Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  Unknown to Sylvia when she wrote this letter, Valentine had been told by Dr Gaster that a swelling she had felt in her right breast on and off for about four years might be cancerous and that she should visit a consultant. Valentine was deeply frightened, but decided not to burden Sylvia with her fears until they were confirmed. The diagnosis was of mastitis, and Valentine was prescribed hormone treatment and a fitting to wear. Outside the surgery she told Sylvia the good news, but Sylvia’s relief was mixed with shock at the fact that she had been kept in ignorance: ‘it was as though we were already apart.’30

  During those days when her health was seriously in question, Valentine had been in what she described as ‘a state of contained panic’, desperate and dreamlike. She realised with absolute clarity for the first time that she could not live without being in close daily contact with Sylvia, and wrote to tell Elizabeth this. In her diary she wrote:

  I feel completely astray at times: Sylvia is so deeply dear to me, so completely integrated that we are practically incapable of sense or sense of life when we are apart. Although I am far less than she in all capacities, yet her capacities and mine agree together, so that we have become almost wordless, from living so closely together, and in most cases we have no need of speech […] and the thought of being about to live a day-to-day life away from her is completely staggering: it makes me dizzy – I cannot comprehend it. And the sight, and knowledge in my heart and mind and bones, of her desolation and woe and shock appals me so that I am really stricken in my heart, and cannot endure it without going almost mad.31

  But still she made ready for the separation; even justified it to herself in terms of the spirit. God had ratified the pledge between Elizabeth and herself; now she must ‘try the spirits, if they be of God’.32

  Meanwhile three flesh-and-blood women were in deep confusion and unhappiness. Mrs White died in the summer and Elizabeth was, in theory, free to come over, but perhaps because Valentine’s insistence on keeping in close touch with Sylvia looked like a dilution of the original plan, Elizabeth began to make all sorts of emendations and adjustments which diluted it further. She could not come over immediately, and when she did, it would be for a month only, a trial month at Frome Vauchurch, during which time Sylvia could stay at a hotel instead of moving out entirely. Sylvia received this news aghast: ‘It was a come-down, and an affront – such an affront that I could hardly look Valentine in the face.’33

  While they waited again for Elizabeth to specify the month and confirm her air passage, Sylvia began her preparations for leaving. She cleaned out cupboards and drawers, sorted linen, did everything possible to tidy herself out of sight, even to unpicking her initials from the pillowslips and towels. Valentine made over Sylvia’s sitting-room on the ground floor for her own use, and her own sitting-room for Elizabeth’s. They put away objects and china special to them, put away love-gifts. ‘I contrive to take care of [Elizabeth’s] feelings,’ Sylvia wrote in her diary, ‘– it is the extreme of moral affectation.’ But much more than Elizabeth’s, it was her own feelings she was trying to protect.

  In the same spirit of cleaning and clearing, Valentine decided that she could not part from Sylvia without telling her at last of the drink problem which had dogged her for so many years. Sylvia received the news with surprise, but no horror. She looked on Valentine’s deception as ‘heroic’ and marvelled at the self-control and good manners involved in keeping such a secret, for Sylvia swore she had never seen Valentine drunk. How Valentine managed to hide the evidence of an addiction from Sylvia over a period of seventeen years is puzzling. It would appear that Sylvia had no idea of a problem existing at all, believing the story only because Valentine told it her. When Valentine tried to implicate the hand of God in the matter, however, Sylvia was privately dismissive, sure in her own heart of where all credit lay: ‘to me, she was the miracle.’34

  Valentine made her deliverance from drink the starting-point of an autobiography she had been finishing during the summer of 1949 and which she presented to Sylvia as a record and explanation of her life up to that date. Addressed to an impersonal Reader and insisting, in the text, on the anonymity of the author, it would appear to have been written with publication in mind, if only as a means of imposing form on what is otherwise a painfully personal account. The unremittingly remorseful tone of the book (which was not published until 1985) and its joylessness are indicators of Valentine’s state of mind during that turbulent summer, a time when she was ‘sold into multiplicity’:

