Valentine Ackland, page 37
27.‘stony / it is’ – VA letter to STW, 4 June 1962.
28.‘I lay beside you’ – VA poem, 30 November 1963, JfW p192.
29.‘Epithalamium’ – VA poem, ‘Epithalamium for Death’, 30 November 1963, JfW p193.
30.‘love grown old’ – VA diary, July 1963.
31.‘Shut your eyes’ – STW diary, 4 March 1963.
32.‘I see’ – STW diary, 13 March 1963.
33.‘It is what’ – STW diary, 12 April 1963.
34.‘because / Valentine’ – STW diary, 16 April 1963.
35.‘like a wild’ – STW diary, 29 April 1963.
36.‘All perfectly’ – STW diary, 22 July 1963.
37.‘never, now’ – VA diary, 19 July 1963.
38.‘perfectly’ – VA diary, 14 November 1963.
39.‘Severe’ – VA diary, 22 November 1963.
40.‘the first one’ – STW diary, 25 December 1963.
41.‘It is lovely / So far’ – VA diary, 12 October 1964.
42.‘Pericles’ – VA letter to Peg Manisty, nd [1965].
43.‘Skilled / He turned’ – STW, T H White (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), pp70, 139.
44.‘unspeakably / When I feel’ – VA diary, 19 May 1965.
45.‘I remember the story’ – VA poem, 6 June 1965, JfW p194.
46.‘I will not / very complete’ – VA diary, 19 May 1965.
47.‘You could / Do you’ – VA diary, 22 January 1964.
48.‘I loved’ – VA diary, 18 March 1966.
49.‘the Opus / very thin / sparingly’ – VA diary, 21 March 1965.
50.‘Out of the cold’ – VA poem, 12 December 1954.
51.‘the thing’ – VA diary, 8 September 1952.
52.‘coffee’ – STW diary, 14 January 1966.
53.‘romantic’ – VA diary, 12 January 1966.
54.‘dreadfully’ – ibid.
55.‘the promised / An omen’ – STW diary, 17 January 1966; 1 February 1970.
56.‘Middle Age’ – VA diary, 19 May 1966.
57.‘holding her off’ – VA diary, 27 January 1966.
58.‘frozen out’ – VA diary, 9 February 1966.
59.‘Night Poem II’ – VA poem, 13 December 1966, JfW p196.
60.‘A not-poem about love’ – VA poem, JfW p195.
61.‘Hold on’ to ‘twice in one day’ – STW letter to Janet Machen, 25 June 1966, Letters p220.
62.‘It was all’ – STW diary, 20 September 1955.
63.‘total inattention’ – STW diary, 5 September 1965.
64.‘erect’ – VA letter to Peg Manisty, nd [1965].
65.‘You can’t win’ – ibid.
66.‘No one / the long’ – STW diary, 19 October 1965.
67.‘unspeakably’ – VA diary, 16 April 1965.
68.‘The smell’ – STW diary, 12 August 1967, (slightly mis-) quoting A E Housman’s poem from A Shropshire Lad XL, with its sad reference to ‘the land of lost content’.
69.‘one cannot’ – STW diary, 10 August 1967.
70.‘shining / My heart’ – VA diary, 29 January; 30 December 1967.
71.‘Vietnam (or any of the other wars)’ – VA poem, 27 July 1965, JfW p194.
72.‘On a Calendar of Anti-War Poems’ – VA poem, 5 June 1968.
73.‘June 17th 1967 China explodes the H-bomb’ – VA poem, 17 June 1967.
74.‘Of course’ – STW diary, 7 March 1968.
75.‘Don’t grieve’ – STW diary, 6 March 1968.
76.‘I totally’ – STW diary, 19 March 1968.
77.‘She looked / strange’ – STW diary 27; 30 March 1968.
78.‘it seems’ – VA letter to Peg Manisty, March 1968.
79.‘that trousered / I’m’ – VA diary, 27 May 1968.
80.‘I have written’ – VA letter to Peg Manisty, 30 November 1968.
81.‘Poem in the Chinese Manner’ – VA poem, 4 August 1968, JfW p198.
Chapter 12: How Wild and Strange A Live Man Is
1.‘We are bound / any excursions’ – VA letter to STW, 10 December 1968.
2.‘I have never’ – STW letter to VA, nd [18 December 1968].
3.‘greatest treasure’ – VA written on STW’s letter, 18 December 1968 6.45pm.
4.‘nothing amiss’ – STW diary, 11 March 1969.
5.‘Reflections as I pack to go to London’ – VA poem, 18 May 1969.
