Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  Sylvia took the plane home from Alderney with eight cartons of annotated books from White’s library, a growing fascination with White himself and several new friendships; with Carol Walton and Harry Griffiths, friends of White, and with Michael Howard and his wife Pat. It was flattering to be sought after as a writer, admired as a woman and amicably squabbled over by Cape and Chatto & Windus, who agreed to a temporary joint-ownership of her: ‘I never thought to become a Helen of Troy in my old age,’ she said. Sylvia was disappointed, though, that Valentine did not seem very interested in the project: ‘Everything loving met me, but no interest; and again I realised that I should not come home having got drunk at the party.’

  Sylvia received the contract for the book two weeks later, having already planned chapters and an experimental beginning, and on the heels of the contract came the Howards in a car ‘like the great bed of Ware’, full of manuscripts and notebooks belonging to White. Valentine cleared part of the shed, but White spread himself all over it, and flowed into the house. Undaunted by the mass of paper, Sylvia set to, reading his books first, then his diaries, then the notebooks. By the end of the year she was well into her first draft, getting up early most days to secure some hours of undisturbed writing. As she finished each section she posted it to Carol Walton to be typed and to either Michael Howard or William Maxwell or David Garnett – White’s and Sylvia’s mutual friend – to be read. It was a remarkably overlooked first draft, and being overlooked ran up against criticism occasionally. Garnett wrote ‘vehemently denying’ any link between White and Turgenev and putting forward various amendments, none of which Sylvia used. ‘No one will believe my book,’ she wrote, ‘because it is drawn from his diaries not from what is called life.’

  She set out intending it to be White’s White, ‘a self-portrait’, and in her first letter to Michael Howard had stated grandly that ‘the essential in biography […] is that the subject of the biography should have known himself; and this T.H. White certainly did.’63 When she had laboured her way through his papers (one of her surviving notebooks for T.H. White is numbered ‘89’), it became less easy to say whether he had ‘known himself’ or not, there were such extremes in his character – child and man-of-action, swashbuckler and scholar, do-er and dreamer – that White seemed sometimes to have slipped down the gaps and disappeared. Eight months after her letter to Michael Howard, she was writing to William Maxwell, ‘I find I am writing this book from the standpoint of an Aunt’,64 but that changed too. A biographer is both master and servant to his subject, and the servant can be extraordinarily possessive. After two years work on her book, Sylvia wrote in her diary: ‘Sometimes as I handle these mss, notebooks, letters, the sense of his existence – that he handled them, knew the look of them – almost overwhelms me, and I think, I shall die when they are withdrawn: they are mine, he bequeathed them to me.’

  Over this period, Valentine’s health did not improve and she was forever being plied with new medicines. In April 1965 she was put on cortisone again to combat what appeared to be her main problem, ‘thyroid trouble’. A few months later her head began to ache in the old place and all her fears of arteritis, blindness and incapacitation crowded in. She was given sedatives. But even more depressing was the car accident Valentine had in June 1966, which led to her licence being endorsed after forty blameless years on the road. What actually happened is unclear. Sylvia dismissed the other party’s evidence as a pack of lies, and it was never decided whether Valentine’s brakes had failed, or whether she skidded on oil – or mud – in the narrow lane outside Mappowder, or, having drawn in to let the other car pass, turned the wheel the wrong way. At the impact, Valentine threw herself sideways to protect Fougère and thereby hit her head against the dashboard instead of through the windscreen. Sylvia was not in the car at the time, but, alerted by Lucy Powys on the phone, reached the Dorchester hospital just as Valentine was being taken out of the ambulance. She had a broken nose, two black and swollen eyes, a bruised temple, and was bleeding profusely. After examinations in Dorchester and Weymouth, Sylvia managed to take her home. A night in hospital, she maintained, ‘would have been as ruinous as the accident – and far more prolonged.’65

  Valentine hired a car while their five-month-old Renault was being repaired (they replaced it with another new one), and got some of her old confidence back, but never all of it. Sylvia looked on, horrified, one day in October as Valentine completely lost her nerve manoeuvring out of the King’s Arms garage, fell, grazing her knee, and cried out repeatedly, ‘No one helps me!’

