Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  It seems that by this time in her life Sylvia had all but given up composing. She was to say later, to Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘I had come to the conclusion that I didn’t do it authentically enough, whereas when I turned to writing I never had a doubt as to what I meant to say.’42 Of the very few pieces of her music which survive, ‘Memorial’, a rhapsody for solo voice and string quartet written between 1918 and 1920, is the most ambitious. It is a setting of parts of Walt Whitman’s ‘A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Grey and Dim’ and ‘Memories of President Lincoln’, and the music, dark, brooding and uncertain in key, is sensitive to Whitman’s words, a hymn to death. It is interesting that the work contains discords ‘of a wilful nature’43 and that ‘whenever it seems about to lift into the light it falls back – or, on occasions, surges back – into the dark.’44 Even the ending, lifting through a long diminuendo, is not wholly consolatory; it is quiet rather than peaceful. As with many of her poems and, later, her stories, a deliberate friction is set up between the form and the tone.

  In one sense, Sylvia never gave up composing, for all her writing is musical in nature and shows not simply a fine ear for cadences and the lyrical effects of language, but a keen interest in form and structure. ‘I really learned all my ideas of form from studying music’,45 she said late in her life. Many of the poems Sylvia had been writing since her visit to the marshes ended on a sombre note, a dying fall. Even in the most straightforward of them there could be a quiet key change, often subtly disturbing, as in ‘Match me, O Rose!’:

  A red rose shining in the sun

  Told me of summer new-begun.

  I smoothed each petal, and kissed each petal,

  And counted them one by one.

  Eighteen – and I had two years more.

  ‘Match me, O rose!’ I said; and tore

  In half two petals, two crimson petals,

  To bring them to a score.

  Just at that moment the wind blew –

  Petal by petal away I threw,

  And turned to the rose-bush, the lovely rose-bush,

  Where other roses grew.46

  Plain diction in Sylvia’s poems does not always convey plain meaning, but can be complicated and counterpointed by the ‘music’ of the poem. As the critic Denis Donoghue has written, ‘Poetry consisted, for Sylvia Townsend Warner, in the turning of an experience, real or so fully imagined as to be real, toward the decisiveness of song.’47

  In the autumn of 1923 David Garnett had been reading Sylvia’s poems and said he would like to send them to Charles Prentice, and that they were very good. Sylvia was unusually nervous while the poems were being ‘considered’: ‘I felt like a cat whose kittens are taken away and she goes anxiously leaning about the house and as her hope fails her mew grows harsher and more imperative.’48 In November she heard with amazement that they had been accepted.

  Sylvia went to meet Charles Prentice at the Chatto & Windus offices in St Martin’s Lane, ‘feeling sick and highly-strung’: ‘I was shown into a small room and presently a stranger came in and looked at me without a word. I transferred a great many bus tickets from my right hand to my left and we shook hands and sat down. After a very long pause I said Are you Mr Prentice? and he said: Yes. After another long pause we both began to speak at once. It was like a nightmare, or a religious ceremony. But he said such praising things about my poems that I soon felt quite at home with him.’49 The book was to come out in the spring of 1925. In the course of conversation, Prentice asked if Sylvia had written anything else and she promised to send him her novel.

