WarnerST

Helen at A Gallimaufry is hosting another Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week, and I think I’ve managed to join in every year – my bookshelves are nothing if not replete with unread STWs. I have rather failed with many of her novels, and gave up on The Flint Anchor a few weeks ago – but I tend to have much greater success with her short stories. I bought most of the available collections in a spree in 2011, and am gradually reading through them – and 1962’s A Spirit Rises is brilliant.

In her novels, Sylvia Townsend Warner travels widely through time and space. In her short stories, she tends to stick to contemporary England – and this is doubtless one of the reasons I love them so much. She doesn’t need to take us to another world; she can turn her observant eye to the world directly in front of her. And nobody is as good as Warner at the slightly unexpected twists of wording that show deep below the surface of people and their relationships with one another.

It’s always hard to write about a short story collection, so I’ll just pick out some of my favourite stories. Right up there was ‘A Dressmaker’, about an older woman who decides to stop being a dependable relative (shades of Laura Willowes!) and set up as an independent dressmaker. She is mostly doing dull, everyday outfits, but finds most fulfilment on the rare occasions when she has been asked to make evening gowns. And then quiet Mrs Benson comes – seeming quite drab, but bringing extravagant fabrics and asking them to be made into fanciful, beautiful pieces. Here is a section of it – best read slowly, enjoying every word choice Warner makes:

Five months later, she reappeared, and once more it was an evening gown she wanted. Winter had done its worst to Mrs Benson, but had not tamed her ambition. She brought billows of glistening white gauze, splashed with vermilion and rose and lemon, together with a wide ribbon of mignonette green for a sash – ‘like an azalea bed’, she remarked. Mary was about to ask if Mrs Benson was fond of gardening – many ladies were, and looked the worse for it – when Mrs Benson went on, ‘And after this, there is something else I’ve been thinking about, something quite different.’

‘A spring tailor-made, Madam?’ Mrs Benson’s daytime appearance made this a natural assumption.

‘For sad evenings.’

The word ‘sad’ had secondary meanings. It can be used for cakes that have failed to rise, for overcast weather. Mary supposed that the next dress she would make for Mrs Benson would for those dusky, clammy evenings when one almost lights a fire but instead puts on a shawl, and she was glad to think that for once Mrs Benson was facing realities. Mrs Benson was doing no such thing. The silk she brought, patterned in arabesques of brown and mulberry and a curious dead slate-blue, was fine as a moth’s underwing. Held against the light, it was almost transparent, like a film of dirty water.

‘You’ll have a slip underneath, of course, Madam. What shade were you thinking of?

But for once, Mrs Benson had not got it all planned and settled. She stared at the stuff as people stare at slowly running water, and said nothing.

Nobody but Warner could have written this. There are so many things I love in it, but ‘those dusky, clammy evenings where one almost lights a fire but instead puts on a shawl’ stands out. Just wonderful.

As another example, here’s the opening paragraph of ‘Randolph’, about a man returning to his sisters after some time away:

The date of the glossy new tear-off calendar was January 1 but from the window behind the writing-table one saw the vaguely smiling sky of a London spring. It was a room on the first floor, square, and rather too high for its floor-space. The folding-doors in the back wall were open, and gave a view of the room behind – once the back drawing-room of a Victorian mansion but now furnished as a bedroom. Both rooms were inhumanly tidy and smelled of moth-powder. Two women came in and began unwrapping the parcels they carried. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m reeled in immediately. She sets up the small world of the short story so quickly. I said earlier that Warner was describing the world in front of her – but often it is a hazy, timeless world. There are few 1960s references – and I suppose many of the stories would have appeared in the New Yorker in the previous decade. Perhaps it was writing for an audience across the ocean that meant Warner didn’t put English culture too front and centre.

When I read a later collection of stories, The Innocent and the Guilty, for Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week a couple of years ago, I found it all a bit vague and abstract. Some of the stories in A Spirit Rises go a different way – it’s the only time I’ve seen Warner use the precision of the unexpected denouement. I’m not sure those perfectly suit her writing style. Better are those like ‘A Dressmaker’ or ‘The Snow Guest’, about an escaped prisoner in a snowy countryside, which end on a stray observation. Something with far-reaching implications, but which is only a moment in a series of moments – not a turning point or a conclusion.

My favourite collection of Warner’s remains Swans on an Autumn River, though this was at least partly because I read them in a castle in Dorset. A Spirit Rises isn’t quite as meteorically wonderful as that book, but it’s not all that far off – it certainly includes the finest writing I’ve read this year, and I know will reward careful, slow, luxurious re-reading. If you’ve only encountered Warner the novelist, please don’t hesitate in exploring her extraordinary talent as a writer of short stories.