  The day-to-day running of the shop was getting too much for Valentine, and in May 1966 she spoke of closing it down except as an agency to supply customers with specific items. And she was deeply melancholic – though she said little of this to Sylvia – about the state of her beloved Church since the changes initiated by the second Vatican Council. The foundation upon which she had re-built her life seemed to be giving way, and hearing the new English version of the Mass every Sunday was almost beyond her capacity for mortification, although Sylvia, when asked her opinion, could only muster ‘a scholar’s distaste’. At the same time, Valentine felt isolated because of all the emotional energy Sylvia was pouring into her book on T.H. White.

  In the summer of 1966 Sylvia had embarked on the painful business of reading White’s intimate diaries, bequeathed to Michael Howard with strict instructions that they should stay in his care. As a compromise – so that Sylvia could read them – Howard entrusted them to the Dorset County Museum. In the peaceful atmosphere of the Museum library, she went through the contents of the yellow tin trunk as if she were going ‘deeper into dungeons’. ‘Perversions like his are like a goblin child that will not quit the grown man’s being. I would like to present the whole series to Cheltenham College.’ She did not put any sexual ‘revelations’ directly into her book; as she noted, White’s aberrations were ‘so puny in fact, so overwhelming in feeling’ and it was the feeling she represented. ‘There is a kind of ill manners about such discussions with strangers: and that is what the printed page means.’ There were people who did not want their names mentioned in connection with White and one of them turned up on the doorstep at Frome Vauchurch, ready to harangue. ‘Oh poor Tim, what awful friends you made,’ Sylvia exclaimed in her diary, adding afterwards, ‘N.B., however; the anguish, dull to searing, of persons who from their desire for higher things, make friends with Tims.’

  Sylvia finished the book on a Friday evening in mid-December, a few days after her seventy-third birthday, and wrote in her diary, recalling the envoi at the end of Mr Fortune’s Maggot: ‘Goodbye, my poor Timothy!’:

  Valentine was out churching. The house so cold and silent, and I longed to rush into a congenial debauchery, to boast, moan, be praised and pitied.

  So I fed the animals and cooked smoked haddock and drank a little solitary whiskey. Then Kit [Kaoru] saw my state and said with large clear eyes that life has a lot of partings. I don’t think he will live much longer. He is becoming profoundly wise.66

  The letting-go of White was extremely difficult. Each diary to be returned, each parcel of manuscripts to be tied up, was a severing of the bonds of intimacy she had formed between herself and him. She felt she had never been at a lower ebb, and though the acknowledgements and notes were diversions, she dreaded everything being done, ‘For suppose I don’t want to write anything further? Or try, and it is dead.’ White’s friends had become her friends; she knew him better than he had known himself, more comprehensively, with her biographer’s god’s-eye view of his life, and foreknowledge of his death. It was hard to hand him over to whoever might care to read her book.

  The lights are going out all over Sylvia […] as I walked to the kitchen to eat after finishing the preliminaries I said to the air, O Tim, I don’t like to lose you; and could have sworn that a large shape – much too tall and too broad for the passage – was following me. It has been a strange love-story between an old woman and a dead man. I deliberate
ly say love, not friendship, nor intimacy. One cannot have friendship or intimacy without some foothold in living memory.67

  V

  T.H. White was published in November 1967, and was Sylvia’s greatest critical success since Lolly Willowes, praised as ‘sympathetic’, ‘shrewd’, ‘splendidly intuitive’, ‘elegant’. She was gratified as much on White’s behalf as on her own. At the end of the book is a rather badly-reproduced photograph (a late addition) of White’s gravestone in Athens, with its epitaph ‘who/from a troubled heart/delighted others/loving and praising/this life’. In a letter to Eric Hiscock, Michael Howard revealed that this was Sylvia’s work, ‘although she shrinks from taking credit for it. But David Garnett wrote to me the other day – “It is a most unusual epitaph – because it is strictly true.” ’68

  Sylvia emerged from T.H. White overdrawn on her current account, probably because her output of New Yorker stories had been so much reduced by it. She was exhausted in spirits, but forced herself to work. And, with less effort, she threw her threescore years and ten around the garden in a series of ambitious remodelling schemes, often staying out all day, which, as always, revived her vitality. One day in July 1967 she noted the garden ‘all roses, the tall and the Stourhead syringas, delphinium, crimson single pinks, Valentine’s sweet peas, canterbury bells. I sat on the old stump dangling a coffee cup and opened my senses to this small earthly paradise.’

