Sylvia Townsend Warner Read online

  Nothing puzzled Sylvia more than the disparity between her fame at home and in America. Buck accounted for it in economic terms: narrative is for the prosperous, although the Wall Street crash in October of the same year did not seem to have any marked effect on Sylvia’s sales. The most seductive reason for going to New York had been financial, ‘having once tasted the decency of having enough to spare for good manners, it is hard to contract again into a careful dowdy’, and Sylvia made at least $400 from the Herald Tribune. In September she received £542 in royalties from the Viking Press for The True Heart, a book which in England had earned her half that sum. It had some very mixed reviews at home and seemed to excite either pious admiration or puzzlement. No one really knew what to make of it.

  The True Heart, which had come out while Sylvia was away, is a re-telling of the story of Cupid and Psyche, but as the original was not generally recognised, a great deal of ingenuity in transposing names and characteristics from Apuleius to Victorian England was wasted. Sukey Bond, a young orphan, has just gone into service with a farmer’s family in the Essex marshes when she meets and falls in love with Eric Seaborn, a well-bred simpleton and a victim of fits, who, being a social impediment, is kept there by his parents, a rector and his beautiful, haughty wife. This lady, Mrs Seaborn, does all she can to thwart the match between Sukey and Eric, but Sukey’s true heart triumphs, after a long separation and adventures which include an interview with the madam of a brothel (Juno) and an audience with Queen Victoria (Persephone). The theme is pure love between two simple souls, and Sylvia could hardly have chosen a more difficult one:

  This love was not a thing to be trifled with, or to be weighed against duties, or to be put off with a pretext, with a presently: one might not request it to dance attendance on a bad leg, to cool its ruthless heels until a funeral had been tidied away and a trunk packed. Looking at love in the lane between Chelmsford and Halfacres, Sukey had seen all her scruples and vanities of obligation vanish like a handful of dust thrown in at the open door of a furnace.91

  David Garnett was not among the book’s admirers. He wrote to Sylvia in May, deeply critical of the latter part of the story (the part which Vita Sackville-West especially liked) and of Sylvia’s characterisation of Sukey: ‘You do a very dangerous thing: you invite the reader to feel superior to your heroine. You hand him a stick and say: squail it at her – she’s only an aunt sally and a half-wit.’ ‘Lord knows how you’ll take it after all your maple sugar,’92 he added, contemplating the lunch he’d arranged with her. Their friendship did not suffer in the least. At the lunch, Sylvia listened attentively to Garnett’s criticisms and said she had been convinced of her sin. This was far from saying that she repented of it.

  Sylvia was hardly home from America when Percy Buck announced that he would have to go to South Africa for a few months to his son’s fruit farm, which was in difficulties. These two long separations were harmful to the intimacy between Buck and Sylvia at a time when both were entertaining doubts about it anyway. Earlier in the year, Sylvia had a niggling conviction that love is impossible between equals. One must have a little condescension or a little awe.’ Buck was vulnerable to feelings of jealousy and insecurity for all his apparent composure. When Sylvia had by accident posted an empty envelope to him, he replied by sending her a blank postcard; but on reflection – and the infrequency of their meetings left too much time for reflection – felt it could have been a deliberate signal to him that all was over. On another occasion he turned up at the flat unannounced to find Sylvia about to entertain Harold Raymond to dinner. A third chair was drawn up, and Buck was very sociable, but put out. Sylvia, who was probably enjoying the situation, set her guests to acts of domesticity after the meal: Chatto was sent to work in the bathroom with rawl-plugs, Teague to bottling chutney in the kitchen. Chatto’s efforts were fervent and unsuccessful, but Buck stuck to the chutney despite appeals for help, saying to Sylvia with meaning, ‘I should be sorry to succeed where he had failed.’