This week is Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week, organised by Helen at A Gallimaufry – I was mulling over which collection of short stories to take off the shelf when I decided to do a bit more of a curveball. I bought Warner’s biography of T.H. White (published 1967) nine years ago, and I can’t remember whether that was before or after I read her letters with David Garnett, in which they discuss it a lot. And, indeed, White’s letters – which Garnett edited.

Much like when I read Roger Fry by Virginia Woolf, this is one of those times when I’m more interested in biographer than subject – but a very intriguing portrait emerged nonetheless.

I’ve only read one book by White – Mistress Masham’s Repose, which is sort of a long-distance sequel to Gulliver’s Travels – but I probably saw the Disney Sword in the Stone at some point and he’s one of those names that is around a lot. For most people, he is best known for his Arthurian links – but I believe he has more recently taken on fame by association with Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, in which he features.

Hawking is one of the passions that comes out in Warner’s depiction of White. She is not a biographer who gives equal weight to all the different stages of a man’s life. She zooms straight through childhood in a handful of pages (which didn’t bother me at all; I always want to find out about an author being an author, not a child). What she draws out is White’s love of animals and particularly hawks, his writing, and his isolation.

Some years are dwelt on for so long that I began to feel trapped – 1939, for instance – whereas others flash by. We learn that White’s one real love in life was a dog called Brownie, and she is perhaps the most vivid secondary character of them all. His grief when she dies is long and painful. We also learn quite a lot about his writing processes, mostly from his own perspective. Rather wisely, Warner relies extensively on quotation. Why paraphrase what already exists? The biography becomes almost a patchwork of other people – White’s letters and diary, the letters of others, the memoirs of others. It’s hard to say, at times, whether Warner is a biographer or a collagist.

Chief among these is White’s friend and encourager David Garnett, author of Lady Into Fox and much else. It’s hard to know whether he would be considered quite so significant a figure in White’s life if he had not also been such a good friend of Warner’s, and thus able to provide her with a great deal of written material. But if the share of perspectives is a little skewed, it is none the less interesting for that.

We chart White’s shifting interests and anxieties. There is a curious attachment towards the end with a boy called Zed, about which Warner is coy and oblique. It certainly raises disconcerting questions about the suitability of their relationship, and any more recent biographer would investigate the issue more thoroughly. Warner introduces it mysteriously and leaves it mysterious.

What we see, collectively, is that White was sporadically successful and seldom content. The sentence that sums up the whole comes near the end: ‘He had been unlucky with his happinesses’.

Warner writes biography in some ways like her fiction and in some ways not. It shares the tone of her fiction in the belief that everything is marvellous, in the true sense of that word, but that nothing is especially so. But it has fewer of those sentences that crystallise everything in a suspended moment. Fewer of those sentences that jolt you slightly by their unexpected rightness. But I did write down one such, about Brownie:

There are photographs of her in his Shooting Diary for 1934 -slender, leggy, newly full-grown, with the grieving Vandyke portrait expression of her kind.

I had expected something a little more distinctive stylistically from this deeply distinctive writer. But perhaps she decided not to make herself the star of the book. Yet she cannot help sometimes writing as an exasperated friend – ‘Of course, he should have gone to see her. Rush on by new projects, he didn’t.’ – and sometimes as a fellow author giving her opinion on a work in progress.

There is enough in here to delight the reader who comes because they love Warner. There could be more, and I would have welcomed it, but then it might have cloaked the emerging of the curious, sad, impassioned, conflicted, enthusiastic, inventive, restricted T.H. White.

When Helen announced Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week, I thought I’d pick up one of the volumes of short stories I have waiting. I bought lots in an impulsive moment during my DPhil, and am now slowly working my way through them. Little did I think that Helen would also be reading The Innocent and the Guilty (1971) – you can read her thoughts on her blog.

This was the last book of short stories that Warner published that wasn’t themed – the ones that followed were about elves or about childhood. And, indeed, innocence and guilt aren’t the dominating themes of this collection – I love Helen’s idea that they are linked by the concept of escape.

Certainly that is the keynote to the most arresting story of the collection – ‘But at the Stroke of Midnight’. It is in very much the same area as Lolly Willowes – her 1920s novel about an unmarried woman who decides to stop being dependent on her brother, moving to the middle of nowhere (and, er, other things happen that I won’t spoil). In this story, though, Lucy is married – and we initially see her disappearance from the vantage of her concerned, confused, slightly helpless husband. And then the story becomes about dual identities, as well as searching for self definition.

It’s interesting that, in the approximately five decades between Lolly Willowes being published and ‘But at the Stroke of Midnight’ appearing, Warner has turned an already ambiguous escape into something even more ambiguous. There are no definite emotions, let alone a conclusive ending.

