With The Hunted - Sylvia Townsend Warner

Do you ever wish a book had been published a bit earlier?  I imagine a few people lamented that the first dictionary was issued just weeks after they'd struggled with spelling 'sincerely' at the end of a letter, or mourned that British Birds and How To Spot Them came out mere days after that flock of yellow-crested (or was it crested-yellow?) hornspippets descended.

Well, I'm feeling that way about With The Hunted - the selected non-fiction writings of Sylvia Townsend Warner, recently published by Black Dog Books (their website here.)  If it had come out earlier, it would have saved me a LOT of time scrabbling through enormous, dusty old journals, hunting out articles by Warner, photocopying interviews from books, etc. etc.... But, truth be told, I had great fun doing that.  And now it is available for everyone to read!  Thank you Black Dog Books for sending me a review copy.

With The Hunted really is a goldmine.  I haven't read it all yet, but I've read enough to know that it is an astonishingly varied and fascinating companion to Warner's novels - indeed, I have something of a chequered relationship with Warner's novels, and might find the writings selected here more consistent.

It includes so much!  Remember how much I enjoyed her pamphlet on Jane Austen?  It's in With The Hunted!  I greatly enjoyed an interview from Louise Morgan's 1931 volume Writers at Work, which enchantingly begins '"I wish," said Sylvia Townsend Warner, "that I could tell you I wrote standing on one leg.  Then you'd have something really entertaining and original to say about me!"'  It's included!  Her speech on 'Women as Writers' which re-popularised Woolf's A Room of One's Own - it's there!  Everything from an essay on her grandmother's experience of the countryside ('iniquities she had thought of as rare vestigial occurrences in crime-sheets persisted and were taken as a matter of course among these cottage homes of England') to her views on Daniel Defoe ('there are some books, as there are some personalities, which one can open anywhere and be sure of an interest.  This, I knew, was one of them') is here in this exceptionally wide-ranging volume.  418 pages never contained such infinite variety.

And then there are all the beguiling essays and reviews that I have yet to read!  The titles leap out to me.  I want to read 'Are Parents Really Necessary?' immediately; I cannot imagine what could lie behind 'Not To Be Done in May.'  And then there are pieces on Saki, Katherine Mansfield, Dickens, Edward Lear, Beatrix Potter - what riches!

Peter Tolhurst - the editor of With The Hunted - cannot be thanked enough.  Not only will this book prove invaluable to future scholars of Sylvia Townsend Warner, who will not have the paper trail I had whilst writing my thesis chapter on Warner, but it is for anybody who has any interest in Warner's novels, or indeed in early twentieth-century literature.  In this extensive collection we see Sylvia Townsend Warner as literati and as countrywoman, casting her eye over her contemporaries and Victorian literary greats, yet also the minutiae of everyday life and everyday concerns, with the same perception and humour.

Whether you love Warner or have never read her before, I think this is a wonderful resource to keep on the shelf, dip into, dip into, dip into - and marvel at.

STW on VW

Sylvia Townsend Warner (photo source)

Sylvia Townsend Warner on Virginia Woolf

Diaries 26^thJanuary 1942

‘At Boots Library the young woman put into my hands Virginia Woolf’s last book [Between The Acts].  And I received an extraordinary impression how light it was, how small, and frail.  As though it was the premature-born child, and motherless, and literally, the last light handful remaining of that tall and abundant woman.  The feeling has haunted me all day.’

Summer Will Show - Sylvia Townsend Warner

Yes, the excerpt yesterday was from Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1936 novel Summer Will Show.  STW has had quite a few mentions at Stuck-in-a-Book this year, since I've been researching a chapter of my thesis on her novel Lolly Willowes, and I read Summer Will Show for the same reason.  Well, it's very different.  Warner is renowned, in fact, for the disparity of her topics - which include a missionary on a desert island, a medieval convent, a woman becoming a witch, and, in this instance, the French Revolution.  The only tie between her novels is her striking prose and observational eye.

