Sylvia published another collection of stories, A Spirit Rises, the title story of which evokes memories of her father and his study at Radnor Lodge, the only story she ever wrote which draws directly on her own childhood experiences without making a joke out of them. The stories in A Spirit Rises deal with a remarkable variety of types of people and situations, ‘an uncannily equable openness to human data’,60 as the novelist John Updike later wrote – from the composer exiled from his house by consideration for two illicit lovers in ‘On Living for Others’, to the charwoman preparing to kill herself in ‘During a Winter Night’ and the doctor in ‘The Locum Tenens’, a story which contains an evocation of the West Riding of Yorkshire remarkable in a woman who knew it very little indeed. There seems little justification, in the sympathy and restless energy of these stories, for Sylvia to have looked on herself as clichéd.

  In the summer of 1962 Valentine faced an agonising decision when she was told that Candace had a brain tumour and would not live long. She chose not to have the dog put down immediately for the shock was too great: ‘It is not that C. is affectionate to me: but she LOVES me: and she clings to me.’61 By the end of the month, however, Candy had to be killed. Valentine was so desolate that she immediately ordered a new puppy, which arrived in September and was called Fiddle, but the next month she died too, this time while being spayed at the vet’s. A few months later, and against her better judgement, Valentine took charge of a third puppy, a brown miniature poodle bitch, whom she called Fougère.

  Fougère arrived in the middle of the bad winter of 1963. At Frome Vauchurch, never a warm house at its best, the cats’ peat trays froze – indoors – and washing stiffened with frost before Sylvia could even peg it up. The only place where things were not likely to freeze was the refrigerator. ‘Bitter frost and savage wind’, wrote Sylvia, ‘scarcely a bird moving, or able to move’. Maiden Newton under snow was ‘like the Switzerland of my youth: frozen, scentless, deadly pretty-pretty in its colouring of painted houses and white ground and background.’ Sylvia hated cold weather and felt herself drain away under its influence: ‘I feed the birds every morning and afternoon, I feed the animals, I feed Valentine, I do the fire (bless it) and the cats’ trays; and little enough – but by the evening I am so tired I can hardly put one foot in front of another.’ Niou was also miserable with the weather, but not only the weather. Sylvia noticed with desolation that his health was failing. Valentine’s health was the more immediate worry, though. In February her ankles swelled enormously and she was put on some new drugs for oedema, which did not work. Her legs swelled, and her heart was racing. High blood pressure, the doctor said, and then, in April, he diagnosed TB of the pericardium and told Valentine she would need a major operation or submit to ‘a long gathering invalidism’. This diagnosis was scotched by a Harley Street specialist to whom Valentine was referred for a second opinion. He said that there was no need for an operation but that Valentine needed to spend a fortnight in the Brompton Hospital having her blood thinned and undergoing tests. Meanwhile, completely overset by the implications of all this, Valentine had asked to be put on the ‘black box’ again, this time by a friend they had made through the Stones, and the next day her ankles were ‘definitely less swelled’. ‘I try not to think of what’s to come,’ wrote Sylvia. ‘How shall I manage not to go to pieces, even if things go well.’

  Valentine emerged from her fortnight in hospital on 9 May, vastly thankful to be going home, although she was still taking Warfarin, and another drug for her continuing oedema. The blood-thinning treatment had been a course of pills to which she had reacted violently, and on her penultimate day the specialist had mentioned that she might have a benign lump – he did not say where – which would need to be removed at some later date.

  When they went to pick up the cats from the Hicksons’ farm on the way home, Vera confirmed that Niou was dying. He pulled himself up the stairs every night to sleep on Sylvia’s heart ‘as ownerly as ever’ and by day he sat for hours and watched the river, as Thomas had done. Before the month was up, Niou was so weak that Sylvia called the vet and he was given his quietus. They buried him in the garden in a basket lined with sweet hay and catmint. ‘I don’t believe stoicism improves with age. Body goes out of it, as out of a wine.’ Sylvia was, in a self-contained, tearless way, quite unhinged by the death of Niou and had a dream connected with him ‘along the edge of madness’. Valentine bought her a new kitten in October, a Siamese called Quiddity, whom she grew to love, but five months later he was found dead in the river on a cold February morning.

  Sylvia was not writing well, and knew it. ‘Total Loss’, the story she wrote immediately after the death of Niou, was returned by the New Yorker. Looking over three sets of proofs sent to her in one lot for correction, Sylvia saw a falling-off in her work and resolved to improve: ‘I must acclimatise myself to Decline and Fall, and try not – if I do still write – to become a gay grandam, frisking beneath the burden of fourscore. I must study to be plain.’62 She had begun her series of stories about Mr Edom, the antiques dealer, trying to keep her hand in while she recovered herself, but found that she couldn’t take control of ‘a nonsense piece’ as easily as before. A month later, she set out on ‘a nice calm story about incest’. ‘[It] must be flat as flat,’ she warned herself, ‘and dry as dry – WITH NO FRISKS OR QUIPS, my old girl.’ The story, called ‘Between Two Wars’ at first, later ‘A Love Match’, flowed along so satisfyingly that Sylvia felt it must be doomed to failure, like ‘The Beggar’s Wedding’, but by the time she finished it (only a couple of weeks later) she was in a trance-like state. She had not been so involved in a piece of writing of her own since The Flint Anchor. At about 10,000 words, ‘A Love Match’ was longer than her usual New Yorker sprint, and weightier. The central theme, the incestuous relationship between a man broken by the First World War and his sister, bereaved by it, is a powerful but unobtrusive allegory for the condition of England between the first war and the second. The story was very compactly told, with the scope and leisure of a novella, and the themes of village life, wartime conditions and illicit love were ones Sylvia warmed to easily. The New Yorker cabled their acceptance without hesitation.

  While she was writing ‘A Love Match’, Sylvia had a series of letters from Michael Howard, of the publishers Jonathan Cape, inviting her to write the biography of T.H. White the novelist, who had died only two months before, in January 1964. Sylvia agreed provisionally, but as a series of legal complications threatened the book, she gave it little
thought for the time being. She had never met White, though he admired her books very much and had sent her his poems early in 1963 inscribed ‘From an unknown worshipper’. She had noted in her diary at the time ‘Some of them I like very much; partly no doubt because they are of my own way of writing.’ On 17 January, she had written, ‘T.H. White is dead, alas! – a friend I never managed to have. He sent me his poems, I wrote out of my heart to thank him. That was all.’

  By the middle of May the project seemed to be viable and Michael Howard suggested that he take Sylvia to Alderney, White’s home for the last seventeen years of his life, so that she could see his house, talk to his friends there and decide whether or not to do the book. In the bookroom at the top of White’s tall house on Connaught Square, St Anne’s, Sylvia felt herself quicken to her subject and went out to tell Michael Howard that she had decided in favour. White’s suitcases, which had come home from White’s last sea-voyage, stood unpacked in the hallway. His clothes and books and the accoutrements of his many enthusiasms lay about the house; half-finished projects, and, Sylvia noticed, an uncompleted hawk-hood in the sewing basket. ‘I felt it intensely haunted, his angry, suspicious, furtive stare directed at my back, gone when I turned round.’