Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  Sylvia loved Spaniards and especially admired Spanish women. When they were in Madrid and the civilian centre of the town was under bombardment by Franco’s forces, Sylvia noted that ‘the women, on whom these persuasions of shell and bomb are lavished, wear, one and all, whether they are old or young, stupid or intelligent, whether they look well or tired – and most of them look deadly tired – the same expression of indomitable concentrated rage. If you talk to them they are as friendly, as kind, as you please. But the moment they leave off talking this look of whitehot bad temper comes back. It was the most impressive thing I saw in Spain.’111 There was no sentimentality in her feeling for these people, but a great deal of emotion. Bearing this in mind, and Sylvia’s physical responsiveness to anyone in distress, there seems little doubt of the identity of the English writer whom a Spanish journalist and writer, Corpus Barga, observed with admiration at Minglanilla as the delegates were preparing to move on after their lunch:

  A Spanish woman all in black from head-scarf to shoes […] was in the embrace of an English woman writer […] Her husband executed, her brothers dead in battle. Behind the woman in mourning a child hid in the folds of her skirt. The English writer, knowing no Spanish, understood and comforted her, drawing her ever more closely into her embrace. In the end the two women walked back and forth in each other’s arms, weeping without tears […] The child followed behind, not letting go his mother’s skirts, while neighbours looked on passing comments:

  “She’s not really from here, she’s a refugee,” they said of the woman clad in mourning, and about the English writer: “No doubt she has found someone from her own country who is comforting her.”

  It was true what the women of Minglanilla said, and the governments of Europe lie. The illiterate Spanish woman had found someone from her village in the English writer, who had to get into the car and, extending the top half of her body through the window kept hugging her, reluctant to separate herself from her paisana.112

  The Hotel Victoria, where the delegates were staying in Madrid, had already been hit by shells and there was a real danger of it being hit again, though the fighting seemed oddly remote as the guests sat down to another sumptuous banquet on their first evening. Valentine took comfort in the fact that the waiters were calm and that, after a while, one scarcely noticed the sound of distant gun fire. The dinner over, the guests began to sing and converse; some soldiers came in and sang too, but later, ‘just as everything was going on well and many of us had got down to talking about literature, which we liked doing, the waiters, with suddenly serious faces, began closing the shutters and putting out some of the lights. Then people began walking out of the room, into the passage, down the stairs. And suddenly the only noise in the world was the noise of gun-fire.’113

  There was always an air raid at five o’clock, so everyone set their alarms for that time and went down into the hotel foyer for safety. In a letter to Alyse Gregory several years later Valentine recalled ‘the strange amorousness’ which overcame the sleepy guests that first night in Madrid:

  Sitting on the marble floor of the hall, in close groups of ten and twenty, almost everyone turned to love-making. I went upstairs to fetch my cigarettes […] and as I left my room, in the flashing darkness of three stories up, I was seized by someone who had come up after me. I found that it was the red-haired Dutch delegate, no word of whose language I knew and who could only speak French with the utmost difficulty, and not at all when he was excited. We had a very sharp struggle (for I was extremely startled, having my mind set on shells and war!) and ran downstairs with the utmost speed – into that odd confusion of amorous bodies … a kind of lunatic Babel. I remember detaching Sylvia from a West Indian negro who was weeping on her breast but who seemed perfectly contented to be moved gently onto a next-door French woman who herself had been making very sophisticated love to a tall, large Swedish woman next to her. And then, to make all things totally mad, two English journalists burst in through the front door shouting, “The Hospital is on fire – who wants to come and see –”

  That was my first night there and I loathed it. Loathed it. But I know much more than I would have ever known if I hadn’t seen it and been in it.114