  It took Sylvia a number of weeks to choose a title for her poems, but she finally hit on ‘The Espalier’: ‘it seems to me expressive – a naturally rather straggling plant such as the mind is – mine at any rate straggles – deprived and formalised into producing fruit.’50 When the book was published it attracted a creditable amount of attention from reviewers, most of whom noted what Charles Prentice had singled out in Sylvia’s poetry, its objectivity. The Nation spoke of its ‘quality of freshness, of spontaneous feeling’ and the author’s ‘un-Victorian mind’. Part of the book’s impact was made by the un-Victorian mind expressing itself through forms which were not simply traditional but almost quaint in 1925; the ballad, the epitaph, the pentameter quatrain; the bathos with which gipsies, sextons and country maids are treated; and a frame of reference which stretches from Pyrrhon to Mother Goose – not, in Sylvia’s mind, a necessarily large step. There are several poems which are Chaldon-based, notably ‘Nelly Trim’, Sylvia’s most anthologised poem, and many which reflect the enthusiasm she shared with Powys for wanting to make your flesh creep, but there is no attempt at consistency in the collection, not even consistency of surprise. As the book settled down, she began to acquire a few influential admirers; A.E. Housman, Louis Untermeyer, who did much to promote her work in the United States, and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, her grandfather’s old pupil, who was later to write that ‘the writings, especially the poems of […] Miss Sylvia Townsend Warner, perpetuate – with a curious turn as often happens – the mental distinction of a family.’51 The only person whose response was a slight disappointment was the dedicatee, Percy Buck.

  Sylvia’s novel, ‘Lolly Willowes’, which had been submitted at the same time as the poems, was accepted by Charles Prentice with only one demur. The version that he saw ended at page 244 with Lolly burying the apple bag and smoothing the earth over. Prentice felt that in the light of the preceding conversation between Lolly and Satan this was too strong an intimation of death. Sylvia therefore added the last three and a half pages and handed it back, later regretting that she didn’t tidy the whole book up more. It was scheduled for publication in 1926. Meanwhile Sylvia was writing two short stories very different in tone from ‘Lolly Willowes’; ‘The Son’ and ‘Some World Far From Ours’, an extraordinarily delicate story about the bed-maker of a chambre d’accommodation, which is at once both worldly and lyrical, reminiscent of Colette, whose writing Sylvia admired. In this year she also began a story written in the first person, ‘Elinor Barley’, based on the folksong ‘The Brisk Young Widow’. It was a rather deliberate exercise, and after a few months began to drag. At the end of the year advance copies of Lolly Willowes were ready, but Sylvia was apprehensive about the book, as she indicated to David Garnett: ‘Your letter has given me a great deal of silent joy. It has given me the assurance I wanted, and if it comes from you I can believe it. Other people who have seen Lolly have told me that it was charming, that it was distinguished, and my mother said that it was almost as good as Galsworthy. And my heart sank lower and lower.’52

  Laura, ‘Lolly’, Willowes is a twenty-eight-year-old spinster when her adored and adoring father dies and leaves her dependent on the hospitality of her two older brothers and their wives. For twenty years she lives the life of a spinster aunt, familiar and negligible as the furniture in her brother’s London home. Then she decides to break away and live by herself in the country, thinking that her capital, administered by her brother, will enable her to be free. Despite the discovery that she has very little money to call her own, Laura takes a room in a small Bedfordshire village, Great Mop. In the company of her landlady, Mrs Leak, and a gentle poultry-farmer, Mr Saunter, she leads a released and happily aimless life, only slightly disturbed by intimations that there is a secret in herself she has yet to uncover. The arrival in the village of her self-important nephew, Titus, havocs Laura’s peace, and in a perturbed state of mind she realises that the only further escape for her is into witchcraft, and that she has had a vocation for it all along. A vicious and ugly kitten appears, her familiar, as confirmation of her compact with the Devil and Laura understands that most of the villagers – including the parson – are witches too. With her landlady as chaperone, she attends her first Sabbath, but is bitterly disappointed by its semblance to any other social occasion, calling out skills she has never possessed. Thinking that witchcraft, too, might prove inadequate, Laura wanders off alone, only to meet
Satan in the guise of a kindly gamekeeper and have her faith in him restored. Her nephew is subsequently bedevilled by a series of plagues which drive him out of the village and Laura, meeting Satan again, is able to come to an understanding of his character and her own which frees her to live undisturbed, ‘a hind couched in the Devil’s coverts’.

