HYBRID: The 2023 Sylvia Townsend Warner Lecture
Streamed live on Wednesday 18 October 2023
Join us for the 2023 Sylvia Townsend Warner Lecture, featuring Professor Claire Harman.
The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society(https://townsendwarner.com/) is very pleased to host Professor Claire Harman presenting the 2023 Sylvia Townsend Warner Lecture. Her subject is ‘”The true voice of the heart”: capture and evasiveness in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s life and work’.
Claire Harman is an award-winning writer and critic, and the author of seven major literary biographies. She is especially known for her pioneering work on Sylvia Townsend Warner, including a biography published in 1989 and editions of Warner’s poetry and journals. She has taught English at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford and creative writing at Columbia University in New York City. She is now Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006 and became President of The Alliance of Literary Societies (https://allianceofliterarysocieties.wordpress.com/) in 2016.
The previous three Sylvia Townsend Warner Lectures were given by Maud Ellmann (2017), Peter Swaab (2019) and David Trotter (2021), and are published by UCL Press in the Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society (https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/stw/).
They are freely available online as open access publications:
After the Death of Don Juan: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Spanish Novel – https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/stw/article/id/2322/
Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Possibilities of Freedom: The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society Lecture 2019 https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/stw/article/id/1325/
‘My Usual Despicable Hold on Life’: The View from Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Diaries – https://journals.uclpress.co.uk/stw/article/id/595/
The lecture is supported by UCL Press: https://www.uclpress.co.uk/, the UCL English Department: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/english/ucl-english-0 and the UCL Institute for Advanced Studies: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/institute-advanced-studies-ias.
Well welcome again it’s uh it’s lovely to see you all here and um to welcome you to the biannual soia Townsend Warner lecture and I’m Peter swab I I teacher UCL and I um edit the Warner Journal at the moment and I’d just like to start
With a few thanks to um various people who’ve enabled the occasion today um first of all the IAS the instit of advanced studies who are hosting us and uh whose room this is um and then various people from U press who um publish the journal and have set things
Up today so that there’s uh you probably spotted the the reception to come at the back there’s a few printouts of previous versions of um of this this occasion as well including the talk by m Elman who very pleased to see us here tonight um
As well um and if I could also thank um Amy Lynn and sunball actar and Ian Caswell from the press for help with the reception with quite a lot of technical um bits and bols that that we’ll be enjoying today in cla’s talk um and um and for anything else
I’ve forgotten to forgotten to say so thank you to to all of those um most of all thank you to um to CLA who will now be introduced by um the society the Warner society’s chair Jan Monte Fury I just wanted to say a particular thanks
To to CLA who’s battled not only the elements that um us all need today and who is as Chan will explain really the person most suited probably in the entire world to give the lecture today good evening um well I am tempted to say that CLA Haron needs no introduction
Here but of course that would be silly it is my very great pleasure and honor to introduce her today give this lecture um as you will know Claire is an imminent biographer she has written the claimed lives of Fanny Bernie Robert Lewis Stevenson danl biography of charlot
Bronte and a b b detection in Victoria in England and most recently biography of cine Manfield all sorts of lives came out this year she’s also written fiction which has been shortless to the bed Awards and in 2015 I’m very envious of this a poem The Mighty HUD Hudson first
Published in the TLs won the forward prize for best single poem but of course we know her best as the as the prevident S the s on war scholar um her Publications include first of all the biography not just the biography but the biography of Sylvia T War up in 1989
Which was AED John L L prize and is um recognized as a classic um the following year her edition of San bers darar is came out um she wrote the introductions for the seven novels by syvia to War printed by verago before that um or any of that she edited the
Collective poems of Sylvia tan and Warner for carinet in 1972 followed by a very much enlarge new edition of 2008 and before that um she edited for the journal PN review the special Sylvia tanen Warner celebration that was in 1981 um this was the first to publish um a selection of War’s poems
And of her letters um and I remembered it particularly because I picked up a copy of it not far from here in what is now Waterston and brought it home that was the first I’ve ever heard syvia to at B and um and um you know I couldn’t
Put it down and became a bber Enthusiast and for that I have always been particularly grateful to so I look keenly forward keenly um as I think everybody here does and everybody online um to her lecture on the voice of the heart capture and evasiveness in Sylvia Town’s life and
Work thank you very much I’m GNA just sit down so um is this microphone working adequately can people hear good that’s great I’ll and Ian’s going to do some Al I better keep an eye on there are a fair number but not a wealth accounts of what it was like to meet
Sylvia CH and Warner David Garnet remembered an alarming lady with a clear and minatory voice dark dripping with tassels like a black and slender barve caparisoned for war with jingling earrings swinging foxtails black silk Acorn hanging from umbrella black tassled gloves dog chains key Rings tripped like in and speaking to me in
Sentences like scissors told me it was you Darry San that was in 1927 we’ve been know each other for about four years William Maxwell’s first impression was equally folded over he said I met her for the first time when she came to the New Yorker office in the fall of
1939 she was dressed in black her voice had a slightly husky intimate quality her conversation was so Charming it made my head swim I didn’t want to let her out of my site ever Steven spender first impression was slightly less complimentary he referred to Warner just as the Communist lady writer
This was in his Memoir world world within World it the Communist lady writer in Spain who looked like and behaved like a Vicar’s wife presiding at a tea party given on a Vicor lawn as large as the whole of Republican Spain her extensor smiling mouth and her secretly Superior Eyes under a shovel
Hatch made her graciously forbidding one other impress first impression was by Louise Morgan who was one of the interviewers I’ll talk about in a minute and Morgan noticed what a lot of people noted which was Sylvia’s voice said she sets one chuckling at once she rarely laughs herself however
