Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  a) a very lovely mourning clasp, to wear as a bracelet – sewn on wide black velvet. Date: George II (£6.16.6 & cheap)

  b) a picture of Queen Vicky’s wedding (sic) (2s)

  c) a picture of St Matthew, looking very evil (7.6d)

  d) a little French contraption, for cutting flowers and such-like – rough, but quite pleasing (9d)

  e) a bead purse – to be put away, for when she needs a present! (£1.10.0)33

  The day’s shopping cost her about two weeks’ allowance.

  A week later Sylvia herself indulged an extravagance so enormous that she surprised and rather unsettled herself. Valentine had been longing to buy a car, and after test-driving a disappointing Alvis early in July (asking price ten pounds), they had asked the Dorchester car-salesman to keep his eye open. His eye picked out a second-hand two-seater sports Triumph in red and cream, with red seats and a dickey at the back, which so excited Valentine and was such a complement to her driving skills that Sylvia could not refuse it: ‘looking out cautiously 1 saw her gazing into the engine with a look which, combined with the pleased pink she had hoisted driving back, assured me it was a car to get. So I bought it then and there, trembling faintly: £110’ – twenty pounds more than the price of the cottage. But if it is more blessed to give than to receive, it is also easier, and Valentine had plenty of time before the delivery day in which her happiness could be nibbled at by melancholy second thoughts. When the car arrived, however, there was unalloyed excitement and a succession of small pleasure jaunts, one of them to Droop, north-west of Dorchester, a place Theo had long wanted to see on account of its name. And when the inevitable letter came from the bank telling Sylvia she was £38 overdrawn, she announced there was nothing for it but work and immediately began some magazine potboilers.

  A decade later Sylvia made this distinction between Valentine’s sensitivity and her own: ‘[Valentine] has more heart. My heart is passionate, but it has a rind on it, a pomegranate heart. Hers has a fine skin, a fig heart.’34 In 1931, she did not seem to appreciate quite how fine a skin it was, and by trying to help Valentine’s career as a poet, probably hindered it. When Charles Prentice came to stay in Chaldon in July, Sylvia made use of the visit to solicit Charles’s opinion of Valentine’s poems. Sylvia had taken the matter entirely into her own hands, selecting from a large bundle those she thought would most interest Charles. Had Valentine been left to approach him herself, or to send the poems in to the Chatto & Windus office, they would both have been spared the uncomfortable situation Sylvia’s solicitude landed them in. Valentine, sitting opposite Charles in the living room at Miss Green’s, watched him reading and re-reading with a puzzled expression, pulling at his side-hair nervously, and her heart fell. The answer he gave Sylvia in the end was such a classically non-commital publisher’s answer that it is a wonder she accepted it: ‘We [Sylvia and Charles] talked about publishing. I think he would have made a proposal for Ch & W, were things not in such a bad way now. As it was, he counselled that she should write more, and more let-out-ly.’ Sylvia could not have made matters better by apologising to Charles for the inconvenience and dullness. He protested his excitement, but as Sylvia noted in her diary: ‘It was a well-controlled excitement, certainly.’

  Things were noticeably different the next day when Charles sat down to read Sylvia’s latest poems. He was engaged by them, and at ease. Sylvia was sitting in the same room, writing, and Valentine, who had noticed him admiring her, wondered what Sylvia would do if Charles proposed marriage, they seemed so easy sitting in perfect silence together. And would the poems that Charles was then reading, love poems coincident with the poems he had read the previous day, leave him with any doubt in his mind as to the situation? Poems such as Sylvia’s ‘Since the first toss of gale’:

  … For long meeting of our lips

  Shall be breaking of ships,

  For breath drawn quicker men drowned

  And trees downed.

  Throe shall fell roof-tree, pulse’s knock

  Undermine rock,

  A cry hurl seas against the land,

  A raiding hand,

  Scattering lightning along thighs

  Lightning from skies

  Wrench, and fierce sudden snows clamp deep

  On earth our sleep.