And that lack of conclusion, or perhaps lack of clarity, permeates the collection. There’s a story about drinkers meeting, and the final moments suggest (half-suggest) that one of them has a very troubled life; there is a story about a devastating flood; there is one about a widow guarding her writer-husband’s legacy. In earlier collections, Warner might have shown us a moment where they changed. She is brilliant at those tiny moments that make lasting differences – or the tiny moments that illuminate whole lives. Here, I found the tiny moments didn’t really make anything illuminated. They happened (or perhaps didn’t); they confused the reader into an impressionistic sense of what the story felt like, rather than anything imprecise about what it actually was. This reader, at least. ‘The Green Torso’, for instance, has some wonderful moments about false friendships and pride – but they are in a whirl of other elements. I finished most of the stories feeling that they hadn’t quite coalesced into one radiant beam.

I think there are two outliers, in this. The final story, ‘Oxenhope’, is gentler and more lovely than the others. And ‘Bruno’ is more confusing, more unsatisfactory – to me, that is. I didn’t know what was going on or how the people were delineated.

Warner always writes great sentences. She is a delicious stylist, and often very funny. And these stories might be right up some readers’ streets. For me, having discovered what exceptionally striking, immersive, satisfying stories she could write, in the other collections I’ve read – The Museum of Cheats and Swan on an Autumn River – these ended up being the smallest bit disappointing. And I think that’s because those other two collections rank among my favourite ever short stories.

I set a tall order for Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week, and it couldn’t quite be met. If this is where you start with her stories, you’ll probably appreciate the many gems and insights, and so you should. But, let me tell you, there are greater delights in store!

One of the reasons I never make ‘end of year’ lists of best books until the last possible moment (more or less – I don’t spend New Year’s Eve parties typing away) is because sometimes I read something brilliant in the last few days of the year. And picking up Swans on an Autumn River (1966) by Sylvia Townsend Warner, I’m glad I’ve waited. (It was published as A Stranger with a Bag in the UK, but I’ve gone with the title of the edition I have.)

This is my second collection of short stories by Warner, and it’s just as brilliant as the first one I read (The Museum of Cheats). The more I read by her, the more I think – with the possible exception of the brilliant Lolly Willowes – that short stories were truly her metier, rather than novels. She somehow puts humanity powerfully into these curious, wise, and very adeptly controlled short pieces.

Warner is exceptionally good at first lines. They aren’t the pithy, quotable sort that are laboriously placed as some sort of diving board, after which the tone of the story becomes much more natural – we all know that variety, and they are indeed fun to quote, but don’t always sit well with the rest of the narrative. Warner captures your attention, but there is no jolt as we move from the first sentence to the second. Here are a few of them:

We had divorced in amity; when we met again after the statutory six months we found each other such good company that we agreed to go on meeting from time to time. (‘A Jump Ahead’)

From that morning when he woke to the sound of the first autumnal gale lashing like a caged tiger against the house fronts and knew with physical infallibility that after all he was going to recover, Guy Stoat burned with impatience to get out of the County Hospital and go home. (‘The View of Rome’)

As he quitted the Aer Lingus plane from Liverpool and set foot for the first time in his life on Irish soil, he was already a disappointed man. (‘Swans on an Autumn River’)

My favourite story of the collection is the first one, ‘A Stranger with a Bag’. In it, a travelling salesman notices a rickety old house out of his train window for the first time, and – on an uncharacteristic impulse – decides to go and see it. Warner weaves together his imaginative journey with the one he actually takes, putting both into simple sentences, so the reader is (for a while) unsure whether things like ‘he walked towards the house’ are actually happening or not. The scene he finds is unexpected, to him and to the reader, and the title shows Warner’s tilts of perspective – as he realises that, to the household, he is just a stranger with a bag.

I like it so much because it mixes elements of fairy tale with the unshakably mundane. Warner is very good at scene-setting and buildings – she shows us the house from a distance and then close-up, knowing that a house is very different from these perspectives, and somehow conveying it in her writing.

Other topics she looks at are the visit of a young relative to his grandmother and great-aunt, and the clash of his recollections of them with the real experience; a new wife and an old wife collaborating unexpectedly; a disturbing picnic. Many more. In perhaps her most famous short story, ‘A Love Match’, a brother and sister quietly become a couple.

A few of the stories feel a little too dramatic at their climax – the title story, ‘Swans on an Autumn River’, perhaps falls into that category – but, at her finest, she is brilliant at undercutting a reader’s expectations and, in doing so, showing a truer, brighter light on human nature. And that doesn’t mean that she always sees the worst – she sees past either cynicism or pollyannaism into the heart of what makes people who they are.

This beautiful, beautiful edition of The True Heart (1929) by Sylvia Townsend Warner was given to me as part of a wonderful Secret Santa present from Christina (the secret was eventually revealed!) in a Virago Modern Classics LibraryThing exchange. That was back in 2014, and it recently got to the top of my list by being nominated by Ali when I asked people to tell me what to read from my tbr. Thank you both, because I loved it!

