Other literary forms

In addition to the short stories for which Sylvia Townsend Warner is best known, she wrote seven novels: Lolly Willowes: Or, The Loving Huntsman (1926), Mr. Fortune’s Maggot (1927), The True Heart (1929), Summer Will Show (1936), After the Death of Don Juan (1938), The Corner That Held Them (1948), and The Flint Anchor (1954). She also wrote several collections of poetry, which were published as Collected Poems (1982) and New Collected Poems (2008); a biography; a travel guidebook; and a volume of literary criticism, and she translated two books from French into English.

Achievements

In 1926, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s first novel, Lolly Willowes, was the first Book-of-the-Month Club selection; her second novel, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, was a selection of the newly formed Literary Guild. Her later novels did not attain the same popularity, but her short stories, 144 of which were published in The New Yorker over a period of four decades, gained for her a wide readership.

In 1967, she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (she wryly commented that it was the first public acknowledgment she had received since she was expelled from kindergarten) and in 1972, an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short story “The Love Match” was awarded the Prix Menton for 1968.

No full-length critical monograph of Warner’s achievement as novelist, short-story writer, and poet has been produced, although in 2006 a collection of essays analyzing a wide range of her writings was published. John Updike noted in a favorable review that her “half century of brilliantly varied and superbly self-possessed literary production never won for her the flaming place in the heavens of reputation that she deserved.” As far as her achievement in the short story is concerned, however, she certainly ranks alongside H. E. Bates and V. S. Pritchett, her two British contemporaries, whose work most resembles her own.

Biography

Sylvia Townsend Warner was born in Harrow, Middlesex, on December 6, 1893. She was educated mostly at home (her father was a schoolmaster), having been considered a disruptive influence in kindergarten. Her early talent was for music, and in 1914 she was set to travel to Vienna to study under Arnold Schönberg, but the outbreak of World War I prevented it. In 1916, after the death of her father, she moved to London and was a member of the editorial committee that compiled the ten-volume Tudor Church Music (1922-1929). Her first publication was a collection of poetry, The Espalier, in 1925, a time when she thought of herself primarily as a poet. In the 1920’s, she met the novelist T. F. Powys, who proved to be influential on her early poetry and fiction. In 1930, Warner moved to the country and lived with her friend Valentine Ackland in a Dorset village. During the 1930’s, she and Ackland became involved in left-wing politics, joining the Communist Party and serving with the Red Cross in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. In subsequent years, Warner lived the quiet life of an English gentlewoman in rural Dorset, managing to sustain her literary output up to her final years. She died in 1978.

Analysis

One of the notable features of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short stories is her elegant, precise, epigrammatic, and witty prose. These qualities are particularly noticeable when she focuses on what she knows best: the niceties of English middle- and upper-class life as they reveal themselves in day-to-day domestic and social routines, and the sudden disruption of those routines. As in the novels of her British contemporary, Barbara Pym, Warner’s detached and humorous observance of the oddities of humanity is one of the chief pleasures to be gained from her stories. She has a sharp but sympathetic eye for eccentricity of all kinds, and her stories cover a wide range of situations and points of view.

Perhaps because of the variety of her fiction, it would be misleading to pinpoint specific themes or leading ideas. Warner’s stories do not reveal a consistent or dominant mood or atmosphere. She does not espouse a philosophy or champion a cause. Her subject matter is the infinite variety of human nature: its follies, regrets, hopes, deceits, compromises, small defeats and victories, and the tidy chaos of the average human life. The stories frequently develop out of an apparently insignificant event or chance encounter or an incident or memory from the protagonist’s past, which resurfaces to affect the present. A sudden rift is produced in the otherwise smooth fabric of daily life, and often an ironic twist at the end will reveal a new dimension to a relationship or to the inner life of the protagonist.

Warner is a traditionalist. She does not experiment with modern techniques (her chief technical device is the flashback); her stories succeed through strong characterization and plotting. There is an old-fashioned quality about her and her fictional world. Almost all of her stories are set in England, with a carefully evoked spirit of place (perhaps this accounts in part for her success in The New Yorker, since she usually portrays a timeless, civilized England that popular American culture has tended to idealize).

“Hee-Haw!”

