Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  Sylvia realised that Candace was, for Valentine, ‘a new medicine against her melancholy […] And alas, her woe, her void, can’t be stuffed up with a poodle.’ When Valentine had a story read on the radio or an article published in a magazine, she would sometimes now not tell Sylvia, for fear of being an embarrassment and being disappointed herself. Though they still loved each other deeply, their former joy seemed blunted, an aspect, they both supposed privately, of growing old. Sometimes a sense of times past would sweep over them, as when, in the spring of 1954, they stopped the car in a lane to pick primroses together: It was such innocence, such happiness,’ wrote Sylvia, ‘that I felt as though it were Chaldon twenty-five years ago. But I also know that Chaldon twenty-five years ago was not in the least like that. The sun’s levelling rays stripe longer shadows, and light, but do not set on fire. And since last autumn I have come to feel ineluctably old.’

  Through the shop and its reverberations Sylvia and Valentine came to make several pleasurable and long-lasting friendships; one with Reynolds Stone, the artist and engraver, and his wife Janet, who lived at Litton Cheney, not far from Maiden Newton, another with the Pinney family at Bettescombe Manor, near Bridport. Janet Stone had a wide circle of literary, musical and artistic friends, whom she was dedicated to entertaining, and through her Sylvia met Gerald Finzi, the composer, and his wife Joy. To dine at Litton Cheney, or at the Finzis’ house at Ashmansworth, and meet such people as Edmund Blunden, Frances Cornford, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, L.P. Hartley (George Warner’s admiring pupil), John Piper and John Nash was a pleasure Sylvia had almost begun to think impossible in the provinces. And though Valentine did not often share it with her, being painfully shy of ‘parties’, it was stimulating to Sylvia to be in intelligent company, like taking a vitamin she had long done without.

  Valentine was not sure what was lacking in her own life, but as her fiftieth birthday approached she felt a desperate need to set herself on a right course and be freed from the uncertainties which had dogged her for years. Sylvia was preoccupied by the long and intricate job of translating Contre Sainte-Beuve, leaving Valentine feeling isolated. Towards the end of 1955 she found herself, much to her own surprise and against her better judgement, considering returning to the Roman Catholic Church. She wanted to be able to worship and join in the rites, but there were seemingly insuperable obstacles to that; her own inability to do so ‘in simplicity, without cerebration’,25 her distaste for English Catholicism and its ‘minority-movement’ politics and the likelihood of being dragged into the ‘buns-and-coffee aspect of their society […] the little jokes about Father-This and Mother-That; It seems to RUSH me away from God.’26 If she could just slip back into the church quietly though, thought Valentine, she would do so without hesitation.

  On 12 January 1956 Sylvia and Valentine celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of their marriage – or almost did. They could not agree on whether the night in question had been that of the 11th or the 12th, so Valentine gave her present on the 11th and Sylvia hers on the 12th – a sad portent.

  In her diary Valentine continued to fill page after page with the disincentives to rejoining the Church – a sure sign that she was preparing to overcome them. She had been taking advice from Father Weekes, the Dorchester priest, and also Bo Foster, Valentine’s long-ago lover who was now living in Dorchester, an active member of the Conservative Party and a devout Catholic still. The biggest disincentive by far was the effect Valentine knew her re-conversion would have on Sylvia and the threat it would pose to their life together, which she anticipated with remarkable clarity:

  So many things are involved here: her contempt for anyone who ‘submits’ intellectually (which I share): her feeling of loyalty – but I do not know the exactly right word to describe it – for the Church of England as by Law established (which I share) and her affectionate familiar knowledge of the Prayer Book and King James Bible (which I feel: for no prayers anywhere can match the beauty and perfection of the Collects nor any text match that Bible – and the Church of England is magnificent, like St Paul’s … so here is another agonising thread attached to me!) and her enjoyment (which I share, heaven knows) of the Voltaire, Anatole France school … the shrewd, pertinent, disillusioned wise ones who write like angels and who have been our masters and guides all our lives … And, of course, much more than just these things: I know that her respect for me (what she has, and I think she has some, though I do not know what it is based upon) will be knocked away for good and all: and for me that is the most appalling prospect: a real maiming of myself, and even worse it could be: a maiming of her, coming on top of so much else she has borne, and somehow weathered.27

  Four days later she spoke to Sylvia, in a rather casual way, about becoming a Catholic again, but the conversation so quickly waltzed off onto the question of whether or no she could rejoin without a new hat (in which to go to London, to confession) that Sylvia did not allow herself to become alarmed. ‘I hope it may rest there’, she wrote in her diary. ‘I think it may, as in fact she has one very suitable hat.’