  Valentine loathed it, and was drinking fairly heavily to hide her fears from others, but Sylvia seemed almost to relish the situation and was partisan enough to enjoy watching an aerial battle over the city on the second night: ‘our fighters went up straight into the formation of fifteen Caproni bombers and scattered them. I have never seen such flying, such speed and precision.’115 Sylvia’s enthusiasm was such that she could at times be almost frivolous: on an official tour of the front line at the Guadarramas, conducted at siesta time for the safety of the delegates, Sylvia made a flippant remark about the propaganda value of her attracting an enemy pot-shot. With a certain degree of self-control, Valentine pointed out that it would be merely wasteful, as the papers would probably overlook the incident. Valentine herself was in no mood to make jokes – ‘in Madrid, while I was new to it, the sight of one house broken and destroyed made my heart beat so that I could not breathe’ – and on her return to England she wrote to Alyse Gregory, ‘War is INFINITELY worse than we imagine it will be.’116

  The delegates were driven to the Congress Hall in Madrid through shelled and bombed streets, the Catalan driver stopping before various heaps of stones and announcing how many had been killed there. The hall was a new brick building on the outskirts of the city with guards outside to salute the delegates and a military band inside to greet them with Riego’s Hymn. The first session was interrupted by the announcement that the town of Brunete had fallen to the Government. There was applause, singing, tears, the clenching of fists and later the militia arrived, waving flags and a grim trophy, the tunic of a Moorish captain. Everyone knew that the victory would spark off reprisals, and that night at the hotel was again noisy and disturbed.

  In Madrid, Sylvia and Valentine had the opportunity of making the acquaintance of several of the distinguished delegates: Ilya Ehrenburg, Pablo Neruda and Ludwig Renn, the German Communist novelist who had escaped from a concentration camp and joined the International Brigade. Renn was staying with the other delegates at the Hotel Victoria and going off to the front each morning. To Sylvia the ‘affinity of mind’ many of the delegates shared was an affirmation of the benefits of internationalism. Despite the language barriers, the delegates did not ‘stiffen into cliques’, with the exception of the neat and self-contained Soviet group who, in Sylvia’s opinion, ‘were ludicrously like the traditional British Raj’.117

  Sylvia’s attitude was, in general, enthusiastic and uncritical. There was no word from her on the great controversy over André Gide’s book, Retour de l’URSS, which had so precipitately lost him his position as a contemporary Party saint, nor did she seem aware of the violent factions between Trotskyists and Stalinists within the ranks of the Republican army, nor of the arrival of a British and French Trades Union deputation the day after their own arrival in Valencia to investigate the murder by Stalinists of the labour leader, Andres Nin. One of Sylvia’s most persistent theories about Spanish republicans, developed among the ruined churches of Barcelona the previous year, was that they did no gratuitous acts of violence or damage. When Stephen Spender tried to disabuse her of this notion by re-telling the voluntary confessions of a Catalan taxi driver, Sylvia and Valentine, in Spender’s words, ‘turned from me in a pained way. Then the lady novelist remarked to the poetess: “Isn’t it strange that now, for the first time after all these long, long days, I feel just a little bit tired?” ’118

  This incident took place at Port Bou on the return journey from the Congress. The delegates reached Paris on 14 July, in time to join a Bastille Day march and conclude their business. Sylvia and Valentine got home to Chaldon on 16 July, full of plans for articles and propaganda, and Sylvia consumed by a ‘raging passion for gossip’, wanting to know everyone’s responses to the Congress.

  It was the last ti
me they were to come home to Chaldon. Very soon after their return they saw advertised in the local paper a house to rent on the outskirts of Maiden Newton, a village eight miles to the north-west of Dorchester. Tired of fighting the damp and discomfort of 24 West Chaldon, and pleased with what they saw at the viewing, Sylvia and Valentine took up the tenancy and on 23 August 1937 moved into Mrs West’s house by the River Frome.

