A happy coincidence: Sylvia Townsend Warner on Mary Eleanor Wilkins

As a few of you already know from a previous mention of it, a few years ago, before I ever started blogging, I put my fantasy publishing energies to use by self-publishing an anthology of short stories by American women. This was just at the beginning of my interest in women writers that most people had never heard of, and I wanted to learn about the process of putting together an actual book.

At that time I had not the foggiest notion of tracking down heirs or creating rights contracts, so I chose stories from the middle of the 19th century up to 1922, because under U.S. copyright law nothing published in the U.S. before 1923 can still be under copyright. (Thanks to Disney wining and dining the U.S. Congress a while back in order to obtain changes to our copyright laws, it's possible that that year will never change—and it's not a coincidence that Mickey Mouse came along later in the 1920s and was in danger of lapsing out of copyright, but that's another story.)

Putting together the book took a crazy amount of time, since I was figuring out each step on my own, but it was a lot of fun, and what I ended up with was a book called Her Peers: Stories by American Woman, 1852 – 1917. I was pleased with the result overall. It was also a marvelous excuse for reading writers like Harriet Prescott Spofford (whose "Circumstance" can stand alongside anything Hawthorne ever wrote), Rose Terry Cooke, and Susan Glaspell, and probably led me to the greener pastures of exploring women writers from the other side of the pond. If I were doing it again I might make the book a bit shorter and therefore more affordable (a valuable learning experience about nice big reader-friendly fonts and how quickly they add to the cost of a book), and although I thought it was nice to use a picture of a quilt made by my grandmother for the cover, I might actually use one showing the design to better effect instead of just some of the blocking. And don't remind me of the several typos I found too late. But oh well, not bad for a first attempt.

I was amused to find that Her Peers is yet another example of insane
overpricing on Amazon--presumably an algorithm gone berserk? 

You can still view the book on Amazon here, and I'm delighted to report that it's current sales rank is #6,388,680—clearly they can barely keep up with demand! (You can also see the pretentious and utterly embarrassing little blurb I wrote about "Canon Fodder Press," as if it was going to be the next Random House. Ugh.) But this is NOT a pitch to get you to buy the book, as I will hasten to add that since the stories are all public domain, they are also all available for free online, so please save your money for the next batch of Furrowed Middlebrow titles…  :-)

Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

But on to the happy coincidence: One of my favorites of the authors I read in researching Her Peers was Mary Eleanor Wilkins (later Wilkins Freeman, following her own unhappy marriage), best known for her story "A New England Nun" and the 1891 collection from which it came. Although I didn't read enough of her work to make a broad generalization, several of her best-known stories deal with single women who choose or have already chosen to retain their independence and their solitary happiness. In an age, of course, when most writers still wrote as if happy endings must necessarily include marriage.

Although scholars these days are perhaps a bit more aware of Wilkins than they used to be, and some literature students might happen to read something of hers, she is still not widely known. So imagine how happy I was to find another of my favorite authors, the brilliant Sylvia Townsend Warner, devoting an entire, very charming, late story to Wilkins.

I've been reading several of Warner's later collections recently and loving every second of them (spoiler alert: her abilities just kept improving with age), and in the middle of reading The Music at Long Verney, a volume of previously uncollected stories which only appeared in 2001, comprised mostly of stories that first appeared (as almost all of her stories did) in The New Yorker, there was "Item, One Empty House," a lovely, humorous, presumably autobiographical tale from 1973 that centers entirely around Warner's fondness for Wilkins!

Here Warner is irresistibly describing her first experience of Wilkins' work:

After I had been taught to read I was left to read on unassisted. If a title looked promising I tried the book (and thus for years and years never opened Gogol's Dead Souls, being convinced it was a work of piety). One day I pulled out a volume called A New England Nun. There were two convents in our town, and a nun was a regular feature at the fishmonger's—but nuns in fiction led more animated lives; though my notions about New England were of the vaguest kind and Mary E. Wilkins not a compelling name, the title, I thought, warranted a try. There was no word of a nun; but from the moment when Louisa Ellis tied on a green apron and went out with a little blue crockery bowl to pick some  currants for her tea I lost all wish for nuns and animated lives. I had found something nearer the bone. Though I could not have defined what I had found, I knew it was what I wanted. It was something I had already found in nature and in certain teapots—something akin to the precision with which the green ruff fits the white strawberry blossom, or to the airy spacing of a Worcester sprig. But, scampering between balderdash and masterpiece, I had not so far noticed it could happen in writing too.

Having found it, this mysterious charm, I read on how Louisa, after she had finished her tea and washed up the tea things, took off her green apron, disclosing a pink-and-white apron beneath it, which was her sewing apron. This in turn she took off when she heard a man's steps coming up the walk. Beneath the pink-and-white apron was her company apron, of white linen. The man came into the room; he was her suitor, and his entrance, as usual, frightened the canary. He was honest and good and had wooed her faithfully, but in the upshot she dismissed him and remained alone among the currant bushes; and that was the end of the story.

She goes on to think of Wilkins in relation to her more famous contemporary, Maupassant:

He would have thought her a quaint character and put her into one of his stories. She would have surmised him to be a bad character and kept him out of any story of hers.

And she also delineates Wilkins' limitations, including that "lettuce juice too often flowed through the veins of her characters instead of blood," with which I might have to quibble with dear Sylvia, however much I adore her. But there is a clear genuine affection for Wilkins, and it may be no coincidence that I feel that both Warner and Wilkins are kindred spirits.

I can't spoil the story by revealing the ending, but Warner, in just a couple of final paragraphs, describes how, walking in the New England woods one day, she came upon an intriguing scenario that perfectly evoked Wilkins, and concludes:

This was no business of mine. I had come on a story by Mary Wilkins—a story she did not finish.

