SOURCE: Steinman, Michael. Introduction to The Elements of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell, 1938-1978, edited by Michael Steinman, pp. xv-xxvii. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001.

[In the following essay, Steinman considers The Elements of Lavishness a testament to the true friendship between Warner and editor William Maxwell.]

Between 1938 and 1978, the inimitable writers Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell exchanged more than thirteen hundred affectionate and witty letters. Their at first formal relationship—he was Mr. Maxwell, the New Yorker fiction editor; she was Miss Warner, the distinguished contributor from Dorset—soon deepened into “a real, unshakable love.” Twenty years after Warner's death Maxwell told me, “I still remember the pleasure of walking into the apartment and finding a letter from her on the hall table.” The Element of Lavishness celebrates that pleasure, part of the larger pleasure both writers shared equally—the pleasure of writing well for a friend, one whose every reply was a gift in turn.

A forty-year friendship seems a monument to constancy, but it is easy to imagine an alternate universe in which Warner and Maxwell admire each other's work but never meet. In 1970, she said as much to him: “Suppose I had been in the hands of some eminently worthy and painstaking person called Halibut? What we both would have missed.” When Maxwell was a graduate student at the University of Illinois, his close friend and mentor Garetta Busey gave him a copy of Warner's narrative poem Opus 7; he went on to Mr. Fortune's Maggot and The True Heart. In 1935, when he had written his first novel but as yet had no connection to The New Yorker, Warner submitted a story to the magazine in a bet against herself: “We had an American friend staying with us [the poet Jean Starr Untermeyer] and I was telling her of some absurd thing which had happened in the village and she said, ‘You really ought to write that for The New Yorker.’ I said, ‘Ba Pooh! I can't write for The New Yorker. People who write for The New Yorker are a special race—they are like nothing else. I couldn't write for The New Yorker!’ And she said, ‘Oh write it; I think they'd take it.’ I said, ‘Bet you they wouldn't!’ She said, ‘Well, try it!’ I said, ‘I bet you £5 they won't take it.’ And they did, so I had to forfeit the £5. But on the whole, it was a good bargain.” Her first letter to the editor, Harold W. Ross, was a masterpiece of sweet audacity: “I have been reading The New Yorker for years, with such veneration that it has never occurred to me that I could write for it. Now that blasphemous thought has lodged in my head.” Warner's “good bargain” was just that; her first editor, Katharine S. White, ended an early letter with the words “You can't send us too many stories,” and The New Yorker published one hundred fifty-three between 1936 and 1977.

In 1936, Maxwell got a job as Mrs. White's assistant; part of his work was to write letters to authors to convey his superiors' decisions. He could approach Warner only as an apprentice copyeditor, along such lines as these, scribbled in the margins of her October 1937 letter about “Stanley Sherwood”: “Maxwell—Seems OK except that I can't interpret all of her marks. Just do what we want on punct., I guess taking her suggestion wherever possible.” Mrs. White left the magazine the next year to live in Maine; she told Warner that she could correspond with Maxwell or his fellow editor Gustave S. Lobrano, but did not tell her Maxwell's first name. When Warner wrote to him, she apologized for her “discourteous envelope,” and they began exchanging friendly letters. Encouraging her to submit poems, he told her that he admired Opus 7. Sending American reviews of After the Death of Don Juan that she might not have seen, he added, “In general, I'm afraid, they are far from conveying how good it really is.” Informing her of a rejection, he mitigated it by praising a detail that had charmed him: “For my part I like anything which has ‘hark’ in it because I know a woman who always used to say to me ‘Hark, child’ whenever she wanted me to stop what I was doing and go upstairs and get her sewing basket.” Sixty years later, he told me that “reading the Sylvia / New Yorker correspondence of the 1930's is like seeing again the part of the movie where you came in. I am surprised at how long we remained on formal terms.”