  Yet who would guess our coming together

  Should breed wild weather

  Who saw us now? – with looks as sure

  As the demure

  Flame of our candle, no more plied

  By tempest outside

  Than those deep ocean weeds unrecking

  What winds, what wrecking,

  What wrath of wild our dangerous peace

  Waits to release.35

  Valentine, though she retained a jealousy of Percy Buck and this niggling fear that Charles Prentice might at any moment drop on one knee in front of Sylvia, did not doubt Sylvia’s love so much as her constancy, simply because that was what she doubted in herself. Valentine had little idea of what a deeply romantic figure she was to Sylvia; reading The Arabian Nights aloud by candlelight, wearing her inscrutable ‘Chinese’ face, tossing Sylvia into bed at a moment’s notice, exhaling perfumes and cool elegance. Asked once why she was never unfaithful to Valentine, Sylvia said, ‘Because she was the best lover I ever had.’36 For her own part, Valentine’s fears were inseparable from a love which occupied her whole heart:

  Sylvia is writing a poem, I think – judging by the sharply-indrawn breath, and her endless cigarettes. She is curled up on the chair by her writing table, elbows on the table and one leg curled under her small buttocks. Her hair looks very black against her pretty pink coat. How narrow her hands are – How deeply I love her. My eyes constantly stray from this page, across to her. How much, and how completely I love her.37

  III

  Visits and visitors seemed to take up more and more of Sylvia’s and Valentine’s time. ‘If they are unpleasant, they need not be asked again,’ Valentine decided, jealous of her privacy with Sylvia and never pleased to be billeted out at Mrs Way’s, but few of their guests fitted the category. The Machens – Arthur, Purefoy and the twelve-year-old Janet – came in July, drank a great deal and played cricket at Beth Car, where Theo fielded holding a kitten. After them came Mrs Keates, who still ‘did’ for Sylvia at Inverness Terrace, with her two young daughters. It was Mrs Keates who showed them how it was possible to bathe in the copper – if you drew your knees up to your chin and clasped your shins, in the manner, Sylvia noted, of ancient British burials. Nora would not come to Chaldon, so Sylvia was duty-bound to spend at least a fortnight that summer at Little Zeal, while Valentine took Ruth to Paris for a holiday. Both lovers pined terribly during this time.

  In October they took a houseboat at Thurne in Norfolk and while they were there they heard that Ruth was intending to draw her horns in by letting the London flat and moving to The Hill House permanently. Valentine felt that it would help her mother if someone was with her for the first few months at The Hill, so reluctantly she and Sylvia locked up Miss Green’s cottage and moved into the flat above the Acklands’ garage at Winterton, sharing meals and outings with Ruth, but retaining a degree of privacy. Ruth’s implication that she was giving rather than receiving favours was irksome, as was her habit of coming in on their private anniversaries and making much of them – a dinner-party and presents for Valentine’s Day and nosegays on their beds for 12 January. It was during this winter that Sylvia’s deep dislike of Ruth took root, for what she had not thought about before, or attributed to kindliness and tolerance, was shown up by living at close quarters to be desperate attempts by Ruth at complicity, for she would do anything to hold on to Valentine’s love and respect.

  Valentine’s worries about money reached a peak at Winterton that autumn, and she became suicidally despairing at the thought that even were she to ‘climb down’ – as her mother put it – over poetry, there was no job she could do to earn money on a satisfactory scale: another oversight of her educ
ation, along with accounting. Her overdraft terrified Valentine so much that Sylvia gave her a cheque to ‘tide her over’, although when Nora, in a similar gesture of spontaneous generosity, had offered her £50 in the summer, Sylvia had refused it, ‘feeling proud and scrupulous’. Towards the end of their stay in Norfolk, Sylvia finished a lengthened and revised version of ‘The House of the Salutation’, the story she had started in 1930 as a sequel to Mr Fortune’s Maggot. The new story formed the basis of a collection which was published late in 1932 under the title The Salutation. The book included ‘Elinor Barley’, ‘The Maze’ and the three stories from A Moral Ending, all previously published in limited editions, and nine other stories, some of which had appeared in periodicals. ‘Early One Morning’ was included too; nine pages was all she salvaged from the novel which had taken so much of her time.