6.‘For an hour / we really were’ – STW diary, 19 May 1969; VA diary 15 September 1969.
7.‘unchangeably’ – VA letter to Peg Manisty, 17 June 1969.
8.‘Valentine’ – Jean Larson conversation with the author, 2002.
9.‘I’m perhaps’
– VA letter to EWW, 14 July 1969, EWW Papers.
10.‘June 1969’ – VA poem, June 1969.
11.‘how lost’ – STW diary, 1 September 1969.
12.Poems in Pain / ‘The Crow’ – VA poems, 27 November 1968, JfW p197; 2 June 1969, JfW p198.
13.‘very bad’ – VA diary, 16 September 1969.
14.‘she looked so’ – STW diary, 15 September 1969.
15.‘Suddenly’ – VA letter to Peg Manisty, 20 September [1969].
16.‘so that / immeasurably’ – VA diary, 1 April 1966.
17.‘Such a situation’ – VA letter to EWW, 17 September 1969, EWW Papers.
18.‘Like the beautiful’ – VA poem, 3 March 1969.
19.‘Sunt Lumina’ – VA draft poem, 25 September 1969.
20.‘Absorbed’ – VA draft poem, 2 October 1969.
21.‘The whole’ – David Constantine, Strong Words (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2000), p228.
22.‘an exemplary’ – STW diary, 28 October 1969.
23.‘in the high Roman’ – STW letter to Janet Machen, 2 November 1969, Letters p242.
24.‘its windows’ – STW diary, 1 November 1969.
25.‘DON’T’ – VA letter to Peg Manisty, 2 October 1969.
26.‘it is so very’ – STW letter to Janet Machen, 2 November 1969, Letters p242.
27.‘An old marchioness’ – VA diary, 24 September 1969.
28.‘please do not worry’ – VA letter to EWW, 2 November 1969, EWW Papers.
29.‘revived her’– STW letter to William Maxwell, 4 November 1969, EoL p205.
30.‘The stormy’ – STW diary, 9 November 1969.
31.‘tragic’ – ibid.
32.‘strong brown’ – STW diary, 10 November 1969.
33.‘in the cellular’ – STW diary, 29 April 1972.
34.‘none / in our own / that happy / I do not’ – VA Will, 20 June 1969.
35.‘such good / beech boughs’ – STW diary, 22 November; 17 November 1969.
36.‘She can / Maureen’ – VA Will, 20 June 1969.
37.‘I am a part’ – STW diary, 7 August 1970.
38.‘when Valentine’ – STW letter to William Maxwell, 3 October 1973, EoL p260.
39.‘The bell / The Practice’ – STW diary, 22 May 1970.
40.‘I woke’ – STW diary, 23, 24, 25 September 1972.
41.‘the long room’ – STW diary, 4 September 1971.
42.‘her corduroy’ – STW diary, 17 March 1970.
43.‘her shirts’ – STW diary, 30 September 1970.
44.‘We remember’ – STW diary, 27 June 1970.
45.‘agonies’ – ibid.
46.‘she was so brave’ – STW diary, 24 June 1970.
47.‘O WHY’ – STW diary, 6 May 1970.
48.‘the misery / the agony’ – STW diary, 21 September 1970.
49.‘She couldn’t have’ – STW diary, 6 January 1970. The friend was Angela Debenham, widow of Piers.
50.‘How can I’ – STW diary, 27 April 1975.
51.‘I am / A false’ – STW diary, 14 February 1976.
52.‘All her trees / A day’ – STW diary 7 September 1971; 19 May 1973.
53.‘remembered’ – STW diary, 25 February 1970.
54.‘was an admirer’ – STW letter to Mr Ferguson, 10 April 1975, Collection Ray Russell.
55.‘lyrical / Extremely observant’ – STW draft VA biography for NM.
56.‘sardonic’ – ibid.
57.‘I think’ – VA diary, Easter Sunday 1956.
58.‘Began’ – STW diary, 17 June 1942.
59.‘So much / Every line’ – STW letter to William Maxwell, 18 January 1971, EoL p217; STW diary, 12 January 1971.
60.‘My love’ – STW diary, 1 October 1970.
61.‘I had never seen’ – STW Introduction, The Cat’s Cradle Book (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960), p12.
62.‘incantation / love-poem’ – STW diary, 31 July 1972.
63.‘My mind’ – STW diary, 20 January 1971.
64.‘more rational’ – STW Introduction, The Cat’s Cradle Book, ibid p36.
65.‘And by her death’ – VA poem ‘Sleep’. STW wondered whether ‘In a dream-sense this could mean that by my death she recaptured the wild black-haired Sylvia of when she first loved me’, or was the swan ‘her poetry – which tending me had impeded’? STW diary, 24 May; August 1971.
66.‘there, lolling / Thomas’ – STW story, ‘The Five Black Swans’, Kingdoms of Elfin (London: Chatto & Windus, 1977), pp19, 22.
67.This is discussed in more detail in ‘The Practice of the Presence of Valentine’, my contribution to Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner, ed. Gill Davies, David Malcolm and John Simons (Lampeter & New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), pp29–43.
68.‘as the great English’ – Julius Lipton letter to unnamed recipient, 3 February 1981, Warner-Ackland Archive.
69.‘You know’ – William Maxwell letter to STW, April 1978, EoL p339.
70.‘I do not / Poems’ – VA Will, 20 June 1969.
71.‘I can imagine’ – VA letter to STW, 12 April 1934.
72.‘a bloody’ – VA diary, 16 October 1932.
73.‘clearly identifiable’ – Emily Hamer, Britannia’s Glory: A History of Twentieth-Century Lesbians (London: Cassell, 1996), p129.
74.‘a thousand’ – VA letter to Julius Lipton, 13 May 1935, quoted in TNP p245.
75.‘prejudice’ – Sarah Shulman, Hooters, documentary film dir. Anna Margarita Albelo, 2010.
76.‘first public’ – STW letter to William Maxwell 2 May 1967, Letters p225.
77.‘lesbian companion’ – Frances Partridge, 27 December 1965, Other People: Diaries 1963–1966 (London: HarperCollins, 1993), p189. This namelessness or invisibility continues, for instance in Virginia Nicholson’s delightful Among the Bohemians (London: Penguin, 2003), in an entirely sympathetic portrait of STW’s ‘fulfilment beyond her wildest dreams’ with ‘her lover Valentine’ – no surname, p48.
78.‘Bill Empson’ – VA diary, 6 June 1952.
79.For instance, in Julia Blackburn’s Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015) the author describes VA as the ‘woman who looks like a man’ (p207), and ‘a bit like [ex-prime minister] David Cameron’ (p6). In a Guardian article about Craske, ‘Life on the Ocean Wave’ (13 March 2015), she again comments on being struck by VA’s ‘resemblance to David Cameron’. This may seem superficially amusing, but is analogous to saying that ‘all tall, dark-haired, white Englishmen (or other racial stereotype) look the same’; the observation actually being made is that VA comically resembles a man. (Gender diverse people may well find this offensive.) The point being missed is that twenty-first century Old Etonian Tories also represent an archetype, perpetuating the style, suits and haircuts of the 1930s to indicate their allegiance to an outmoded patriarchal caste system which VA was committed to undermining when she wore contemporary male attire.
80.‘I have served’ – VA diary, 24 March 1957.
81.The poem Sylvia misattributed to VA was ‘where the hills make a home hollow’ by Mary Casey (see note 54); VA’s poems ‘Never love unless you can’ (first line ‘Lesbian love is equally’), and ‘Towards the place to which we would or would not come’ have in the past been mistakenly attributed to STW, and ‘A Hard Winter’ to Katie Powys.
82.‘read on’ – VA diary, 8 February 1933.
83.‘Darling London’ – STW diary, 7 December 1952.
84.‘thinking’ – Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London: The Hogarth Press, 1928), p240.
85.‘because I had a habit’ – VA Will, 20 June 1969.
86.‘Strange to think’ – STW diary, 12 July 1970. Susanna Pinney was the typist-reader.
87.‘When you’ – VA poem, 5 September 1954, JfW p175.
A Personal Note: The Quest for Valentine
1.‘every one’ – A J A Symons, The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography, Cassell, 1934 (London: Penguin, 2018), p251.
2.‘there is a great deal’ – Janet Machen letter to the author, 17 September 2001.
3.‘a biographer’ – Sybille Bedford (quoting a saying of Desmond MacCarthy), ‘Afterword’, in Jigsaw (London: Eland Publishing, 2005), p353.
4.‘Nothing’ – Symons, ibid, p251.
5.‘when I am’ – VA memoir For Sylvia.
Select Bibliography
Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner, Whether a Dove or Seagull (New York: Viking Press, 1933; London: Chatto & Windus, 1934).
Valentine Ackland, Country Conditions (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1936).
Valentine Ackland, Twenty-Eight Poems (Wells: Clare, Son & Co, 1957).
Valentine Ackland, Later Poems (Wells: Clare, Son & Co, nd [1970]).
Valentine Ackland, The Nature of the Moment (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973).
Valentine Ackland, Further Poems (Beckenham: Welmont Publishing, 1978).
Valentine Ackland, For Sylvia: An Honest Account (London: Chatto & Windus, 1985).
Frances Bingham (ed.), Journey from Winter: Selected Poems of Valentine Ackland (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008).
Gill Davies et al (eds.), Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner, English Novelist 1893–1978 (Lampeter & New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006).
Claire Harman, Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1989).
Claire Harman (ed.), Sylvia Townsend Warner: New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008).
Claire Harman (ed.), The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner (London: Chatto & Windus, 1994).
Peter Haring Judd, The Akeing Heart: Letters between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland & Elizabeth Wade White (Reading: Handheld Press, 2018).
William Maxwell (ed.), Sylvia Townsend Warner Letters (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982).
Wendy Mulford, This Narrow Place. Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland: Life, Letters and Politics, 1930–1951 (London: Pandora Press, 1988).
Susanna Pinney (ed.), I’ll Stand by You: The Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner & Valentine Ackland (London: Pimlico, 1998).
Michael Steinman (ed.), The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner & William Maxwell (Washington DC: Counterpoint, 2001).
Judith Stinton, Chaldon Herring: The Powys Circle in a Dorset Village (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1988).
Index
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
A
Ackland, Joan, see Woollcombe, Joan
Ackland, Mary Kathleen Macrory, see Ackland, Valentine
Ackland, Molly, see Ackland, Valentine
Ackland, Robert 17, 39, 50–53, 71–72, 74, 76, 84, 117, 229, 234, 254, 280
– character 46–47, 72
– disowns VA 47–49
– death 52
Ackland, Ruth 19–21, 24–25, 27, 29, 40, 42, 48–52, 56, 63, 71, 74, 75, 84, 86, 88–92, 103, 106, 117, 135, 164, 170, 184, 192, 195, 225–226, 229, 251, 280
– character 13–15, 48–52, 72–73
– VA’s birth 71
– early influence 72–73
– questions VA about Lana 45
– during WWII at Winterton 148–151
– annoys VA 165–166, 192, 210
– annoys STW 149–150, 165–166, 225–226, 238
– religion 72–73, 170, 219
– declining health 226, 235–236, 238
– death 238–239, 245
Ackland, Valentine (VA)
(also Ackland, Mary Kathleen Macrory; Ackland, Molly; Turpin, Molly)
– alcoholism 103, 111, 121, 136, 150, 159, 161, 168–169, 184–185, 247–248
– boxing 76, 84
– cars and driving 56, 74, 76, 92, 97, 105, 110, 115, 192, 206, 220, 252–254, 290
– cross-dressing 1, 6, 22, 55, 57, 110, 278, 290
– dogs 211, 241, 253–254
– gender identity 26–27, 29, 47, 48–49, 53–57, 82, 86, 152, 211, 220, 236, 245, 278–280
– guns and shooting 110, 126, 159, 245
– in STW’s imagination 81, 84, 180, 235
– lesbianism 26–27, 29, 37, 47–49, 53, 59, 82, 101, 280
– sexual persona 26–27, 36, 42, 59, 67, 171, 202
– smoking 228, 228–229
– sources of poetry / creativity 191, 201, 203–204, 213, 214–216, 248, 259, 264, 281–282
– trousers 7, 27, 32, 53–57, 156, 228, 269
Chronology:
– ancestry 71–72, 247
– birth 71
– unhappy childhood 72–76
– influenced by mother’s piety 72–73, 184, 219
– Nanny 71, 73–75, 74
– visits brothel with father 48
– visits plastic surgery ward with father 72
– abused by sister Joan 42–45
– continuing abusive relationship 92–93, 185, 195, 226
– schooling 74–75
– holidays at Winterton 17, 76
– infatuation with Myra 43–44
– finishing school in Paris 38–42
– affair with Lana 39–42, 45–48, 51
– father disowns her 47–49
– Eastbourne domestic training college 47, 49–51
– presented at Court 51
– father’s death 52
– affair with Bo Foster 12, 13, 19, 20, 21, 24–25, 26–27, 42, 57–59, 82–83
– becomes Catholic 12
– engaged to Rodric Heming 12
– engaged to Richard Turpin 12
– marries Richard Turpin 12, 15–16
– haircut (Eton crop) 16
– honeymoon 16–19
– operation to remove hymen 7, 11, 19, 20–21
– first visits Chaldon 7–12
– leaves marriage 11–12, 26
