http://homepages.pavilion.co.uk/users/tartarus/warner1.htmBig Bill's Sylvia Townsend Warner Stuff!
(She wrote "Lolly Willowes", don't you know!)
SiIvia Townsend Warner's' first novel, "Holly Willowes" (1926), has an unusual theme for a twentieth century literary success. It tells the story of a respectable maiden aunt, put-upon by her relatives, who finds fulfillment at last. But Miss Willowes' fulfilment comes not in the shape of a mortal suitor, but in the guise of Satan himself, whom she finds and embraces in the heart of rural Buckinghamshire.
The book was an instant success on both sides of the Atlantic. In America it had the unique distinction of being the first ever selection of the newly-formed Book of the Month Club. Before its publication, the name of Sylvia Townsend Warner was unknown to the literary world apart from a slim volume of verse, "The Espalier", issued the previous year; but by the time her second novel, "Mr Fortune's Maggot", appeared in 1927, she had won the recognition of a large, discerning group of readers both here and in the United States, and was being hailed as a writer of rare promise and individuality, with a special gift for "making the ordinary seem extraordinary".
Sylvia Townsend Warner's reputation grew with each publication. It was soon evident that she was a true original, and that no-one would ever be able to compare her with anyone else. Her seven novels are widely disparate in theme and setting, and in their placing in time. Her short story collections are no less diverse, covering everything from the mundane events of village life - she excelled in writing of the vagaries and eccentricities of the lonely and old, living on limited means - to brushes with the super-natural that bring a chill to the spine.
Miss Townsend Warner's novels and short story collections, mainly published by Chatto and Windus, include some handsome volumes issued during the 1920s and 1930s, which are eminently collectable. The later, more reasonably priced volumes from the 1960s onwards, are equally worth including in any collection, several of them having colourful dust-wrappers designed by well-known illustrators.
There are many more felicities for collection among Sylvia Townsend Warner's works: scarce volumes of poetry and single stories issued in limited editions such as "Elinor Barley" (1930) which was produced with beautiful accompanying illustrations.
Sylvia Townsend Warner produced a number of other collectable works, including translations from the French and a highly acclaimed biography of the author T.H. White. She always claimed, indeed, that she couldn't NOT write; but her first love had been music. She composed libretti, and references to music, musicians and compositions abound in her written work. Autobiographical notes tell us that she reached maturity "committed to music" and would have gone to Vienna to study with Schoenberg had she not been prevented by the outbreak of the First World War.
IMMERSED
In a letter that was intended as source material for a publisher's blurb, she recalls becoming immersed in the works of "John Taverner, Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons", adding that in the fourteenth century, "England was more celebrated for its music than even for literature and piracy"! The result of her labour, "tracing, scoring and collating Masses and Motets", was her joint editorship of the ten-volume "Tudor Church Music" (OUP, 1922-29), a monumental scholarly achievement in itself.
Sylvia Townsend Warner's family background was conducive to such scholarly attainment. She was born on 6 December 1893 at Harrow on the Hill, where her father was a house-master at Harrow School. An apparently happy and comfortable upbringing - there were nannies and governesses, holidays in Cornwall and on the continent, described vividly in the largely autobiographical volume "Scenes From Childhood" (1981), and "A Spirit Rises" (1962) - came to an end in 1916 when her father died at the age of 51.
He and Sylvia had been close. In a letter written to William Maxwell after her mother's death many years later, she admitted that her father's death crippled her, "and at the same moment (I) realised that I must make my journey alone."
In the same letter she confessed that her mother had not wanted a daughter, but a son. Her mother, Nora, described as "an immensely capable, witty, autocratic woman and not easy to live with", eventually married again - one of her husband's ex-pupils - by which time Sylvia had left the family home in Devonshire to start a life of her own in London.
The outbreak of war having put an end to her proposed musical education in Vienna, Sylvia went to work in a munitions factory. Her first published piece was about this experience.
