Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  In October, Sylvia was on a platform again, displaying her oratorical skills. She was opening the Dorchester Labour Party Fayre:

  I made a beautiful little speech. Beginning with what pleasure one can get out of a Fayre, and how socialism stood for more pleasure in the world. I mention this sentiment only because at this juncture an enormous and very common old woman who was in charge of the jumble stall said Hear Hear in a voice like thunder, and applauded most passionately. Then I went on to say that it was a privilege too, that without the struggles and sacrifices – all the stallholders began to simper – of those who worked now and worked in the past there would be no Labour Party in Dorchester; and then, with my eye fixed on the co-operative stall covered with little packets of groats and soap, I said that we must remember (implying in our prayers) that in some countries in Europe it would be impossible for people like us to meet together openly in order to raise money for our cause. […] Minna herself could not have bettered the melancholy candour and simplicity of my tone. In fact it was perfect except that overcome by my own effect I sat down having forgotten to say the Fayre was open.5

  It is clear that Sylvia relished the opportunity to educate the people of Dorset, however mild the occasion. Given a more obviously political occasion, such as a Labour Party meeting, she could be astute and prophetic, as her notes for a speech show. It was not enough to be organised, she told the Trades Unionists; Germany had Workers’ Unions which had been made a mockery of under Fascism. She called for commitment to the unions and argued that a union card should be the worker’s dearest possession. In Spain such a card was ‘dyed red with the heart’s blood of those who carried them’:

  This war in Spain is not a Spanish Civil War (what the Govt and BBC have taught us to call it). It is an international war, and it is a class war. It is a conflict between a ruling caste, and the people.6

  In Britain, she said, the seeds of the struggle which had subdued Germany and Italy and which threatened Spain had already been sown. Fascism was an international pest: ‘Guernica was a town very much like Sherborne and Hitler’s bombers would be as ready to destroy the one as the other. They would come as fast at Mosley’s bidding as they did at Franco’s bidding.’ Her subject, ostensibly Spain, was widening out. Spain was a vital issue, she said, because it had a vital lesson to teach: ‘On whether we learn that lesson or not depends whether this crusade will be a step towards victory or merely a period in which some of us make speeches and some of us make good resolutions.’

  It was a period in which Sylvia was preoccupied with strategy, for which she had a natural predisposition. She was frequently in contact with Edgell Rickword and full of suggestions on which she hoped he might act. One was that there should be an inquiry into elementary school history books, another, more extreme and urgent, was that the Party should expel Stephen Spender before he decided to leave of his own account, as seemed likely. Sylvia felt that Spender had ‘gone off’ as a poet since joining the Party and that the Party may have been, directly or indirectly, the cause: ‘This is the most serious aspect of the whole situation to my mind,’ Sylvia wrote to Rickword, ‘SS may not matter very much; but it does matter if our methods are such as to damage imaginative workers, because in that case, whether they leave us or stay with us, we lose them for the best they were worth.’ Behind this problem can be discerned the antipathy between Sylvia and Stephen Spender, a continuation of the old quarrel between Bolshevik and Menshevik. Her solution to it was entirely in keeping with the hardest Party line, and a solution of which ‘Uncle Joe’ – a character she esteemed highly – would have been proud: ‘Having brandished him [Spender] so much in the beginning it will be a great mistake not to brandish quite as much the fact that he has not proved up to our standards. In fact, let us be sure that it looks like a purge, and not a miraculous escape of Jonah the prophet.’7

  A note in Sylvia’s diary shows that as early as December 1937 Valentine was herself feeling uncomfortable with the Communist Party, though of course there was no question of Sylvia applying the same rigorous treatment she prescribed for Comrade Spender. ‘I suppose,’ Sylvia wrote, ‘that CP is at once too tight a pot and too draughty for her roots to settle in to their own comfort. She feels at once unused and misused.’8 It could also be the case that Valentine wanted to indicate she could not follow Sylvia at the same pace down the fellow-travellers’ road, being the less intensely involved of the two. Certainly, Sylvia had become prey to some absurdities of ideology, such as her observation of drivers in the New Forest, along a tricky part of the road in bad weather: ‘All along this stretch we noticed that lorries were polite and friendly, whereas not a single gentry-driven car showed the slightest movement towards courtesy.’9

