Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  I was sitting in the kitchen, looking at the deepening sky, and she appeared, stately and happy, cradling a child in her arms – lost Tamar. And I rejoiced to see that loss restored to her.4

  Sylvia felt she was ‘not so much haunted as possessed’, guided and watched over; Non omnis moriar, as Valentine had chosen for her epitaph. ‘This continuity is at once my only joy and my sharpest stabbing,’ she wrote in her diary. After a day of sorting Valentine’s room, when she had re-read Valentine’s autobiography, ‘For Sylvia’, and some melancholy letters, ‘It was time to go upstairs and draw the curtains round this empty house. On the stairs, in the narrow window, she halted me to look at the two birch-trees in their lacework, the moon shining over them, a mist, a mermaid mist, rising through them. I felt her then, her compassion. So I went out and walked the drive and came [in] chilled and drank whiskey and caressed the cats. I know nothing, nothing.’

  As the second diary shows, Sylvia continued to write, though with the utmost effort and no pleasure. In her clearances, she found several half-finished stories which she decided to re-work, but the results were not satisfactory: ‘Considered re-hashing Mr Dalrymple,’ she wrote in February 1970, ‘but it is just an itch, a psoriasis, and while I scratch, absorbing; and when the scratching is over I come back to my solid widowhood.’ She undertook a number of book reviews for the Spectator at this time, and an introduction to Northanger Abbey. Although she did not expect to flare into artistry again, she found that ‘on the whole, harness is supporting wear’.

  ‘I have had my whole raison d’être sent out of my bosom,’ she wrote to Jean Larson, ‘and when I turn to any familiar occupation, trying to write, cooking my boring meals, listening to music, their familiarity catches me in the illusion that she is still here, I shall hear her tread, her whistle; or else that she is away and I am waiting for her return.’5 She was unsteadied by having no one to care for and support. A few weeks after Valentine’s death, Sylvia had had a visit (not a visit of condolence) from Betty Pinney’s daughter Susanna, ‘a nymph in ragged jeans’ recovering from an unhappy love affair. Sylvia quickened immediately to the candour and melancholy of the young woman’s tone and noted that as well as being intelligent and lonely she could also type. Unwittingly, Susanna did what little else had succeeded in doing: ‘she raised my head because I felt I could help her.’ Similarly, when an American writer and academic, Garold Sharpe, was recovering from influenza, Sylvia was pleased to have him convalesce at her house. ‘It is so strange to have no-one to love,’ she wrote.

  By Easter 1970, she was incredulous that she was still alive, and wept for loneliness on seeing the first white violets.

  A week later, she was sorting stories listlessly for a new book when she came across a poem by Valentine, ‘This is the world exactly as Adam had it’, written when Valentine was still the stalking solitary glimpsed from afar in Chaldon. It fired Sylvia with the desire to write a preface to the first section of their letters, telling the history of how they fell in love. All her energy flooded back as she set about this task – ‘Tore up and tore up – but wrote on’, she wrote on 9 April. Two days later she had worked her way to Miss Green’s cottage: ‘I bleed from every limb from cutting my way out of thickets. But I live – and can bleed.’ It became clear that the letters themselves needed to be copied, for some were almost illegible with having been carried round, slept with, loved, and that they did not need a preface so much as a series of narratives, linking section to section. She asked Susanna Pinney to make a start on the typing, and realised with pleasure that she was preparing something for posterity. To William Maxwell she wrote, ‘It is far the best thing I have ever written – and an engrossing agony. I am terrified that I should die before I have finished this. A month ago, it was the only thing I had the least inclination for.’6

  Reading the letters of the troubled years, and her corresponding diary entries, Sylvia was accosted by remorse and regrets, and wherever she felt she had failed Valentine, was utterly woebegone. ‘I WAS WRONG,’ she wrote in her diary, thinking back sadly on the two episodes of Elizabeth: ‘Either way it seems I was wrong to her, whom I loved with my whole heart, having made that primal mistake in 38/39. And yet I did it to please, or thought so; and to succour her renewal of life by lust: or thought so. But not for a moment do I doubt the truth of our love. It shed the dear pleasures of the flesh; it carried heavy burdens of doubt, care, calamity, disappointment. It never failed. It does not fail now.’7 It was imperative to Sylvia to convey that truth, at whatever cost to herself. Overcome by the narrative of their stay at the Kibbe house in America, Sylvia had to break off and recover from it, but she wrote and re-wrote scrupulously in her determination to be both honest and accurate. It had to be the truth – ‘it must not be dichtung.’

