Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  Valentine’s fortieth birthday in May 1946 set her thinking about mortality – or rather immortality, as death was an almost constant preoccupation of hers, but now she began to think about the soul. ‘It became of first importance to me,’ she wrote a year later, ‘not so much to hoard up virtue and find a creed or a faith, for those things did not seem to have anything to do with the matter, but I felt a compelling desire to find out about the nature of the soul and if, as I suspected, it proved to be necessary to cultivate and care for it, to make it strong and put it in the way of freeing itself easily from the body, then I felt it was now my main concern to do that.’62 The books she was reading at this time indicate the sort of journey she had set out on: Plato’s Last Days of Socrates, Kabir, Vaughan, Traherne, St Augustine, Yeats, Epictetus, Seneca, Montaigne. These were ‘like matches struck in darkness. They have each flared up very strongly and vividly in my night and in that moment of brightness I have seen the outline of my soul.’63 She began to think of her spirit as something which had been neglected in favour of her body and mind, something which she might still be able to revive, if she were to make an enormous effort to nurture and tend it. The idea of her spirit having gradually wasted away connected very clearly in Valentine’s mind with the lessening of her conviction that she was a poet. She began to hope and trust that if she could revive her spirit, the conflicts and frustrations she encountered in her creative life might be resolved too.

  Her addiction to drink was, she felt, a symptom of the same spiritual debilitation. She had sought medical advice on a number of occasions and in 1940 had undergone an expensive commercial ‘cure’, to no lasting avail. In the summer of 1947 she sustained a whole month ‘D.D.’, but then fell back more violently than ever. She began to despair of ever gaining control over herself.

  This state of things changed dramatically soon after Sylvia’s and Valentine’s return from a holiday in Ireland in the autumn of 1947. On the night of 8 October, Valentine staggered to bed, drunk and despairing; she felt ‘as if eternity were opening all around me; and it was as black as hell.’ Then, as she recounted in her autobiography, ‘for no reason that I can give, instead of climbing into bed and putting out the light […] I knelt down and – with this vertiginous black Eternity surrounding me – addressed Emptiness like this: “Is God there?” There was no reply. Everything was completely dead. I had no sense except of emptiness and the rushing swirling dark.’64 Into this emptiness, and ‘without faith or hope’, she vowed never to drink again, got into bed and fell asleep. The next day was blighted by a powerful hangover, but by evening she became aware that she was ‘walking in tranquillity and with perfect confidence’; she had turned herself around.

  Her reading continued and acquired a focus, Nicolas Herman and St Augustine taking precedence over Greek philosophers and oriental mystics. ‘And where have I come to?’ she asked in her diary of 11 October. ‘I do not know yet. I may know soon. I wish I may. Words are troublesome because of what they “mean” above, below and behind their first-apparent meaning; faith, for instance; and belief.’ The process of ‘rebirth’ intrigued her. She knew it did not intrigue Sylvia at all. Sylvia did not accept, consciously or otherwise, the Christian mystics’ idea that the present world is a ‘vale of soul-making’; nor did she feel any impulse to develop her personality or question it. There is no sign of her being in the least critical of Valentine’s spiritual ‘quest’, though; indeed, she may not have even noticed the crisis taking place. She would have noticed (and for the most part approved) Valentine’s reading, the more frequent presence of God in Valentine’s talk, the improvement in Valentine’s spirits and health, the philosophical turn of her poems of 1948, without concluding that there had been some radical change. But Valentine felt changed – or changing: ‘It is a curious sensation to think of oneself as a work in progress: after so long being accustomed to think of oneself as a creator.’65 Everything had become new, had to be relearnt, in the context of having a soul. Valentine was not just ‘translating’ her old life, but beginning again:

  You can live on the country, they say, and do better so than to carry provisions which, under that sky, will rot. You can travel fast or slow; there is nothing to tell you how much further you have to journey until you arrive, how much further before you reach –

  Reach what? I do not know.