  In 1929 Sylvia was beginning to feel dowdy and ageing, and this was exacerbated by the uncertainty she felt about her relationship with Buck and the unlikelihood of there being anything comparable to replace it. Her figure had changed, her hair displeased her, looking ‘like Disraeli in middle-age, so oily and curly’ and she decided to let it grow, against the fashion. Also, it had struck her suddenly that ‘what was wrong with my face was that the orders had been mixed. Such a comfort to have a name for it, at any rate.’ This mood of low confidence was noticed by a young French friend of Sylvia’s who, having spoken of her own lovers, ‘enquired when we were going to hear about mine. So I said I should require a little notice in order to beat the moth out of them.’ Nora was making a few enquiries too. At Little Zeal that summer, in the middle of a conversation about account books, she drew Sylvia’s attention to a cousin who was able to extract offers of marriage from young men on only three meetings. Sylvia was on her mettle and replied that ‘ingenuity could do anything, though personally I diverted my ingenuity to ward them off from doing it. Still, said she, the third time. O said I, that’s nothing. I have often had young men who didn’t propose to me the third time they met me.’

  Charles Prentice had met Sylvia so often and still not proposed that they seemed doomed to eternal friendship. His devotion to Sylvia grew steadily, and as a result Sylvia began to take him somewhat for granted. Staying with the Garnetts at Hilton Hall in the winter of 1928, Charles had taken dog William off on a long walk to save Sylvia from the cold: ‘Hearing footsteps ringing on the frozen road and snorts I said “It is difficult not to treat Charles like a dog, he is so obliging.” Bunny remarked “He is a great deal more obliging than most dogs.” ’ Prentice was an acutely observant man, and perhaps an awareness of being watched by him affected Sylvia’s behaviour. After a dinner with Charles, she made an interesting note in her diary: ‘He knows me very well, I think, and perhaps I scarcely know him at all […] That extreme gentleness excites me and I find myself behaving with him as though I were alone out of doors. It’s almost unnerving to be so freed of self-consciousness. What he thinks of me I cannot imagine, because I know myself apart from my books. I do not see them as integrally part of myself. But I fancy he is giving the peach to Lueli, taking Mr Fortune in the taxi, picking up Nelly Trim’s handkerchief. Yes, I feel sure of this; that accounts for my lack of self-consciousness. As an artist I am not self-conscious, and when I am with him my mind flows as though I were my full artist-self, not the naked Sylvia that wears clothes and is met by people. Suddenly I do something clumsy or idiotic and Sylvia is in torment. But I soon forget her again, she is no more to me than the woman reflected in the mirror opposite.’93

  Seeing the works as integrally part of the man is exactly what Sylvia herself was doing to Theodore Powys. Her book about him, though not progressing very fast and stooping under the working title ‘Eikon Animae’, was still a serious project and her diary is full of the raw material for it, anecdotes about Theo, his bon mots. Sylvia was freed by Charles’s attentions into her ‘full artist-self’, but Theo did not thrive under scrutiny and was driven further into self-consciousness. When he had requested and read the first section of Sylvia’s book, his response had been so evasive that Sylvia immediately began to have doubts: ‘He praises the writing so much that I can’t help wondering what he won’t disclose about the matter’, but she was not deterred from publishing a section in A Chatto & Windus Miscellany 1928, and the project only ground to a halt in 1930. At Easter 1929, when Sylvia was down in Chaldon with Charles, she was still observing the village for her book: Billy Lucas’s drunken singing and Mr Child’s coughs ringing through the lanes at night were rendered quaint by being part of Theo’s context. Theo himself had ’flu and, having finished Kindness in a Corner, had begun work on his last novel, Unclay. When it appeared in 1931 Unclay was Powys’s twenty-fourth publication since The Left Leg in 1923.

  In the spring of 192 Sylvia began a novel, ‘Early One Morning’, with ever
y expectation of success. It was, in outline at least, the most Powys-like story she had ever conceived, which perhaps explains why she was unable to finish it:

  Arthur Clay lives in Rebecca’s cottage and feeds her hens. He preaches sermons explaining the stock exchange and giving tips to investors. Mr Spider becomes extremely rich and seduces Sheila. The Gillespies open an Agapemone. Mr Clay abets all these doings, with his success as a pastor he becomes more and more cold-hearted, till he thinks he is possessed by the devil. He takes Sheila to live with him, and subjects her to a torment of chastity. The Bishop steps in __? The communion service in Hebrew, the Bishop fails to understand the language. Mr Clay must turn out the Gillespies and live in the rectory himself. He goes into the empty house and hangs himself.94

  It was a summer of false starts. She had too many ideas for stories, and none of them had time to settle. Some galling disappointments resulted, such as when the Atlantic Monthly, which had begged to take her next novel in installments, rejected a long story called ‘This Our Brother’. Sylvia, who hated to waste work almost as much as she hated to be rejected by a magazine editor, touted the story round to a small press and in the summer, in her first really cynical move as a writer, re-modelled and completed the story ‘Elinor Barley’, begun in 1926, purely because she had found a well-paying publisher she did not particularly respect willing to do a signed limited edition.

