Barricades and Gardens

...Barricades and Gardens Scenes of Childhood By Sylvia Townsend Warnei Viking 177 pp $10 95 Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" READING this book, I gradually realized that almost everything that mattered to the author was either left out or skipped past or splashed over with a rather urgently whipped-up froth of spoofing Almost, I have to emphasize There are passages of sudden, seemingly involuntary spellweaving that match the best pages of her other works That is saying a lot, both qualitatively and quantitatively She published seven novels, 13 collections of short stories, six volumes of verse, and two biographies, besides her early political articles and literary studies, including a translation from Proust She wrote a libretto for an opera based on the last days of Shelley, and when very young, having trained as a musicologist, was one of the editors of a 10-volume history of Tudor church music I had hoped to find in Scenes of Childhood the answers to some of the puzzles left by my acquaintance with the author But I should have remembered the fashions that helped form the patterns of the New Yorker, where the pieces gathered here originally appeared In the '20s stylish parents referred to their children as beasts or monsters Relatives were always mad, causing comic disasters In the New Yorker they were preferably upper-class For at the young magazine's ambivalent heart, along with worthier aspirations, there was an innocent Midwestern snobbery, a wide-eyed hankering for high life, an Anglophile yearning for butlers and nannies, for vicars and tutors, and if possible some connection to a title Sylvia Townsend Warner was able to provide all this One piece tells of her mother's desire "to explore the ravishing novelty of doing without any servants " It goes exhaustively into her mother's efforts to boil an egg properly, and finally remembering an ancient directive for timing by the reading of the 51st Psalm Another sketch, about the unlikely acquisition of an impeccable but cold-breathing butler, begins bafflingly "When I visited New York at the turn of the decade [presumably 1930] I met a great quantity of English butlers who had been imported, I understood, to combat prohibition " In the frailest anecdote, though, characteristic notes ring out "The cat went up the stairs like an arpeggio passage in a cadenza", the brass bed had "a starched white valance usually stencilled with dogpaws" Parts of some stones rise tantalizingly above the whole In a tale of the mother's demented battle against mice, genuine emotion suddenly takes over, revealing "the astonishing storehouse" of the mother's memories of her Indian childhood, memories of scent and sound and color that become the author's own Is it unreasonable to wish that Warner had invariably written from the heart9 Not, I think, when the difference in quality is so striking Curious about this contrast in the book, I checked the dates of the stories Sure enough, though they are not otherwise arranged chronologically, the final one, "The Queen Remembered," was the last to be published, in 1973, five years before the author's death And that is where she opens her sitting room to show herself with a taken-for-granted companion, Valentine, planning a quest for peat fuel as they drink their evening coffee On the journey they meet a countrywoman whose reverent memones of Victoria's wifely devotion affect them in a way that could not be described more quietly, more reticently and yet more directly, or more satisfyingly It adds to one's desire to know what really concerned Warner when the first of these sketches was published in 1936 Titled blithely "My Mother Won the War," it looks back on her mother in a fierce and lengthy feud with the head of the local Red Cross committee over whether a soldier's pajama trousers should have a button, suggesting that the mood of 1914-18 in England was hilarious Yet Warner felt a bitter revulsion against the "mass madness," the "brutal bungle" of war At the time she wrote the story she was a committed Communist, contributing to the Left Review and trying desperately to place articles about Spain wherever they might help the Republican forces fighting Franco In 1938, After the Death of Don Juan appeared, although set in 18th-century Spain, it expressed her passionate antifascist convictions In 1939 (the same year as the trifling "Madame Houdin" and "How I Left the Navy" in this volume), she published one of her most remarkable novels, Summer WillShow, the story of a woman's escape from her marriage into a strong erotic and political involvement with her husband's mistress The background is Pans during the 1848 revolution, and the book ends with the heroine, after seeing her lover Minna stabbed to death on the barricades, staggering home a few days later and sitting down absently to glance at one of the leaflets she had been distributing Then, "obdurately attentive and with growing absorption," she reads on in the Communist Manifesto I met Warner that June, following a talk I gave at the climactic Congress of the League of American Writers—the last one before the August Hitler-Stalin Pact where writers could come together in anti-fascist unity With some long gaps we kept up contact, mostly by telephone when I was abroad In one of these conversations she confided her unhappiness at the neglect of her work by English critics This she tacitly attributed to politics We talked of my visiting her, but not till early in the '70s was I able to travel to Dorset Once there, as the hours in her sunny garden went on, I felt a growing blankness Our only real communication, I thought, had been about her cat (I did not know then that cats were truly important to Warner, and gardening too In fact, it was her "husbandry" that had radicalized her—learning the miles a woman walked for water, "the amount of unpaid time filched from the laborer the average number of sleepers per bed and of rats per sleeper ") I suppose I did realize vaguely that in the intervening decades many other Americans had made that pilgrimage before me By now, like Adolphine Cor-bett, widow of a famous poet in her short story, "The Perfect Setting," she had probably had enough of pilgrims "She could put them off and have another day to herself Almost all her days were such, but as one grows older one increasingly values them " Warner was nearly 80 then, it may have seemed too late to add to her circle of close friends The driver she had hired to take me to my train at Dorchester must have sensed some of my disappointment, for he said matter-of-factly, "The woman she lived with, you know, Miss Ackland—she died not long ago " I registered this as significant, linking it with what I knew from the novels But I was still preoccupied by frustration What I was thinking about was our wasted chance to talk of the commitment we had shared, and what had happened to it afterward Among the many ways former Communists deal with their political past, one is to wall it up from memory, denying its existence This seemed unlike the author I knew, who had written so early about homosexuality and politics Even her masterwork, The Corner that Held Them (1948), set in a 14th-century nunnery during the Black Plague and the Peasants' Revolt, was conceived (though this was not evident to critics) as a Marxist approach to religious history Throughout her fiction, short stones as well as novels, Warner made clear her horror of the cruelty and hypocrisy of bourgeois conventions Throughout her fiction There lies the key What I did not realize, riding to Dorchester that evening was that onlv in tiction could she tell her great truths She may have had more reasons for this reserve than most writers, at least until the last days of her life, but for every ar-tist a certain withholding may be essential—a blocking of channels outward, allowing the pressure to build up, so that the power can go into the work This came to me with the memory of "A Love Match," a short story that must have exploded into the New Yorker offices with more force than the bombs out in the streets during those tumultuous '60s A sister goes at night to her brother, who is home on leave from the trenches of World War I, and tries to comfort him in his terrified dreams They find themselves mated for life, and solve their problem by settling in a remote village as"junior fogies " "Returning from their sober junketings, Justin and Celia, safe within their brick wall, cast off their weeds of middle age, laughed, chattered and kissed with an intensified delight in their scandalous immunity from blame At first I thought the unusually gleeful tone of mischief about such a subject might have surged from the need to express somehow Warner's joy in her own idyll "Loving each other criminally and sincerely, they took pains to live together happily and to safeguard their happiness from injuries of their own infliction or from outside " But I learn that there were injuries Valentine, whom Warner served—doing, for instance, all the household's cooking?was often attracted to others, and finally dealt the blow of becoming a Catholic when religion was anathema to her lover...