  All I know is the blight of the North wind, the carrion patience of winter hanging up there in the sky, and the blow that is aimed from the Pole, that is aimed to destroy us.

  These things, and the date of starting, are all I know.66

  5

  1947–1950

  I

  Sylvia dreamed last night that she was staying in an hotel (I think in London) and it was depressing and she was impatient to get out into the streets. As she went across the hall to the front door the manager of the hotel, a soapy, unpleasant man, intercepted her and told her she must be very careful whenever she went out, because – ‘Look!’ he said, and showed her – Directly in front of the door-step […] there was a very deep pit […] At the bottom of this shaft there was a pale pinkish light, moving always slightly or looking as though water lay there, lighted somehow, or catching from somewhere this pinkish light.

  She was very frightened, and the more so when she heard a voice from this deep shaft, desperately reiterating ‘Remember the Pit! Remember the Pit!’

  In her dream she felt an extremity of fear at this, and then with a great effort of will, out of a determination not to be compelled by any terror but to continue doing what she had intended to do, she ordered the hotel manager to make it possible for her to go out. Which he did, by placing planks over the opening to the pit – but, he unctuously explained, it was necessary to leave a gap, a dangerous gap, and she would have to cross carefully. And it was a wide space that he left, down which she could have fallen, but she did not; she crossed in safety and came out onto the street.1

  Valentine recorded this dream of Sylvia in March 1948, because she felt the behaviour in it to be characteristic and admirable. Sylvia was a vivid dreamer and at times of stress her dreams seemed to her especially significant. This dream of the pit, which struck Valentine as showing bravery, seemed to Sylvia more an expression of fearfulness.

  The fears which preyed most on Sylvia’s mind were to do with her mother, Nora, who had rapidly become senile. As late as 1946, Nora had been merely eccentric, and still lived at Little Zeal, alone except for her two remaining dogs, a chow and a pomeranian, both old and musty. Nora, then aged eighty, had been cantankerous towards Sylvia for many years, but her sourness was gradually extending to everyone except Evans the gardener, Mr Boucher, a neighbour whom she considered to be an admirer, and herself. As a result she had become very isolated. Sylvia made light of her mother to other people – it was one way of keeping some control of the situation. When she was visiting her aunt and uncle in Amersham in 1940, Arthur Machen had noted that Sylvia ‘told a stream of stories about her mother, the point of them being mostly against her mother; but all very amusing.’2 By the late 1940s, when Sylvia went on her regular but short visits of filial duty, she found Nora’s endless talk and its aimless, repetitive nature, exhausting and depressing. Nora was so deaf that the radio had to be turned up painfully high, and that set the dogs off barking. During one particularly fierce Dartmoor gale, Nora was unaware that anything untoward was going on outside until she noticed boughs of trees passing across her window. Sylvia made Valentine promise that if ever she went the same way, Valentine was to shoot her.

  The following year, Nora’s condition worsened considerably and when Sylvia visited her, at first Nora didn’t know her daughter, then ignored her. The old resentments, angers and jealousies began to work themselves out – delusions, too, for every time Nora had some message for Sylvia to take to a dressmaker, or a packet of lace for some long-dead acquaintance. ‘She was like a mad infant, pitiable and terrifying,’3 and Sylvia was frightened again, for the first time since her youth. Nora
was in generally good health, and not insane, but she was incontinent and needed constant attention. The district nurse came once a day, but that was not enough, and the doctor believed that Nora could last in the same or worse condition for years. Sylvia went to Devon in December 1947 and thought she might get through the visit ‘by shutting both eyes’, but things did not improve, and she began to search for a suitable nurse-companion. Unable to find one, Sylvia considered for the first time the possibility of putting Nora into a home, despite the promise she had made some years before that her mother would never be made to leave Little Zeal. It was either a home, or Sylvia herself becoming the nurse-companion. This she refused to do: as she wrote to Steven Clark, ‘if this course leaves any specks on my conscience, as I daresay it may, I will rub them off at my leisure. But go down quick into the pit I will not …’4

  Valentine had come down to support Sylvia after a few days, distressed at the tone of her letters. Sylvia was afraid that Nora might attack Valentine, for she made no bones now about her violent dislike for the younger woman, but in the event, Nora didn’t seem to recognise her properly, or chose not to, and Valentine avoided Nora’s room carefully, not least because she couldn’t bear the stink of it.