In 1939, he learned that Warner would be coming to New York to deliver a paper on “The Historical Novel” at the Third Congress of the League of American Writers (along with Dashiell Hammett, Thomas Mann, Langston Hughes, and Dorothy Parker). He invited her to lunch, officially to “talk about possible pieces for The New Yorker,” less officially, I am sure, to meet her. When they met late in June, he was enthralled: “She was dressed in black. Her voice had a slightly husky, intimate quality. Her conversation was so enchanting it made my head swim. I did not want to let her out of my sight. Ever. I urged her to stay in the United States, where bombs were less likely to fall on her, and she said she thought she would go home and raise vegetables.” Her note of thanks to Maxwell was brief, but their letters became more playful and informal.

Maxwell left The New Yorker in 1940 to work on his novel The Folded Leaf, and, although he returned to the magazine after, Lobrano became Warner's editor. She continued to submit stories and poems, but was burdened by her war work with the Women's Volunteer Service. The house she shared with the poet Valentine Ackland, her partner from 1930 until Ackland's death some forty years later, “was full of strange beasts at the time, evacuees and billetees and what not.” Maxwell wanted to sustain their friendship even if he was not her editor, and sent copies of his novels They Came Like Swallows, The Folded Leaf, and Time Will Darken It. Warner wrote admiring letters for each one, reciprocated with The Museum of Cheats, and invited the Maxwells to visit her in Dorset. (He had married Emily Noyes in 1945; Warner and he exchanged letters about their domestic lives for nearly a quarter-century.)

Writing paper and envelopes were scarce in Britain during and after the war, so Maxwell had The New Yorker send them and asked Warner what else she needed. She told him that reports of food shortages were untrue, but he chose to believe otherwise. He refused to take credit for the magazine's generosity, but many of Warner's letters into the nineteen fifties begin with thanks from her and Valentine for canned meats, butter, or other provisions. He later said that “their gratitude for the food made their relationship to The New Yorker much more personal than it would have been otherwise.” He closed a letter of August 1945 with “Now that the war is over, we expect a visit from you,” which did not happen. By 1947, Maxwell was now her editor for good: “Lobrano admired Sylvia Townsend Warner's stories very much indeed, but on the theory that a thing belongs to the person who cares the most about it, he gave her back to me.”

He could now write Warner that the point of a letter was “to tell you that I love you dearly.” However, they still addressed each other as Miss Warner and Mr. Maxwell. He first began a letter with the words “Dear Sylvia” when writing to her of Harold Ross's death; later he apologized for his impulsive act. This endearing breach of decorum became a landmark in their shared history: twenty years later, Warner asked him to retell it, and I have included both versions. She started addressing the Maxwells as “dear William, dear Emmy” after the two couples met on a 1953 visit to Dorset. Unfortunately, the visit was marred by a maid's theft of his wife's antique pin. Maxwell later remembered that, although Warner and Valentine “were tireless in driving us around to see the important ruins, a Tudor house, etc., I was uncomfortable with her for the first time, and when I got back to New York found it a little harder to write to her as easily as I had before. This she noted, I think in her journals. Nothing escaped her. With time we fell back into our easy habit of corresponding, there being always something to correspond about, and I was never uncomfortable with her again. Liking and disliking are perhaps, as Maeve Brennan would say, all a dream.” Warner did not share his doubts and wrote in her diary, “They are perfect people to take about, they see everything, & smell everything. The only flaw in the day, that they must go tomorrow evening.”

Maxwell described the joyous freedom of their correspondence in his introduction to a selection from Warner's letters: “The personal correspondence of writers feeds on left-over energy. There is also the element of lavishness, of enjoying the fact that they are throwing away one of their better efforts, for the chances of any given letter's surviving are fifty-fifty, at most. And there is the element of confidence—of the relaxed backhand stroke that can place the ball anywhere in the court that it pleases the writer to have it go. No critic is looking over his shoulder; the writer's reputation is not at stake …” Yet a willful modesty underlies this, for he says nothing of their forty-year correspondence. Warner, he said to me, “needed to write for an audience, a specific person, in order to bring out her pleasure in enchanting,” and the correspondence shows how he and she were ideally matched.

In 1997 he said, “I suspect that of all the writers I edited I was most influenced by Sylvia Townsend Warner, though I have never looked into the matter.” Asked to elaborate, he said, “I think what you are infinitely charmed by you can't help unconsciously imitating.” When The New Yorker published Warner's first story, she was fully formed, yet Maxwell was an invaluable collaborator on over a hundred more: I think those he edited are her finest work, and her letters show how much his discerning comments shaped her writing. He was also her ally even when writing ruefully that a new story had been turned down by Harold Ross or William Shawn. The closing sentence of his first rejection letter, from June 1938, is wonderfully gentle: “We are very sorry to have to send back anything from you but we hope you will be forgiving and will send us something else right away to take the place of this.”