If you haven't read any of Wilkins' work, I do add my recommendation to Warner's, and I just stumbled across this site which has a number of her stories as well as stories and even novels by many other authors (including some British authors, strangely enough considering the site's name, so I have made a note to revisit it and explore further). Under "Authors" at the top, there's an option for "Women Writers," which leads to an array of options.

And for that matter, if you haven't read Warner's witty and charming late stories, I recommend those too. I have now moved on from The Music at Long Verney to Scenes of Childhood, comprised of recollections of her late Victorian/Edwardian childhood, also originally published in The New Yorker, and I am eating it up. Fans of Gwen Raverat's Period Piece might find it right up their alley.

More Sylvia

Well, so far my not-quite-resolution to finally read more of Sylvia Townsend Warner seems to be coming to some fruition—unlike most other resolutions I've ever made. I already reported in January on her wartime stories, and now I've read Claire Harman's excellent biography of Warner and finally read her second novel, Mr Fortune's Maggot, which I had a previous false start with.

In fact, the bio may well have helped me in engaging a bit more with Mr Fortune, though I was, as always, a bit conflicted in reading it. Bios are, after all, the one form of storytelling that always ends in the death of the main character. It's true that Hemingway once famously noted, to a woman who criticized his work for being too bleak, that all stories, continued far enough, end in death, but somehow bios are particularly depressing for me. I always feel that I've become close friends with the subject of the bio (if I like them, at least), and then, just when we've got well acquainted, I have to watch them grow old and die.

If anything, this biography was more gruelling than most in that respect, since although Warner lived into her eighties, she lost her wife of nearly 40 years, Valentine Ackland, nine years before she herself died and was haunted (almost literally) by Ackland and thoughts of their life together for much of that time. What's more, Warner was brilliant at analyzing her grief and her own gradual decline in her diaries, as in this darkly funny passage from a letter to David Garnett:

Do you ever feel the childishness of old age? I don't mean second-childhood, but the particular childish excitement at being able to do things dexterously?—to pour out milk without spilling it, to put things back in their proper places, to be capable and responsible? It is a pure pride, as it was then. I only get it occasionally, and it lasts like morning dew.

And so, while I certainly found some inspiration in how bravely and self-deprecatingly she carried on, having it so often in Sylvia's own words was even a bit more like watching a friend go through it all first hand.

But really that's true of almost any biography, which may be why I tend to shy away from them. But Claire Harman, who has also published bios of Robert Louis Stevenson, Fanny Burney, and, most recently, Charlotte Brontë, does an excellent job here of bringing out both the mundane domestic lives of Sylvia and Valentine and the larger trajectories of their lives, political engagement, friendships, families, and marriage. 

There was much to enjoy here, including the fascinating dynamic between Sylvia and Valentine, who, I think, might have been a difficult person for me to like, but on the other hand what I saw as her more neurotic and perhaps selfish approach to life may well have complemented Sylvia's instincts to love and give and be flexible.

The excerpts from Sylvia's diaries provide some of Sylvia's wonderful turns of phrase, as when she writes of a home they lived in for a time, "The east wind sobs and whimpers like a Brontë in the kitchen." And I was tantalized to learn of at least three novels begun at various times and abandoned—do manuscripts survive, I immediately wonder? Two of these fell by the wayside while she was at work on The Corner That Held Them, the medieval nunnery novel that I love but have never quite managed to finish. And a long story Harman describes from the same period clearly does survive and sounds fascinating:

In 1948 Sylvia began another story, set in contemporary England, about a Swedish au-pair girl arriving at the country home of her new employer to find that the lady is dying. The first, completed, part of 'Song Without Words' is among the best things that Sylvia wrote, psychologically compelling and remarkably evocative of an English winter landscape, but the second part of the story ran dry, and was shelved.

Of course, since I still have so much of Warner's published work to read, I need hardly be bemoaning the lost and unfinished work, but you know how I am—the less available something is, the more enticing I seem to find it.

I was interested to see what a dramatic effect the arrival into Sylvia's life of The New Yorker had. Despite her early bestsellerdom with Lolly Willowes, by a few years later her and Valentine's finances had become a bit hand-to-mouth, until someone suggested that some story of village life Sylvia was telling in conversation would make a perfect story for The New Yorker, and the rest (along with any and all financial difficulties) was history. She died a rather well-off woman, if not actually wealthy, despite the fact that most of her work was out of print, and the reason was all those hefty paychecks from the Big Apple.

And in following up on my recent post about her wartime stories, there were two diary entries related to the war that I found particularly interesting. The first, a classic eccentric mother-in-law story, is Sylvia describing the rather overeager war work taken on by Valentine's mother:

In her ardour for service she has undertaken the charge of so many things that as far as I can reckon she will be essential in five different places at once; and as she attains terrific velocity, fells whatever stands in her path, and is permanently fitted with a screaming device like a German bomb, she will create incalculable havoc amid both defenders and attackers, besides spraining her ankle and getting very much out of breath. I often think that Mrs Ackland is the real reason why Hitler has not yet tried a landing on the East Coast. She thinks so, too. It is very odd to look at all these poor consequential idiots and remember that war might at any moment make real mincemeat of them. Even under the shadow of death man walketh in a vain shadow.

And finally, less amusingly but revealingly for an American whose list of top historic moments to travel in space and time to visit, given the opportunity, has always included, pretty high up the list, Trafalgar Square on V-E night, here's Valentine's own assessment of the moment:

'I was sure we would all collapse, perhaps die of joy,' Valentine wrote. 'Instead it feels as if we had all died of fatigue and impacted rage before the joy came ... Probably there'll be photographs of drunken crowds in Piccadilly and reverent crowds in village churches—They won't be true—they won't be representative!'

When peace was finally declared, Valentine wrote, 'we both felt peculiarly tired and perhaps we were rather particularly polite to each other. I had to work, which was ordinary, but I felt odd and unreal [ ... ] And most profoundly, indistinctly gloomy.

