A week later a much worse blow fell at Frankfort Manor in the shape of a sudden, inexplicable and deathly plague among the cats. It affected cats, dogs and squirrels first, and the local people feared it might spread to the cattle, as had a plague sixty years before. Meep, who was in kit, was removed to Winterton, but the two grey cats died, as did at least two of the rough cats, and the rats, who were unaffected by the disease, began to take over the outbuildings. The plague struck quickly and was as quickly gone. Meep’s grey kittens returned to Frankfort Manor and helped alleviate the gloomy atmosphere which had prevailed during that unhappy week in March. Sylvia, working in the rich soil of the lovely garden, listening to Valentine whistling contentedly nearby and hanging the grey kittens in trellised pink roses to be out of the way, felt it ‘impossible to know greater happiness.’
In April, though, Llewelyn wrote from Chydyok that another mentally deficient servant girl had run away from the vicarage. This, the same issue that had brought them together in 1930, immediately touched Sylvia and Valentine and they wrote to endorse the petition Llewelyn had got up among the villagers of Chaldon, demanding of the landlord (the vicar) that the matter should be investigated by the Council, under whose licence Miss Stevenson operated. Llewelyn had consulted a J.P. friend of his before drawing up the petition, which contained the signatures of forty local people, including Alyse Gregory, Llewelyn, Theodore, Katie, Gertrude and William Powys and James Cobb, the West Chaldon farmer, and he was confident that they were proceeding quite legally. When the document was sent up before the County Council, however, it was found not to bear the necessary riders of confidentiality which would have protected the signatories from what happened next – a libel claim.
At first, Sylvia and Valentine were only mildly perturbed by this development. The solicitor they consulted pointed out that Miss Stevenson would be out for damages, and the best – and cheapest – course would be to apologise. This they were prepared to do until they were faced with a continuing liability for damages, regardless of any apology. At this point they chose to persist with the allegations, which were well-founded and undramatically worded. When the writ of libel was served it cited only four of the signatories of the petition, those from whom money was deemed extractable; Sylvia, Valentine, Llewelyn and James Cobb.
They were persuaded to appoint a K.C. to conduct the defence, who in turn needed a junior. As the date of the trial neared, it became obvious that the expenses were going to be high and, whatever the outcome of the case, they would be unable to afford to go on living at Frankfort Manor. They had taken the house in the hope that they might be given the opportunity to buy it, but the hope had proved groundless. They would be ousted sooner or later by the young owner and, with this new oppression over money, they decided to minimise the wrench by leaving sooner. On a visit to Chaldon in August 1934 to discuss the case with Llewelyn, Valentine noticed that the barn-like house standing alone in a field on the road to West Chaldon was empty. This, they decided, would be easier to live in than Miss Green, which after Frankfort would seem ridiculously small, so they arranged to rent the barn, 24 West Chaldon, and let Miss Green to Jimmy Pitman, a young labourer whose thatched home had been bought from the Weld Estate by Betty Muntz to form part of her studio.
They left Frankfort Manor in November, deeply regretful. Their sixteen months there remained for both women the embodiment of all that was good and happy in their relationship. ‘Goodness is like a flower of the locality,’ Sylvia wrote. ‘We were never again so unimpededly good as we were at Frankfort Manor.’68
Lovely the house is, sheltering and kind,
Warm and faithful against besieging winter,
But we shut the door, and nothing remains behind.69
V
24, West Chaldon stood in the middle of a field under High Chaldon hill, about fifty yards in from the road which runs between East and West Chaldon. It was rented from a farmer who was in turn a tenant of the Weld estate, the major local landowner. The house had no electricity, no mains water, sanitation or damp course and though distempered thoroughly and decorated by Sylvia and Valentine before they moved in, always ran with condensation at the least excuse. There was no bathroom; they had a chemical toilet and bathed in a galvanised tub in front of the fire, using water hand-pumped outside and heated in a copper. It was obviously not a house where either Sylvia or Valentine felt they would stay long, though the two and a half years they spent at West Chaldon were happy ones: ‘we loved and we loved and we loved,’70 as Sylvia wrote of it, remembering ‘24’ many years later.
