Читать книгу Side-Stepping Normativity in Selected Short Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner - Rebecca K. Hahn - Страница 8

“She [Warner] has the spiritual digestion of a goat”, writes John Updike, “Her stories tend to convince us in process and baffle us in conclusion; they are not rounded with meaning but lift jaggedly toward new, unseen developments” (235). Warner’s stories begin relatively innocently and then, as in “The Grandmother’s Children”, take a surprising turn that catches the reader unaware. In keeping with Updike’s description, Warner temporarily lifts her feet off the ground to present events, characters or settings from a new and unexpected angle. This perspective is not necessarily oppositional to a more conventional perspective; however, it does contain surprising and slightly peculiar elements – for example, a dying grandmother who prefers dead children to living children, or an artist who literally seeks to become one with his work of art. While Warner’s stories are very often very realistic, they always seem to develop a taunting little twist that makes them strange. “In Writers at Work” (1931), Louise Morgan observes that Warner displays similar characteristics in real life, “She [Warner] has that same quality of unexpectedness. It is part of her personal charm that she keeps her listener constantly on the alert, and never by any chance gives him what he is prepared for” (393).

Most reviews imply that there is something bewildering about Warner’s writing, something that her readers cannot quite grasp – in addition to a certain feature that is apparent in all her writing. In the Times Literary Supplement of August 1984, for example, Anne Duchêne comments on Warner’s idiosyncratic writing style. In her article on the short story collection One Thing Leading to Another (1984), she criticises the fact that Susanna Pinney, the editor, left two of the thirteen stories undated, but points out: “Dates are of little significance, however, where there is no evolutionary change, and all stories might equally well have come from the previous two decades of the author’s writing life” (953). Duchêne draws attention to the fact that there is something unique about Warner’s style that she cannot pinpoint and continues to comment that:

She [Warner] was happiest in the liberating latitudes of eccentricity, or when she could tilt some well-fleshed verisimilitude gently over into the unlikely, or perhaps beyond that into the fantastic; but she was a modest exotic and her taste for the improbable was always tempered by good humour, good taste and good will. (953)

Duchêne also points out, like Updike, that Warner’s stories often take a turn for the unexpected. Duchêne, however, does not ascribe Warner the same amount of courage, artfulness and ingenuity as Updike. By repeatedly using the nondescript adjective “good” to refer to her, Duchêne makes her writing appear less novel and less enterprising.

While Updike and Duchêne admire Warner’s style, other reviewers find it inaccessible. In “Wit and Fancy” (1947), a review of The Museum of Cheats and Other Stories (1947), Elizabeth L. Sturch writes that

As a short-story writer Miss Sylvia Townsend Warner belongs to the school which believes in making its readers do a large proportion of the work. It is a commonplace that the farther we travel from the illustrated women’s magazines the farther removed also are the neatly tailored and explicit endings, the tidily rounded situations of the popular story. (461)

Sturch criticises the fact that Warner does not resolve her stories, but asks her readers to actively engage with them. Decades later, Maud Ellmann flatly contradicts Sturch’s assessment of Warner’s writing: while Sturch bristled at the fact that Warner tends to alienate her readers, Ellmann claims that Warner does the exact opposite, “In this critical context, a modern novelist who strives to captivate rather than to alienate the reader tends to be discounted as a throwback, lacking the gumption to burst the confines of the Victorian novel” (“The Art of Bi-Location: Sylvia Townsend Warner” 82). Sturch’s criticism has a strong misogynistic undertone, denying Warner the right as a woman to write stories that challenge her readers to think. Sturch even implies that Warner’s style displays a trace of conceit. With regard to the “exercise of imagination”, as she calls it, she maintains that

[…] it may be questioned sometimes whether too much is not expected of it, and whether readers are not deceived by intellectual snobbery into supposing that they have understood certain authors who in reality leave them completely fogged. (461)

Sturch criticises the fact that Warner deliberately eludes her readership and establishes the author as an authoritative figure whose message the reader must aim to decipher. Her review clearly shows that she considers Warner’s writing too difficult and too odd to understand. In contrast to Tóibín, she does not see any value in the strange and unfamiliar elements Warner introduces into her writing. With regard to Warner’s style, Sturch points out, “There is nothing portentous or bludgeoning about the style; and as in her previous work, the author is at her best when she is most absurd or fantastic” (461). Sturch values the fact that Warner’s writing is – supposedly – auspicious and undemonstrative; that it is, as she believes, harmless. In a similar vein to Sturch, the critic Paul Binding also finds Warner’s stories not entirely convincing. Yet while Sturch criticises their open structure, Binding considers the stories collected in The Music at Long Verney (2001), a posthumous collection edited by Michael Steinman, to be too contrived. He writes,