Our heroine is Sophia Willoughby, who begins Summer Will Show as a rich, aristocratic wife and mother in 1840s Dorset.  Her marriage is not an especially companionable one, but she doesn't seem particularly upset about it.  Indeed, it seems to be par for the course.  Warner expertly encapsulates the change in temperament between an engaged woman and a married woman of the period:

Sophia might refuse her food, pine, burst into unexpected tears, copy poetry into albums and keep pet doves, while her marriage was being arranged and her trousseau ordered; but once married it was understood that she would put away these extravagancies and settle down into the realities of life once more.

Sophia seems rather unfeeling at the outset - strict, rather than motherly, and without any noticeably emotional attachments.  Warner often summarises people's essential characters through seemingly incidental - and here is Sophia's sentence: 'She disliked sitting down in the middle of a walk, she disliked any kind of dawdling.  A slow and rigid thinker, to sit still and contemplate was an anguish to her.'

She is contented, if anything, when her husband absconds to Paris - but even her delight in the freedom afforded by her unassailable singleness is tainted when she learns about her husband's Parisian mistress, Minna Lemuel:

For even to Dorset the name of Minna Lemuel had made its way.  Had the husband of Mrs. Willoughby chosen with no other end than to be scandalous, he could not have chosen better.  A byword, half actress, half strumpet; a Jewess; a nonsensical creature bedizened with airs of prophecy, who trailed across Europe with a tag-rag of poets, revolutionaries, musicians and circus-riders snuffing at her heels, like an escaped bitch with a procession of mongrels after her; and ugly; and old; as old as Frederick or older - this was the woman who Frederick had elected to fall in love with, joining in the tag-rag procession, and not even king in that outrageous court, not even able to dismiss the mongrels, and take the creature into keeping.

Ouch.  But doesn't Warner arrange an image well?

Something tragic happens, which sets Sophia off to find her husband - even with the obstacle of Minna.  She arrives in Paris, and first encounters Minna while the latter is telling a story about her past to an assembled group of eager listeners.  The difficulty about having a great raconteur as a character is that the novelist must be one themselves (it's one of the things which makes Angela Young's accounts of storytellers so wonderful in Speaking of Love, incidentally) - Warner is pretty impressive, but her strength lies in unusual metaphors and striking images (which only occasionally go too far and become too self-conscious), rather than compelling anecdotes, per se.  Here's another of those curious little verbal pictures I love so much:

And with dusters tied on her feet she [Minna] made another glide across the polished floor, moving with the rounded nonchalant swoop of some heavy water bird.  Her sleeves were rolled up, she wore a large check apron, she had all the majestic convincingness of a gifted tragedy actress playing the part of a servant - a part which would flare into splendour in the last act.

Indeed, Minna's personality is captured most effectively when we are told that 'she was always pitching herself to an imaginary gallery'.  Her dramatic nature captures Sophia's interest, and the burning resentment with which she arrives turns into affection, and then devotion...  The excerpt I posted yesterday comes into play here.

I enjoyed the first half of Summer Will Show.  Warner's prose is certainly dense here, not to be read speedily, but the dignity and spark of Sophia still came through strongly.  Her concerns about reputation in a judgemental aristocratic world were interesting and subtle; her relationship and re-encounter with her husband were vibrant and never slipped into the sort of unrealistic emotionalism seen in a lot of novels from the 1930s.  But... the second half dragged and dragged.

First edition (can be bought here)

Perhaps my main problem was that I'm not especially interested in the French Revolution - and I'm certainly not coming from the impassioned left-wing perspective with which Warner wrote this novel (although she later grew rather less zealous in later life.)  Understandably a lot of the action of revolutionary France takes centre stage later in the novel, and as the narrative wandered a little away from relationships, hurt, and pride - themes Warner explores rather masterfully - I lost interest.  And yet even in the first part of the novel, I admired more than I loved.  It was enjoyable, but I couldn't respond with the fervour with which I greeted Lolly Willowes.  The writing was so thick, so relentlessly beautiful, even, that I felt exhausted reading it.  That can hardly be labelled a criticism of Warner, but it prevented me loving the novel deeply.

