Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote seven novels dazzling in their originality and in
their difference not just from the novels of her contemporaries but even
from one another. Her cache of perfectly judged New Yorker short stories
(she was on contract to the magazine) kept her solvent for much of her
writing life. But she was first and arguably foremost a poet, whose debut,
The Espalier (1925), was remarkable for its dexterity, for its strange
formal mesh of the pastoral, the modern and the archaic, and for its
haunting liminality: “As though I’d shed it like a husk, / My body casts no
shade; / I walk suspended in the dusk / Just as a spirit might” (“The
Traveller Benighted”). When she followed up the success of Lolly Willowes
(1926) and Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927), the first of her witty and
startlingly idiosyncratic novels, with her second, equally strong poetry
collection, Time Importuned in 1928, it must have seemed that Warner was
also en route to being one of the most notable of the post-First World War
poets. In “Tudor Church Music”, the speaker, who is quietly researching old
sheets of music in a near-silent church (“‘Dumb and deaf, dead and dust,’ /
Confirms the clock”), is surprised by the noise of a group of fidgety
holidaymakers on a visit.
And only when they are gone
Do I doff the mask
Of the scholar deep in his book:
“Did they see me?” I ask,
“Or am I, too, a ghost?” and so
Turn once more to my task.
Reading her poems now it is possible to see crackling synaptic paths back to
George Crabbe, John Clare and Thomas Hardy and forward to Stevie Smith and
Philip Larkin, at the same time as noticing a contemporaneous use of texture
and line-breath which makes for interesting comparison with a writer like
Charlotte Mew.
But such a fin-de-siècle comparison makes it very clear: something vital in
Warner, in both the life and the work, transcends any fin. The quirky,
clever, only child of George Townsend Warner, the Harrow historian, Warner
lived a full, lively and near-emblematic kind of twentieth-century life; she
did munitions work in the First World War, settled down with another woman,
the poet Valentine Ackland, in the early 1930s as easily as if Ackland were
simply any country gentleman, went to Spain a newly declared Communist
intellectual in 1937, protested against both Fascism and the Second World
War, protested against the Vietnam war, then protested against nuclear
proliferation. She and her work spanned three-quarters of a century, but,
“because I am too imaginative”, she never wrote an autobiography. “She had
the spiritual digestion of a goat”, according to John Updike; Gillian Beer
notes how “she composed with an exploratory verve that is quite
extraordinary”; “she is so alive that her vital awareness is translated into
everything she thinks and does”, wrote her friend, Jean Starr.
Even so, in her introduction to this new and gratifyingly full edition of her
poems – in fact, in its very first line – the editor, Claire Harman, whose
assiduity is one of the reasons Warner’s writing has had any critical
attention at all since her death in 1978, expresses one of the central
paradoxes of this writer and her work. “Why does Sylvia Townsend Warner seem
such a ghostly figure in twentieth-century letters?” Harman, over time, has
come to believe that Warner’s curious critical absence-presence is because
“no one of her books was sufficiently like another to produce the impression
of coherence upon which a loud reputation depends”; in this book’s
introduction she adds her concern that “being a woman and a Communist
certainly didn’t endear Warner to the establishment or to literary
canon-mongers . . . her poetry fell even further below the radar”.
The ghost self, the self-effaced artist, the liminal: these are all part and
parcel of the strange vitality of the first two collections. “Today I wish
that I were a tree, / And not myself, / Confronting spring with a neat
little row of poems / Like cups and saucers on a shelf”, she writes in “Wish
in Spring”, imagining a branching structure covered in poems as green as
leaves, “one kissing the other” in an act so natural that no one would
“question my right” to “wave them above the heads of the people, / And sing
them to myself all night”.
