A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  She sent the manuscript to a friend in England, who recognized as she opened the parcel ‘the strange, pungent smell of the smoke of woodfires, familiar to those who know a Karoo farm.’ It was published in 1883, partly on the recommendation of George Meredith, and with its great success Olive Schreiner entered on her passionate dialogue with the world at large. Of all Lyndall’s confused perceptions, the clearest is: ‘When I’m strong, I’ll hate everything that has power, and help everything that is weak.’ Olive was not a leader, or even an organizer, but she was a great advocate, and the evangelist her father had failed to be. The only necessary claim on her attention was weakness. She needed, as she freely admitted, to be needed. For women’s right to financial and sexual independence, for the Boers against the British, the small farmer against the capitalist, the blacks (always ‘Kaffirs’ or ‘niggers’ to Olive) against the whites, she spent herself recklessly. All this was in the face of a chronic illness, apparently asthma, which is often said to be psychosomatic (though never by any one who has had asthma), and an inability to settle for long in one place. Her restlessness meant, as her biographers Ruth First and Ann Scott point out, that she ‘lacked a constituency.’ In spite of her record of friendships, she felt the pain of isolation, both personal and political. ‘Indeed the two were joined, for her sense of politics included the necessity for the individual to define her independence and make it an inviolable part of herself.’

  First and Scott’s Olive Schreiner was written in the context of the women’s movements of the Seventies. The earliest biography, by her husband Cron Cronwright, has been under fire ever since it appeared in 1924, and indeed even before that, since several of Olive’s women friends refused to lend him their letters. Cronwright, as a practical man, a farmer and lawyer, probably felt he had done a fairly good job and put the best face on things, but he allowed himself omissions and even alterations. Now the Clarendon Press has published the first of two authoritative selections of the Olive Schreiner letters.

  The book is divided into three parts, beginning in 1871, when Olive was sixteen. One of the troubles about collecting letters is that before the writer becomes famous no one is likely to keep them: there is only a handful of family letters here, but they are touching in their awkwardness and affection. Hard work, scarcity, the death of nieces and nephews, all in a careful copybook style. In 1880, with the help of her brothers, she scraped together £60 and sailed to England, meaning to study medicine. She never completed her training, either as doctor or nurse, and this was one of the personal failures—as opposed to her great public successes—which made her call herself, at the end of her life, ‘broken and untried.’ At last, however, except for persecuting landladies, she was free, and, after a day spent ‘worrying an idea to its hiding-place,’ she had people to talk to, and was understood. A celebrity after the publication of African Farm, she launched herself into socialist circles of the Eighties, and joined the Fellowship of the New Life. ‘It’s dreary work eating one’s own fire’—but now she no longer had to, and her relief can be felt like a kind of intoxication. The most important letters are to three new friends, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, whose Towards Democracy came out in 1881, and the mathematician Karl Pearson. With Carpenter she was always on easy terms, he was ‘my dear old Ed’ard.’ She does not discuss in her letters, and perhaps never recognized, his homosexuality, nor does she criticize his version of the Simple Life, although she tells him that he has been overfed with education whereas she is ‘dying of hunger.’ Havelock Ellis, still when she first knew him a medical student, offered her a long and tender friendship that was perhaps intellectual only, although in My Life he recalls her dashing naked out o f the bathroom to explain an idea that had suddenly come to her. Rive himself, in his introduction to the 1975 edition of African Farm, mentions Olive’s ‘inability to exercise restraint over the number of themes which interested her.’ In the Letters, Havelock Ellis is asked, as her ‘other self,’ to respond to them all. Karl Pearson, on the other hand, set definite limits on their friendship that Olive seems not to have been able to keep. He was the moving spirit of the Men and Women’s Club, which met for free discussion of all matters concerned with relations between the sexes. And Olive does discuss them freely, leaving herself without defences. ‘I would like to think you could make any use of me as a scientific specimen, it would be some compensation to me.’ The break with Pearson was a dark night of her existence. She wrote, but could get nothing finished, and dosed herself with dangerous medicines. Her influence over most people she met was as strong as ever—‘I sometimes am filled almost with terror at the sense of the power I have over them,’ she tells Havelock Ellis—but she had begun to long for South Africa. Her last letter in this selection is to Edward Carpenter (October 1889). ‘Goodbye, dear old Brother. You will have to come out after me some day, when you hear about the stars and the black people and all the nice things. I’m going to be quite well.’