  The story was really an elaborate way of presenting the same thesis as Virginia Woolf did in A Room of One’s Own, published three years later, except that where Virginia Woolf’s woman wants a room in which she can write fiction, Lolly Willowes’s vision is of women being able to ‘sit in their doorways and think’:

  When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers, and Puritans. In places like Bedfordshire, the sort of country one sees from the train. You know. Well, there they were, there they are, child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washing from currant bushes; and for diversion each other’s silly conversation, and listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen. Quite different to the way women talk and men listen, if they listen at all. And all the time being thrust further down into dullness when the one thing all women hate is to be thought dull. […] It sounds very petty to complain about, but I tell you, that sort of thing settles down on one like a fine dust, and by and by the dust is age, settling down. […] And they think how they were young once, and they see new young women, just like what they were, and yet as surprising as if it had never happened before, like trees in spring. But they are like trees towards the end of summer, heavy and dusty, and nobody finds their leaves surprising, or notices them till they fall off. If they could be passive and unnoticed, it wouldn’t matter. But they must be active, and still not noticed. Doing, doing, doing, till mere habit scolds at them like a housewife, and rouses them up –53

  To be struggling for privacy, not power, is still not a very common view of the feminist ideal and the retiring nature of the heroine, Lolly, perhaps persuaded readers that it was not a very serious one either. The book seems ultimately comfortable on that score, though it was much wittier and crisper than most women’s fiction of the period. The novelty of the theme, and the author’s apparent imperviousness to received wisdom, ensured the book a high oddity value. Though Lolly Willowes set out to overturn ‘the bugaboo surmises of the public’ about witches, and about the single woman, that too common phenomenon of the post-war years, it amused people more than it startled them.

  The novel was a great success. The Chatto & Windus press cuttings book alone include over ninety notices for Lolly Willowes, many of them lengthy, and all favourable. ‘I have felt what it is to be famous,’ Sylvia wrote to Charles Prentice. ‘A friend of mine was sending her silver to the bank, and I helped her to wrap it up in newspapers. Suddenly I discovered I was wrapping up forks in my own name.’54 The American reviewers were predominantly reminded of Jane Austen, the British reviewers of David Garnett (whose fantasy novel, Lady into Fox, had been a bestseller in 1924). Lolly Willowes was ‘one of the “smart” things to read this season’.55 Sylvia was written up as ‘the girl who is responsible for the sudden interest in witchcraft that has seized on London’56 and in interviews was asked a lot of foolish questions about black magic, which she answered with a mixture of candour and flippancy, at one time suggesting that modern witches might use their vacuum cleaners instead of broomsticks for flying. There was speculation, too, as to whether Sylvia herself, like Lolly, was a witch, and Sylvia dined out on it for some time. She also encouraged the notion in her own fancy. As a child, she had repeated spells to her cat, Mister Dive, ‘feeling a black hope that they would work’,57 and had persuaded the cook to perform the cauldron scene from Macbeth with her in the Radnor Lodge kitchen. Sylvia had always kept an open mind on religious questions. A month after Lolly Willowes was published, she took tea with Margaret Murray, whose study of witchcraft had been so influential. Miss Murray, an imposing elderly lady, liked the character of Lolly ‘though she was doubtful about my devil’, Sylvia wrote to David Garnett. ‘I wish I were in her coven, perhaps I shall be. Round her neck she wears a broad black velvet band probably for a good reason. She said things that would make the hairs of your head stand bolt upright.’58 Sylvia also had dinner with Virginia Woolf, summoned by fame and mutual friends, at which Mrs Woolf asked how she knew so much about witches. ‘Because I am one,’59 Sylvia replied.

  The sales of the book were very high. Chatto & Windus reprinted twice in one week in February 1926 (the book came out in January) and the U.S. sales ‘leapt the 10,000 fence’60 by June. Lolly Willowes was selected as the first Book-of-the-Month choice of the new American book club and nominated for the Prix Femina (which was won that year by Radclyffe Hall). Sylvia had written to Charles Prentice at the end of January acknowledging receipt of an ‘incredibly magnificent cheque’ for £16 5s 6d, more than five times her weekly salary, but such sums became so familiar that by September she was able to receive a cheque for £233 without comment. In 1926 she earned £437 from Lolly Willowes and in 1927, from Lolly and her next novel Mr Fortune’s Maggot, an amazing £1284, eight and a half times her Tudor Church Music income. It was the only time at which Sylvia could be considered a bestseller, and Lolly Willowes remains the book by which she is imperfectly remembered.