Valentine had private reasons for approving of the new house: ‘It will be solitary and sombre and stern and perhaps I shall be able to take myself in hand,’71 she wrote, thinking of her continued dependence on drink, which was making her feel trapped and desperate. In 1935, she made a concerted effort to give up drink altogether, marking her diary in her accustomed way with ‘D.D.’ – Devoid of Drink – on each successful day.
The libel case opened at the Dorchester Assizes on 18 January 1935, heard by Mr Justice Findlay. Llewelyn, a chronic consumptive, was very ill at the time but determined to attend the trial in person. He was taken across the downs in his sister Katie’s dog-cart, and from Chaldon to Dorchester in Mrs Thomas Hardy’s car. His entrance into the courtroom on a stretcher, defiantly clutching a daffodil, prompted the headline in the News of the World on 20 January: ‘Dying Man in Dorset Assize Drama’. At the trial, it was claimed that the occasion of publishing the petition, i.e. it being sent to the Dorset County Council, was not ‘privileged’ because the words ‘Private and Confidential’ did not appear on it. Having ascertained this, it was the jury’s job to decide whether or not the defendants had acted maliciously in publishing it. After the summing-up, which took place on 21 January, the jury was absent for an hour and a half. The verdict went against the defendants; Llewelyn Powys and James Cobb were fined £100 each, Valentine and Sylvia £50 each in damages. The costs, which they were presented with two months later, were an altogether more serious matter. Llewelyn’s costs amounted to £573 8s 3d, Sylvia’s and Valentine’s a staggering £733 15s 3d. Valentine wrote in her diary, ‘I’ve had to raise a loan – I can NEVER pay it off now’,72 and indeed she owed her mother money for over twenty-five years because of it. Sylvia set about selling some of her shares – a last-ditch measure, for her generation was extremely reluctant to touch capital, and Sylvia had kept hers intact all through previous financial crises. Small donations towards the costs came in from sympathisers, but even so, Sylvia and Valentine were left very badly off by the case, eating rabbits shot by Valentine with her .22 rifle, and sometimes little else.
Valentine’s concern about the spread of Fascism in Europe and the popularity of the Fascist party in Britain had already directed her towards taking politics more seriously, and in a more practical spirit. She had had reservations about Communism as recently as 1933, when she and Sylvia met a Communist in London who said he would die to protect his portrait of Lenin. His piety and the fact that he was ‘possessed by the […] spirit of self-justification through violence’ had deeply offended her. ‘But Communism is all mixed up with religion now’, she wrote in her diary. ‘It is the new religion – As bad as the others have been.’ 73 By 1934, however, her attention to the Nazi atrocities had changed her mind. The trial in Germany of the Bulgarian Communist Dimitrov, accused of organising the Reichstag fire of 1933, also helped convince Valentine, and Sylvia, of the rightness of the Communist cause. Sylvia particularly admired Dimitrov’s ‘extraordinary courage and enterprise and poise’,74 reading in The Times each day of the proceedings, how Dimitrov defended himself brilliantly by turning the tables on his Nazi accusers. While Sylvia was reading The Times, Valentine was reading the Daily Worker, to which she began to subscribe in December 1934. Valentine also subscribed to Left Review, the magazine set up by Edgell Rickword in 1933, and she began to write a series of articles for it, called ‘Country Dealings’, exposing the bad conditions
of the poor in the country, citing real cases and plenty of facts, gathered first-hand in Chaldon and Winterton. Sylvia, impressed by the intensity of Valentine’s convictions, began to consider her own. She found that they were dislikes rather than beliefs: ‘Priests in their gowns, anti-semitism, the white man who is the black man’s burden, warmongers – I had long been sure of them but, beyond a refusal to give money to people who came collecting for missionary societies, my convictions remained unacted desires. Perhaps this was not enough.’75 A mordant poem of Sylvia’s, ‘In this Midwinter’, which appeared in the January 1935 issue of Left Review, shows how quickly and completely Sylvia followed Valentine’s lead:
In this midnight, shepherds, not a saviour possibly.