  By this time her younger brother Will was legal adviser to the Governor of Cape Colony, and she made a forceful entry into Cape politics. ‘There is one man I’ve heard of,’ she tells Havelock Ellis (April 1890): ‘Cecil Rhodes, the head of the Chartered Company, whom I think I should like if I could meet him; he’s very fond of An African Farm.’ She did meet him, four months after he became prime minister of the Cape, and began what Rive calls ‘a complex relationship,’ although it might perhaps be seen as grandly simple. At first she felt a ‘curious and almost painful interest’ in Rhodes as ‘the only big man we have here.’ She had the highest hopes of him politically and perhaps in other ways, walking away from him at Government House where ‘it had been said that I wished to make him marry me.’ But after he voted in favour of the Strop Bill (making it legal to flog farm servants for certain offences) she never forgave him. He came to stand, in her eyes, for the greatest of all political evils, capitalism. ‘It’s his damnable and damning gold which has first ruined himself and is now, through him, ruining South Africa.’ As to the Jameson Raid, she saw his complicity at once, although her old friend, the journalist W. T. Stead, did not. A point was reached when Olive and Rhodes were passengers on the same ship and, as she told Will Schreiner in 1897, ‘he was so afraid of me that he dared not come and wash his hands in his own cabin, because he had to pass my cabin and might meet me.’ But when there were rumours that the ‘almighty might-have-been’ had suffered a breakdown, she felt ‘intense personal pity.’

  Olive believed, or thought she believed, that women must take responsibility for their own future—this is the subject of one of her allegorical Dreams—but she had to combine this with her evolutionism, with the eugenics learned from Karl Pearson, and with Lyndall’s declaration in African Farm: ‘I will do nothing good for myself, nothing for the world, till someone wakes me.’ In 1894 she married Cron Cronwright, seeing him as he at first saw himself, as ‘something like Waldo, but fiercer and stronger.’ Cron, eight years younger than Olive, deeply respected her genius and sacrificed a good deal for her: he changed his name to Cron-wright-Schreiner and gave up farming, which he loved, for the sake of her health. Olive calls her marriage ‘ideally happy,’ and indeed continued to do so in the years to come when they found it impossible to live under the same roof or even in the same country. Only five of her letters to Cron are given here, showing their early years together as ‘tenderness itself,’ though deeply shadowed by the death of their child, who lived for only sixteen hours. ‘Morally and spiritually’—which for Olive was the same thing as politically—they were, at first, completely in tune. They campaigned together against Rhodes and the Chartered Company. The ‘Native Question’ was not Olive’s main concern as yet, although she saw, as perhaps no one else in South Africa did, that it was another aspect of the world’s confrontation of capital and labour. In the Nineties her pressing duty was to champion Boers, the small upcountry farmers, the patriarchs of her childhood. Olive’s vision of Africa was pastoral and republican. On the other side were princip
alities and powers, the ‘wild dogs of gold.’ ‘All my friends (liberals) from home write saying there cannot be war,’ sh e tells her brother in July 1899. ‘But for us there is a worse possibility than war, that of slowly falling into the hands of speculators.’ On 9 October 1899, the Transvaal presented its ultimatum. Two days later, war began.

  Olive, too ill to go to the Front as a war correspondent, as she had been asked to do, braced herself to do all she could in ‘my poor little handful of life,’ confident that her time of work would come when the war was over. Her letters show her courage, her integrity, and her intuition, and, with them, the alarming neurotic force of the Victorian ‘wonderful woman.’ It was this, probably, that made the liberal politician J. X. Merriman call her ‘one of those persons one admires more at a distance.’