After finishing the bio, I dived right into reading Mr Fortune's Maggot, Warner's follow-up to my favorite novel of all time, Lolly Willowes. I had indeed attempted to read it once before and was unsuccessful. This time, I enjoyed the book a lot, though it certainly doesn't rank, for me, with dear, dear Lolly. To complete the segue, I loved this note in the biography about Warner deep in the throes of composing Mr Fortune:

In the middle of writing the storm on the island, she took William the chow out for his midnight walk and had got half-way down Inverness Terrace under a raincoat and umbrella before she noticed that in Bayswater it was a mild autumn night.

Mr Fortune is a well-meaning but rather feckless missionary, who asks to be allowed to venture to the impossibly remote island of Fanua, somewhere in the neighborhood of New Guinea, in order to gain converts. In short, he only manages a single convert, and that one, a boy named Lueli, perhaps a tentative one at best. The two live rather idyllically together in a hut in the shadow of a volcano, and Mr Fortune's eagerness to make other converts among the tribe gradually withers amidst the islanders cheerful indifference and happy lifestyle.

Undoubtedly Mr Fortune's watch, which he forgets to wind one night long after his arrival on the island, is an important symbol in the novel—perhaps not only for his abilities as a missionary but also for his faith itself, which seems to become displaced, "fraudulent," by his isolation with the cheerful natives:

But what time was it? The sky was overcast, he could not guess by the sun and he could not guess by his own time-feeling either, for his body had lost touch with ordinary life. He sat debating between nine-seventeen, five past ten, ten-forty-three, eleven-twenty—indecisive times which all seemed reasonably probable—and noon exactly, which was bracing and decisive, a good moment to begin a new era—but too good to be true. At last he settled on ten-twenty-five; but even so he still delayed, for he felt a superstitious reluctance to move the hands and so to destroy the last authentic witness his watch could bear him. Five minutes, he judged, had been spent in this weak-minded dallying: so resolutely he set the hands to ten-thirty and wound the poor machine up. It began to tick, innocently, obediently. It had set out on its fraudulent career.

I was also struck by Warner again using in Mr Fortune's Maggot the idea of names and the power of naming, as she did so prominently in Lolly Willowes. And here too the power of naming seems to be humorously undercut. The idea of a missionary arriving on an island and assigning his convert a new name is one that grates on my nerves, but I'm not sure, in this passage, that the object of the name is taking it any too seriously:

For a long while he stood lost in thankfulness. At last he bade the kneeling boy get up.

'What is your name?' he said.

'Lueli,' answered the boy.

'I have given you a new name, Lueli. I have called you Theodore, which means "the gift of God."'

Lueli smiled politely.

'Theodore,' repeated Mr. Fortune impressively.

I love that polite smile in the face of Mr Fortune's "impressive" pomposity. And just as Warner played in the early novel with the use of "Lolly" vs. "Laura," here the fact that the name Theodore never appears except when spoken by Mr Fortune—in the text, Lueli is always Lueli—makes clear how much of an impact Lueli's Christian name has had on him.

On this second reading, I found the novel entertaining throughout, but my favorite passage by far is when Mr Fortune attempts to instruct Lueli in greater depth about Christian scripture:

Since the teaching had to be entirely conversational, Lueli learnt much that was various and seemingly irrelevant. Strange alleys branched off from the subject in hand, references and similes that strayed into the teacher's discourse as the most natural things in the world had to be explained and enlarged upon. In the middle of an account of Christ's entry into Jerusalem Mr. Fortune would find himself obliged to break off and describe a donkey. This would lead naturally to the sands of Weston-super-Mare, and a short account of bathing-machines; and that afternoon he would take his pupil down to the beach and show him how English children turned sand out of buckets, and built castles with a moat round them. Moats might lead to the Feudal System and the Wars of the Barons. Fighting Lueli understood very well, but other aspects of civilisation needed a great deal of explaining; and Mr. Fortune nearly gave himself heat apoplexy by demonstrating in the course of one morning the technique of urging a golf ball out of a bunker and how English housewives crawl about on their hands and knees scrubbing the linoleum.

Perhaps a problematic sort of teacher to have if one wants to get anywhere in particular.

Mr Fortune's Maggot is actually in print these days, wonder of wonders, from Virago in the U.K. and from New York Review Books Classics in the U.S. Oddly, though, there is one important difference between the editions that folks might want to know about. The NYRB edition, now retitled simply Mr Fortune (perhaps the "maggot" was judged a bit offputting for bookstore shelves?), also contains "The Salutation," the novella sequel Warner wrote in 1932. My edition being an old green Virago from the 1980s, I had to track down the original story collection for which "The Salutation" was the title story, and I've now had a jolly time reading the entire collection as well. This makes about five Warner titles that I've read in rapid succession, which reflects far more focus on my part the last month or so than I am generally capable of.

If you do have a non-NYRB edition of the book, you may want to try to track down "The Salutation," which I found generally lighter, more cheerful, and more entertaining than the novel itself, though perhaps less powerful overall. In short, Mr Fortune, having left his idyllic island, has made his way exhaustingly to somewhere in South America, where he faints in the backyard of a lonely widow's house.

There are lots of entertaining passages in the novella (as well as, I have to admit, a slightly bewildering ending, but that didn't take too much away from my overall enjoyment), but I was particularly struck by the following passage, which says a lot about violence and intolerance and may be of particular relevance in the current post-Brexit Trumpian catastrophe. It follows a scene in which Timothy has been happily observing a rhea (related to the ostrich and emu) when it is suddenly shot dead by his hostess' dreadful nephew:

There was no need to look for the motive. Opposite slays opposite, as fire and water writhe in their combat, as lion and lamb wage their implacable enmity. Slender, fiercely erect, racked with youth and pride, the boy with the fun stood in a trance of hatred, defying a world of rheas, a world of harmlessness, dowdiness, ungainliness. There could be no mistaking his intent. Apollo could not have bent his bow with a more divine single-mindedness to destroy; and seeing him, the impulse of blame was quenched in the man's heart. One might as well have blamed a flash of lightning.