During the four decades of this correspondence, Maxwell and Warner wrote more than twenty books. Creative labor was an abiding subject, and each was the other's most trusted sounding board. Maxwell told her that he feared The Château was a travel diary, not a novel, talked of historical improvisations in Ancestors, described his troubles with the farmers of So Long, See You Tomorrow. She reported her battle with the Scott Moncrieff family over a new translation of Proust, commented on T. H. White's sexual obsessions, tantalized Maxwell with glimpses of the latest story-in-progress.

In his fiction, Maxwell gave familiar scenes intense emotional energy without calling attention to doing it: the losses of They Came Like Swallows and The Folded Leaf, a family visit that unlocked passions in Time Will Darken It. He used deceptively unadorned language to write to Warner about his domestic life and marriage, but conveyed deep feeling by quietly refusing to treat the apparently ordinary as if it were so. (And she never missed the point; he said, “Sylvia was terribly perceptive. She could see through a vault.”) In Mr. Fortune's Maggot and Kingdoms of Elfin, Warner presented the remarkable, the otherworldly, as if it were everyday. She and Valentine, a devoted lesbian couple in a conservative landscape, may have lived at a greater distance from their surroundings, yet she depicted their life without self-dramatization. Trusting that the Maxwells would read her words and understand her experience with great sensitivity, she wrote of her marriage as equivalent to theirs, so that she and Valentine seem to double-date by mail with William and Emmy.

Letters written to send someone the news run the risk of becoming formulaic, but Maxwell and Warner seized upon what they saw, what amused, perplexed, or moved them. No subject was unworthy; what Maxwell called “delight at the way everything is” made scenes and people immediate and tangible. Warner entertained herself and Maxwell by folding juxtapositions into her single blue air-mail page, defying the postal regulation “An Air Letter Should not Contain any Enclosure.” Unusual behavior pleased her always, even when the subjects were her friends. Here is one couple, the husband an organist, the wife with absolute pitch: “He has only to say, Ruth. B flat, and she obliges. So he doesn't need his tuning-fork. If one were to include one-tenth of the remarkable people one knows, in one's fiction, no one would accept it. Real life remains one's private menagerie.” She described the intellectual nurse who boasted of having bathed T. S. Eliot, considered the astrological impact of television antennas, re-created an all-tartan Scottish bedroom. Maxwell was less a satirist, more an impressionistic painter who considered the shadings of natural light and darkness, the Turner landscape in early-morning Manhattan. Warner said that she and Maxwell were “made out of much the same clay—quiet characters, with a simple savage delight in cataclysms,” and his descriptions of a hurricane and the 1965 Great New York City Blackout are matchless short stories.

Warner was “that odd thing, a musicologist,” an authority on Tudor church music; she and Maxwell loved opera, paintings, drawings, so they wrote happily about music and art, moving freely among genres. A moment in The Magic Flute was the best way to describe the roses; Chardin summed up the essence of a short story. They sent each other new books and wrote lyrically of the ones they knew by heart. Prized books were not by definition antiquarian: see her 1968 letter about Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn! Reading for joy, they illuminated Samuel Butler, Hardy, Byron, Shelley, Goethe, the Woolfs, James, Balzac, Proust, Rilke, Yeats, Elinor Wylie, Francis Kilvert's diaries, the Goncourt journals. However, readers trolling for gossip about their artistic contemporaries, the lively malice found in Dawn Powell's diaries, must look elsewhere: here, the inside stories are about Lady Ottoline Morrell and Madame de Sévigné, not about J. D. Salinger. They satirize few people, although an American professor who had presumed to write a book about Warner and the neighbor whose negligence made Maxwell get poison ivy are given what they deserve. Typically, the political events of the day provoked Warner and Maxwell; they were terrified by the Cuban missile crisis, appalled by Eisenhower, Nixon, the Vietnam War.