  London Review of Books, 1988

  Keeping Warm

  Sylvia Townsend Warner: Letters, edited by William Maxwell, and Sylvia Townsend Warner: Collected Poems, edited by Claire Harman

  Sylvia Townsend Warner expected her correspondence to be published; indeed, she sensibly provided for it. ‘I love reading Letters myself,’ she told William Maxwell, her New Yorker editor and literary executor, ‘and I can imagine enjoying my own.’ She was born in 1893, an only child. Her father was a Harrow master, who, in a way not very complimentary to his profession (but quite right for STW), never sent her to school. She was allowed to study what she liked, and was devoted to him, emerging from the ‘benignly eccentric household’ as a musician: she was about to go to Vienna, to study under Schoenberg, when the First World War broke out. When her father died, leaving her, as she put it, ‘mutilated,’ she saw that it would be better to earn her own living than stay in the country and quarrel with her mother. She came to London, and worked as an editor on the monumental Tudor Church Music. Plain, frail, shortsighted, not quite young any more, and, for the first time in her life, rather poor, she set out to enjoy herself. ‘I am sure that to be fearless is the first requisite for a woman: everything else that is good will grow naturally out of that.’

  In her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), she puts the situation in terms of fable. The decorous Lolly sees that she must escape her family. This intimation comes to her in the greengrocer’s, when she looks at the plum jam and feels herself in a darkening orchard, where the birds are silent. To find where the jam comes from, she gets an ordnance survey map—as STW did when she set off in search of T. F. Powys, the writer she most admired. When a well-meaning relative pursues Lolly even to her country cottage, she asserts her will by transforming herself into a witch. Admittedly, she has now been captured by Satan, ‘the loving huntsman,’ but she has proved that she ‘prefers her own thoughts above all others,’ and, in any case, she feels that she knows more than Satan—more about death, for example, ‘because, being immortal, it was unlikely he would know as much.’ This is reassuring, and typical of the writer. What STW herself wanted to do, and did, was to write (though sometimes she thought she was better at sawing and digging), to hear music, and to live in the country with the human being she loved best, Valentine Ackland. The two women settled in one cottage after another, and finally at Frome Vauchurch, in Dorset.

  What happened to them? That was left in their letters, journals, and poems for the world to understand. In 1935 they became 1935-ish members of the Communist Party. In 1936 they went to Spain together for three weeks to help in the British Red Cross bureau. By 1950 Valentine had joined the Catholic Church, and STW, while remaining fiercely anti-clerical and ready to fight to the death against privilege or bullying, allowed a little irony to modify her left-wing views. ‘It takes reckless resolution now,’ she wrote, ‘to admit that one has known a more civilised age than the present. It is painful to admit it to oneself, and apparently shameful to mention it to others. Everyone is busy pretending that even if they once or twice went out to tea they always drank the tea from a mug.’ In 1949 Valentine (described as a ‘sea-nymph who can split logs with an axe and manage a most capricious petrol-pump’) fell in love with another woman, a young American, and STW courageously faced solitude, preferring ‘the sting of going to the muffle of remaining.’ The crisis passed, because, STW thought, ‘I was better at loving and being loved,’ and they returned to a life that she could only call blessed. She meant travel, many friendships, gardening, jam-making, perilous motoring, cats, books, and music. Guests might find the cottage exceedingly cold (Maxwell says that the temperature was the same indoors and outdoors and the front door stood wide open), but the welcome could hardly have been warmer. These years brought STW, not prosperity, but recognition, both here and in America, as a deeply imaginative writer whose novels and poems were most distinctively hers. More than this she didn’t expect: when, in 1967, she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature she mildly pointed out that it was her first public acknowledgement since she was expelled from kinderga rten for upsetting the class.