  Valentine’s birthday came and went, so did the stonemason with sketches for the gravestone – both women’s names and only Sylvia’s death date left blank. As often as she was elated and assured, Sylvia was downcast and desolate. On 27 June she wrote: ‘melancholy, I was haunted by the till you came to me letter. When I read it, after the first caress of her assurances, I was overwhelmed by knowing how I had lost all that love, that no other love meant more than a dead leaf to me. I almost lost all sense of her, my sense of what I had lost was so vehement.’ Before Valentine’s death, Sylvia had looked elderly. Nine months after it, she looked ineluctably old; stooping, lined and bewhiskered. ‘Till Valentine’s death I never noticed that I was growing older,’8 she wrote to Joy Finzi. The house was ‘haggard with removals’ and with inattention. Even the garden was neglected, although the enormously hard work of the previous two years showed in it still – the summer was ‘jewelled with flowers – unbearable’. Lying in the bath and looking at her own arm, Sylvia remembered how often Valentine had kissed it: ‘I bethought me that I inhabit my body like a grumbling caretaker in a forsaken house. Fine goings-on here in the old days: such scampers up and down stairs, such singing and dancing. All over now: and the mortality of my body suddenly pierced my heart. For of that, there is no question; no marrying or giving in marriage.’9

  The gifts remain, and I

  remain and love on

  But the hand of the loved one is gone.

  The gifts remain, the light-

  hearted, the love-freighted,

  The useful, the trivial, the

  remembrances of past pleasure, the

  promises of pleasures to come,

  the gifts remain

  And on them is the sheen

  Of their moment of giving, the

  hand of the giver, the lover,

  The summer hat hanging by the garden door,

  The sharp knife in the kitchen drawer,

  The shell and the feather.

  But I myself remain, and live on

  All else being gone,

  The chosen, the cherished,

  The longest meditated,

  The kept to the last, the most sadly relinquished.10

  II

  In September 1970 Sylvia wrote to David Garnett, then in his late seventies and living in the South of France: ‘How old we both are, my dear. Alike in that, if in nothing else. In a way, I am now like the Sylvia you first knew, for I have reverted to solitude. I live in a house too large for me, with three cats; and when the telephone rings and it is a wrong number I feel a rush of thankfulness. I was grateful to you for your letter after Valentine’s death, for you were the sole person who said that for pain and loneliness there is no cure. I suppose people have not the moral stamina to contemplate the idea of no cure; and to ease their uneasiness they trot out the most astonishing placebos.’11 The passage of time did nothing to heal Sylvia’s grief, in fact it made it worse, for her sense of being alone gained in mass and substance as Valentine receded into the past, as her presence was overlaid, even slightly, by changes in the house. Sylvia could no longer enjoy any part of being ill, for it was simply illness, ungraced by Valentine’s ministrations, and she in turn had no
one to cherish. ‘That is the worst thing,’ she wrote to Bea Howe, ‘by far the worst thing: not to please, or comfort, or support, or enliven, or amuse. Not to give. To have, and not to share.’12 ‘I can’t live for myself, it’s not worth it,’ she wrote, coming back from a visit to Ian and Trekkie Parsons in Lewes to her dishevelled house and the sheer tiresomeness of looking after herself. Even her sturdiest pleasures failed her: ‘An interval of sitting in the garden, but the flourish of May overcame me and I cowered in again. Then, talking to Pericles, I said a truth: Only two things are real to me: my love and my death. In between them, I merely exist in a scatter of senses.’