All her expression is put into her voice which is like a viola with heart compliment slightly precious description but I think we get get the idea about that of course when you’re writing biography you gather in all these different Impressions and have to make what you can of them you read The Works
Of course and in the case of Warner encounter very quickly that bemusing diversity and inconsistency so often remarked on and the charm and the voice in every sense the bravura voice and the intimate plangent one the fantasy novels that coexist with the realist stories she won’t be categorized she
Can’t in the surviving interviews with a Warner I think you find a person who doesn’t relish being the object of the sort of attention she was being asked to give talking about her own books explaining things but she was willing to oblige if necessary the interview which Louise Morgan conducted in 1930 at
Sylvia’s flat in in vaness Terrace and which was published in her book writers of work is very full of deflections and digressions in fact it was rereading that that interview uh earlier on this year that made me think about um Sylvia’s evasiveness basically um Louise Morgan kept the
Interview at a fairly superficial level what is your routin routine where did you get your ideas that sort of thing and Sylvia replied in kind with a light Breezy often quite factious sounding tone even a totally straightforward and practical question gets a not entirely enlightening reply have you any special secret in
Cooking that you don’t mind giving away asked Morgan one should always use butter that’s what I actually find that incredibly difficult piece of advice to follow um also during that that interview which Morgan interestingly records the phone keeps ringing several times so Sylvia is distracted she’s also distracting and Morgan says she herself
Has that same quality of unexpectedness it is part of her great personal charm that she keeps her listener constantly on theer the alert and never by any chance gives him what he’s prepared for that’s a very interesting observation of Sylvia both as a person and a writer another interview that she did is
I think it’s 1971 with franois GX um which is republished in the journal um was about th white and GX was obviously somebody she not only wanted to help but with someone with whom she could talk on a mutually interesting subject and she consequently consequently sounds much
More relaxed in that interview with him than with any of the others the interview in 1975 that was done by Michael Schmidt and Val Warner is an incredibly interesting document um and in a minute I’m going to play you a bit of it it’s really incred it’s very
Very Instinct the recording that war had had to climb up several flights of stairs I feel sorry for her today um to get to the flat where they were going to record and um uh Michael didn’t know much about Sylvia’s work at the time but Val Warner was actually very well
Informed and Sylvia was clearly quite surprised that Val Warner knew so much about her work she didn’t expect a young person of 1975 to have been to been able to even get the books um I think in this interview a lot of you will know it it’s
Been reproduced several times um it does have a lot of information in it’s quite extensive Ive too and Sylvia seems ready and willing to tackle any subject and seems also completely in control of the proceedings but she is going to say too much on any one area which she kind of
Jumps around quite a bit she answers sometimes with a very pppy answer that she doesn’t kind of stay on the subject it’s quite quite frustrating when you’re listening to it or wanting to get more out of her she says for instance in that interview uh that she was expelled from
Kindergarten for being disruptively Lively and wanting to make the children laugh and play and I think that’s clearly a lifelong trait to be amusing and Lively to keep things going socially to entertain herself if no one else but there’s also a feeling of how difficult it was for any of the interviewers to
Get past her charm to a straight answer um so I’m going to with Ian I’m we’re going to listen to don’t worry it’s only two minutes it’s terribly it’s a agitating bad recording um this is the CD it comes from it says um very poor quality and they’re not wrong um that CD
Was made some years ago from the realtoreal tapes that um Michael gave me that they were in such a you know realtoreal tapes had so many different types and when I was trying to get things digitized you know 10 or 15 years ago a lot of the companies involved had
Trouble playing some of the old tap tapes tape recing and this is one of them and what happens is with this one is that although the original tapes fairly comprehensible and I listened to them in the BBC back in about 1984 with headphones on and a special
Button you could sort of rest the tape so I was able to make a transcription of the interview because I had this special equipment which now no longer is accessible by me anyway um so this terrible recording um you you will hear Sylvia’s voice up front you won’t really
Hear Michael or Val Warner because they are they are so sort of indistinct um so as I say it’s just two minutes it’s to give you a sense not just of Sylvia’s voice um at a period before those late recordings when she she was much weaker in
1977 when she did the P hour recordings but in 75 she’s got much more sort of energy in her voice um but also just what she’s doing she’s always going into these digressions um thank you I think that I’m always been interested father record the activities of witches
Wi in Scot and the most beautiful much and I enjoyed reading there and I suppose I went on from that course I was very much influenced by she was I I suppose the long right and that was an important book in my life but that all through the world all other
Horrible things I have to do and whenever I got my I went down with I degree couldn’t I wouldn’t do that to any you know I’ve never had any Temptations for these Christians I met in my childhood woman family nurse and family All Join I are all chrisan great Justice not all
Of thank you that’s great go back to the super um so yes as you can tell that’s incredibly strange and practicly Reporting but um and now much harder to hear now than it was 20 years ago um but I and these things are just hanging on
These captures of her voice and and of her the sound that wonderful Pence of her speech um we sort of Clinging On these things technologically and that sort of strange satanic back wash the recording is I think it’s because the latest uh attempt to process it um you know the the back
Of the tape sounds if there’s a baby cry doesn’t there but anyway if it’s introduced a lot of extra agitation um anyway so so there you get that wonderful story about the um oral Christians cross this typical sort of diversionary tactics possibly and diversionary um procedures um and I’d like to look
Today at this fondness for digression um evident throughout War’s works and I was wondering how much of it is temperamental how much of it’s defensive how much self-conscious um how much Artful she was certainly someone who didn’t want to be pinned down or captured and she seldom so showed her