Warner has a Thomas Hardy-like awareness of the ironies of fate (Hardy was a major influence on her early poetry) and of the tricks that time plays. Many of her stories, for example, “The Sea Is Always the Same,” “Johnnie Brewer,” and “A Second Visit,” center on the protagonist’s return, after a gap of many years, to a former home or place of memories. In “Hee-Haw!” from Winter in the Air, and Other Stories, Mrs. Vincent returns to the village in Cornwall, where for three years, thirty years previously, she had lived turbulently with her first husband, Ludovick, a young artist who was later to gain eminence. The first sound she hears on her return is the unchanging, regular sound of the foghorn from the lightship (“Hee-Haw, Hee-Haw!”), which seems to span the thirty years of her absence, giving a sense of permanence and familiarity to the external environment. What of her internal environment? She is introduced to an old man in the hotel bar, who needs little prompting to recall the famous artist. His recollections, however, shock her. He tells her that Ludovick and his wife (or girlfriend, he did not know which) were the happiest couple he had ever seen, and he relates several incidents in which they were playing and laughing together. Mrs. Vincent, however, knowing how stormy her relationship with Ludovick was, assumes without question that the old man must be referring to another woman. In a wave of jealousy, she realizes that she has discovered, thirty years after the event, her husband’s infidelity. She is left to her anger and her melancholy; an old wound has been reopened in a way that she would not have imagined possible.

The strength of “Hee-Haw!” is in the contrast between the ease with which the reader guesses the truth (although the truth is never overtly established) and the inability of Mrs. Vincent to recognize that her relationship with Ludovick might have looked quite different from the outside. It is at once a poignant tale of reminiscence and a reminder of the subjectivity of the experience of life. Appearances are not what they seem, and memory is only shifting sand.

“Winter in the Air”

“Winter in the Air” also focuses on a return. A middle-aged woman, Barbara, returns to live in London after a twelve-year absence following the breakup of her marriage. The story consists of a series of flashbacks to the final stages of her marriage two months previously, interspersed with Barbara’s thoughts as she arranges the furniture in her new apartment. The reader is given a minimum of clues regarding the reasons for the divorce, and the chief interest of this otherwise slight, although typical, story lies in the fact that nine-tenths of its emotional force lies below the surface. Deep emotions surface only momentarily.

What Barbara really feels, though, is contained in the half-remembered snatches of a quotation from William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (pr. c. 1610-1611, pb. 1623) which flash into her mind: the dignified, despairing speech of Hermione, the wronged wife, whose chief comfort in life, the favor of her husband, has gone, though she does not know how or why it went. As Barbara sits down to write to her former husband Willie, she knows that in real life one does not say such things, and all she is prepared to commit to paper is a platitude about her new charwoman; this, however, is as unsatisfactory to her as confessing her true feelings and she tears up the letter and throws it away. Neither truth nor platitude can be uttered, and the deeper emotional terrain of her life must remain as silent as the silence that she notices enveloping her new apartment. Silence will hide secrets and heal pain, and life will go on. The story finishes with Barbara projecting herself into the mundane thoughts of the charwoman about the weather: Winter is in the air. This final thought has a slightly ominous connotation; whether it hints at Barbara’s future loneliness, old age, or simply the demise of emotional honesty and communication, Warner rightly leaves it to the reader to decide.

“A Love Match”

Swans on an Autumn River contains what is often regarded as Warner’s finest story, “A Love Match.” It centers on a quiet conservative couple, Justin Tizard and his elder sister Celia. Justin returns on leave after the 1916 Battle of the Somme, in which Celia’s fiancé has been killed. He stays at her apartment in London, but during his sleep he relives the terrible scenes of battle, raving incoherently. Celia, sleepless, listens in horror in the adjoining room. The following day, as they stroll casually around London, an old woman mistakes them for man and wife. The incident is one of several foreshadowings of what is to come. Two nights later, Celia is again awakened by Justin’s ravings. She goes to his side to comfort him, and the combination of her compassion and his distress drives them into the physical expression of love.

Afterward, they feel no regret, and as the years go by they find happiness together. They possess an intuitive insight into each other’s feelings, feel no need to impress each other, and are not particularly concerned with each other’s likes and dislikes. Their common childhood memories act as a bond between them. They also become practiced at shielding their true relationship from their neighbors in Hallowby, the English village to which they move in 1923, and soon become one of the most respectable of couples.

Their lives are upset in the 1930’s when Celia, who has become bored with local society and has developed a reputation for supporting unusual causes, receives a series of anonymous letters which claim that her secret is common knowledge in the village. The letters turn out to be only idle gossip from one of Justin’s disappointed female admirers, and he soon puts a stop to them. Nothing has changed, and the secret remains intact.

The final outcome is carefully developed to produce the maximum effect. During World War II, Hallowby is bombed. Rescue workers entering a bombed house find a bedroom floor deep in rubble. Slates from the roof have fallen on the bed, crushing the two bodies that lay there. One of the villagers at the scene offers the opinion that Justin went into Celia’s bedroom to comfort her. Others agree, and the coroner accepts this hypothesis as truth.