  The title story, ‘The Salutation’, set in Chile in the 1920s, is a haunting, melancholy piece in which Sylvia’s powers of evoking place, mood and the complex forces which govern ordinary human behaviour found their perfect expression. ‘I wrote it out of my heart as an amende to my poor Timothy [Mr Fortune]. Not that I could make him happier, but to show that I did not forget him.’38 The sorrowing traveller in the story is never named as Mr Fortune, and the references back to the earlier novel are few: Sylvia did not want to flaunt her pursuit of this character into another book. She could not make him happier, a ruined man, dragging his sorrow across the South American pampas, and her apparent reticence to interfere with the man or the story is what gives ‘The Salutation’ its truth to life. The protagonist has, at one point, been watching a large clumsy rhea and identifying himself with the bird when it is shot, before his eyes:

  With a confused impulse of compassion he rushed towards it, but even as he reached it it lay dying. The shot had entered its neck; a ruffle of loosed plumage showed where the spine was broken. Now that it lay on the ground its bulk seemed enormous, a death as portentous as a man’s. And he turned to look for the murderer.

  There was no need to look for the motive. Opposite slays opposite, as fire and water writhe in their combat, as lion and lamb wage their implacable enmity. Slender, fiercely erect, racked with youth and pride, the boy with the gun stood in a trance of hatred, defying a world of rheas, a world of harmlessness, dowdiness, ungainliness. There could be no mistaking his intent. Apollo could not have bent his bow with a more divine single-mindedness to destroy; and seeing him, the impulse of blame was quenched in the man’s heart. One might as well have blamed a flash of lightning.39

  Sylvia felt that ‘The Salutation’ was ‘the purest, the least time-serving story I ever wrote, and […] one of my best’,40 but being in a collection of stories it did not attract the sales or amount of attention accorded to her other books. The reviews it did get were appreciative, and one or two were perceptive as well. R.H. Mottram in The Bookman wrote of the element of ‘possession’ in the story, ‘nearly always a benign spiritual seizure which […] drives these perfectly credible, if never commonplace, men, men and beasts just over the border of their ordinary existence into a dimension or plane of being which is not ordinary’. This quality of credible extra-ordinariness is present in all Sylvia’s best work. As for the emotional and imaginative engagement which can be called ‘possession’, sometimes it is a moot point who ‘possessed’ whom more: Sylvia the book or the book Sylvia.

  Sylvia and Valentine left Winterton in March 1932, and in the following May took a short holiday in Paris. They were delighted to be there together for the first time and, in that worldly city, to find their relationship so readily accepted. Sylvia noticed the looks Valentine attracted and the following glances of congratulation to herself. Outside a grocer’s shop in the Rue Mouffetard, Sylvia was suddenly aware that she wanted to write a novel about the 1848 revolutions. She had had the two main characters in her head for some time and now they ‘started up and rushed into it [the book]’.41 Braced by Paris and Valentine, Sylvia was again engaged on a novel, though not, as it turned out, along any former lines.

  On their last day in Paris, Sylvia consulted a fortune-telling machine on an arcade, asking if her lover would be faithful. ‘Oui, malgré les folies’ was the remarkably accurate answer. ‘Les folies’ were part of Valentine’s life. Whether she had new lovers during the first few years of their marriage or was simply maintaining the prior commitments of old ones is not clear, but certainly Sylvia was neither surprised nor upset by Valentine’s behaviour and was proud of the attraction Valentine held for many women. ‘She was so skilled in love that I never expected her to forego love-adventures. Each while it lasted (they were brief) was vehement and sincere. They left me unharmed and her unembarrassed.’42 At Miss Green’s, Sylvia used to delight in the stories of Valentine’s past conquests and even made a little chart, filled in with coloured inks, to show the number, gender and duration of Valentine’s affairs since 1924, which in 1932 numbered twenty-seven, at least five of which were with men.

  Valentine was feeling less gloomy about her writing and had had several poems published in magazines – including one, the American Saturday Review, which rejected a poem by Sylvia at about the same time. But there was no prospect of Valentine having a book published yet, though Charles Prentice assumed that Sylvia’s poems would follow their usual course into print. Realising the hurt this would cause Valentine, Sylvia struck upon an ingenious plan while they were staying in the small village of Tinhead in Wiltshire in October 1932; they would send out their poems together for publication in a single volume, anonymous but for the initials ‘T.W & V.A’ on the title page, ‘because of her fame and known name’, Valentine wrote in her diary. Sylvia’s motives were nicely mixed; part blackmail of her publisher, part a pure desire to make poems she believed good available to readers, part the personal motive of making readers available to Valentine. But even in the first excitement of making lists, Valentine had her doubts, or qualms of conscience. Sylvia was very pleased with her plan, and was already busy putting it into practice. ‘She has concocted a most suavely blackmailing letter to “Dear Charles”,’ wrote Valentine. ‘Poor devil. But his bald head is smooth enough to slide out of her small, slim fingers – I think.’43 Charles replied asking to see the collection, and a month later he provisionally accepted it, causing Valentine elation, and more doubts: ‘I am two thirds in favour and one third not. I have still a lingering desire to be only myself – but I suppose it is foolish to wish so – At least: to wish to appear so publicly.’44