...It seems to me now—knowing Warner nursed Valentine Ackland through a lingering death from cancer?that this story, ending with the sister and brother being killed instantly in bed by a rocket during World War II, their bodies "disentangled" by a discreet and sympathetic discoverer, must have drawn its power from a passionate, prescient wish-dream against reality Only after Valentine Ackland had been dead some years could there be a slight relaxing of Warner's need to hold back Having taken her strange departure into "the world ot Faery" she could at last talk a little about her ow n life In a taped interview given in 197S, she tells win she wrote the stones collected in kingdoms ol Ellin "I suddenly looked round on my careei and thought, 'Good God, I've been concentrating on understanding the human heart for all these decades Bother the human heart...

...We make our way to the grave de-lighnting nobody...

...She was still writing about it, though, and unmasking human absurdities " I kept on making the most delightful discoveries of great social importance I discovered that no well-bred fairy would dream of flying, they leave that to the servants When one has discovered some truth of that sort, it's so reviving, it's such fun This bluff cheer ultimateh remains protective Warner was still more guarded about her political history It was clear that she was no longer under Communist discipline, but when and how she left the Party no one seems to know Speaking of the nuns in The Corner that Held Them being in retreat she adds, —as w ho that one has ever loved was not in retreat in 19489" The reason she had written no more novels after The Flint Anchor was that "Nothing big enough was left to say We had fought, we had retreated, we were betrayed, and now are misrepresented So I melted into the background as best I could, to continue sniping You can pick odd enemies off, you know, by aiming a short story well ' Another explanation for Warner's not revealing herself in personal contact is that she was a journal keeper She left some 40 notebooks—nch, no doubt, with answers that will some day solve puzzles Also, amazingly, she wrote to Valentine Ackland almost daily, whether they were together or apart Publication will be possible after the death of two people who are now in their 70s Meantime William Maxwell, her editor tor many years at the New Yorker, is editing a collection of her other letters to appear next year It may tell some of the truths behind Scenes of Childhood, and give the he to these lines in the last volume of Warners verse, Tuehe Poems Learning to walk, the child toilers between embracess Admiring voices confirm its tentative syllables In the day of unlearning speech, mis-laying balance...