Both of them were prone to respiratory illnesses, so many letters were written to console and commiserate; Warner began one with “J'ai mal de ma poitrine.” Perhaps because she was so often the victim of “influenza,” she gave unsolicited medical advice generously, including home remedies (goose-grease, raspberry-leaf tea, a restorative diet of ham and fresh pasta). In a 1972 letter, after offering remedies both homeopathic and conventional for hives, nervousness, and kidney stones, she concluded, “You know I am the Maxwell Family Prescriber.” Reciprocally, Maxwell worried that Warner's house was dangerously cold and begged her to let him pay for a modern heating system. He tried to make her wealthy in the only way he could, urging her to write more and earn the bonuses The New Yorker gave prolific writers, even suggesting ruses to forestall taxes. Happily, this shared advice was unusually effective: Maxwell celebrated his ninety-first birthday in 1999; Warner had few financial worries.

A fiercely enthusiastic writer, Warner sometimes sent Maxwell three letters while waiting for his reply to her first, explaining “I might die in the night, so I will write to William now.” Often she wrote to him twice a day, and to Emily and to Kate, his elder daughter, as well. Astonishingly, she corresponded with two dozen other friends, kept a daily diary, wrote novels, stories, a biography, poetry, translated Huguenin and Proust. When a new story was the occasion, Maxwell would write her several times in succession, but during the four decades of their correspondence he also worked and corresponded with John Cheever, Harold Brodkey, Eudora Welty, John Updike, J. D. Salinger, Maeve Brennan, Frank O'Connor, Shirley Hazzard, John O'Hara, Mary Lavin, Kay Boyle, Mavis Gallant, Irwin Shaw, Ludwig Bemelmans, Mary McCarthy, Tennessee Williams, Peter Taylor, Nancy Hale, James Thurber, and Vladimir Nabokov. He could not reply to each letter from Warner as it arrived, but would write to her as a pleasure deferred. At first, reading the complete correspondence, I thought that Warner dominated it by the number of letters she had written, but Maxwell edited it by his responses much as he edited her stories.

In Warner's last decade, the pace of her correspondence seldom slackened, even when her subject was the somber details of Valentine Ackland's final illness. When Valentine, a dozen years younger than Warner, died of breast cancer in November 1969, Warner was devastated. Eight days after her death, Warner began to reread their love letters and found herself compelled to arrange them, annotate them, and write narrative passages linking them. It was a private literary endeavor; she did not consider publication until her friends urged her to do so. She had the letters typed, then sent them to Maxwell, installment after installment. Years later, he called them “the most beautiful and moving love letters I have ever read.” (Excerpts have been published as I'll Stand by You.) Valentine had had a decade-long affair with an American woman, Elizabeth Wade White, which Warner had hinted about to Maxwell at the time, but which she now wrote about—as she wrote about all their life together—with tenderness, candor, and insight. When she had sent Maxwell the final envelope, she left the post office “feeling that I had posted my guts and that you would look after them,” which he did.

Nearly eighty, curiously invigorated, she began a series of improvisations about elfin kingdoms: “I suddenly looked round on my career and thought, ‘Good God, I've been understanding the human heart for all these decades.’ Bother the human heart, I'm tired of the human heart. I want to write about something entirely different.” Maxwell, enchanted, was ever her finest advocate. In 1998 he said, “It is likely that The New Yorker would not have published the elfin stories except for me. Many readers and members of the staff protested. I was wild about them. I have always loved fairy stories and these struck me as electrifying. I felt they were written out of firsthand knowledge.” She completed twenty, stopping only when William Shawn inexplicably wearied of the series.

As obliged to by company policy, Maxwell stepped down from The New Yorker on January 1, 1976, when he was sixty-seven. Warner wrote, “I wish you a happy departure, a blissful retirement—another book? But woe to Sylvia!” He tried to reassure her, because he had trained her new editor, the writer Daniel Menaker, and wrote, “I am certainly not departing from you, only from 25 W. 43rd Street.” After retiring, Maxwell read her stories with even greater pleasure and his letters of 1976-78 are expansively leisurely, surely because he never again had to write that a story had been rejected. Their final collaboration was a volume of her letters, a book she wanted him to edit, published four years after her death. When Maxwell, now her devoted researcher, asked her whom she had written to “most often and most intimately,” he learned that he was that person and the knowledge pleased him greatly. Warner did not suggest publishing their joint correspondence, but she thought Maxwell's letters outshone Henry James's; he said that hers made Virginia Woolf's letters seem “very poor reading.” Editing the book over his shoulder, she insisted: “Do not let my letters to you be elbowed out by letters to other people: modesty can impel one to fatal acts. Damn the other people.” Maxwell envisioned at least two volumes, but the published book contained only a fraction of what she had written.