  Whether I have been set askew in my judgement by those long years of drunkenness and waging useless warfare, I do not know; or whether I am as I feel myself to be: so made that I really can, in truth, be in love with two separate and most alien people. But I know beyond any doubt that my whole being is rooted in Sylvia – that out of my being, however base and bad it seems to be, this matchless love and faith has grown, which is the love she has for me and I have for her. As I write this she is downstairs, listening to some poems of Ronsard being sung on the Third Programme: the sounds come up to me very clearly, and the July evening is slowly darkening. It is just ten o’clock. I know that I shall remember this evening always, and that it may be the most searing torment to my soul, or it may be an almost sweet, light pain only – remembered when there is no more threat of pain to come.35

  In an oddly intimate and colluding way Sylvia and Valentine went on together towards their separation. They chose a dove-coloured, overcast morning in July to visit Chaldon and see, for the first time, the ruins of Miss Green’s cottage, bombed five years earlier. The steps into the garden remained intact, but there was barbed wire around the rubble of the house. Valentine climbed over it and wandered in the garden, calling out to Sylvia when she found familiar plants among the tall grass. Sylvia stood and looked at the crumpled water-butt, the young buddleias growing in what used to be her kitchen and, on one of the two remaining pieces of wall, Ronald Eiloart’s well-made hearth. They said little to each other and drove away up towards the Five Marys, passing as they turned the corner the thorn tree under which Sylvia had plighted her troth in 1930. Sylvia cried only rarely, but she cried then.

  Back at Frome Vauchurch, Sylvia continued to sort and clean, and to tidy the garden. She was unable to write, except for a few letters. The lovely summer evenings were spent sewing – always by hand – ‘for my trousseau as divorcée’. With characteristic ingenuity, though possibly to peculiar effect, she concocted a blouse for Valentine out of a 1938 green silk dressing-gown, but seeing her love wearing it was struck down by a sensual melancholy:

  […] under it her arms were milk-white, slender, timelessly young. I kissed the hollow of her elbow – gentle now under my lips, and no stir beneath the skin. She looks as beautiful now as when she was beautiful with love for me.

  The torment of the flesh is so much purer, so much nobler, than the torment of the mind. It keeps an unbruised innocence.36

  Sylvia never grudged Valentine pleasure, so it was a particularly piquant grief to her that the agent of all this regenerated loveliness was someone for whom she had no liking and little respect. Earlier in the summer, Sylvia had managed to vent some of her spleen by being sardonic and quoting favourite French epigrams in the cooing and dovelike tone she reserved for her most barbed utterances. As Elizabeth’s arrival drew nearer, Sylvia began to lose fight, and if she wanted to comment on the latest dreadful ‘carping’ letter from America or on the contents of a piece of luggage in advance, did so only to Thomas the cat.

  By the beginning of August, Elizabeth’s arrival date had been set for 2 September and Valentine went about finding Sylvia a suitable hotel to live in for the month. Posing as Sylvia’s secretary, she drove round the countryside in the new Vauxhall car which was also part of the preparations for September and at length chose the Pen Mill Hotel on the outskirts of Yeovil, a sober sandstone building near to the station, reasonably priced and with a view across the road to a small stand of trees. Yeovil, a town without romance, s
eemed a good choice for a month in the wilderness. It was businesslike, had as yet no pathos of association for Sylvia or Valentine, and later, when it would have, could easily be avoided.