Quiet aside David garet again describes two quite different modes that he observed in her on an outing to the Essex marshes in early 1920 in the early 1920s on the way out she showed an extraordinary display of verbal fireworks ideas epigrams and paradoxes raced through her mind and poured from
Her mouth as though she were Delirious that must have been an intimidating spectacle although on the way back exhausted by The Long Walk Sylvia for the first time in his company fell silent Brilliance and shyness were alike forgotten our hearts were warm to each other and have remained so ever
Since the person who most closely observed Sylvia and who in the spring and summer of 1930 was becoming fascinated by her if at a distance was of course Valentine acam soon to be Sylvia’s lover Valentine talked about Sylvia to their Mutual acquaintance in Chon took her photograph surreptitiously
This is the one of syvia sitting in a de chair Beth car tfos his garden um it’s the kind of thing would be lber would do isn’t it a secret photo B and um and she’d began to dream about Sylvia too and in her in Valentine’s dream Sylvia was displaying an eager and
Loving look it was catching sight of Sylvia by accident while driving down in beness Terrace which had moved Valentine to offer Sylvia the use of her rented Cottage in Chon the event which led eventually to them living together thinking herself alone and unobserved Sylvia had seemed to Valentine haunted and Des
Sparing there was obviously power in Valentine having captured this having seen this as well as a trigger for compassion Sylvia did love Solitude as much as company it seems to me and she had written a witty truthful poem in the summer of 1929 on the occasion of her
Then lover Percy Buck being away on an extended trip to Africa it’s the absence how happy I can be with my love away no care comes all day like a dapple of clouds the hours pass by time stares from the sky that does not see me where
I lie in the hay so still do I lie like points of due the Stars well in the skies taller the trees rise dis shadowed unsell I wander slow my thoughts flow and flow but whether they tend I know not nor need to surmise so softly I go
Till to my quiet bed I must undress then I say alas that he whom too anxious or too gay I torment all day can never know me in my harmlessness while he is away too anxious or too gay Sylvia was aware of and interested in her own self-consciousness after having suffered
With her friend and publisher Charles Apprentice in 1929 sorry 1928 she wrote this in her diary he knows me very well I think and perhaps I scarcely know him at all that extreme gentleness excites me and I find myself behaving with them as though I were alone out of doors it’s almost
Unnerving to be so freed of self-consciousness what she thinks of me I cannot imagine because I know myself apart from my books I do not see them as integrally part of myself but he I fancy is giving the peach to lelli taking Mr fortune in the taxi picking up Nelly trim’s
Handkerchief yes I feel sure of this that accounts for my lack of self-consciousness as an artist I’m not self-conscious and when I’m with him my mind flows as though I were my full arst self not the naked Sylvia that wears clothes and is met by suddenly I do something clumsy or
Idiotic and Sylvia is in torment but I soon forget her again she’s no more to me than the woman reflected in the mirror oposite I think it’s it’s interesting to think about this secret private quiet Sylvia as opposed to the the performer both in society and in in literature
Forgetting Sylvia was hard for Sylvia to do though her relationship with Valentine certainly stabilize things I wouldn’t go as far to say as Terry Castle does that Sylvia’s writing lacked gravitas before she and Valentine became a couple the fanciful and whims side of her temperament remained pretty active
All her life but life with Valentine encouraged Sylvia to feel Freer while being pleasurably caught as this poem of the early 19 19 30s a sort of companion piece or repost to the absence shows I so wary of traps so skillful to outwit Springs and pitfalls set and
Caught now perhaps though capture while I’m laid so still in hold is but the limb’s long sigh to admit how heavy Freedom weighed that sort of um pleasurable capture that she was celebrating there in a poem which was clearly just directed towards um Valentine it was it was um not primarily
For public consumption um shows the kind of state that that they were in by 1931 Valentine at that point was actually beginning to worry that Sylvia’s Solitude might be something she was missing and that she that perhaps Freedom hadn’t weighed as as heavily as she was saying in the
Poem when Valentine was writing to Sylvia in January 1931 uh she’s at Winterton and they are anticipating going to labanon together uh with labanon being a place that Sylvia thought of as a kind of alone and special place in the country Valentine said to her we will be very happy of
Course and how lovely to be together where you were alone but will you your lost estate and wish to be solitary again perhaps I shall pick up scent of that outborn Sylvia and track her from out her sleep and learn what she was like but I believe that her sleep will
Slide into death and that haunting haunted and despairing creature I saw in the street will never come back that’s a strange thing to say isn’t it I think that idea that that her the sleep of the outborn Sylvia will slide into to death it makes it sounds that Sylvia herself would also
Be extinguished but it’s the it’s the um outworn soul that she thinks will never come back that haunted in despairing creature that she uh saw from her car on inous terce self-consciousness of course is an issue comes into the diary writing that Sylvia did for 50
Years and one doesn’t think of it or read it as a self-conscious diary but that’s because it’s so Artful she understood the compositional difficulties of autobiography in a diary from the start especially the problem of add dress who is one speaking to in a diary a future self current acquaintance
Who might be shown or steal a look at supposedly unvarnished truths about you posterity Virginia Wolf’s um remark in her in her own diary do I ever write even here for my own eye if not for whose eye is a very potent and interesting uh rumination isn’t it who
Would one ever be writing a diary to neither wolf nor Warner would have imagined their journals being published though they must have acknowledged however detachedly the likelihood of that happening or of them being read very few people get around to destroying or even sorting out their personal
Papers they just generate them and keep them for one thing it be a very timeconsuming task and for another what the one person who might want to look back at personal papers at Diaries but doesn’t is on self and what you’ll find there might well not square with what
With how you now remember it which is the gist of what Sylvia wrote to Elise Gregory in 1953 she says I don’t wonder at your mood of self-questioning if you’ve been typing out old journals of all Pandora box is the wor first is the one one keeps journals letters
Unfinished manuscripts in I have mine too and many to open them in search of some specific thing is enough to send me tossed and Shipwrecked into that strange Uncharted sea of time past sometimes I cannot even recognize the woman who did these things knew these extraordinary forgotten people entertained these Jun
