Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  Valentine was desperately concerned to put herself on a right footing with God, for she felt her private debate about the Church was threatening her faith. She had a tape-recording machine which she loved (she loved all such gadgets) and used to record birdsong, cat-song, herself speaking favourite poems and Sylvia’s conversation (hopeless, for Sylvia immediately fell silent). Onto this machine she spoke some of her thoughts about the changes in the Church and whether she could live with them. She had lost respect, she said, for the Roman Church, and would have loved to rejoin the Church of England if it were not for ‘schism, the Martyrs, Dame Julian’. And there were many practical considerations which made her reticent to leave Catholicism: small but important matters such as the effect her leaving might have on the faith and peace of mind of others. She inclined further and further towards Quakerism (except insofar as she was not a pacifist). It alone seemed to allow some room for the working of the Holy Ghost. On the tape her voice is truly beautiful, ‘a viola voice’ as Sylvia said, melancholy and resonant, with a correctness of pronunciation, phrasing and breathing so unusual now it sounds ‘trained’. There are almost inaudible sighs, a long pause for thought, then another flow of speech.

  In June, Valentine was told that she was healing well, and that the outlook was good, although she still had pains near her scar and felt crushingly tired and devitalised: ‘If only I could feel interested in something again. This bewilders me: to be so heavy and so tired and so dull and so unloving! All my love is inside me but it is tears and weeping and parting and regret and dread. God – restore me to myself! If I can only find myself again I shall be free to love and live, even if it’s only a month or so, and live in praise and joy, not as a lumpish burden.’75 But a check-up in London in December indicated that the cancer had spread and a second operation was arranged immediately, at Guy’s again, for the removal of her breast. This operation, coming so soon after the other, weakened her considerably. Her scar was very painful, her arm swollen and weak and her left shoulder ached continually. When she got home in the middle of January 1969, she had more determination than ever to return to ‘ordinary’ life, and drove the car, even though it was only as far as the pillar-box, by the end of the first week’s convalescence. The same desperate desire to be doing things revived Valentine’s interest in the shop, which Sylvia thought too much for her, but did little to stop. ‘As for the further future, I don’t intend to look at it till I have to,’76 Sylvia wrote to William Maxwell. In the meantime they hung, unillusionedly, on every small possibility of a recovery.

  After the second operation, Valentine spoke at length to an elder of the Society of Friends in Dorchester, and by the spring was attending Quaker meetings regularly, though she had not given up going to Mass. By the summer she had lapsed from Catholicism and had applied to join the Society of Friends. Writing to a priest she had known for some time, Valentine tried to explain why, in honesty, she felt she could no longer attend Mass:

  I have had to stop going to Mass, & Holy Communion: quite simply because for some long time I have realised that I no longer believe that there is one true Church – except in the widest possible sense […]

  I found that the Quaker way of thinking exactly matched the point I had reached, and their way of worship enabled me again to pray with my fellows, which I had not been able to do because the changes in the Mass completely distracted me and I had found no way of making it, for myself, an act of worship or of fellowship.77

  Valentine was accepted as a member of the Society of Friends on 11 September. Sylvia went with her to meetings, for Quakerism was a form of worship she could understand and approve. She went as an observer and did not speak. It was a pleasure and a comfort to attend because she did it with Valentine, and if Sylvia did not go as far as praying, she did have much to think about, and much to hope, though her mind was inclined to wander during the silences. There was a geometrically patterned carpet at the Meeting House which set Sylvia off on Euclid, or simple reveries of Miss Green’s cottage and once ‘a strange vision of a short hairy neolithic man peeping in; and recognising a circle.’

  Sylvia wrote to Joy Finzi on 8 August: ‘This miraculous summer still embraces us: the river flows gently and the moorhens converse and the enormous trout rise like explosions; we have never had such roses and the raspberries went on and on like Schubert and the figs are ripening. We have not slighted it, but we have been held back from it.’ ‘It is almost unbearable to LOVE things so much,’78 Valentine wrote in her diary.