Among her friends in London were a number of young men - the 'bright young things' of the 1920s - whom she had first encountered as small boys at Harrow. One of them, the sculptor Stephen Tomlin, introduced her to David Garnett, who at this time was running a bookshop in Tavistock Street. The meeting forged a friendship between the two that lasted until Sylvia's death over fifty years later.
Garnett was more than just a friend, though, he was instrumental in getting Sylvia's work published. He showed one of her poems to Charles Prentice at Chatto and Windus, who immediately asked to see more. The poems were published in "The Espalier" in 1925, beginning a mutually satisfactory working relationship which lasted through-out the writer's career.
Charles Prentice was soon asking Sylvia if she had ever thought of writing a book. "Lolly Willowes" was produced and published within a year, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's literary career was set fair for life.
The story of Lolly Willowes - a gentle creature - who, after years of apparent domestic happiness as part of her brother's family, enters into a compact with Satan, is a superb piece of writing, spiced with wit and irony. Its 'old fashioned' narrative drive - there is little dialogue - draws the reader in, exercising a subtle hold that sustains to the end. It has been dismissed by some as whimsical and fanciful, but discerning readers soon detected Sylvia's 'message', and it is one that runs through all her work: the dilemma, and the survival, of the individual in an oppressive society. Sylvia Townsend Warner is always on the side of the individual and the underdog.
Towards the end of the story, Lolly sums it up like this: "When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. I see them, wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers . . . there they are, child-rearing, housekeeping, hanging washed dish-cloths on currant bushes . . . And all the time being thrust down into dullness when the one thing all women hate is to be thought dull. They are like trees towards the end of summer, heavy and dusty, and nobody finds their leaves surprising, or notice them until they fall off..."
Her own startling answer is to become a witch. But the put-upon characters in her stories - usually but by no means invariably women - do not always assert themselves in such a dramatic fashion. In the short story, "Some Effects of a Hat", scapegoat Mary Daker leaves a hostile Cornish village to return to her northern roots and marriage; while exploited housekeeper Miss Logie in "One Thing Leading to Another" rebels by adding strange substances (snuff to the curry, cough linctus to the sauce, mustard to the marmalade) to her cooking, much to the consternation of the Reverend Fathers who are her employers. There are many more such examples in the stories.
TRIUMPHANT
In "Mr Fortune's Maggot", which followed close on the heels of "Lolly Willowes", the protagonist is a male, and the outcome of his sudden break with convention is rather less triumphant. Mr Timothy Fortune leaves a dull clerical job in a Hornsey bank to join a mission based in a group of islands in the South Pacific. After serving there for some time, he is seized by the 'maggot' of the title - which the dictionary informs me is "a nonsensical or perverse fancy".
His maggot takes him to the remote island of Fanua, where he hopes to convert the natives to Christianity, but he only manages to make one convert - the young native boy, Lueli - and his conversion is not as wholehearted as Timothy believes. When a terrible earthquake engulfs the island, Timothy loses everything, including his own faith, and realises that he must leave the island and its people to their own ways. The book's envoy says: "Poor Timothy, Good-bye! I do not know what will become of you." In fact, Sylvia Townsend Warner's readers do know - the story entitled "The Salutation" from the book of the same name (1932) is a sequel to Timothy's story.
Both "Lolly Willowes" and "Mr Fortune's Maggot" are distinguished by their remarkably vivid, almost mystical, portrayals of natural surroundings. In "Lolly Willowes" nature is relatively benign; while in "Mr Fortune's Maggot", descriptions reach disturbing heights in the depiction of the earth-quake and its aftermath. The natural world lives and breathes as vibrantly, and in some cases a great deal more vibrantly, than the human characters.
BINDING
Both these novels were first issued in mottled dark blue binding. A similar binding was used for her first published work, "The Espalier", and for a number of subsequent books, e.g. "The True Heart" (1929), her third novel which has a title page vignette by Ray Garnett, David's first wife; the so-called political novels, "Summer Will Show" (1936) and "After The Death of Don Juan" (1938); the collection of short stories, "The Salutation" (1932); and the collection of poems, "Time (1928).