There is a second novella in the collection, "Elinor Barley," which I have to confess I found a bit dull. In general, the stories are not as strong as in Warner's later collections, but there is certainly a quirky charm with occasional echoes of Lolly Willowes. "The Son," about an anti-social woman who has served as caretaker of a large family home for more than 20 years, disconcerted by the return of the family's son, who seems to have been driven mad by his hatred for his mother, is a small masterpiece of atmosphere and oddity. Ditto "The Maze," in which a man moves to a small village, discovers that a 17th century memorial ignored by villagers has a forgotten maze of ditches around it, and becomes obsessed with mapping the maze, to the villagers' consternation. And "The Holy War," about a piously autocratic man who sets out to write a book annotating all the places where the atheistic Edward Gibbon went wrong in his Decline and Fall, only to become seduced by Gibbon and have his entire personality changed, is a humorous testimony to the power of books to disrupt and sometimes undercut our beliefs and our lives.

So what next in my reading of the divine Sylvia? More of her stories for sure, but perhaps I'll also move on to her third novel, The True Heart (1929). Hmmm…

The wartime stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner

It was a little shocking for me, in preparing this post, to realize that I haven't written about Sylvia Townsend Warner here since my very first review back in 2013—which was, appropriately, of my all-time favorite novel, Warner's first, the amazing and lovely Lolly Willowes (1926). Though, to be honest, perhaps it's not all that shocking, since many of Warner's later novels are notoriously challenging to engage with. I read and quite enjoyed Summer Will Show (1936), but that was before I started this blog and so I haven't written about it here. And then I attempted, in succession, Mr Fortune's Maggot (1927), After the Death of Don Juan (1938), The Corner That Held Them (1948), and, most recently, The Flint Anchor (1954), and somehow never managed to finish any of them.

Mind you, I love the way Warner writes, and Corner has the unusual distinction of being absolutely positively my favorite novel of all time that I've never actually finished. It's set in a medieval convent, and is fascinating in its historical detail and its sharp, icy prose that is somehow so fitting for a book about that period. And for what it's worth, I love it tremendously in theory. It's just in practice that I get into trouble… (Do you have books like that? That you like for many reasons, but are unable to finish?) Similar things happened with my attempt to read The Flint Anchor. And as for Mr Fortune's Maggot, some of you will have noted that I picked up a new copy of the old green Virago edition in the U.K. in October, so I'll be making another attempt there soon. (I'm optimistic about it, as other bloggers seem to have liked it—I think I was just in the wrong frame of mind when I approached it before.) In fact, I'm hoping that 2017 will be the year of properly discovering all of Warner's work, and as I have a good deal of it already on my bookshelves, that project, at least, will require little or no book shopping expenditures!

At any rate, all of this was before I had ever really engaged with Warner's short stories, and it's they who have now given me a proper excuse to write about her again. I had been meaning to read the two story collections that include her wartime stories—A Garland of Straw (1943) and The Museum of Cheats (1947)—ever since a couple of the stories were mentioned in Jenny Hartley's marvelous Millions Like Us. Which was a few years ago now, so I'm right on time in finally getting round to them now…

Many of these stories first appeared in The New Yorker, not unlike the more famous wartime stories by the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen, and Mollie Panter-Downes. I know I make this sort of comment constantly, but I do wonder how it is that Warner hasn't garnered her own collection of wartime stories like Panter-Downes' excellent Good Evening Mrs Craven from Persephone. I happened to check, after reading these two books, to see which of them were included in the Selected Stories volume published in 1988 (and reprinted later by Virago), and I have to say that almost none of my favorites from these books were included. Was it just that publishers assumed readers in the 1980s couldn't relate to war stories? Whatever the reason, it's yet another reason for a collection focused specifically on wartime themes.

Which is not to claim that every story in these collections is a winner. There are a few bits of somewhat obvious propaganda ("Apprentice" and "A Functionary", for example), and a few more that I found a little bewildering ("The Museum of Cheats", "Unknown to History"). But most of the stories are entertaining at the least, and a good many are out-and-out brilliant.

To cut to the chase, my favorite from both collections is easy to select. "From Above" from A Garland of Straw, struck me as distinctly Lolly Willowes-esque in its story of a woman whose home—stuffed to the gills with her husband's highly cultured and treasured posessions—is threatened by a time bomb, and who finds herself feeling giddy with freedom and exhilaration at having a day away from the posh confines of her home:

With guilty alacrity she jumped on a bus; shameless and nimble as any cat running off with the cold pheasant, she ran off to make the most of her holiday. Hourly becoming more depraved, she told the manicurist all about the time-bomb in the Mews, and lapped up the sympathy that followed. At the record-shop too she told the man about the time-bomb, and he agreed with her that music was what she needed, music was the only possible comfort and solace. She played through an album of songs by Debussy, a type of music that James detested, and went out, having bought nothing, humming to herself a vague incantation of wholetone scale melodies in her husky voice that was like a pastel, for it smudged and never could stay in tune.

It's a funny story, and definitely a surprising direction for a time-bomb story to take, but it manages to get in a lot of subtle observations about married life and the quieter forms of feminine oppression and resistance.

"The Trumpet Shall Sound," also in Garland, likewise manages to take some morbid humor from the Blitz, as a gathering of mourners at a cemetary (of a man who has fallen over a bicycle in the blackout, no less) must seek shelter from a daylight raid by climbing into the freshly dug grave.