  During the summer Valentine’s shoulder hurt her so much that she had more treatment at a hospital in Yeovil, where the doctor thought her cancer may have spread to the lungs. She tried to give up smoking, and was put on hormone pills to contain the disease’s advance, but they only made her feel worse, exhausted by any exertion, swollen and melancholy. ‘She felt ill after lunch,’ Sylvia wrote on 1 September. ‘I gardened. While I was clearing up, she came out and gave me a skeleton leaf off the rainy tree, then picked some raspberries saying she could only totter – it is true – and went to bed.’ At Guy’s a fortnight later, Hedley Atkins told Sylvia plainly that things were going badly. Valentine had a growth in her neck. She was on too many drugs, he thought, and should go into Nuffield House for tests. There was to be no more radiation treatment and no further operation; clearly they were leaving the disease to take its own course. ‘[Valentine] began to realise that she had been cheated: that nothing was done or suggested to help her oedema, that the series of tests is to ease the medical mind, not her. And she raged. And I could do nothing.’79

  The next day their G.P., Dr Hollins, put off the idea of ‘tests’ and took Valentine off the hormone treatment. She had several pronounced growths on the lungs and a swelling in the neck. He wanted to try a new drug for a fortnight before taking last-ditch measures. ‘She said if she could not be cured, then she would prefer to be killed – and quickly. My heart assents; my hope still holds out.’

  On 1 October Valentine became breathless while shopping in Dorchester – for 1970 diaries – and Dr Hollins put her on yet another medicine. She had to spend a great deal of time in bed, getting her strength up, but rose whenever possible, dressed with great care and did some small job before collapsing into bed again. They bought a new grey kitten, Moth, to sit on her bed and be played with and Valentine watched the birds and trees she loved through a pair of mother-of-pearl opera glasses, lighter to hold than binoculars. Although she was very ill, she looked immaculate and kept very clean, a fastidiousness which Sylvia admired greatly.

  At the end of October, her health took a sharp downward turn; she could still walk along the landing, and sometimes downstairs to the kitchen, ‘but bent, crouched under her pain, with how slow steps. Her lovely gait, her proud carriage.’ That day, in bed and bleeding, she folded Sylvia’s hands over her own. ‘It is sad,’ she said. On the 26th, Fougère was taken away by Mr King, the garage man, and a night-watch began, shared by Sybil Chase and another local woman.

  On the 27th, Sylvia wrote in her diary, ‘This morning the swans flew over. She wept silently. This world so lovely, and she with such quick eyes for its loveliness. […] I knew I had given up all hope. Panic descended on me at the thought of watching her die, then living half-dead without her.’ Sylvia sat with Valentine all day, much of it in silence. She kept visitors away, but let Father Weekes in, though Valentine told him emphatically that she did not want the Last Rites. By 6 November, Valentine was wretched; alternately drowsy and in pain and bringing up a grey froth. That evening she was given her first morphia injection. They were stronger the next day, doubled the day after that. ‘She is as strong as a horse,’ Hollins said to Sylvia, for Valentine’s pulse was steady although she was unconscious most of the time. In the small hours of 9 November, Sylvia sat holding Valentine’s unresponsive hand, and ‘though she could not have heard me’ repeated her favourite poems and her marriage vow over and over. ‘When the first light sifted into the room I knew she was beginning to d
ie’:

  A gale raged round the house: a torn cloud let through the low sun. I saw a tall rainbow standing there. Hollins came. By now her breathing had changed – slow, harsh, like a tree creaking. His part was over, he went away. Sibyl and I stayed by her, wiping her lips, I still holding her hand. The intervals between her creaking breaths grew longer, longer. Then, no more. The silence seemed to solidify, like hardening wax. We cleaned her face and Sibyl took away the soiled towels. Sibyl spoke of calling old Mrs Stewart to lay her out. I said at once that we would do that. So between us we cut away her red silk pyjamas, and washed her beautiful, beautiful long body, so smooth, so white, and re-dressed her. The pliability, the compliance of her dead limbs – the last token of her grace and affability and obligingness. And we bound up her jaw.

  Soon after her death, I saw all her young beauty flooding back into her face. It was the Valentine of forty years [ago], Valentine I first loved. Binding her jaws slightly changed this. She had the tragic calm beauty of the dead Christ we saw carried in the Good Friday procession at Orta.