"Lolly Willowes' and "Mr Fortune's Maggot" are probably the most universally popular of all her novels, although they are all worth reading. All have very different settings. "The True Heart" (1929) takes place in the middle of the last century in the Essex marshes, retelling the legend of Cupid and Psyche in the story of Sukey Bond and Eric, the 'holy fool'. "Summer Will Show" is set in revolutionary Paris it 1848, while "After the Death of Don Juan" takes 18th century Spain as its backdrop.
Some admirers have a special regard for her last novel. "The Flint Anchor" (1954), a tour de force set in Victorian East Anglia which relates the life stories of the Barnards of Loseby, trapped in the prison-like Anchor House, and each trying to escape in his or her own way. "The Flint Anchor" has a dust-wrapper designed by Lynton Lamb.
I must confess to a particular affection for her penultimate novel, "The Corner That Held Them", which resembles "The Flint Anchor" is some ways. Both have been criticised for having no single protagonist with whom readers can identify, and for being "claustrophobic" - although the latter is surely a deliberate device.
"The Corner That Held Them" (1948), written when Sylvia Townsend Warner was busy with the war effort, concerns a group of nuns who inhabit a Benedictine house called Oby, in the wilds of fourteenth century East Anglia. Their patron saint is St. Leonard, patron of the convent and all prisoners, and it soon becomes apparent that the nuns are subject to the same worldliness and temptations that afflict their lay brethren on the other side of the walls. Humour relieves the darker moments, and once drawn into the story, readers find themselves quietly surrendering to the book's imaginative power and are guaranteed to learn more about the realities of life in fourteenth century England than can be gleaned from any number of history books.
Memorable though most of the novels are, Sylvia surely excelled as a writer of short stories. Most of her collections - all, in fact, except "Some World Far From Ours" (1929), "A Moral Ending" (1931) and' "More Joy in Heaven" (1935) consist largely of stories that were first published in 'The New Yorker', for which she wrote prolifically.
She had originally been reluctant to write for the magazine. An American friend, Jean Starr Untermeyer, had been 'very persistent' in urging Sylvia to send something to the periodical. "Irritated by this nagging", William Maxwell tells us, "she did so finally, but only in order to prove that 'The New Yorker' would not publish her." But they loved the story she submitted, entitled "My Mother Won the War", and it appeared in the issue of 30 May 1936. Over the next four decades, 'The New Yorker' published 144 stories and nine poems by her, which must be close to a record.
In her "Letters", we get a glimpse into her working methods for the short stories. Ordinary everyday things could 'start her off: a' house seen briefly from a passing train, a face glanced at once then lost in a crowd, a sentence in a book she happened to be reading, and, in one instance, a visitor who left without his hat. All these provided a launching point for her imagination and within days the story would have been plotted, written and completed.
All her collections of short stories contain good things - it is impossible to single out the best. From "The Maze", a short story published on its own with a frontispiece and vignette by Ceri Richards (Fleuron Press, 1928) to "Kingdoms of Elfin" (1977), the last published in her lifetime. Her array of characters include the 'oddballs' of society: eccentric spinsters, lonely widows who drink on the quiet, unhappy married women who escape to new lives, widowers trying to recapture youthful moments, loners who fix their affections on the unworthy. The theme is often escape, but the stories are usually hilarious rather than melancholy, giving full reign to Sylvia's strong sense of the ridiculous and the absurdity of much human behaviour.
Perhaps one of the most enjoyable collections is "A Stranger With a Bag" (1966), which includes "A Love Match", the story that won the Katherine Mansfield Menton Prize for 1968. In this, considered her best short story, the lovers are siblings - Sylvia Townsend Warner's explorations of the human condition went far beyond the merely conventional.
