Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Flint Anchor and Modernism

The old centre of modernism has long since given way, with its view that the high modernism associated with Joyce, Eliot or Pound is at the core of the modern movement and somehow qualitatively superior to other art. That being the case, Sylvia Townsend Warner can no longer be regarded as a ‘peripheral modernist’. However, discussion of how to think about her practice as a modernist lags, specifically in terms of form and style, perhaps because these are usually seen as the focus of high modernists. I will here discuss her use of the novel form in The Flint Anchor (1954), but also take my cue from the spatial imagery in older descriptions of modernism to discuss space and place in Warner.

Warner’s response to the modern can be approached through the story ‘Visitors to a Castle’ in Kingdoms of Elfin (1977). ¹ The main events occur in Wales in 1893 – the year, of course, of Warner’s birth – and ‘we are within sight of the twentieth century’. ² ‘Visitors to a Castle’ sees a new district nurse encountering the Elfin kingdom of Castle Ash Grove on her way to a confinement. New life is thus deftly linked with a new world of work and independent travel for women. The nurse is disorientated because the mountain that was there the week before is not there today. Coming off her bicycle and cutting her knee, she falls out of her changing society and into the Elfin world. However, the fairies are themselves not immune from changes in the human sphere. For example, in ‘Winged Creatures’, another story in Kingdoms of Elfin, the court of a French kingdom has to decamp after plague among the humans, which results in hunger for all. ³ The nurse in ‘Visitors to a Castle’ treats herself with a ‘well-known disinfectant’. This leads one of the fairies, Dame Bronwen, to faint because of the fumes. ⁴ Even modern medicines, with their ability to prevent infection and to aid recovery, are, it seems, bound up with other, darker forces. (The connectedness of apparently diverse elements of the modern – that they cannot simply be seen as some good, some bad – is often present in Warner’s writing.) The nurse initially appears confident and professional. However, the problems she encounters remind her of how far she is from her home in Nottingham and she breaks down in tears. Without focalising the narrative through her, Warner exposes a sense of psychological depth and the difficulties and fragilities behind the adoption of new modern roles for women.

Though the nurse eventually goes on her way, after getting blind drunk on the medicinal spirit, Bronwen is not the same fairy afterwards. Her friend, Morgan Spider, resolves to get to the source of the problem:

‘Bronwen, what ails you?’

Bronwen said, ‘A bad smell.’ She pressed a branch of the sloe to her bosom as though its thorns would help her to speak. ‘Do you remember the smell that came out of the bottle?’

‘And was so appalling that it made you faint? Of course I remember it. But by the time we go back, Castle Ash Grove will have been cleaned and aired. […]’

‘It will never be gone.’

Dame Bronwen pressed the branch so hard to her bosom that a sloe burst and its juice spurted out.

‘When I fainted it was because of what was shown to me. I saw trees blighted and grass burned brown and birds falling out of the sky. I saw the end of our world, Morgan – the end of Elfin. I saw the last fairy dying like a scorched insect.’

She was mad. But she spoke with such intensity it was impossible not to believe her. ⁵

Though the final sentences here are highly ambivalent, the future of the modern world may be fixed and bleak. There is an opposition between the long-established cultural associations around sloes (blackthorns) – infection, bad luck and struggle – on the one hand, and the modern world with its scientific knowledge on the other. ⁶ The many ways in which the fruit can be fermented or used in making other alcoholic drinks – the best known of which in Britain is infusing it with gin and sugar to make sloe gin – suggests a comparison with the nurse’s surgical spirit. Environmental degradation and war, aerial bombing (perhaps the nuclear bomb) and the ‘end of Elfin’ are all powerfully evoked. The interconnectedness of varied and overlapping tonal registers prevents full exegesis; the comic tone is still present in the depiction of fairy eccentricity.