  Valentine had been sent a novena by Father Weekes to apply a little grease to the slow machinery of decision, and Valentine performed it, though it caused her private embarrassment: ‘the awkwardness of the language & the downright silliness of the “hymns” & some of the remarks I am to make to Our Lady put me into a state of definite UN-grace!’28 When Sylvia went into Valentine’s room about a week after this, her eye fell immediately on a new object there, ‘a small rosary by her bed, curled up neat as a snake. The comparison was instant, it must have shown in my look, or in my prim removal of the gaze; for afterwards in my sitting-room she began to talk more of going back to that bosom; and her objections were the kind of objection that, I thought, she had already discounted or slighted, and she talked without the smallest accent of dubiety or effort in her voice: she talked as though she had “gone and done it”.’29 Sylvia still tried to maintain a calm face towards all this, thinking both that it might blow over and that she should not interfere in Valentine’s private affairs. Valentine, misled by Sylvia’s reaction into believing she approved the idea, went to bed with a lightened heart.

  The next day Valentine showed Sylvia pages of her diary relating to her movement back towards Catholicism, to explain herself. It was a mistake. To Sylvia, they were simply horrifying and corroborated all her fears about what was happening to Valentine; worse, what had already happened. It was as if Valentine had been stolen away from under her nose. Valentine saw with desolation that Sylvia was suffering from ‘severe shock’: ‘she looked frighteningly like she had looked about Elizabeth – shaken and on the edge of sudden tears.’30

  It became difficult, almost impossible, to talk about the matter after this. On 11 March, Sylvia noted in her diary, ‘This morning Valentine drove to the Cat. church at Weymouth. A difficult matter to enquire into. I heard it was very full. I presume it may shortly be fuller.’ Valentine was very keen to remain ‘anonymous’ for as long as possible, hence her choice of Weymouth for the Mass, but as soon as she told the three or four people she felt ‘had to know’, the news began to spread and became what Valentine had dreaded, an item of small gossip. Valentine could attend Mass, but not communicate yet, for there were business matters to clear up. It was discovered that for some reason the decree of nullity which had terminated Valentine’s marriage was void in the eyes of the Church. Until she could trace the documents and the husband to prove otherwise, she was still Mrs Richard Turpin. Sylvia, knowing that on the heels of documents and husbands would come penance and contrition, began to fear that if the Church kept her to the letter of the law, Valentine might be forced to leave her and that certainly their long and happy years together would now have to be reviewed in the light of sin.

  There was only one mitigating factor in all this for Sylvia and that was that Valentine had said of Mass that it gave her pleasure: ‘So pleasant, she said; and the old spell snapped back and worked again, and I knew I could ac
cept it, if it is pleasant to her.’31 Sylvia decided to stand firm and try to weather it as best she could. She understood matters of faith, for she had one of her own, Valentine, to whom she had promised to be true twenty-five years before. ‘[Valentine] swears it will make no difference to our relation – and a minute later I was saying that I should undoubtedly settle down and get used to it. These two statements are incompatible, and both are sincere, and what happens with a sincere incompatibility I shall have to find out.’32

