Valentine Ackland, page 11
Although Valentine was always insecure and prone to test love beyond any reasonable endurance, she did not really doubt ‘Sylvia’s heart’. But she found it galling that her own status was unrecognised, socially as well as legally, while a ‘real’ offer of marriage would have absolute validity. This slippage between the absolute reality of their relationship, to them, and its official invisibility would always be painful to Valentine; it was an area in which she was powerless.
A happier summer visit was that of Sylvia’s aunt Purefoy with her husband, the writer Arthur Machen, and their fourteen-year-old daughter Janet, who was a great favourite with Sylvia. Valentine taught her to drive and they had water-fights in the garden with soda-water siphons; Janet, for one, was delighted with Sylvia’s new companion. Later in August, Valentine and Sylvia had to part for holidays with their respective mothers; Ruth in Paris, Nora at Little Zeal.
This separation confirmed how much they loathed being apart; it also clarified other areas of their relationship. Hitherto, Sylvia had declined to expect fidelity from Valentine, while freely offering it herself. Indeed, as she later said, ‘with refusing of vows and rejecting of contracts … I paid out such yards of free reins and long ropes that it is a marvel to me now we didn’t get strangled in them.’ 53 Valentine wrote to her from Paris: ‘I have seen some pretty and even two beautiful girls here – but to my horror and wry joy, I look dispassionately and then my gaze travels to you’. 54 When a French friend offered to set her up with a woman, Valentine extricated herself and assured Sylvia that she had no interest in anyone else – ‘But what violent storms of desire I suffer for you.’ 55
In reply, Sylvia departed from her previous policy, and even ridiculed herself for it:
I was just going to put my head on one side and say O what a pity that not one of the slenders or the slys or the willings caught your fancy. And only just in the nick of time did I find myself out – my deep female pride and content that they didn’t.
Doubts about the wisdom of this admission constrained her to add:
And as soon as I’d written that I found myself cautiously going on to say that if by any chance one of them had done so since your letter, I was, of course, delighted. 56
Sylvia knew that Valentine had terminated her existing love-affairs, but now that she’d voluntarily refrained from embarking on new ones, Sylvia was emboldened to admit her preference for mutual exclusivity. Whatever happened later, this could not be unsaid.
Although based in Chaldon, Valentine and Sylvia moved about frequently, travelling between London and Winterton, and also staying regularly at Lavenham (where they borrowed a house), on a houseboat at Thurne in the Norfolk Broads, and at a favourite pub, The Lamb at Tinhead. These miniature holidays romantically alone together were always part of the pattern of their life. To make it easier, Sylvia bought a red and cream Sports Triumph car which Valentine adored driving. Sylvia’s confidence as a learner driver was permanently dented by her devoted cleaner Mrs Keates’ lugubrious advice: ‘O Miss, I hope you won’t be too venturesome.’ 57
Their pleasures were again threatened by an outbreak of familial obligation. Ruth decided to let the London flat and spend the entire winter economically in Norfolk, because of largely illusory financial anxieties. Valentine perceived it as her duty to share this self-imposed penance, and even pay rent for the flat above the garage at Winterton. Sylvia determined to make the best of this ‘new sort of winter’, but when she witnessed the Ackland family in action – Ruth’s continual demands and encroachments on Valentine’s privacy, Joan’s competitiveness and needling – she utterly deprecated their treatment of Valentine, especially the ‘recurring cry of justify yourself by being a typist’. 58 Unsurprisingly, Valentine sank into a suicidal melancholy (fortunately alleviated by love-making), drank heavily, and suffered from hangovers, migraines and gastric ulcers.
Joan’s campaign against Valentine continued unabated, though her usual tactics did not work with Sylvia, needless to say, and Sylvia’s love afforded Valentine some protection. Yet the pattern continued in which the two sisters were twinned in parodic mimicry. Joan was now gaining some journalistic success, which she emphasised by employing Valentine to type, and passing on certain commissions to finish. These articles, on calculated subjects such as female pilots or the transvestite ‘Colonel’ Barker, Valentine knew to be ‘hideous nauseating hypocrisy’, 59 but she still felt inferior because poetry wasn’t so lucrative. By the Ackland family’s materialist standards, Joan was the successful one, though she knew her writing was of no intrinsic worth. Valentine’s was the ethical victory, Joan’s the worldly one, and Joan’s life was a travesty of Valentine’s. Throughout their later lives, this uneasy distorted mirroring would continue: in Joan’s increasingly masculine appearance, her relationships with women after her husband’s death, her war work, her conversion to Catholicism and so on. This imitative tendency of Joan’s suggests a competitive obsession with taking over Valentine’s private spaces, as had happened throughout her childhood. Yet it only emphasised the absolute contrast between the two sisters.