Her stories are very much those of the professional writer, aware of how effects can best be made in short space, of how essay-like musings can be given a narrative shape […] and of how endings – like the flamingos Alice holds in Lewis Carroll’s croquet game – can turn round and bite the reader. (23)

The above reviews highlight the controversial attitudes towards Warner’s writing. They also underpin the fact that there is something about Warner’s stories that reviewers find hard to place. Duchêne detects a timeless quality in Warner’s work but is unable to describe it further. Sturch describes Warner’s narrative style as neither “portentous” nor “bludgeoning” but does not enlarge on this. Binding disapproves of Warner’s short stories, dismissing their style, structure and content as too artificial. These widely differing opinions may be one of the many reasons why Sarah Waters writes about Warner, “The intelligence of her writing has sometimes resulted in her fiction being misunderstood as difficult, and has perhaps lost her readers; she’s certainly one of the most shamefully under-read great British authors of the past 100 years” (Waters). While I agree with the second part of Waters’ statement, I do not agree with the first premise that Warner’s writing has simply been misunderstood and labelled difficult. As the previously mentioned reviews have shown, her writing is not only difficult, but also extremely challenging. In accordance with Gay Wachman, I would argue that Warner’s writing is unexpectedly demanding: at first glance, her writing style seems innocently straightforward but as her stories progress it becomes apparent that the opposite is true. Referring to Warner’s intricate prose, Wachman writes,

The complexity of her writing – her crossings of genres and genders; her learned but seemingly offhand allusions to literature and history; her sexual, feminist, communist, anarchist radicalism – is perhaps a cause of the simplification in much of the writing about her. (Lesbian Empire 2–3)

Wachman believes that many readers readily allow the seemingly straightforward texts to deceive them, dismissing them as nothing out of the ordinary. Short story readers often approach short stories metaphorically to find a hidden meaning. However, with Warner’s stories this approach does not work, since her stories are not riddled with symbols, images, or metaphors, but characterised by a clear structure which explores aspects of human (or, in her later stories, elfin) life in a very rational way. In addition, Warner’s prose is very clear and devoid of long, complicated sentences obscuring the plot. Consequently, the reader may be fooled into thinking that some of Warner’s stories are too simple, too ordinary.

Not only reviewers, but also literary critics have found it difficult to classify Warner’s work, much as they admire her writing. In 1967, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, William Maxwell, Warner’s editor at The New Yorker, writes to Warner,

I shall tell her [Professor C.D. who wants to write a book about Warner] that the novels are a work of a secret society, each being by a different hand, which is why they are so different from one another. And that there is an affiliated sub-secret society that is responsible for the stories. I shall hint, rather heavily, that I belong to the latter and am the author of The Cat’s Cradle-Book. And that the greatest of all your books is unpublished, waiting in the British Museum – a four volume novel about Richard IV of England, the facts of whose reign were suppressed, in all the history books, by Cardinal Wolsey, for political reasons. (The Element of Lavishness 172)

Warner was an extremely prolific writer of many genres, and, as Glen Cavaliero notes, “[…] a writer who stubbornly resists categorisation” (209). As Maxwell recounts, Warner’s first short story “My Mother Won the War” was published in The New Yorker in 1936. He adds that, “Over the next four decades The New Yorker published one hundred and fifty-four stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner, and nine poems” (“Sylvia Townsend Warner and The New Yorker” 44). Numerous other short stories have been included in collections, together with stories previously published in The New Yorker. Many more remain undiscovered in the Sylvia Townsend Warner archives.1 Warner also wrote seven novels,2 four volumes of poetry,3 a biography of T.H. White (1967), numerous newspaper articles, a great number of letters,4 and in addition translated Marcel Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve (1954) into English (1957). Although Warner published a considerable amount of literary work during the modernist era, she was never considered part of the literary canon of her time. Her indifference towards literary norms and expectations has posed a challenge for her critics who would like to assign her work to a specific genre and/or establish her as a writer of a movement. They have propounded different explanations for her absence from the canon and the lack of critical interest in her work. Claire Harman, for example, argues that “[…] the author’s name eludes recognition precisely because her oeuvre is so tremendously varied and, as a result, difficult to classify” (Garrity, Step-Daughters of England 147). Jane Marcus, who concurs with Harman, maintains, “Warner’s neglect is due in large measure to the fact that she was both a lesbian and an active member of the British Communist Party” (148). Jane Garrity believes that “[Warner’s] marginalization […] has at least as much to do with her narrative style itself, which consistently employs the props of traditional storytelling” (148). Warner was neither considered a modernist, nor a so-called ‘“writer of the 1930s”’ although, ostensibly, she resembles these writers in many aspects (Montefiore 143). As Janet Montefiore writes,