  Sylvia had been going through Valentine’s notebooks and manuscripts slowly over the year, but early in 1971 began to read the diaries, and was overset by them: ‘I had not realised how soon she began to lose hope of our love, to be ravaged about her poetry, to feel the cold.’ She felt unequal to Valentine’s melancholy, and gripped by remorse for the times when she had been insensitive or unnoticing. At about the same time, a radio broadcast vindicated Kurt Geisen, a man they had quarrelled over, who had been persecuted by the Russians. ‘I listened frozen with shame,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘remembering how Valentine had bade me believe against my loyalty to USSR. Alas! Alas!’ Having to admit that a hole had shown up in her bullet-proof Stalinism was nothing now to the thought that she had disbelieved her love.

  She continued across the minefield. One day in March 1971, sixteen months after Valentine’s death, Sylvia was suddenly released into ‘real, unhinderable free weeping’, remembering how she had lifted Fougére from Valentine’s dying bed. The Kings were moving to Malta and taking ‘Fou’ with them, and when Sylvia went to say goodbye, she was greeted rapturously by the dog, ‘a real contact with the past, and that is over.’ ‘It is the body which grieves, grieves for the body of the lost one,’ she wrote, after sorting some of Valentine’s clothes for a jumble sale. ‘I took up her gloves, her paws, her little paws – and looked at her bedroom slippers. I do think her soul survives; but my body grieves and grieves for hers. My courage at the time has shredded away. I have none left. I am an old woman, and crave for comfort and protection like a child.’13 She parted with Valentine’s clothes stoically, as she had parted with all the mementos of their expeditions to Spain (sent to an Oxford college archive) and other treasures such as Valentine’s poetry books (sent to the Arts Council Library), the car, the Craske pictures (given to the Snape Maltings). Part of this was her instinct to clear the decks, preparing to leave with a clean pair of heels, but part was pure Roman matron.

  By the end of 1971, Sylvia had almost finished the narrative links and notes to the love letters, although it took her so long to compose five hundred words in the final section that she began to fear she was becoming senile. This intimation was less pleasant than the intimations of death she felt from time to time, which disappointingly came to nothing. She felt herself walking ‘crouched forward and shambling, like an old woman’, saw herself looking like Nora in age and feared the path down into decay. She had very little interest in herself and her own doings; she was phlegmatic about being made an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and virtually ignored the publication of her stories, The Innocent and the Guilty, late in 1971. It was Valentine’s doings which excited her deepest concern. After the love letters, Sylvia turned to Valentine’s poems and submitted a selection of them to Chatto & Windus. They were accepted, and published in 1973 under the title The Nature of the Moment. This, together with the pamphlet, Later Poems, which Sylvia had privately printed in 1970 as a keepsake for friends, represented more than Valentine had published in her lifetime. But there was no escaping from the old trouble. The Chatto & Windus catalogue entry about Valentine harped on Sylvia, and neither Ian Parsons nor Norah Smallwood understood why Sylvia was deeply affronted by it.

  During 1971, Sylvia began to write with more ease again and inadvertently made so many dollars from her short stories that she found herself ‘much too wealthy’ and gave away large sums – ‘pre-legacies’ – to friends and relations who needed them. She appreciated fine things, good food, good wine, but spent little on herself. Old habits die hard; even in her wealthy old age Sylvia was more likely to put on more and more layers of clothes in the winter than light another fire. A friend of hers wrote that ‘Sylvia, with an air of boasting, sometimes said she liked luxury, by which she often meant no more than clean sheets or a hot water bottle.’14

  Ironically, a life insurance policy which Valentine had struggled to pay to provide for Sylvia’s old age had matured in the autumn of 1969 and yielded £6,000, but even such a large sum went almost unnoticed in the general flow of income from Sylvia’s writing and investments and the income from the money she had put by for Valentine in the fifties. She still prided herself on the ingenuity which could make an old pair of curtains into a tablecloth, or a tablecloth into a dress, or a dress into the appliqués on a cushion cover. A garment of hers survives in which one can almost see her train of thought in composing it: in front of her was a thick old Paisley cloth, in her head the idea of the warm dress it would make. Launching in with scissors and a needle (she never used a pattern and always sewed by hand), she arrived at her goal; a winter dress with panels in unexpected places, superlative darns where there had been holes and an elaboration round the collar which is the essence of afterthought.