Over the winter of 1931-32 Valentine was writing well, despite family pressures, publishing poems in periodicals such as The New York Review of Books and even getting (modestly) paid for them. She was anxious if she didn’t write poems in enormous numbers – five a day was quite average – and she dreaded being ‘a bloody little minor poet’. 60 In this she was influenced by her family’s conventional idea of success, however inapplicable to a poet. Bouts of depression about her work and her finances continued even after they returned to Chaldon in the spring of 1932, but alternated with ecstatic delight. Most importantly, Valentine wrote,
I have – my deep and true and dark and passionate love for Sylvia – our life together of warmth and passion and continued desire – our mutual rekindling, constant planting of fireseeds, constant budding and leaving and shedding and dark rooting and fresh spring again – this is exactly the stuff of poetry. 61
In a letter to Bo, Valentine wrote a detailed description of daily life in Chaldon in 1932 which – although it has an understandable note of self-justification – gives a fair idea of how she intended most days to be spent. It demonstrates the importance of creative work in her life, and the relationship between life and work in which she believed.
Most days I write in the morning, after doing the rougher part of the housework – coals and oil and wood-cutting and lighting the copper. Then lunch, and I go out to work in the garden or drive or talk to the people at the pub or I walk – then tea, and I read while dinner is getting and read afterwards too – or we play chess or the gramophone and Sylvia sews and mends sometimes, or writes. Then we go to bed. We sleep together always and I am very happy. It is a particularly full life, very productive and intensely happy. And passionate, which fills a need I have always had, and makes my poems come alive … I see no difference between our state and the state of normal true marriage between a man and a woman. As long as pleasure and physical enjoyment lighten the deep passion and as long as the deep passion, which is equally animal and spiritual goes on burning redly to the core – then this love in which we live is true and produces truth. 62
(Not exactly what Bo wanted to hear, perhaps.)
Many more glimpses of this happy and productive life come from Valentine’s diary: her delight to be back in trousers after a brief ‘imprisonment’ in a skirt; her forthright comment on an article about perversion (‘Balls!’); her experiments on Sylvia with kisses: ‘Which did she prefer?’; a scrap of reported speech: ‘“Hurry up, now” I said – “Whaffor?” she answered – lingering – “Bed” I answered – and she was gone in a flash.’ 63 Sylvia’s writing also flourished under this Chaldon regime. Valentine recorded that she was busy ‘writing the beginning of her Lesbian novel’, 64 an illuminating reference to Summer Will Show. On their second October anniversary Valentine wrote of her gift of a mourning-ring ‘Let it be a pretty mourning for the sad days and nights she spent out of my arms – for I was ready for her so long before she came.’ 65
Later in October Valentine and Sylvia heard that Charles Prentice had accepted their joint book of poems for publication. Cautious Charles would run few risks by publishing the unknown young poet together with one of his firm’s established writers, but it was a compromise for them both. Valentine was, she calculated, ‘½ in favour and ⅓ not,’ for her conscience was troubled by Sylvia’s involvement. But, reminding herself ‘Honi soit –’ (although she must have known that Joan would always think evil) she overcame these scruples and agreed to the ‘new scheme’. 66 The book would be out in about a year.
12.‘This kind paradise where we were so happy’ – Valentine and Sylvia in the looking-glass at Frankfort.
