Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  Valentine’s love letters and Valentine’s poems were all that could comfort her now. Posting the poems, after agonies of choosing and arranging, seemed to Sylvia another milestone ‘in my long journey towards my dear death’. She was keeping the old anniversaries again – finding Miss Green, moving in to the cottage, becoming lovers – and read her 1930 diary day for day in 1972, like a breviary. She felt feeble and lonely, stuck in ‘this cellular prison of time’, with Valentine’s presence waning and herself the prey to folly. One evening she heard footsteps overhead – light, intermittent. They were not Valentine’s footsteps but ‘with some such thought’ Sylvia ran upstairs. Moth was in a corner with a dead vole. ‘Weeping for my foolishness, my childish old age foolishness, my loneliness’s credulity, I came down and went on with the poems.’

  The intimations, when they came, were much more unworldly and real, so vivid that she felt sure of imminent death.

  […] somewhere about 3 a.m. I woke in my sleep and there she was beside me in actuality of being: not remembered, not evoked, not a sense of presence. Actual.

  I was sitting in the kitchen and she standing beside me, in a cotton shirt and grey trousers, looking down on me, with love, intimately, ordinarily, with her look of tantalising a little, her easy amorous look. She was within touch of my hand. I looked at her and felt the whole force of my love for her, its amazement, a delighted awe, entrancement, rapture. We were familiar, ourselves to ourselves. I was withheld from speaking. I looked. I gave myself. I loved with my whole being. No words occurred to me. I knew I must not try to touch her, and I was wholly an embrace of her. And then without ending, it was at an end. I was conveyed into another layer of sleep.21

  And again, on 9 November, the third anniversary of Valentine’s death, Sylvia dreamed ‘with total distinctness’ of Valentine in a long dress of brilliant rose colour, a dream of reunion. Walking up to Maiden Newton post office later that day against a brisk wind, Sylvia considered the odd duality of her life: ‘an old woman lopsided with parcels, looked at kindly as come down in the world, inwardly alight with my dream.’

  In the summer of 1972, Susanna Pinney left Dorset to take up a job in Italy, and in her absence Sylvia made friends with the young widow of an Austrian count, Gräfin Antonia Trauttmansdorff, who lived in the same village as Reynolds and Janet Stone. Antonia was widely and eclectically read, with a wayward imagination masked by gentle manners. This delighted Sylvia, as did Antonia’s taste for the eighteenth century and Europe, and her combination of a disillusioned, mischievous mind with one that was also searching, ardent and open. What began as a slight social acquaintance grew rapidly to mutual liking, love and an alliance based on frivolity and diversion. One of Antonia’s talents was for pen-and-ink drawing, and she entertained herself and Sylvia by creating ‘surrogate holidays’ through pictures. These ‘holidays’, in which Sylvia often appeared as an owl, and the many other private jokes they shared were very liberating, as Antonia has described:

  The games which Sylvia used to play with me were the games of a disillusioned mind. If one believes in nothing, one can pretend to believe in everything, the whole ragbag. I used to draw cartoons for Sylvia and she often contributed ideas. Our God could sometimes be an old Edwardian roué, who had become tired of philandering, or a family doctor or, on occasion, a Jethro Tull looking over the fields as Satan wrought havoc with the wheat. Satan on the other hand might be an Italian puppet master or a decadent French poet. In such diversions of fantasy the next door neighbour can become St Paul and the mouse in the larder can become Hercules.22

  The advent of Antonia marked a significant change in Sylvia’s life; her loneliness was eased, her imagination challenged, and as a result she was livelier than she had been in years. The opportunity to be flippant and to exercise the more acid and malicious side of her wit had presented itself and Sylvia took it willingly. It was not so much that the wound of her bereavement had healed as that she was exasperated at living so long. The letters and poems had been attended to, her business was done. She gave herself over to divertimenti.