  Sylvia’s idea to publish the poems unattributed, as well as being suitable to the ‘purity’ of Valentine’s poems, was also an acknowledgement – instinctive or deliberate – of their discrete nature. Valentine’s poems express a sensibility, not a personality and were in that respect not only unlike Sylvia’s own poems but impervious to the charlatanism Sylvia had thought to teach. Poetry was not a career to Valentine, but a frame of mind. Her ambition was, in Bea Howe’s words, ‘to capture and transfix the true character of the elusive, fleeting moment’.45 Her poems were often written quickly and did not necessarily benefit from revision. Her few long poems are not particularly satisfying, for length was in Valentine’s case at odds with her natural manner: sensual and essentially ‘slight’. They are the sort of poems which may well lose by being read en masse, for each poem is a ‘made thing’. Possibly the best way to have published Valentine’s poems would not have been in a collection at all, but separately, like broadsheets, to be tasted one at a time. A poem such as ‘Summer Storm’, for instance, displaying what is both good and bad about Valentine’s poetry, might seem, in a book sixty pages long, merely tiresome:

  ‘I will not!’ I say, ‘I will not!’ – Saying

  I will not, while all through the air around me

  Resounds, ‘I will – I will!’ Swallows playing,

  Birdsong, leaved trees, all confound me –

  Confuting truth with truth, hope against hope, despair

  Bundled between them, by one side or th
e other

  Used as a bludgeon – ‘I will not care –’

  (‘I care – I care – I care –’)46

  ‘Birdsong, leaved trees’, now almost taboo words among poets, were already suspect in the Thirties and Valentine’s liberal use of them automatically disqualified her from being considered serious or modern. The fact that birdsong and leaved trees is what she saw was beside the point, for her more forward contemporaries eschewed such subject matter as leading on inevitably to the sentimental. Valentine was aware of this problem, but believed of her poems that ‘inside the mood is the true mood of this time [1933] – Flinching, apprehensive, intent, fearful, and yet intent and intending – But, here is the fear – my poems may not manage to reflect that; I can only say that, for myself, I am aware of it – It is there, in me – But if it doesn’t come out, I’m no good.’47

  Sylvia and Valentine seemed very settled at Miss Green’s cottage, as Alyse Gregory, their friend and neighbour from across the downs, noted in her journal: ‘Sylvia and Valentine had built their life much as married people build theirs, only it is more sensitively poised – their little love birds, their canary, their vases of spring flowers, V’s daggers and pistols, the sentiment they attach to the objects about them.’48 But the winter of 1932 proved to be the last they spent at Miss Green’s. On Valentine’s twenty-seventh birthday, 20 May 1933, they were out on a drive from Winterton when Sylvia’s whim led them up an unmarked turning near Sloley, along which Valentine caught sight of a beautiful small manor house. Backing up to take another look, they saw that it was empty and to let. They talked it over, and decided to try to take the house for a year; it was large, lovely, in Valentine’s beloved Norfolk and at £50 annual rent, reasonably affordable. Miss Green’s cottage had never been intended to house two people permanently and it was proving too small. Though they would regret leaving it for sentimental reasons, leaving Chaldon village would not be too great a wrench, for it had changed for them in the last year; Granny Moxon had died of cancer, Shepherd Dove, her devoted admirer, had also died, and a distance had grown between Sylvia and Valentine and Beth Car, due not only to the death of the Powyses’ elder son Dickie in 1932 but to Theodore’s and Violet’s guardedness surrounding their adoption of a baby girl early in 1933. Sylvia thought that ‘they will both be rather glad than sorry when our eyes remove their gaze to Frankfort Manor.’49