If Warner’s novels and stories are revolutionary, her poetry has much in
common with them. Her fiction is often concerned with the transformation of
Englishness by foreignness; tradition and convention juxtaposed with wild
and wonderful exotica, or out-argued by deeper, more archaic, traditions;
and with the role of outsiders – often women – in the margins of traditions
or societies. She proclaims an anarchic pastoral, the rotting fertility of
which leaves the urban in a weak-tea-coloured light. Her poetry, overflowing
with images of natural demise and decay, is dismissive of despair, glows
with a kind of rank local merriment, and enjoys a similarly merry
paralleling of archaic with contemporary. She loves a good local drama; much
of her poetry takes a dramatic monologue or ballad form, which allows an
objective perspective on a speaker, at the same time preserving the intimacy
of a one-to-one exchange. Here the self is always a story, and it is a story
that saves a lost or ghostly self and, against the odds, becomes what
survives of us. Her poems are laden with nature’s unforgiving and its mercy,
with speakers who go down to the root, or the grave, and speak, full of
life, from what should be a place of the dead; as a poet, she sets
resonating, simultaneously, a selfless faith in nature’s long view and a
very human fear of the brevity of things. Her rich and spare melancholia, at
first post-war shocked, later more calmly meditative, is both lyrical and
practical, and always frank, like a mode of thinking, a philosophical
practice of self-effacement.
But after the critical failure in 1934 of her third collection, Whether a Dove
or Seagull, a collection courageously co-authored with Valentine Ackland,
Warner made the decision to stop publishing poetry. After this she made very
little of what she wrote publicly available, though over her long life she
wrote a substantial amount. Now, as Fyfield Books publishes the first
sizeable retrospective collection of Ackland’s poems, Journey from Winter:
Selected poems, as a sister edition to Warner’s New Collected Poems, it is
possible not just to surmise why she did this, but also to reconsider this
ill-fated collaboration, “out of print since that first edition”, as
Ackland’s valiant editor, Frances Bingham, comments. “This has become an
almost legendary text”, Bingham says, “an important collection, crucial to
any overview of women’s poetry at that period.”
Whether a Dove or Seagull, with its title taken from a line in one of
Ackland’s poems (though this must have its own source in the first lines of
“The Arrival”, Warner’s opening poem in Time Importuned: “When I set out I
did not know / Whether an ash tree or an elm”), was an experiment in the
resonances of context. Because Warner’s editor had been only lukewarm in his
response to her lover’s poetry, with which she was clearly infatuated,
Warner hit on this way of publishing Ackland’s work – a joint publication of
over a hundred poems, roughly half by each, without any indication of who
wrote which poem. The intention was to focus attention on Ackland’s poems at
the same time as avoiding the interest focusing on Warner’s well-known name.
Is there such a thing as writerly harmony? Warner’s musician self – she had
been the youngest (and the only woman) among the editors of the massive
ten-volume Tudor Church Music, as well as a composer – may have imagined
that a co-authored book would make a new and sweet kind of literary accord.
Ackland was not that keen on harmonizing. “I am two thirds in favour and one
third not. I still have a lingering desire to be only myself.”
Ackland, thirteen years younger, and what might be called a post-war creation
herself (whose father had been a renowned dental surgeon and reconstructer
of the fractured faces of the war-wounded), was “like a very handsome boy,
with her high-bred . . . haughty features, her close-cropped nut-brown hair,
and the look of a real dandy”, as Jean Starr saw it. She had enjoyed a
series of artistic, high-society love affairs before she and Warner decided
to “be known to be eccentric” and took to driving round England dashingly
fast in their green MG Midget. Ackland, of the pair, was what might be
called too unimaginative not to leave an autobiography, and an
“unremittingly remorseful” one in tone; For Sylvia: An honest account,
published posthumously in 1985, is, as Harman notes, a work of some
“joylessness”. But Ackland liked the bad; it was her inspiration, so much so
that after she met Warner she began to fear for her poetry, concerned it
would suffer because she was too happy. She believed in poetry rather as
later she believed in Roman Catholicism. Her religious conversion gave
Warner – whose scepticism and anarchy when it came to religious faiths could
be said to be the only real uniting theme in the panoply of her work,
certainly the only thing each of her novels has in common – much more cause
for concern than the effects of decades of secret alcoholism, which Ackland
managed somehow, in a very intimate household, to disguise as regular
migraines.
Ackland believed poetry to be a calling. “Writing is not a thing by itself, it
is a self”, she wrote. Her own recurring crisis of faith lay in whether she
was, in fact, a poet or not at all, and comparison with Warner and with
Warner’s apparently easily won public success was truly painful to her. “I
think it well to develop the conscious parts of our minds individually.
Individually we can do anything”, she wrote, after the failure of Whether a
Dove or Seagull. “It is collective action that I fear.”