As she grew older, Warner's failing health concerned Maxwell greatly, and his letters grew more tenderly anxious. The Maxwells planned to visit England in 1978 “for no other reason but to see her,” and her last letter to them, written on March 5, ends “But meet we will.” They arrived in London on April 30 but never met; she died on the morning of May 1. Maxwell recalls her funeral in a postscript, and The Element of Lavishness ends with his fable “What You Can't Hang Onto,” previously published in book form. Evoking Warner and her house by the River Frome, he “exaggerated her possessions and invented the correspondence with Thomas Hardy” in an affectionate, deeply felt memorial.

In October 1995, when I had finished editing the letters of Maxwell and Frank O'Connor, a few details had to be settled before publication. O'Connor's widow, Harriet Sheehy, a close friend of the Maxwells, arranged for me to visit them in Manhattan, where I spent a day I do not expect to equal, attending to particulars, trading anecdotes, and laughing. I would gladly have asked the Maxwells to adopt me had I not thought that the suggestion would embarrass them. When it was time to leave, I stood in the doorway and said, “You will let me know if you have any other projects for me, won't you?” He smiled and said that he would. When The Happiness of Getting It Down Right was published, I asked his permission to begin a book about his fiction. He liked the idea and wrote: “I have a certain quantity of my own letters that have come back to me—the correspondence with Warner, for example—and if you ever want to see them just let me know. I doubt it there is much in them about my own work but I haven't reread them.” She had returned his letters to him a year before her death.

I agreed instantly: any letters from Maxwell would be a pleasure, as I knew from those he had written me. Like his fiction, they are brief, plain-spoken, yet warm and evocative. Envelopes full of them came a few days later. The yellow, beige, white, and blue pages were typed and handwritten, well-folded and well-read, annotated in an unfamiliar handwriting. Most were undated or labeled only “Tuesday,” “March 11,” and so on. All were delightful; even brief notes about editorial business (choosing “vender” or “vendor”) were loving and witty. The “mountains” of letters Warner preserved speak of her love for him; she had told Robert Henderson, another New Yorker editor, that her house was “so small that nothing gets kept in it, reliably, except cobwebs.” Maxwell, luckily for us, was an even more conscientious archivist.

Reading these pages for the insights they offered on his fiction was rewarding, but the letters themselves cast a deeper spell. Soon I was trying to fit Maxwell's letters to the excerpts from Warner's that he had published, looking for evidence in details of publications, events, occasions. Wherever I turned, I was listening to two dear friends, casually memorable about any subject, be it Proust or the locksmith who came when Maxwell forgot the house keys. The result was an immediately gratifying contrapuntal conversation, echoing the Maxwell-O'Connor letters only in the deep feeling on both sides.

But much of the conversation was missing. After her death, Maxwell had given all of his Warner and Ackland papers to the Dorset County Museum, which maintains collections of their work. With his help, I requested copies of Warner's letters from Richard de Peyer, the museum's curator, who graciously sent them to me through 1997. When each bulky envelope arrived, I would begin to read a new sheaf of letters and disappear into another world until summoned back to this one. I had thought Warner and Maxwell had written to each other often, but “often” turned out to be an understatement. After months of research, I arranged the letters in sequence, admiring their writers more whenever I could fit a part of their conversation into its proper place. I bless Warner for beginning every letter with the date and place she was writing from, even when this routine so bored her that she invented new addresses, such as “Cequatia” when it was raining. When she thanked Maxwell for a “beautiful fourteen word letter,” it was a triumph to know which undated page it was, when he had written it, what story they were discussing.