  Practical considerations filled up the remaining days together: the laundry, the larder, the box-room, the garden – everything was unnaturally clean and tidy, a fortress against the stranger. But despite her best efforts, Sylvia was tormented by the anticipation of Elizabeth’s physical presence in the house: ‘In three weeks she will be here. Her foot trailing on the stairs, her glance dawdling over our possessions, her voice and smell filling the house.’ She began to have bad dreams about Elizabeth, one where she was being squashed, and other, more worrying dreams, full of images of desolation. In the last week of waiting, she found herself almost wishing the days away, ‘and yet I know that they may be the last days I shall live with her.’ For the first time in her life, Sylvia experienced boredom in Valentine’s company when she had to listen to a series of lengthy discussions about Elizabeth’s situation and future. They even had something like a row, stemming from a repeated comment of Valentine’s that Sylvia was making a bogey out of Elizabeth. In her own defence, Sylvia produced a letter, found that morning on one of her clean-outs, from Valentine in 1941, reassuring Sylvia that they were securely together again. This made Valentine angry, and she produced another letter, one that she had never yet shown Sylvia, which she felt justified her position. A sleepless night followed, and some difficult days, but Sylvia did not regret having spoken, for she felt that Valentine was not crediting her with any ordinarily base feelings. If Sylvia made a bogey of Elizabeth, Valentine was certainly making something of a martyr out of Sylvia. ‘She ought to understand,’ Sylvia wrote in her diary, ‘that I am not a complete idiot before I go to Pen Mill.’

  On 31 August, the last preparations were done, the bags were packed, the bed for Valentine and Elizabeth was made up by Valentine and Sylvia. After the first night in Yeovil, the plan went, Sylvia would come back to look after the animals while Valentine was on her way to fetch her visitor from the airport in London. At six o’clock, Valentine drove Sylvia to the Pen Mill Hotel. By nine o’clock, Sylvia was already feeling desperate:

  My room looks out on the main road, with buses – behind is the station. I have a view of the laundry, some public trees, and a poor, almost real wood. I have a choice of a bent-wood chair, an easy one that is not easy, and the window-sill, which is best. It is really a nice room, plain, and clean, no pictures; and at dinner there was a good deal of that pathetic English food, so well-meaning, and so dreary. There is a nice waitress, foreign I think. All the other guests are men. Valentine rang me, and there has been a Mozart qu[arte]t, and presently there will be the Winterreise. And I feel idiotic with grief, with care, with bewilderment, with exhaustion of spirit. This is where I have travelled since May. Yet my love left me swearing I was her love. […] For one moment, in the dining-room, I staggered to life, feeling myself returned to that melancholy, saturnine young animal wandering about for Tudor Church Music – at Wimborne, at Norwich, and in Oxford.

  And so I think of refugees.

  III

  The days passed incredibly slowly. By the time Sylvia set off to spend the night at Frome Vauchurch on 1 September, she felt as though she had already expended all the ingenuity and strength stored up to last out the month. At the house she found loving messages, a tray of delicacies and a letter full of love, praise and dependence. She slept with Thomas in her arms and felt hopeful, almost happy. Elizabeth’s plane had not yet landed. Back at Pen Mill the next day, her optimism soon drained away: ‘now I am in my severe little isolation-cell, and how soon, how tragically soon the feeling of home establishes itself – looking round on it ownerly.’ But the letter Valentine had left her in the typewriter at Frome Vauchurch allowed Sylvia a window in her isolation cell. It allowed her to break the agreement they had made not to write to each other during the month apart – an absurd plan, as even one day had proved.

  The written word is a much safer vessel for love than the spoken word. It is chosen with deliberation and set down carefully. And a love letter, netting something of the lover’s physical presence in its very ink and paper, is always a love token, whatever else it may or may not be, a material thing, with a permanence and validity beyond the words it is made up of. The letters Sylvia and Valentine wrote to each other that September, the most moving of their correspondence, formed the place to which their exiled love retreated, and grew. Sylvia’s letters began as rather repining but cheerful descriptions of her exploits in Somerset: the walks she took on Sedgemoor, the churches she visited, cats she met – all in a tone geared to reassure Valentine, a tone significantly at variance with that of her diary entries. And it seems that Valentine was reassured by it, almost to the extent of feeling jealous of Sylvia, for Valentine herself was finding life at Frome Vauchurch extremely exhausting, not least because of the constant talk and lack of the solitariness she both loved and needed. But as Sylvia squeezed herself towards the end of the first week, her letters became much more frank. She had read Valentine’s autobiography and was clearly appalled by its unremiting self-reproachfulness, what Sylvia saw as a Ruth-begotten insistence on guilt and blame. Because she saw a mortal danger to her love, and perhaps because she felt she herself had little left to lose, Sylvia wrote a letter of extreme clarity and urgency, a deeply emotional letter but without a trace of sentimentality or mystification. Telling an exact truth is expensive to the spirit, and Valentine’s incomplete response (Valentine found criticism of her mother increasingly hard to take) left Sylvia feeling dull and deflated. Words had failed her. Packing to go to Alyse Gregory’s house at Chydyok for the weekend, Sylvia felt ‘as derelict as an old bus-ticket’.