  At the end of 1937, Sylvia was finishing another novel, her fifth. After the Death of Don Juan is Sylvia’s least known novel, published in a modest edition in the autumn of 1938 and ‘swamped’, as Sylvia once said, ‘by 1938–39 events’.10 The story, set in late eighteenth-century Spain, begins where Da Ponte’s libretto for Don Giovanni leaves off: the report of the libertine Don Juan’s descent into hell fire, his reward for a life of wickedness. As the novel unfolds, Sylvia makes three-dimensional the two-dimensional characters of the opera, a subversive process, for the extra element is the workings of human nature and it undermines completely what the reader thinks he knows at the beginning of the book. Even the dire climax of the opera (and of Moliere’s play) is overturned, for this is a worldly and cynical book and Sylvia grasps the essence of the character of Don Juan by showing him as a survivor.

  In Sylvia’s story, three of the characters from the opera, Dona Ana, Don Ottavio and Leporello, journey into the provinces to break the news of Don Juan’s death to his father, Don Saturno, a philanthropic landowner, whose backward village, Tenorio Viejo, is too small even to appear on the map:

  The castle stood on a small hill, the original square stone keep rambling off into lower levels of russet-tiled barns and storehouses. On a further hillock stood a church. It had been built with more pretensions to architecture than the castle, but less solidly, and its cupola had slipped awry, like an old woman’s head-dress. Between the church and the castle straggled the village, an array of lime-washed hovels. The olive trees in their cultivated earth looked like the spots on a leopard’s skin, the vineyards were few and poor. There were no meadows. All around were the mountains. Some cultivation had struggled up them, forcing its way between the shaggy oak-woods. On the higher slopes the colour of the earth, fading from the valley leopard-colour to an ashen whiteness, showed that cultivation need strive no further.11

  What would transform the bleached valley is, of course, water, but Don Saturno’s plans for an irrigation system have been inhibited by his son’s profligacy at the gaming tables and in the bedchambers of Seville. One of the book’s ironies is that at the end, it would appear that the estate will get its water, but for all the wrong reasons, and only if Don Juan – not dead at all – can reclaim his tenants’ land. As a political novel, it is entirely different in kind from Summer Will Show and shows a shift in interest from the ideology of Communism to its practical applications. It is a very neat, very literary book, employing a sort of Marxism even in its method, for there is no protagonist; each layer of Spanish society as seen in the microcosm of Tenorio Viejo is examined in turn, each with equal weight. Don Saturno the enlightened gentleman, Don Francisco the disaffected school-master, Don Gil the sacristan, Don Tomas the priest, the miller, his avaricious daughter and the peasants fit effortlessly into the scheme of the book, ‘a parable’, as Sylvia described it, ‘or an allegory, or what you will, of the political chemistry of the Spanish War, with the Don Juan – more of Molière than of Mozart – developing as the Fascist of the piece’.12 Among the peasants a multiplicity of views is represented: there is Ramon, the man of moderation, Andres the strategist, Jesus the atheist, Dionio the god-fearing innkeeper, hot-blooded Diego and an equally differentiated group of women, very limited in their
sphere of action but by no means without opinions. Creating and keeping alive such a mass of characters is an achievement in itself, but the way in which Sylvia accumulates their small motives towards a catastrophe is both technically brilliant and deeply entertaining. What is somewhat surprising is that such a devout Communist as Sylvia was in 1937 could have produced such a detached, politically objective novel – a mark, if one were needed, of her imaginative integrity.