Then there are the stories about the unusual living arrangements inspired by wartime. "Sweethearts and Wives," from Museum is about a household comprised of three women whose husbands are away at war, along with their three children, and deals with the logistical difficulties of communal living. And "View Halloo," in the same collection, is the story of Antoinette, a woman who has taken a house in Wales to be out of harm's way, has advertised for fellow tenants, and is apparenly cheerfully living with the results—until she discovers the children playing at ghoulish ways of killing an apparently fictional woman named Mrs. Lawther. What starts as light and cheerful ends up as a rather disturbing, powerful little tale (I won't spoil it here).

Then there are the darker stories, at which Warner is also terribly effective. "Noah's Ark," from Garland, is about evacuees who give their hostess nightmares with their obsession with the wild animals in the London Zoo. Which doesn't sound like much of a theme, but it ends up quite poignant. And "Time's Silvering Hand," from Museum, is about a young boy entertaining an elderly woman with tales of the horrors he's witnessed in the Blitz, which she seems to enjoy a bit too much.

Warner is particularly brilliant with the little touches that show the ongoing effects of war. In "Mutton's Only House," a woman habitually looks for the quick glimpse of her own house through the trees as she returns home on the train, and mentions that now and then she has missed it and automatically imagined that the house has been bombed. And in "The Way Back," we see, in a simple reflex action, how war traumas linger in a returning soldier.

Most of these stories will certainly reward rereading. I've reread a few of them already, and noticed new things—Warner's delicate, skillful touches that that are so simple as to be easily missed but that, given proper attention, cause the story to open out with new meanings and new significance.

(As it happens, Simon at Stuck in a Book only recently wrote about Museum of Cheats as well—see here—and in fact named it as one of his top reads of the year. Happily, he was as enthusiastic as I am, and in fact his writing about one story in particular, "To Come So Far," made me go back and pay closer attention to it. I think I had rather breezed through it the first time, so thank you Simon for making me appreciate it more!)

At any rate, I had a great time with both collections, and they've led me to dive into reading Warner's diaries, which were reprinted by Virago, and to request Claire Harman's biography of Warner from the library. Plus, I'm happy knowing that Warner wrote a whole slew of other stories—a dozen or so additional collections in all. So, you'll likely hear more about her in the coming months.

In the meantime, I will leave you with a particularly amusing and wonderfully morbid metaphor, taken from "Boors Carousing" in Museum:

Beyond this, suddenly and surprisingly whitewashed and neat, was Miss Metcalf's dwelling, like a bandbox abandoned on the river's brim by someone who had committed suicide.

ANNA GORDON KEOWN, The Cat Who Saw God (1932)

A woman's feelings upon discovering a Roman Emperor beneath her roof are bound to be a bit bewildered.

No doubt it's even more bewildering when the emperor is Nero and he's in feline form… 

In spite of the fact that I have a huge wish list of books I'd like to own some day—especially those that just can't be found in libraries anywhere—as soon as I read the basic premise of this novel, I knew I needed a copy of it.

Miss Eliza is the woman in question—a 42-year-old spinster and sometime book reviewer and novelist, who has just severed a relationship with a clergyman because of her inability to relate to organized religion, and who has moved, with her housekeeper Sarah Lupin, from Ireland to a fairy-tale-ish house on a steep hillside, built on the remains of a Roman settlement and apparently buffeted by gale-force winds all the year round.  Approaching the house for the first time, she comments to the driver:

"But, dear me ... what scraggy poplars! Quite extraordinarily scraggy they look from up here, like a row of witches' brooms. I suppose you don't believe in witches, chauffeur?"

"Certainly not, ma'am."

"Not even if you saw one with your own eyes?"

"I shouldn't, ma'am. Rubbish, the whole boiling of it!"

"Ah!"

"All this bosh about witches and fairies and the rest of it makes me sick, straight it do."

Miss Eliza was very unwilling that anyone should celebrate so rapturous an expedition by being sick. It would have been a thousand pities.

I immediately perked up at this passage, because the whole relationship of spinsters and witches in literature has always been of particular interest to me—at least since Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes seduced me and became my favorite novel a decade or so ago.  And although Keown's book is not (for me) quite on a par with Lolly Willowes, I was happy to see that this exchange was no fluke.  The witchy subtext remains rather muted in this novel, but it is certainly present—and was actually even more intriguing for me than the spectacle of the Emperor Nero purring by the fireside.  But more about that later.

Personally, I think Nero looked a bit more
like a dog (a pug, perhaps?) than a cat...

Miss Eliza arrives first at the women's rather desolate new home, and when a black cat suddenly appears in the living room she welcomes the company.  But soon he begins to create unease, as when the women are discussing the cat with the carter who, a day or two later, has brought Sarah and her baggage to the house:

As for the carter, his mouth had fallen wide open in astonishment.  For the cat, turning his head very quietly and suddenly, had fixed upon his critics a stare so awful that the stoutest heart might well have missed a beat. In his enormous eyes, eyes glowing just now like red hot coals, it seemed as though the scorn of the whole world lay concentrated. An evil look he gave them, an evil and venomous glare, and so triumphantly out of proportion to the offense was it (for who, after all, does not speak of a cat as of an article of furniture, something to be either condemned or admired?) that the poor humans sitting there in the warm and companionable kitchen were struck guilty in their own minds by very contact with its accusing strength...

It's not long until the cat begins conversing with Eliza, and his slip of the tongue about a mother named Agrippina reveals that he is, in fact, none other than the Nero who so famously waxed musical while Rome burned.  It turns out that after 1900 or so years in Hell, Nero has decided to do penance for his earthly deeds and thereby get to Heaven.  The powers-that-be (fortunately kept vague in the novel) have allowed him to return to earth as a cat, in which form his natural instincts toward cruelty and gluttony will be at their strongest.  He must learn to cultivate, among other things, mercy toward mice and birds, tolerance of cold and wet, and a casual indifference to—you guessed it—fiddles and bonfires:

"If we had lived in the Middle Ages," cried Miss Eliza, laughing, "I should have been burned as a witch and you as my familiar."