  Sylvia gave up writing realistic stories and turned back to the subject of ‘Something Entirely Different’, written three years before. Elfindom and its anarchic, amoral inhabitants suited her mood exactly: she was herself set outside ordinary human society by her bereavement and the parallel elfin world with its ruthless rationality and freedom from sentiment appealed strongly. In an interview she said, ‘I suddenly looked round on my career and thought, “Good God, I’ve been understanding the human heart for all these decades. Bother the human heart, I’m tired of the human heart. I want to write about something entirely different.” ’23 The stories drew on her knowledge of the Border ballads and fairy lore; her material an intriguing mixture of Legends of the North and the memoirs of Saint-Simon:

  The mysterious tribe of fairies are erroneously supposed to be immortal and very small. In fact, they are of smallish human stature and of ordinary human contrivance. They are born, and eventually die; but their longevity and their habit of remaining good-looking, slender and unimpaired till the hour of death have led to the Kingdom of Elfin being called the Land of the Ever-Young. Again, it is an error to say ‘the Kingdom of Elfin’: the Kingdoms of Elfin are as numerous as kingdoms were in the Europe of the nineteenth century, and as diverse.24

  This extraordinary departure seemed calculated to irritate and confuse a great many readers, which probably added to Sylvia’s pleasure. Speaking of these stories in an interview she said, ‘I hope some of it will annoy people because that is the surest way of being attended to.’25 She used Elfindom as a mirror to society, although all the satire in her elfin stories is very casually arrived at; she seems too uninterested in human dealings to aim at them with any care. She adopted a heartless, detached narrative style for the purpose and invented a great many sociological facts:

  Elfhame is in Heathendom. It has no christenings. But when a human child is brought into it there is a week of ceremonies. Every day a fasting weasel bites the child’s neck and drinks its blood for three minutes. The amount of blood drunk by each successive weasel (who is weighed before and after the drinking) is replaced by the same weight of a distillation of dew, soot, and aconite. Though the blood-to-ichor transfer does not cancel human nature (the distillation is only approximate: elfin blood contains several unanalysable components, one of which is believed to be magnetic air), it gives considerable longevity; up to a hundred and fifty years is the usual span. During the seven days, the child may suffer some sharpish colics, but few die. On the eighth day it is judged sufficiently inhumanised to be given its new name.26

  To write about elfindom, Sylvia ‘inhumanised’ her prose; the rhetorical equivalent of the blood-to-ichor transfer. The results are peculiar, both brutal and amusing, with not a moral guideline in sight. Many people considered the elfin stories to be Sylvia’s most original work: to others they were little more than an old woman’s folly. She threw herself into them with all the relish of a self-indulgence, and, propelled by curiosity and ‘passionate’ excitement, completed seven of the stories in 1973 alone. ‘I never want to write a respectable, realistic story ever again,’27 she said.

  On 6 December 1973 Sylvia’s eightieth birthday was celebrated at the Garrick Club by a select group of friends which included Bea Howe, Ian Parsons and Norah Smallwood. ‘I never thought to drink such wines again – nor to eat a more superlative fish soufflé with prawn sauce. There was no one there I had not known & liked for a long, long time; & by the end of the evening I felt that the waiter and waitress were also dear old friends, they looked on our decent mirth with such kindness.’28 The next morning she rose ‘with octogenarian energy’ and went to the Chinese exhibition at the Royal Academy. Her vitality was as boundless as her devotion to pleasure; she was determined to make the best of age, and extract amusement from it whenever possible. ‘I am cultivating a new Vice for my old age,’ she wrote to Joy Chute. ‘I go to bed early – 10.30 or so, eat half
an orange, read about the Tractarians and go to sleep. The cats flock to bed with me, & see how much of them can sleep on my face. By compression and involution they manage quite a high quota. There are not enough poems in praise of bed – and rather too many of them are taken up with epithalamiums.’29

  Suddenly, two years afer Valentine’s death, Sylvia had started to garden passionately again, and put enormous energy and love into it, although she no longer felt very interested in the state of the house. In 1972 she found the perfect char, Hilda Cleall, a Cockney married to a local man. Sylvia enjoyed Mrs Cleall’s voice and company quite as much as the fact that the house was tidied. Bea Howe recalls how on a visit to Frome Vauchurch she heard a noise downstairs very early in the morning and went to investigate. It was Mrs Cleall tidying the kitchen, because, she said, Sylvia never remembered to do it and she wanted to get things straight before her ‘official’ entrance later in the day.