  It also seemed that Sylvia was incapable of producing any two books the same. There is remarkably little consistency – except in a prevailing intelligence – between one of her novels and the next, a fact which partly explains why she has escaped the close attention of literary critics. She was not interested in developing a ‘presence’ as a novelist; the individual book was what absorbed her, and when she was writing she was as much as ever bound up in the fictional world she was creating. This emotional engagement ensured her work its immediacy. She was clear about her priorities, as she explained in an interview late in her life: ‘Really I believe that the thing that forms the structure of any narrative and holds it together is the importance of the narrative, the interest one has in the narrative. That’s why Defoe is such a master because he’s really interested in the story.’ As for the inconsistency (it was to become more marked as the years went by), she said in the same interview, ‘I remember a passage in Walt Whitman where someone or other is accusing him of being inconsistent and he says “Am I inconsistent? Well, I am inconsistent. Within me I contain millions!” ’13

  Sylvia was least inconsistent in her work for the New Yorker, which was taking several stories a year. Writing for a specific market certainly did not inhibit her imagination, but it did unobtrusively single out a certain tone in her writing, a tone which she was able to refine and, by constant usage, perfect. This is not to say that her New Yorker stories are unvarious, but that the mild discipline of a limited consistency enabled her to produce, over the years, a handful of masterpieces.

  In 1937 Harold Raymond suggested that Chatto & Windus should publish some of the New Yorker stories in book form (Charles Prentice had retired – early – in the mid-Thirties), but Sylvia was uncertain how they would transplant into native soil, if at all. This was enough to slow down plans for a book, further slowed down by the outbreak of the war, and A Garland of Straw was not published until 1943. Meanwhile Valentine had been sending pieces to the New Yorker too, and though they took a couple of poems, her short stories and articles were rejected, which was becoming the usual story. Valentine earned next to nothing from writing during these years. The sort of magazine she contributed to regularly – Country Standard, Left Review, The Countryman – paid poorly, if at all. Sylvia, on the other hand, had earned an average of £250 a year as an author in the period 1933–7. Her ‘gentleman friend’ was a man of means.

  II

  At the end of 1937, Sylvia and Valentine received a letter from Elizabeth Wade White, the young American woman who had stayed at ‘24’ in the early days of their political fervour. She had raised $1,180 for Spanish Medical Aid, run by the Quakers, in her Connecticut home town and had received invitations to meet both Mrs Franklin D. Roosevelt and a naturist colony. ‘Such a pity they could not be combined,’ Sylvia wrote in her diary. ‘That was a good day’s work when we fired her.’ Elizabeth was so ‘fired’ that the Quakers asked her to go to Spain to do some publicity work for them. She stopped at Frome Vauchurch for a few days on her way over.

  1938 was a bad year for the Republican side in the Spanish War: Franco was receiving even more German and Italian support, and his offensive was redoubled all across Spain. In August, his forces began to break down the hold of the Republican lines and penetrated the Catalan Front by the year’s end, with disastrous consequences for the Government side. When Elizabeth Wade White got as far as Paris on her way to Spain in the autumn of 1938, she heard such alarming news about the progress of the war that she wrote to Sylvia and Valentine that she was returning home. They replied with an invitation for her to come to Dorset for an indefinite stay. Soon after her arrival Valentine fell in love with Elizabeth, and by November they were lovers.

  At first this new affair did not alarm Sylvia, except in that Valentine was so quiet about it. The constant presence of Elizabeth in the house became a strain, though, and Sylvia moved from her shared bedroom with Valentine to the spare room. ‘According to the lights of the day,’ she wrote later, ‘I was behaving correctly in a quite usual situation. The only item by which I could have bettered my conduct would have been to take a lover. But I desired Valentine as sensually as ever, which saved me from that complication, as it saved me from any deviation into maternal kindness.’14 By Christmas, however, the situation had crisped up considerably; Elizabeth had begun to show moods, and Sylvia, released by these from the grip of her good intentions, allowed herself to be unhappy – for herself and for Valentine. The festive season passed by grimly and 12 January arrived, the eighth anniversary of their marriage, with a love poem from Valentine pinned on the pillow of Sylvia’s single bed, but no Valentine.

  At the end of January, Barcelona fell to General Franco and it became clear that the Republican cause in Spain was in imminent danger of complete collapse. The turn of events bitterly discouraged Sylvia, but was hardly unexpected after the ‘Munich betrayal’ of September 1938, an event which had roused Sylvia’s deepest anger. Early in 1939, though, the wind had gone out of her sails, for all her energy was sapped by personal unhappiness. In February she came to the conclusion that she would have to leave the house at Frome Vauchurch, as the situation was becoming intolerable to her, but Valentine begged her to stay, and she did. Elizabeth had been with them for almost four months and her parents, concerned at how she was, sent a suitor of hers from New England to investigate. His report back could not have been very reassuring to the Whites, for both Sylvia and Valentine took a violent dislike to him and though he was able to get Elizabeth as far as London for a while, he was not able to persuade her to come home. Elizabeth came back to Frome Vauchurch, but a few weeks later, possibly because she felt a change of address might allay her parents’ fears, she moved into part of the Dairy House in East Chaldon, where she could entertain Valentine alone.