Warner’s and Ackland’s own “collective action” came out in 1933 in the United
States; by the time their book was published in Britain in 1934, the fact
that American reviewers had spent their time trying to guess which poem was
whose, and usually getting it wrong, led to a key to the authors being added
at the back of the book. Many reviewers decided that Ackland was male, some
thought the name was simply a pseudonym for a mischievous Warner; the
comparisons the reviewers did make were very unfavourable to Ackland, and
most critics and many of their friends took it for granted that the “best”
poems had simply been written by Warner.
Robert Frost, to whom the book had been dedicated, and whom Ackland deeply
admired, wrote the women a polite thank-you, but privately shuddered,
requesting the editor whom he and Warner both knew, Louis Untermeyer (a
champion of Sylvia’s early poetry), not to associate him publicly with the
collection or “that couplet in England”.
Such strong reactions on all sides of this story: it is not surprising that
there is a great deal of partisan good-heartedness in Frances Bingham’s
impassioned reading of Ackland’s work. Journey from Winter is graced by
Bingham’s open-hearted yet still reasonably cold-eyed critical advocacy.
Hers is a commendable act of support, and pretty convincing, until you get
to the poems themselves. Where Harman selects a clutch of Warner’s poems
from the combined collection for her own edition, Bingham reprints Whether a
Dove or Seagull complete, following each poem with the initials of its
author. “It was an experiment in equality, fashionable in the ethos of the
period, and it completely failed . . . the poems are curiously arranged . .
. a shorter book would have been a better one.” She is right. This
collection’s availability is a mixed blessing.
Almost from its opening, it asks unfortunate comparison. Two of its earliest
poems use the image of a cuckoo. The first is the echoing tale of an
arresting visitation on a new loving couple by, yes, an old ghost, recalled
by the sound of the bird and the new spring to question the couple’s own
newness. It is a fine poem, whole and resonant. The second, by comparison,
is a mediocre play on sound whose rhymes are rather forced: “The cuckoo in
the air, / The sultry air / In level fields of grey, / The grey bird
wandering there. / . . . Careful to spill / Over a chosen field / Music from
his bill”. What Bingham’s reprint makes clear is the unevenness of the
collection, both in arrangement and in the mismatch of talents which bleed
uncomfortably into each other, an imbalance of a poet for whom form is a
natural and sophisticated habitat set next to one who rhymes “spill” with
“bill” and “fire” with “desire”, and whose rather woolly use, here, of
“wandering” is typical throughout.
“My hand, being deft and delicate, displays / Unerring judgement; cleaves
between your thighs / Clean as a ray-directed airplane flies.” The reprint
of the complete collection reveals that Ackland’s vision of love is often
mechanistic, even rather threatening: “Death, when it stops my heart, / Will
slay you too”, she discomfitingly states. But Harman’s careful selection of
Warner’s poems from the collection reveals a new erotic concentration in
Warner’s own verse: a passionate commitment in the shedding of the objective
narrative frame and an intimacy, “sudden, dauntless and shy / As a bird
moving in a tree”. For Warner, the collection was clearly a creative act; it
seems to have signalled both a release of the self and a commitment to
communality, a ghost at home on the earth at last:
Greet finally the earth, greet leaf and root and stock.
Stand in your last hour poised, like the dandelion clock –
Frail ghost of the gaudy raggle-taggle that you were –
Stand up, O homing phantom, stand up intact and declare
The goodness of earth the greatest good you found,
Ere the wind jolts you, and you vanish like the foam.
(“Go the long way, the long way home”)
Bingham claims that “to read the collection in its entirety now is valuable
not only for period context, but because it reveals correspondences in the
two poets’ work”. The correspondences were indeed fundamental. In “Sparrow
Hall”, the penultimate poem in Time Importuned, Warner’s speaker narrowly
avoids becoming the tenant of a ghost house; “life calls me and love calls
me, / And I must obey”. Meeting Ackland was a crucial baptism of
politicization and a vital erotic rebirth for Warner, though it might be
argued that the impact it had on her work was a lot less vitalizing. It
resulted in the conscious removal of her public poet-self, and her next
novel, Summer Will Show (1936), her most conventional and indubitably her
baggiest, took twice as long to write as her first three novels, all
remarkable works formally and thematically, combined.