Not every letter survived; Maxwell said, “Some may have disappeared during the Second World War when the building superintendent took it upon himself to donate The New Yorker's correspondence files, then stored in the basement of 25 W. 43rd, to a scrap paper drive in Larchmont.” Between 1941 and 1944, Warner wrote to Gus Lobrano at The New Yorker, not Maxwell, and no letters from 1949 exist. What survived, however, amounted to more than half a million words, which made a collected edition impossible. When Warner and Maxwell were discussing a book of her letters, her response to her own prolific nature was quick and direct: “You must either cut or select. It is not as if I were Fitzgerald.” Neither choice was easy, and reprinting a smaller number of letters in their entirety would have narrowed the conversation considerably. Their informal writing was so consistently remarkable I was reluctant to abandon any of it, even a two-sentence observation. Both Maxwell and Warner had wide-ranging interests, and few letters were restricted to one topic. Thus, in addition to complete letters, this book includes excerpts and substantial passages from more than five hundred others. I have not included every passage from Warner's letters that Maxwell chose for his 1982 book, but have restored much that he deleted due to modesty. Editing was necessary because Warner did not keep copies and could retell anecdotes. She also repeated herself for emphasis but knew full well when she was doing that; I cherish her admonitions about flu shots in four summer 1976 letters. Gratitude and love are on every page; purely for reasons of space I have cut many such heartfelt lines, believing that readers can easily imagine deep, shared feelings.

Their correspondence was simultaneously personal and professional, but their working letters were always animated. Maxwell was quick to praise a new story, often in a cablegram of ten ecstatic words or less. But some letters were necessarily devoted to details of style, grammar, and usage. Maxwell said, “Often questions raised by the editor of the magazine, or by the proofreaders, intruded upon the flow of our remarks and had to be dealt with.” Though The New Yorker's quest for textual perfection can approach the sublime, the step-by-step record of the editorial journey makes tedious reading; consequently, I have omitted most such passages. Within a letter, a break between passages of text indicates that a sentence or more has been omitted. If the first line of a passage is also the opening of a paragraph, it is indented; if it is an excerpt, it is not. I have avoided the ubiquitous ellipses because their presence makes readers think that something offensive has been removed, which is not the case in this correspondence, remarkably free of malice. I have, however, included a few pointed exceptions to the general goodness of spirit. In a few cases, since an unflattering reference might cause someone pain, I have substituted arbitrary initials (A. B., C. D.) for the name of a private person. Famous personages abused in these pages have received far worse in the press.

Perhaps because he spent much of his working life untangling knots other writers made, Maxwell wrote first-draft letters that were easy to follow and to read. Except when on vacation or recovering from an illness, he always typed his letters. (He once told Warner, “The thought of dictating a letter to you, or even sending you one from somebody else's typewriter, fills me with horror.”) Warner's letters resemble the Christmas packages she sent the Maxwells, boxes filled with beautiful, apparently unrelated things. He told me that the “great charm” of her conversation was that “you never could anticipate what she was going to say, or even the direction the conversation would take.” Perhaps because paper had once been scarce or because her small house became cluttered quickly, she filled the blank half-pages of Maxwell's letters with notes, shopping lists, menus, drafts and revisions. Because she kept his letters at hand, their pages were ornamented by rings from her coffee cup, the bites and paw-marks of the nearest cat. Although she typed many stories and letters until late in life, writing to Maxwell was a pleasure, never business, so she sent many handwritten pages. Even when she wrote carefully, her script, “elegant as a vine,” she said, was occasionally puzzling. Maxwell gallantly said it was his “pride and pleasure to decipher it,” but now and then had to ask her what she had meant. She invented new uses for common words, improvised on familiar expressions, preferred “'tother” to “t'other,” used “&” and “and” in the same sentence. I have preserved these habits as well as Maxwell's American and Warner's British spellings, but I have corrected errors and regularized the titles of works. In a handful of instances, a brief, crucial word (“is” or “you”) was left out; I have put it back when its absence would have been perceptible. Some explanatory notes seemed necessary, for every reader might not immediately recognize Stockmar, A World of Love, or “Mr. Smith, I believe?” However, I have not peppered the text with annotations, for many references that initially seem puzzling unfold themselves a few lines later.