  Towards the end of 1970, Sylvia had written a story for the New Yorker called ‘Something Entirely Different’, a departure from her usual sphere, as the title suggests, and the forerunner of a series of stories about elfindom which provided her with a challenge and a diversion in the last years of her life. ‘Something Entirely Different’, which was not published until 1972, told the story of an elfin child, a changeling, planted in a Scots Presbyterian cradle and the parallel history of the human child taken into elfindom. The transposition allowed full reign to Sylvia’s gift for social satire and she revelled in it. When Mr Shawn, the editor-in-chief at the New Yorker, saw the story, his comment was simply ‘Remarkable!’15

  Susanna Pinney, who had typed many of the love letters, was also typing Sylvia’s stories for her. She would come to the house regularly, converse, share one of Sylvia’s meals – planned and cooked with real artistry – and work. Their growing friendship had a congenially practical basis. The oppressive concern of friends for Sylvia’s bereavement had begun to wear off – at one time Sylvia had likened it to being a tree every dog lifted its leg against – and she was able to regain some privacy and quiet, seeing those she chose to see, mainly the Scotts, the Parsons and Michael and Pat Howard, to whose grand new home, Boughrood Castle, Sylvia went for Christmas 1972. In the same year, Sylvia took up a long-standing invitation from Paul Nordoff to visit him in Denmark; a surprising decision, for apart from being seventy-eight, Sylvia disliked leaving Frome Vauchurch. ‘The truth is,’ she wrote to William Maxwell, ‘I was growing rather alarmed by the way I was acceding to routine; compliance with it felt increasingly like madness. “Now I hang up the tea-cup on the 3rd hook. Now I put the blue plates in the rack.” ’16 She planned to be in Denmark only one week: ‘it will be easier for me to make a short stay – because of the return. The return to myself, I mean, to the shape of my thoughts and the pattern of my days. I have found it hard enough to return even after a few days – to the accumulated emptiness of this house and the accumulated familiarity of it. I daren’t stretch the continuity too far, or for too long. I live with an old woman, Paul, and have to humour her.’17

  Sylvia enjoyed her week in Scandinavia and was pleased to be involved in Paul’s latest project, the book he was writing with Clive Robbins on their method of music therapy for handicapped children. ‘In the mornings we disentangled the knots and in the afternoons went out to play.’18 Photographs taken on this holiday include one of Sylvia in a Kensal Green attitude of woe before a piece of metal sculpture. In an unbecoming fur hat and coat she looks grey-faced, wrinkled and surprisingly small.r />
  Some of Sylvia’s most highly valued friendships were founded and maintained by her transatlantic correspondences. She loved, and needed, the uncluttered intellectual intimacy which depended on distance and separateness and which such correspondence allowed. ‘A correspondence kept up over a length of years with never a meeting is a bridge which with every letter seems more elastically reliable,’ Sylvia had written in her biography of T.H. White, ‘but it is a bridge that only carries the weight of one person at a time. When the correspondents meet it collapses and they have to founder their way to the footing of actuality.’19 Sylvia never met Leonard Bacon, met Anne Parrish very infrequently and George Plank, the American artist and illustrator, only once, yet she exchanged letters regularly with all three until their deaths. Her important later correspondences with William Maxwell and the sisters Marchette and Joy Chute were also nurtured by the Atlantic, and it was to these three friends she sent the love letters when complete. These were the most intimate and personal documents Sylvia possessed, the autobiography of her heart. Susanna Pinney had read most of them in the typing, but no one else had, and it is interesting that Sylvia entrusted copies to the very people with whom she was rarely, if at all, on ‘the footing of actuality’. To the Chutes she wrote:

  I am so glad you have read those letters – for now you know us. As I grow old and cold, sometimes I feel as though she and I were being whirled away from each other like leaves on an autumn wind; it restores, it reassembles me to know that we still exist to you, in our exact truth, in our reality; and that reading her letters you will know the phoenix that I loved in life and reality: that we were truly so … ‘so well completed in each other’s arms’. A strange thing is, that we took the miracle almost for granted; heaven was our daily wear, at times, hell, too, but never completely; there was always, even in our worst afflictions and perplexities, a lining of comfort in each other.20