  4

  1937–1947

  I

  This place is most beautiful. We love it far more than we thought we should. The river is an incessant pleasure, and is always handing us small nosegays of beauty or entertainment. The latest nosegay is a posy of three fat young water-rats who have just learned to swim. They cross the river swimming with every limb, their tails lashing about, their eyes beady with purpose; and swarm up the bank and sit in a clutch, pressed close together, chewing the same iris stalk. Now the nightingales have just arrived. They came on a night of sharp frost, it was curious to hear their passionate excited voices singing of summer on that rigid silence of frost.1

  Sylvia wrote this to Steven Clark nine months after moving to the new house. It stood on the Maiden Newton side of the river, but was considered part of Frome Vauchurch, the hamlet across the bridge. One of the chief attractions of the house for Sylvia and Valentine was that it had no immediate neighbours, but the village was not far, only a hundred yards up the lane, and contained a number of shops, a number of pubs and a railway station. ‘Ugly, but practical’ was Sylvia’s verdict, and though she and Valentine missed the noble contours of Chaldon, and lamented their ascent into the bourgeoisie, Maiden Newton’s ugly comforts were sufficient to console them.

  From across the river, the house looked very much like a cumbersome beached boat, being built right at the water’s edge with a balustraded deck protruding over the river and running the whole length of the house. It was a plain-headed building which had survived its low Victorian birth more by luck than design. Its whitewashed stone had been covered over in many places by corrugated metal sheets, supposedly a protection against damp, which gave the house a distinctly jerry-built look, but as Sylvia and Valentine never removed them one must assume they didn’t mind. Inside, the rooms were not many, but ample: on the ground floor was a long dark passage-way leading to the kitchen at the further end of the house. Off the passage-way to the left were a dining room and Sylvia’s sitting-room, both overlooking the river. Upstairs were three bedrooms, a boxroom, bathroom and Valentine’s sitting-room, immediately above Sylvia’s and with views in two directions. There was a little room for fishing-tackle, which Valentine also used as a work-room, and a larder which answered to all Sylvia’s desires. For the first time they were living together in a house with electricity and hot water.

  Outside, and mainly to the front of the house, was a garden about a third of an acre in size. One of the first things Valentine did was to plant willow-slips all along the river border, for though there were several mature trees they wanted a more effective screen for the house. No enormous feats of gardening were undertaken that year, though. They were busy with other matters and gave the third of an acre only a tenant’s care, for they did not expect to stay very long at Frome Vauchurch.

  Tom, the surviving Frankfort grey, was the only pet to make the move. Sylvia and Valentine had given away their spaniel Towser, acquired at ‘24’, to Jimmy Pitman. Victoria the goat had either perished or, more likely, been given away too, and a kitten with distemper called Endymion, whom they had nursed, had died. The river, though, held many pleasant surprises; there were otters, swans, moorhens, a heron occasionally on the opposite bank and an embarrassment of trout. Valentine began fishing for them as soon as the move was over, and acquired a little cosh ‘called demurely “a priest” ’2 with which to kill a landed fish quickly. In her diary she began to tot up her total catch as systematically as she had formerly done with Chaldon rabbits.

  The return from Spain had fired both women with added energy for campaigning and their political activities took on a less parochial nature, partly due to the fact that Maiden Newton was less permeable to Communism than East Chaldon had been. At the end of September, Sylvia was in London to meet with a group of left-minded writers who formed the executive of the Association of Writers for Intellectual Liberty. Called to set up the committee, of which Sylvia became Secretary, were Cecil Day Lewis, Montagu Slater, Rose Macaulay, Mulk Raj Anand, Amabel Williams-Ellis and Goronwy Rees and, as before, Sylvia was unsparing of those whose commitment seemed questionable – in this case, Rose Macaulay. Macaulay had protested that the committee was being too political and should concentrate more on what was being done for culture by the two sides in Spain than on their ideological differences. To this Sylvia retorted that the only cultural development reported of the Spanish Fascists was their recent burning of the works of Dickens. Rose Macaulay, not to be done down, lamented the ignorance shown by one country of another’s culture. Sylvia agreed, adding how few people in England would have the first idea which Spanish books to burn or not.