A publicly identified Communist and a distinguished writer of fiction and poetry, Warner is […] very close to the canonical “Auden Generation” male writers in terms of her class, culture and education; but like so many other women writers of the thirties, she belongs to the wrong sex and the wrong generation (she was born in 1893) – to be counted as a “writer of the 1930s” by the historians. (143)

Montefiore’s claim is still very accurate, although considerable effort has been made to re-evaluate the literary canon of the 1930s.5 Montefiore adds, “Moreover, the ironized traditional forms which she [Warner] chose to write in – lyric poems and a pastiche of Crabbe, short stories and historical novels set in unpopular periods – do not fit standard perceptions of thirties writing” (143). Warner not only ignores the conventions of the 1930s literary scene but also remains indifferent to the literary or stylistic conventions of the time. In line with Montefiore’s assessment, Robin Hackett writes that

Warner also seems to have lived the wrong kind of life to have been embraced by scholars of British modernism, left history, or feminist politics. She lived in London in the 1920s, was friends with Bloomsbury’s David Garnett and Steven Tomlin, once had lunch with Virginia Woolf, and later became friends with Leonard Woolf. But after the mid-1930s, Warner lived rurally and wrote about rural people, while modernism is often defined as exploration of urban lives and mechanization. (85–86)

Montefiore and Hackett both agree that Warner does not conform to the commonly held views about writers of her era. Apart from the fact that Warner was female, she was slightly too old to be considered a writer of the 1930s. Moreover, she did not show enough interest in the London literary scene and society, and in other London writers and intellectuals, to be grouped together with other modernist writers. Furthermore, her writing did not fall into the traditionalcategories of modernist writing. Ellmann puts forward the following reasons why Warner was not considered part of the Modernist canon:

Although Warner constantly experiments with form and content – her later novels subvert the convention of the hero, as well as the expectation of a climax and an ending, while her poetry shows a prosodic versatility akin to Auden – her grammar and sentence structure remain too orthodox to count as ‘modernist’. (Ellmann, “The Art of Bi-Location” 83)

Like Montefiore, Ellmann sees the reason for Warner’s exclusion from the canon in the author’s style – she is convinced that most critics think that Warner simply lacks the “verbal complexities of Joyce” (83). Ellmann is highly critical of the categories that have defined and continue to define modernist literature and writes: “A further reason of Warner’s neglect in the academy is the long-standing over-valuation of experimental Modernism” (83). Ellmann welcomes the fact that these categories are slowly becoming less rigidly defined and observes that “[in] recent years the stranglehold of Modernism has begun to loosen, enabling a wider range of writing and writers to re-emerge, especially women and minorities” (83). She firmly believes that “[t]he term ‘modernism’ has long since outlived its usefulness, having condemned many talents to obscurity” (“Sylvia Townsend Warner” 18). Like Ellmann, Garrity believes that Warner should be included in the modernist canon since “[her] fiction, far from conventional or conservative, frequently melds satirical fantasy, social realism, allegory, and literary allusion – always with a convoluted eye towards subversiveness” (Step-Daughters 148). The following chapters examine the seemingly subversive elements in Warner’s short stories and show that they may indeed have a different quality altogether. Wachman further highlights the fact that Warner’s writing essentially blurs the lines of demarcation:

Warner’s estrangement from the dominant ideology is crystallized in these narratives’ matter-of-fact crossings of borders that are generally assumed to be impassable: the incest taboo [“A Love Match”], the line between the human species and others animals [The Cat’s Cradle Book], the distinction between the material and the supernatural [Kingdoms of Elfin]. What all this crosswriting of borders does is to blur rather than to cross the lines between genders, sexualities and species: not just hierarchies but boundaries themselves are made ridiculous. (Lesbian Empire 45)

Wachman suggests that the literary works in question do not necessarily seek to reverse or deconstruct (hetero-) normative value systems and/or boundaries. Rather than contesting them, Warner’s stories subtly expose their absurdity.

The reviews as well as the literary criticism, including Wachman’s assessment, all revolve around Warner’s lack of desire to conform to any standard or norm; either in terms of style, or content. They all confirm Maxwell’s humorous remark about Warner’s oeuvre – that her novels must be a “work of a secret society” and that an “affiliated sub-secret society” must have written the short stories.