  Six weeks later, when Valentine was still pursuing proof of the nullity of her marriage (‘the last hurdle in the Grand Ecclesiastical’, as Sylvia called it), Sylvia wondered, after a happy day together, whether she was really beginning to get over the shock, ‘or whether I am acclimatising, with my usual despicable hold on life, to a pis-aller.’ Valentine was happier by the day, though it troubled her to be in ‘a tract of country we cannot walk about in together’. ‘For my part, I think it would be better to walk about in it freely, even if we disagree about whether it is pleasant or not: but I think it exasperates her unbearably, and I think she cannot overcome her sense of wariness with me, when we are on that ground.’33 Wariness was inevitable when Sylvia was forever biting back remarks, and there was much to remark: Valentine’s growing collection of statuettes by her bedside table, the recital of prayers before bedtime (‘like taking up a drawbridge’), the candles lit to Blessed Martin Porres when Kaoru stayed out for the night, the keeping of such anniversaries as Valentine’s shot-gun reception into the Church back in 1925. ‘Flippancy is the only answer, the only remedy,’ Sylvia decided, though again this was unshared country, for Sylvia could not refer to the church in Weymouth as Our Lady Queen of Winkles nor to her devotional candles as ‘blue nightlights’ in front of Valentine. Looking at a pious prayer leaflet one day in Valentine’s absence, Sylvia laughed so incontinently that Mrs Chubb, the charwoman, put her head round the door to see if Miss Warner was all right. But ‘Holy Crumbs’ was what Valentine read every morning and night with a straight, indeed sombre, face.

  Valentine had rejoined the Church intending to keep as low a profile as possible, but she could not help attracting other people’s curiosity and attention; her very modesty conspired against her, drawing her further into the Catholic social life she had wished to avoid. Her capacity as chauffeuse was often in demand, and her sense of duty prompted her to take up the tiresome jobs no one else wanted to do. Sylvia began to resent the side effects of religious observance, the lack of leisure it left Valentine, and the headaches, caused, so Sylvia believed, by early Mass on an empty stomach, followed by ‘church-porch button-holings’.

  There was no doubt that Valentine was a valuable new member of the flock. She was unostentatiously devout and always sincere. Though she had hoped to be at best a ‘bad Catholic’, she was in fact a very good one, certainly in matters of observance. And the fascination which she had always held over certain types of women continued to work in or out of a church, leaving her with an impressive list of converts to her credit, among whom was her own sister Joan. The relationship between the sisters had improved rapidly since Valentine was made to feel that Joan relied on her. Valentine had such a compassionate and protective nature that she found it almost impossible to refuse any appeal to it. She pitied Joan and, just as she had done as a tormented small child, longed to gain her love and trust. They began to see much more of each other and share holidays in Norfolk on a motor launch, where Candy was a welcome guest, and Sylvia not. Joan even went so far as suggesting she and Valentine should live together in Norfolk, and have a jointly-owned antiques shop. As ever, she was desperate to emulate her younger sister.

  Ruth, who was eighty in 1957, also wanted to live with or near Valentine, and Valentine kept her eye on estate agents’ windows in Dorchester for her. Sylvia was very displeased with the way Valentine was mauled by her ‘vampire-bat’ relations, and often incurred Valentine’s wrath saying so. Valentine was constantly alarmed by reports of disaster and near-death in Winterton, but Sylvia took the news of the latest ‘heart-attack’ calmly enough: ‘One day the Wolf will really get her [Ruth], poor wretch – but till then she will go on like this, spending and causing others to be spent.’ In 1959 Ruth went to live, temporarily, she thought, with some nieces in East Sussex, Valentine’s plans for Dorchester having come to nothing. Ruth found the change of scene and company invigorating, as always. When Sylvia and Valentine took her out for the day to Worthing, Ruth was frisky as a kitten and ‘in raptures telling everyone how ill she is’.