Warner’s own consideration of place and space is complex, and critical discussion has to go further than reading her texts as spatial allegories. ‘Visitors to a Castle’, for example, could be interpreted as showing the modern – in the form of new roles for women, medical care and the impact of English city life – extending its reach into the Welsh rural margins. That the story evokes the Elfin margins as well suggests an excess, a further otherness and difference that is not readily comprehensible in such terms. For Fredric Jameson, in his pamphlet Modernism and Imperialism, modernist form and style respond to a world system that people know they are part of, and that they are aware has been mapped, but which they are unable to grasp cognitively due to its sheer size and complexity. For Jameson, the writers of the period responded to their condition at the level of form and style, while not consciously aware that they were doing so. ⁷ Spatial disjunctions are so integral to Warner’s writing from the start at a formal and stylistic level, however, that it is hard to claim that she was unaware of such issues, which is not to assert that she would have used Jameson’s terms. Spatial disjunction is one of a number of ways of thinking about the mountain that is there some days and not others. (Humour is another.)

In Warner’s last novel, The Flint Anchor, the spaces of the book can be read as having particular meanings. The wall erected around Anchor House in the period of social unrest that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars also stands in for the patriarchal constraint imposed by John Barnard on his family. Julia, his wife, sees the damage the ‘domination of the wall’ does to their children, but John regards it as inevitable:

He, too, once out of babyhood had begun to stammer, to scream at night, to be dainty, and peevish, and sullen. It was not the wall, but the children’s common inheritance from Adam, and a particular inheritance from him, that brought these changes in their children. ⁸

Reference to the inheritance of Adam is only part of what is in play here. That John Barnard is aware that not all fathers are the same, that his children have a ‘particular inheritance from him’, suggests his own, always incomplete, awareness of his own failings and self-doubts. The nocturnal screams here may evoke for readers the famous lines ‘An infant crying in the night: / An infant crying for the light’ from Section 54 of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. The section imagines a time that has lost religious faith in a benign God, facing a future where there is no certainty that all will turn out well, and where indeed ‘we know not anything’. ⁹ Barnard remains the ‘patriarch’ (15) until he is displaced at the end of the novel by his beloved daughter Mary and her second husband, Peter, the rector. Retreating first to the garret – where, poignantly, Julia’s furniture is stored after her death – Barnard loses his moorings, as it were, and leaves Anchor House to live with Mary and Peter at the Rectory. We also get a keen sense of how changing economic conditions are transforming Loseby, in ways that might be read alongside Marxist theories of space. ¹⁰ Examples include the building of Prospect Terrace, with its attraction for older middle-class people seeking cheap seaside living and, more importantly still, for the fishing community, with mores and values that are very different from those of Barnard-style respectability. That the family firm trades with the Baltic suggests further geographical relationships, not fully known to the reader nor to many of those who live off its profits. The other major structural relationship is with the Caribbean, and thus with British colonialism. Barnard’s son Joseph settles on a plantation; Jennifer P. Nesbitt has explored both the source of the ingredients of Julia Barnard’s rum and The Flint Anchor’s relationship with Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Warner had written her ‘Writers and their Work’ essay on Austen in the years before the novel. ¹¹

The spatial displacements and disjunctions are even more arresting. An example is the difference between the tablet in the church and the Barnard burial plot outside. When family members die, beginning with the infant children, they are recorded on a gravestone in the form of a white obelisk in the churchyard. Characters are often seen relating to the monument: for example, Euphemia leaves letters there for Marmaduke Debenham (41), and the elderly John Barnard spends much of his time sitting and looking at the obelisk. Thomas is not mentioned on the obelisk; Mary only tells their son Johnnie negative things about him and we realise that hers will be the story that gets passed on. John Barnard’s efforts to talk to Johnnie about his father while walking back from the graveyard – initially he has taken Johnnie’s footsteps to be those of his father, Thomas – only leads Johnnie to start to walk more quickly. On reaching the house John Barnard, unable to regain his breath, becomes ill and dies that night. ¹² However, the novel’s structuring conceit is not these graves but the memorial tablet inside the church that is reproduced on the first page of the novel – we are told ‘it is a brass one, large and showy’ (1) – which lauds Barnard’s worthiness. What follows calls what is said on the tablet into question in a number of ways and also questions the very form of the eulogising memorial. During a trip to the Moravian settlement in Herrnhut in Germany – his daughter Euphemia is to return and join the community – Barnard visits the graveyard. The ‘stones, which among the uniformity of the dead, were distinguished only by bearing neither name nor date, only a number – the number of a death as it was registered in the book of burials’. This is what Barnard ‘would choose’; however, ‘in England such a gravestone would be declamatory by its mere oddity’ (137). At the novel’s end, after he has considered going to Herrnhut to die, Barnard’s final words address how he is to be remembered:

‘Listen, all of you,’ he said, wrenching his faculties back into life. ‘Attend! Only my name, and after that, Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner. Do you hear? Nothing else. It is my dying wish.’

