Valentine Ackland, page 33
Jean Larson generously gave me her copy of Valentine’s Twenty-Eight Poems, with Sylvia’s dedication, lent me her many letters from Valentine and Sylvia from the 1950s and ’60s (mostly about the antiques shop, as she used to go to auctions and sales for Valentine), and later gave me Valentine’s letters – all now in the archive. Jean often talked about Valentine and Sylvia’s support for her when she was in need of friends but on one visit, after particularly reminiscing about the fun they’d all had together, she suddenly cried ‘I wish those days were come again!’
As I write now, it’s over twenty years since as a young writer I first began to find out about Valentine Ackland. My subject (if I can call Valentine something so prosaic) has inevitably become part of my life, as her poems can become part of all her readers’ lives, if they so choose. Like many writers who research a subject over an extended time, I have sometimes felt resistant to over-identification with the one topic, like an unwilling portrait-painter eternally condemned to revise the same likeness, for their sins. (And, as Sybille Bedford reminds us, ‘a biographer is an artist under oath’.) 3 But in fact, I’ve been lucky that my other writing – of fiction, plays and poetry – has co-existed with this long-gestated biography; my work has benefited in so many different ways – with unexpected opportunities and travels and meetings and picnics interrupted by dogs who were over-excited because ‘they’m just been to church to have their pictures took’ – none of which would have happened without the quest for Valentine.
When the original biography was due for delivery, the publisher had folded, unable to honour their contracts, so their forthcoming titles never did come out. Instead, I wrote on Valentine for Carcanet Press in Journey from Winter, and for The Guardian on her centenary in 2006, for various magazines and academic journals, Edwin Mellen Press’s Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner and so on. And I talked about her life and work a great deal too, on BBC radio (Woman’s Hour and From the Ban to the Booker), in the Southbank Centre’s Literature and Spoken Word Programme at the National Poetry Library, in libraries and at book festivals, at gay literary salons, and club nights. Many of these occasions were made memorable for me by the enthusiasm of the audience, often young gay people hearing about Valentine for the first time. BBC Radio 4 commissioned me to write a play, Comrade Ackland and I, which – like Sylvia’s riffs on fragments of history – iconoclastically imagines the possibility that she could have used witchcraft to stop Valentine driving to Spain. And in 2020 The Society of Authors awarded me an Authors’ Foundation grant for this biography. Research is never wasted, as they say.
(This is my retrospective version, of course. At the time, I was bereft to lose the book whose arrival was so imminent, taken by surprise, shocked, baulked, angry. Very few people understood the cost of writing such a biography – in time, commitment, intellectual investment, emotional energy, imaginative endeavour, physical labour, not to mention financial outlay. I felt unequal to explaining, and for a while I didn’t talk about it. My disappointment, if such a setback can be contained in the word, was complicated by a kind of awkward sympathy for Valentine, invisibled again, together with illogical guilt and personal chagrin over my lost opportunity to celebrate gender transgression. It was a long time before I could face the prospect of engaging with it all again.)
Many lives were interconnected with Valentine’s while she lived, and there are people alive now who still remember her with fondness, gratitude, dislike or fury. But also many of the people who told me about Valentine are now dead, and her life doesn’t seem relatively close anymore, but from a distant era. The world has changed radically in a few decades, from one similar to that Valentine and Sylvia inhabited to a sometimes almost unrecognisable place, with the explosion of technology and AI, the floods and fires of climate crisis, the growth of political extremism and nationalism, the financial disasters of late capitalism, the spread of pandemics and the accelerated destruction of the natural world.
In Dorchester, then, there were places still much as they had been when Valentine and Sylvia shopped there; in the Judge Jefferies tea room, as Liz observed, they clearly hadn’t changed the solid oak loo-seats since the war, creating a literary heritage experience of a whole new kind. I bought a classic pair of driving-gloves in the leather and basket shop that had been there forever, and a hat in the gentleman’s outfitters on the High Street where Sylvia bought clothes for Valentine (if she hadn’t sent to London for them). Staying in the town a feeling of familiarity – entirely spurious, but real – and of moving in a different time, inevitably developed. Although that was in the twenty-first century, just, Dorchester now seems to have caught up with this new millennium. Proper coffee, cool places to eat, unwelcome chain stores; a different ethos.