"The Cat's Cradle-Book" is another highly enjoyable volume. Published in 1960, it is a delightful series of stories "seen from a cat's eye view", and said to be "chosen from a collection of traditional narratives current among cats". (Sylvia's love for cats was celebrated. She once finished a letter to David Garnett: "I wish you had a cat, better still a brace of cats, dear David. They are worth a wagonload of disinterested well-wishers.")
"The Cat's Cradle Book" sports an attractive dust-wrapper in white, green, pink and black with a cat motif by the artist Carol Barker.
"The Innocent and the Guilty" (1971) also deserves a mention, partly because the title and contents reflect a recurring theme in Sylvia Townsend Warner's work. In a letter to William Maxwell she talks about her obsession with this motif: "Perhaps one day I shall be pure-minded enough to write a story where the innocent are charming and guilty nauseating." Only in one of these stories, though, does a character achieve total innocence, and then only by going out of her mind.
Several of the short stories, either singly or in collections, were produced in signed, limited editions, such as "Some World Far From Ours" and "Stay, Corydon, Thou Swain", which were published together by Mathews and Marrot in 1929. The volume was issued in an edition of 531 signed numbered copies, 500 for sale, in a plain grey binding with a purple three-pronged fern design. It was No. 18 of the Woburn Series. The first story, "Some World Far From Ours", was reprinted in the volume "The Salutation".
Two years later, the collection "A Moral Ending and Other Stories" was published by William Jackson as No.8 in the Furnival Books Series. With a frontispiece by William Kermode and an introduction by T.F. Powys - a friend and mentor - it was issued in a limited edition of 550 signed and numbered copies, bound in rough red cloth with gilt lettering and a glassine dust-wrapper.
LIMITED
Perhaps the most sought-after Sylvia Townsend Warner limited edition is the story 'Elinor Barley", which was issued by the Cresset Press in 1930. It is a beautifully crafted book, consisting of 350 copies on mould-made paper, and 30 copies printed on hand-made paper, bound in quarter vellum boards and issued in a marbled slipcase with an extra set of prints inserted. The dry-point illustrations by I.R. Hodgkins are particularly attractive, and this very desirable item was signed by both the artist and the author. The story of poor Elinor Barley, who married the wrong man and was driven to murder, was later published in 'The Salutation'.
The later volumes of short stories have the added attraction of colourful dust-wrappers by well-known and collectable illustrators: "A Garland of Straw" (1943) has a pink dust-wrapper by George Plank; Carol Barker provided the illustrations for the dust-wrappers of both "The Cat's Cradle-Book" and "A Spirit Rises" (1962); "A Stranger With a Bag" has a design by Humphrey Stone and "0ne Thing leading to Another" depicts 'Bishopstone, Sussex' by Edward Reginald Frampton.
Sylvia Townsend Warner also published several volumes of poetry, and in her correspondence she describes how inspiration struck: "Usually just when I'm about to pack, or catch a train, or have someone to stay. Always at inconvenient times like that."
Her poems, though, contain her most personal statements, and she wrote in many forms: ballads, epitaphs, narrative and love poems, lyric and burlesque. She wrote verse all her long creative life and although it was well received by a small circle -and she was admired by Yeats and Housman - many of her fellow poets and critics believe that this side of her work has been sadly and unduly neglected.
"I intend to be a posthumous poet", she wrote shortly before her death, coming to terms with what she called not neglect, but 'inattention'. When her "Collected Poems" was published posthumously in 1984, it aroused new interest and enthusiasm, and she was praised for her admirable craftsmanship and subtle musical ear.
She published five volumes of verse during her lifetime, one of which, "Whether a Dove or a Seagull" (1934), was produced in conjunction with Valentine Ackland, her life-long companion. This is a very scarce volume today and proves as difficult to find as 'The Espalier", her first book.