Warner’s comment that the story’s success was a victory for “incest and sanity” was only partly tongue-in-cheek. Rarely has incest been so sympathetically portrayed. Warner places subtle emphasis on the ease with which the lovers communicate and the depth of their love. The very criminality of their liaison adds to its preciousness for them. The ambiguity of the conclusion is also important. It is not made explicit whether the villagers genuinely believe their own explanation, whether they simply cannot comprehend the implications of what they see, or whether they guess the truth but, out of common human decency, desire to shield the lovers from shame. The open-endedness of this conclusion reflects the necessary mixture of emotions which the story has raised and left unresolved. The image of the two lovers in death, locked together in the tenderness of their illegal union and surrounded by the debris of their ruined house, remains vividly in the reader’s mind.

“Swans on an Autumn River”

“Swans on an Autumn River” also culminates in a strong visual image, which juxtaposes opposites to suggest the unattainable nature of an ideal. Norman Repton, an engineer in his late sixties, visits Ireland for the first time on a business trip. It is a country for which he has always felt a romantic longing, fueled by the poetry of William Butler Yeats. The country does not meet his expectations, however, and he soon discovers that he is an alien in an unfamiliar land.

Repton is attracted to the river, which is one of two central symbols in the story. It is as if the river has power to compensate him for his old age, his weak physical condition, and the dissatisfaction with life that he feels. At night, he leaves the curtain of his room undrawn in order to see the river, which also casts its lightly dancing reflection on the ceiling. In spite of this, he is aware of neither, being alternately sunk heavily in sleep or at the mercy of his bladder and digestion. His low vitality is a strong contrast to everything that the flowing river and its reflection suggests. In its ease, serenity, and sparkling movement, the river represents another realm of being, but it is a realm which is forever closed to him, however much he longs for it.

This theme is restated and developed by another powerful symbol in the climax of the story. When he wakes in the morning, he sees a gathering of swans on the river. He looks at them enraptured, as if they were his own treasure. He grabs some bread and rushes out of the hotel, by which time eighteen swans have collected. The swans come flocking toward him as he excitedly tosses them the bread. He notes how skillfully they swim “without check or collision,” unlike his own troubled and unsatisfactory life. When the feeding is interrupted by a swarm of gulls competing for the bread, Repton strikes at one of them and becomes so angry that he loses all thought of where he is. He only succeeds in making a fool of himself, falling down and hitting his head on the pavement. To two passersby, he is nothing more than a corpulent old Englishman behaving eccentrically, and the story ends with a policeman arranging for an ambulance to take him away.

The poetry of Yeats may well have been in Warner’s mind when she wrote this story. The swans resemble those in “The Wild Swans at Coole” which “drift on the still water,/ Mysterious, beautiful.” In their effortlessness, they seem to belong to a realm of eternity, and they are contrasted in the story with the frequent emphasis on the limitations and restrictions of ordinary bodily life. Repton himself calls to mind the lines from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”: “An aged man is but a paltry thing,/ A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/ Soul clap its hands and sing! . . .” Repton cannot clap his hands and sing, however, and he cannot be gathered into the “artifice of eternity” which the swans on the river symbolize. “Swans on an Autumn River” thus becomes a tragic story of the disparity between the infinity of human desire and the finite realities within which it must operate.

The Innocent and the Guilty

The Innocent and the Guilty is the only one of Warner’s collections to be organized under a specific theme. She had confessed to an “obsessive” concern with this theme, but the title is wholly ironic (“Perhaps one day, I shall . . . write a story where the innocent are charming and the guilty nauseating”). The ironic purpose is clear from “Truth in the Cup,” in which a group of self-righteous villagers, celebrating in the local hotel on a stormy night, lament the moral decay of the young. Like sinful man in Genesis, however, they become victims of a catastrophic flood. Warner’s purpose is also clear in “The Quality of Mercy,” in which a drunken young woman and the local toughs who help her home are more virtuous than the “respectable” sister who greets them with abuse and recrimination.

“But at the Stroke of Midnight”

The distinctions between innocence and guilt become blurred in “But at the Stroke of Midnight,” one of Warner’s most ambitious stories. It is a mysterious tale, with a hint of the supernatural, and it centers on the motif of rebirth. The protagonist is Lucy Ridpath, an undistinguished middle-aged woman who escapes from her dull marriage to seek a new life. Adopting the name Aurelia, she goes through a number of adventures in London and becomes like “a nova—a new appearance in the firmament, the explosion of an aging star.” She has a powerful effect on everyone she meets. A clergyman sees her as a tranquil, spiritual woman; others find themselves curiously attracted to her and do her unexpected favors.