At the mention of burning the cat's eyes glowed with undisguised delight. "Nothing like a really good bonfire," he said, licking his lips.

All of which sounds hilarious, and it often is.  Sometimes his instincts get the best of him, as after a visit from the neighborhood gossip, Annabella Climp—a version of the stereotypical witch in her own right—when he advises that Eliza should eliminate Miss Climp with nightshade.  At her horrified response:

"As you please," said he. "Don't blame me if that old woman spreads unpleasant stories about you. Mark my words, she's bound to be a thorn in your side. You'd be very well advised to put her out of the way. But," he added in a huff, "don't mind me. I'm nothing but a novice in such matters."

And since the cat does not speak to Sarah Lupin, only to Miss Eliza (and, later, others, but that would be telling too much), there are some humorous misunderstandings and developments:

The word as applied to Miss Eliza's cat, had a ridiculous sound. It irritated her to hear Sarah Lupin out there in the moonlight calling, "Puss Puss." As well attempt to snare a professor of theology with a buttonhook.

The only weakness here, for me, is that Keown takes her theological themes a bit more seriously than the novel's tone seems to warrant.  There are a few longish discussions of religion, organized and otherwise, with the rather predictable conclusion that a free-spirited love of nature and a deep enjoyment of the beauties of life have the advantage over a bunch of stuffy, hypocritical bishops aching for an idyllic afterlife.  These sections are sometimes humorous and entertaining, but they do tend to slow the novel's pace—particularly near the end.

But I'm still delighted to have come across the book, because its themes of spinsterhood and witchery are the real attraction.  Miss Eliza's concerns with spinsterhood may perhaps result from the fact that she has just ended a romantic relationship at age 42 and might understandably be coming to terms with her possible (but not inevitable) future.  At any rate, there seem to be lots of sinister witchy types in the village and thereabouts.  What about the postmistress, for example?:

The mingled smell of wallflowers without and peppermints within went to Miss Eliza's head. She laughed unguardedly, saw, too late, that she had offended this sinister virgin behind the counter. However long she might live in the valley, however many stamps she might buy while she lived there, that laugh would never be forgiven her. Something of this she caught, with her intuitive larger vision, from the steely eyes behind the spectacles.

Witchiness also continues to be associated with Miss Eliza herself, even in offhand comments such as this one, to Sarah, as she is hurrying to a party:

"We must hurry," said Miss Eliza, "if I lose that bus I'll be forced to fly."

A mere figure of speech, of course.  Or is it?

Later, when Eliza pays a visit to the aforementioned Anabella Climp, one might wonder if the cat's suggestion of a dose of nightshade might not have been wise after all.  After assuring Eliza that she doesn't care what anyone thinks of her (a good thing, too!), she adds:

"What's the matter with you is that you do care. Your weakness lies all the other way round. When you hear folks telling each other, 'Here comes the witch. Look at the witch and her cat,' you do care; your wretched little niming piming pride is up in arms at once.  You enjoy being a witch, you wouldn't not be witch, but you don't like people calling you a witch. I know you, I've met your sort before."

She seized the arms of her chair and sat back in triumph.

"But I'm not a witch," protested the victim of this curious charge. "I never was and never will be witch, and nothing could ever make me one."

"There you are. What did I tell you?" cried Miss Climp, slapping her lean flank with surprising vigor…

I don't know enough about Keown (and indeed, there's apparently little enough information to be had without some serious digging) to know if she might have been acquainted with Sylvia Townsend Warner and have been self-consciously responding to Warner's novel from only a few years before.  They were both novelists and poets, after all, and might have run across each other, for better or worse, at literary gatherings. 

Perhaps not Eliza's idea of "flying" to a party...

Since Lolly Willowes was a bestseller (and the inaugural Book-of-the-Month Club selection), Keown would surely have been aware of it.  But while Lolly embraces her witchiness, Miss Eliza resists hers.  If Lolly sees being a witch as a liberation from societal constraints, Miss Eliza might even see this forcing upon her of a witchy identity—based only on her spinsterhood and her unconventional beliefs and lifestyle—as itself a societal constraint, which makes Keown's novel a sort of interesting rejoinder to Warner's.  And yet, as we have seen, Miss Eliza herself seems to flirt with witchy visions of herself flying to parties or being burned at the stake.  Is she suggesting that witchiness is inescapable for a woman who chooses to remain unmarried, however she might resist it?  At the very least, some internal conflict is apparent and adds considerable interest to the novel.

The high point of Lolly Willowes is the sustained brilliance of Lolly's wonderfully bitter climactic monologue on the position of unmarried women.  And while it can't match up to Lolly's speech, Miss Eliza too makes a final declaration of independence of sorts (albeit one delivered to a cat), defending her one-ness with nature and her aversion to the constraints of conventional religion:

You are to beware of the lust of the eye...the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. You are to learn to mistrust your instincts. You must not worship the beauty of earth. You must not linger by the way. You must blunder blindly along, your thoughts fixed upon a better place, as a discourteous guest will blunder through the drawing-room of a beautiful hostess in order to attend a (presumably better) party elsewhere.

The speech goes on, and it continues in a later scene, but I don't want to spoil it for anyone who might track this book down.  And it is well worth tracking down.  Its most intriguing themes may get a bit muddied at times by the presence of the Emperor Nero meowing on the rug, but the novel's high points really are rather high.