  I put her wooden cross and rosary in her stiffening hand, and some sprays of wet rosemary and the remaining white cyclamen from the garden.

  Later that day I rang up Joy Finzi and asked her to come and do a drawing of my dead beautiful love.80

  Sylvia had laid Valentine out very simply and beautifully, Joy thought, when she arrived to do the drawing. A pillow supported the head in such a way as to conceal to some extent the largeness of the growth on her neck. The bedroom window was open, and the wind lifted Valentine’s hair slightly. But after about an hour, a trickle of blood began to run out of Valentine’s mouth at the right side.

  Joy left on 11 November, the day Valentine’s body was taken away in a forget-me-not blue van, a detail Sylvia felt she would have liked. ‘We always rejoiced when people went and left us alone together,’ Sylvia wrote. ‘So we are now.’ The cremation took place on the 15th. Sylvia attended, against Valentine’s written wishes.

  I unmake the death-bed, I remake the marriage-bed I said. And as I lay thinking of all the beds we had lain in, she came and pulled aside the sheets and leaped in beside me. And so I slept all night with her ashes in a respectable little fumed oak tabernacle beside me.81

  In a letter of instructions dated 20 June 1969, Valentine had stipulated that she wanted to be buried in St Nicholas’s Church, East Chaldon, in the south-east corner of the churchyard, ‘with the regular C of E Burial Service […] no changes and no cuts’. ‘The funeral should be as cheap as possible: flowers, if people want to give them, but don’t let them just die on the ground …’

  In her diary, Sylvia made the following entry for the day of the burial, 22 November:

  […] it was a pearl-coloured morning, pale colours through a watery mist, a pearled morning such as she loved. Strange interval to fill up between waking and burying the ashremains of the treasure of my soul. […] Janet Stone, Sibyl and the car at 1.30. By now it was clear, fine, arrayed in light. […] The wooden box lay on my knee. At Chaldon, Steven was in the road, looking at 24. 24 is empty, gutted, staring black windows. We were too early. People came up the road like deformed ghosts. Betty shrunken, André limping on two sticks. At last, without any stage-fright, I followed Mr Tate up the steep path into the church, holding my Love and my mate in my arms. In the darkish church, Betty Pinney’s face, dead white and small. I put the box on a little table. He took off his long black cloak, and read the two funeral psalms, verse about with the congregation. The first wrung my heart: it was as though her sadder self had written it, ‘Let my young grow up’. He read the epistle extremely well; as if it were meaning something to him as he read it. Then the prayers and the blessing; and he came out of the chancel and I picked up the box and followed him into the brilliant green world, and to the pit. There was a hassock beside it. I knelt, and lay the box in the pit (such good earth) and settled it, and put the knot of rosemary and married myrtle on top. And the sexton threw the first handful of earth. I turned my eyes to High Chaldon above the low stone wall, and knew she was there beside me, looking the same way. Not comfort, but acceptance. I was loth to come away. But I drove back with Janet [Machen], who looked so young with grief: and near Owermoigne we stopped for old old Dr Smith on his bicycle.

  Our queer impromptu tea of crumpets and red wine and prawns. She stayed till dusk had fallen, and went away again in tears. […]

  And so I began my widowed estate, with three cats and a book about Scotland by a man called Smout.

  Sylvia did not cry. On the 25th, she wrote that her eyes were ‘arid with unshed tears’. Three weeks after Valentine’s death, when she was still sorting out small bequests and legacies, she went into Dorchester to find ‘the burly broken-nosed stallkeeper’ in South Street, to whom Valentine had left £10.

  [He] had known about her operations and had always encouraged her and kept his fingers crossed for her. He was there today, looking detached and philosophical and drinking out of a large white mug. I stopped. Did he remember the lady with the poodle? At first, not. I coloured the poodle. Yes, of course he remembered her. I told him she was dead, and had left him a parting present with her love. He stared at me, all woe and incredulity.

  ‘She was a lovely lady,’ he said. ‘We shall never see her like again,’ said I. His eyes filled with tears. The reality of his words and mine broke into my composure. I began to cry. With tears on our old cheeks we patted each other sadly, while a woman who wanted to buy a cabbage stared at us.