  Drives out on sunny days, fireside conversations on chill ones and, from 1974 onwards, Christmas, were all undertaken by Antonia. ‘Every difficulty can be overcome by having an Antonia,’30 Sylvia wrote. Antonia came to the house several times a week and brought things to show Sylvia or give her: a basket of pears, books, figs, an item of gossip, a piece of meteorite. Once they had a ‘truly Addisonian morning’, eating strawberries and discussing Antonia’s illustrations to Crabbe, and when Antonia went to China in the summer of 1975, Sylvia missed her much more than she expected to.

  Although Sylvia still found herself ‘craving and craving’ for Valentine to appear to her, the peculiar intensity of the early apparitions had gone. On the seventh anniversary of Valentine’s death she wrote in her diary and marked with an asterisk: ‘rainbows an inherent possibility: the sun – so the cloud – so. The rain-washed transparency of air in between. So apparitions.’ It is as if she was waiting for something to happen. A later entry for the same day is ‘Sea-Symphony – my love in the doorway. Her exact height,’ but though this sounds comforting, it had not the intimate quality nor the actuality of before.

  In the spring of 1976, Sylvia appears to have been preparing a larger, probably collected, edition of Valentine’s poems, but found it intensely difficult to write the foreword and epilogue. Going back through Valentine’s diaries and notebooks was a melancholy business, and on Valentine’s Day, reading her own careworn diary of 1969, Sylvia was struck by ‘a false thought’, that she was happier than then. ‘False and flimsy and soon dismissed,’ she wrote, no doubt appalled at the imputation of infidelity that being ‘happier’ implied, but there must have been something in it, if only a nagging sense of guilt at enjoying an ostensibly jovial old age. The joviality, as she knew, was part of her ‘despicable hold on life’.

  As she wore down physically there was less to find amusing in old age. During Antonia’s absence in China, Sylvia suffered some back trouble which led her to invoke the help of her friend with the black box. ‘I feel as if I’ve been rolled on by passing cart-horses, but they have passed,’ she wrote in her diary. To David Garnett she wrote: ‘Do you ever feel the childishness of old age? I don’t mean second-childhood, but the particular childish excitement at being able to do things dexterously? – to pour out milk without spilling it, to put things back in their proper places, to be capable and responsible? It is a pure pride, as it was then. I only get it occasionally, and it lasts like morning dew.’31

  A bleak short poem she wrote in 1973 has a similar theme:

  Learning to walk, the child totters between embraces;

  Admiring voices confirm its tentative syllables.

  In the day of unlearning speech, mislaying balance,

  We make our way to the grave delighting nobody.32

  III

  Sylvia had lived long enough to see the reprinting of her early novels and a certain growth of interest in her as a writer. Lolly Willowes and Mr Fortune’s Maggot were being reissued under the umbrella of feminist works and she was pleased to have After the Death of Don Juan sought after and The Corner That Held Them reprinted by Chatto & Windus. Norah Smallwood planned to publish a collection of Sylvia’s elfin stories, Kingdoms of Elfin, early in 1977 and in America, where the New Yorker had made them known, the stories subscribed 6,500 copies before publication. Sylvia herself suggested to William Maxwell, whom she appointed as one of her literary executors, that a selection of her letters could be made after her death and there was interest too in her poems, which surprised her, as she wrote to the publisher in question, Michael Schmidt: ‘It is the most astonishing affair to me to be taken notice of in my extreme old age.’33 Peter Pears, a friend of her later years, proposed to put on a Sylvia Townsend Warner day at the Aldeburgh Festival. At first the prospect seemed rather alarming, but when she realised he meant 1977, not 1976, Sylvia was pacified: ‘I might well be dead by then.’

  Her flow of elfin stories was checked in the spring of 1976 when Mr Shawn let it be known that he thought the New Yorker had published enough of them. They had taken fourteen over the previous three years and rejected only a handful, but all the same Sylvia felt disappointed and wrote to Mavis Gallant that Mr Shawn ‘doesn’t like me […] Vieux singe ne plaît à a personne.’34 Though she had lost her appetite for any other kind of story, she set herself to tease it back to life, the impulse in her to work, even aged eighty-two, was so strong. Money was not a consideration, for she had more than enough and gave much away, especially to friends faced with medical expenses or divorce suits.