  The writing which gave her most real pleasure at this time was poetry, in which she felt she had found a new manner. ‘My fingers drop myrrh’, she wrote in September, and when she began her long narrative poem ‘Opus 7’, she found it scandalously easy to write. On one occasion she was so carried away with writing a poem that she almost forgot a dinner engagement with Charles Prentice: ‘I was dressed by the time he came, but perfectly demented, and told him I was like the Victorian ladies who hurry home from a lover to meet a husband’s eye and pour out the children’s milk, still quivering, with not a grain of powder to veil their shameful radiance.’

  A poem which Sylvia wrote in July, when she was in Lavenham trying to distract herself from Percy Buck’s absence in Africa, was read in a magazine later in the year by Valentine Ackland, and aroused her curiosity:

  How happy I can be with my love away!

  No care comes all day;

  Like a dapple of clouds the hours pass by,

  Time stares from the sky

  But does not see me where I lie in the hay,

  So still do I lie.

  Like points of dew the stars well in the skies;

  Taller the trees rise.

  Dis-shadowed, unselved, I wander slow,

  My thoughts flow and flow

  But whither they tend I know not, nor need to surmise,

  So softly I go;

  Till to my quiet bed I must undress –

  Then I say, Alas!

  That he whom, too anxious or too gay,

  I torment all day

  Can never know me in my harmlessness

  While he is away.95

  Valentine had time on her hands and a speculative nature. She admired the poem, but wondered who the lover could be whose absence was received so equivocally. Some months before this, when she was driving down Inverness Terrace (she had a flat of her own very near by at 2 Queensborough Studios), Valentine had caught sight of Sylvia looking ‘haunted and despairing’96 – a private face, very different from that presented at Violet’s tea-party. She felt an immediate impulse to help and wrote to Sylvia offering the use of her rented cottage in Chaldon, specifying dates. Sylvia was not able to accept it, but appreciated the disinterested generosity of the gesture and the faultless manners of the young woman she had snubbed so pettishly.

  Sylvia’s planned summer of distractions was too full for spare cottages. She invited a stream of friends to Lavenham and went on from there to stay at Elsworth with Wobb, from whom she was alarmed to hear that Tommy still asked after her. She visited the Machens in their new house at Amersham, which she had helped them to find, and on one occasion took with her a young American woman she had met at a party in New York, Elizabeth Wade White. She went to stay with the Raymonds at Wayford, then on for a week at Beth Car, where Theo gave her his opinion of his brother John Cowper’s new book, Wolf Solent: ‘he thought John kept teasing his characters, not like “an honest Sadist”, but lecherously.’97 But all this jaunting did not shake off Sylvia’s melancholy and on a walk over Chaldon Down, when Theo was decrying the unattractive manner of a female relation, Sylvia said she was no better herself:

  Theo faced round. ‘You will never be like that, Sylvia. You could not be.’ ‘Why Theo?’ ‘You are broad-minded. You are interested in the stars.’ He thought it better for the wife to be much younger, for one can make allowances to [sic] a child. With my mind on my own affairs I said, What happens when the child is grown into a disappointing woman like another. ‘But she will always keep some childish tricks, some absurd way of behaving. He will recognise that.’ Then we came into the sheepfold at Rats Barn, full of fat young lambs like impudent cherubs, and I wondered if to any shepherd a sheep kept some lamb’s tricks.98