  Catholicism led to a number of serious arguments at home about politics, which Sylvia and Valentine both used to show up the underlying hypocrisies in each other’s behaviour – Sylvia for being unchanging in her views, Valentine for having altered hers. Sylvia maintained a very unchippable admiration for Stalin all through the 1956 Politburo renunciations and revelations of Stalin’s purges. The one matter in which she had to admit herself disillusioned was Stalin’s exclusion of the French at Yalta, but for the rest, the blacker he was painted, the more firmly she stood by him and scorned his detractors. There was not a glimmer of disapproval from her at the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956, though it horrified Valentine, who thought it as provocative and unjustifiable as Hitler’s incursion into Czechoslovakia in 1938. They also disagreed profoundly on the Russians’ treatment of Pasternak. Sylvia felt her old enemy Stephen Spender was right in saying (in a letter to the papers) that anything that happened to Pasternak in Russia would be the fault of those exploiting him in the West. Valentine was furious, incredulous, and told Sylvia that she was mad to ‘white the Russians by blackening someone else’. When Sylvia cited Franco’s treatment of writers and journalists in Catholic Spain as being much worse, Valentine agreed, but added that Franco had never had any pretensions to respecting intellectuals, whereas the Russians ‘have played that old gramophone record (which once sounded charmingly true) for so long now that it is full of cracks and pits and blanks … and still they play it. (I suppose it has become like the Blue Danube to our mothers! Most of us – the aging soi-disant Intellectuals – soften and twitter and break into happy tears when we hear it – remembering the heavenly waltzes of our gaudy youth, clasped in the Bear’s arms …)’34

  One of the last issues over which they were to feel politically unanimous was the proposed building of an atomic reactor on Winfrith Heath, which first came to their attention early in 1956. There was great opposition to the plan, naturally, from the local people; fear of explosion and contamination, the certainty of the landscape of the Heath unalterably changed for the worse; the influx of workers, lorries, noise and mess into the area. Sylvia and Valentine immediately set about writing to the papers and making their objections known. Sylvia also had the active support of Reynolds Stone, and together they wrote to The Times about the reactor. The next January, when the public inquiry was being held, Sylvia was asked to speak in opposition to the choice of location. The scientists at the inquiry appeared to her ‘a shabby, scurvy-looking lot’, a far cry from the scientists she had known in her youth. Her turn came on the third day: ‘I spoke briefly on the letters after our Times letter, and came home on a cold frosty night. It is all no use. The heath is doomed.’35 The speakers for the project were all men of substance, those against an inept woman and a cranky common-land expert. Construction of the plant began the same year.

  A little while after the inquiry, Sylvia and Valentine were discussing the matter with Katie Powys and Alyse Gregory, who was desperately unhappy about it (the reactor is visible from every hill-top on Chaldon Down). Alyse asked to what purpose does one strive ‘against mobs, officials, atom bombs’ and how, she asked Sylvia, should she feel about such wasted efforts at the end of her life? ‘I said, “When I die, I hope to think I have annoyed a great many people.” And Katie, suddenly breaking back into the old Katie, rubbed her hands on her knees and shouted out, “That’s it. That’s it. I like to hear that.” ’36

  The ‘chasm’ opening
between Sylvia and Valentine disturbed Sylvia mentally as well as emotionally and she began to have not only the brown dreams which intimated to her coming madness, but a recurring ‘vision’ of a brown, slug-like creature she referred to as ‘the horror in the hood’ and which, not surprisingly, frightened her a good deal. On bad days, she felt herself more and more like the senile Nora; on good days she was simply ‘ripe for otium cum dignitate’. Though flippancy was one sort of medicine against her unhappiness, it could not be used too often, nor against Valentine. In the spring of 1957 Sylvia put off Paul Nordoff from visiting because she felt it might make Valentine feel isolated, even ‘ganged-up-against’: ‘this Roman Catholic business is like a third person in the house (as you said) and a third person bent on mischief-making. If you came now, and we absorbed ourselves in the opera [Nordoff was working again on his opera of Mr Fortune’s Maggot] it would expose her – in the state she is now in – to feeling out of it and unwanted, and that would drive her further into this damnable R.C. persuasion that mortifications are sent from God, Crosses to be embraced, sufferings offered up. […] you are the only person to whom I speak of these things at all. I try to think of them as little as possible. For while she still loves me – and she does, however far away all this has dragged her from my side – I don’t want to alarm her by looking careworn or horrified, or plain dumbfoundered. And besides, Paul, I must face it, though it destroy me. Part of it must be my fault. She would not, she could not, have turned back into that church if loneliness, unhappiness, sense of frustration, disappointment, disillusionment, had not driven her.’37