  In 1968 Valentine died of lung cancer. ‘I have always prayed that I might not die first,’ STW wrote, ‘though my age made it probable that I should.’ As she went through her dead friend’s possessions, she found in the coat-pockets notes from herself, ‘on the lines of Keep warm, Come Back Soon.’ They had agreed that STW should live on at Frome Vauchurch, and this, until May 1978, she did. ‘With a heart as normal as a stone’ but quite undaunted, she was still writing and reading voraciously—and giving dinner parties and denouncing Mrs Thatcher—to the very end. Misfortune and egoism, she thought, turned women into vampires—very different from witches—and this she was determined to avoid.

  Her letters, from which I have been quoting, are formal, in the sense that STW hardly knew how to write carelessly. It isn’t that she is considering the effect: she produces one, from a long habit of elegance. She knew that herself. ‘I can’t say it yet,’ she wrote to Leonard Woolf after Beginning Again came out. ‘Already I am writing like a printed book, and falsifying my heart.’ Often, however, her formality couldn’t be improved upon—for example, to David Garnett: ‘I was grateful to you for your letter after Valentine’s death, for you were the sole person who said that for pain and loneliness there is no cure.’ It enabled her to deal with publishers, and, most difficult of all, to give away money gracefully: ‘I can well afford it; I have always made it a rule in life to afford pleasures.’ Every now and then a short story that she never had time to write rises quietly to the surface:

  Now I will sit down to tell you about two very old and distant cousins of mine, brother &2009-11-8 11:01:54 sister, who live together. She is in her nineties, he is a trifle younger. They were sitting together, he reading, she knitting. Presently she wanted something, and crossed the room to get it. She tripped & fell on her back. So she presently said: Charlie, I’ve fallen & I can’t get up. He put down his book, turned his head, looked at her, and fell asleep.

  Just as careful, and just as brilliant, are the descriptions of day-by-day life in the cottage and the village, often to correspondents who had never seen either. All records of passing time were precious to STW, from Proust to Gilbert White’s notes on his tortoise. ‘Continuity,’ she said, ‘it is that which we cannot write down, it is that which we cannot compass, record or control…An old teapot, used daily, can tell me more of my past than anything I recorded of it.’ Few people can ever have described a teapot as well as STW.

  Editing this volume was clearly a labour of love, and not an easy one, for William Maxwell. Unfortunately, he has cut and edited the letters on a system peculiar to himself (‘I have used three dots, unbracketed, to indicate an omission at the beginning of a letter…I have not used three dots to indicate that there is more than the last sentence’), and, disappointingly, there is only a sketchy index. Addicts of collected letters will tell him that this is a serious mistake. STW’s index would have read, in part:

  celibacy, STW recommends

  clearing up, STW’s passion for

  coalshed, T.H. White’s diaries lost in


  cold baths, STW advises, if piano kept in bathroom

  Contre Sainte-Beuve, STW translates

  As to the selection, the correspondence with Valentine Ackland is being published separately, while some other series have disappeared or been withdrawn: still, there is plenty here. It is only a pity (though no fault of William Maxwell’s) that he has found nothing from America for 1927, when STW was guest critic of the New York Tribune, and that there is so little reference to her poetry.

  It is sad that she should have died such a short time before the publication of her Collected Poems. Claire Harman begins with the unpublished and uncollected work, arranged as far as possible in chronological order. STW is shown as an endless reviser, hard to satisfy. The Espalier (1925) and Time Importuned (1928), with their demurely ironic titles, are the only two collections she brought out in her lifetime. Opus 7, a satirical narrative in the style of Crabbe, based on the story of a ‘drinking old lady…a neighbour for many years, and I had the greatest esteem for her because she knew what she wanted,’ came out in 1931. The late poems were privately printed, except for Boxwood, which STW thought of simply as verses for Reynolds Stone’s wood engravings (although it includes the haunting ‘People I never knew’). The rambling joint collection with Valentine Ackland, Whether a Dove or a Seagull, has not been reprinted here, for the tactfully put reason that ‘it exists on its own terms.’