  Following the interest in Lolly Willowes, Sylvia began to contribute articles and book reviews to a number of magazines, The Nation, Time and Tide, Eve, The Forum. There was a widening gulf between Tommy and herself – he was now often in the company of the painter Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey and Lytton’s brother Oliver. Sylvia had made new friends at Chatto & Windus: Charles Prentice, who became her devoted escort, and Prentice’s junior at the firm, Harold Raymond. Raymond and his wife Vera lived on Launceston Place, only a few steps across Kensington Gardens from Sylvia’s flat in Inverness Terrace. Vera, though only a little older than Sylvia, indulged her husband’s authors in a maternal spirit and Sylvia was often present at her select Christmas and birthday parties. Sylvia called Harold ‘Chatto’; they called her ‘Lolly’.

  Charles Prentice was almost exactly Sylvia’s contemporary, although he looked older. He had joined Chatto & Windus in 1914, straight from Oxford, only to leave it almost immediately for the front line in Flanders. In 1926 he succeeded Percy Spalding as senior partner in the firm and his former place as typographer was taken by the young Ian Parsons. Under Prentice’s guidance, Chatto & Windus ‘maintained what was possibly the most distinguished list in London, both in content and appearance’,61 for he was a scholar and acute businessman as well as a publisher ‘of exact judgement’.62

  His looks were undistinguished. He was of medium height, with a round, bespectacled face, a balding head and ‘the quietest voice of any man I’ve met’, according to Bea Howe. He was ‘a man of silences’ and ‘a genius in eiderdown clothing’,63 inspiring confidence and admiration in his authors, many of whom, like T.F. Powys, became his friends. From 1926 until the early Thirties, he was devoted to Sylvia.

  Sylvia and Charles Prentice often went down to Chaldon together (along with William the chow, a seasoned traveller) to visit Theodore, Sylvia staying at Beth Car, Charles in Mrs Way’s spare bedroom at the other end of the village. Theo had finished a long novel in 1925 which he said would be his last and which had, for the time, exhausted his fervour to write. The title, ‘Mr Weston’s Good Wine’, was taken from Jane Austen’s Emma, appropriately enough, for Sylvia opined that ‘Mr Woodhouse talks exactly like Theo.’ Powys was in high spirits, no longer fretted by poverty, and enjoying a certain celebrity, much of it in Chaldon itself, for the village had changed since Tommy retreated into it. Betty Muntz, another of Frank Dobson’s students, had heard of Tommy’s unspoilt country workplace and followed him there. In the mid-Twenties she was taking Mrs Wallis’s cottage regularly, and later began to buy up a row of cottages
which she turned into a studio and summer school, attracting a succession of arty young Londoners and Americans on short, possessive visits. Theodore was not the only literary attraction. His brother Llewellyn, the ‘earth-philosopher’, and sister-in-law Alyse Gregory, the American novelist and woman of letters, had a cottage at White Nose, a mile or so further along the coast from Chydyok, where Gertrude and Katie Powys, both remarkable and talented women, lived in one of two very isolated downland cottages. A tall betrousered young woman from London, Mrs Molly Turpin, was one among many visitors suffering from ‘what we knew as “Powys Mania” […] everything all of them said was beautiful and wise and true.’64 Theodore’s more famous callers included Augustus John, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Lawrence of Arabia, whom Theo mistook for a tax inspector and treated with extreme caution. ‘Theo used to invite them to go for little walks with him,’ Sylvia recalled, ‘so that Violet could wash up the tea-things in peace.’65 The only person missing from the scene was Tommy, who had bought himself a cottage in Swallowcliffe, Wiltshire, and saw little of the Powyses any more.