Even as high, perhaps, as a flying broomstick…

SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER, Lolly Willowes (1926)

Sylvia Townsend Warner is better known today than she was a few years ago when I first came across her, and most of her novels are now available from either New York Review Books Classics or Virago Modern Classics, but she still doesn’t get the attention she deserves.  She was the author of seven novels, including Lolly Willowes (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 was also widely known in her lifetime for her short fiction, much of which originally appeared in The New Yorker and most of which remains out of print today. 

Warner has garnered some interest in recent years because of her 40-year lesbian “marriage” to Valentine Ackland, a prominent British poet. Their letters to one another, along with a connecting narrative by Warner—which she wrote before her death along with instructions to publish the letters once those mentioned in them were dead—appeared as I’ll Stand by You in 1999.

Since Lolly Willowes, as I already mentioned in my introductory post, is not only my favorite novel, but also the novel that initiated my researches into lesser-known writers, I figured it was only right that it should be the first novel discussed on this blog. 

I have to make the disclaimer, however, that I first wrote about this novel when I was still laboring vainly in academia, and my original writing about it was a bit theoretical.  But apart from the fact that I’m not even sure myself what I meant by some of the gibberish I wrote at the time, I can’t seem to get away from thinking about the same three possible interpretations that I wrote about then, and I still find it interesting to try to balance all three of them in discussing the book.

In a nutshell, Lolly Willowes is about Laura Willowes, insistently called Lolly by her family—a name that began with a child’s inability to pronounce her correct name and then stuck, perhaps becoming symbolic of her status as a spinster hanger-on in the family, without her own identity.  Laura doesn’t care to marry and lives with her father on his country estate until his death when she is 28. She then resides with a brother and sister-in-law in London until she reaches middle age, at which point she suddenly rebels, moves to a small country village by herself, becomes a witch, and sells her soul to the devil in exchange for peace, solitude, and a nonsocial existence, unencumbered by family or civilization.

Same old same old, right?

The novel became a surprise bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic when it was published in 1926 (it was the inaugural selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club).  This might in part have been because there were so many unmarried women in the post-World War I years—“women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded”—who could relate to the character’s situation and savor her fantastic refusal of the role of demure, helpful, but largely invisible spinsterhood (a refusal, without doubt, that was—and still is—considerably harder to pull off in reality). In fact, another highly entertaining novel about a woman similarly resisting repressive social norms (though not by selling her soul), Rose Macaulay’s Crewe Train, appeared the same year.

On the surface, then, the novel is a hugely entertaining fantasy, and this is all I asked of it when I read it the first couple of times.  The prose is gorgeous and endlessly entertaining, the world it presents is magical and liberatory, and Warner constantly and eloquently subverts the assumptions of male society throughout.  It frequently made me laugh out loud, not so much with hilarity as with sheer delight, and I identified completely with Laura’s escape from familial drudgery and invisibility.  For example, here is Warner’s description of the death of Laura’s mother:

During the last few years of her life Mrs. Willowes grew continually more skilled in evading responsibilities, and her death seemed but the final perfected expression of this skill.  It was as if she had said, yawning a delicate cat’s yawn, ‘I think I will go to my grave now,’ and had left the room, her white shawl trailing behind her.

And here is a description of Laura’s domestic activities while living with her brother:

Such things as arranging flowers or cleaning the canary-cage were done with a kind of precautious routine which made them seem alike solemn and illicit.

Laura sells her soul to a surprisingly comforting and cheerful Satan and lives happily ever after as a witch. This is summed up in Laura's highly uncharacteristic, beautiful, hilarious, and heartbreaking 3-page rant about the position of unmarried women, culminating with:

But they are like trees towards the end of summer, heavy and dusty, and nobody finds their leaves surprising, or notices them till they fall off. If they could be passive and unnoticed, it wouldn't matter. But they must be active, and still not noticed. Doing, doing, doing, till mere habit scolds at them like a housewife, and rouses them up—when they might sit in their doorways and think—to be doing still!

Laura compares the treatment of her family with how Satan treats her, and it strikes me as a powerful statement about overprotection vs. freedom:

They say: ‘Dear Lolly! What shall we give her for her birthday this year?  Perhaps a hot-water bottle.  Or what about a nice black lace scarf?  Or a new workbox?  Her old one is nearly worn out.’ But you say: ‘Come here, my bird!  I will give you the dangerous black night to stretch your wings in, and poisonous berries to feed on, and a nest of bones and thorns, perched high up in danger where no one can climb to it.’  That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure.

There are so many gorgeous and brilliant passages, and my copy of the book is so spotted with x’s in the margins next to memorable prose, that I could end up posting most of the novel here, but I’ll let you find out some of the wonders for yourself.

Anyway, it wasn’t until about my third reading of the book (I’m up to eight or nine by now) that I began to wonder about the “reality” of the novel.  I happened to have just been reading Henry James’s classic ghost story “The Turn of the Screw,” in which a young governess with two young wards on an isolated country estate, may—depending on how you read the story (and, no doubt, depending on your own biases and inclinations as well)—either be fending off actual ghosts determined to harm or traumatize the two children, OR be hallucinating ghosts as projections of her own sexual repressions and anxieties, in the process of which she may be traumatizing the two children herself.

And suddenly, I found myself wondering if Warner could be doing something similar in Lolly Willowes.  Could Laura be interpreting perfectly ordinary occurrences in supernatural ways, or could she even be having hallucinations?

I didn’t like the idea at first, because I loved and related to Laura so much as a character and didn’t want to be diagnosing her as “neurotic” or “delusional” in her rebellion against society.  But when I started reading with this possibility in mind, I did start finding clues.  Warner repeatedly presents Laura—long before she actually moves to the country and sells her soul to Satan—as having increasingly vivid fantasies, and perhaps finding it harder and harder to return to reality. When doing needlework, “She had actually a sensation that she was stitching herself into a piece of embroidery with a good deal of background.”  And later on, Laura is hilariously faced with a potential suitor:

Mr. Arbuthnot certainly was not prepared for her response to his statement that February was a dangerous month.  “It is,” answered Laura with almost violent agreement.  “If you are a were-wolf, and very likely you may be, for lots of people are without knowing, February, of all months, is the month when you are most likely to go out on a dark windy night and worry sheep.”