Two of these collections were issued in limited editions: "Opus 7", which appeared_in an edition of 110 signed copies before the appearance of the trade editions (Dolphin Books No.6); and "Azrael", published posthumously by the Libanus press in 1978 in an edition of 200 copies sewn into light brown paper wrappers. Incidentally, "Azrael" was later reissued in 1980 as "Twelve Poems", with an introduction by Sir Peter Pears who mounted a programme in her honour at the Aldeburgh Festival three years earlier. Pears recited a number of poems on this occasion, including the superb "Gloriana Dying."
'Boxwood", a joint production with the engraver Reynolds Stone, is perhaps the most widely known and collected poetry collection. It is generally classified under Stone's work, and indeed the engravings came before the accompanying verse, as Sylvia explained in an interview in 1975:
"Poor Reynolds was going out of his mind looking for suitable quotations ...1 said to him 'Leave all this nonsense. I'll write you poems to illustrate your drawings; I can do it in half the time'..."
ENGRAVINGS
"Boxwood" was first issued in an edition of 500 copies in 1958, with 16 engravings by Reynolds Stone and the same number of poems. It was set in Monotype Dante, a typeface designed by Giovanni Mardersteig, here used for the first time. But this edition is said to have been rejected by the publisher because of poor printing, with only a few copies going into distribution, making it a scarce item and very difficult for collectors. Most enthusiasts will settle for the later edition, issued in 1960. It has the same type-face and the added attraction of five additional woodcuts and poems. Four of the woodcuts first appeared in Adrian Bell's 'The Open Air".
"Boxwood" celebrates nature and the English countryside, which were always dear to Sylvia's heart. She spent most of her adult life deep in the country, either in Dorset where the Powys brothers were her neighbours, or in rural Norfolk. After Valentine Ackland's death in 1969, she continued to live in the house on the river at Frome Vauchurch, which they had shared for many years. In her correspondence she described herself as becoming "grey as a badger, wrinkled as a walnut", and in a letter to Joy Chute in l974 she wrote: "l am cultivating a new vice for my old age. I go to bed early - 10.30 or so - and eat half an orange, read about the Tractarians and fall asleep. The cats flock to bed with me to see how much of them can sleep on my face."
In 1967, Sylvia Townsend Warner was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and in 1972, along with Rebecca West, she was granted honorary membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died on I May I978, at the age of 84.
Susanna Pinney, who along with William Marwell is an executor of Sylvia Townsend Warner's estate, tells me that her journals are in the process of being edited by Claire Human and will be published shortly, as will her correspondence with Valentine Ackland.
By the time this article is published, Chatto and Windus will have reissued, in large paperback format, Valentine's : "For Sylvia - An Honest Account", a fascinating autobiographical essay first published in 1985 This is being reissued to coincide with the publication of the long-awaited biography of Sylvia Townsend Warner by Claire Hannan. The biography promises to be an absorbing account of the life of a witty, lovable individual, and one of this century's most original and entertaining women of letters. It's also likely to stimulate more interest in her work from readers and collectors alike.
http://homepages.pavilion.co.uk/users/tartarus/warner1.htm
http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/rbk/faids/warner.html
http://www.womenwriters.net/editorials/alovematch.htm
Where can you get all those old, out of print books? Here!
And if you fancy searching Amazon.com for any ol' li'l thang at all....why not go direct from here!
Or if you preferAmazon.co.uk
The above was loosely adapted (other than mydeleting the odd outdated piece or adding a contemporary comment, it's original) from an article authored by one Helen MaCleod in Book and Magazine Collector Magazine, issue 65 of August 1989.
This page maintained by
Philip K Dick Isaac Asimov Edith Wharton Angela Brazil John Fowles Robert Heinlein Raymond Chandler John D MacDonald Wilfred Thesiger Sylvia Townsend Warner Elizabeth Jane HowardHugh Walpole Nevil Shute Vita Sackville-West Star Trek, The Next Generation - Big Bill's Star Trek Stuff! Close-ended Questions