No godling, God not even in turncoat mufti of doubt.
Man having rationalised destruction inalienably
Needs God no further. See, not a King is out.
War, famine, pestilence, not a saviour now, shepherds.
Light not lantern on such an idle errand.
In the spring of 1935, after the usual formalities of application, they were both admitted as members of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
There were no half-measures about this step. They threw themselves into Party business with all the energy of the newly-converted disposal. In February they attended a United Front demonstration in Hyde Park and met Tom Wintringham, the socialist M.P. and writer, with whom they had many dealings over the subsequent months and years. He was one of a number of new friends Sylvia and Valentine made through political activism, many of whom they had nothing in common with but Party loyalty. After a May Day rally in London, Sylvia wrote to Julius Lipton, a young poet: ‘I appreciate how lucky we are, coming newly into the Party, and from such a dubious quarter, middle-class homes and genteel upholstery, to have met you so early and to have had your greeting and welcome’76 – the tone of which is almost apologetic. Later she was to write that in the early thirties, the Communist Party of Great Britain ‘was accepting new adherents from what it thought of as the Bourgeoisie and called the Intellectuals’.77 If at first Sylvia felt conspicuous in the Communist Party, she did not let it trouble her and indeed tried to turn her apparent inappropriateness to advantage, more than pleased to exploit gentility to further the cause. In Summer Will Show, the book Sylvia was working at seriously all through 1935, the heroine, Sophia Willoughby, has a similar experience of finding her class and background difficult for the revolutionaries of 1848 to overlook. The Communist Ingelbrecht, approving a comment, remarks: ‘I wish more republicans thought like this aristocrat. But your brains are in the wrong place. They should be under a red cap instead of a fashionable bonnet. Why were you not born one of your own poachers, Mrs Willoughby?’78
Asked, in an interview forty years later, about her politics, Sylvia said, ‘I became a Communist because I was agin the Government but that of course is not a suitable frame of mind for a Communist for very long. […] I was a Communist, but I always find anarchists very easy to get on with. I think that’s because if the English turn to the left at all, they are natural anarchists.’79 A great part of her attraction to Communism was its anti-authoritarian stance. In extremist politics she found a satisfactory way of expressing her personal revulsion from all the corruptions, large and petty, done in the name of democracy and tolerated for the sake of peace and quiet. In this sense, her politics were idealistic. The letter to Julius Lipton goes on to make a criticism which only a recent convert, mindful of the rubric, could make. She is writing of a concert at the Aeolian Hall on the evening of the May Day rally:
Music is important enough, but not concerts adjusted to the usual convention; and though this one was well enough, and one quartet by Starokadomsky really admirable, it was a little tainted with snobbishness and pretence, a Party snobbishness of people going there and applauding the music, not because they like music in general or this music in particular but because they had been told it was Soviet music and therefore to be applauded of course. But they gave themselves away, as shams must; for the pieces that had the greatest applause were those which had the least to distinguish them from any other capitalist luxury music.
Music, about which she was so sure-footed, showed her that, (though her observation is not free of a snobbishness of her own) but as time went on such discriminations became rarer as Sylvia’s, prejudices in favour of all things Soviet developed and hardened. Having espoused the cause, she stood by it and brought to bear on adherence to matters of Party faith all her strength of character.
Another element in Sylvia’s wholehearted enthusiasm for Communism was the way in which it underlined the sense of ostracism she and Valentine had been made to feel because they were lesbians. Rather than being slightly outcast, they could move themselves beyond the conventional altogether. Thus Communism conferred a blessing on their marriage and, because it was so closely tied up with their love for each other, became sacrosanct.