  Valentine had never stayed at Little Zeal before, and having the leisure to look round it found it full of exquisite furniture and antique objects, ‘like a museum, or a curiosity-shop’. She also had the opportunity to observe Nora’s behaviour, which horrified her: ‘[Nora] has been, all her life, a vain, domineering and self-gratifying woman and now she lies in her bed living over and over the situations in her life when either she was arousing envy or desire or was herself experiencing one or the other. […] she tells over and over the triumphs she has had – social triumphs, triumphs of despotism, triumphs of wit or domination. And then she chatters, in her loud, crazy voice, about the men who have admired and desired her and what she said and did and wore and the way she managed them.’5 Nora had sharp dips down into idiocy and upward into something like normality, when she would show a sudden flash of affection or gratitude towards Sylvia. Sylvia did not respond to these, though; it was too painful, and Valentine dared not speak to her of her feelings, knowing as she did that ‘all Sylvia’s experience of her mother had been miserably unhappy and full of torment. Nora has hated and thwarted her and done, as it were by instinct, everything she could, at all times, to suppress and injure her. Although I do think she has felt pride, at times, and sometimes pleasure too, in having Sylvia as her child. But it is probably true, as Sylvia says, that Nora’s only appreciation of anything or anyone has been founded upon the glory they gave her or the regard they brought her.’6

  On Christmas Eve 1947 Sylvia took her mother to the Windermere Nursing Home in Paignton, stayed long enough to see Nora settling in to domineer a young nurse, then went back to Dorset exhausted. But going to the home seemed to worsen Nora’s behaviour and on the first night she was found getting into the bed of a ninety-three-year-old male resident, and told the nurse who came to his rescue, ‘I was just going to kill him.’ Every day she tried to get to the front door by stealth, only to find she had forgotten for what reason. She became absorbedly vain about small luxury items, spending a fortune on silk stockings and kid gloves, sent for from London stores, and wrecked her room several times, apparently trying to find exotic clothes from her past she felt were hidden there.

  When Sylvia went to visit, she was surprised that the matron insisted on going in with her as a sort of bodyguard, for Nora had been telling everyone that when her daughter came, she was going to knock her head off. Valentine felt that this ferocity of Nora was mostly a sham, an exercise of power, and that the crazy voice and bullying expression were to some extent assumed. But sham or no, Nora was at this time almost constantly aggressive. On one visit, she told Sylvia to open the wardrobe, saying she had four pairs of boots in there ‘for kicking people with’. The only thing in the wardrobe was a pair of bedroom slippers, which Sylvia brought. Nora became very cross and said, ‘Those wouldn’t hurt anyone.’7

  The nursing-home was expensive, and Little Zeal had to be maintained, Evans paid, the dogs looked after. Worst of all, as Sylvia found out, Nora had ‘spent the last few months of her wits in becoming overdrawn’8 and there were debts to be covered. Nora had assured Sylvia years before that she had been cut out of her will, so there was no question of post-obiting to cover these expenses. Sylvia’s usual expedient of pot-boiling was neither sufficient, nor, at the time, very effective. She had only just finished The Corner That Held Them, a very preoccupying book to write. In its shadow had withered a novel about family life, begun in 1946, and ‘Amy’, a novel begun in 1947 and abandoned four years later. In 1948 Sylvia began another story, set in contemporary England, about a Swedish au-pair girl arriving at the country home of her new employer to find that the lady is dying. The first, completed, part of ‘Song Without Words’ is among the best things that Sylvia wrote, psychologically compelling and remarkably evocative of an English winter landscape, but the second part of the story ran dry, and was shelved.