Great thoughts or these absurd Ambitions and in that same letter to Elise she made this one me remark she said an old teapot used daily can tell me more of my past than anything I reported of so wonderful observation and yet of course Sylvia t a Warner uses her diary to try
To do exactly that to capture the everyday The Fugitive flavor of any particular time a site a conversation a passing thought I mean the old teapot might have its uses many uses that she is still writing her diary in this kind of knowledgeable hopelessness about being able to to capture the
Minute her Diaries are brilliant but very lonely minded lonely voiced she’s certainly I think not after the initial years um intending Valentine to meet them at all it’s a sort of repository uh resource and a recourse uh in her lo ious times um she addresses herself sometimes bitterly during the periods of
Sorrow with Valentine and heartbroken the after Valentine’s Day they really are some of the most affecting personal writing I the artificiality of the Diary form uh of course trying to create the illusion that what is recorded is time passing not time passed is something that Valentine that Sylvia was also I think
Very very alert to but when she was asked why she wasn’t intending to write an autobiography she said because I’m too imagin it was a problem that that she obviously thought about um and wrote a very interesting piece which is only recently being published again in the
Journal um she wrote it for and she submitted it to the New Yorker in 1945 um it’s called the difficulties of water biog um but it was rejected by the New Yorker and first published by the journal in 2019 it’s short about eight or 00 words only and seems connected
Very obviously with the series of childhood stories that Warner wrote in the 40s and 50s and which were collected after her death in the book scenes of childhood and one thing leading to another stories with an irrepressibly comic tone um depicting her parents as very definite characters almost
Cartoonishly at times and sort of sending up in a very benign very funny um but tiring Jolly way sometimes um by early life I find those stories very heavily narrated rather than exactly fictionalized so the anecdotes from her youth that she kind of narrates in a really layered fictional way she
And it forms a sort of autobiographical fiction rather than a fiction or anything else and it’s interesting they categorized those books of chood in Jan Monte Fury’s bibliography of Warner under Memoir but I think they flagrantly display her most flamboyant and fictionalizing tones so this um P the difficulties of a
Biogra oh no sorry I just forgot to show you the inter photograph that was the because I only got this Photograph today at lunch time I’ve forgotten it was in there um this is a picture supplied by the dors History Center of Sylvia in bed it’s taken by Valentine meant to be
Illustrating being captured think this this is the difficulties of autobiography sets out to identify and describe the point at which Sylvia first became excited about words it’s a very appropriate place she states to start writer’s autobiography so she’s in the story apparently trying to begin her autobiography and do it thoroughly and
Truthfully and she pins down this moment of excitement to a specific time in the Autumn of 1899 she would have been five Rising six when she was out with her nurse and another Harrow the nurse of another Harrow family and listening in a Desy wage these two women’s
Conversations she just depicts him as walking ahead of her so she’s got the back two nurses there’s one who’s slim and there’s one who’s chubby there’s one who’s her nurse who’s lovely and the other one is Gastly I suspect the other one of being that um the the cross Christian from the
Inter um either she is or she’s very a close cousin back um but anyway the infant the young syia is walking along listening to their their conversation she says they were talking about an outbreak of fire in a lunatic as Asylum more of their family Affairs I supp they
Both had that kind of family but then Sylvia’s nurse utters the words that’s the shadow of ashat and this is the next part of the story says for for a moment that will last me till my dying day everything became transfixed and Transcendent speechless blue of the Autumn Sky The Road To
London sloping down before us with its Vista of dismantling dreams the iron bench where which the Town Council or possibly some dead benefactor had C for to be placed just there and which the nurses scorned to use but to sit on sit upon cold iron brings on you know what
The falling leaves I was scuffing with my feet the pungent sorrowful smell of autumn in a clay soil country of fine Timber I received the words and swallowed them and became conscious of literature presently I saw a nun flash by on a bicep one and this very strange little
Passage which is anep Epiphany is a description of becoming conscious of literature but of course it involves no written text and which also at the date when she’s she’s recording has no association for the child with books since she doesn’t recognize the shadow of Ash lyat as the
Title of a novel by Mrs Henry wood to which her nurse is refered she receives the mysterious words the shadow of of Ash lyad and something kicks in the walk changes in its nature everything became fixed and Transcendent transubstantiated one could say to pick up on the language of
Communion that runs right through the pieace it’s a moment of heightened perception and the nun flashing by on a bicycle is it seems an important contribution to the impression fixing so strongly in the child’s mind but then Warner goes off of quite a tangent to explain about the glimpse of the cycling
Nun and we’re forced from the shimmering epanic moment described here to some very mundane considerations the nun turns out not to have been a nun on the road but one in the grounds of a Convent that they were passing the convent had a cracked fence through which the children had become
Familiar with the sight of nuns pedling briskly around the grounds every afternoon floating in and out of the bushes like Rooks she says this was not a bicycling order Warner explains stly but enclosed and contemplative one who resp responded to their doctor’s suggestion that they should get more exercise by purchasing
And frequently using 12 machines Warner even digresses onto the specific cause of their full health constipation and introduces into the story her father as a friend of the doctor aining that all contemplative orders are constipated he says this she says as though he’d lived in dozens of
Them he was a historian she continues and found an occasional Axiom very soothing so things are getting sillier and sillier in this story um there are so many digressions even within this digression onto the the nature of of her father’s Delight in in occasional Axiom and him deploying it there but at the
Same time amid all this this uh distraction there’s an oblique sort of knitting up going on underneath even in 8 to 900 words as Mrs Henry wood and Mrs Humphrey Ward there are wheels of bicycles and wheels of perambulators there’s Slim cheerfulness and The Heavy nurse whose very hair declares her Rel religious
Persuasion Sylvia receives her vocation to literature while swallowing the words the shadow of Ash lyat the doctor ruthin is a zealot even though his zealotry is focused on regular evacuations which is why he wants to get the nons on bicycles sometimes the underlay of this is as simple as PLS the nuns for
Instance show an unenterprising spirit in their faithfulness to C but what Warner set out to describe in this piece was something very powerful Impressions coming together and sticking together through an extra force of intense perception it’s a truly prium moment but not conveyed in language ker
Would ever have used or or chosen that here not understanding the phrase is the shadow of Ash lyat that she but she feels his power and mystery and the nuns have to be there because they are part of the strong moment she goes on to say many people
Have assured me that this could never have taken place that I must have dreamed or invented it this is the cycling NS just as I cannot gains say the fact that it was the shadow of Ash lyat which aoke to me sorry awoke me to the power of the word I cannot recall
That Awakening without a flash of wheels and a sweep of black skirts crossing my mind eye this sort of clustering or adhesiveness is is going on in it sorry it’s going on in state of mine described here is highly characteristic of Warner here the impressions are shown
Flying inwards and sort of being sucked up and and remembered but in so much of Warner’s writing they are there to be released or unpacked at different times and at different speeds there’s a layered in his style the literary echoes as well that she often employs and all the
Freight the poison they bring with them it’s seems to me the very opposite of evasiveness it’s a kind of packing in almost like a big bang intensity she ends the little essay the difficulties of a biography thus says unfortunately a feeling for words is but
A minor part of the business of being a writer the sense of form is more important and harder to come by in writing fiction one can achieve at any rate symmetry but in autobiography I do not for the life of me see how one can reconcile the claims of truth and the
Claims of proportion nothing is clearer In My Memory than how I first began to feel excited about words what better beginning for an autobiography and just look what happens next so this is you know she’s she’s attempt she sent this then to gu La brano at the New York we didn’t want to
Take it but she it’s a sort of sardonic experiment in actually if you’re going to write an autobiography if you’re going to read cly describe say the moment when he first became alert to literature you’re really going to have to go into all those craim in the convent evence um the doctor constipated
Nuns the bicycles so I’ve been worrying a bit about veracity in Warner but there may have been another equally important factor at work which is proportion and she says there the claims of truth and the claims of proportion she sets them together and here we can do no better
Than turn to Bru the master of unpacking the moment and wrapping it up again um Warner’s uh commission to write the first translation of cruce Contra andur when it was published in 1954 was a very important uh commission for her chatt W just wanted an English translation as
Soon as possible after the first French translation in 1954 and they approached syvia it did take her couple of years she was working on from January 1955 to April 1956 and it was only published in 1958 but this was a text which uh really made a great impression on the on the
Literary World um not published in Cru SL ch um to her it was an important and absorbing and interestingly related to uh all the issues to do with aut biography and bio and it certainly does relate to um how she approached her bio wi 10 years later um PR as many of you
Will know in that book it’s a series of essays um which is sort of like a dry run in some respects for did Tom and PR um operates it really is like a sort of portra fiction he appears in the essays as Marcel poost um and he uh writes
Really in he’s got a great interest in the hybridity of the thing he’s writing he he’s observing himself he’s U introducing some of the characters who been later in the novel but he’s also um taking a long aim at sanber the the critic sanber whose method the method of
Sanber is one that CR uh profoundly disagrees with um and Bruce sort of characterizes the method of sber the literary critic as being because s wrote a weekly article in the kosa region Landing and he um described meeting writers he described writers through their basically their physical appearance in their social persons
Um by writing against sber and of course sy’s title isn’t a literal it’s more deflected title she says by way of sandur rather than C and um but the celebrated method uh which in her translation of Cru she says consists if you would understand a poet or writer in greedily
Catechizing those who knew him who saw quite a lot of him who can tell us how he conducted himself in regard to women Etc precisely that is at every point where the poet’s true self is not involved so in in Sylvia’s translation of parts of of the Methodist
And CR says that no time do sber have seem to have understood that there’s something special about creative writing and that this makes it different in kind from what busies other men and at other times busies writers he drew no dividing line between the state of being engaged
In a piece of writing and the state when in solitude stopping our ears against those phrases which belong to others as much as to us and which we make use of in our consideration of things whenever we are not truly ourselves even though we may be alone we confront ourselves in
Try to catch the true voice of the heart and to write down that and not SL all the implication that there’s something more superficial than empty this s in a writer’s authorship something deeper and more contemplative in his private life is due to nothing else than the special pleading of
Necessity in fact it is the secretion of one’s innermost life written in solitude and for oneself alone that one gives to the public what one bestows on PR life in conversation that is however refining or in those drawing room essays whittled down to suit a particular Circle and scarcely more than
Conversation is the project of quite superficial self not the innermost one which one can only to recover by putting aside the world and the self that the world that innermost self which one has waited which has waited while one is in company which one feels certain is the
Only real and which artists and they own End by living for I’ve always actually found this a very powerful passage um ever since I first read it years ago um and I love that idea of um you meet the you know tfield goer or J at a cocktail
Party if you’re sber you go away and write it on you know what it was like to be with with and J um but Cru is saying the only way really to encounter these people even if you’ve seen them in public is to read their works because
The works sort of Leep over person in the personal life and circumstances and and that is the only conjur and that is also what the writer should or does wish to have to be read rather than reported on so just as PR was um evolving his own aesthetic through this
Attaction and his feelings against s Sylvia I think evolved her aesthetic through the prism of PR and as I was saying the White biography does show thoughtfulness about how do you represent the subject for biography how do you what’s the purpose of the biography and and how truth what can
Be the invitation to write the B of th white came just months after his sudden death in 1964 and was at the initiative of friends including David Garnet who were trying to stop White’s agent David hyim taking charge of the project himself Warner had read none of white’s books
Except his poems and she felt very hesitant I think one would say about the idea of writing a biography at all but in a letter to William Maxwell in 1967 she explained how the oddness of the request became part of its appeal also Al how being amongst wh things in his
House in aldering tipped her towards a feeling of human obligation towards the dead stranger his clothes were on hangers she wrote to ma his sewing basket with an unfinished Hawk Hood his litter of fishing flies his books his awful ornaments presented by his vooy friends his vulgar toys bought at the sheril
Fairs his neat rows of books about flatulation everything was there defense less as Corpse and so was he morose suspicious intensely watchful and determined to despair so when we think of the first impressions of Sylvia this is her first impression of white who was of course
Dead by that point but it’s a very powerful feeling that she gets through being in his amongst his possessions in his house in Bel the friends who wanted her to write it thought her a good choice because of her broad-mindedness and her sympathetic imagination and they of course right but
There’s no doubt that white and Sylvia would not have gone on at all in life White’s individualist policy politics his fear of women his thoroughgoing approach to tax evasion and even his awful art would have neck in the B friendship and the flagellation library was hardly going to be mutual
Interest and yet Warner did end up loving him Le loving the unpeeled him of her private understanding gained through his books letters and Diaries when she started writing the book she was was fascinated by by his personality and also by the um by the sort of predicament of Tim
The horror of his loneliness and his depressive life um but as she started reading his work Works she was interested but she was never really much grabed by his Works which was a Pity there were one or two that she she admired but on the whole she found found as work
Disappointing but the private writing that she found had access to and also his his own his autobiograph biographic writing uh she wanted to use wherever possible she and so her biography had a sort of aspect of being um a bit in the way of Victorian lives and letters you know presenting some of
The documents that the public haven’t seen yet and writing narrative with links I mean it wasn’t just Extreme as the actual Victorian lies and letters model but it certainly had something with that in it but of course white was a concealer and Warner wasn’t Warner was a celebratory defiant in plain sight private
Lesbian in any elements of evasiveness you find in her work never have any to do with avoidance or unwillingness to be explicit on moral problems she was Master of the eloquent silence and clung to her father’s Maxim never apologize never explain about her politics and her sexuality she felt she
Had nothing to apologize for with Warner fiction was often her way of expressing the plainest truths which are never concealed in her work although they might just appear in glimpses and be all the stronger for it she establishes a sort of stat quot and then you only realize after the event
That that the context is is rather specific um there are obviously as you all know homosexual themes in Mr Fortune’s maggot some will show the Flint anchor many of the stories and in fiction I think she felt she could say whatever she liked the same effect is of this being
Able to speak plain truth is achieved in the very interesting title story um of winter in the air which many of you will know is wonderful story and wonderful collection um at the end of the story when an abandoned wife is has returned to London
Um and is living in in the same way that she did before her marriage which is now over um she’s attempting to write a thank you letter to her ex so very she’s very being very polite she’s trying to be good about about it um and she gets
Stuck in the middle of the thank you letter or not just a letter of of making contact with him um and she says I hope and then she doesn’t know what she hopes um while she’s trying to finish her awward letter exactly what she would
Like to say comes to mind which is part of speech by herione at the end of Winter’s ter so in her mind she’s saying to me can life be no commodity the crown and comfort of my life your favor I do give lost for I do feel it gone yet know not
How it went so those are the perfect words for this character’s situation but then she has she can’t say that she has to just resort to um some absolute conventional word wording says in real life one cannot write so plainly the plain truth it would look theatrical but of course in the story
She’s in AFF fiction and she’s able Warner is able to give us both what she would like to have said and then what she does end up saying um with regard to to White uh Warner wasn’t going to dodge or fudge any of the issues raised and
There were a lot of what we think of as delicate sensitive issues um she aimed to be as open as possible about his nature while withholding details which were both sens ational and in her view somewhat beside the point when she was already halfway through the book she was
Given access to the diaries that might have kept under lock and key and in which he wrote obsessively about his Peter B urges and his sadism reading them was like going deeper into dungeons she told her own D and yet she saw the papul of them even more than
The behaviors so puny in fact she said so overwhelming in feeling she had already guessed at those dungeons when details of the MS murders were made public in Spring 1966 she had noted in her diary that it was exactly that sort of thing that waited around every corner
For white that’s before she read the the um the flagellation di in her diary she said this I must both grasp and state it was a part of his character his nature that she wanted to grasp and state but not necessarily grasp or state specific um sins or crimes or deviations in the
Finished book the subject of white sadism and its Origins turns up again and again but without explicit references to his fantasies and she said in her own diary again there’s a kind of ill manners about such discussions with strangers and that is what the printed page means I think it’s a very
Interesting Junction because she’s uh certainly she’s she’s she’s not a Bas of person she’s not a moralizing person she’s somebody whose manners and whose manner forbids her from making a over Sensational case against white she wants to get to the heart of them which she does bringing uh there were compromises with
That book um that had to be made for reasons of reasons of prudence rather than principle uh there’s a last minute request from the Publishers Kate to take White’s word for it that there’ been no sodomy in an affair with an underage B she called Zed in the book and this is a
Point that did worry her because it wasn’t that she um wanted to expose him or not but she said white said there was no sodomy but how am I to substantiate this because she couldn’t actually prove it she couldn’t substantiate it it was one of those elements in in when you’re
Researching biography that the jwelry is out to Garnet she wished she could use White’s torment over Z fully but said to him it’s a sad reflection that after all these years intelligent people like ourselves have been Illuminating English society it is still totally impossible to be honest of course this was the year
In which homosexuality was decriminalized she was being um very CL about about white sexuality much to his agents annoyance um she’ faced this as well this um impossibility of being honest in her own work um Ian Parsons her publisher her editor Chad winders had some last minute editorial anxieties about the
Flint anchor he wanted to take out the whole of the conversation with the fisherman cruso in which cruso declares his love for Thomas Kettle and this is um it’s slightly surprising to Thomas Kettle when cuso comes out to him that it it’s worked into the fabric of the novel
So you know without any is being batted it’s so completely part of the book it’s an essential part of the book but it’s certainly not sensationalized it just suddenly reveals to us the context of of how the fishing Community lived and how they you know they they um what they the
Their stand their their moral sort of feelings were and what the conventions were them too suff um and so really it would been awful and absurd to take this passage out she fought for stayed in but in when the correspondence was going to and fro with the Imp passers who was
Anxious about the book being um perceived as a gay book 194 um she she writes uh in she says all this how he do about homosexuality you know why would people be fussing about it it’s just there is a historical mod anyway but it’s also
There in the fabric and why my my draw attention to it while trying to remove it um so she was as I say she was open about White’s nature and she was witholding about some of the details um but talking to Fran GX in that very I think very relaxed and reving interview
Um she she mentioned that the that the character called Puck who was a woman who was actually in love with white in the last uh years she said it was very sad because although she she pck could have told me a great deal as a biographer she just could not unclench
Herself she was in such a state of hatred and spite people can talk out of their hatred and be very reliable but you never get a reliable Verdi from Spite and the friends she’d met fight’s friends in Aly which is going around collecting information biographically um were of very mixed and
Sometimes dubious usefulness um she said they were almost all Tipsy and they were all genial and I did not feel that except for Carol Walton I was getting very much out of any so she went around she did meet White’s friends she she wanted to know about him socially
She wanted to see him reflected to friends but they didn’t really give her information that was particularly professional that came from her own connection with the di and her own communion with what s um she did feel that connection but didn’t stop her being critical of him
There bars in the text that kind of Jabs in the text about him and off record remarks and letters to friends and she also felt that there was an in essential unknowability there was there was a limit to to what her personality and her her lack of
Actuality with what what that would mean to G she said sometimes I feel I know him very well indeed but then I remember all I know is my own white I am just another of the people who have their own light and then she said I never felt I’d
Come to the end of this was about 10 years after so she’s carrying on thinking about him and also knows that her portrait of him which was as good as as this she could do was also partial partisan and own um I’m just going to end with to bit
About researching syia as as a biographical subject picture just goingon to end on on that which because it’s a nice one and came very crisply resar with uh with Warner with her which uh vitality and as ter Castle has said her inevitable self-possession was in many ways is in
Many ways an intimidating subject of biography and when I set out to gather that sort of information I had little idea how long it would take or how complex it would be as well as delightful and pleasurable and educational and nurturing and exciting um the chronology of Warner’s
Life when I first started to research which was actually for that um in new that J was mentioning so about 198 um the chronology was unclear and there’s a huge amount of data about herself and her family to actually find out you know who were were that family M
So family tree where they come from now there was detective work to be done there were connections to be made there were books to track down by War which was no easy task at that date and then read obviously manuscripts published and unpublished to dier transcribe and make
Sense of um actually reading through the um notebooks which her Diaries are in um took me two years because the handwriting is beautiful but it wasn’t easy I was reading it on my microphone which was gous um there also there were friends to meet and from whom to learn of course
There was information to report to the world as well as a portra to be pained as a kind of you know the basic core of information to be established but I was always acutely aware that part of it my personal Judgment of her was also going
To be subjective in part his own and people would always have their own warness my basic view of her hasn’t changed a bit in 30 years but the steady accumulation of extra information about her life and works and that of Valentine and the Really significant growth in
Warner studies as well as her leadership generally has been a source of enormous interest pleasure and kind I wouldn’t want to rewrite my 1989 book but I would very much like to augment it with all the extra material I’ve come across in those years I’d like to do some
Diversions and have some second thoughts and um of third thoughts many of them in fact a few years ago um Kings London suggested that we could do a digitized version of my book with that’s super Illustrated you know uh with all these extra bits of material which would would
Just surround the book but not um not interfere with that first first version which I would like I would never want to Rew write it I just want it to be as it is it’s it’s a thing of 1989 this thing of the past but there
Is more much more that I could say about those sorts of things she want and meanwhile she’s always there to be met and REM met in her Works where she’s ready as she said of R Manfield to project herself across time and space to capture and Captivate more than
We would expect which is what all great literature succeeds in doing well what can I say but thank you we have been most privileged to hear that um that was a wonderful lecture um by our biographer about a biographer load and Loans to think about and I have questions myself but self-denying or
Ordinance L responses so um perhaps I will begin my own it was just a sort of loss that when um that wonderful extract from difficulties with biography and I was reminded of a letter that she wrote to B noog who seems to have been creatively
Very very close to her and I think think actually not long after the crisis with Valentine she writes to him which is as you say we must meet together at that lonely desperate place where we could tell each other the deepest the impersonal secrets of the hearted by
That connected with what You’ been saying and there’s also this um a letter to Le B which I couldn’t work in which is a wonderful letter she never met Len bakon the American writer um and when he died she said I’ve lost a confident the person to whom I could write quite
Freely without reservations without considerations without any draw of personal circumstances it’s the same sort of idea and she says I recollect in one of his letters his simile of people meeting at a masked Hall could speak with perfect intimacy and transgress nothing that should not be transgressed and
There is a huge freedom in that Sor yesing over my CR yeah uh thank you so much for this wonderful lecture and uh if I may ask not directly related to the topic but obviously related to Sylvia uh about your editing choices when uh lishing the Diaries or H how how did you
Choose what to include or rather even what to exclude because specifically I’m thinking about the uh the entries for when she goes to Paris and they are so delightful and I was wondering why why didn’t you include those well part of space like you know you get into a sort of mindset you’re
Ching particular things um and I was aing about it’s not terribly ring cre processes that it does a lot Rel I tended to the cats but yes it is very very difficult also devel this thing the complete entries number just how many of the ENT knowly but able to do a larger Edition
Initially medit just like the goodam Maxwell is fantastic you see earlys through various non reading I think all but be Lu enough go read I’m not quite sure where the I some just fres day possession Rosary rning the of and she sent itest and she posted them to my house in
A and she didn’t so this package arrived and was in my for some time because get I went to the what is this and it was through and allowed me to didn’t know what I to use I I to Pi one job and essentially them and I don’t
I don’t know what she then did those studies and whe they they may Ed but if they’re not if they’ve you knowed or whatever lost or in I have some phot copies of some of them there these sources that gather together so so maybe this is part of her diversionary
Tactics but um I found in in working on her that it’s it’s very frustrating that she says so little about her own Writing Practice or anybody else’s I mean there seems to be very very little on you know know what what is s syia Town Warner’s
View of the novel I mean what does she think it is or what what should it be doing um I mean all those kinds of questions um you just have to kind of guess that don’t you but I was wondering if you knew of um more material of that
Kind that might ultimately be accessible I’m afraid I don’t want because um else is this okay um I I I don’t know of any particular sort of stashes apart from you know saying things like the the Valentine letters um when I saw the Warner material it’s donkeys years ago
And it was all up in a little attic room which was locked it was quite eccentric the whole thing you had to crawl over Elizabeth um mts’s sculptures to get to it um because nobody knew where to put Elizabeth mts’s sculptures and you know and the Warner archive being put into
The room and then was being um the first time I saw it it was just in box boes and that was much easier because I’d go through boxes and there’ just be you know photographs and everything all just in a big mess um but at least I I could
See things in a box about three years later a strange sort of system putting everything into an envelope so one photograph would then be in an envelope and it was very arduous it wasn’t cataloged it was just enveloped um but I I mean I I didn’t have all the time in
The world to go through all the notebooks so then there there’ll be lots of other things and there I do remember having read that I now can’t locate there was a an unfinished story about um about a girl stuck in the snow which I was a wonderful SN story sory um and
There were also um you know sometimes for cross things that one has just captured them in one’s memory and they they must be there somewhere it’s just I I don’t know quite where um there are almost sometimes when I go to um towns with the University library and
And I’ve got time on my hands I’ll go and just look at their catalogs and see there are so many little stashes of Warner letters around the place and as I say I think if that was drawn together it would just be astonishing um and then she does in her letters actually
Sometimes write it quite pointedly about practice in the Diaries she doesn’t do that you’re right um and it is frustrating just to know that she got to page 120 of writing you know the Flint tankor um although she’s that excites her she wants and she’s a very quick
Writer too really when she gets the the bit bit between her teeth um she you know works hard and she must have been able to concentrate very hard part of that Vitality that um Everybody noted and which Antonia TR MF you know said that when Sylvia was a very old lady she
Would wake up basically speaking you know there’s no sort of dragging in out of of of Consciousness and she would fall asleep very quickly too there’s this kind of engine her mind was very very active um but no well in fact rather than hearing about there being
Papers that are available what I tend to hear about it is people then having destroyed them or lost them um and um yeah so that’s but maybe some nice young energetic people will will discover some stuff yeah just partly responding to W’s question I think one of the places
Sylvia does write more about creative processes and their ideas of it is is to Paul nordol I think partly you know they were very close friends and I think his being a composer and her being a novelist maybe maybe sort of they had an agreement that they they do that and and
She also doesn’t mind sort of saying which of her things she thinks are very good to nordol where usually she’s you know she’s very modest in the Edwardian English kind of kind of way I I got one little question really which was about your title CLA about um capture and
Evasiveness and um I was just thinking that in a way one antonym for evasiveness would be cander and I was interested in in capture and um maybe some of the you know thoughts you’d had about that were the things that Sylvia feared she was captured by or might be captured by
Well yes I that’s what I was hoping to to transmit was this um actually wanting not to be captured necessarily wanting to be um free to be unselfconscious but that that sort of social self was a bit of a of a prison to her too but but also she clearly I
You even hear it in her voice in that little crackly agitating uh recording um she did have a lot of energy and she wanted to keep you know if she was talking to somebody she wanted to keep talking and uh she had lots of ideas and
She would Express them so um it she sends herself up sometimes as being kind of oppressively anxious and gay but she I think it really was the case I think she must have been quite exhausting at times to be with and exhausting to be herself you know some some level you other
Question I thinkes is um what is to do is to thank you once again CL Absolut super you have done so your proud so much really thank you very much