It is in the countryside, the English landscape, that it’s still most possible to experience a sense of being in the same place as these writers, and in some inexplicable way step out of time for a moment. Despite all the changes, the incessant new road-building and house-developing, and the appalling impoverishments of climate change, by the coast or on the downs we can still glimpse a view very like the one Valentine and Sylvia saw. May blossom, sun on water, the Pleiades in the night sky or the rain on the leaves – are there in the poems, and still there in the world. When Valentine wrote about them she was claiming a kind of immortality in nature, aside from that in memory and poetry. But as her century recedes further into the past, connections are most often made through her poetry. Now she has become one of ‘the poets’, that great company it was always her ambition to join, we readers of today know her – as she did her ‘friends and protectors’ – through her own words.
28.‘A view very like the one that Valentine and Sylvia saw’ – on the Dorset coast.
To return to Symons, his finale continued: ‘Nothing was left to be discovered: the Quest was ended …’ which no biographer in their senses would claim now. Much is surely left to be discovered, reinterpreted, and re-discovered. But, for me, I hope the quest is ended, if not the connection. He concluded his ‘experiment in biography’ with the words ‘Hail, strange tormented spirit, in whatever hell or heaven has been allotted for your ever-lasting rest!’ 4
Valentine, true to her great obsession with these matters, imagined where her own ghost would walk, and (while resisting any Symons-like temptation to address the biographee directly) in the same realm of fantasy I allow myself to imagine the two lovers, still strolling together in spirit through the landscapes which were most precious to them:
… when I am dead for sure my ghost will haunt there [Frankfort] loving and grieving – there, and along the Drove at Chaldon, where my love stood beside the thorn tree and vowed her troth to me. Because of that vow and because of our life together, I do not think that she will leave me alone, even when I am a ghost; and if she will walk with me, we will be happy – as we always have been, even in despair, together. 5
Acknowledgements
The Society of Authors awarded me an Authors’ Foundation Grant towards the research and writing costs of this biography for which I am most grateful.
I am also very grateful to the current Literary Executor of the Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner Literary Estate, Tanya Stobbs – and her predecessor Susanna Pinney – for their kind permissions to quote from the works, and for their support and encouragement of this book. The Elizabeth Wade White Papers in the New York Public Library are quoted by kind permission of Peter H Judd, who most helpfully sent me scanned copies of the originals during the Covid-19 crisis when it wasn’t possible to travel to see them, thus enabling me to work from the virtual documents themselves; copyright acknowledgement for this is also due to the New York Public Library. MI5 files from the National Archive are quoted with the necessary acknowledgement that this work contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
I’d like to thank everyone who has lent or given me books and other Valentiniana; so many people have contributed in various ways, over a long time.
At the start, Dr Clare Rowntree helped me to understand the (characteristically extensive) VA medical evidence, Ray Russell of Tartarus Press alerted me to a missing provenance, Dr Julianne Lambert at the Bodleian Library excavated hard-to-find documents and Anna Greening, Archivist of Queen’s College, Harley Street, provided Valentine’s school record. Dr Morine Krisdottir was the knowledgeable Curator of the Warner/Ackland Archive when I was working there. Sylv and Tone (then) of Westwood House Hotel in Dorchester were generous with their hospitality, like many others in Dorset. And special thanks to these people who spent substantial time talking to me about Valentine and Sylvia, now sadly all ‘the late’ – Janet Machen Pollock, Jean Larson, Margaret (Peg) Manisty, Roger Peers, Marianna Clark. I owe Claire Harman thanks for her interest in this book and of course for all her pioneering work on STW. I’ve also enjoyed interesting Ackland talks with Ailsa Granne, one of the first generation of scholars to study Ackland and Warner since Journey from Winter was published, who so generously acknowledged it in her PhD thesis, (which I’m delighted is to be published as a scholarly monograph by Routledge).
Special thanks to my wonderful agent, Ann Evans at Jonathan Clowes, and to other generous encouragers of my work: Nikki and Charlotte Diamond; Maureen Duffy; the Davids (Hass and Mitchell); Maggie Ford, Jeremy Hooker; Mimi Khalvati; Julie Lydall and Elin Høyland; Flora MacDonald; Dan Mathews; Joyce Mitchell (O Shenandoah); Jane, Pip and Clare Rowntree; Mary Stewart; Katie Webb; among so many other friends and family, especially my first supporters – my grandmother, Muriel Worsdell, and my mother, Caroline Bingham.
And most of all to Liz Mathews: I’d dedicate the book to her, with love and thanks, but she’s too much a part of it, a contributor and enabler in life and art, without whose strength and enthusiasm this book wouldn’t be here and neither would I.
Picture Credits
Author’s collection: 1, 7, 21
EWW papers: 14, 27
Liz Mathews: 2, 3, 17, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28
STW/VA Archive: 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 20.
Notes
All references to Valentine Ackland (VA) and Sylvia Townsend Warner (STW)’s diaries, papers, memoirs, typescripts, shopping lists and letters to one another are from the original documents in the Warner-Ackland Archive, now in the Dorset History Centre, Dorchester, unless otherwise stated. I’ve used dates to identify them. I’ve included page references for VA’s poems in Journey from Winter, but not for her only published memoir For Sylvia, as I worked from the typescript version in the archive, which has slight variants from the edited printed book. The same applies to STW’s linking Narratives for the letters published in I’ll Stand by You; I have included page numbers for the start of each Narrative in the book for the reader’s convenience, but there will be minor variants from the printed versions (‘mere’ for ‘more’, and so on).
MI5 NA refers to declassified MI5 documents in the National Archives, Catalogue ref: KV/2/2337, 2338.
Bodleian refers to STW and VA’s Spanish Civil War Papers, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford: two box files of loose papers and memorabilia including newspaper cuttings, leaflets, photos and identity cards and passes, which were uncatalogued when I found them.
EWW Papers refers to the Elizabeth Wade White Papers in the New York Public Library. Peter Haring Judd kindly gave me access to electronic versions of the originals when it wasn’t possible to travel to New York in 2020, so in most cases I was able to work from these rather than his transcriptions in The Akeing Heart, where some of them are published with slight variants. I should also explain that some of the most important letters exchanged between Elizabeth (EWW) and VA were copied and kept in VA’s diaries, which enabled me to include excerpts from them in Journey from Winter before the EWW Papers were available; see introduction to News of the North. A box of memorabilia and documents relating to them both, which was given to Janet Machen by EWW, and then to me, also contains copies of some letters.
EoL – Michael Steinman (ed), The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner & William Maxwell (Washington DC: Counterpoint, 2001).
ISBY – Susanna Pinney (ed), I’ll Stand by You: The Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner & Valentine Ackland (London: Pimlico, 1998).
JfW – Frances Bingham (ed), Journey from Winter: Selected Poems of Valentine Ackland (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008).
Letters – William Maxwell (ed), Sylvia Townsend Warner Letters (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982).
NM – Valentine Ackland, The Nature of the Moment (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973).
STW Poems – Claire Harman (ed), Sylvia Townsend Warner: New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008).
TAH – Peter Haring Judd, The Akeing Heart: Letters between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland & Elizabeth Wade White (Reading: Handheld Press, 2018).
TNP – Wendy Mulford, This Narrow Place. Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland: Life, Letters and Politics, 1930–1951 (London: Pandora Press, 1988).
See the Select Bibliography, after the Notes, for details of relevant books.
Introduction: It Is Urgent You Understand
1.‘Of course’ – VA diary, 19 March 1966.
2.‘life …’ – Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London: The Hogarth Press, 1928), p240.
3.‘It is growing dusk’ – VA diary, 29 November 1953.
4.‘written at about’ – VA ms note on typescript of poem, ‘Accept the cold content’, August 1949. The Sea Change was an opera libretto STW wrote for Paul Nordoff, at an unhappy time.
5.‘Reading my own works’ – VA poem, 1941, JfW p132.
Chapter 1: Becoming Valentine
1.‘unheard-of then’ – VA memoir 1924–25.
2.‘It was an extraordinary place’ – VA memoir For Sylvia.
3.‘like a tiger’ – ibid.
4.‘steadfastly’ to ‘that comes’ – ibid.
5.‘nice, normal people’ – ibid.
6.‘Will you please’ – ibid.
7.‘Married Dick’ – VA diary, 9 July 1925.
8.‘It comes off’ – VA memoir 1924–25.
9.‘I suppose I do’ to ‘any other situation’ – VA memoir For Sylvia.
10.‘What is all this’ / rest of dialogue – VA memoir For Sylvia; 1924–25.
11.‘O Shenandoah’ – VA memoir 1924–25 (from the American folksong).
12.‘I haven’t kissed’ – ibid.
13.‘a mixture of cringe’ – STW diary, 14 March 1932.
14.‘She told me’ – VA memoir For Sylvia.
15.‘I will’ – ibid.
16.‘Why CAN’T’ – VA letter to Peg Manisty, nd, c 1967.
17.‘My husband’ – VA memoir For Sylvia.
18.‘There’ – ibid.
19.‘I’m fainting’ – ibid.
20.‘the ordinary’ – ibid.
21.‘possibly’ – ibid.
22.‘a privately-adventurous’ – VA memoir 1940.
23.‘My mind’ – VA memoir For Sylvia.
24.‘We did not’ – ibid.
25.‘I did not understand’ – VA diary, 2 November 1958.
26.‘under a haystack’ – VA memoir For Sylvia.
27.‘commonplace cause’ to ‘beloved’ – VA diary, 2 November 1958.
28.‘nervous injury’ – VA memoir For Sylvia.
29.‘I fought’ – VA memoir 1924–25.
30.‘sickened’ – VA memoir For Sylvia.
31.‘every chance’ – ibid.
32.‘Physically revolted’ – ibid.
33.‘moult away’ – ibid.
34.‘embarked together’ – ibid.
35.‘We made a list’ – ibid.
36.‘Let who will’ – VA rhyme for Valentine’s Day 1935.
37.‘Why don’t more people’ – VA letter to Peg Manisty, nd, c 1966.
38.‘deeply / Bo is a’ – VA diary, 5 January 1925.
39.‘She looks like an angel’ – VA memoir 1924–25.
40.‘slowly and so’ – ibid.
41.‘Well’ – ibid.
42.‘considerate’ – VA memoir For Sylvia.
43.‘Bo made love’ – VA memoir 1924–25.
44.‘dedicated’ – ibid.
45.‘I am/ I WILL’ – ibid.
46.‘My beautiful / Let a gale’ – ibid.
47.‘Spain’ – VA diary, 28 May 1925.
48.‘light love’ – VA diary, 10 December 1946
49.‘I was naturally’ – VA memoir For Sylvia.
50.‘walked’ – from VA poem ‘Who walked around Mecklenburgh Square’, 2 October 1940.
51.‘All right / Never’ – VA memoir For Sylvia.
52.‘told him’ – VA letter to STW, 12 October 1957.
53.‘the strange ambiguity’ – STW diary, 3 January 1931 Although in TAH this miscarriage is referred to as an ‘abortion’ (p30), there is no evidence to suggest it was an intentional termination of pregnancy. Valentine’s diary at the time and later recollections all refer to it as an accident, and it seems unlikely that her searingly honest autobiographical writing would suppress the fact if she’d undergone a then-illegal operation.