  Sylvia had published two books since the end of the war, The Portrait of a Tortoise, which was a selection from the writings of Gilbert White, tracing the story of his tortoise, Timothy, and The Museum of Cheats, a collection of twenty-two short stories. The Museum of Cheats is almost entirely about the war at home and the types of behaviour – new and old – engendered by it. Many of the people and situations, according to notes Sylvia once wrote, were ‘studied’ from life, including the most improbable, such as ‘Rosie Flounders’. When Sylvia was compiling the book, she became dissatisfied with some of the material and wrote the title story as a substitute. ‘A general survey of bunkums’,9 it is much longer than anything else in the book and was presumably intended to make the collection cohere, but its jauntiness prevents this, being out of key with the other stories. Among these are several excellent stories – perhaps more accurately described as sketches or studies, for they rely only slightly on plot – which convey the tone of provincial life in wartime – ‘Poor Mary’, ‘English Climate’, ‘The Cold’, ‘Waiting for Harvest’. Satire, so imperative in the Spanish campaign, and irony, so unavoidable in the run-up to the war, have given way to an overpowering sense of melancholy disillusionment, not so much in the author (there are the subtlest sideswipes in all these stories) but in the texture of the writing, which had to form a suitable vessel for the sad, shabby, petty and pitiable characters Sylvia was observing. As the curator of the Museum of Cheats realises on his return from fighting with the Maquis to dealing with the petty intrigues of Tipton Bacchus, ‘he was handling a much smaller gun; but the target was equally the same.’10

  ‘Boors Carousing’ in The Museum of Cheats is about a writer, ‘studied from myself’ according to Sylvia, who, distracted by visitors, has been unable to work on his novel and instead wrote short stories, ‘a prey to human nature – which is poison and dram-drinking to the serious artist’.11 The story goes on to have him interrupted again by an eccentric and reclusive neighbour whose house down-river is troubled by flood. Going into the old lady’s house after grudgingly helping her, the writer realises that she is a genteel alcoholic and on returning home begins to make a story out of her. He is drawn to her because they are two of a kind – both ‘dram-drinkers’. Sylvia had used this image for the obsessive nature of the act of writing before, in Opus 7, speaking of Rebecca Random, her gin-soaked heroine, and her own progress through the poem as its author:

  Each day declares

  yesterday’s currency a few dead leaves;

  and through all the sly nets poor technique weaves

  the wind blows on, whilst I – new nets design,

  a sister-soul to my slut heroine,

  she to her dram enslaved, and I to mine.12

  Almost half the stories in The Museum of Cheats had been published first in the New Yorker, where Sylvia’s work had become well-established. In 1945 she had been honoured by the magazine
with a First Reading Agreement, in effect a higher rate of payment and a contract granting the New Yorker first refusal on new stories. Though this should have given Sylvia a degree of stability, by 1947 she was finding it frustrating to have to wait months sometimes for a decision before she could try to market a story elsewhere. She felt, as she complained to William Maxwell, ‘as though I had plighted my vows to a refrigerator’.13 In the longeurs between dollar cheques she turned to other sources of income, modest though they were by comparison: adapting a novel by her American friend Anne Parrish for a radio play, contributing articles and stories to magazines, notably Our Time, the successor to Left Review, the New Statesman and The Countryman, and accepting a commission to write a book about Somerset, which she did in the summer of 1948, going out for long car rides and walks with Valentine to study the county in detail.

  Somerset, which was published in 1949 in a series edited by Clough and Amabel Williams-Ellis, Communist friends of Sylvia’s, is a book which would seem to justify Sylvia’s stated wish to be a landscape painter in another incarnation. Her sensitivity to colour, texture and quality of light was never given greater scope than in this ‘err-and-stray’ view of the county – ‘I am constitutionally incapable of resembling a guide’14 – full of the most stimulating descriptive prose, such as this paragraph about Ham Hill stone, the most distinctive local building material: