Mr. Fortune Read online

  SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER (1893–1978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music and a member of the Communist Party. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (available from New York Review Books), appeared in 1926 and was the first ever Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, her second, followed a year later. The Salutation was the title novella of a 1932 collection. According to Warner’s biographer Claire Harman, it “was almost certainly begun in the expectation that it would grow into a full-length novel, a sequel, or an extended coda” to Mr. Fortune’s Maggot. Yet it also stands on its own, and Warner considered it “the purest, the least time-serving story I ever wrote.” Over the course of her long career, Sylvia Townsend Warner published five more novels, seven books of poetry, a translation of Proust, fourteen volumes of short stories, and a biography of T.H. White. NYRB also publishes Summer Will Show, Warner’s novel of the French Revolution of 1848.

  ADAM MARS-JONES was born in London, where he lives and works. His fiction includes Monopolies of Love (1992) and The Waters of Thirst (1993). He writes about films and books for London newspapers.

  MR. FORTUNE

  SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER

  Introduction by

  ADAM MARS-JONES

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  Contents

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Introduction

  MR. FORTUNE’S MAGGOT

  THE SALUTATION

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  COMPARISONS of writers with barnyard animals aren’t ordinarily complimentary, but there’s no mistaking the admiration in John Updike’s tone when he describes Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978) as having “the spiritual digestion of a goat.” Elsewhere he has saluted the “more than half a century of brilliantly varied and self-possessed literary production” which somehow “never quite won her the flaming place in the heavens of reputation that she deserved.”

  Yet Warner’s first two novels were highly successful in both Britain and America (Lolly Willowes being selected in 1926 as the very first Book-of-the-Month Club choice), and for forty years from 1936 she contributed a mass of stories to The New Yorker—upwards of a hundred and fifty in all.

  Some of the reasons for her relatively slow absorption into the canon are trivial: a three-part name like Sylvia Townsend Warner, for instance, nude of a hyphen, suggests an American origin to British eyes, which may have discouraged one of her natural constituencies (readers have always been parochial, or if they’re being cosmopolitan they like to know it).

  Other reasons lie deeper. Although Lolly Willowes was the opposite of a false start, it did create a false impression. British reviewers rightly compared this fantasia about a superfluous woman who finds that there is a place for her in the world after all (she’s a witch) to David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox (1922), but it also seemed to hint at a feminist agenda.

  Her second novel, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot (1927), consolidated the success of the first, but it gave notice that this was a writer who infused personal material into her work with a pipette, rather than pumping it in using a high-pressure hose, as the century more and more preferred. Mr. Fortune is a missionary in the South Seas seeking to make converts in a joy-based, guilt-immune culture.

  Sylvia Townsend Warner’s later long fiction was at home in very various settings: late-eighteenth-century Spain (After the Death of Don Juan, 1938), for instance, or a community of nuns in fourteenth-century East Anglia (The Corner That Held Them, 1948). Since the 1970s, these novels have been republished by feminist presses, but without Lolly Willowes to start the series and set the tone they would seem politically wayward and escapist.

  Warner herself was anything but a superfluous woman, even before the appearance of Lolly Willowes turned her from a praised and published poet into a best-selling novelist. She was one of five editors (the youngest, and the only woman) of Tudor Church Music, a massive edition made possible, in the straitened economy after the First World War, by a grant from the Carnegie UK Trust. As such she already enjoyed in specialist circles what her biographer Claire Harman splendidly calls “muted celebrity.”

  This seems an admirable life for a professional woman, but her appointment would hardly have happened without the influence of Percy Buck, another of the editors. The two were lovers for seventeen years from 1913, or rather she was his mistress, since the affair was secret and there was no question of Buck leaving his wife and five children. She had affairs with other men over the period of their involvement, but infidelity to her boss’s infidelity was hardly enough to make her a model of emancipation.

  In 1930 she started to share a cottage in Dorset with Valentine Ackland, a young woman with short hair and given to the wearing of trousers, whose marriage had been annulled. Shortly after that they were sharing a bed.

  The dislocation of status between being a married man’s secret and a scandalous woman’s wife-partner was in theory absolute. In practice Warner weathered it smoothly. Sexual heresy made her no more radical, and no less so.

  Admiration for her casual fortitude is inevitably damped down by the conviction that Ackland (1906–1969), the love of her life, was in many ways the bane of it also. There followed decades of repetitive trauma. As Chester Kallman to Wystan Auden, so Ackland to Warner. Auden, though, might have envied the lucid triumph Warner recorded in a letter of 1951: “Here I am, grey as a badger, wrinkled as a walnut, and never a beauty at my best: but here I sit, and yonder sits the other one, who had all the cards in her hand—except one. That I was better at loving and being loved.”

  In her low-key attitude to her own sexual dissidence, as in so much else, Sylvia Townsend Warner was the strongest possible contrast to her older contemporary Virginia Woolf. She emancipated herself from provincialism at least as fully as Woolf, but without anything like the same struggle, the same effort of the will. She had the knack of melting across barriers, rather than defining herself against them. Though her prose has its cubist moments, she was immune to the sense of crisis, of total rupture, that marked modernism.

  Reading Mrs. Dalloway shortly after publication, she resisted the spell of its author, “though I think she can move like a swan, speak like a siren, twine like a convolvulus.” Warner’s root objection was that Woolf remained enthroned in her own prose, unwilling or unable to abdicate in favor of her readers: “What is the use of describing feelings and thoughts, however vividly, if they are to remain the author’s? This is My book, this is what I feel about it—It made me feel almost ashamed as I read it to see such gifts made such a schoolgirlish use of.”

  Warner may have been a passionate member of the Communist Party (she and Ackland joined in 1935, and visited Spain the next year), but ideology leaves the lightest possible footprint in her work. She boasted that the medieval nunnery in The Corner That Held Them was analyzed in orthodox Marxist terms, but what sort of Marxist devotes six years to the perfecting of a novel so remote from the struggle for tomorrow? Political crisis she could recognize, but it took place—and demanded response—in a parallel universe from her writing life.

  There’s a similar separation of domains and powers at work in the novel reprinted here, Mr. Fortune’s Maggot. The theme that teases what we now call colonialism—the assumption that Western civilization deals directly with reality, while other groups are subject to local illusions—is anything but doctrinaire. It doesn’t inhibit the writer from confidently embroidering any amount of Polynesian exotica, from a narrow base of knowledge. Warner claimed to have relied on a single book for background (a volume of letters from a female missionary)—and a book read ten years previously at that, so
vivid in memory that she didn’t need to revisit it or consult others: “...it had the minimum of religion, only elementary scenery, and a mass of details of everyday life.” She did ask friends, though, about some less exotic matters: “Before long I must see you, for my missionary has got to dive under the sea somewhere about p. 115. The only time I have been under the sea was quite involuntary, but I remember your telling me you loved diving...I have also made some enquiries about algebra, but the earthquake and the harmonium...have settled in nicely” (letter to David Garnett, March 6, 1926).

  In a letter to William Maxwell written in the mid-1960s, Warner traced the beginnings of the story to “an extremely vivid dream. A man stood alone on an ocean beach, wringing his hands in an intensity of despair; as I saw him in my dream I knew something about him...” Even late in the writing of the book (which she compared to being pregnant with a child made of Venetian glass) she remembered being “in a state of semi-hallucination,” dressing for instance for the weather in the book rather than the weather in the streets.

  Yet in letters written in the mid-Twenties to her most intimate literary friend, David Garnett, close in age but senior in reputation, she made no mention of a dream and struck a jaunty, almost boisterous note: “You would laugh if you could see the story I am writing now. It is a lovely subject, there is nothing original about it, for it takes place on a Pacific island (like Defoe and H. de Vere Stacpoole), and the hero is a clergyman (like Mrs. Humphry Ward and Oliver Goldsmith), and it is written in alternate layers of Powys and Garnett, both imitated to the life. I roar with laughter at it and write on feverishly. The Rev. Crusoe is Theo, of course, and Man Friday is you...” (November 11, 1925). “Powys” is the reclusive T. F. Powys, best remembered for his novel Mr. Weston’s Good Wine, and so is “Theo”—Warner had originally met David Garnett when trying, successfully, to get Powys’s fiction published.

  Jauntiness can of course defend softness and susceptibility, and since Garnett would be the book’s first reader Warner may have wanted to play down her involvement with her character and his story. Perhaps a fresh wave of feeling overtook and enlarged an original satirical impulse, producing a change of tone that surprised even the writer. In March of 1926 she was warning Garnett that despite such gaieties as earthquake and harmonium, “it is not a gay story, and perhaps you will not like it.” In October she further distanced herself from the story: “My missionary is an impossible length, fatally sodomitic, alternately monotonous and melodramatic, his only success is an aigre-doux quality which will infuriate any reader after the third page. I love him with a dreadful uneasy passion which in itself denotes him a cripple...”

  Whether the novel’s tender thread was there from the beginning or woven in later, Garnett was the first of many readers to respond strongly to it: “David took the proofs to read and shut himself up with them,” Warner wrote in her letter to William Maxwell. “When he came out, having read the book, he began to tell me that he thought it was good. His face swelled and reddened and we both realized that he was in tears.” Garnett corroborated this account of his reaction in a review for the Daily News: “...suddenly, our eyes are blurred with tears, and through them we see the truth, bitter and needing more courage than we can command. So we are rather childishly ashamed of having ever laughed at Mr. Fortune...”

  Warner herself claimed to share this feeling of responsibility: “I remember writing the last paragraph, and reading the conclusion and then impulsively writing the envoy, with a feeling of compunction, almost guilt, toward this guiltless man I had created and left in such a fix.” It isn’t good for authors to be too much at the mercy of their own effects—think of Alice Walker solemnly thanking her characters for coming—but Warner seems to have come to no harm.

  In 1930, though, she reread Mr. Fortune’s Maggot and decided she could do more for her hapless hero than desert him with apologies. She could intervene again, and continue his story.

  She wrote two thousand words of what became The Salutation in a single sitting, with no idea of what would come next. A timely dream that night provided her plot. Warner continued to think well of the finished story, written “out of my heart as an amende to my poor Timothy. Not that I could make him happier, but to show that I did not forget him.” She described it as “the purest, the least time-serving story I ever wrote,” and made it the title story of a collection published in 1932.

  That phrase “time-serving” seems unduly harsh, an implied rebuke to the rest of her short fiction, but she may have had a particular private criterion in mind. In a letter of 1962 Warner referred, with regret, to the “moral purpose” informing some of her writing, saying she was never aware of it at the time of composition, “but when I read myself afterward I see my moral purpose shining out like a bad fish in a dark larder.” Perhaps she meant that there were no off smells of that sort about The Salutation. The novella is free of any taint of wheedling—though there is an inherent paradox about a sequel that offers no antidote to the unconsoling firmness of its original.

  This was the only time in her literary career that Sylvia Townsend Warner returned to finished work and tried to take it further. Her instinct was all the other way, toward moving on. In her last extraordinary group of stories, published as Kingdoms of Elfin (1977), the characters are mainly fairies, though the cuteness factor is low to nonexistent—it’s as if she wanted a change even from warm-bloodedness.

  The Salutation, being designed to be read without necessary reference to Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, contains no explicit identification of the heroes of both stories as one. It isn’t quite substantial enough to be a companion piece to the novel, but there’s too much new material (a whole new country and society, a whole new palette) for it to be considered a coda. Not quite matching, not quite contrasting, novel and novella are like a chair and a stool from the same marvelous maker. The ending of The Salutation, with its dream loop, suggests that even the second time around, Sylvia Townsend Warner found it hard to finish her business with so tender a creation.

  —ADAM MARS-JONES

  MR. FORTUNE’S MAGGOT

  MAGGOT. 2. A whimsical or perverse fancy; a crotchet.

  —N. E. D.

  The scenes and characters of this story are entirely imaginary. In the island names the vowels should be pronounced separately with the Italianate vowel-sounds. Words of three syllables are accented on the second: Fanùa, Luèli.

  I am greatly obliged to Mr. Victor Butler for his assistance in the geometrical passages, and for the definition of an umbrella.

  Preface

  IN 1918 when I first went to live in London, at 127 Queens Road, I was poor and thought I could not afford a Times Book Club subscription. I soon exhausted my own books, and though I had the British Museum by day I wanted something to read in the evening. Then I happened on the Westbourne Grove branch of the Paddington Public Library. It was a very down-at-heel establishment, with a great many bad biographies of unimportant people, and all the books had the same smell (I suppose it was some public disinfectant). I found it very convenient, and used it hard. One of the books I borrowed was a volume of letters by a woman missionary in Polynesia. I can’t remember the title, or her name; but the book pleased me a great deal, it had the minimum of religion, only elementary scenery, and a mass of details of everyday life. The woman wrote out of her own heart—for instance, describing an earthquake, she said that the ground trembled like the lid of a boiling kettle.

  In 1925 I had finished Lolly Willowes, and was writing poetry and a few short stories when one early morning I woke up remembering an extremely vivid dream. A man stood alone on an ocean beach, wringing his hands in an intensity of despair; as I saw him in my dream, I also knew something of his circumstances. He was a missionary, he was middle-aged, and a deprived character, his name was Hegarty, he was on an island where he had made only one convert: and at the moment I saw him he had just realised that the convert was no convert at all. I jumped out of bed and began to write it down, and e
ven as I wrote a great deal which I had known in the dream began to scatter; but the main facts, and the man’s loneliness, simplicity, and despair, and the look of the island, all remained as actual as something I had really experienced.

  With the minimum of fuss I made a few notes of the development, discarded the name of Hegarty because it might lead me into a comic Irishman, and began to write. The opening, up to Lueli’s baptism, is, with scarcely a word’s alteration, as I wrote it down. This must have been in winter, because I remember Duncan Grant coming to dinner on the same day, and we had the gas fire on, and ate some sort of stewed game. The moment he had gone I went on writing.

  My remembrance of the book from the Paddington Public Library was so vivid and substantial that I never felt a need to consult any other books. The lady’s account of the earthquake I could supplement by Bea Howe’s remembrance of the Valparaiso earthquake: this gave me the lamp beginning to swing. The public library lady also gave me the lava in the water flowing towards the south. The idol I had from the missionary’s cottage at Wayford in Somerset which I hired for the summer of 1926. The parrot lived next door to this cottage, and I grew very familiar with its voice in a tree, and noticed how much quieter unconfined parrots sound.

  There had been some breaks between when Duncan came to dine and when I was at Wayford; but after that I wrote steadily, and with increasing anxiety; not because I had any doubt about the story, but because I was so intensely conscious that the shape and balance of the narrative must be exactly right—or the whole thing would fall to smithereens, and I could never pick it up again. I remember saying to Bea that I felt as if I were in advanced pregnancy with a Venice glass child. It was made the more alarming by the way in which things kept on going right—like the business of Mr. Fortune’s watch, for instance. I was really in a very advanced stage of hallucination when I finished the book—writing in manuscript and taking wads of it to be typed at the Westbourne Secretarial College in Queens Road.