  The stories Sylvia was writing at this time were collected in The Innocent and the Guilty, which was published in 1971. A Stranger with a Bag, Sylvia’s eighth collection of short stories, had been published in 1966 while she was still working on T.H. White. It included ‘A Love Match’, which was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Menton prize in 1968, and a selection of pieces, mostly from the New Yorker, which had been written between 1961 and 1965. The two collections contain some of her very best stories and show how her manner had become less polished over the years, and all the more powerful for it. ‘She has the spiritual digestion of a goat,’ wrote John Updike (an unexpected champion), reviewing A Stranger with a Bag, and added, ‘her stories tend to convince us in process and baffle us in conclusion; they are not rounded with meaning but lift jaggedly toward new, unseen, developments.’69 Part of this effect was achieved by Sylvia’s sudden dropping of one point of view in a story and picking up another, as in ‘Heathy Landscape with Dormouse’ when, having established our sympathies with Leo, the husband, the focus switches to his wife Belinda and everything is re-cast in the light of her view of events. Not only does this further the narrative by default, as it were, but demonstrates, as Sylvia’s stories often do, that no motives are wholly knowable, particularly our own.

  John Updike was able to write about Sylvia Townsend Warner in a familiar and unapologetic way because he was writing for an American magazine. In England, Sylvia’s stories still ‘dropped imperceptibly’ into the book market, and the tone of reviewers had become ominously respectful, as if they were talking of a valuable but useless family heirloom. Something of this tone must have crept onto the Chatto & Windus jacket for The Innocent and the Guilty, for Sylvia wrote back to Norah Smallwood with evident irritation: ‘The blurb’s second paragraph is like getting a presentation electro-plated teapot. So here is an alternative, which says something about the book instead of some kind words about a retiring Cub-Mistress.’70 The printed version of the blurb reads as follows:

  The Innocent and the Guilty is a title with intention. These stories explore the perplexing frontier between innocence which can steal a horse and guilt which cannot look over a wall – a frontier which has nothing to do with Goodies and Baddies, and lacks the reliability of classical Calvinism, since it is constantly shifting. Only in one of these stories does a character achieve total innocence, and then only by going out of her mind.

  The story she refers to is ‘But at the Stroke of Midnight’, a disturbing and unsatisfying tale which is, even so, among Sylvia’s best. It is structurally quite odd, with a series of confusing time changes, appropriate to the progress of the narrative, which is about schizophrenia. Lucy Ridpath, ‘middle-aged, plain, badly kept, untravelled’, leaves her home and husband suddenly and for no apparent reason. Adopting a dead cousin’s name and assertiveness, she becomes Aurelia Lefanu and wanders from place to place, struggling to retain her new identity and evade her old husband. Freed by irrationality she lives purely for herself and the moment, inspiring in those she meets a sort of awe. She is ‘a nova’: ‘A nova is seen where no star was and is seen as a portent, a promise of what is variously desired.’71 She befriends a broken-down, cringing tom cat, whom she names Lucy, and it is the death of this animal which ‘dislocates’ Aurelia back into her former self and propels her towards her death. ‘But at the Stroke of Midnight’, which was written in 1967, was one of Sylvia’s last ‘conventional’ short stories, and with its otherworldly heroine forms a bridge between those stories and her later development as a writer about elfindom. It is also a story with many oblique parallels to Lolly Willowes, and a comparison of the two works gives some measure of Sylvia’s tremendous scope and breadth of feeling.