  About a week later, Valentine went as a voluntary worker to Tythrop House, near Thame, which was about to be opened by the Basque Children’s Committee as a home for refugee children from Bilbao. It was a frustrating job, beset with administrative teething troubles, and Sylvia, unable to bear the prolonged absence of Valentine, and concerned that she was being overworked and ill-fed, went up to Thame for a couple of days to help with the cooking and the intimidation of the woman in charge. By the end of October, Sylvia was in London again, seeing her committee, attending a P.E.N. meeting, calling in at Party headquarters and the Left Review office, where she reduced Edgell Rickword to silence and his wife Johnnie to helpless laughter by pointing out that Left Review should really not expect its contributors to write for no pay – was that not, after all, a form of black-legging? Sylvia also saw Oliver Warner and his new wife, Elizabeth, at a dinner at the National Liberal Club where Arthur Machen was giving a speech, ‘an account of how he once went down a rope-ladder’.3 Purefoy did not at first seem very pleased to see Sylvia but warmed up on a little gin. It was as busy and sociable as Sylvia’s former life in London had been, except that being anywhere without Valentine was intolerable – almost a physical pain.

  One reason for the exaggerated activity of that month was that Valentine was romantically in love with a young woman and Sylvia wanted to leave them alone together, first at Frome Vauchurch, then at Thame, where Valentine had taken the ‘young white goose’. This was a magnanimity which Sylvia felt easily able to afford. She was very fond of the girl in question; had, indeed, encouraged Valentine to act on her first impulse of desire, for Sylvia, then aged almost forty-four, was above all unwilling to have Valentine’s sexual desire for herself tainted with longings and regrets for others. Valentine was as easily smitten with lust as ever, and her handsome masculine appearance led inevitably to excitements among both the worldly and the simply curious of their female acquaintances. Sylvia always knew this and knew, too, that their love for each other was rock-solid, the immovable centre of their lives. Sylvia was not jealous of this latest love because it was doing Valentine nothing but good, and she told her so. She also made it clear to Valentine that, as circumstances alter cases, she might not always be able to encourage every affair; that if Valentine ever fell in love with someone who did her damage, Sylvia’s feelings about that person would be very different. It was a ghastly anticipation of what was to happen later.

  Sylvia, being the more willing and able public speaker of the two, was rapidly becoming a more prominent Party activist than Valentine. Soon after their return from Spain, Sylvia was on a platform in Dorchester’s Labour Hall with John Cowper Powys, making a speech about Spanish culture and literature and begging a collection, not this time for the Communist Party’s Spanish Fund, but for a fund she and Valentine had set up to alleviate the soap shortage they had witnessed in Spain. Ludwig Renn had pointed out to them how demoralising it was for the militia to remain enti
rely soapless and how nothing was being done to help. In Paris, on their way home, Sylvia and Valentine had arranged for £25-worth of soap to be sent from Marseilles to Madrid and, as soon as they got to England, began asking round for contributions. ‘We set about it without much spirit. At least I did. Sylvia had more vigour and more hope, as usual,’ wrote Valentine to Alyse Gregory, and recorded some of the responses to their appeal: the Dorchester meeting raised £4 5s, May Pitman gave 2s, the fishing-women at Winterton 25s, four waiters in a train dining-car 5s, four shop-girls in London 10s, Joan Woollcombe, Valentine’s sister, gave nothing, Joan’s servant 5s, Rosamund Lehmann £5 and Vita Sackville-West £1, with the following note attached: ‘I hope you will forgive me when I say that your letter was one of the funniest appeals I’ve ever had! I thought the Spanish need for soap was chronic, and not just due to the war!’ to which Valentine responded in her letter to Alyse, ‘if she can find it just stolidly funny, then how funny the less civilised beings to whom we’ve written must think it! But it hasn’t worked out like that – and I am thankful. I think perhaps I haven’t a very strong sense of humour at any time, and at present it seems to be completely dormant!’4