  Sylvia went on to Little Zeal for a month, during which several problems connected with her father’s estate came to a head with an enormous tax bill which had been laid on his book royalties. The family appealed against the assessment but lost, and the trustees became liable for tax against all the royalties since 1916. Mr Sudbury, a tax lawyer, arranged for the Revenue (known to the Warners as the Income Poop) to be paid and the estate adjusted to prevent the same thing happening again. Sylvia had for some time been one of the trustees of the estate (after the death of Mr Byng) and had been in the invidious position of having to countersign her mother’s cheques. Now an arrangement was made whereby Nora had free access to her own money and Sylvia received half the current royalties on her father’s books and some invested royalties’ dividends. On 4 September, Nora handed her a statement, neatly compiled by Ronald, of her inheritance: £320 per annum allowance, £250 per annum marriage settlement and £195 as her share of the dividends. This gave her a secured income of almost four times her salary, plus dividends, to add to her already substantial income as a writer. She was rich. ‘I had no idea it would be anything like this, and felt flabbergasted and rather distressed. In fact I didn’t like the prospect of being a wealthy old lady at all. But I must buy a sealskin coat and take lessons in riding a bath-chair and prepare myself, I suppose.’ Sylvia invested a large part of the new money and, as always after a windfall, bought presents for all her friends, thinking ‘how scandalously easy it was to be kind, when one had money to spend.’

  She had been back in London for three weeks when, coming through her front door, she found Percy Buck standing in the hall, having got in with the laundry. Sylvia was uncombed and unprepared, but the greater surprise was to discover ‘how massively intimacy can just sweep one on as before. And there was the reflecting piano-top, accepting the umbrella, calm as a glacier, and it was only when he said Kiss me, that absence – his share of it – reared in my ears for a moment.’ She decided to dismiss her misgivings, her feeling that his love was less than before, and they settled back into the old pattern.

  There were, however, new circumstances. Tudor Church Music was finished, the last committee meeting ravelled up and, in early October, the final meeting took place with the Carnegie Trustees, who ‘made no foolish pretences of not being delighted to wash their hands of us’. The same group of editors had undertaken to edit William Byrd’s Cantiones, but the funding of the work was limited and necessitated economies which Sylvia objected to on grounds of inefficiency. She had just finished preparing William Wooldridge’s Gradualia for Oxford University Press – a job which had taken years and paid only £25. ‘Never mind,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘Virtue shall be its own reward: for never again will I undertake anything of this sort.’ One must assume that the offer she accepted soon after to edit the ‘Eton Manuscript’, Henrician church music, for the Pla
insong and Medieval Music Society was better paid.

  Musicology may not have brought many benefits, but it did bring pleasures. In May 1929, Sylvia had gone to Newcastle with Ram to hear Tallis’s forty-part motet, ‘a glimmering uncountable tissue’ and in June there was a service at Westminster Abbey to commemorate the work of Robert White, for which Sylvia had prepared all the music. She went alone to hear it. ‘It was entertaining to hear my added cantus part careering about that roof on 18th-century wings.’ To many people she was still better known as a musicologist and composer than as a writer. Meeting Herbert Howells at a concert, Sylvia was asked which she was doing, ‘Music, or t’other thing’. She had to tell him that she had given up composing, not adding that she had also destroyed most of her music. ‘Perhaps you will be composing again when you’re 85,’ said Howells. Sylvia replied that at eighty-five she should be taking up monumental sculpture.99

  By the end of 1929 nothing had happened in Sylvia’s personal life to assuage the feelings of gloom and resignation which had been building up all year. Nervousness and depression did not come naturally to Sylvia, and she took them badly, but resignation was the worst-fitting mood of all, and almost her undoing. Despite Mrs Keates’s assurances that 1930 would be an especially lucky year for her, Sylvia only wished for it to pass unobtrusively, perhaps in the country. Walking in Kensington Gardens with William she wondered ‘if I could ever get back into the queer inhuman world I inhabited in my salad days. But I can’t.’ Everything was changing away from her. On 15 January 1930, Bea was married to a young composer and conductor, Mark Lubbock. Sylvia had gone to say ‘goodbye to my nymph’ and saw the wedding-dress ‘spread in her bedroom – an enormous rectangular ghost – like an aeroplane, shrouded in tissue-paper and dust-sheets.’ After the wedding she went back to 113 and wept by the gas fire.