In 1933 Valentine and Sylvia left Miss Green. The honeymoon cottage seemed too small, their village friends Granny Moxon and Shepherd Dove had died, other neighbours (notably the Powyses) were difficult, Valentine was drinking too much. Frankfort Manor at Sloley in Norfolk was a good place to re-establish their enchanted realm; the beautiful dilapidated seventeenth century brick house was romantically too large for them, and sparsely furnished. The lawn in front of it had never been mown except with a scythe, a tradition the new tenants had to promise to uphold. There were abandoned outbuildings and ruined greenhouses, like Winterton, and an ancient orchard, remarkable old trees. Their stay at Frankfort was not long (they lived there for just over a year, across two summers) but its imaginative impact was great.
Valentine called Frankfort
the perfect house … the loveliest small manor house that I have ever seen … We lived in a kind of solemn, fairy tale splendour … every day, every evening, every night and every dawn there was some new, strange beauty or curiosity or discovery. And we were very very happy. 67
Among the pleasures of the place was the wild garden which produced bumper crops of asparagus, whitecurrants, chestnuts and rare varieties of pears. They both loved the seclusion, left alone with few visitors – although one evening they met a hedgehog walking up the mossy drive. ‘Another day, in full sun,’ Valentine recalled,
I was picking green peas into a colander, and saw the earth near my feet heaving, and a mole emerged, and I caught it instantly, in the colander, and carried it to Sylvia, who was writing in her room, and set it down beside the typewriter on her table. 68
Valentine was in her element. She shot record numbers of rats in the stables, observed birds’ nests in the wood, studied the stars through the telescope Sylvia had given her. (Knowing the Ackland penchant for ‘expensive and devouring passions’ Sylvia imagined Valentine announcing ‘Sylvia, we must sell the car and the silver and all that we have and buy an astronomer’s telescope … I shall be perfectly happy, I shall wish for nothing else. We must get it instantly.’ But she was content to study the moon and ‘the expressions of the hens in the field across the lane’.) 69
In love, too, she was intensely happy, writing of her physical relationship with Sylvia ‘No one has ever answered to love as she does – Love itself is matched by her.’ 70 Only occasionally her old fear of death intruded, when she remembered the great sorrow that such a great love would inevitably bring. ‘Last night,’ she wrote in her 1933 diary, ‘after such an intense happiness, I lay awake for all the night, swung between despair and despair’. 71
Valentine’s poetry could absorb such thoughts; at Frankfort she wrote well and prolifically. In just one of her extant notebooks there are ninety-two poems, written between March and September 1934, as well as short stories and notes. Yet it was hard work living at Frankfort, with the time-consuming demands of the house and garden. Money was tight; as well as paying the £50 a year rent, they needed a servant to help with the labour-intensive housework. (She was a young local woman, Irene Peake, who sensibly ate the cats’ meat when there was nothing else for breakfast.) They were as self-sufficient as possible, stored and bottled produce for the winter, sold jams and pickles, and delivered their potatoes to the local chip shop in Valentine’s beloved motor car (now a racing green MG Midget). It was hard work, and to survive there at all required total commitment to the place. Yet, despite these prosaic hardships, there was something unreal about it all.
The fairy tale atmosphere of Frankfort gave the time they spent there a magical significance in Valentine’s memory. Writing of ‘this kind paradise where we were so happy, so hard-working, so good’, Sylvia sadly asserted ‘we were never again so unimpededly good as we were at Frankfort Manor.’ 72 But the good, as in all fairy tales, were tested; the strange house had its dark side. Although in sunlight it was propitious and enfolding, during thunderstorms the atmosphere was sinister; the trees seemed to crowd around, while Valentine and Sylvia sat on the sofa calming cats and expecting to be struck by lightning. Shortly after they arrived, Chow William had to be put down. Valentine dug his grave, and remembering the dog’s ‘simple-hearted love’ she determined to ‘take on some of William’s simplicity of goodness towards her – for even my great love can do with that.’ 73
Early in 1934 their book Whether a Dove or Seagull was published by Chatto (having come out in America at the end of 1933). It was named – approximately – after the first line of one of Valentine’s poems ‘Whether a dove or a seagull lighted there / I cannot tell.’ The book had an introductory note explaining that fifty-four of the poems were by one author and fifty-five by the other, that they had not been worked on collaboratively (an important point for Valentine) and that they were not individually attributed, to ensure that each would be read without bias, not pre-judged by the individual poet’s reputation.
Valentine had always had reservations about publishing with Sylvia, but she had been persuaded by Sylvia’s enthusiasm – and doubtless tempted by the irresistible idea of seeing her work in book form, and vindicating herself to her family. It may now seem obvious that publishing jointly with a famous author, who happened to be her lover, was an error of judgement. But at this stage of her career it wasn’t so obvious to Valentine; she had an optimistic belief that the quality of her work would silence any criticism, that it only had to be available to be appreciated. She was twenty-seven, ambitious for success, with impossibly high expectations. Perhaps she secretly hoped to wake up and find herself famous, certainly she imagined that those who had previously been unconvinced by her writing would now recognise it, and acknowledge her talent. Writing twenty years later, Valentine recalled ‘I was simply, placidly sure that I was a poet – a writer – and that it would be made clear to everyone, just like that.’ 74
With hindsight, Sylvia noted: ‘Probably, it would have been better to wait until she had sufficient poems to her liking for a book of her own’, 75 which carefully understates the gravity of the mistake. However, Sylvia makes the reasonable assumption that – with her existing record of magazine publication – Valentine could have built up a collection which would have found a publisher, even in the Depression. As it was, she appeared to be merely Sylvia’s protégée (or, to the less charitable, her dilettante lesbian toyboy).
When the reviews began to arrive at Frankfort, Valentine realised her mistake. They were universally positive. But it was not enough for her to be hailed as ‘a remarkable new poet’, one of ‘two good poets’, ‘a good technician … with fine sensibility’, and so on. 76 She was enraged when one (admittedly idiotic) critic commented that her verse ‘moves sweetly’ and sardonic about remarks such as ‘Valentine Ackland brings a more obviously passionate note into his work’ or ‘Miss Warner is … less deliberately an artist than Mr Ackland.’ 77 These comparisons were possible because everyone had been so distracted by the authorship puzzle that a key was added to the English edition, which at least prevented Valentine’s best poems being presumed Sylvia’s and Sylvia’s weaker ones assigned to Valentine. But confusion remained; it’s still often thought to be a book of jointly-authored poems, and both poets have been credited with the other’s work at various times.78
The nepotism of the project was perhaps too obvious to need mentioning; it could be assumed that Chatto had been obliged to take the book since Sylvia was, after all, one of their best-selling authors. A more curious silence was maintained over the authors’ very obvious relationship. It’s unclear whether Valentine and Sylvia envisaged their readership as an extension of their own bohemian, sexually liberated circle, expected a succès de scandale, or optimistically believed that their work would be treated as entirely separate from their life. Certainly to avow their love so passionately and publicly was an act of daring. In that era it took courage for any woman writer to proclaim her sexuality as an urgent driving force; to acknowledge this powerful force as directed towards another woman was outrageous. The recent Well of Loneliness obscenity trial demonstrated that openly lesbian writing could be interpreted as a danger to society, and censored.
Lacking overt political statements about lesbianism, Whether a Dove or Seagull was unlikely to attract the legal attention Radclyffe Hall’s work had received. But there are other kinds of trouble, and the book takes real risks. The love-poems in it are not disguised with a fictional framework, or distanced by classicism and encoded references to Sappho. Only an extremely blinkered reader could miss the way the poems echo and answer each other, and it would be difficult to interpret them as heterosexual, despite Valentine’s androgynous name, when both poets write explicitly about women’s sexual experience. Despite this there was no public comment, many reviewers named Valentine as Mr Ackland, all moved sweetly. Presumably Charles Prentice had relied on this heterocentric public response, if he’d thought about it at all.
Privately, some people were less pleased. Robert Frost, the poet to whom the book was dedicated by an admiring Valentine, was disgusted. He wrote to Louis Untermayer, the mutual friend who had sent him the book, ‘if you could have got along without two or three of the more physical poems in the book, you can imagine how much more philosophically I could … Don’t you find the contemplation of their kind of collusion emasculating? I am chilled to the marrow, as in the actual presence of some foul form of death, where none of me can function.’ 79 His castration anxieties, triggered by two women he didn’t even know, may be unintentionally comic, but his inability to see past the poets’ sexual orientation enough to consider their poetry makes distasteful reading. Evidently his prejudice was shared by Untermayer, and the two men sympathised with one another over their dreadful experience.