They promised him it should be so. He shut his eyes and tried to compose himself, but after a few minutes he began to hiccough. He covered his face with his hands to veil his agony. At a nod from Peter, Johnnie went out to order the passing bell to be rung. (281–2)

We know from the novel’s opening that this instruction – delivered with his old, lost authority – has been ignored, even if the memorial tablet may be an addition to what is recorded on the obelisk. The Flint Anchor ends both with Barnard’s death and with his grandson’s actions stretching beyond the timescale of the novel: the future is Johnnie’s.

In The Flint Anchor the character that most challenges respectability is also the one who moves most often; indeed Thomas eventually moves beyond the novel’s purview. Barnard’s lack of self-knowledge regarding his attraction to Thomas is present from when he first notices ‘that handsome, that remarkably handsome young man’ (66). His feelings for his daughter Mary, which from early in her life take the form of ‘love, passionate, romantic love’ (17), are to ebb and flow, though he never fully confronts their incestuous element. John Barnard gains limited retrospective self-knowledge about his actions, which he had often justified to himself by the evangelical Anglicanism of the early nineteenth century. Putting Thomas in charge of the new London office takes no account of his lack of interest and competence. Thomas drifts through life, taking the novel away from the Loseby setting as he does so: he goes from teaching to working in the London office of Barnard’s company, to nearly dying in London, before marrying Mary Barnard. Leaving Loseby with her to live inland in a cottage on the estate of the elderly and eccentric Miss Basham, his job is to catalogue her collection of conches. Thomas is happy in part because he is away from John Barnard’s plans and interventions, and from the pressures of nineteenth-century propriety and masculinity. However, his attempt at freedom from Barnard is only a matter of appearance, just as one only imagines that one hears the sea when holding a conch to the ear.

Two of the novel’s most remarkable set-piece scenes evoke freedom from what holds and constrains the self. John Barnard regains youthful vitality skating; ¹³ he becomes ‘inoffensive’ (72) as a result, imagining that only in heaven would he be so ‘detached’ (72) from familial obligation. The other scene is Thomas’s first overnight trip on the fishing boat with ‘the cool air blowing between himself and his thoughts’ (58). There is a sense of movement suspended between sleeping and waking: ‘Of all the things that held in that globe of night sky only the stars traversing the gaps between the clouds seemed to move and have purpose’ (59). That the boat is named the Mary Lucinda after his future wife suggests a parallel between his relationship with her and the freer world of the sea; it is also an example of the novel’s interest in names and naming.

Thomas’s time with the fishing community is associated with sexual transgression from the start, when his father takes his absence for the night as evidence that he has visited a prostitute. (The message explaining his absence, sent via the boy Crusoe, misfires.) Warner had lived in Norfolk, and knew it well, but given the date of the novel the sea-going material suggests that the novel can be read alongside Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes (1945) and Billy Budd (1951). By basing himself in Aldeburgh in Suffolk, Philip Brett has seen Britten’s music as ‘an attempt to disrupt the center that it occupied with the marginality it expressed’. ¹⁴ The sea, social mores and male–male sexuality were in the cultural air, post-war.

One possible way of thinking about The Flint Anchor is as a demonstration that the novel form can present what the tablet in the church radically falsifies, namely what is at stake in Victorian patriarchy and class relations. However, seeing The Flint Anchor as bringing forward an otherwise occluded aspect of the nineteenth century is inadequate on its own. Instead, Thomas’s story radically questions the idea of the novel as the bourgeois form that helped induct readers into forms of respectable behaviour. Such a view might make sense of The Flint Anchor as a last and late novel, open to readings that draw on debates on lateness spurred by Theodor W. Adorno and Edward W. Said. ¹⁵ Against this emphasis on lateness, however, we could note that from at least as early as Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927) Warner was a modernist novelist profoundly sceptical about the novel form. The Flint Anchor suggests that a decisive recasting of the novel form to critique capitalism and bourgeois norms may not be possible as the genre cannot finally be detached from what has formed and sustains it.