But settling in with Ackland in Dorset in 1930 did bring Warner alive, out of
“this death I have sat so snugly in for so long”, and the couple stayed
together, with a couple of rocky periods, in their open relationship for
four decades. As Bingham, Ackland’s critical guardian angel, writes
elsewhere, “the presence of Valentine in her work is one way in which Warner
represented the possibility of an alternative society; the revolutionary
ideal as she was actually living it”. By comparison, though, Warner
sublimated her poetry to Ackland in much the same way as she, a woman who
loved music, simply stopped going to concerts because concerts bored her
lover. If her lover needed to be The Poet, then she wouldn’t challenge her
for the role. It was a huge act of generosity, and the real question is
whether it was a loss to the work, if not the life.
Regardless of any comparison, Journey from Winter reveals Ackland to be, put
very simply, not that great a poet. It is a melancholy revelation,
especially in the light of the respect Bingham’s short essays about
Ackland’s life rouse in the reader. Although the poems markedly improve when
Ackland embraces politics and finds inspiration in a cause other than her
own melancholy temperament, or the death of her cat, or a bad bout of
earache, they are, together, a bit banal, a bit stiff, leadened with a kind
of rhetorical dullness; troubled by cliché and forced rhyme, forced
inversion (“the wounds invisible that none forgive”) and, worst of all, a
terrible cyclic hopelessness:
Here again, where not twelve months ago
I was – But here without you now, and by my stern
Plain-spoken wish, alone,
And yet I must aver
No happier.
(“Here again”)
“It has ceased to have life since I wrote a poem about it”, begins one poem;
this sums up the tragedy of these works. Much of Ackland’s poetry is a
draining experience. It only occasionally raises itself on a kind of wing –
often in her poems about birds, which play a large part in the private
codified imagery she shared with Warner. But there is no getting over it:
the experience of reading a collected Ackland is not a happy one, and the
empathetic energy a reader might hope for in the alternative, sadness, is
somehow also blocked in Ackland’s poetic, where form and philosophy are both
battened down. Her war poetry and her political poetry, on the other hand,
have a literalness less spoilt by self-conscious poeticism, and an anger, a
plainness and an energy, a hint of some considerable and selfless power,
which, in Journey from Winter, is a relief:
I went to throw away the flowers that were not quite dead
And opened the furnace, but the girls burnt alive
Stared back at me with their drained, living faces.
So – Open the door, we will jettison these outside.
(“December Evening, 1946”)
What Bingham calls Ackland’s “deep conviction of the power of poetry to change
the world” goes hand in hand with a grieving, desperate, but pure state,
“the white tread of the poet like snow footprints on dark earth” (“Paul
Eluard”). At the least, the significance, the self-conscious footprint, at
the most the grandiosity and quasi-religiosity of the poet’s role, will have
been an uneasy music to Warner, who was profoundly aware of “the whitened
face / of the road where I must go”, as she writes in “The Traveller
Benighted”, and whose work was so concerned with issues of self-effacement.
Her own dismissive notions of authorship have effaced her even from her own
fiction. In the light of this, that we have Warner’s New Collected Poems at
all is a literal triumph of these particular life-stories. From the opening
poem of The Espalier, “Quiet Neighbours”, with its almost insolent
simplicity, its conjuring of mundane yet haunting loss in the redolence of
small noises from the house next door, to the committed, haunting, moving
pieces she wrote in her last years to the country she so argumentatively
loved, and to her dead lover, whom she outlived by nine years and whose work
she lovingly published and advocated all that time, the collection is a
revelation of a fine formalist and an alternative rich tradition, a poetics
set apart, and one we are clearly very lucky to have at all.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
NEW COLLECTED POEMS
Edited by Claire Harman
392pp. 978 1 85754 947 8
Valentine Ackland
JOURNEY FROM WINTER
Selected poems
Edited by Frances Bingham
227pp. 978 1 85754 876 1
Carcanet/Fyfield Books. Paperback, £18.95 each
Ali Smith’s most recent novel, The Accidental, was shortlisted for the
Man Booker Prize in 2005. A collection of short stories, The First Person
and Other Stories, was published last year.