Leaving London to stay at a guesthouse, she adopts a stray cat and calls it Lucy. (Cats appear with somewhat alarming frequency in Warner’s fiction.) She moves to a country cottage and successfully tries her hand at being a landscape artist. It seems that her rebirth is accomplished. The title, however, with its Cinderella connotations, suggests that it will not last, and that is how it turns out. One cold wet night, Lucy returns late, mortally injured, and the moment the cat dies, she realizes that she is no longer Aurelia but Lucy Ridpath once more. When morning breaks, she goes outside to bury the cat, but she finds herself immersed in floodwater. Walking toward the road, she has a half-conscious desire to drown, and as she wades deeper in the water, she falls and is swept away by the current.

This curious but stimulating story, a mixture of realism and fantasy, is one of Warner’s very few attempts to deal with an archetypal theme. It does not entirely succeed. The ending is abrupt and the reason for Lucy’s death is unexplained. The cat, it seems, mysteriously embodies her former self, to which she must return when the cat dies. It is quite possible that Warner intended such a supernatural implication. In one of her early stories, “Early One Morning,” from the collection The Salutation, an old woman dies and her soul immediately passes into one of the local greyhounds. Perhaps the tragedy of “But at the Stroke of Midnight” is that having once known rebirth, Lucy cannot lapse back into a former state. Caught between two selves, the old and the new, she can be neither.

“Oxenhope”

In “Oxenhope,” Warner returns to a favorite theme, the effects of the passing of time, as experienced by a protagonist who returns to former haunts. As the story develops, it becomes a subtle meditation on the presence of mortality and the longing for immortality.

William, a man in his sixties, returns to the village where he had stayed for a month when he was seventeen. As he drives through, he recognizes everything in the landscape. He thinks about the old shepherd he had known, with his prodigious memory that seemingly would never die, and he wants to know all the changes that the unchanging valley has seen. As he reminisces, the narrative passes freely between present event and past remembrance; past and present seem to merge. He finds the gravestone of the woman who had befriended him and cleans it so that the name stands out, just as he had done with the other family gravestones so many years previously. He notices, however, that the most recent name is the least visible, as if the woman had not expected to be remembered.

Fully aware of the imprint of mortality, he decides that the past is irrecoverable and that there is no purpose in staying. Then comes the ironic twist in the tale, so characteristic of Warner. He meets a local boy, who talks to him about local legends. One story is of a man who “set fire” to the loch and sent flames leaping up around his boat. William immediately realizes that the man was him—out in a rowing boat he had taken a match to bubbles of marsh gas as they rose to the surface of the water, and the fire had been the result. He leaves the village satisfied, with no need even of a backward glance, realizing that he is lodged in the collective memory of the locality, which lends him a kind of immortality. The subtlety of the observed paradox and its implications reveal Warner’s fiction at its best. Human life remains embedded in the past even when the past has seemed to vanish or to be vanishing, and yet the knowledge of this fact paradoxically frees the present from the past’s stifling grip.

Kingdoms of Elfin

Two more collections are worthy of comment. Kingdoms of Elfin is a collection of fantasies about fairy kingdoms. The product of Warner’s final creative years, these stories display considerable ingenuity (and Warner clearly relishes the telling of them), but few rank with her best work. The fantasy setting does not supply the moral bearings necessary in order to feel and respond fully to the odd adventures of the fairy protagonists. Warner invents her own fairy lore with considerable aplomb, but the kingdoms she describes are not mythical or otherworldly. On the contrary, they tend to parallel human institutions, particularly the hierarchical structure of medieval or Renaissance society. In consequence, much of the pleasure to be gained from them is in the occasional acid comment about the superstitions of religion, or in the gentle mocking of the social pretenses and snobbery and the political plotting and maneuvering that bedevil both human and fairy worlds.

Scenes of Childhood

Scenes of Childhood is a posthumous collection of Warner’s reminiscences about her upbringing in Edwardian England, a time “when there was a Tzar in Russia, and scarcely an automobile or a divorced person in Mayfair.” Impressionistic sketches rather than fully developed stories, they display her epigrammatic style to best advantage. Extracting much harmless fun from the eccentricities of upper-middle-class English life, she parades an assortment of odd characters ranging from her parents to great-aunts, nannies, retired majors, French teachers, and a butler whose smile was so ghastly that he had to be got rid of (he revenged himself by joining the fire brigade and ruining the Warner’s kitchen while putting out a minor fire).

At their best, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short stories constitute a quiet exploration of the oddities and ironies of the human condition as it unfolds itself in time, fate, and circumstances. She is an acute observer, but she is careful not to judge. Her humor, always tart, is never malicious. She is a realist, and few of her stories end in unqualified optimism. She is aware of the pain of loss and the mockery that time makes of human ideals. She notes the human capacity for self-deceit but also the ability to make peace with limitations. Rarely faltering in the smoothness of her controlled, elegant, economical prose, she is a craftswoman whose finely wrought stories entertain and delight.

Bibliography