  1976 was the summer of drought when even Sylvia, who was devoted to heat and sunshine, found herself wilting and needed all her reserves of stoicism to witness the ravages wrought on the garden. ‘The only creatures that thrive are moths and butterflies,’ she wrote to William Maxwell, ‘but they prefer it indoors, and flit about the house as though it were woodland.’35 The drought was followed by floods in the autumn and the river in full spate, ‘violently flowing towards me, breasthigh, as I walked in the squelching garden. Flood water all round the house.’ Sylvia’s physical strength was considerable: in the winter the house was hardly heated at all and the door often left wide open. ‘The temperature of the rest of the house [apart from the heated rooms] was the same as outdoors,’36 William Maxwell noted. But in 1977 Sylvia’s stamina decreased noticeably. In March she had a fall, and though she claimed to feel better for it next day, it was the first of a number of similar incidents. She dropped a bottle of milk and felt ‘weak and silly’ – next she broke a plate. In May she fell on all fours on the river path. ‘I am deplorably the worse for this last year’s wear and tear,’ she wrote to David Garnett, ‘and a prey to vain regrets – that I shall never see the Aurora Borealis again, or listen to larks – too deaf; or walk up hills, too lame, or re-read Clarissa in small type.’37

  Antonia came every Tuesday morning to wake Sylvia with coffee. She was impressed by Sylvia’s instant alertness on the point of waking: Sylvia often began to talk before her eyes were open. Similarly, when she fell asleep, she did so very rapidly. There was no grinding in and out of consciousness. Antonia was a Quaker and in March Sylvia began to go to Meetings with her, where, she said, she played music to herself in her head. In the summer Sylvia gardened hard, but in spates rather than swathes. In her diary she made a note on fatigue: ‘Things remembered, one by one, and at intervals […] each involving a gymnastic of going off to do, to make a note of it: Continuity has to be powered by a working-order battery.’

  On 20 June she set off for Aldeburgh with Antonia to the festival’s day in her honour. It included a reading of her ‘Twelve Poems’, xeroxed and stapled for the occasion, a short story, ‘The Cold’, and settings of her poems by Alan Bush and John Ireland. There were also settings by Paul Nordoff, a melancholy reminder of his death by cancer earlier that year. On that familiar east coast, haunted by her own and Valentine’s younger selves, Sylvia was cast down by thoughts of times past:

  Hoisting my misshapen fat clumsy body with constipation and bad toes out of my bath this morning, I th
ought of past love and pleasure and wished it dead, so that I could escape it.

  But all the wings of my spirit, love and beauty and the sea and music and art and all knowledge and enlightenment and sorrow and pleasure and joy ALL came to it via the body I was wishing dead. My body was the hostess. And even now my sight totters to my eyes to see the wind and the sunlight on the sea.38

  And on a separate page she wrote: ‘By dying I shall lose my loss. The final bereavement? The reconciliation.’

  She went on into the winter exhausted much of the time, and with bad legs. ‘An atrocious night’, she wrote on 14 October: ‘Combatted legs with cigarettes and Wordsworth.’ Nevertheless, she gardened vigorously the next day. On the 17th she fell against the tool-shed ‘with a loud clang’. She felt ‘deboshed’, and though she still sat down to write, wrote ‘fatuously’. ‘Frost fading. So am I.’

  Her eighty-fourth birthday passed quietly with Bea Howe at Frome Vauchurch and she spent Christmas Day at Baglake, Antonia’s home. Her right foot had started to give her pain, and the district nurse was coming regularly to bandage it, but bandages posed problems of their own, such as how to bathe with one leg. Snow was coming from the north and the Rayburn had gone out twice in one month.

  One preoccupation was off her mind, for in November Antonia had accepted her offer of the use of the house after Sylvia’s death. With that settled, Sylvia made her final will at the end of November. In it she gave £36,000 in bequests and willed her residuary estate (valued at £165,000 after her death) to five organisations: the London Library, the National Trust, the University Federation for Animal Welfare, the National Council for Civil Liberties and the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund. Antonia was to be allowed to live rent- and rate-free in the house for as long as she liked. The trustees of her estate were her solicitor, Peg Manisty and Joy Finzi. Her literary executors were Susanna Pinney and William Maxwell.