The Innocent and the Guilty by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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!