Anything that threatens to fix down meaning, whether in words, language or the novel form, is always held up to scrutiny in Warner, as can be seen in the way Thomas leaves the novel. On a Loseby wall appears the graffito saying that he ‘goes with’ Dandy Bilby (175). Ellen Barnard, Mary’s sister, hates Thomas and spreads the news. Writing and reading are again in play because we have just learnt that Ellen learnt her letters from the obelisk, and Thomas is to allow this ‘writing on the wall’ (the biblical echo to Belshazzar’s feast hovers) to fix how he is perceived. His life changes utterly: ‘Someone had written a lie on a blank surface, and he had let it become the truth, and there was no way back’ (181). Choosing not to deny the charge when asked by Barnard whether it is true – Thomas merely notes that it is hardly unknown in the Loseby fishing community – he drifts into leaving middle-class society and becoming an outsider.

Warner shows a keen sense of the mid-nineteenth-century context for same-sex relations by staging a collision between respectability, in the form of the Barnard household, and same-sex desire and acts. Keeping these two worlds apart, as H. G. Cocks has argued, sustained masculine privilege, the closet and new sexual identities. ¹⁶ The events in The Flint Anchor come not long before the explosion of discourse around sexuality noted by Michel Foucault and the emergence of the modern category of the homosexual. ¹⁷ Warner’s representation of same-sex relations is just one example of her deep knowledge of nineteenth-century history in the novel. ¹⁸ The novel’s depiction of non-normative sexuality can be compared to the ideas in circulation at the time when it was being written. It is possible, with her knowledge of French culture, that Warner had read or heard reports of Jean-Paul Sartre’s biography of Jean Genet, Saint Genet, and of his related writings of the post-war period. Certainly it is illuminating to place these texts side by side with The Flint Anchor. Existential biographies see the individual as choosing her or his role in the world. Caught with his hand in the cutlery drawer, Sartre’s Genet embraces being called a thief and, in time, a homosexual. Sartre was at this time becoming strongly interested in Marxism and in the ideological ways that society prevented the free choice of a full life; he sees Genet as adopting the life as an outsider as the only route he felt was available. ¹⁹ Sartre’s view of homosexuality as a choice, and an inferior one at that has, unsurprisingly, been much questioned. That such identities are radically alienated from bourgeois society for Sartre is, though, the point here. For Thomas the false claim is indeed a way out, since that means leaving his home and family. As Didier Eribon has noted, Sartre views the decision to become a writer and the decision to become homosexual in similar terms; it is a response to very real difficulties but is, finally, a false choice. ²⁰ Warner does not address the issues of vocation that so interested Sartre, but the effort to use writing in order to control and change the world recurs as a theme of The Flint Anchor. This can go badly awry: Crusoe writes the graffito as a way to release his long pent-up passion for Thomas, but does not foresee what follows, ²¹ while John Barnard’s efforts to control and circumscribe how his own life is remembered come, as we have seen, to nothing.

Nonetheless, writing may perhaps succeed in changing the course of a life. Thomas’s departure from Britain is not the last we hear of him. A letter arrives from Malaga in his handwriting saying that he is near death, and with it, dated a few days later, a Spanish death certificate. Of course, this could all be taken at face value. The play over the translation of the cause of death offered is itself significant. His father thinks that ‘herida’ means a hereditary condition – Thomas had a family propensity to tuberculosis – whereas John Barnard knows it means ‘wound’. (He thinks, characteristically enough, that ‘A wound got in a Spanish port inevitably leads the mind to drunken brawls and dancingwomen’ (203).) However, it may also intimate that modern masculinity is a wound. The letters could be a true and faithful account, but as no corroboration is ever offered the suggestion hovers, as Claire Harman has noted in her introduction to the Virago edition of the novel (xi), that Thomas has found in the letter and death certificate a ruse that will end his marriage, set him free and finally terminate his links with his family, the Barnards and England.

Whether dead or alive he is beyond both the world of bourgeois respectability and the novel’s purview. The Flint Anchor’s modernism suggests a profound scepticism about whether the novel is still of use in new, changed conditions, detached from the world in which it arose and when it established its predominance. The incomplete telling of Thomas’s story suggests that the novel cannot cast its net wholly beyond nineteenth-century capitalism and the straitjacket of the middle-class family. Not for the first time, Warner can be seen thinking in Marxist terms while not conforming with the prevailing Communist Party line on the use of the novel form. The novel does not to her offer some external vantage point from which the world can be observed, but must always be a part of that world. Authors have to calibrate their effects carefully, aware of the form’s limitations. Even then, they are unable to control how their writing is received, categorised or remembered.