  It was a comfort to Sylvia to walk across Chaldon Down, massive and familiar. Alyse was waiting for her, as she recounted in her own journal: ‘I walked along the cliff path to meet her [Sylvia] in the soft wind with the cattle lying in heavy serenity. I waited in the shade of a clump of elder trees. Then I saw her figure coming along, very smart, with a too heavy bag, so charmingly responsive, so easy to entertain, her mind ready to turn in any direction, so cultured, a woman of rare distinction.’37 Both women were slightly constrained to begin with and Sylvia felt that Alyse was almost too discerning a companion for comfort. This uneasiness disappeared in the evening, however, when they listened to a broadcast of Beethoven’s violin concerto together: ‘at the two pizzicato notes in the third movement I heard Alyse chuckle with delight, and from that moment we became freed and intimate and talked for a long while […] I admitted to her, as openly as to a midwife, the curious sense of security and riches it had given me to discover what frankly base and hateful feelings I had experienced about E. “I can contain this also, and still be myself.” ’38

  Alyse Gregory was Sylvia’s only confidante. She was a stern listener with a wise heart, well able to understand something of Sylvia’s difficulty, for Alyse had been part of a similar triangular relationship between herself, her husband Llewelyn (who had died in 1939) and the American poetess Gamel Woolsey, at the time when Sylvia and Valentine were first living in Chaldon. The friendship between Sylvia and Alyse was more intellectual than emotional: ‘we share so many thoughts in common,’39 Alyse wrote, and they shared many tastes too, especially for French literature and music. Alyse’s combination of formality and openness was tonic to Sylvia, as was the beauty of the downs and the sea after so many dark nights of the soul in Yeovil, and when she had to go back to Pen Mill, it was with a heavy heart: ‘For three days I have had support from someone who has been, is, for all I can be sure, as unhappy as I. The visit was all I hoped it might be – and now it is over, and I stare myself in the face again. And Chaldon was so beautiful, and its ghosts so living, so much more living than I.’40

  Valentine’s letters to Pen Mill were loving and solicitous, but Sylvia was unhappy at the new insistence on gratitude which was creeping into them: Valentine’s gratitude for he
r present happiness. Having behaved well, Sylvia now had to pay for it and be thanked, and feel dowdy. On the evening of 12 September, an evening when she seems to have returned to her diary time and again, Sylvia wrote, ‘Den allen schuld recht sich auf erden. I understood that, this evening, lying in deep misery, thinking of a passage in Valentine’s letter about how she in her love with Eliz. can live innocently – and that is because I am steadfast “and completely without guile or reservation”. Recht sich auf erden. She lives and loves innocently with Eliz. because I am shaken with fear and doubts, ravaged with physical and mental jealousy, and steadily murder myself in concealing it.’ When she saw Valentine the next day, Sylvia found it impossible to shift from under this cloud and felt herself to be dull company, even a burden. Valentine was looking well and lovely, ‘and it is this Eliz. whom I hate and strive against who renews her beauty.’ She came with the news that Elizabeth’s passage had been put back a day, a great blow for Sylvia who was literally counting the hours until she could go home. Valentine was also having trouble finding someone to look after the house and the animals for two weeks in October, when she and Sylvia had provisionally planned to go away together to Norfolk to recuperate. These set backs seemed part of a generally melancholy outlook: everything was shifting and formless, all plans were provisional. Sylvia went back to her room and worked on doggedly at the translation of La Légende de la Mort, a collection of peasant stories from Brittany. It was a task she had set herself, an intellectual diversion, a link with her put-aside writing self. And when La Légende failed her, she fell to darning stockings.