It is slightly shaming that, despite writing about Warner at length in my DPhil thesis, I had only read a few of her novels. Because my thesis was thematic, I concentrated on the novels which fit the criteria (they had to be fantastic, for one thing – if you want to know about fantasy vs fantastic, then that can be another post one day!). That meant that I spent a long time reading the diaries, letters, essays etc of Warner and others, but didn’t look too hard at the novels which came after the ones I was interested in.

I was also rather nervous – because, while I love and adore Lolly Willowes, I liked Mr Fortune’s Maggot rather less, and was bored rigid by Summer Will Show and The Corner That Held Them. That may well be because of my struggles with historical fiction, and I know those novels are well-loved by many. But it meant I was curious how I’d feel about The True Heart.

The novel has two things in its favour: it’s set in the Victorian period, which is apparently within my remit for acceptable historical fiction (and within living memory when Warner wrote it), and it was written in the 1920s. Yes, that is often enough for me to fall in love with a book, but in this case it’s notable because I think Warner was at her best with her first few novels – and this one was her third.

I’ve rambled long enough without actually telling you anything about the plot. Apparently it is a retelling of Eros/Cupid and Psyche, though I had forgotten that when I was reading it (and don’t know the myth, thinking about it, so who knows.) Our heroine is Sukey Bond – a bright and imaginative orphan, who leaves her orphanage to be farmed out to… well, aptly, a farm. She is 16, and the place out in the Essex marshes has been found for her by Mrs Seaborn – a woman whom Sukey admires and idolises beyond all others. In the months that passes, it is a sort of idol of Mrs Seaborn that she keeps in her mind, while she tries to get her head around her new scenario. Here’s a fairly length excerpt, which gives you a hint of Warner’s greatest strength – her style. I love how her writing mixes the pastoral, the emotional, and the wryly amusing.

She hoped that Zeph would offer to take her to the sea, for though she knew that she had but to follow the windings of the creek eastward to find her way there by herself, she lacked courage to go alone. Herds of cattle and horses grazed over the marsh; but she did not dread these, for she soon discovered that the worst they did was to follow her, snorting and inquisitive, but not intending her any harm. It was the sea itself that she dreaded. The Bible had taught her that the sea was to be feared. storms arose there, the cruel floods clapped their hands. Perhaps a wave would take hold of her and bear her away, or perhaps she would see a ship wrecked.

She hoped in vain. Zeph had a poor opinion of the sea; he would have thought it no compliment to a respectable young girl to offer her a sight of that inscrutable nuisance. When they set out he turned his face firmly inland, conducting her to inspect Mr Hardwick’s new silo. Sukey gazed with due respect at this rarity. It reminded her of the Tower of Babel, and she thought how dreadful it would be if Zeph suddenly began to speak French.

The family are chiefly of the ‘poor but honest’ variety, though the girlfriend of one of the sons (Prudence) is more of a minx who is determined to subjugate Sukey. She has recently been in Sukey’s maid role, and thinks that the best way to elevate herself to equality with the family is to distance herself from her former life. Sukey continues to be something of a naive innocent.

It is with this frame of mind that she meets Eric. She first mistakes him for the third son of the family, but is quickly disabused on this front. He is, in fact, Mrs Seaborn’s son – a kind, nature-loving young man, usually silent. His first overtures to Sukey are offering to show her where he has found a secret orchard. And, drawn to kindness and gentleness, Sukey falls in love with him. They get engaged, in private, near a church – which Eric thinks they can just climb into to be wed.

It is only later that he has a seizure, and Sukey is told by the malicious Prudence that Eric is considered an ‘idiot’. He is taken away from the farm.

We follow Sukey as she quits her job, leaves her things, and goes to find Eric – hoping to be welcomed by the Mrs Seaborn she has built in her head. That’s not quite how things go. And the rest of the novel sees Sukey try to win the freedom and independence that she and Eric need for their simple, harmless love. Along the way she meets curious characters (including Queen Victoria!) and there are amusing incidents – my favourite being where she offers to be a maid at a house which, the reader quickly realises, offers other services…

This is a beautiful book, unsentimental in every scene, but never cynical or too detached. Rather, it shows the strength of a character and the gentle power of determination. Above all, it shows Warner at her best descriptive power and storytelling ability.

I don’t think it’s up there with Lolly Willowes, which is truly a tour de force, but The True Heart is still a great novel and I’m grateful to Christina and Ali for working together – albeit unknowingly! – to get me to read it.

Others who got Stuck into it:

Heavenali: “The novel is deceptively simple, but it is a glorious non-sentimental celebration of love, and the wonderful capacity of the human heart.”

Rough Draft: “The beautiful and deeply textured descriptions and the odd encounters give the novel a fantastic, dream-like quality.”