Notes

1. Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘Visitors to a Castle’, in Kingdoms of Elfin (1977; London: Penguin, 1979), pp. 93–102 (p. 93). ⮭
2. Warner, ‘Visitors to a Castle’, p. 97. The sketch ‘Wild Wales’ that opens the posthumous collection Scenes of Childhood suggests that Wales was associated in Warner’s mind with early childhood holidays. (Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘Wild Wales’, in Scenes of Childhood and Other Stories (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981), pp. 1–13.) ⮭
3. Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘Winged Creatures’, in Kingdoms of Elfin, pp. 117–37. ⮭
4. Warner, ‘Visitors to a Castle’, p. 98. ⮭
5. Warner, ‘Visitors to a Castle’, p. 102. ⮭
6. A similar pressing of blackthorn to the chest occurs in the much earlier story ‘“Stay, Corydon, thou Swain,”’ collected in Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Music at Long Verney, ed. Michael Steinman (London: Harvill Press, 2001), pp. 59–70. ⮭
7. Fredric Jameson, Modernism and Imperialism (Derry: Field Day, 1988). ⮭
8. Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Flint Anchor (1954; London: Virago, 1997), p. 15. Subsequent page references are in brackets in the text. ⮭
9. Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H., in Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longmans, 1969), p. 396. ⮭
10. See, for example, Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). ⮭
11. Jennifer P. Nesbitt, ‘Rum Histories: Decolonizing the Narratives of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Flint Anchor’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 26.2 (2007), pp. 309–30; Jennifer Poulos Nesbitt, ‘Sharing a Worldliness of Austerity: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Jane Austen’, Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society 2002, pp. 30–7; Sylvia Townsend Warner, Jane Austen (London: Longmans, Green for the British Council, 1951). ⮭
12. That new forms of masculinity may be even worse is something Warner had highlighted before in her narratives, for example through the character of Alfredo in ‘The Salutation’. See Howard J. Booth, ‘Colonialism and Time in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Mr Fortune’s Maggot’, Literature Compass 11.12 (2014), pp. 745–53 (p. 751). ⮭
13. Warner was perhaps thinking of Henry Raeburn’s painting Reverend Robert Walker (1755–1808) Skating on Duddingston Loch of c.1795, now in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. It provides the cover image for the Virago edition of the novel. ⮭
14. Philip Brett, ‘The Britten Era’, in George E. Haggerty (ed.), Music and Sexuality in Britten: Selected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 204–24 (p. 222). ⮭
15. See Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles (eds.), Late Style and its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). ⮭
16. H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London: I.B.Tauris, 2003), p. 9. ⮭
17. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1981). ⮭
18. In his article on The Flint Anchor, David Malcolm has noted such instances, while making the general case that this novel is hard to place as a conventional historical novel because it often uses a more modern idiom and addresses questions around existence and mortality that are not specific to a particular time or place; see David Malcolm, ‘The Flint Anchor and the Conventions of Historical Fiction’, in Gill Davies, David Malcolm and John Simmons (eds.), Critical Essays on Sylvia Townsend Warner, English Novelist, 1893–1978 (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellen Press, 2006), pp. 145–62. ⮭
19. Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (1952; London: Heinemann, 1963); Douglas Collins, ‘Genet and the Just’, in Sartre as Biographer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 80–110; and Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1984). ⮭
20. Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, trans. Michael Lucey (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 39–40 and p. 361 n. 8. See also Sartre’s essay ‘On Being a Writer’, which was originally part of the Genet manuscript but was published separately in 1950: ‘On Being a Writer’, in Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (eds.), The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 2: Selected Prose, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. 196–201. ⮭
21. ‘I love you so strong, I was fair bursting to tell it, and yet try as I might, I couldn’t get it out. There was no other way but to make you angry, so you’d leave off feeling as a gentleman. I had to get it out somehow, d’you see? And now I have’ (Warner, The Flint Anchor, p. 183). ⮭