The first of Valentine’s articles on ‘Country Dealings’ appeared in Left Review in March 1935, and criticised the scarcity of good, state-run hospitals ‘OPEN TO ALL – ALWAYS’, illustrating her argument by relating the events leading up to Granny Moxon’s death. It ends rather clumsily with Valentine saying ‘Communism would be a good thing for us, comrades’ (not a necessary reminder to Left Review subscribers), but the two following articles, published in May and September, showed her more at home with her material and arguments. Her subjects – the actual conditions hidden under a picturesque thatch, the poor pay and precarious status of the farm labourer, the cheap-skating of landowners – were all very close to her heart. Behind every political point was a personal observation. Her third article contains a description of the ‘Intellectuals’ of her home village – Chaldon – amongst whom, interestingly, she no longer numbered herself or Sylvia:
Down here […] we do not suffer from the County much. Our gentry are the Intellectuals. They are nicer, on the whole. They shut the gates and do no damage to the crops (such crops as there are) and sometimes they will take up a case of injustice and support the exploited and reason with the farmer, occasionally with good results. But they are not really profitable, except that they tip well. They have an idea that the land-worker is ideally situated, that he has unmatched opportunities for studying Nature, that he has, because of this constant contact with the mother, sublimated his needs and desires, and that they themselves can achieve contentment and all-wisdom by copying the labourer’s way of life.
So they take the best houses and spend their days in the open air. Some of the more devout do their own housework and cooking. Further than that, wisely, they do not go. The only solid consolation is that none of them do their household washing, and this brings in a few shillings to the publican’s wife. But beyond that there is nothing much to be said for them, from the worker’s point of view.80
In the spring, Valentine bought a duplicating machine of the drum-and-stencil variety and used it to produce news bulletins, letters and agitprop leaflets for local Party sympathisers. She was also putting her articles and thoughts together for a book about conditions in the country, her first separate publication. Sylvia had no involvement in this, preferring to exercise her ingenuity in composing satirical sketches and biting book reviews for Left Review and tuning her intellect to the needs of the Party. In a letter to Julius Lipton of 13 April 1935, she argued how important form was to ‘our party’s poems’, being easier to learn and easier ‘for the worker to carry round in his memory’. Even in the context of the idealism of the times, this is slightly absurd, and ironically close to the ‘Intellectual’ attitude which Valentine had satirised in her article. But partisanship was now the principle by which Sylvia lived.
Rallies and marches, a sortie into South Wales to demonstrate at a pit-head, political meetings, committees; these activities dominated both women’s lives in 1935. On 6 May, they organised a bonfire on top of the Five Marys in opposition to the King’s Jubilee junketings in the village, a
nd were pleased that the dancing at their party lasted much longer and was more exuberant. And when Sylvia decided that she would like to visit Tushielaw again, twenty years after her last holiday there, they drove to it via Burnley and enjoyed – for the first time – a ‘magnificent view of industrial towns’.81
Their visitors that summer were mostly Party-related friends: Tom Wintringham and his wife Kitty, a couple called Bob and Isa from Bournemouth, two young communists, Kit and Pat Dooley, and Edgell Rickword’s wife Johnnie. Janet Machen, then eighteen years old, was able to come and visit without her parents, and was treated by both Sylvia and Valentine with great fondness, more like a younger sister than a cousin. Elizabeth Wade White, the rich young American Sylvia had befriended in New York in 1929, came to stay too. Sylvia was very pleased at what she thought was a degree of political zealotry emerging in the impressionable Elizabeth during her visit, not perceiving the real object of the young woman’s enthusiasm: Valentine. To Sylvia she was just someone – with money – who might prove helpful to the Party.
Sylvia and Valentine had bought a small second-hand caravan in which to sleep in the garden; ‘and if it weren’t for the fact that second-hand air-mattresses leak, and have to be reblown up at intervals of every two hours or so, I could describe it as very restful and refreshing,’82 Sylvia wrote to Julius Lipton. It was a handy place to be out of guests’ way, for some guests, like Jean Untermeyer, could be wearing, and Sylvia and Valentine still longed more than anything else for each other’s company. Little worker to carry round in his memory’. Even in the context of the Miss Green’s together, Jean had been so impressed by Sylvia’s and Valentine’s attentions: ‘I was always being urged to rest, and one would come to my bedside with the indispensable hot-water bottle against the damp, the other with a steaming cup of Sedebrol to make sure that sleep should come and relax me. Happy memories!’83
Sylvia Townsend Warner Page 17