…

Mr. Arbuthnot said: “How very interesting!  But I really don’t think I am likely to do such a thing.”  Laura made no answer.  She did not think so either.  But she was amusing herself with a surprisingly vivid and terrible picture of Mr. Arbuthnot cloaked in a shaggy hide and going with heavy devouring swiftness upon all-fours with a lamb dangling from his mouth.

These early fantasies are harmless enough, but as Laura gets older, the fantasies seem to become more vivid.  In a scene in a grocery shop just before her departure for the country, Laura has a vision of a woman raising the fruits and vegetables:

She forgot that she was in London, she forgot the whole of her London life. She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit, her fingers seeking the rounded ovals of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves. … No sound, except sometimes the soft thud of a ripe plum falling into the grass, to lie there a compact shadow among shadows. The back of her neck ached a little with the strain of holding up her arms. Her fingers searched among the leaves.

She started as the man of the shop came up to her and asked her what she wished for. Her eyes blinked, she looked with surprise at the gloves upon her hands.

It’s a little difficult to see how these clues fit into the novel except to suggest that Laura’s grasp on reality may not be as strong as it might be.  So, unlikely as it seems from the cheerfulness of its surface story, I started thinking that Lolly Willowes might have something in common with that all-time classic of the madness brought on by women’s claustrophobic domestic lives, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s early feminist story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (though the former is certainly a million times more fun to read!).  Laura might be simply having a clever and comforting fantasy—similar, even, to the escapist fantasy experienced by us, the readers of the novel—except that, in the end, Laura may no longer recognize it as fantasy.

When I returned to the novel a year or so later for a fourth (or was it fifth?) reading, I started imagining that a third possibility might exist (and this is where it may have gotten a little academic and egg-headed, but I still wonder about it, so I’ll share it here regardless).  I started wondering if Warner was really doing something pretty postmodern—if she might be intentionally leaving the “reality” of the novel in doubt in order to focus instead on the whole idea of fantasy itself—of (in this case) a woman’s fantasy of escaping from a rigidly-controlled and ultimately male-dominated culture in which her only value could be as a wife and mother or as a permanent babysitter and domestic servant.  Maybe she was questioning the politics of this escapism (Warner herself sympathized with Marxism and might well have been suggesting that fantasizing doesn’t make the world a better place)?  Or maybe she was questioning if it was even possible to escape in any meaningful way from the culture we live in?



Sylvia Townsend Warner

After all, whether Laura is dreaming comforting dreams or whether she really becomes a witch, it strikes me that the life Laura chooses for herself is really, when you think about it, only a sort of lonely, wide-open prison instead of a socially enforced, tightly constraining one. When her nephew Titus becomes engaged to be married, Laura thinks of the engagement as a business transaction, an engagement between the country estate Titus already owns and the woman he is about to own. She has no understanding of—or, perhaps more accurately, no trust in—romantic love—or, for that matter, much of any other kind of social interaction. Laura's escape from society and social oppression has been a (surely somewhat bittersweet) escape from any meaningful human interaction whatsoever!

Not only that, but, late in the novel, when Laura wonders why being a witch seems so normal to her, Satan—her newly chosen master—tells her:

That is because you are in my power. No servant of mine can feel remorse, or doubt, or surprise. You may be quite easy, Laura: you will never escape me, for you can never wish to.

Which isn’t exactly a reassuringly liberatory ending, since she seems to have exchanged the domination of a real-world husband or her real-world relatives for a supernatural domination. In fact, Satan’s words could be read as a description of the difficulties women (or any other group) have faced in trying to find ways to live within a culture without being completely defined by it. How can you escape something if you’re inside it? How can you think of alternatives to your way of life if your whole way of thinking has been learned from inside that way of life? Might that not, in the end, be the real, gritty, non-escapist point of Warner’s wonderful escapist fantasy?

(By the way, I don’t think I’ve mentioned the name of the village to which Laura retreats.  One might wonder about a triumphant escape from domestic drudgery—to a village called Great Mop…)

I readily admit that when I re-read the novel now, it’s absolutely for the plot—for the wonderful, liberating story of a powerless woman who gains power and happiness and freedom.  And I love Laura for her rebellion, her subversive thoughts, and her joyful liberation.  Her rant, which I quoted from earlier, goes on:

One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick.  It’s to escape all that—to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day, the workhouse dietary is scientifically calculated to support life.

Once she gets going, what Laura has to say about the place of women—especially the “superfluous” unmarried women of her time—is brilliant and inspiring regardless of how you interpret the book. 

But I also don’t doubt that the other meanings are there, or that Warner put them there intentionally.  Moreover, I’ve come to believe that—for me, at least—those other meanings ultimately enrich the novel.  Without the lingering doubt about Laura’s complete sanity, without the questioning of what a “liberating” fantasy (or, for that matter, a “liberated” reality) would actually look like, Lolly Willowes might not have remained my favorite novel and weathered so many rereadings.

But if you need one more bit of proof that Warner intended to call Laura’s delightful escape into question?  Well, what about that title?  “Lolly” is, after all, the name forced on Laura by her family ties, by her defined role as a spinster in a repressive society.  Warner never once uses the name in her narrative except when a character uses it in dialogue. Once Laura escapes to the countryside, she remains exclusively “Laura” until Titus comes to visit her and reinstates the old name. And yet... That repressive, unchosen, unwanted name—which Laura interprets explicitly as a threat to her liberation—that identity that Laura is trying so determinedly and cleverly to resist, is right there in big letters in the title Warner chose for the novel.

It kind of makes you think.