  7

  1969–1978

  I

  Who chooses the music, turns the page,

  Waters the geraniums on the window-ledge?

  Who proxies my hand,

  Puts on the mourning-ring in lieu of the diamond?

  Who winds the trudging clock, who tears

  Flimsy the empty date off calendars?

  Who widow-hoods my senses

  Lest they should meet the morning’s cheat defenceless?

  Who valets me at nightfall, undresses me of another day,

  Puts it tidily and finally away,

  And lets in darkness

  To befriend my eyelids like an illusory caress?

  I called him Sorrow when first he came,

  But Sorrow is too narrow a name;

  And though he has attended me this long while

  Habit will not do. Habit is servile.

  He, inaudible, governs my days, impalpable,

  Impels my hither and thither. I am his to command,

  My times are in his hand.

  Once in a dream I called him Azrael.1

  ‘One cannot grow out of a loss; one cannot grow round it.

  The only expedient is to grow with it, for the loss persists, develops, amplifies.’

  [Sylvia to Samuel Menasche, 22 December 1974]

  Valentine had said she would never leave Sylvia, and to Sylvia that assurance was everything; not a statement of intent, but a statement of fact. She constantly sought, and found, indications of Valentine’s presence; a flight-feather lying by her chair, a letter in a book, a passage marked for her to read, Valentine’s scent, suddenly, sharply, on the air. ‘Her love is everywhere. It follows me as I go about the house, meets me in the garden, sends swans into my dreams. In a strange underwater or above-earth way I am very nearly happy.’2 Even before the funeral, Sylvia had begun to collect up and order their love letters. She was transported by them to the ‘amazing euphoric reality’ of the past, their years at Miss Green, at Frankfort and at ‘24’ which were so happy and unanimous. Sorting through the letters was not a comfort, but a wild excitement; she went to them ‘as if to an assignation’ and through them entered into a life parallel to her daily shadow-life, a brilliant real world in which she and Valentine existed together, where their love lived. All losses were restored in that world: it was not the anxious, ill Valentine of later years who dominated it, but Valentine glorified, imperious, suave. Sylvia, too, appeared in a cleansed form, disburdened of
her ageing body and her scepticism.

  ‘Ordinary life’ persisted underneath the other, and in ordinary life Sylvia was a desolate lonely old woman, who despite whisky, friends and endless jobs to do – dismantling the shop, sending off keepsakes and legacies, writing letters of business – could hardly drag herself from one day into another. ‘I creep on broken wing,’ she wrote, expecting to die at any moment from sheer lack of momentum. She went to Quaker meetings, but fell asleep in them; friends rallied round her, but she could only respond with good manners: ‘they wrap warmth round a stone’.3 In mid-December she went to stay with Ruth and Tony Scott, and was at the Stones’ house for Christmas Day, where Walter de la Mare’s poem ‘Autumn’, in a book she was given as a present, struck her so forcibly she thought she would die then and there from ‘the shock of this sudden assault of the truth’, but being in company, she did not die. ‘Total grief is like a minefield,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘No knowing when one will touch the tripwire.’

  The turn of the year in which Valentine died was very hard; ‘It is a formality of time: but it rends my heart.’ In the first week of January, though, Sylvia found her diary of 1930, the time when she and Valentine first fell in love, their early days at Chaldon, Winterton and Lavenham. The diary not only complemented but corroborated the world of the letters, and Sylvia sat wrapped in it all evening: ‘such happiness burned in me, such reality and such confident love that I was sure she was with me, followed me out of my room, watched me do the evening routine, followed me to bed (but was there already, waiting for me).’ As if in acknowledgement of the two separate worlds she lived in, Sylvia kept two diaries in 1970.

  Her dreams were vivid and in the main happy; Valentine with her at the King’s Arms, Valentine waiting for her in a London taxi, Candace at the front door and the sounds of Valentine’s return, but it was when she was awake that Sylvia had her strongest impressions of a presence, could feel Valentine watching her, sense her exact height in a doorway and, occasionally, very matter-of-factly, see her: