Valentine Ackland, page 7
8.The quintessential image of Valentine enacting her masculinity.
As such identities are only valid if self-chosen, it’s subjective and speculative to imagine which, if any, Valentine might have adopted as well as, or instead of, her contemporary recognition of herself as Lesbian. She might even have felt able to identify as a woman if she could have added ‘butch’ or ‘boyish’ to the title. To me Valentine looks like a butch in her dapper male clothes, with her challenging direct look and swaggering yet ironical performance of masculinity – although my personal view does not, of course, preclude or inhibit other interpretations. (Butch could be defined, among other things, as an exemplar of female masculinity, especially when coupled with the complementary Femme woman, who performs femininity with a similar swagger.)
At the time, lacking labels, Valentine invented her own continuum. Her sense of a complex uniqueness of gender was expressed in her response many years later on hearing that an old acquaintance had described her, to Ruth, as a ‘charming woman’:
This made me feel extraordinarily odd … it is such a strange kind of shock to be reminded … that one is seen and can appear as a “charming (or any other kind of) woman” … Nothing could be more remote from what I feel myself to be. And what do I feel myself to be? Simply myself. 4
That self indulged in many pursuits which, at the period, could be read as masculine signifiers – aside from trouser-wearing. There was her love of cars and driving, which formed an important aspect of her character always; in a still-recognisable trope she liked to drive fast, in a sports car, and was proud of her skill. Later in life, in a larger ‘dear, dear car’, 5 this was transformed into other kinds of power; the driver’s knowledge of the route (such as short-cuts through London) and offers to convey passengers wherever they wanted to go. Other skills – such as repairing gadgets or restoring antiques, filling Sylvia’s lighter and lighting her cigarettes, plying a corkscrew and filling wineglasses, maintaining their bicycles, lighting the fires – would usually have been perceived as within the male domain.
Far more categorically male were Valentine’s country skills of digging and wood-chopping, catching fish, shooting rabbits, skinning and gutting them. Guns, especially rifles, and knives were favourite possessions; apart from their obvious Freudian symbolism (of which Valentine was well aware) weapons, even for field-sports, allowed the demonstration of male prowess. Many other quasi-masculine accoutrements were important to her – sword-stick, compass, field-glasses, telescope, equipment for picnics and camping paraphernalia – and all her possessions, whether town or country, were of the best quality and chosen to complement this ‘gentlemanly’ style.
Researching this book, I spoke to many people who remembered Valentine, and without exception, when I asked what she looked like, they all said a version of ‘She always dressed as a man, you know, all in men’s clothes; she wore trousers always.’ In fact, Valentine occasionally had to wear a skirt on formal occasions, from backless evening gowns in her early life to tailored tweed suits later, and never lost her finishing school ability to walk well in high heels. 6 But this was a ‘disguise’ or ‘imprisonment’; 7 even during the war she managed to wear ‘slacks’ as part of her uniform. Although it is probable that she wore trousers more consistently as she got older – and Sylvia does not mention anything else among the clothes Valentine left at her death – it seems more to the point to say that she is only remembered in trousers.
The archetypal Valentine, summoned up for the person who never met her, appears trousered, not merely trousered but actually cross-dressed, as she perceived herself, and this is how she remains. (Valentine was not, of course, unique in her time as a persistent cross-dresser; contemporaries noted for doing the same include the artists Gluck and Marlow Moss, the writer Bryher, the motorboat racer Joe Carstairs and many others who passed occasionally, most notoriously Vita Sackville-West.)
In Chaldon, and in London, the implications of Valentine’s revelatory trousers were apparently well understood, but this could bring its own problems. Now she sometimes worried that she was invited out merely to be exhibited in the famous trousers, and she objected to being the local ‘eccentric or show-Lesbian’. 8 Bo would certainly have disliked this idea, as she disapproved of Valentine’s sporadic continuing involvement with Dorothy Warren, and was enraged by her casual holiday romances when they went abroad.
9.Valentine explores new freedoms.
Holidays with Bo were opportunities Valentine never resisted. When they went skiing in Andermatt she immediately began a romance with a young German woman called Marianne, with much dancing together and skiing to remote mountain huts to make love. When Valentine found herself locked out of Marianne’s bedroom, she climbed down onto the snowy balcony from above, and appeared through the French windows, with satisfactory results. At Portofino she immediately embarked on another fling, this time with a beautiful Greek woman staying at their hotel. ‘How lovely!’ Valentine exclaimed at the sight of her; Bo, ‘already pensive and bitter’, reluctantly agreed. 9 Aspasia was married, but this did not deter Valentine from her seduction, as usual, whether on Bo’s theory of lesbian sex not constituting adultery, or as part of a post-Lana revenge on husbands in general.
Valentine’s attitude at this time encompassed an upper-class Edwardian acceptance of discreet adultery – the English idea of French morals – and the Bloomsbury-Bohemian ethos of free love, open relationships and sex as a healthy necessity. Ironically, Valentine’s thoroughly modern version of the traditional male prerogative to pursue and seduce made her, during this period, into a fair imitation of the old-fashioned predatory lesbian – usually a mythic figure. If she had been a man, of course, her behaviour wouldn’t have seemed particularly unusual. This raises the interesting possibility that her performance of gender inevitably imitated the most notorious male traits and exaggerated them, enacting a travesty of toxic masculinity?
In the summer of 1928, Valentine had an affair with a ‘strange romantic creature’ 10 who worked a fairground, with whom she later recalled having been much in love. Valentine always had a deeply romantic approach to gypsies and travelling people, although she did not underestimate the hardship of life on the peripheries. Bo was so distressed by this particular liaison that Valentine reluctantly broke it off; it seems likely that the disreputability of the woman was what made it so unacceptable. The only other occasion on which Bo’s annoyance was so great that it made Valentine modify her behaviour was when she was taken to a brothel in Hanover Square (which she found disturbingly like a grand hairdresser’s) by a woman she had ‘picked up (rather stupidly) at Boulestin.’ 11 Bo claimed that she knew about the place because Boyo went there; Valentine was startled to find it so expensive that she went overdrawn at the bank.
Possibly imitating her father’s habits, and with the curiosity of youth, Valentine also visited brothels in Paris during the late 1920s. Initially a male friend persuaded her to try Jeanne, who was best for first-timers. ‘I was wax in her hands, of course,’ Valentine remembered:
She took everything with great speed and encouragement and said ‘Alors’ and shot out of her clothes in a moment … She did instruct me in quite a number of what a London tart I met later called ‘those artificial things foreigners use’ and yet managed to be very flattering so that I felt full of self-confidence when I emerged.
Valentine returned whenever she was in Paris, and also sampled some of Jeanne’s colleagues, including an older woman who was frequently disappointed in her clients’ abilities. She confided to the intrigued Valentine that ‘the best time she’d ever had was from the elderly wife of a shopkeeper.’ 12
Juggling lovers, Valentine was keeping several irons in the fire in Chaldon, too. Katie Powys was still in love with her; once Valentine turned from her typewriter to find Katie at her back brandishing a dagger. Alyse Gregory believed that Valentine’s attempted kindness, after she realised the damage her casual attitude to love had done, was misinterpreted by Katie as encouragement. Llewellyn, characteristically, encouraged Valentine in her exploits, exchanging laddish letters with her about women (and, one can’t help suspecting, getting vicarious thrills in the process). Closely connected with this circle, yet outside Valentine’s romantic entanglements, was Sylvia Townsend Warner, with whom Valentine was now cultivating a friendship.
After their unsuccessful introduction, they had made no effort to meet – quite the reverse – but in the small community of Chaldon some contact was inevitable. First impressions were somewhat revised. Sylvia was one of those unfairly gifted people who can do anything with great success. Aside from her musical, literary and conversational talents, she was a fabled cook (whose recipes are still appreciatively remembered), a remarkable gardener, a skilful and inventive maker, especially with the needle; her idiosyncratic turn of mind made everything she created recognisably hers. (No wonder she unnerved some people.) But although she could be alarming, and did not suffer fools gladly, Sylvia had great sympathy and compassion. One of her best qualities was to recognise talent in others and summon it briskly forth. She now began to realise Valentine’s true value. And Sylvia liked Valentine more the more she became Valentine.
A shared experience, which perhaps made a bond, was the death of fathers. George Townsend Warner had been a profound influence on Sylvia, and she was ‘mutilated’ by his early death when she was twenty-two. 13 ‘My handsome father, who died young’ 14 was a huge figure in Sylvia’s personal mythology; he had been a charismatic, inspirational teacher whose death was hastened by the shocking loss of many pupils in the First World War. But her close relationship with him was not without its difficulties. George gave formal teaching only to boys; like Valentine, Sylvia was almost entirely self-taught. Her formidable breadth of knowledge, fluent French and cultured mind were either acquired piecemeal from him when off-duty, or gleaned from her unfettered reading. Languages were instilled by her equally brilliant mother, Nora, or by her grandmother. Sylvia was always anguished by her exclusion from George’s intellectual working world, and her love for him contained this element of pain.
There was also a problem with her mother, who was difficult, charming, and a natural story-teller, too like her strong-willed daughter for an easy relationship, perhaps, but also deeply competitive for George’s attention. The two never forgave each other for his death, or his love, although Nora exacted duty from her daughter. Only when Nora re-married (to Ronald Eiloart, one of her husband’s ex-pupils, an architect who had built their house, Little Zeal) was Sylvia able to escape to an independent life in London. As they got to know one another better, Valentine found out more about Sylvia’s past, and offered her own history in exchange. She did not yet know the other curious fact about Sylvia’s relationship with her father, which was that Sylvia’s long affair with a married man, twenty-two years older, had begun when she was nineteen and he was in his forties – and her father’s friend and colleague.
Percy Buck had taught Sylvia music since she was sixteen; she called him Teague. (Valentine later admitted that she always winced slightly at the mention of him, ‘deplored’ his age and ‘resented’ his grown-up daughters. 15 She ascribed this to retrospective jealousy, being far too careful of her reputation for broad-mindedness to voice the unavoidable truth that Teague had abused his position; however precocious and brilliant Sylvia was at nineteen, however forceful a personality, she was still his pupil, and the daughter of his friend. Their relative situations would normally have put her out of bounds to him; failure to accept this would later lead both Sylvia and Valentine into some questionable decisions themselves.) Aside from Teague’s position of power, and her youth, by the standards of the Edwardian era he had ruined her reputation – without any prospect of making reparation, as he was already married – thus destroying any hope that she could now make a ‘good’ match, if any. In contemporary terms this was a shocking betrayal of her father’s trust in him, ungentlemanly, grossly improper – but not illegal.
Sylvia remained fond of Teague, and was always impatient with societal norms of this kind. It’s possible that her father was aware of the situation, at some level, or even gave it his approval. Or was this a complicated revenge on the father who adhered to public school traditions even when they excluded his beloved daughter? Or did Sylvia fall in love with a figure who was the closest she could come to possessing her father herself? Whatever the complexities of the situation, Teague remained a link with Harrow, Sylvia’s past, and her lost father.
As solitary girl-children, more used to the company of adults than their contemporaries, sketchily educated yet voracious readers, Valentine and Sylvia had certain parallel experiences during their childhoods. But Sylvia was treasured and encouraged, however unconventionally, and her exceptional gifts recognised, while Valentine was at best ignored, and often tormented. Her knowledge was harder-won, her isolation far more complete. If Sylvia had felt excluded and alien at Harrow School, how much more alone had the child Molly been, hiding in the attic from her sister’s persecution, or sitting on the dark stairs outside the lighted kitchen to escape the cold of the night nursery. Nora had not loved Sylvia as she felt she should be loved, had competed with her for George’s attention, but was an intelligent and principled woman. Ruth had smothered her daughter but neglected her real needs, and manipulated her with tears, threats of illness, moral blackmail and pious silliness.
Both Valentine and Sylvia had developed independence, self-reliance and an individual viewpoint from reading; literature had influenced their development far more than anything else, and remained paramount. Sylvia was interested in Valentine’s commitment to writing; she admired hard work and determination, and saw that Valentine was serious. Valentine, in her turn, began to think of Sylvia as, potentially, something more than the ideal reader of her poetry.
In 1929 Valentine moved her London rooms from Bloomsbury to 2 Queensborough Studios which was – surely not by coincidence – within sight of Sylvia’s house in the parallel road, Inverness Terrace, opposite Kensington Gardens. Once, driving by, she saw Sylvia in the street ‘haunted and despairing’, 16 the private, unhappy woman rather than the busy, successful writer. Valentine wrote to her, offering the use of her Chaldon cottage; Sylvia declined gracefully. Then Valentine read one of Sylvia’s poems in a magazine, which told Valentine what she needed to know about this sorrow; the poem comments on the writer’s oddly contented behaviour when her lover is absent. Valentine was intrigued; from her writing, let alone her social personality, Sylvia seemed too passionate a person for such a lukewarm love-affair. (If Valentine had heard gossip about Percy Buck, she’d have guessed that the sixteen-year-old relationship was stagnating; Sylvia might be independent and confident, but something that mattered profoundly was missing from her life.) Valentine noted Sylvia’s emotional famine, and added her to a mental list of possibilities.
Currently, Valentine herself was enjoying an uncomplicated affair with the American-Chinese film star Anna May Wong, who delighted Valentine by telling her ‘If I could make love like you, I guess I’d father half the world!’ 17 (Valentine was certainly doing her best; Sylvia’s cousin told me that Valentine’s affairs numbered ‘dozens and dozens and dozens!’) 18 These early experiences, though apparently trivial encounters, formed the basis of the scandalous rumours about her past, the dangerous reputation which she did nothing to discourage.
Even so, Valentine found time to write poems. In July she inscribed ‘Ah, did you once see Shelley plain …’ (the title is from Browning) ‘To S T W’, and the poem acknowledges Sylvia’s powers as a poet, marvelling that she’d ever seemed just one ‘among the rest’. ‘No sound / Came to me there / From this deep distant music that you tell …’ 19 Used as she was to critical praise, Sylvia must have felt complimented at the implied comparison with Shelley’s genius. Her friendship with Valentine deepened.
Early in 1930 Valentine’s involvement with Dorothy Warren intensified again, perhaps because her marriage – which she had described to Valentine as a union of people with similar tastes – had turned out to be ‘soft, too-gentle … unhappy.’ 20 They were mixing business with pleasure; Dorothy planned to have an exhibition of paintings by John Craske, an artist Valentine had recommended to her. Craske was an untrained ex-fisherman invalided out of the war who painted naive seascapes and harbour scenes, and also worked carefully-observed maritime subjects in wool, all with extraordinary vigour and originality. Valentine had seen his work by chance when she was at Winterton, and instantly recognised his natural talent. For Valentine, Craske was representative of all that she loved most about Norfolk; the independence of its people, the sea’s perpetual presence. Although comparisons with Alfred Wallis of St Ives annoyed her, Craske is inevitably considered a Norfolk Wallis; stylistically similar and equally an outsider artist.
Valentine wanted to help Craske financially, and had the connections to be able to promote his work; she decided pragmatically that he should benefit from the current interest in Primitive or Folk Art. Sure enough, Dorothy, having seen one picture in Valentine’s flat, handed over her cheque-book with instructions to buy enough of his work for an exhibition. Although it was difficult to put a monetary value on his work, which at first he could hardly believe anybody would actually pay for, Valentine reached a compromise whereby Craske felt well-paid and Dorothy pleasantly surprised. The show was critically well-received, and the danger that Craske might be briefly fashionable and then ignored was averted. Valentine did not forget him; her recommendations brought him new collectors and patrons for the rest of his life, creating a large body of work, much now in public collections.