  On 28 March 1939, Madrid and Valencia surrendered. The Spanish war was over, and the European war came a step nearer. Soon after, Sylvia and Valentine received a request from Louis Aragon to house temporarily Ludwig Renn, who had been interned by the French Government on crossing into France after the fall of Barcelona. Sylvia found his presence at Frome Vauchurch immensely salutary; here was a man whose character she esteemed, who had endured real hardships and had kept his integrity and manners intact. She saw how, in her anxiety not to show hurt feelings, she had got herself into a false position with Valentine and had been cast adrift from her own resources in the process. By trying to act well, she had limited her ability to act at all.

  Elizabeth was thirty-two, Valentine’s junior by a few weeks, and naturally did not choose to ‘share’ her with anyone else. This was her first profound experience of falling in love, and seemed to call for a special degree of commitment. Unfortunately, it was the latter of which she reminded Valentine most frequently, and Valentine’s love and lust for Elizabeth became inextricably mingled with a sense of guilty responsibility which prevented any member of the triangle from being satisfied with the situation, let alone happy.

  Sylvia and Valentine had been invited to another Writers’ Congress, this time in New York. In ordinary circumstances, they would not have attended, but the trip offered such a good opportunity for Elizabeth to go home and yet not be parted from Valentine that at the end of May they all sailed for America, including Renn, whose passage was paid by Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth went to her parents’ house in New England while the Congress was in progress, but Valentine joined her there soon after and Sylvia stayed alone in New York, meeting old acquaintances such as Anne Parrish and new ones, notably a young composer, Paul Nor
doff, who had written an opera around the story of Mr Fortune’s Maggot. Nordoff sent Sylvia the score, which she returned with a warm and praising letter: ‘There are innumerable things I could specially praise: the economy, the absence of fuss, the power of inventing the right device […]; but I would rather praise the unanimity of the work; for plenty of music has good qualities, fine details of invention, and yet is not good and fine music; but yours both has, and is.’15 They met soon after and took an instant liking to each other. Nordoff was a bright-eyed, energetic and eccentric young man, and completely devoted to his art, a breath of fresh air in the New York heat-wave and a release for Sylvia from her equally stifling personal preoccupations. ‘It is so gratifying of you to say in your letter that you like me,’ she wrote to him in July. ‘Things of that kind, which can be very important, people usually omit to mention. Personally, I have no use for unspoken affections, and so I will most readily reply that I like you a great deal, and look on my meeting with you as one of the best things I have found in this country.’16

  They had been in America for over a month and Sylvia was expecting a date to be settled for going home – without Elizabeth – when a plan first mooted in Dorset was brought up again and Elizabeth found them a house to rent, all three together, for the rest of the summer. It was in Warren County, Connecticut, a farm-house belonging to a family called Kibbe. Sylvia fell in with this obviously unsatisfactory arrangement because she was desperate to be with Valentine again and sensed that Valentine, too, wanted her nearby. In her autobiography, Valentine wrote of that trip to America that ‘Over there everything became chaotic and, for my part, disgraceful. If Sylvia had not stayed by me then I should have been damned out and out. I was lecherous and greedy and drunken there, and yet I had two very serious loves in my heart, even then – and poems, too, in my head.’17 Falling in love with Elizabeth had brought Valentine out of a period of lassitude in her creative life, and this was very important to her, for she had an almost superstitious fear of not being able to write. This and the renewal of lust and a genuine love for Elizabeth made the affair seem worth pursuing, despite the unpleasantness of the situation at Warren and Elizabeth’s increasing possessiveness. Of her own part, Sylvia commented later, ‘Mere fidelity could have become a bore and a reproach; it was my dependence on her which called back her sense of responsibility and steadied her footing.’18