Music at Long Verney (23 page)

“‘Stay, Corydon, Thou Swain'” (1929), its title taken from John Wilbye's madrigal, improvises on classical metamorphoses. Perhaps a man who joins a woman named Cave to bicycle through a mysterious wood lacks necessary caution? Warner's compositional gifts are wonderful here; she stops the story abruptly where a foolhardy author would have gone on. “Afternoon in Summer” (1972) follows a pair of ardent contemporary lovers, generously including murder, cannibalism, starvation, a funeral, and a headstone in its bucolic way. All will be well: mortality is held at bay, Time is killed, Sally and Willie feast on each other. “A Scent of Roses” (1972) is less benign; the sky
is
falling. As in Warner's classic story “A Love Match”, ardour and war intertwine.

Named for a beloved artefact whose mystery deepens, “Tebic” (1958) sweetly celebrates marriage; as a study of the proper giving and receiving of presents, the love both acts embody, it is peerless. Tebic itself, at once adorable and Sphinxlike, explains much about the stories of Mr Edom, his assistant Collins, buyers and sellers, objects and ownership. “Real and dear” to Warner, the antiques dealer takes his name from Genesis, although Warner
forgave her Edom for putting his birthright on sale. The stories showcase the same gift for mimicry that got her “dismissed” from kindergarten as “a very bad influence”. An antique shop was made for such comedy; as she wrote Maxwell, “All professions in this country seem to have highish proportions of maniacs and eccentrics, antique dealers eminently so. In a quiet way, too; which makes them even more striking.”

“A Flying Start” (1963) observes a husband and wife whose tastes in beautiful objects differ. When his desires override hers, she acts for herself, silently applauded by Mr Edom. “English Mosaic” (1964) is animated by a sublime example of Warner's visual slapstick: a drainpipe decorated with rare porcelain smashed into recognisable bits, an offence that Mr Edom takes personally. In contrast to “English Mosaic”, “The Candles” (1966) is elegiac. A portrait of an electrical blackout, it offers an inspired meditation on the power of candlelight to evoke lovely, lost time. A complacent writer might have said that the scene became “mysteriously beautiful and enriched”; Warner's reverie is poignant, strange, and fleeting. “Furnivall's Hoopoe” (1970) fills the shop with outlandish people, among them an unprincipled ornithologist devoted to the “post-mortem preservation” of British birds (another Warner rocket) who battles with other patrons for an ungainly piece of Victoriana. “The Listening Woman”, the last Edom story, was written in 1965 but was not published until 1972, as William Shawn, editor of the
New Yorker,
had wearied of the series. The painting described here had been in Warner's family from her childhood and now hangs in the Dorset County Museum. Although comic misreadings proliferate, the story is mournful, even when separated lovers are reunited.

The concluding group of stories depicts artists at work, including Warner herself, and the power of the imagination to create or distort, a recurring subject throughout her work.
In “Item, One Empty House” (1966), Warner's recollections of a guest house in Connecticut turn into an imagined story – unwritten and unfinished – by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. It is as if she had seen objects from her window and had construed them in her own way. “Four Figures in a Room. A Distant Figure.” (1973) asks “Who owns music: the performers, the composer, the listener?” Warner had studied composition and practice and was an expert on Tudor church music. But her questions about interpretation echo her relations to those who tried to impose their own structures on what she had written. (Explaining the little boy under the piano, she wrote, “I am a realist and constantly facing the unexplained,” which points a helpful way in to her world.) Stories of suffering writers are often self-indulgent, but Warner transcends this in “
QWERTYUIOP
” (1977). Her poet, Ursula, despairing and inspired, is constrained by childhood, although her longings, her anger, and her Romanticism are fully adult. “A Brief Ownership” (1967) improvises on place names, freeing Warner to invent a contented life filled with horsehair sofas, Anglican bishops, Orpheus, and ripe figs. So sure was her invention that the
New Yorker
's fact-checking machinery stuttered and lurched, certain she was describing a real town. The final story, “In the Absence of Mrs Bullen” (1962), is a virtuosic display in which an artist and her devoted but obtuse audience suffer hurt feelings on both sides.

I mentioned Warner's expulsion from kindergarten. The punchline to that anecdote makes a fitting conclusion: “They sent me back with a
very
dubious report; only one kind word in it and that was, ‘Sylvia always sings in tune.' That sort of thing decides one's destiny, of course.” It did – Warner's music was always in tune, always hers.

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Epub ISBN: 9781448138340

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First published by Counterpoint Press, Washington, D.C. in 2001

First published in Great Britain in 2001 by

The Harvill Press

2 Aztec Row

Berners Road

London N1 0PW

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Stories © Susanna Pinney, Executor of the Estate of Sylvia Townsend Warner, 2001

Foreword © The Estate of William Maxwell, 2001

Afterword © Michael Steinman, 2001

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781860469329

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