I have heard Summer Will Show praised to the heights, and thus part of me thinks a re-read in a decade or so would be a good idea.  I don't thrill to the thought.  Harriet Devine has also recently struggled to love this novel, so at least I'm not aloe in my assessment.  For those more interested in historical fiction than I am (and it would hard to be less) maybe you'd get more from this than I did.  For the reader new to Warner, I would certainly suggest Lolly Willowes as the first novel - but I have grown increasingly to think that her greatest triumph is her letters.  I've heard people say the same thing of Virginia Woolf, about her letters and diaries, and thought the assessment rather silly - but, for Warner, the chief qualities of her fiction-writing (adeptness at unusual imagery; an eye for original perspectives) appear in her correspondences, without the flaws which creep into her novels.  The Element of Lavishness is still the best thing I've read by Warner, and Summer Will Show didn't come close to challenging the throne.

Authors on Authors (Part 3)

A lot of books I'm mentioning this year seem either to be about Jane Austen or by Sylvia Townsend Warner... so it is appropriate that one of them is Jane Austen by Sylvia Townsend Warner!  It's in the same Writers and Their Work series as Pamela Hansford Johnson's pamphlet, mentioned yesterday, and I'll write a similarly swift post about it.

PHJ on ICB nabbed the Century of Books slot for 1951, so STW on JA will just have to wait on the sidelines... but I rather suspect it will appeal to more of you.  Austen has more adoring fans than Dame Ivy, but are also significantly more spoilt for choice... This is, perhaps, hardly the only or foremost resource for information about Austen's life and work, but I am a sucker (as this mini-series demonstrates) for authors talking about authors.  The combination of Warner and Austen is my favourite yet, and I loved reading Warner's thoughts on the various novels.  She more or less bypasses biographical detail, which was fine by me - there are plenty of other places to go for that.  Instead we get to read Warner's insightful responses to Austen's work.  She doesn't propose dramatic or revisionist readings of the novels, but there are lots of gems along the way.  I loved this:

though sense distinguishes Elinor Dashwood and sensibility her sister Marianne, the contrast is between two ways of behaving rather than between two ways of feeling

and, a bit longer, this:

Of all Jane Austen's novels, Emma must fully conveys the exhiliration of a happy writer. As the arabesques of the plot curl more intricately, as the characters emerge and display themselves, and say the very things they would naturally say, the reader - better still, the re-reader - feels a collaborating glow.  Above all, it excels in dialogue: not only in such tours de force as Miss Bates being grateful for apples, Mrs. Elton establishing her importance when she pays her call at Hartfield, but in the management of dialogue to reveal the unsaid; as when Mr. John Knightley's short-tempered good sense insinuates a comparison with his brother's drier wit and deeper tolerance; or as in the conversation between Mr. Knightley and Emma about Frank Churchill, whom neither of them know except by repute: Emma is sure he will be all that he should be, Mr. Knightley's best expectation is "well grown and good-looing, with smooth, plausible maners" - and by the time they have done, it is plain that Emma is not prepared to fall in love with Frank Churchill, and that Mr. Knightley has been, for a long time, deeply and uncomfortably in love with Emma.

It is a shame, given Warner's sensitive and alert reading of Austen's writing, that she does not recognise the irony dripping when Austen wrote about her 'little bit (two Inches long) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour.'  Read in context - or even out of context -  it is clear that Austen has tongue firmly in cheek, and it's curious that Warner (herself so often ironic) does not spot this.  Never mind.

What I think I love most about Warner's writing in any context - her novels, letters, this pamphlet - is her exuberant use of imagery.  I probably mention it every time I review something by her, but it is delicious - usually quite surreal, but somehow fitting, and often animalistic.  She writes extensively about Austen's juvenilia, and says that they 'have a ringing brilliancy, like the song of a wren'.  Lovely!  And later she writes:

G.H. Lewes, when he recommended Charlotte Bronte to "follow the counsel which shines out of Miss Austen's mild eyes", was unaware of Lady Susan, where Miss Austen's eyes are those of a hunting cat. 

Oh, Warner - you and cats!  She can turn anything around to cats, given enough time - and is thus, in my eyes, a kindred spirit.

As I said earlier, there are many other places to read about Austen.  This pamphlet was issued at a time when a more or less complete bibliography could still be compiled (and one is included - with less than three pages of critical material) but now it proliferates.  The reason I would recommend Jane Austen by Sylvia Townsend Warner amongst this extensive canon is for the particular insight one excellent novelist is able to shed upon another.  STW and JA have been perfectly matched.