  Late in August 1967, Sylvia and Valentine heard of the death of Alyse Gregory, a suicide cautiously and carefully approached across many years. ‘I can scarcely believe it,’ Sylvia wrote. ‘People so seldom get the end to crown the work. She has, dying unvexed and solitary as a blade of grass. Not a familiar voice nor a familiarised fuss round her deathbed […] As for me, I think sadly that my stock of congenial minds is running very low. Never mind, so am I.’72 Valentine watched Sylvia’s health like a hawk, and found it difficult to be reassured about it. Sylvia was very robust. She never took exercise, smoked and drank black coffee continually, sat for hours writing then worked in the vegetable patch regardless of the weather, and never came to much harm. Recovering from a viral infection which she had passed on to Valentine, Sylvia wrote, ‘I try vainly to convince V. that I am well and spry again. This is one of the two hundred things she worries about. They are partly fever worries, partly habitual: Ruth coming out. I realise that it is as one ages and loses one’s natural force that one is at the mercy of heredity, the young are themselves: the ageing, their parents’ children.’

  On 12 January 1968, they celebrated the thirty-seventh anniversary of their marriage:

  It was a cold night like this:

  Midwinter, motionless,

  We had come back from a concert.

  The singer, still wrapped in her music, had greeted us

  – A general blessing and a nuptial, though

  She had no thought of such and we did not know.

  The hall where we listened, the substantial

  House we returned to, toppled into the abyss,

  The instruments of music were burned to ashes

  This, too, was long ago.

  Times change and disconcert:

  The frail promise

  Made on that winter night holds true on this.73

  Two weeks later Valentine was told by Dr Hollins that, despite the odd coloration over the lump on her left breast, and the pain in it, there was no sign of cancer. A week after this, he said she ought to have the lump removed, for she was tense, and the lump was an agitant. Anxiety seemed a likely cause to Valentine, remembering the lump she developed during the summer of 1949, and she told Sylvia forthrightly that she was in despair about the Church, and feared she would have to leave it. This concerned Sylvia deeply, for Valentine seemed ‘pinched in half’ by the decision ahead: ‘12 years ago, how my heart would have welcomed this: But now I can only hope she will somehow reconcile herself and stay in. She would be desolate without it.’ They were both, by this time, very frightened about Valentine’s health, and their fears seemed justified when on 6 March a surgeon in Weymouth said he thought the lump was cancerous. She was to have a biopsy, and, if the carcinoma was malignant, an amputation.

  ‘She is truly brave, I am not. I have only good manners to depend on,’ wrote Sylvia. The weary bus
iness of informing people began, and choosing a surgeon. They plumped for Sir Hedley Atkins on the recommendation of two friends, not knowing that he was President of the Royal College of Surgeons. They tried to continue as normally as possible until the appointment with Sir Hedley in London, but for the first time, Sylvia had to consider the prospect (she did not face it yet) of Valentine’s death. ‘A life without her seems inconceivable: physically inconceivable, like trying to conceive walking without a sense of direction, a flow without a bed to flow into, an aimless plenitude of time.’ Valentine passed Sylvia’s room one day and heard her saying to their cats Pericles and Titus (Kaoru’s successors, both Siamese), ‘The days are gone.’

  The appointment in London was complicated by Sylvia developing a high temperature and being ill at Farnham, where they had broken the journey. Valentine had to leave her raving in a fever – ‘I have never felt so drenched in ignominy,’ Sylvia said – and go on alone to be told by Sir Hedley Atkins that it was certainly cancer and that she must have an operation within weeks. Peg Manisty, a Catholic friend of Valentine, met through a correspondence in the Tablet in 1962, fetched Valentine and took her to Waterloo, whence she returned to Sylvia still flat out in her Farnham hotel. ‘Not only had I totally failed her,’ Sylvia lamented, ‘I had become an alarm and an encumbrance. Not only had I become an encumbrance, I had become a senseless, unspeculative log.’

  Valentine’s operation took place on 10 April at Guy’s Hospital. The surgeon removed a lump ‘the size of a golf-ball’,74 and felt it had all gone ‘cleanly’. Valentine convalesced for a while at Peg Manisty’s house in Mayfield with Sylvia, and then went home, hopeful that the worst was over, bar the twenty-five sessions of radiation treatment she was prescribed over the next two months. Sylvia cast herself upon the garden again. She had written one story for the New Yorker, though it took her four months on and off, and had made two more dolls. Otherwise it was nothing, nothing but the garden.